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

by Marc Brackett

The research is clear: emotions determine whether academic content will be processed deeply and remembered. Linking emotion to learning ensures that students find classroom instruction relevant. It’s what supports students in discovering their purpose and passion, it’s what drives their persistence.

Whenever we notice that we’re suddenly having difficulty paying attention, or focusing, or remembering, we should ask ourselves: What emotion information is there, just beneath the surface of our thoughts? And what if anything can we do to regain a handle on our minds?

EMOTIONS AND DECISION MAKING

We believe that our ability to reason and think rationally is our highest mental power, above our unruly emotional side. This is but a trick our brains play on us—in fact, our emotions exert a huge, though mostly unconscious, influence over how our minds function.

Most decisions are attempts at predicting future outcomes: We ought to buy this house. I’m not going to take that job. Pasta is a great choice. In every case, we consider all the options and choose the one that seems most likely to result in a favorable outcome. In theory, at least.

In reality, our emotions largely determine our actions. If we’re feeling something positive—confidence, optimism, contentment—we’ll come to one conclusion about what we ought to do. If our emotions are negative—anxiety, anger,

sadness—our decision may be quite different, even though we’re working with...

Emotion’s true role in our decision making has been measured abundantly in experiments. Researchers will induce a mood in their subjects—by having them read or watch something happy or sad, for example—and then ask them to make decisions. In one study, subjects were seated in rooms that were either comfortable or uncomfortable and then asked about their satisfaction with their lives. The comfortable-room group reported being more satisfied. In a separate study, when subjects were made to feel sad, they perceived a mountain to be steeper than it actually was. And in a study on medical school admissions, it was found that applicants were more likely to be admitted on sunny days than when it rained (yes, admissions officers’ decisions were biased by the weather!).

We make decisions continually, all day long, and most of them are small. We can’t deliberate over each one, so we rely on our brains to make snap judgments. These issues come up all the time in contemporary research into how our brains operate. There’s the “thinking fast and thinking slow” concept, where our brains are believed to work on two separate but overlapping tracks, one that immediately responds without any or much deliberation and the other that takes its time and weighs the information first. When we use our brains for familiar or relatively simple functions, we come to quick responses, while novel situations or complex problems cause us to cogitate. These quick decisions are particularly susceptible to our moods and unconscious biases, especially when additional information is unavailable. We decide often with minimal conscious thinking.

None of this is to say that emotion inherently clouds our judgment. In fact, with greater emotional awareness, just the opposite may be true: our feelings can serve as another form of information, telling us important things about how we’re responding to any given situation. When we are faced with a decision, anxiety may tell us one thing, enthusiasm something completely different. Knowing this, we can take our emotional state into account before choosing a course of action. Is it our negative mood that’s making us suspicious, or do we have a genuine reason to worry? Is our confidence a result of our exuberant mood, or is this truly the perfect decision?

EMOTION AND RELATIONSHIPS

Human relations are infinitely complex because we ourselves are, but the basic dynamic is rather simple: approach or avoid.

Relationships are the most important aspects of our lives. There’s plentiful scientific research showing the enormous influence they have on our well-being—people with robust social networks enjoy better mental and physical health and even live longer, while unfavorable outcomes are associated with a lack of connections to other people.

This is a particularly serious problem in our schools, which often reprimand children when they express a negative emotion rather than see it as a cry for help.

These are the kids who are neglected, ignored, or suspended for misbehavior, when they should be given empathy, extra attention, and opportunities to build skills and meaningful relationships. Research shows that having just one caring adult can make the difference between whether a child will thrive or not.

People feeling compassion see greater common humanity with strangers. They punish others less, are more generous and cooperative, and are willing to sacrifice for others. Research shows that high-powered individuals tend to be less responsive to the emotions of people around them. In one study, these individuals responded with less compassion than people with less power when listening to someone describe suffering. Does this phenomenon explain anything about our political and business leaders?

Sometimes the emotions we feel send signals that elicit the opposite of the response we want and need. Picture a typical child: if he’s troubled or anxious, he may wish that his parent or teacher would reach out and offer comfort. But when those adults sense that child’s emotional state, especially when he’s “acting out,” they may respond in just the opposite way, because of their own emotional response to the signals of a negative mood. This dynamic rules much of human interaction—when we need emotional support most is when we’re least likely to receive it.

I remember being in seventh-grade math class, where two students would regularly write all over a jacket I wore each day. I’m certain I wore that jacket as a form of protection. My fear and despair had to show in my face, body, and chronic disengagement. But the teacher didn’t intervene. What was his mindset? Stay away—this kid’s a wimp who needs to toughen up? Was he too preoccupied with his own issues to pay attention to mine? Perh...

EMOTIONS AND HEALTH

Our emotions are linked to physiological reactions in our brains, releasing hormones and other powerful chemicals that, in turn, affect our physical health, which has an impact on our emotional state. It’s all connected.

Many of us spend hours and entire days under emotional duress, until it becomes a chronic condition.

“Stress leaves you in a fight-or-flight state in which your body turns off long-term building and repair projects,” said Robert Sapolsky, a professor at Stanford University, in his book Behave. “Memory and accuracy are impaired. You tire more easily, you can become depressed and reproduction gets downgraded.”

Interestingly, we found that a positive workplace climate acted as a buffer for the deleterious effects of negative emotions on health outcomes for teachers.

But our emotions can also prompt the release of beneficial neurochemicals and hormones. Crying is soothing because it carries stress hormones out of our bodies. Feelings of gratitude increase oxygen levels in our tissues, speed healing,

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. college students were tested, and those who experienced the most positive emotions—gratitude, love, and so forth—were less likely to develop depressive symptoms later on. This suggests that after a crisis, people who have more positive feelings may be more resilient than those who experience fewer positive emotions.

EMOTIONS AND CREATIVITY

Whenever we make a decision or face a challenge, we have an opportunity to be creative—to respond to the moment in a way that doesn’t just

repeat what’s always been done before (and perhaps always failed before too). Daily, each of us has many chances to be creative, to act in new and thoughtful ways. It’s what makes life an adventure.

But there can be something scary about creativity too. It represents a break with the status quo and a step into the unknown. Creative decisions, even in the smallest matters, ar...

You can see that our creative impulses and our emotions are closely intertwined.

Many of us believe that personality and intelligence alone drive our ability to be creative. Or that creativity is an all-or-nothing gift, rather than a set of skills that can be improved with practice. True, some personality traits such as “openness to experience” are reliably related to it, but traits alone don’t account for everything. And research confirms that creativity is only modestly associated with IQ (meaning you don’t have to be a genius to be creative!).

In a poll, fifteen hundred corporate CEOs said that an employee’s creativity was the single best indicator of future success. Without innovation, societies stagnate and die.

Wow! What ar thd implications for students? Teachers? What is the call to action?

Creativity also includes two other factors: performance and effectiveness. Creativity can’t exist only in the abstract, in our minds and nowhere else. That’s just having a rich imagination! The creative process needs to be followed by concrete action. Once we devise new strategies, we must have the confidence to put them to use. Effective performance is as much a part of creativity as the initial, animating idea.

Safe to say, at times we all feel less creative than we’d like to be. That’s because our creativity is so closely tied to our emotional state—even though the connection may not be so obvious. Again and again, in working with educators, families, and children, we wind up discussing the ubiquitous problems of stress and frustration—the despair of feeling as though we lack the power to make meaningful changes for the better. It’s hard to imagine a worse feeling. For a child, it can be devastating—children have little control over their lives under the best of conditions. We all

go through tough times, but most of us believe that if we persevere, we can find solutions. That’s another form of creativity: everyday creativity, the ability to keep discovering new answers when the old ones no longer work. What must life be like for the children and adults who can’t hope even for that?

Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), which measure creativity, defined as the ability to respond to situations in ways that are novel and original. For example, people could be asked for all the possible uses for a paper clip or the consequences of people becoming invisible at will. She examined normative data for the TTCT through time, from kindergarten to senior year of high school, and writes, “Children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”

Why does this happen? What can we do about it as an education system? As teachers? As students?

Who or what could we blame except parents and an educational system that often squash original thinking and penalize students for using their imagination? Our students get the message rather quickly from our obsession with kindergarten “readiness,” to society’s detriment. Interestingly, when the developer of the creativity test, Dr. E. Paul Torrance, administered it to students and then tracked them years into the future, he found that scores on his famous creativity tests were a better predictor of adult creative achievements than IQ.

Fascinating! Use as passage after last question.

The divergent approach moves in all directions—it assumes there are many possible solutions and tries to consider each, especially the most creative, unusual ones.

In schools, it’s hard to be creative when convergent thinking—the ability to remember facts and perform well on standardized tests—is most highly rewarded.

For that to happen, schools need to restructure learning so that it promotes unconventional thinking and fresh approaches to problem solving across content areas, not just in the arts. For example, more and more schools are incorporating project-based learning and design thinking—a five-stage process for solving complex problems that includes (1) defining a problem; (2) understanding the human needs involved; (3) reframing the problem in human-centric ways; (4) generating a multitude of ideas; and (5) a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing.

Design Thinking Model

Research shows that divergent thinking results in feelings of joy, pride, and satisfaction. A study across five countries with four different languages found that working on creative tasks leads to an increase in positive emotions and autonomy. Another study showed that creative behavior on a given day leads to more positive emotions and a sense of flourishing the next day. As with so much about our emotional lives, there’s a feedback loop at work: feeling good encourages us to act creatively, which makes us feel even better.

Even emotions such as anger and distress can serve as motivation for creative thinking and enhance creativity.

Creativity is especially important in the face of adversity—when we’re disappointed because plan A didn’t work out; when we tried hard and still received negative feedback; when someone stands in the way of our progress or even tries to prevent it.

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.

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.”

Indeed it does: it’s a safe bet that no one in the history of the human race has ever known precisely what she or he is feeling, in all its complexity and contradiction and chaos, at all times.

We have one brain made up of several regions, each with its own functions, and sometimes they pull us in different directions.

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.

As we saw in the previous chapter, our most important mental functions have an emotional aspect, even if they seem to be purely in the realm of “cognition.”

In fact, that’s when we’re most vulnerable to emotion’s impact: when we fail to detect it.