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

by Marc Brackett

That’s why we need to understand our emotions, be aware of how they influence our actions, and have strategies to regulate them.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor at Northeastern University, recently shared with me that when our “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.

But grit isn’t an emotion skill. There are plenty of gritty people who struggle with regulating their emotions. Grit and emotional intelligence are not in competition with each other but rather work hand in hand to support people in achieving their goals.

First, emotion skills must be acquired. Nobody is born with them all in place and ready to work.

Another time, at a demanding medical school, a senior professor made little effort to hide his skepticism. When I asked if there were any questions, he stood up and said, “What happened to academia? We are training future Nobel laureates here, not nice people.” As if the two qualities couldn’t coexist within one person. There were so many prejudices, weaknesses, and contradictions encoded into that statement, it would have taken many hours of discussion (and probably a lot of therapy) to untangle it all. The plainest, shortest response I had was, “Well, you could be training

a lot more Nobel laureates if…” (I later asked the chair of the department, “Is this really happening?” He whispered, “Why do you think I brought you in?”)

Throughout the rest of this book, we’ll explore those skills in detail. Here, I’ll provide a brief introduction. They’re known by an acronym—RULER.

Yet I am comfortable making the case that emotional intelligence is as important as IQ.

We know for a fact that no matter how smart you are, your emotions will have an influence—positive or negative—on your rational thought processes. That’s important.

Perhaps unsurprising, male students’ estimates of their scores were significantly higher than those of the women, despite the fact that the men did worse than the women when they took a performance-based test.

The general consensus among researchers is that these tools measure perceived traits, competencies, and aspects of one’s reputation, but not emotion skills.

The real test of emotion skills isn’t while reading on the beach; it’s when someone kicks sand in your face!

Most of us use words such as “emotion” and “feeling” more or less interchangeably, with a general understanding of what they mean. But there are some subtle and important distinctions too. Let’s go through the glossary. An emotion—happy, sad, angry—arises from an appraisal of an internal or external stimulus. By appraisal I mean an interpretation of what is happening in the world or my mind through the lens of my present goals or concerns. We hear, see, feel (through touch), taste, or smell something that alerts us to a shift in the environment. We are provoked by a memory or sensation, or an event, something someone says or does, or something we witness or experience. I think about someone who treated me unfairly or someone actually treats me unfairly, and I feel angry. Emotions are mostly short-lived (have you ever felt surprised for an hour?). They usually include a physiological reaction, such as a blush, chills, or an increased heart rate, and a release of neurochemicals to prepare you for action. They are often expressed automatically in our facial expressions, body language, and other nonverbal cues. Emotions also are accompanied by a subjective experience in our conscious minds. When we feel happy we have positive thoughts. Being upset turns us into pessimists. Finally, emotions mobilize us into action—to approach or avoid, fight or flee. The classical view of emotions was that they were evolutionary adaptations and that people across all cultures experienced and d...

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. We often have more than one emotion at the same time. I’m excited about my new job, and I’m anxious over whether I can handle it. I’m angry at how you’re treating me, and I feel superior because I’ve never treated you so badly. Here’s one I know all too well: The airline lost my luggage, and I’m simultaneously angry over their carelessness, worried because my medicine was in there, embarrassed because I’ll have to attend a meeting dressed in what I wore on the plane, and discouraged because I know they’ll never find my suitcase before my trip is over. We can even have emotions about emoti...

Great Connection possible between vocab of emotions and using descriptor words in writing

Here is where we have to decide whether we even wish to understand what might have caused our own or the other person’s feelings.

Understanding emotions is a journey. Possibly an adventure. When it’s finished, we may find ourselves someplace new, someplace unexpected, somewhere, perhaps, we had no intention of

going. And yet there we are, wiser than before—maybe wiser than we wished to be. But there’s no other way forward.

But what matters is the person’s experience—that’s what

we’re trying to identify, so we can address it. 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.

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?

For most of us in the West, joy is something we strive for (think the pursuit of happiness). Contentment, however, is more a state of psychological balance, not something we actively pursue—we feel contentment when we cherish the present moment.

But we’re not just verbalizing questions—we’re also sending unspoken messages as we make our inquiries. I’m talking about the nonverbal cues we display, the facial expressions, body language, and vocal tone that say we’re genuinely interested in the answers, that we care about the feelings of the person to whom we’re talking and are willing to give this conversation the time and attention it deserves. If I ask about your feelings but I’m glancing at my phone or at the clock on the wall, or if I’m leaning away from you with my arms crossed and my eyes narrowed, the message is clear: I don’t really want to know.

An emotional outburst signals that something is going on, but it doesn’t tell us what.

This is a critical moment in our attempts to understand emotions. It’s easy to get this part wrong. We focus on behavior rather than on what might have caused it. It’s like treating the symptom and not the disease. As a result, the best we manage to do is modify behavior—by force. And this distracts us from the underlying causes.

If you aren’t asking questions, you haven’t acquired the skill yet. If you aren’t listening to the answers, you aren’t using the skill. The emotion scientist has a genuine desire to understand and acknowledges that all emotions are information. Until we understand the causes of emotion, we’ll never really be able to help ourselves, our kids, or our colleagues. Had either my mother or father been able to cope with my tantrums and reach out to me, maybe with a hug or some show of affection and acceptance, who knows how those scenes might have ended? If my mother had said something like “Okay, Marc, I can tell you don’t want to talk about Hapkido now, how about if we stop for ice cream on the way home and then watch TV?” perhaps