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

by Marc Brackett

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.