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

by Marc Brackett

We need to pause—to physically stop whatever we’re doing, check in with the state of our minds and bodies, and ask ourselves: At this exact moment, what is my emotional state? Am I feeling up or down? Pleasant or unpleasant? Would I like to approach the world or steer clear? Next, let’s check for physical clues. Am I energized or depleted? Is my heart racing, am I clenching my fists, is there a knot in my stomach, or am I feeling balanced, cool, and at ease? The first of the RULER skills we need to acquire in order to become emotion scientists is Recognition. That’s what we’re learning in this chapter: simply how to recognize emotions in ourselves and others with accuracy.

Recognition is especially critical because most of our communication is nonverbal. This includes everything from facial expressions to body language to vocal tones—not the words but simply the way we say them. Words can lie or hide the truth. Physical gestures rarely do. That underscores the importance of the first R in RULER—it requires us to recognize a person’s general emotion or mood before attempting to get at the details of exactly what he or she is feeling and why. It points us in the right direction.

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.

As a tool to help people recognize emotions, the Mood Meter was first used in The Emotionally Intelligent Manager, a 2004 book by David Caruso and Peter Salovey. Later, Caruso and I built on that and developed it into the centerpiece of RULER, our evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning that currently is in more than two thousand schools and districts in the United States and in other countries, including Australia, China, England, Italy, Mexico, and Spain.

Ekman and other psychologists ran a series of cross-cultural studies in the 1970s, making the case that all human faces express six “basic emotions” in much the same way:

Happiness Sadness Anger Fear Surprise Disgust

In one study, sixth graders who went five days without glancing at a smartphone or other digital screen

were better at reading emotions than their peers from the same school who continued to spend hours each day looking at their phones, tablets, computers, and so on.

The core skill of Understanding is the search for the underlying theme or possible cause that fuels the emotion.

“I hate school and I’m never going back!” That’s important information, but only if we know what to do with it. What’s the cause? Is this child afraid of something related to school? Possibly. There are times we hate what we fear. What causes fear? Its underlying theme is danger, threat. So perhaps in this instance hate equals danger, in which case we know the direction our next questions should take. Now when we ask, “What’s happening at school that makes you hate it so much?” we know what to listen for: a potential source of danger. A difficult teacher? An impending bad report card? A schoolyard bully? We suspect it’s there somewhere, and we gently investigate until we find it.

Perhaps it’s disappointment, or shame.

We also need to keep in mind what psychologists refer to as “appraisal theory.” Many emotions—both positive and negative—have universal, underlying themes, but their individual causes vary from person to person. All day, each of us rapidly, and even unconsciously, evaluates situations or experiences, and these evaluations lead to different emotions.

These are some of the questions we can ask when we’re trying to understand our own feelings: What just happened? What was I doing before this happened? What might have caused my feelings or reaction?

What happened this morning, or last night, that might be involved in this? What has happened before with this person that might be connected? (In the event that your emotion has to do with a relationship.) What memories do I have about this situation or place?

When we’re acting as an emotion scientist with someone else, we can ask the other person: What might have happened to cause this feeling? What usually makes you feel this way? What’s going on that you’re feeling this way? What were you doing just before you started feeling this way? Who were you with?

What do you need right now? What can I do to support you? As a teaching exercise, we’ll sometimes have children read a story, then ask them: What does this character feel? Why does he or she feel that way? What do you think might have caused this character to feel this way? What about what happened to the character helps you to understand his or her feelings? If the same thing happened to you, what do you think you would feel?

Stress is a response to too many demands and not enough resources—managing both family/work responsibilities and financial burdens—to meet them. Pressure is a situation in which you perceive that something at stake is dependent on the outcome of your performance like performing in front of a group or acing an interview.

effectiveness to building and maintaining complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations. In chapter