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

by Marc Brackett

Your life didn’t have to be tragic for you to feel as though your emotional life didn’t matter to anyone but you.

that if we can learn to identify, express, and harness our feelings, even the most challenging ones, we can use those emotions to help us create positive, satisfying lives.

Pessimism can make it easier for us to anticipate things that could go wrong and then take the proper actions to prevent them. Guilt acts as a moral compass. Anxiety keeps us trying to improve things that a more generous mood might be willing to accept. Even anger is a great motivator—unlike resignation, it drives us to act and perhaps to fix what made us angry in the first place.

Interestingly, anger makes people more optimistic than does sadness, possibly because angry people feel in greater control of their lives.

We tell people to come closer or we tell them to back off. People communicate the same thing to us. So much of what happens between human beings is a result of how we communicate our emotions. And it all depends on something deep inside us, perhaps hidden from our own view: our emotional state.

Research shows that having just one caring adult can make the difference between whether a child will thrive or not.

This suggests that after a crisis, people who have more positive feelings may be more resilient than those who experience fewer positive emotions.

Daily, each of us has many chances to be creative, to act in new and thoughtful ways. It’s what makes life an adventure.

We first have to manage our hurt or anger—not deny it but accept it and then put it to good use, as a motivational force. That’s where our creativity can come to our rescue and allow us to achieve our goal despite obstacles.

You could be brilliant, with an IQ that Einstein would envy, but if you’re unable to recognize your emotions and see how they’re affecting your behavior, all that cognitive firepower won’t do you as much good as you might imagine.

having a repertoire of emotion-regulation strategies can help gritty people to overcome difficult emotions and obstacles that arise on the journey toward achieving long-term goals.

Emotional intelligence doesn’t allow feelings to get in the way—it does just the opposite. It restores balance to our thought processes; it prevents emotions from having undue influence over our actions; and it helps us to realize that we might be feeling a certain way for a reason.

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.

Many of us have spent time chasing the wrong goals or refusing to engage in activities that actually might make us feel better.

Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others.

You’re going to fly off the handle. You’re a work in progress. If you mishandled it today, and you have sufficient emotion skills to recognize that, you may do better tomorrow.

Again, the necessary skills: 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.

We are more accurate at reading emotions of people from our own cultural background.

The term psychologists use for this phenomenon is “attribution bias,” meaning we observe someone’s cues or behavior and wrongly attribute them to our own emotional state.

If you go through life angry, you will see anger everywhere you look. The same is true of other emotions—even positive ones.

That’s another part of the emotion scientist’s skill set—the ability to put aside one’s own appraisals so we can comprehend and empathize with those of other people.

Until we understand the causes of emotion, we’ll never really be able to help ourselves, our kids, or our colleagues.

When we attach a word to a feeling, it gives emotion substance and creates a mental model of the word, which means it can be compared with other feelings we have and also with other people’s feelings.

We don’t expend much mental energy analyzing why we feel so good.

when you can name and understand a specific emotion, your brain circuits and nervous system will calm you down.

But we also have trouble making our positive feelings known to others. Perhaps we don’t want to sound as though we’re bragging or gloating. Maybe it’s because happiness doesn’t require empathy from other people—it’s its own reward in that sense.

When men are forceful, they’re strong and assertive; when women are, they’re called bossy and controlling. When a man raises his voice, everyone snaps to attention; when a woman does, she’s dismissed as shrill or hysterical.

And we should keep in mind that expression need not be only of the spoken, face-to-face variety. Sometimes, sharing with other people is too difficult. In those cases, it may be better to express it in writing. Many of us have had the experience of writing something in a journal or letter that seemed impossible to say in conversation.

Give ourselves and others permission to feel. Accept and acknowledge that there’s no shame in expressing our emotions. We don’t need to fix or hide what we feel. Expression enhances our lives in many ways, not all of them obvious.

The initial goal of Regulation is to manage our own emotional responses, but then this skill makes a leap into even greater complexity: co-regulation.

emotion regulation starts with giving ourselves and others the permission to own our feelings—all of them.

As a rule, doing something you enjoy is a very effective strategy for regulating negative emotions.

we use reappraisal as a way to reimagine or reframe whatever is triggering an emotional experience and then react instead to that new interpretation.

Pausing helps you refrain from making a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion.”

We all arrive in this world programmed differently where emotions are concerned. Each of us has a different threshold for being provoked, activated, aroused, startled. Some of us experience feelings more intensely than others. We recover from emotional reactions at different speeds.

Permission to feel doesn’t mean obsessing over every time somebody is mean to us or ignores us. It’s really just the opposite—teaching the ability to get through those moments, to learn from them, and to continue to function normally.

Sometimes parents avoid dealing with their child’s feelings by turning to technology as a way of removing themselves from the stress of the moment.

Often, when we’re under psychological assault, our default position is surrender—we accept that this negative view of us must be true, and we adopt it as our own. Children do not have the inner strength or knowledge about people and their motivations

However, when we support our children to be their full, feeling selves, we’ll see how deeply and enduringly they can flourish. And it starts with us as their role models.

Children learn what they care about. They’re no different from adults in that regard.

that if we grew up acquiring emotion skills, they would make us better learners, decision makers, friends, parents, and partners, better able to maintain our health and well-being, deal with life’s ups and downs, and achieve our dreams.

In other words, it’s not a high IQ that gets you places. It’s the social and emotional skills that give today’s college students the competitive edge.

Emotional intelligence in the workplace doesn’t merely mean providing comfort and sympathy; sometimes it requires the ability to deliver difficult feedback to help people build greater self-awareness and skills.

And for leaders with high emotional intelligence to be successful, they also need to be placed in organizations with a workplace culture that allows these leaders to use their emotional intelligence.

Corporate America is replete with bullies and megalomaniacs occupying the corner offices. They are successful if the only measure of success is making money.

There are entire professions that count on the willingness of intelligent, educated people to endure high levels of stress and exhaustion in exchange for the big payday. At some point, most of them discover, no matter how much they were paid, it wasn’t worth the toll it took.

Emotion skills are the key to unlocking the potential inside each one of us. And in the process of developing these skills, we each, heart by heart, mind by mind, create a culture and society unlike anything we’ve experienced thus far—and very much like the one we might dare to imagine.