Marc Brackett - Yale Emotional Intelligence Expert | How to Effortlessly Master Emotions

I was sexually abused as a kid for five years in my childhood. I don't define myself as a sexually abused person. I define myself as a human being who experienced childhood sexual abuse. But I'm sublimating that negative experience into trying to make the world a better place. What if the key to peak performance is an intelligence, but emotional intelligence? Mark Brackett is a psychologist, best-selling author, and the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. I have a framework, which I call ruler, recognizing emotions in oneself and other, understanding the causes and the consequences of emotion. And so this regulation piece, probably the most important skill anybody can learn. In my research, I survey thousands of people across the world. Only 10% of the samples say they learn anything about that. Only 5% say they learned something about it in school. So we have masses of people who are experiencing a lot of strong emotions. They don't know what to do with them. For decades, he's been at the forefront of research helping leaders, educators, and organizations understand the power of emotions in driving performance, relationships, and well-being. Today, he's here to show us why emotions aren't obstacles to success. They're the strategy. One of the things I talk about is how we're so desperate for the quick fix. But you don't deal with your emotions using these quick fixes. It's a life strategy. You can make good decision, feeling any emotion, as long as you're aware that you're feeling the emotion and regulating it effectively when you're making the decision. So Mark, you're the expert in emotional intelligence. So before we sort of go into all of that, what does emotional intelligence actually mean? Can I put it back on you? Yes. What do you think it means? It means being aware of what you're feeling, being in touch with your thoughts, your emotions, and understanding maybe not just how they impact you, but also how they impact other people. That's pretty good. It's not a decent. Yeah, not bad. Okay, podcast over. We're good. So what is it? That's a piece of it. A piece of it. What else is it? So I have a framework, which I call ruler, which is R-U-L-E-R, recognizing emotions and oneself another, which is what you are getting to, and we can go deeper in any of these skills that you want. The second is understanding the causes and the consequences of emotions. So I'm recognizing and feeling slightly pleasant in my energy's low. Well, why? What's going on? I'm here. Well, that's not what I'm actually feeling. I'm feeling pleasant and high energy. Well, why Mark? You know, oh, I'm about to just great podcast with Scott. Okay. So how are you really feeling? That's the L labeling emotion. So I'm feeling, I would say I'm feeling a multiple set of emotions, like feeling excitement. And a little anticipation, maybe, because I don't know where we're going. And so that's my R-U-L, recognizing, understanding and labeling my own emotions. And I also tried to do that with you. So how are you feeling today? Good. Excited. Can't say the word good with me. Well, I can't say the word good. Yeah. Okay. So I would say that I'm excited, a little bit anxious always whenever I'm trying to show up and perform and make sure that I can keep up with somebody who's really smart. That's, that's my job. That's what I do for a living. But it's always, it's fun because I get to just like dive into your world. Right. So I always want to make sure that like I pull the best out of you. I, I don't know, podcasting gives me energy in general and every time I have this conversation or a conversation with somebody, which is why I think I'm doing the right thing as a job. After the conversation, I've learned so much, like I just feel like I'm just on like a little bit of a high because we've been learning and just vibing with each other for the past, you know, hour and a half. So I'm excited for the conversation. I'm excited for what I learned. I'm excited also because it's kind of selfishly podcasting is like the best education you're ever going to get if you host the podcast. I think you're right. So, but I don't know if those are all emotions. Some of these are. Yeah. They are. They are. Okay. Yeah. You're excited. I mean, your primary emotion is excitement. You can have more than one by the way. It's allowed. So that's RUL. So we're both excited. Look at that. It's not always common. Then you have to decide, okay, well, can I talk about it? You know, you have a lot of people who are in big jobs, workplace, you know, how much do we talk about our feelings in this? Never. Exactly. HR is telling us not to. Yeah, there you go. The research and psychology would say otherwise. But yes. And that says that's interesting to think about, right, they kind of the juxtaposition of like what we know is best for people psychologically and for their health and performance and what HR wants us to do and not do. That's another podcast. And then there's the final r of regulation, which is the topic of my new book, which is called dealing with feeling, which is how do we deal with these emotions that we have? What are the strategies? And just a piece about that. So I wrote a book years ago called Permission to Feel. Very proud. It's 30 languages. I run around the world 17 times. And then the pandemic hits. And everybody's like, Mark, you know, thank you for giving me permission to feel about what the, do I do with all these feelings? And I also really struggled during the pandemic in my center closed down. The world felt like it was coming to an end. And my mother-in-law moved in with us. It was a bit of a mess. And so this regulation piece for me is probably the most important skill anybody can learn. So regulation, because this seems to be a buzz word now, but I feel like people are going after regulation without tackling the first few letters of this framework. And I think that that's probably why they don't do a good job of actually regulating themselves. Because if we actually go through recognizing, understanding, labeling and expressing, we don't do that. And we just try and regulate that I'm assuming there's a really, really high chance we're going to fail. Yeah. Because you can't just regulate for regulation's sake. But that's what people are trying to do. Yeah. Everybody's trying to control themselves. Yes. You know, I think that's, you know, the good and the bad of the mindfulness world, right? Everybody's breathing. Everybody's meditating. They don't know why they're meditating necessarily. Just, they don't know. They just talk on it. You know, if all else fails, just breathe. You've been doing that anyway, and it's not working. The, sorry, you know, the, everybody's obsessed with breathing, which, by the way, is really important. But it's not, it's not a sufficient strategy for dealing with your emotional life. It's like, you know, if you're in a relationship or your boss is like, you know, being difficult, you can't be like, I'm just going to breathe. Well, your boss is going to be the Nomura. So you'll be breathing a lot. Why do we, um, well, I guess there's probably a psychological reason it probably just seems like a hack to tie a result to a simple action. It is. And it, and it probably helps us avoid the deep work that we should be doing by going through this framework and probably some of the others that you have. Um, so this is why everybody is what depressed has high anxiety. Like, you mentioned that there was difficulty during COVID when you wrote your first book, but I, I intuitively feel with no data and you're the person who puts out PubMed peer reviews so you can probably back this up that post COVID, the world is like a little bit off. It is emotionally. Yes. I think the disconnection, you know, the loneliness that, you know, we really felt then has still prevailed. You know, obviously people are on their phones more than they've ever been before. We know that research. There's a lot of loneliness and disconnection out. Not all loneliness is bad. It's good to be alone. It's nice to be able to reflect. I actually love being alone, um, an introvert. So like, I love alone time. I don't want to be lonely though, difference or alienated, you know, left out excluded yikes. But I think a, we know that, you know, there's people are worried about climate change. People are worried about the wars that we have constantly going on. People are very worried about politics right now. People are worried about violence in society right now. And there's a lot of things that are kind of just happening for young children too. It's like they, they haven't been alive when there hasn't been a war or some kind of crisis. And, um, and people have not learned what to do with it. So in my research for my book, what I did was I surveyed thousands of people across the world. And I just asked them, I mean, a lot of questions, but the one I'm focused on now was, what did you learn growing up about how to deal with your feelings? And nothing. Yeah. Probably the answer. Yeah. Like, only 10% of the people that I surveyed, and this is like, very, you know, high performing people, big business people, teachers, kids, you know, all over the place. Only 10% of the samples say they learn anything about that. Only 5% said they learned something about it in school. So we have masses of people who are experiencing a lot of strong emotions. And then I don't know what to do with them. And so there, you know, one of the things I talk about is how we're so desperate for the quick fix, you know, that one Instagram post that's like 10 seconds long that says, you know, that I won't mention the person's name who's driving me crazy right now. But, you know, gets on and like, is sitting in the car, I'm throwing my anxiety out the door, you know, and then I say, I'm thinking of myself, that door is going to slam in your face so fast. You don't even know what's happening. You know, we, that's what we're desperate for. It's we're desperate for feeling better. But you don't feel better or deal with your emotions using these quick fixes. It's a, it's a life strategy. And that, that's probably overwhelming for people. Yes. Because if you're talking about so, just to, to clarify, so emotional intelligence, how do we achieve that? Well, through emotional education, learning, if the learning. But if we think for a second, okay, I've never gotten emotional education from, from ever, from, there was no point in life. You know, we got it from our parents, you know, I learned a lot about emotional intelligence. Like what is not what it's not, right? And I think that listen, listen, I love my parents very much and they gave me a very good childhood. But also you have to understand that most of the teaching and most of the, the, the, the minds that they give over to whether or not it's with work and money and love and emotions, it's just their lived experience that's all in the room. That's all they know. That's all they know. And they don't know anything else. So it's very hard for them to subjectively teach something that they haven't experienced themselves. 100%. It's actually impossible, really, unless you study it for a living and then you understand how to teach it. Unless your kid gets a PhD in psychology and it comes your teacher. Exactly. Which didn't work out 100%. But we can talk about, we can talk about, because I know that your mom has given you shit sometimes too for not what eating your own dog food to a degree during COVID. But yes. So maybe it was your mother-in-law. It was my mother-in-law. Mother-in-law. Yeah. By the way, mine also moved in with us during COVID. Oh goodness. Yes. So it was actually, it's, we weren't married, we weren't married, but I say mother-in-law. It was girlfriend's mother who moved in with us plus or two sisters moved in with us during COVID too. It was a wild, a wild house, but that's how we got so close so quickly and we're still together. So it's only worked out. All right. Good. But if people are thinking, okay, I don't have any emotional education in my life ever, it seems overwhelming to start now because we have a whole world view formed. So where do people start? Like where do we go for emotional education? Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously people like me write books on this and have apps. I have an app called How We Feel that I created with the co-founder of Pinterest and our teams. That's very helpful. It's free to build your emotional self-awareness. But I do think, you know, reading is a good way to do it because, you know, you have to get your head into it. And I think the first step is mindset shifting. There's no such thing as a bad emotion. How does that make you feel confused? Because I was honest. Yeah. Confused because I feel like there's some emotions that don't serve me. Like I feel like jealous, jealousy, envy, sometimes anger. Like I feel like there's there are not, they're not aligned with who I want to be or they're not like I understand why they exist from like an evolutionary perspective. But I also don't think that they really serve like my goals, for example. So I don't see how they would be a benefit. Well, they're going to come whether you like them or not. Because life is filled with a roller coaster ride of emotions. I feel envy all the time. I watch some people present. I do a lot of public speaking and I was like, oh gosh, that person has the best timing or they tell the best jokes or they know how to bring that audience on a journey that's crazy. But I frame it as Mark, you could learn that. You're a freaking good presenter too. You're just going to tweak some things based on that. As opposed to thinking they're better than I am, I'm blessed then. So it's a mindset just like anxiety. A lot of people think anxiety is a bad emotion. I have a good friend who's a scientist of anxiety and she would interview me about this and she said, well, what are you going to anxious about Mark? I said, well, I get anxious, you know, I want to make sure that my research papers are the highest quality. I get anxious about fundraising because I do a lot of fundraising and I want to make sure we have the funding to do our research. She's like, well, what do you have in common with those, you know, what's the theme? And it's so they're important to me. And she goes, yeah, well, then why would anxiety be bad if you're anxious about the things that actually are meaningful to you and powerful to you? And it's a reframe because she's right. I don't get anxious about the things I don't care about. I do get anxious about achieving the goals that are important to me. And then I could strategize to do a good job to achieve that outcome. So it's a signal. It's a signal. Just like anger. Anger is about injustice. But why would that be a bad thing if someone's treating you unfairly? It's a signal, hey, this is unfair. We got to do something about it as opposed to allowing yourself to just be crapped on. So if we understand, that's the first reframe. It's a big one. It's a huge one because I think that most people would intuitively feel probably the same way that I did when they are told that all emotions, there's no things a bad emotion. Right. Everybody wants to feel good emotions, happy contentment, all that. And we want to avoid the bad ones. First, you can't avoid the bad ones. Life is going to happen. And if you have a new mindset around them, that they're information and data. So then the bigger issue is not emotions. It's when you have no instruction on what to do with these emotions. Correct. That's the first step. Yes. Okay. So it's part B to the mindset piece. You also have to believe that you can deal with it. Explain what that means. Like regularly. You can... Yeah. You know what? I'm not going to... Anxiety doesn't have to have power over me. I can use strategies to help me manage that anxiety when it's overwhelming to me. There are things I can actually do that are helpful, which by the way, my research and other people's research shows there really are a lot of strategies. We just haven't learned them. You know, what did I... My mother was very anxious. So what I learned from my mother was tell everybody you're having a nervous breakdown and then lock yourself in the room. That was her... That was how she regulated. That was that. I can't take it anymore. That's what she was saying. And then she'd like have her little doers on the side of the couch while watching Johnny Carson's show. And then she'd go to her room and that would be it. Like, okay. That's a strategy too. I wouldn't call that a healthy strategy. So then the answer is no longer, again, emotions, they're not good or bad. Emotions are emotions. But then the education should teach us what is an appropriate response to that emotion. Correct. What is... I don't like the word appropriate just because it's like... I'm going to... I'm using all the wrong words. It's all right. You're in it. You're getting an emotion education. Why is appropriate wrong? Why is... Why is feeling good? Not acceptable answer. Why is using the word appropriate? Like, why are the... Are these like... Because good has no meaning. Like, how you feel... Good fine. Okay. It's useless. It's almost trying to suppress our trauma. It's like a little dismissive. I mean, not like in a bad, a negative way. It's more like... That's just kind of what we... You know, you just say good so you can move on with your day. You know, you're at work. How's it going? Good. And then before you even say good, the person has gone away anyway. So that's... And then the... The appropriate thing is more around that there's a correctness. There really is no correct strategy. What's the beauty of emotional intelligence is that it's what works for you, based on your personality, based on your gender and culture. You know, there's a lot of strategies. You have to find the ones that work best for you given who you are. And that's where you tie the emotion into what are my goals in life. Exactly. 100%. I haven't met... You know, there are a few people that I've met that have achieved their biggest goals in life without learning how to deal with their emotions. Meaning it's very difficult to do that. No, meaning that the people who achieved the most in life have really learned how to deal with their feelings. Yes, exactly. Yes. Because if not, then it's almost like you're living this reactive life. Correct. And in life. Or suppressed life. Or suppressed. And in life, good and bad will always happen. But if you don't know how to regulate, then the good will probably give you a false indicator of your own potential or your own competency. And the bad will probably derail all the other things you're trying to accomplish because you let that emotion almost consume you. Exactly. You got that one right? Good. I like... Listen, I don't attempt to bat 100. Like, well, as long as I get some of the terms, that's all the counts. You teach at Yale. I podcast for a living. You've done this a couple of... I'm sorry. You know, we both had our two rodeos. But the... You know, it's an interesting thing, you know, I do teach at Yale. You know, the assumption is that everyone's brilliant, which people are really smart. And that everyone's going to be enormously successful, not true. Just because you have a high cognitive ability does not mean you're going to achieve your goals in life. I've met so many hundreds of students who could not achieve what they wanted out of life because they couldn't deal with the anxiety, the stress, the fear, the overwhelm, the disappointment. They just don't know what to do with it and over time it just catches up and they give up. And is there... I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter if there's some sort of... Some sort of upbringing that creates a certain ability to regulate or not. I'm sure that some households that are probably a little bit calmer create a person who can regulate a little bit better, but it doesn't really matter. It just matters like what you can do going forward. So even if you do come from like a very traumatic upbringing in a household where parents are fighting or there's a lot of contentiousness, there is no upbringing where you can't at some point learn to regulate. This is what we're talking about. You can learn all these things. It's 100% learned. Okay. 100% learned. You are not born with a pocket full of research-based strategies to help you deal with your feelings. That's fair. That's fair. What is the difference between... I find this interesting, emotion and having emotions and being emotional, like it's almost like it becomes your identity? Well, by the way, that's another big issue these days because we've gone like to a whole another level of like high school kids telling me, I am not just feeling anxious, I am anxious, which is really problematic because we are not our feelings, our feelings are experiences. And if we identify as an emotion, that means our mindset around it is not helpful. Does that make sense? It does. I'm just thinking about all the... I think that tying your identity to anything is actually problematic in general. And I'm just... Every time you talk about emotions, I see so many parallels from when for an example an entrepreneur ties their entire identity to their business or you tie your entire identity to how much money you make, like super problematic. I agree more. I couldn't agree more. Of course, yes, it makes tons of sense. Like if you tie your identity to like what you feel, then that becomes all all... That's how it is just all consuming and it's everything, every aspect of your life is controlled by that. You said that this is more of a recent phenomenon where we consider ourselves to be our emotion not just experience it. Why is this? I think it's for, for adolescents, I think it's all about social media. It's just they're so... And they're just feeling like they're in social comparison mode all day long. Everyone's smarter. Everyone's got better lips, better hips, better biceps, better this, but you know, and it's like it just puts you in that cycle of never ending feeling less than. Which by the way, going to... Going back to the L of Ruler, I did this big study with college students and they also they were stressed. And I, you know, I have empathy for people in general. I think I'm a pretty empathic guy. But I also was not believing they were so stressed because it's not that hard to be a student at my university. I mean, it's the course they're tough. I'm like, look at me, you got a great professor. And so I challenged them to really do a deep dive into their stressors. And lo and behold, what I found was that the number one emotion based on the themes for the reasons they were saying they were stressed was... Was it their identity? No. Well, it's around it. But was there, what was the number one feeling? Do you think they were actually having... Oh, the reason? The real feeling. Not stressant? Overwhelmed? One of those two for sure. Yeah. So comparison would lead to what emotion? Envy? Or jealousy? Jealousy. Okay. So it had nothing to do with the schoolwork at all, actually, that was causing them stress. The way it had to do with schoolwork was that, you know, this person can study for less hours and get better grades. That's so interesting. So there was still this like social comparison component that tied back to like not enough that created jealousy. And they're labeling it as stress. So it's totally not stress at all. It's envy and jealousy. That's so interesting. And then they're going for counselors who don't know the difference between stress, envy and anxiety, and they're given like yoga exercises and mindfulness exercises. And meanwhile, their peer, whatever, their classmates is still studying four hours and getting like the best work. And they're sitting around, you got better lips, you got better hips, you're better than this, you're better than me. Then they just... I don't know how yoga is going to take away your self. Not. Right. Why I love yoga, by the way. I have no problem with yoga, but it's just not the right... It's not the right strategy for the emotion. Why are we so bad at intuitively labeling our own emotions properly? Again, no one taught us how. It wasn't a priority. You know, it's like we tend to be called clumpers. I feel like shit. I feel fine. So we're done. We're done. Just bulk all these emotions. Well, we don't get to that granularity of, is it anxiety, stress, pressure, fear, or well? Is it happiness, elation, ecstasy, or just contentment or tranquility or peace? Is it because, from a biological perspective, there's certain chemical reactions, certain emotions that feel like others, and we just really don't know, we just pay attention to the reaction? Well, there is a problem there, too, because a lot of people... We do feel emotions in our body, for sure, and we have the same sensations for similar emotions. I'm just wondering where that clumping comes from, and everything. Oh, it just comes from not being taught the specific emotion words, people just, you know, honey. You know, like, I don't know about you when you were growing up and let's say you were coming down the stairs and you're getting ready for school and you're, oh, shoulder's a little slumped and you look a little different than the day before. You know, did you have a parent and say, hey, you know, hey, Scott, you know, I'm noticing your body language is different today. You know, let's have some breakfast together and talk about how you're feeling, really. Dad, no, I'm not in the mood for that right now. I just want to go to school. Honey, I know you want to go to school, but, you know, come on, let's just trick him. I didn't have that. I didn't have that either. Yeah. And if, you know, I'm sure my mom would have probably, if you noticed something, tried to do that, and I probably would have ran away as fast as I could. That's true, too. And that's part of the kind of cultural piece, too, that we have grown up in a society, especially for boys and men, you know, like your week, if you talk about feelings, you're just supposed to, you know, knock on it, buckle up, kiddo, suck it up, which is ridiculous. I mean, everybody has emotions and there's nothing wrong with them. There's no bad emotions. Remember, we have to learn how to regulate them. So, but you can't regulate if you don't know how you're feeling. So what we've covered actually are the first two buckets in my work in my book. The first bucket is the mindset piece, just emotions or data. That's freedom. The second bucket is we got to have language for those feelings. We need to get more precise. Some people say you got to name it, to tame it. I say you got to label it, to regulate it, you got to have a little phrases. Then there are actual like real strategies. By the way, those strategies are sometimes enough. Sometimes you're saying, wow Mark, you're really envious of this guy or you're really frustrated right now. Yeah, I am. Okay. That awareness is a gift. I can just let it go. Sometimes it's not enough. And that's why you need more strategies. So another bucket would be the breathing and mindfulness bucket. It is, I was joking about it earlier, but it's really important. You need to know how to breathe, to deactivate your nervous system. In many ways, especially like when we're with our partners or we're at work and we get triggered by a colleague or a boss, you really have to deactivate before you say anything. It is too, because what happens when we're triggered, we go to our automatic habitual retaliatory strategies as opposed to our go-to helpful strategies. You can down-regulate through breath or through some kind of reflection exercise, at least you can say, Mark, take the high road. Like I have a lot of phrases for myself. One of them is like, Mark, I do say, Mark, take the high road. When I'm really upset about something, I say, Mark, you know this is impermanent. Because I have a problem with emotions myself as an expert. When I feel the strong emotion, like in a relationship, it feels like it's permanent. Do you remember that? I know exactly what you mean. It's like this weird thing, like when I'm angry with you right now, it's like my anger for you is forever. But that's why, because it's all consuming. It's all consuming. And if you don't recognize that, that it isn't going to be all consuming and over time, you're going to chill out. All emotions are a femoral, a new rule, another rule. Emotions are impermanent. That's part of when I talk to people who say, I am actually, I'm like, tell me about your day. When you were at the gym, when you were at lunch with your friends, you know, when you're doing this project, when you were doing your musical work, did you feel it then? Oh, actually, it was in a great place. Oh, so then you are not anxious. You have moments of anxiety and we have a negativity bias. So when we're asked to reflect on our emotions, oftentimes we focus on the negative ones. I'm going to add on one more piece because you said when you are feeling a certain way, especially anger or some kind of emotion that's like really charged, I'm not going to say bad anymore. Just like a charged emotion. Good boy. Exactly. Then it's not only about responding. Your decision making ability is completely, it's gone to shit, basically. So every decision you make is going to be less effective because you're doing through the emotion. There are things that aren't related to that person. I want to be careful about that. So what I would say is that this is a real nuance here that you can make a good decision feeling any emotion as long as you're aware that you're feeling the emotion and regulating it effectively when you're making the decision. There's a difference. Do you see the difference? Yes. So you can be angry and still make a good decision if you know that you're angry and you are compartmentalizing that feeling away from the decision. Because if I get off a bad call or I get off a bad email, it's so funny that you mentioned breathing exercises. Whenever I'm actually angry at work, I intuitively go for a walk, for a run, go to the gym because I find that I make better decisions after. I've never really once thought and walked through that in my head of, okay, I'm angry now. Let me not make that next bad decision. That has nothing to do with the anger. But I've just through experience realized that my decision making ability is skewed to a degree. So I try and like separate it with a physical activity. But that was just a learned response over time. But this is something that you can actually. Yeah. And so you have a go to strategy, which is taking a walk, you know, giving yourself some space or going to the gym. I do, when I was writing my book, I was like, out of my mind. There were some days I was like, I hate my life. I hate writing. Like this is boring. Nobody's going to want to read it. And in those moments, I wouldn't push through. I'd say, Mark, you're done right now. Like anything comes out and I was going to be shit anyway. I shut the computer and I went to the gym. And I told myself. One of my, I hired a trainer during COVID, you know, after and after COVID, because I was like, I ate way too much Thai food and needed to like, give me the wheelchair. And I remember joking with them. I said, you know, I may never finish this book, but I'm going to be the best freaking shape I've ever been in. And it was like, it really actually was amazing to me. But similar to you is that if I would get like kind of just like lost or just kind of like just feel like it's not going anywhere, close the computer, go outside. I live in the countryside. I'd look at the beautiful nature or I go take a, you know, do a little, some yoga or a workout, come back, always in better place, always, it's just like amazing. But let me get to the science for a minute because I think this is interesting because we're, we're kind of talking about it, but let me clarify it, which is that, you know, we live in a roller coaster ride of emotions. Some days, you know, you're at work, let's say you're going into work, like people who are listening probably travel to work oftentimes, while they work at home. But let's imagine this scenario, you're traveling, traveling to work, but you had a fight with your kid or your partner or your spouse, you know, on the way to work. And you're like, in the car, I can't take anymore. This is bullshit. You know, this is me being a little bit therapeutic here. And so, and then you open the door to your office and someone says, what do you think about that? And you're like, I hate it. I do a lot of evaluating of people's work or they're writing, you know, their grant proposals. I'm like, oh, this study is terrible. And I'm not realizing that it's the emotion that's driving the judgment. It's not marks, marks not being rational in that moment. Work is allowing the emotion. And this is interesting because it's called incidental emotional leakage. So like, I'm angry at my home life and I'm not processing it well. And what I'm allowing me to do is subconsciously influence the choice that has nothing to do with the argument I had at home. So we're talking about, so this is a real phenomenon. It's a real phenomenon. It happens all the time. And so, the antidote is very simple. It goes back to RUL. It's before you open the door to your office, you take a breath and you say to yourself, what I'm really in a bad place right now, I can't say bad, I'm in a dark place, I'm in a frustrated, I'm angry. What's going on? Oh, I'm, you know, it's the fifth time I told my spouse that I didn't want to walk the dogs and I, you know, I needed to get to work today. You know, running late and I'm so annoyed, I'm so frustrated at my spouse. Oh, okay. Then you walk into the door and you, you've attributed, you use the word compartmentalize, which is okay, but it's really about attribution. I've attributed the emotion to its actual cause. So no longer have that subconscious influence. All of these, all of these strategies. This is what comprises emotional educations. Just a frame, I don't, I want to go back to Ruler again and we'll keep going through, but what would in your perfect world emotional education actually look like? Like, I just want to go back to kindergarten or a way to do that because that's where my work is primarily. So I have a program that's also called Ruler that's in 5,000 schools across the United States and in 33 other countries. And it is a pre-K, pre-school, to high school curriculum that's developmental. Teaching kids about emotions and the emotional intelligence. And it looks like, you know, think about it when you're in 5 years old, you learn the word sad and you learn lonely and what does that really mean? What does that feel like in your body? What are your thoughts when you're sad? And then you get disappointment and you have despair and hopelessness and depression and, you know, those long, you know, that kind of trajectory of emotion that's in a category, you know, of sadness. Same thing with anger, I could be peved and irritated and angry and live it and enraged or I could be calm content, tranquil, peaceful or feeling bliss now and I know why you don't like the word good. You have a much more powerful thoughts for that. Exactly. I mean, if I don't have a good emotion but I can't really, nobody will. But what we do as a curriculum for kids and the adults who are serving kids because they haven't had the education they need to teach it. So ruler is both for the leaders and teachers of kids and also the students is we provide the language for them to learn. And then there's always exercises kids link it to characters and history or they write a poem about it or they do a character analysis, then they do role plays around like situations in school where they feel these emotions and then what do you do when your friends feeling left out in the playground? What do you go to strategies? Do you have them? Well, if not, let's talk about them. What are some helpful things? And they problem solve through that and then they apply that to themselves and that gets kind of done across development. When you have a child who's gone through this program, I'm assuming it's relatively new. It's not, it's not something that's been around for 40 years. No, it's been around, well, truthfully, my whole career is because of my uncle who was my hero in life, who was developing a curriculum like this in the 1970s. He was one teacher in New York State way out of his time then. Way, I mean, God, a little more of him was like a pioneer. I'm lucky, I discovered him and literally he and I worked together for the first 10 years of my career to build up a lot of these curriculum. Then I went to Yale and scaled it. I was going to ask what is the result of a child that goes through this versus somebody who does not? Better mental health, better physical health, better academic performance, happy health and positive. Oh, and there's been meta analyses which are studies of studies at this point done on curriculum like ruler and others and the evidence is consistently clear. Kids do better academically, they do better in terms of their friendships, there's less bullying in the schools and they're healthier, happier people. Quick question. What's your go to when you got 10 minutes before a meeting or a workout? For me, it just used to be whatever I could grab, which usually meant skipping meals entirely or just grabbing something that left me crashing an hour later because it was just full of garbage. That's why I'm partnering with Hule. This black edition ready to drink is a complete meal. So it has 35 grams of protein, six grams of fiber, 35 essential vitamins and minerals. It is no sugar added, gluten free, under five bucks. I always keep a few of these in my fridge and honestly, it's solved the whole back-to-back meetings, go, go, go, non-stop, no time to eat problem. Super well. And this one's new for me. It's Hule's Daily Greens. I had the blueberry this morning, honestly first impression, it was way better than I expected. 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So whether you're doing millions or hundreds of millions, NetSuite keeps you ahead. And if I needed this product, this is what I'd use. Now if your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get the free business guide, be mystifying AI at NetSuite.com slash Scott Clary. The guide is free to you at NetSuite.com slash Scott Clary. That's NetSuite.com slash Scott Clary. Now it's nice if we have this available to my kids or kids that are currently in school. You mentioned for an adult, they can read books, they can educate themselves. But where would an adult start? I think starting with, again, reading, I feel like I'm like massive self-promoter today. No, but it's important because somebody who's listening to this, I don't want them to think, well, I've never learned this. I'm going to read one book, but they're going to read one book, but reading one book doesn't change your life. No, it's got, well, maybe if it's a really good book, but I mean, come on, let me actually can I tell you a funny story about this? So I got a letter. This is my first book, which is called Permission to Feel, which is kind of like my baby. I got a letter after writing that book from a 94 year old man. He wrote me a note and he says, dear Mark, I finished reading your book and I cannot tell you how helpful it was for me, even in my 90s. I only wish I had learned this when I was younger because I would have been a better husband, I would have been a better parent, but I'm grateful to have these strategies now in my life. I wrote him, I was like a sterical crying from this, like it was 94 old man and from like a lawyer from Boston, a real wasp guy, writing to some Jewish neurotic psychologist that he's thankful for his book, it's pretty good. And I write him back. Now in my book, I dedicate my book to my Uncle Marvin because he, I had pretty traumatic childhood that included abuse and my uncle really pulled me through that. And so I have a phrase that we have to have more Uncle Marvin's in the world and I have a whole study on that too, but that's separate. So this guy writes me back and I say to him, you know, gosh, thank you so much for that letter. I just made my day, you know, it makes what I do worth doing. And he writes me back again and he goes, no Mark, thank you for being my Uncle Marvin. Wow. I'm like, okay, I've had an, I need therapy, I'm like, this is too much. So there's no, there's no age where this can't be learned. No age. It's sad that we don't have this in a curriculum. What we do, we have it, I'm in 5,000 schools, I want to be in 50,000 schools. It's sad that it was never a focus outside of your work and Uncle Marvin. And this pushback on it now too, by the way. Why? By the way, the state that we're recording this in is not very fond of the work that we do. For real. For real. What? See, I don't understand how this could be a political thing at all because it just seems like when I listen to the, like listen, from just personal experience, dealing with emotions and emotions being a huge part of my success, the ones that have sort of taken me the next level, the ones that I have to learn to manage so that I can be a competent professional. There is zero about emotion that I don't see to be a benefit if you just learn more about it. I couldn't agree more. Like I don't quite understand. Yeah, me neither. Either would be pushback. The pushback is that it's the parents job to teach this. And my pushback to that is like parents, you haven't done such a good job. More often than not. Yeah. If anything, like the anxiety levels in our society, if parents were doing a great job at teaching kids emotional intelligence, you know, and I'm not bashing parents now. Parents are doing the best they can. They never have the education either. Yeah, but I wouldn't say that all parents should teach math and science and all the other topics and I couldn't agree more as a, I don't have kids yet, but I can guarantee you when I do have kids, I'm not going to know every single, you know, historical English lit book that we should unpack. Like what? It's not like I can teach you maybe a little bit about social media and podcasting, but yeah, yeah. Well, they think that, you know, some people believe that it's like prying, like you're trying to like pull private information out of kids and that's the problem. And so I tell them like, I have, that's not what we do. We teach kids language to describe their feelings and we teach them evidence-based strategies to help them regulate their emotions. And importantly, we don't tell them when and how they should feel what they should feel, nor do we tell them what strategies they supposed to use. We just make the offering. So they have that edge of issue, I know that you, you can verbalize how you're feeling. And also choose a strategy that works for you. Like I didn't know anything about a technique, for example, that's called psychological distancing. It's one of the most helpful regulation strategies I've ever learned, which is kind of ask like, for example, I mean, we're talking, you know, to, you know, people in the 30s, 40s that are, you know, working adults, they're in relationships. Things, do you ever get triggered by your partner? Not, not often. You've been in a while. But if you're careful, you're pretty good. You're pretty good. No, but of course, I mean, we've been together for like six and a half years. There's been times where we trigger each other a hundred percent. Exactly. Over the stupidest things, right? Of course. Yeah. It's like at the grocery store. Like, why are you buying that? I have a thing with that. Like, why do we need that? I have a thing with that too, because she loves all organic everything, which is probably healthy. It's probably a good thing, but then we don't finish it. So then we have this like dead, wasted, you know, moldy vegetable that lasted two days in our fridge. I'm like, why did you get that? That was $19. A hundred percent. I mean, we have the same triggers. We should go grocery shopping, I guess. So yes. All those little things. Right. In that moment, like, you have to decide, am I going to like be at the grocery store like over my girlfriend's shoulder saying like, why are you buying that's ridiculous? Don't do it. Don't do it. Or are you going to be like, Scott? Is this really that important to my relationship? No. Not at all. But in that moment, you just want to be like, give me that lettuce. Yeah. Throw it back at me in the freezer or the refrigerator. It's like, yeah, and I have the same issue because I'm like, we have this thing with like organic almond milk. I'm like, this is a rip off. Oh my God. Organic almond milk. That sounds expensive. Or the little, what is it like the $30 strawberries from Aeroan or whatever they are? Oh, I wouldn't even walk into Aeroan. I don't either. I don't either. I have walked in. Actually, it's nice. But I have to like close my eyes. The ones that you should that are protecting you versus things that are silly, sort of non-consequential emotional, for example, like the irritation at the grocery store. The irritation at the grocery store versus someone disrespecting you. Yeah. Totally different. How do you understand? Because there could be this, this, this sort of, like they're both anger. They're both anger. Both injustices because you think it's an injustice to buy that lettuce. But if somebody, obviously, if somebody, if a girlfriend is cheating on you, Gina never has, thank God. But if someone is cheating on you versus somebody who's buying a tomato, and there's a sliding spectrum of emotions on, and every single bit of injustice between those two extremes, how do we know which one should inform our actions versus which ones are? And there's a, this would be probably adding a lot to this conversation about like moral and ethics and what, what you want from a partner or you want from a job. You're getting at the point, though, which is that the, it's about the relevance and meaningfulness, you know, of that relationship and the emotion, you know, and what do I do about it? The context matters. This leads to the, the overreaction, right, for things that should not be overreacted too. If you act your life, you know, like someone lied at work to, you know, get ahead, like, that's a big deal. And so you're going to have to come up with a good strategy to deal with the anger with that person and also have the courage to talk to the boss and, you know, that's a strategy that needs to be played out and thought through it really carefully. And I think that then I, where I was going with this was what happens if we have past triggers that make us overreact to things. Yeah, which is common when the person doesn't deserve it. For example, then you have to really pay attention to that and in that moment, say, is this really about what's happening now or is this my past? And this brings us back to the actual being able to recognize it and name it 100%. You know, I think that a lot of people, this is where there's a strong connection to the trauma literature. Yeah, I feel that. And I am part of my, you know, we do work in trauma, which I think is important work. At the same time, the goal of life is to move forward. The goal of life is to move forward, not to move backward. I come from, I was, I was sexually abused as a kid for five years of my childhood by my parents best friend. I appreciate that. Every time I was seeing an Instagram post about abuse or every time I was in a meeting as a psychologist about abuse, I was triggered, I would go crazy. And so I've had, I've learned to really understand, you know, that I am going back to defining yourself. I don't define myself as a sexually abused person. I define myself as a human being who experienced childhood sexual abuse. And I have, I don't deny it. I don't ignore it, but I have put it in its place in my life. Do I get triggered? Do I feel strong emotions when I see abuse happening in the world? Of course I do. Do I, is it part of my passion for making sure people have the courage to talk about their feelings, which I didn't have as a kid? Of course it does, but I'm sublimating that negative experience into, you know, trying to make the world a better place. And I think that if you're constantly in a triggered space, I think that's an opportunity for growth, not an opportunity to believe that the world needs to change to make your life better. Understood. So it's more of an internal locus of control and, and you take responsibility. I think it's an orange scenario. We went a little way, we got heavy for many years. I know, I know, but I think it's important too, because I think that it's heavy, but it's real. It's real. We all have traumatic experiences, little, I have a big one, some people have little ones, some people don't have any. But I think that the goal of life, I just want to say there's a hundred times, the goal of life is to move forward, not backward. And if we're going to allow ourselves to always be triggered by things from our past and not kind of understand those and put them, you know, in a place in our life that isn't so controlling over us, if we can do that, our life's going to be better. When we go through this process and we can identify and we can regulate to a greater degree, you mentioned this improves overall mental health. It does. What can this do for us? What can it not do? So can it, can it help us heal trauma? Can it help us? It can help us do a lot then. I think emotion regulation is the most powerful skill that anybody can learn. And the research is there to support it. If you can deal with your emotions, with the anger, the frustration, the overwhelming fear, you're going to have better physical health, you're going to have better mental health, you're going to have better relationships. And actually the research shows that you're going to live longer, you'll have a longer healthier life. Is that because of high blood pressure, cortisol levels are going to be lower. If you can regulate your emotions, you're not going to be having these cortisol spikes all the day all day long. You know, I was at a conference recently where a friend of mine was talking about mental health and trauma. And it was a great conversation we had because, you know, how sometimes you, you know, you remember like you get into bed at night, if you're a parent, you do this with your kids or you're even with your partner. And like you start talking about what went wrong that day, well, that's going to spike cortisol levels, right, because it's going to, you're going to go into fight play mode. You're going to be activated, which is going to make rest more difficult. So there's a prevention strategy. Don't talk about the bad shit before you go into bed, do it late afternoon over a cup of coffee, call somebody up then because you want to go into your night with cortisol levels dropping so that you can get a good night's sleep. Who learned that growing up? No one. No one. Of course not. Of course not. But that's like a real concrete strategy to make a huge difference in your life that by the way, and if you have, you know, the cortisol spikes, which leads to chronic or toxic stress is what makes your life shorter. Well, if you can use it evidence-based strategy, which is like talking about that earlier in the day so that your mind can be more at ease when you go to bed, guess what? You're going to be healthier. Your immune system is going to be stronger. So there's not really a part of your life that doesn't improve. I don't think so. I think it improves everything. I just thought it was interesting how you've said that we are very bad at naming, labeling our own emotions. And then I was thinking about how many words you were just using to describe very similar experiences. So, yeah, without the education, it makes sense we're very bad at labeling our own emotions. So if we're talking about differences between a certain kind of emotion, something that people would normally get confused. So stress, anxiety, pressure, fear, overall. You mentioned that ironically, these were all things that maybe some of your students described that was actually jealousy. So it's not even just that we are completely wrong. We could even be wrong if we, if the emotions are a little bit more closer together, closer together. Yeah, that's a good way of saying it. The same family. The same family of emotions. Why are we so bad at understanding, even within the same family, what are our emotions? Is it because you don't have a proper definition of what they, what they are? And then what happens when we mislabel? So let's think about it. Anxiety, stress, pressure, fear, overwhelmed. Oh my. Anxiety is about uncertainty. I get anxious when I can't control the future or predict the future. I'm stressed when I have too many demands on me and I don't have enough resources to deal with those demands. Same or different. Different. Different. Different, much different. Fear is when there's an immediate impending danger. Also different. Different. Anxiety, stress, pressure, pressure. Something at stake is dependent upon your behavior. Also different. Yeah. Exactly. Overwhelmed. You're just saturated with emotion. What would be when you have too much happening and not enough time to do it? Stress. That would be stress as well. Yeah. Okay. So you have too many constraints. Too many things to accomplish. Correct. So why would that, like, why would you, Scott, be better at regulating your emotions if you were more granular or specific? Because I would know what's causing the emotion. I would know how to deal with the thing. So for example, if I'm feeling fear, fear means that something is immediate and present. Well I can't feel fear about a big project or a big presentation or a speech that I'm speaking in front of 5,000 people and I've never spoken in front of that many people before and it's in three months from now. But I'm like, I say it's fear but it's not fear. It's not fear. So that means that I'm actually tackling the wrong emotion. So if I want to strategy to remove some sort of feeling, then I have to name the right thing. Yeah. Quite simply. It's anxiety because you're uncertain about the future. Yes. You're making your prediction that it's not going to go well. So then I can do it now. I can have a strategy that deals with anxiety as opposed to a fear based. Exactly. The fear is sort of like you're in it. Yeah. There's nothing. Once you're in it, it's tough. Then it's like run away. You know, when the, you know, but then people could have the wrong reaction. Then they could, for example, they could self-sabotage and because they think it's fear, maybe they cancel the speaking engagement because they don't want to go on stage, even though that's totally not the thing. This is why if you don't have emotional intelligence, you don't always achieve your goals in life. You're giving the best example right there. That's why it's so important. You speak about the emotional regulation budget. Yes. When I read that or when I say that, it sounds like I can only regulate so much per what our day, lifetime. It depends on your job, you know, if you're a kindergarten teacher, it's tough work. Like, you know, think about that kindergarten teachers all day long, boys and girls and everyone. Please sit still. Sit still. If I have to tell you one more time, everybody let's smile. Let's do our little marching to the water fountain. It's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. Think about if you're a bill collector, you know, the police officers at the airports. Ooh. Like their whole day is like move the car, move the car. I know. And they're not happy people for good reason because they're stuck in their emotion. There's a good example of that, which is, we call that emotional labor, which is another term that's about the emotion that you have to experience or that you're kind of required to or just have to do in your work, you know, it's the bill collector who's stern. It's a kindergarten teacher who's always smiling, you know, it's the professor who is always got to entertain or, you know, things of that sort. And it can be draining. Like I do like to speak publicly and I do a lot of it and I, you know, I can't come home and be like, and tonight, it doesn't work well. So if you have this regulation budget, are there ways to expand? I'm assuming going through this process and education definitely helps. Well, the budget is specific. There's a three piece to the emotion regulation budget and it's all the stuff that I think that you're interested in, which is sleep. It is food and it is activity. These things actually help expand your budget. Correct. Yeah. So it's not even education. That's the biology of regulation. Okay. You know, a lot of people, for example, a lot of young parents, they're working big jobs and they have young kids. They, I get all these phone calls and I can't deal with my, you know, I'm trying to be the best version of myself and I, and I fuck up the first thing, you know, at breakfast. And then the first thing I asked them is, A, how was your sleep last night? I didn't go to bed till midnight. Well, if you went to bed at midnight and you're up at 5 a.m., you know, it's five hours of sleep. You're not going to be the best version of yourself. So it's not that you can't be the best version of yourself. It's that you are not restoring your body. You need more budget. So that's a big deal for people. And I know people have, it's like ad nauseam how much every podcast is about sleep, but everybody needs quality sleep and longer sleep because we just need to rejuvenate. Our brains need to relax and, you know, we need time to allow those neurons to just kind of wash away the crap from the day before and restore themselves. So that's number one. Number two is food. My hunch is that you care about what you eat. Yeah. And so you know that, you know, eating a high fat, high sugar diet is not going to be great for you. No. It won't feel good. It won't look good. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But yet when we're anxious and we're overwhelmed, it's a while ago, but about two years ago, I was traveling and I was so angry with myself for taking this trip to give a speech in the middle of nowhere land. And I was saying at a really shitty hotel and I had not eaten dinner, I got to the hotel room. The only thing was a bag of gummy bears, it was it. So the choice of starve or look like a maniac watching television at midnight eating a full bag of gummy bears. And I chose to eat half the bag. But I was like, and I, I, in the moment, like I'm like, you're going to hate yourself in the morning for doing this. You hate yourself right now for doing it because you know you shouldn't be doing this and like you didn't even eat this kind of crap. But the point is, I now have not traveled without a bag of protein bars. You will not catch me without having a healthy alternative in my backpack. It's changed my life because when I'm flying, I think you're going to give me that clopping thing. I'm like, no, thank you. And I eat this instead. And so that's part of me being aware that A, I'm going to have a troubled night's sleep but we have all that crap on my body and B, I'm going to be, I'm going to be negatively ruminating the following day about it, even which is going to interfere with my presentation. The third, and even like today, so today I had to give a speech before this. I just got back from London today before yesterday, actually, yeah, day before yesterday. And the reason I'm sharing that is that I woke up this morning too early from jet lag about five o'clock and I was like, Mark, you should sleep. I went a bit early though. I pushed myself to go to bed early. I'm sharing this with you because this may resonate with people. My brain was saying, Mark, you've been traveling. You should just like lie in bed and get room service and then watch TV and then take a shower and get ready for your talk. But Mark's like deepest true self was like, you're lying to yourself, you jerk. You were just like making, you were like, this is, you know that what you need to do is get out of bed, go to that gym, take a walk outside. And I, I, my, my bed herself came out. I got up. I was annoyed because there was no coffee shop open at 5.30 in the morning, but I did a crappy coffee in the room and I went to the gym and it transformed my whole day. It does. It does. So that cascade of decisions came from understanding where that emotion was coming from too. Correct. And also this is a good point, which is that it's not emotional until it's not about indulging in your emotions. If I indulge in my emotions, my emotion, which I'm not even sure what I was even feeling, which was tired maybe, that's just not even a feeling, I was feeling, you know, a little bit overwhelmed because I've been on the road so much. And I, my, my lazy Mark self was just staying bed, you know, you deserve the rest. That's going to make you feel better. But Mark who's been working out regularly now for a couple of years knew that Mark, do the forecast, do the forecast, and the forecast was I knew I would feel a lot better if I went to the gym, which was true. 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What I love about it is a skip all the theory and they just tell you what's actually working today. So demand gen marketing content linked in attribution. They talk about real strategies that they are using that you can use today that are working. So if you're an entrepreneur, if you're building a business, if you're really selling anything to anyone, go search demand decoded wherever you get your podcast. It's so interesting. So sometimes your emotions, what you're describing are actually lying to you because your subconscious knows what is actually good for you. The emotions aren't lying. It's the strategies that you've learned over life that are making you or could be the lack of the sleep, the lack of nutrition that can also influence all influences your kind of automatic, like the lack of sleep, the lack of all that influences your cravings. When someone has no budget left, what are they feeling through the day? How can someone identify if they are, it's good to say like get more sleep, eat better, but what is the life of somebody or the experience of somebody who has no emotional regulation budget left? Do they just feel strung out? They're burnt out, they're drained, and they're making poor decisions. Is that the majority of people? It's a lot of people. It's a lot of people who, you know, you look at the obesity rate in our society, you look at the depression rates in our society. We know from research that exercise has the same impact as psychotherapy or drugs, different treatments for supporting people who have depression even. We have not built the muscle, you know, the learnings of, and this is by the way something really interesting that I want to talk about, but this is one thing because, you know, I'm looking at you and I know you can see you don't just, you know, you work out. And he's like, yeah, no, it's a big part of my life, but it's not for the aesthetic look good reasons. A lot of what we're talking about, again, I've never studied this, but peak performance, not from like a, you know, got to bench the most, got to run a marathon, be an Iron Man, got to, you know, build a billion dollar company, just like, I want to feel good through my day. I want to be, I want to be there cognitively, I want to make smart decisions, I want to be able to, you know, people interact with, I want to interact them with kindness and empathy and generally just leave the world in a better place than I found it. Like I just want, and it's hard for me to do that if I eat like shit. If I don't work out, if I get to sleep, I don't get to sleep. Like it's very hard in the relationship piece, which we didn't get into with another whole piece. So it's like, these are just the direction that I've moved in is better sleep, better food, more activity. And it just, it just bleeds in a positive way into all other areas of my life. So yes, I do work out. I enjoy it. I immensely enjoy it. And you know, I mentioned before, whenever I get a bad email or something like that, I'll go to the gym. So yeah, it's a super, there's a super positive reaction to that. And great, you look good once in a while on the beach, but the point is the rest of your life is much better because of it. Exactly. And it's not your only strategy. You're going to have to respond to the email, but you're going to respond to it in a more thoughtful way after you do the workout than if you just went right to the trigger. For sure. I apologize. I hijacked your thought. No, no, no. You were going somewhere with that. I want to give credit to Marco Jimenez, who is the, this trainer that I met. And online, I was like lying in bed, feeling not good about myself because I had my, by the way, my other whole life career was as a martial arts teacher. And we had this conversation because when I first started working out, like, I always been like, I did yoga, I did martial arts, but I never like lifted weights weights. Now I'm a four day a week lifter. And I've never felt better. And but the first phase of the workout change was like, you know, cutting the calories and, you know, monitoring my steps and my walking and activity and then doing the lifting. I mean, I would work out. I have such negative self-talk. Arch your 50 years old, like who cares about your body, even with your partner 30 years, you know, who cares? You've been, you know, your professor and nobody's looking at you. And I like, that's sick. Why am I so nasty to myself? And the part of the reason why I wanted to work out was for my physical health. But I also, you know, I do a lot of public speaking. I wanted to feel good when I saw the pictures of me on stage, like I want to feel good about how I'm representing me. That was important to me. And it wasn't in some grandiose, like, narcissistic way, which is I wanted to feel when I looked at the picture. I wasn't sure. Yeah. You look good. You look good. That's only my uncle. And then you look good. Let's remove the Florida. You have a little bit. A little bit. Yeah. A little bit. I know exactly what you mean. That's funny. Anyhow. But the point was that the first phase was like, it's like, do it at all costs. Like Mark plow through the negative talk, just like try to catch your negative talk and reframe it. And so that was all the cognitive strategies. The second phase was when I actually saw progress. I actually had lost the weight that I had gained. I saw some toe because he made me take pictures every month. You know, all the pictures. And I was like, wow, Mark, you look better. You look different. But the third phase is what interests me the most, which was when working out no longer really was something I had to push myself to do. It became part of my identity. And now I do see it that way. It's rare that I make the excuse that I did this morning. And I still got up and did the workout though. I'm proud of myself. And the interest that I have in my work as a psychologist is for people like you and for the people that are listening to your podcast to come to a place in their lives where they wake up every morning and actually see themselves as a highly skilled, emotionally intelligent person. So if I think about what turned you from somebody who was forcing themselves to work out to somebody who enjoyed it, it's because now you have this collection of evidence that it's in that positive in your life. 100%. So it's very easy for you to do it. So I'm the type of like loser that will find a hotel based on how good their hotel gym is. Me too. I actually have a big deal for me. I get it. There's a website. It does it for you too. But is there? I will talk about that later. Yeah. There's a website that ranks hotel gyms. Love it. Because I know that I'm going to feel worse. I'm going to, I'm just going to feel lethargic and gross and I won't enjoy myself as much. So I'm like, okay, so how do I architect my life in a way that will support this being very important to me. And every time I travel, it's a must have you and I really the same very, very similar. But it's because we have this like once we see something that's a benefit in our lives. It's no longer a habit that you have to force. I'm sure that, you know, James Clear, I'm sure there's some part of his book that talks about this, right? Where the thing turns into the identity because it's so net positive for you. This is what people have to do with emotions. They have to, they have to. So the belief I can do this, I can label my feelings. I have the words to regulate them. I can breathe and do all those exercises to still my mind and deactivate my nervous system. I can stop being a freaking self-sabotor and be so self-critical, like, I'm not good enough. You know, talking about like negative talk, abs have always been my worst area. And you know, I was doing abs a while back and I'm like, the first two minutes, like, why is this in particular, again, like, it creeps back in. It's amazing to me. And I'm like, Mark, you just made a commitment, like, you were going to, this is going to be the month where you're going to be a Mr. positive self-talk and like 10 seconds later, like, never going to get those abs. And you have to catch that negative talk and you've got to work on it. You just have to. There's no option because it will ruin your life. It will ruin your life if you cannot get rid of the self-criticism. It's interesting because you mentioned that the people that have achieved the most have basically whether or not explicitly knowing it or just intuitively understood it, gone through this ruler process and their own life, which is interesting because there's a lot of these, I don't know, hustle, culture, people that just talk about, like, suppressing emotion. Yeah. But then it's like, those are kind of like the, there's like a ceiling on that. Well, the dude, I love it now because all these dudes, like other podcasts that I've been on, like Uberman and Chris Williamson and Monowiz and they're all talking about emotions now. It's interesting, right? Yeah. Because they realize it. And by the way, there are people who are successful who are not emotionally intelligent. We can name a few of them in our society. But again, what's your definition of success? That's what's key. This is what this podcast turned into. When I first started, it was talking about business and entrepreneurship. And then I started realizing, okay, if you make a little bit of money, if you're successful by a financial, you know, KPI or standpoint, how do you make sure the rest of your life doesn't go to shit? Correct. And that's very important. It is. And that's why this point of success, I actually would advocate for emotion regulation being a big part of our success in life. If your definition of success is having, is being a powerful CEO or government leader who doesn't care about people, you know, I don't want that success. I'm not interested in that as being successful. I'd rather see leaders who are creating a world where there's greater well-being for the people in that. And in other people's life, but also their own. Of course. You don't want to be a great CEO, oh, I say great, a successful, built a big company. But you know, like four X wives, kids hate you. You're physically out of shape. You feel like shit. Like, you don't want this stuff at all. The whole model that I have created with my book is about self and other. It's always self and other. I have to be a good self-regulator. And I've got to share the love. And I've got to help you as my significant other, my employee, my friend, whoever, the community. I've got to help you regulate better too. That's the thing that I think people have a hard time with. And just maybe talk about that for a second, regulating other people. Because I can listen to this. I can read the book. I can do the work. And now great. I'm fine. My spouse or my partner or the five, 10,000 people that work at my company haven't done any work. Well, you've got to create the opportunities for them, you know, they've got to read the book too. But truthfully, the relational piece of this is important, which is that, and by the way, I have a whole lot of studies on this. There are three characteristics of our emotional allies in life. Do you want to guess what they are? Three characteristics of an emotional ally. Okay. I feel like I'm going to probably miss not even define what a characteristic is, but I would say like supportive. Yeah. Like those kind of attributes. Yeah, empathetic, supportive, empathetic, caring, loving, like, is just what you're talking about. You're in the right direction. Okay. So the top three are non-judgmental. Oh, non-judgmental. That's good. A huge one. Yeah. I think people feel like they're endlessly judged. Yeah. And social media doesn't help. So we all feel it all the time. The second is good listening. Can you just listen a little bit more, please, not you, I'm not talking in this, right? And the third is empathy and compassion. There are other little ones, but those are the three big. And by the way, they'll show up across culturally for me, whether I'm in China or Australia or England or Spain or Italy. Now, interestingly enough, you know, ask yourself, have you worked in a, and now you have your own business, but have you worked for other people in the past? Yeah. When I started my career, I worked in a huge, huge, like fortune 1000 company, I worked in smaller companies of 100 to 200 people, yes. Right. How many of the bosses that you had were concerned about your well-being? Some, but not many. Yeah. How many of them showed up as non-judgmental, good listeners who had a lot of compassion? I would say very few. I would say very few because I feel like the bosses I had were more traditional bosses. And they cared about my well-being to a degree as long as it aligned with the business. Yeah. So there's like a caveat. Exactly. There's like a, you know, you have to, so, but I think that's what most people who are high performers think. Like I care about your well-being, but what if your goals or your passions don't align with what I'm trying to accomplish? Then you shouldn't work together. You know, that's, you know, we, you have, all organizations have values, but the point is, is that each of us is healthier, is happier, so I have very strong research on this. We are higher in our ability to deal with our feelings. We are physically healthier, mentally healthier, we actually get better sleep at night. And we have higher life satisfaction and higher purpose in meaning in our lives. When we work with people, our bosses who are highly emotionally intelligent. So then this leads to the question, why do people suppress emotions at work? Because they've been taught to leave their emotions at the door, which actually leads to lower performance. Exactly. And again, it's not about emotional indulgence. It's about recognizing that, yes, I have employees who are stressed right now. Let me give them strategies and support systems to help them alleviate the stress, because a less stressed employee is going to be a better performer. And it's not about getting rid of stress. I actually like to hire people who have a little bit of anxiety. They get stuff done. I appreciate that. That's true. You know, the person is like, whatever. I'm not interested. You know, I like a little anxiety, but it's, it's at a peak. Once it's chronic, you're done. The workload, you know, the work, the quality diminishes. One thing that you speak about when you're trying to like sort of help someone else regulate, you mentioned the three characteristics. So non-judgmental, active listening, emptying the passion. But no one's looking for a fixer or a problem solver. And I think that's a good reframe because I think that everybody tries, especially people that are those three things, I think they can incorrectly assume that, well, let me just go in and tell you what to do. I figured it out. I love you. I care about you. I want you to be your best self, but I'm going to try and impose my knowledge and like fix your emotions or whatever. And that doesn't work. That's not what people want. And by the way, like for parents who are listening, it's the worst thing for your kid. You're not teaching them resilience. You know, they're never going to build the muscle. No one can build your biceps for you. Right? You can encourage your kid with you being a good role model to exercise and go to the gym, but you can't build their biceps. Why does this matter emotional regulation, emotional education? Why does this matter now more than ever? It's funny. I was doing a talk now. It's called why a regulation? Why now? Oh, that works. I didn't know that. I know. I know. That works. And I'm glad you brought it up. And I think it goes back to a little bit of what we talked about earlier. I think we are on overdrive. I know, but I don't know about you, but my brain is on overdrive. I'm just like, I just got out of this conference where everybody was an influencer. I was like, I have not enough. And like, how does this person, I like, I know that I know more than they do. They have 15 million followers. I don't have any role. I mean, it was like endless like overdrive of like, and then like, nobody was actually watching me present. You know why? I'm taping my presentation. It was the weirdest moment. Like I'm here and like presenting to thousands of people and like, I'm not looking at cameras of phones. Yeah. It was the weirdest experience. That's because you're on an influencer event. Yes, yes. But still, it's weird. It is weird. I'm sorry, but my point is that it's and it's like the conversations with people that I had were all about like next, next, next, next, next, next. And your brain is in that kind of overdrive, your body and your mind are going to go nuts. And so I think kids are that way. We know the average high school or six hours a day on their phones. That means they're not doing what we're doing right now, which is eye contact and having conversations. And my research and others research, it shows that kids prefer texting each other than even talking to each other. So now we're more isolated than ever before. We're lonelyer than ever before. We're going to AI for relationships. Yeah. It's a whole other can of worms. Yeah. And by the way, it's all stemming from a lack of real connection from early childhood on. Families who balance these technologies, you know, have kids who are healthier, happier, and, you know, et cetera. So that's number one. Is this the overdrive? Number two is all about like the societal stuff. You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, when I was a kid, you know, I hated school, but I wasn't worried about school shootings. Do you know that last year in the United States of America, there were 80 school shootings? I didn't know that. 80. So that's not like a little number. So if you're a kid right now, who hears that, you're worrying that your school is going to be next. So you live in a fight or flight mode? Correct. That's where we're at right now. And so this is why we need to A, in my opinion, a motion regulation, by the way, if you ask me for my real big vision, is that CEOs, government leaders, it's requirement to learn this stuff. Parents, leaders of schools, teachers, you know, and kids themselves, so we have an emotionally intelligent kind of world. Who suffers the most when this education isn't part of a curriculum or they don't learn it young? It's the kid. It's the youngest with the least amount of power. So they're growing up without the education, with this constant overwhelm and a society that is, it's really just a society that is promoting comparison and anxiety and stress and expectations. And now they have this, again, this hypercharged environment they're growing up in. They have no tools to deal with it. So the effect of not understanding this in 2025 and beyond is going to be even more pronounced only to even more mental health issues with adults. Yeah. And guess what? What we want to do is a society and what we're doing is quick fixes, which don't work. And what we also are doing is, you know, like, I'll give you a speech at a big psychiatry conference. Let's phones. What? Let's phones. Well, that's the obvious. But yes. But here. No. You know, I really give a good talk, I'm just, you know, just saying. And so these psychiatrists came up to me afterwards and they said, hey, Mark, you know, great talk. But you know, we've had a meeting about this and we predict that, you know, we need about 10,000 more psychiatrists to support all the mental health problems in our nation. And I said, dude, like, my job is to put you out of business. And so we have a society that is actually willing to spend more money and resources on treating people with mental illness than knowing that the work that I and others do as an early preventionist is much more cost effective. And Malita, a healthier existence for children and the adults in our future. I hope that more people pick up your work and teach in. And I think it's like, because say that again. I hope that more people pick up your work and teach it and run with it and learn it. Because what you're actually describing, again, I'm not as knowledgeable about the mental health and psychology fields as you are. But what you're describing as prevention is something that on the, on the other side with medical issue, like, like physical issues, health and wellness issues, like physical health and wellness, it's all, I mean, it's like sick care. It's never healthcare, right? It's always, it's always after the problem occurs, then you get some drugs to fix it or you go to a doctor to fix it after you get sick after you get the disease after what after. So I mean, a lot of what I believe in is prevention is fixing the leading indicator that's going to lead to the hopefully, you know, better life. And that's the sleep, the nutrition, the activity, like when you do these things properly, you're going to have less of all the other ailments. Correct. But it's the same, it's the same issue in mental health. Correct. You are the, you are the fix that's going to cause a healthier, a mentally healthier individual, whereas adding 10,000 more psychologists is just fixing poor mental health. And people can't even afford it, you know, I worked in New York City. There's a child, a psychiatry institute that charges 900 hours an hour. Oh my God. So who's getting the treatment, the privileged kids? And I just, you know, I get it, but it makes me, there's also no, there's also no, there's no reason for that. Like, I know that there's a lot of great therapists that really want the best for their clients, but the business model also doesn't work well. Because if everybody's healed, then you start making money. Correct. If there are no more diseases, then pharmaceutical companies don't make money anymore. Yeah. And this is why we need it. A whole new way of thinking about prevention, yes, prevention. And what it means to live a good life and living a good life is the things that we spoke about. It's about the biological, but the budget stuff of exercise and nutrition and sleep, but it's also about, you know, having a healthy mindset. It's about knowing what you're feeling. It's about knowing how to breathe properly and meditate. It's about knowing how to have positive self-talk. It's about having healthy relationships and eventually saying that this is not just for my life, but my job in life is to pay it forward. But after all the research you've done, so you've been researching this for how long, over 30 years? About 30 years now. 30 years. So this has been your whole career. More or less. Yeah, I don't know anything else except the Ben Emotions. What has been the most surprising thing that you've discovered? Sadly, the resistance to education, to learning about this stuff. My job is not to learn about feelings. My job is not to talk about feelings. It's the resistance to really incorporating this into parenting, into schools, and into workplaces. So basically, we have all the tools for everybody to be happier, healthier, live better lives. Obviously, you still do research, but we have the fundamentals that have been proven time and time again with tons of data. 100 percent. If somebody influences right now in their lives and their kids' lives, they will be significantly happier. Happier, healthier, and live longer. So the goal is to reframe the apprehension about education and understand it's not. The next generation of people who have an emotion education are the people who are leading our companies in our country. If people want to learn more about this, where do they go? So we have your newest book. So your newest book, dealing with feelings, use your emotions to create the life you want. That is available now. So wherever you get your books, Amazon, whatever, I'll put a link in the show. Where else can people watch your talks, follow you? My website has a lot of stuff, written a lot of articles for Time Magazine and Wall Street Journal and other places like that, so they can download and read fun little articles. And then the app that I co-created with Ben, someone who is the co-founder of Pinterest, called How We Feel, which is free on Android and iOS. We have about three and a half million users. People love it. And it's a nice tool to help you build emotional awareness. I think reading and the app together is like a good combo. I like that. And you know, you've done a lot of work already. You have the strategies that work. What are you interested in now? They could really impact people in the future. What is sort of the next? Yeah. It's funny you asked that. It's a trigger. Why is it a trigger? Because I think that's the way we think in life is what's next, what's next. And one of the things that I pride myself on is going deeper and deeper and deeper with the same thing. Like I haven't achieved my goals yet. Every school is not doing this. Every family is not doing it. And so my next to be frank is to figure out how to get people to do what we know from the research works. Okay. So if you could tell and pass on sort of one lesson to your younger self, well, however you want to frame it, something that has been so impactful in your understanding of emotion. If you could only pass on that one lesson, what would that lesson be and why the most important lesson that you'd want to leave your younger self in the audience with? It goes back to my first book, which is Permission to Feel. You got to give yourself Permission to Feel. It's okay to have these feelings. There's no bad emotion. And it, hard job as friends, as parents, as lovers is to give everybody we love and care about Permission to Feel too.