Permission to Feel: The Power of Emotional Intelligence to Achieve Well-Being and Success

by Marc Brackett

When we consult with corporations, they tell us they’re searching for employees who persevere with a task, who take personal responsibility for their work, who can get along with others and function as members of a team. Not technical abilities or specialized knowledge—they’re looking first for emotional attributes. A colleague from the RAND Corporation told me that technology advances so rapidly today that companies don’t hire workers for their current skills—firms are looking for people who are flexible, who can present new ideas, inspire cooperation in groups, manage and lead teams, and so on. We may acquire some of those skills by osmosis—by watching and emulating others who possess them. But for the most part they must be taught. And they are best learned in communities. Emotion skills are both personal and

They can be used privately, but their best application is throughout a community, so that a network emerges to reinforce its own influence.

“the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”

idea of a “cognitive loop” that connects mood to judgment. For example, when a person is in a good mood, they’re more likely to have positive thoughts and memories, which in turn keep the person thinking about positive things (the loop).

“social intelligence”—the ability to accumulate knowledge about the social world, understand people, and act wisely in social relations.

five areas where our feelings matter most—the aspects of our everyday lives that are most influenced by our emotions. First, our emotional state determines where we direct our attention, what we remember, and what we learn. Second is decision making: when we’re in the grip of any strong emotion—such as anger or sadness, but also elation or joy—we perceive the world differently, and the choices we make at that moment are influenced, for better or for worse. Third is our social relations. What we feel—and how we interpret other people’s feelings—sends signals to approach or avoid, to affiliate with someone or distance ourselves, to reward or punish. Fourth is the influence of emotions on our health. Positive and negative emotions cause different physiological reactions within our bodies and brains, releasing powerful chemicals that, in turn, affect our physical and mental well-being. And the fifth has to do with creativity, effectiveness, and performance. In order to achieve big goals, get good grades, and thrive in our collaborations at work, we have to use our emotions as though they were tools.

Emotional sickness is avoiding reality at any cost. emotional health is facing reality at any cost. —M. SCOTT PECK

Rational thoughts never drive people’s creativity the way emotions do. —NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

According to my colleague at Yale, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, a creativity researcher, “Emotions are both the spark that fires the engine of creativity and the fuel that keeps the firing burning when other people try to douse it, or the kindling runs low.” Emotions rule the whole creative process, from motivating creative work to idea generation to persisting toward the actualization of our own ideas. It’s the challenge that keeps us striving.

When we are making a decision, there are two kinds of emotions: integral and incidental. Integral emotions are directly caused by the action at hand—we’re fearful while climbing a tricky mountain path; we’re joyful as we’re falling in love. All completely understandable and connected to the moment. Incidental emotions have nothing to do with what’s going on

“body budget” is running low and we feel distressed, our brains search around for things that might be wrong in our lives to make sense of the distress. When these symptoms present themselves, we don’t always pause to ask: Is there an emotion behind this, and what can I do about it?

the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

neither stability nor neuroticism equals emotional intelligence. Grit, which Angela Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, defines as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,”

mental skills like any others—they enable us to think smarter, more creatively, and to get better results from ourselves and the people around us. There’s nothing squishy about that. Emotional intelligence doesn’t allow feelings to get in the way—it does just the opposite.

RULER. The first skill: Recognizing the occurrence of an emotion—by noticing a change in one’s own thoughts, energy, or body or in someone else’s facial expression, body language, or voice. That’s the first clue that something important is happening. The second skill: Understanding, which means that we know the cause of emotions and see how they influence our thoughts and decisions. This helps us make better predictions about our own and others’ behavior.

The third skill: Labeling, which refers to making connections between an emotional experience and the precise terms to describe it. People with a more mature “feelings vocabulary” can differentiate among related emotions such as pleased, happy, elated, and ecstatic. Labeling emotions accurately increases self-awareness and helps us to communicate emotions effectively, reducing misunderstanding in social interactions. The fourth skill: Expressing, which means knowing how and when to display our emotions, depending on the setting, the people we’re with, and the larger context. People who are skilled in this area understand that unspoken rules for emotional expression, also called “display rules,” often direct the best way to express what they feel and modify their behaviors accordingly. The fifth skill: Regulating, which involves monitoring, tempering, and modifying emotional reactions in helpful ways, in order to reach personal and professional goals. This doesn’t mean ignoring inconvenient emotions—rather, it’s learning to accept and deal with them. People with this skill employ strategies to manage their own emotions and help others with theirs. In the RULER framework, the first three skills—Recognizing, Understanding, and Labeling—help us to accurately identify and decode what we and others are feeling. Then, the two remaining skills—Expressing and Regulating—tell us how we can manage those emotions to achieve desired outcomes—our ultimate goal.

As we mature, our emotional repertoire becomes more precise (one hopes). Preschoolers have one word for angry: mad. Older children in schools where we work learn to make fine distinctions, using concepts such as annoyed, aggravated, irritated, livid, and enraged. A feeling is our internal response to an emotion. I’m angry about something that’s happening between us, it’s caused me to give up hope, and I can’t keep going this way. That’s a feeling. It’s nuanced, subtle, multidimensional. When you ask someone how they’re feeling, the answer is sometimes an emotion, such as happy, sad, afraid, angry. But they may also say they’re feeling supported, connected, valued, respected, and appreciated. These words do not refer to emotions per se but are motivational and relationship states that are steeped in emotion. Technically, an athlete doesn’t feel motivated to run a marathon; it’s the athlete’s current and anticipated feelings of joy and pride that motivate him or her to run each day in order to participate in the marathon.

A mood is more diffuse and less intense than an emotion or a feeling but longer lasting. Most typically, we don’t quite know why we’re feeling the way we are during a mood, but we are very certain when feeling an emotion. Moods also can be the aftermath of an emotion.

On the road to becoming emotion scientists, we need to avoid the temptation to act as emotion judges. In both cases, we’re attempting to recognize emotions and their source and then to foresee how they might be influencing our thoughts and actions. But an emotion scientist seeks to understand without making value judgments or rendering opinions about whether feelings are justified or not, beneficial or not, or reflecting an objective reality. An emotion scientist comes equipped only with questions and a desire to listen and learn. An emotion judge, on the other hand, is seeking something else. An emotion judge attempts to evaluate feelings (even his or her own—we’re not immune to harsh self-judgment) and deem them good or bad, useful or harmful, grounded in reality or a figment of the imagination. An emotion judge wants the power to validate feelings or negate them—to pass judgment.

We base most of life’s decisions on how we think our actions will make us feel. But without emotion skills, research shows that we are notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy. Many of us have spent time chasing the wrong goals or refusing to engage in activities that actually might make us feel better. We eat sugar to lift a depressed mood when exercise likely will do a better job; we engage with social media to feel connected when we know it amplifies anxiety.

Emotionally intelligent individuals had an intuitive understanding of one of the central conclusions of happiness research: Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others. Because emotionally skilled people are more likely to recognize this core concept, they are likely to have an advantage in their decision making.

The first step is to recognize what we’re feeling. The second step is to understand what we’ve discovered—what we’re feeling and why. The next step is to properly label our emotions, meaning not just to call ourselves “happy” or “sad” but to dig deeper and identify the nuances and intricacies of what we feel. The fourth step is to express our feelings, to ourselves first and then, when right, to others. The final step is to regulate—as we’ve said, not to suppress or ignore our emotions but to use them wisely to achieve desired goals.

The Mood Meter was built based on what is called “the circumplex model of emotion,” as developed by James Russell, a professor at Boston College. He said that human emotions have two core properties or dimensions—energy and pleasantness.

The Mood Meter is designed to chart every feeling a human being can experience and project it onto a graph similar to the one Russell proposed. It allows us to chart our observations about pleasantness and energy in order to understand key information about emotions at a glance.

think Mike Tyson had it right when he said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” What’s true in the boxing ring is true everywhere else—it’s easy to say that from now on we’ll master all our emotional responses, until our significant other or cranky child or unreasonable boss triggers us with a word or a look, and suddenly all the RULER training goes out the window. So, along with permission to feel, we must also give ourselves permission to fail. When that happens, we can only try again—take a deep breath or two, envision our best selves, and start over at the first R. At such moments, we also need the courage to apologize and to forgive ourselves as we’d forgive others. Courage can even mean seeking professional help when all else fails. We’ll never stop having to work at being our best selves. But the payoff is worth it: better health, decision making, relationships, better everything.

Okay, now it’s time to examine how we were raised and search our memories for clues about the family we carry in our heads. Take a moment and think back to the home you grew up in. Consider how it felt to be in your home, your relationship with your mom, dad, or caregiver. With that in mind, what’s one word you would use to describe the emotional climate of your childhood home? Here’s a summary of thousands of responses from people across the globe. They fall into three categories: about 70 percent of the terms were negative, 20 percent were positive, and 10 percent were neutral. The top negative responses: stuck, heavy, toxic, suppressed, inconvenient, stunted, avoidant, blind, intense, and unsupportive. The top positive answers: supportive, loving, caring, nurturing, and accepting. The top neutral words: unaware, selective, clueless, even, and neutral. When

or pact that details how everybody in your home wishes to feel. It also includes a list of commitments that everyone in the family will make to one another to create the best possible home environment. Depending on the age of the children, they may need help with the writing part. But even young kids know the right words to use. The charter is created by asking three questions. The first is: How do we want to feel as a family? This question can be asked over an evening meal or, perhaps, over the weekend when there is some downtime. Some of the words we’ve seen come up frequently among families are loving, respectful, included, safe, happy, calm, grateful, and playful. The second question is: What can we do to experience these feelings as often as possible? You can get highly specific with responses to this question, such as deciding how you’ll set the proper mood when it’s time to do homework, or at bedtime, or when dinner is served. Some families make a commitment to saying “I love you” each night before bed. The third question, which gets answered after the charter has been “lived” for a while, is: What can we do when we are not living the charter? Again, it’s helpful to get specific. For example, if one family member says something that makes another member feel disrespected, what’s the best way to express the feeling and settle whatever dispute might have caused it? Many charters include statements like “We will listen carefully without judgment to the person who feels...

We also asked subjects for three words to describe what they would most like to feel at work. “Happy” was the number one choice. That came as no surprise—in all my work with various groups, whenever I ask how people would like to feel, the first word out of everyone’s mouth is “happy.” It’s like the default choice, the one that we blurt without much thought. But it was the number two and three choices that were most revealing. After happy, respondents said they wanted to feel excited, joyful, appreciated, supported, fulfilled, respected, inspired, accomplished. The word valued was another top choice, and women were about twice as likely as men to use it. That list indicates what’s most lacking in the typical workplace.

In the nonprofit sector, 45 percent of young employees insist that their next job will not be in the nonprofit sector, citing burnout as one of the main reasons.