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

by Marc Brackett

This is especially so in the business world. In fact, just the opposite is true. These are mental skills like any others—they enable us to think smarter, more creatively, and to get better results from ourselves and the people around us. There’s nothing squishy about that. 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.

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.

We base most of life’s decisions on how we think our actions will make us feel. But without emotion skills, research shows that we are notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy. Many of us have spent time chasing the wrong goals or refusing to engage in activities that actually might make us feel better. We eat sugar to lift a depressed mood when exercise likely will do a better job; we engage with social media to feel connected when we know it amplifies anxiety.

They’re more likely to accurately interpret nonverbal cues, understand someone else’s feelings, and know which strategies could support another person to feel something more or less.

People higher in emotional intelligence are just as likely to push back when attacked—but they will have an easier time dealing with the emotions in a confrontation and will be more skillful at finding a peaceful solution.

when kids and adults are given the permission to feel all emotions, and learn how to manage them, it opens doors to collaboration, relationship building, improved decision making and performance, and greater well-being.

Recognition is especially critical because most of our communication is nonverbal.

But these are the times when we need to try hardest to break through the displays of rage or self-alienation. This is when we must remember that our behavior sometimes sends the exact opposite message of what we really need. Our actions scream, “Get away!” or, “I’m fine!” while our emotions beg for attention.

Back in the eighteenth century, the poet Alexander Pope said it well: “All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.” If you go through life angry, you will see anger everywhere you look. The same is true of other emotions—even positive ones.

Understanding is where the science of emotion really becomes a pursuit—almost a detective story.

The only way to get at the meaning of an emotion is to learn the why—how someone perceived the situational factors that produced it. Behavior alone is a clue to the riddle, not an answer.

As I started by saying, Understanding is in some ways the most challenging skill to acquire. It calls on all our powers of analysis to honestly and correctly answer that powerful three-letter question: Why?

Children growing up in higher-income environments are exposed to more words than their poorer counterparts, and this gap may help account for future educational performance, earning power, even intelligence.

Before the experiments were begun, participants stated that they didn’t believe Labeling would be an effective emotion regulation strategy. But they were wrong. Lieberman referred to this as “incidental emotion regulation,” because the subjects were not aware that Labeling

Other research has shown that affective labeling is linked to lower activation of the amygdala, the brain region that’s activated when we feel negative emotions, and higher activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), which supports emotion regulation.

emotional granularity is the “adaptive value of putting feelings into words with a high degree of

The implication seems clear: the importance of a subject is demonstrated by the number of words available to describe it.

Attaching the correct label to the emotion is critical because once we’ve labeled a feeling, we’ve also begun figuring out what to do about it. If we assume incorrectly that our child is feeling anxious, we’ll fail to address the actual emotion—perhaps embarrassment, maybe fear, both of which can look a lot like anxiety from the outside. Imprecise Labeling can lead us astray as we search for ways to resolve negative emotions.

The trick in Labeling is to make sure we’ve hit on the correct word. If we go too far afield here, we may find ourselves addressing a problem that doesn’t exist and ignoring one that does. When we become emotion scientists, we find quite a few of these potential near misses that can lead us astray if we’re not attentive.

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

During those times when we suffer in silence, we make it impossible for anyone to truly know us, understand us, empathize with us, or—the big one—help us. When we suppress those feelings, we send a message to everyone in our path: I’m fine even when I’m not. Stay back. Keep your distance. Don’t ask why, because I don’t want to tell you what’s going on.

“Why would we talk about it?” another said. “When you’re a woman, talking about your feelings only makes you seem weak.”

We need to clear up a misunderstanding that may have been building in your mind: that permission to feel means license to let it all hang out, to whine, yell, act on every emotional impulse, and behave as though we have no control over what we feel, so we should just go for it and freak out.

But habitual, unhealthy methods of expression—yelling, gossiping, verbal or physical aggression, among many others—almost always creates havoc in our lives.

expression. According to research, women tend to express themselves more overall, particularly positive emotions, and also internalize negative ones such as sadness and anxiety more than men do. Men, on the other hand, tend to express higher levels of aggression and anger than women. But when subjects’ physiological signs of emotional excitement, such as blood pressure and cortisol release, are measured, men score higher—indicating that they likely feel as much as women do but keep more pent up inside.

Gender, race, culture, and class together make a potent combination to suppress the expression of certain emotions.

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.

Pennebaker concluded that suppressing traumatic experiences is debilitating, while confiding them to someone else, or writing them down, can bring relief.

Stanford University psychology professor James Gross, an authority on emotion regulation, defines it as “the process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions.”

As I said earlier, our emotions flow in a continuous stream, like a river, and to keep up with that we’re constantly regulating them. It’s how we maintain our balance and keep from being swept away by one strong feeling or another.

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

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

The basic principles of reframing are that we consciously choose to view a situation in a way that generates the least negative emotion in us or we attempt to take the perspective of the person who is activating you and assume the best intention.

Visualizing our best self redirects our attention away from the “trigger” and toward our values.

We are hardwired to seek social contact and support—people who lack it are prone to anxiety, depression, and cardiovascular disease.

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.

You teach your children to express their emotions by skillfully expressing yours.

Once we’ve acknowledged the power of the past in our current emotional lives, we’re ready to begin dealing with the present.

We all owe it to one another to stop bullying when we encounter it. It’s not just a matter of a child being mistreated—peer victimization actually changes the biology of the brain. It disrupts the development of the stress regulation system and related neurocircuitry, leading to a host of problems, from physical and mental illness to difficulties with social relationships and academic challenges. And these effects persist well into adulthood, contributing to problems with employment, relationships, and overall quality of life. Bullying isn’t just something that happens in playgrounds or on school buses. Its effects never completely go away.

But research shows that the presence of a caring adult allows a child to manage stress more effectively. Yet in a study of two thousand teachers, only about 50 percent said they have strong individual relationships with their students. In the same study, two thousand students also were surveyed and only 34 percent reported having such relationships.

SEL is the universal life jacket, keeping students afloat and open to learning. Only when children learn in psychologically safe environments that nurture their emotion skills can they can move from helplessness to resilience, from anxiety to action, from scattered to centered, from isolated to connected.

SEL must be grounded in a larger context of equity and justice efforts to ensure all children, especially the most marginalized, have the opportunity to thrive and take greater control over the direction of their lives.

complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations. In chapter 2 we discussed how our cognitive abilities—what we focus on, where we devote our efforts, what we remember, how we make decisions, our levels of creativity and engagement—all depend on our emotional state. And as we’ve seen in chapters 4 through 8, our ability to use those emotions wisely—to recognize, understand, label, express, and regulate them effectively—often determines the quality of our relationships, health, and performance.

Today especially, when so many jobs require the ability to communicate, our emotion skills determine how we’ll perform. If we can’t recognize and understand our own feelings, label them, and then express and regulate them successfully, we’ll struggle. Many of us are interacting with other people—colleagues, customers, counterparts at other firms—and if we can’t empathize with them, and use that information to co-regulate their emotions, we won’t be effective. If we can’t find grounds for friendly collaboration, it will be almost impossible for most of us to do our jobs well.

Research shows that our emotions and moods transfer from one person to another and from one person to an entire team—both consciously and unconsciously. It’s called “emotional contagion,”

It’s trickier to develop new emotion skills in the workplace.

They were both saying the same thing: that at work they’d rarely, if ever, express how they felt to the people who could do something about it.

The lesson for me was that I needed to make myself more vulnerable by expressing my own feelings more often and to more of my colleagues. Only if I did that first would they feel safe expressing themselves to me. I had to learn to operate with less authority and more humanity.

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.

They put forth the idea that “feelings of affection, compassion, caring, and tenderness for others” are beneficial even among work colleagues, creating what they call “a culture of companionate love.”