Transcript of Emotional Intelligence: From Theory to Everyday Practice – Marc Brackett

Put your hands up really, really high. Really high.

Look around the room, please. So over 50% of the room had challenged was challenged finding the best word. Any hypotheses about why that might be the case? Yes. It’s hard to sum up.

Okay. Other thoughts? Yes. Think about it. High energy with a lot of pleasantness.

Jazzed. Happy. Elated. Ecstatic. So here we go.

We’re going to build your vocabulary now. You’ve already learned something. Write that in your evaluation. Other hypotheses? Yes, back there.

You’re not having a specific clear emotion in car. Sure. So you might be having mixed emotions, like when you lose your luggage when you’re traveling, right? You’re like annoyed at the airline, you’re fearful that you’re going to have to go without your clothes, etcetera. One more.

Oh, now you’re challenging me. So that’s a possibility. Maybe we just don’t have access to our emotional life because why? I’m putting it back on you now. Yes, it’s possible.

Or perhaps maybe we’ve just never been formally taught to go deep into our emotional lives. Just for curiosity, how many of you drink wine? Wow. Okay. How many of you like are really into wine?

Yes. So, sir, like what kind of wine do you like? Italian wines. And what about the Italian wines do you like? I just like the range.

The range, what does that mean exactly? The fruits. Anything else? Smoothness. Any particular notes or flavors or dryness?

Okay. So you can see, if you like something a lot, you pay more attention to it and you’ll develop a more sophisticated vocabulary about it. My hope is after today, perhaps you’ll develop a bit more of a sophisticated understanding of your inner lives.

Understanding the “Why” Behind Emotions

Now, perhaps if I had asked you the reason why you’re feeling the way you are, you would have had a little more clarity. So take a moment now and think about you chose a quadrant, yellow, green, blue or red.

And I’m going to ask you to ask yourself the question, why? What’s your reason that you put yourself in that quadrant? Who can share who’s in the yellow? Raise your hand again. Okay.

I’m going to use the front audience. Sir, why are in the yellow? Because I feel that way. Just because you feel that way. You feel happy?

Full energy. Full of energy. But is there a reason? Just had a long trip. Had a good trip?

And everything is fine? The weather is nice? The is raining, the sun. The weather is going nice. There’s nothing to do with my presentation.

You just randomly showed up today. It’s okay. All right. How about for you, ma’am? You’re ever happy and motivated?

The inspiration? Progress. Great. Well, that’s a nice thing to do. So there are underlying reasons why we feel the way we do.

Labeling is important. How about expressing emotions? How many of you believe that you are skilled at masking your true feelings? Raise your hand. How many of you believe that even though you’re skilled, most people read through the mask?

Okay. So that’s a little bit of a conundrum there, right? We’ll talk about that a little later. Finally, I’m going to ask you to think about your strategy. So I’ll be here for about an hour talking about this work on emotional intelligence and maybe you’ll go on a roller coaster ride of emotions.

Maybe you’ll feel inspired, then maybe you’ll a little bored, hopefully not. Maybe you’ll get irritated with something I say, you’ll disagree. My question for you is what is your strategy for sort of my goal for you is somewhere between yellow and green. I don’t want you to be too excited and jumping out of your seats, nor do I want you to thinking sort of being in the deep green, maybe like sitting on the dock by the bay drinking a glass of wine. I’d like you to be sort of moderately energetic and moderately pleasant.

So my question to all of you is what’s your strategy? Yes. Look at the positive things in your life. Very good. Other thoughts?

How about for this presentation? Remember to breathe. Remember to breathe. That’s a good thing. Any other strategies?

Yes, ma’am in the red. Pay attention. That’s an interesting – I want to just go to that for one second. How many of you have ever told your child to pay attention? Yeah. How many of you have even done it like this?

Pay attention. Yeah. How many of you believe and how many of your children like immediately just pay attention? Yes. So one thing I’m going to challenge with you challenge you today to think about is when we say things like how many of you have said something like, I need you to calm down?

Anyone? Yes. And how many of you have shown in your own research that that really works well? It tends not to work very well. Pay attention.

I need you to focus. Focus. The question is what are we actually doing to focus? What are the strategies? What are the underlying mental processes that we’re teaching children and adults to focus, to calm down, to pay attention?

Components of Emotional Intelligence

What I’ve done for you so far is really taken you through the components of emotional intelligence. I asked you to plot yourself. I asked you to think how you’re feeling. Then I ask you to think about the word and the reason for your feeling state. I ask you to consider, how are you expressing this?

How are you showing it to the world around you? How many of you believe that where you are on the Mood Meter is correlated with how you’re expressing yourself right now? Raise your hand if you’re in the yellow, please. Okay. So just to give you a little bit of feedback.

Some of you, yellow, high energy, pleasant. I’m not totally there we go. Yellow is yellow. Here, right? And then I’m asking you now at the end to think about the strategy.

So my hope for you during this weekend is that you’re going to be experiencing lots of pleasant emotions, joy, contentment, excitement, maybe even go to feelings of ecstasy.

The Evolution of Emotional Intelligence

So what is this thing about emotional intelligence? The historical view of emotional intelligence doesn’t look so great, does it? This is what ancient philosophers, stoic philosophers, even psychologists, educators said about emotion. Passion and reason are antithetical.

Rule your feelings lest your feelings will rule you. So the idea of an emotional intelligence millennia ago or even just one hundred years ago probably would not have occurred. As a matter of fact, even more recently, I was taking a car service back from the airport, and the driver asked me, he said, What do you do for work? And I said, I study this thing called emotional intelligence. And he said, Emotional intelligence?

That’s an oxymoron. And that is the way most people think about emotional intelligence. How can you be intelligent about your emotional life when your emotions are these idiosyncratic impulses that drive you to different sides, maybe the dark side?

What we now know is a much different story, is that emotions matter and they matter a great deal for multiple aspects of our daily lives. From our attention, memory and learning, has anyone here ever experienced anxiety?

How many of you are being treated for enough? We know when we’re feeling anxious that it’s hard to concentrate. I mean, by definition, our brains are either ruminating or obsessing on something. Think about, for example, a child who’s being bullied in school, what it’s like for that child worrying about going from class A to class B, worrying about going from school to home. When your brain is focused on dealing with very strong unpleasant emotions, how can it be available for learning?

Think about it. Now that’s a negative example, but the same thing goes with positive examples. When you’re so focused on your upcoming vacation, you just can’t wait to go away that weekend. Very hard to focus, unless, of course, you have effective strategies. Decision making and judgment.

Just for curiosity, how many of you have ever made a bad decision? How many of you made a bad decision in the last week? So, we’re making decisions every day of our lives, every minute pretty much. And what our research shows is that emotions are behind a lot of our decision making. For example, we now study educators, the lives of educators.

Emotional Intelligence in Action

And most recently, we published a study looking at how teachers’ emotional states affect their evaluation of their students. So how many of you believe that grades are objective? Nobody raises their hand, of course. If I hadn’t primed you, you might have changed your mind. So we did a study where we showed that if we put teachers in the yellow versus the blue, just by having them think about a good versus a bad day, that after that few minutes of writing, when we gave them an essay, a middle school student’s essay to grade, there were one to twofold grade differences between the teacher’s grades who were in those different mood states.

What’s interesting about that is not necessarily that I knew that was going to happen because that’s what I study. Negative moods are going to shift you to be more narrow. Positive moods are going to make you more expansive. But for me, the most important piece was this. After the study was over, we asked teachers, do you believe that your emotion state influenced the way you evaluated your student?

What percentage of the educators said, of course? Zero. You’re so pessimistic. Again, most, 90% said there’s no way that my emotions would have changed the way I thought about this essay. But yet, when we showed them the bar graphs, there was a full grade difference.

What’s interesting about that is that emotions are affecting our judgments and decision making, but we’re not conscious about it. We’re not aware of it.

Impact on Relationships and Health

How many of you, when you’re at work or even in your own family, love to be around the angry, disgruntled, dysregulated family member? Anyone? Like you see that person at work who’s always irritated and kind of nasty and you say, that’s who I want to go for coffee with today. Most of us don’t want to be around people that display a lot of negative affect nor do we want to be around people who misread us constantly. That’s in the relationship quality area.

Finally, physical and mental health. When you think about what emotional intelligence is, the ability to recognize and understand and regulate our emotions, how can we be healthy physically or mentally without having effective strategies and self awareness?

The Origin of Emotional Intelligence

Those decades of research led Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer to come up with this idea of emotional intelligence. As a matter of fact, the history of this work is kind of fun. They were both doing independent research projects along the same lines, and they became close friends.

And Peter and Jack were painting Peter’s house when he was an assistant professor here living in Fairhaven. And all of a sudden, they were having this conversation, talking about their research. Each one—the story is nobody knows who really said it first. My guess is that they don’t want to tell anybody about it.

And all of a sudden, this idea says, well, what if there were this thing called emotional intelligence? And then it happened. And the idea was that there are two things. One, individual differences, that some people are just going to be gifted in terms of their emotional life. They’re going to read people like that.

They’re going to have effective strategies to manage their emotions. Other people will not be so skilled in this area. And the other piece of it was that it could be seen as a mental ability, that there would be a way to measure it and a way to sort of study it to show that it made a difference in people’s lives.

The RULER Skills

More recently, we’ve narrowed these skills down to what we call the RULER skills. The first is recognizing emotions.

So for example, looking at all of your facial expressions and I’m thinking, wow, this is not going so well. I am looking at your facial expression thinking, okay, are you interested? Are you bored? Are you tired? Are you questioning what I’m saying?

That’s a natural thing for me as someone who studies this. All of you now will just walk around. I imagine you leaving here, going to the inauguration like this, become paranoid about everybody’s facial expressions.

Understanding emotions, where are they coming from? Why do I feel angry? What is the theme, for example, around anger versus sadness versus pride?

Labeling, what are the words?

Expressing, how do I express myself in appropriate ways in different contexts?

And then finally, regulating emotions.

Breaking Down the RULER Skills

When we talk about recognizing emotions, we’re thinking about it in terms of identifying emotion in oneself, so my own physiology, my own thoughts and others by looking at data, facial expressions, body language, posture, gesture, vocal intonation. How many of you can tell how someone is feeling by a conversation on the telephone? You get that vibe, don’t you?

Let’s try it right now. Let’s imagine that you want to show the world on the telephone or in person the feeling of compassion. But you’re not going to say anything. You’re not going use words. You’re just going to use a sound. Are you ready? On the count of one, everyone in here is going to make the sound for compassion.

Three, two, one, go.

So there is something unique about compassion, right? All right, now we’re going to do awe, like you’re in awe. I have to be careful because I’m from New Jersey. Get the sound of awe. You’re in awe of someone or something. Ready? Three, two, one, go.

Compassion. That sounds a little bit like despair. Let’s go back to awe. Awe. All right. We have some work to do.

Understanding Emotions

Understanding of emotion. Where do our feelings come from? How do they influence our thinking, our judgments, our decision making, our behavior? That study I showed you earlier, how when you’re in that yellow mode, you just sort of like say, that’s a great essay versus when you’re in that blue mode, you say, uh-uh, you missed that little semicolon or, that’s not the best word to describe that feeling state right there.

So we know that our emotions are constantly affecting our thinking and judgment. As a matter of fact, you can see from our mood meter now, we can move away from language and start thinking about how the brain works and what are the activities that we might want to engage in in a classroom in each of these quadrants.

Because there is a bias in our culture. Everybody wants to be happy all the time. How many of you believe it’s realistic to be happy all the time? That’s good. Nobody raised a hand. It’s not realistic. There’s death. There’s breakups. There’s all these things in life.

Yellow is great for creative writing and brainstorming, for example. I want to get people in a group and generate ideas for a topic. Let’s go. Put on loud music, everyone gets together, generating ideas. Not the best place for deciding on what you’re going to move forward with though, is it? Think about it. You’re feeling really pleasant. Everything’s fantastic. Someone asks you a question. Go for it. Without really thinking about it.

The green is wonderful for building consensus, for getting people’s opinions together. Nice, calm energy. So what do you think?

Blue. Some people say blue? Why would I want to ever be blue? Well, has anyone here ever wanted someone to express empathy to them? Please raise your hand. Empathy is a good thing. Empathy tends to be a blue feeling. You are expressing your concern. You are expressing your feelings. You are walking in their shoes. So we want children to be able to generate a feeling of empathy.

A lot of people say, Red, anger? Why would I want anger? Well, think about it. There’s injustices in this world. As a matter of fact, my anger for the way our state, not just this state but our nation, is dealing with bullying, it infuriates me. It infuriates me that people think that you can solve problems by creating zero tolerance policies or by telling people you have to give bystanders the courage to stand up to the bully.

I was one of those kids who was bullied in school. And guess what? I may look pretty confident now, but at 13, I was pretty introverted and quite sensitive. So the idea that someone is going to tell me to stand up to somebody who is bigger than I am and tougher than I am and say, leave me alone, it’s pretty scary. It doesn’t really take into consideration a lot of knowledge about child development or individual differences in personality.

So that anger that I feel about the way our world manages constructs and ideas motivates me. It motivates me to work harder, to go down to Washington, D.C. and make speeches to lobbyists.

So you can see here that from our perspective, from an emotionally intelligent perspective, all emotions are valid and important. It’s what you do with them. Think about it. That red is useful, but if you’re dysregulated and nasty, not useful. If you convert it to passion, now you have a difference.

Labeling Emotions

Labeling emotion, building that vocabulary to describe ourselves clearly. So I do this a lot and I’m going to ask all of you right now. You have ten seconds to work with someone at your where you are. And I’d like to know from you what the difference is between jealousy and envy. Ten seconds, go.

Okay. Time is up. Who feels confident? Who feels like absolutely confident that they can share? Yes, sir?

Okay. So jealousy is more negative than envy, you’re saying? Yes. Any other thoughts? This is Yale, by the way. You’re supposed to be thinking.

Yes, sir?

Interesting. So are you a couple? No? Okay. Well, that’s good. Come here. Come here. Come here. By the end of the weekend, you’re not—what’s your name?

Dana. Dana, would you mind coming up? Oh, no. Come on. No, no. Need you. It takes two seconds, I promise.

So you’re not going on this date. So everyone, Dana and I, just so you know, we’re going on a date. And we’re walking down the street. And all of a sudden—what’s your name again, sir?

Andres. Andres. She sees Andres. Just take a look at Andres. Very handsome. Very handsome. But I want you to give him a look like you’ve never given another man. See, it’s going to happen.

Now, I notice, Dana, right? Yes. Looking at Andres that way, how do I feel?

So now it’s obvious. So jealousy is about relationships. Jealousy has to do with—I’m jealous that you have a nicer tie than me. I’m envious. But jealousy is about dynamics. It’s about relationships. Thank you, Dana. Thank you.

Now my question is, some people say, oh, well, is like intellectual jargon babble. Who cares about the difference? I mean, we just use these terms. Why would I want a child or a teacher to understand the difference between jealousy and envy? Yes.

Yes. Jealousy can cause more violence, more aggression. So the strategies that I might use or teach a child who is feeling jealous in a classroom will be very different than the strategies I might teach a child who is feeling envious.

Expressing Emotions

Expressing emotion for curiosity. Does anyone here know anyone who is socially inappropriate? Anyone? Yeah. That’s where this skill comes into play. It’s not knowing like the how and the when to express your emotions. I won’t give you any personal stories in this area because they’re not appropriate.

But my point here is that there is that level of appropriateness that has to do with context and culture. I’ll never forget my other career is I’m a martial artist. I know I don’t look like one, but I have a fifth degree black belt in a martial art called Hapkido. And when I’ve gone to Korea, when I went there the first time, I remember very vividly my American teacher said, don’t look anybody in the eyes. It’s rude and inappropriate.

So I remember meeting my teacher saying, hello. And of course, he thought I was like some weirdo from America. It’s not that extreme. There’s subtle things. Here, when I teach in my martial arts studio, everybody bows. I don’t think any of you are going to bow to me at the end of this presentation, although it’s not a bad idea.

So there are cultural rules that we have to be sensitive to. There are rules between New York and Connecticut. I mean, I remember when I was a student in New York City, I would work in coffee shops on the Lower East Side. My friends would come and say, Mark, I’m depressed, I’m bloated, I’m tired, I’m irritable. Now I live in New Haven, Connecticut, and it’s sort of like, hello. It’s a little different here emotionally. I always say, I haven’t gotten a hug in ten years. I’m exaggerating a little bit. But there are differences. There are differences in the way people communicate about emotions.

Regulating Emotions

Regulating emotions. How many of you believe that your lives would be somewhat healthier, happier, even better, if you had more strategies to regulate your own emotions? Raise your hand. Most people agree with that.

It’s interesting. Another question. How many of you believe you’d be healthier and happier if everyone who you live with had more strategies to regulate their emotions? Yes. Yes. This is when couples therapy begins after this part.

What we want to make sure we do is give people, teach people effective strategies for managing their emotions. And there are a lot of them. Most of us know the negative ones, like negative self talk, rumination, worry, abusing substances. What about positive self talk? What about positive reappraisal? What about visualizations? What about other more active strategies, like doing some yoga or exercise or taking a walk?

And what we know is that emotion regulation is more complex than we originally thought it was. It’s not just about down regulating the negative emotions, like anger management and stress management. How many of you have ever taken a course in optimism induction? Think about it. It would be nice to teach a little bit of strategies to be more optimistic, wouldn’t it? Or happiness maintenance.

The way we think about emotion regulation is in terms of helping people prevent unwanted emotions, reducing unwanted emotions, initiating emotions that may be necessary to achieve a goal.

Emotional Intelligence in Leadership

A good leader, for example, has to be skilled at inspiring his team or her team. You’ve to be able to generate a feeling in a room so that people can be thinking in the way that you want them to think, like getting in that yellow for that brainstorming session or in that blue for that reflection. Maintenance to me is interesting. How do you maintain emotions? I always joke that I like to do work in coffee shops.

It’s just the way I like to do my work. And oftentimes, I do my writing in different coffee shops around town, my brother will call me. And he’ll say things like, “How are you doing?” I’ll say, “I’m doing fine.” “Well, I hear all that noise in the background. Where are you?” “I’m in a coffee shop.” “Oh, so you’re working in a coffee shop? Yeah. So the university pays you to sit in coffee shops.”

“Sort of.” And that’s okay. And all of a sudden, you’re in that flow state. You’re feeling really positive. You’re working. You start thinking, maybe I should be in my office. Am I doing something wrong? Maybe I should be out of here. So you have these pleasant emotions that people try to pull away. Has anyone ever had a dream stealer in their life? Someone who says, “Wow, it’s great that you get to work in coffee shops. You should come work where I am.”

And my question is, how do we bring people back up? How do we keep them there? So when I get off the telephone, I’m feeling irritated and annoyed at my brother, how can I go back to that place where I was feeling flow and focused?

Measuring Emotional Intelligence

We spent a lot of time thinking about how do you measure this thing called emotional intelligence. And you can do it a number of ways. First is you can ask the person directly. And we’re going to try that right now. As a matter of fact, we’re going to do it a little differently.

I want you to look at the person or the people that you came with. Just take a look at them for a minute. Anyway, look at somebody else. Look at a stranger, somebody you might know. And I want you to just ask yourself this question: How much more emotionally intelligent are you than that person? Raise your hand if you think you’re more emotionally intelligent than the person you’re with. No, nobody’s going to do that.

Now here’s the interesting thing about that. When I’ve done research on this, like paper and pencil, like secret, with my even Yale undergraduate students, eighty percent say they’re more intelligent and emotionally intelligent than their neighbor, than their partner. For those of you who are familiar with probability and statistics, 80% can’t be smarter than the other 80%.

So asking the person directly is probably not the way to go. That self-report is complicated, right? Well, if you ask me like how emotionally intelligent are you? I say, well, compared to my father, I am an emotional genius. Compared to the Dalai Lama, you know, need some work. So there’s no reference point. It’s very complex, our knowledge. First of all, where have we learned to be emotionally intelligent?

You can ask other people. How many of you would rely on your children’s rating of your emotional intelligence? We won’t go there today. But we tend to find that informant reports, or sometimes people call it three sixty reports, are really not about your skills but about your reputation, whether or not they like you or not, not necessarily how skilled you are at something.

And then finally, you can ask the person to solve emotion-related problems, which is the way our center manages the study of emotional intelligence. So Jack, Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer and David Caruso developed a test years ago called the Mesquite, which was an ability-based assessment tool. It was asking people to solve problems, look at facial expressions, decode them, give you complicated vignettes and say, what would be the best way to manage that situation?

What we’re doing now in our center is working with gaming companies to build virtual tests. We’re using avatars, so we’re going to bring people into a world and requiring you to sort of look at the world and make judgments about expressions and deal with emotions, which we’re very excited about. But unfortunately, self-knowledge is quite limited. And it’s interesting because our world has tried to move towards very simple ways of doing this. And what our research shows is that measuring emotional intelligence by asking people like, how good are you at regulating your emotions and things of that sort just doesn’t have any validity.

The Impact of Emotional Intelligence

Everybody wants to know what does this predict about people’s lives. We’ve done a lot of studies on students, young adolescents. What we know is that children with higher emotional intelligence tend to experience less anxiety. They tend to have less depression. They tend to be less likely in middle school and high school to abuse alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. They tend to be less aggressive and less likely to engage in bullying behavior. They also are perceived by their teachers and their peers as being better leaders. They’re more attentive and less hyperactive.

And what’s important in our nation right now is academic performance. And what we show is that children with higher emotional intelligence just do better academically. They have those skills to manage those challenging moments.

What’s interesting to me about this work is how powerful that skill of emotion regulation is in determining the quality of your academic performance. And my own life is an example. I was unfortunately, when I was in my early 20s, my mother passed away, right before I came and went to graduate school. And I remember being in that room taking the GREs to go to graduate school. And it was just a few months after my mom had passed. And just literally, who’s the protagonist? Who’s the antagonist? I was so just in the grieving space that I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t take the test well.

And I realized that now, as an adult, a bigger adult, that it had nothing to do with my ability to problem solve. It’s just that my emotional life was interfering at that moment in my life with my cognitive ability. And what I hope happens is that people take that more seriously, that people understand the nuances that some people have anxiety around testing. Some people are in a place in their life where they’re not capable of doing complex problem solving because of outside influences, like that child who is being bullied in school.

Emotional Intelligence in Education

We’ve worked on emotional intelligence among educators themselves, and look what we know. They’re more positive about teaching. They receive more support from their principals. Go figure. They even report greater job satisfaction and have less burnout.

We’ve moved beyond the study of emotional intelligence in children and adults and gone into studying the dynamics of classrooms. So what we do is we work with other researchers to develop systems of coding the quality of interactions between teachers and students. And then what we do is we use those data to predict performance.

So for example, a teacher who uses more positive nonverbal behavior, a teacher who regards a student’s perspective and brings them into the learning environment, who uses less cynicism and sarcasm. And when we code that using videotaped analysis and then we use it to predict things, we find the following: Students in those classrooms are just more engaged learners. They have better quality relationships with their teachers. They’re more pro-social. And they perform better academically.

So how many of you are starting to have more buy-in for the power of emotional intelligence? Anyone? If you don’t raise your hand, you have to leave.

Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace

We’ve also had the opportunity to study managers and leaders of organizations because people want to know, well, what does that have to do with the real world when someone’s in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, beyond in the workplace? And as you can see here, adults, managers of organizations, are just better off when they have these skills.

As a matter of fact, we did a study with a Fortune 100 company recently where we had the 100 managers of this company take our test of emotional intelligence. And we had the CEO, the CFO, and the COO of that organization do a rating of the 100 managers. And that last question was one I just experimented with, which was this: If you had to leave this company tomorrow, would you do anything to take that person with you? And I had to rate every one of those 100 managers on that particular question. That was the strongest correlate of emotional intelligence. People just want to be around people that have these skills.

And it’s interesting for me because here I am at Yale University working with some of the brightest students in the world. And I teach my first day teaching was in this classroom, actually. And I had about 380 students in my class, and I looked at all of them and I said, wow, in four years from now, on paper, you’re all going to look exactly the same. You have great SAT scores. You have perfect GPAs. You’ve studied abroad in a country that I’ve never heard of. You play an instrument that only three people know how to play. But you’re going to go apply for this job.

I get about thirty, forty, 50 applications a year to work in our center now. I don’t look at their grades. I mean, who cares at this point? I know they’re smart enough to do the work. So what are the things that I’m looking for? Can they work as a team? Do they make you feel comfortable?

I actually, because I like coffee shops, I have what I call the coffee shop criteria, which is in the first thirty seconds, if I say to myself, I would love to go to have a cup of coffee with this person and just shoot the breeze, that’s my decision making. Because I get that feeling that they’re going to be interesting, they’re going to be creative, they’re going to know how to ask you questions. All the things that we tend not to really teach.

The Development of Emotional Intelligence

People always ask, how does this thing called emotional intelligence develop? And of course, have nature and nurture. Simple, psych 101. How many of you, just for curiosity, are biologically predisposed, like me, to be more anxious and worried about things? Anyone? Okay. The front row, so you must really want to—they’re like, we came to learn. We want those strategies.

So that’s the nature piece, right? We all have a temperament, a personality. And some of us are more just prone to being attuned and aware of emotion. We also all grew up in a family. Some of us were raised by wolves. Some of us were raised by people who really knew a lot about emotion.

I have a question for all of you. How many of you believe, as you think about your own childhood for a minute, you didn’t think you were going to have to do that today, like don’t do that to me, believe that you grew up in a family environment where emotional intelligence was nurtured? Please raise your hand. So a few of you. My goal is for that number to be much larger in the next decade. Every parent should be learning these skills. Every parent needs to know how to talk to their students about emotions.

I did a training. I was at a boarding school yesterday in Upstate New Hampshire. And I had about 150, two hundred parents. And one parent said, “So you mean it’s okay for my son to be sad?” And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s okay.” “What do you mean by that?” She’s like, “Well, I just wanted to be happy all the time.” I said, “That’s great. But the reality is that he’s going to have some disappointments in his life.”

And sometimes being there for a little while—think about some of our most creative people are the artists of our generation. That sadness is what inspired them to develop their products. As a matter of fact, we now have a study that shows that people who are more creative just biologically, who are more open to experience, only are rated in terms of their products as being creative when they’re high in emotional intelligence.

And think about it. Why is that? Because when you’re creative and you’re trying things out, you’re going to fail a lot. You’re going to have disappointments a lot. And unless you have those strategies to manage that disappointment, that creative potential just will not be unleashed.

Our goal is to make sure, as I say, everybody with a face gets trained in emotional intelligence because what we know is that when you have that training from preschool to high school and beyond, you have those important outcomes in life.

The RULER Approach

So I think we’re here. I asked you this question already. Most of us didn’t get this training, and most of us don’t have concrete tools. So what I want to share with you from my last few minutes is what do we do in schools and other organizations about this thing called emotional intelligence? And we’ve developed an approach that we call RULER. People in New Hampshire tend to call it “Rula.” Makes me crazy, but it’s okay.

And the idea behind RULER is that educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. Not an original quote, by the way. Millennia ago, this was said. My question is why is it taking until 2014 for our nation’s education system to take this seriously? Still pushing. We have a lot of work to do.

We have what we call the anchors of emotional intelligence. How many of you remember when you were in school that there were rules? Classroom rules, school rules, right? No running, keep your hands to yourself, only talk when, you know, just years ago, was probably only talk when spoken to. I mean, all these crazy rules. What we find is that how many of you like to break rules? I hate rules.

Breaking the Rules for a Positive Environment

I love finding a way to break those rules. We decided to move away from rules and say, let’s think about the environment that we want to create. Knowing that a positive climate in a classroom matters so much, how can we be intentional about creating it? So we ask kids and students, how do you want to feel in school?

You’d be blown away by what they say. They say, I want to feel respected. I want to feel supported. I want to feel valued. I want to feel empowered. I want to feel inspired. And then we say, well, what do you have to do on a daily basis in order to have those feelings? What are the behaviors that you can engage in to make sure that everyone in your learning environment feels that way? And knowing that there’s going to be conflict and aggression, what can we do to prevent it and manage it? And that’s done from the leadership down to the student level.

The Meta Moment: A Tool for Self-Regulation

We’ve learned that mood meter already, building that self awareness. The third tool is called the Meta Moment. As you can see, it has six steps. This is our tool for self regulation. We make very strong claims in our research that if you take the six steps of the mental moment seriously, you can avoid the 12 steps later.

Step one is something happens. How many of you have triggers? Like, you know what I mean by triggers, right? Like, if you think about your home life, it’s like, “Didn’t we agree that you were going to do that? Remember that?” Or at work, people who trigger you? Littlest things, right. The littlest things. Some big things, too.

We want to teach people to be aware of their triggers. We know that all emotions affect the way we think, our physiology, and our behavior. So what we are doing is giving children and adults that knowledge of how our emotions are affecting the shift in our thinking. How many of you have been angry in the last month about something? Anyone?

How many of you noticed when you’ve been angry, like you’re angry about everything? Do you know what I mean by that? Like, I’m not just angry. “Do you remember three years ago when we were on a vacation? Do you remember that time? Do you remember that? Do you remember last week you promised you were going to pick that up for me? Do you remember that? And do you remember when our child was born?” I mean, it’s like you just go back and you just start digging for that because anger is one of those emotions. You just search for all the reasons. We want to stop that from happening.

You go to step three and you take that breath. You activate your parasympathetic nervous system and you take that breath and you bring that hijacked experience down a little bit so that your prefrontal cortex can help you to problem solve and make sense out of it and do something. Because when you’re hijacked how many of you experienced that hijack, honestly, and there’s no coming back? I’m going for the jugular. That’s we have, see? It’s evoking a lot of emotions.

Step four is seeing your best self. For us, it’s important to have motivation to be regulated. I joke a lot. I say sometimes I take that breath, try to calm down and I say to myself, “Wow, how am I going to just rip your head off?” So it’s not enough to just breathe. You have to know how to shift your mindset. And that’s where our best self piece comes in, where we teach children, what does your best self look like? What does it look like for you?

This lecture is bringing back memories because I got the idea for this best self piece working with my colleague Robin, and also by teaching a course where one of my students wrote an article about my course on emotional intelligence. And the article title was “The Feelings Master.” And I started—I was a little embarrassed by it, of course, the feelings master. But then I started thinking, wow, how does the feelings master walk?

The feelings master has good posture. I tend to be a schlepper. And then the feelings master has students. I get some of those winners, like “Professor Brackett, I’ve got a question, but I’m not sure you’re going to know the answer.” Love those students.

And you know that feelings non-master is like, “All right, you’re kidding me, right? Like you’re kidding me. You’re kidding me. Did you know about the research that I do on emotions and judgments and grading? Do remember that?”

So I can’t go there. I’ve got to be the feelings master. The feelings master says this is a teachable moment. Let’s talk about that. Do you think that’s the best way to approach your professor to engage him in the process of higher order thinking?

And then, when we have that best self activated, we can strategize effectively. We can choose and use adaptive versus maladaptive strategies and then have more success in our social interactions. Knowing that sometimes problem solving doesn’t work, that you try it in the moment but you fail. Even I, I’ve been working on this stuff for years. Even at home sometimes I think, “Mark, you’re the feelings master.” And then piece from here says, “And he doesn’t care right now. Go for it.” And then of course, I’m sleeping alone on the couch that night. But you never regret taking a Meta Moment. I can promise you that. You never regret being your best self. You always regret being dysregulated.

Problem Solving and the RULER Approach

Problem solving. We have to teach our children from our perspective to empathize, to build perspective taking skills, to not just look at it from the me, me, me, me, but from the we and the us and the our. So when we have conflict in schools, what we do is say, it’s not just about you. Uh-uh. How did you think the other person felt? What were they feeling just before that whole argument got started? And get them to really think about the dynamic in the relationship. And that’s our blueprint.

And very importantly, we train everybody with a face. I don’t care who you are in a school, whether you work in the front office, or whether you work in the back office, or whether you’re the superintendent, the preschooler. Everybody’s learning this stuff. And we have a theory for why that makes a difference. We’re not just sitting in coffee shops all the time, by the way. We actually do do science.

And what we know is that when you train leaders, teachers, and staff, when you train this classroom and give that curriculum in that classroom, and when you bring in families and teach parents the same skills and the same tools that their children are learning, great things happen. You get to enhance the skills of all people in that environment. And that also helps to shift simultaneously the culture. So there’s a common language.

So a superintendent can walk into the preschool and say, “Hey, how are feeling today?” The little boy will say, “I’m the yellow.” And “Me too. What’s your strategy?” “I’m going to stay there.”

And then we show in our research that when you enhance people’s emotional intelligence and shift the culture and climate, you get those important outcomes that we all care about for our children and the adults involved in their education: better engagement and achievement, better relationships less bullying and aggression, greater health and well-being.

Research Outcomes

We’ve done a number of research studies to show that this stuff really matters. Experiments in schools to show that when schools can adopt this approach, these are the kinds of outcomes you can expect: less anxiety and depression, children become better problem solvers, have greater social and leadership skills, experience fewer attention and learning problems, and they also perform better academically. That climate that I said matters so much, we’ve shown that we can shift that as well.

We shift between 10-50% in just one year. All three of these—the emotional climate, children feel more engaged. They want to be there. The instructional climate, teachers become better instructors in general, better modeling of language, better classroom management.

Gareth’s Story

So I’m going to wrap up today by showing a short video. I have had the privilege to travel around the world to do this work. And right now, our approach called RULER is in about 700 schools throughout the world. And many years ago, I was in England, where I began a lot of my international work. And I had the opportunity to really do some interesting studies in England, as well as create a lab in a school. And there was a little boy in this school who I never met until after he had been trained in emotional intelligence.

His name is Gareth. And Gareth was a little boy who was horrifically bullied in his elementary school and then went to this middle school that was very different. They had embraced emotional intelligence. And this is a poem that he wrote in his class on emotional intelligence about his experiences of bullying and the way he thought about it now as a little bit different than he thought about it previously.

“You’re open. I know I have been told this. You’re silly. I know I have realized this. You look like Amy. I know this has been pointed out to me. You have big eyes. I know have looked in the mirror. You can’t be a pilot. You’re not smart enough. It is possible I have considered this.

With every insult you invent, it’s strange, but it’s true. You point out my many favorites and help me to improve. As you highlight my many weaknesses, you also highlight my strengths. My openness leads to my kind personality. My silliness brings the laughter to the world. Our resemblance to movie endings only highlights my intelligence. My big eyes portray my feelings and widen my view. I may not make it as a pilot, I couldn’t be.

You see, every insult you invent gives me a view into your mind. And now I have many problems, I feel sorry for you. Why, oh why, do I feel sorry for you? Because your mind cannot break it free. The wall of insult you build limits your mind or feelings. So as soon as you don’t stop, you’ll turn it to your feet. And that’s the biggest problem of all, loneliness.”

Think about it. So as we think about this boy’s life in school, how was he able to get—he was a C-D failing student in fifth and sixth grade. How could he have been successful when that’s the way he felt about his life, when that’s the way he felt he thought other people felt about him?

Gareth went into this school where he was feeling much safer, more confident. He was developing skills. And he wrote this poem. And originally, they were doing public speaking. And he said, “I’m not ready. I’m scared to share it because I don’t know what’s going to happen if I share it.” And the teacher, of course, having been trained, said, “Well, you know what, Gareth? That’s okay. You don’t have to share it right now. But is it okay if I share it with other teachers?” He said, “That would be fine.”

So here is now in this new elementary, middle school. The poem has been brought around, and teachers come out, “Gareth, my goodness, you’re so articulate. Gareth, that poem, how meaningful, how wonderful that poem was.” His self esteem is building. He says to his teacher a few weeks later, “I’m ready to read it to the class.” He reads it to the class. Lo and behold, he gets a standing ovation from his peers. They say, “We wouldn’t treat anybody like that here. That’s not the way we do business in this school.”

And what’s interesting about Gareth, this is about three or four years ago now. I’ve gone back to this school. He’s in high school now. And I remember sitting just about two years ago in the cafeteria, having meetings. And he came up to me, “Sir, do you remember me?” I said, “Of course I remember you. I’ve been exploiting you throughout in America.” And I said, “Of course, I remember you.” And he goes, “I want to be a poet.” I said, “That’s fantastic.” And I said—he goes, “And I have a girlfriend now.” I said, “Great.” And he said, “Do want to read some more of my poems?” Said, “Absolutely.” And he’s like brings me this pile of things. And he walks away and he says, “You know, sir, look for me on the bookshelves.”

I can’t take credit for Gareth because I wasn’t his teacher. I get emotional just thinking about it. Because when I think about what it was like for him, like it was for me in elementary school, not having that ability to connect, not having that ability to feel safe and valued. How could you survive in that environment? Now he’s in a place where he feels safe, where he feels valued, where he can succeed. From the reading of his poem, we know that he’s academically gifted. But you can’t show your academic or cognitive ability if you’re feeling oppressed or you’re feeling unvalued or not valued.

The Guesthouse

So I will end today by reading a poem by Rumi that really gets at the value and importance of all emotions.

“This being human is a guesthouse. Every morning, a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness. Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all. Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

So I want to thank you for your time and attention, and I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful weekend here at Yale. It was indeed a privilege and a pleasure to present to all of you. Thank you.

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