Raising Emotionally Intelligent Kids #23

Raising Emotionally Intelligent Kids

Episode Number: #23

Description: In this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast, Jon discusses the importance of raising emotionally intelligent kids. Jon shares personal insights and practical steps on how parents can foster emotional intelligence in their children. Jon also opens up about his recent break from podcasting, the challenges he faced, and how taking time for self-care has impacted his parenting.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Introduction and Jon's return to podcasting
• 00:34 - Focus on topical episodes and the importance of emotional intelligence
• 01:32 - Understanding and processing emotions
• 03:31 - Personal updates (Why I ghosted)
• 08:43 - Step 1: Recognizing and understanding emotions
• 17:56 - Step 2: Naming and labeling emotions
• 30:03 - Step 3: Expressing emotions in a healthy way
• 36:00 - Encouraging kids to express their emotions

Key Takeaways:

Jon's Three Step Process for kids

1. Recognize Emotions: Check in with your body to identify physical signs of emotions.
2. Name Emotions: Labeling emotions helps in processing and understanding them better.
3. Express Emotions: Find healthy ways to express emotions, avoiding explosive outbursts.

Links to Resources Mentioned:

• Dr. Mark Brackett's work on emotional intelligence
• Whole Brain Child by Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
• Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown

What episode should you listen to next?

• Punishment-Free Parenting with Tina Payne Bryson

How to Connect:

• Never Miss a New Episode: CLICK HERE
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• Share: Share this episode with friends and family, especially those who would benefit from learning about emotional intelligence.

Episode Transcript: The full transcript of this episode is available here.

Connect with Whole Parent:

• Email: podcast@wholeparentacademy.com

Social Media Links:

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Chapters

• 0:00 Raising Emotionally Intelligent Kids
• 11:27 Why many of us are Emotionally Ignorant
• 22:37 Step 1: Recognizing Emotions
• 31:27 Step 2: Labeling Emotions
• 38:43 Step 3: Expressing Emotions
• 44:20 Concluding Thoughts Emotional Intelligence

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:59

Hello and welcome to this episode of the whole parent podcast. It has been a long time since I have recorded an episode of this podcast and I am so excited to do that today with you, wherever you are, wherever you are listening. It's been a minute and I'll talk about that in a moment, but before I get to that, I want to tell you what we're talking about today, which is raising emotionally intelligent kids. We're talking all about emotional intelligence today. It's a little bit of a different episode we are in. Is this season two? Does this count as season two? It's been so long since I've released an episode.

Speaker 1: 2:34

I feel like it should be a new season, but we're not going to make it season two because that will just massively confuse me. But in these upcoming episodes I'm going to do a lot more with talking about topical ideas. I've gotten some really positive feedback when we've done some topical things, and so, yes, we'll still do parent questions on occasion. Yes, I'll still have guest episodes, but I really want to focus in on some topical episodes, and this topic of emotional intelligence and specifically the importance of emotions, is so central to me that in a book that I have recently turned in the final draft of, or something close to the final draft. I don't exactly know the publishing process so well that at this point I know exactly what is the final draft or is not, but what I assume to be. Basically, the final draft has an entire chapter devoted to the concept of emotional intelligence and fostering positive emotions.

Speaker 1: 3:31

And before we even get into talking about emotional intelligence, the first thing that I want to say to anyone who is listening is that if you find yourself to be a person who struggles with emotions, I get it, I understand it. I've worked with so many parents for whom this is the case If you find that sometimes, or if you are still under the impression I hope you are not at the end of this episode but if you're still under the impression that some emotions are bad not that some emotions are uncomfortable, that is true absolutely but that some emotions are uncomfortable, that is true Absolutely, but that some emotions should be avoided at all costs I hope at the end of this episode you will no longer feel that way, because people who do not process through, engage with, understand their own emotions become people who are driven by their emotions. Somewhat paradoxical, but this is what we're talking about today, and why teaching emotional intelligence to kids actually makes your job as a parent much easier In the short term. It may be more difficult than just shutting down your kids' emotions. We'll talk a little bit about why parents often default to shutting down kids' emotions when those emotions feel triggering to the parents, and we can't get into all of that today, but that's a big point in this. But what we first have to say is that all emotions are information, and so I'm going to reference a couple different people throughout this episode, people who I would love to have on this podcast, although I guess I don't even know if one of these people is still alive, but one of them I know is still alive, and he's a person who I'm really excited to try and bring on the podcast at a future date, if I can get him, if anybody has a contact, please send me some information.

Speaker 1: 5:31

But before we do all of that, I do want to give a little bit of update on my life. Basically, the last two months, I have taken a break from everything whole parent related, except for the membership that I run, and the reason why I have not taken a break from the membership is because that's my primary commitment. So if you are a member and you're listening to this and you're like, oh, but you've still showed up at group coaching and you've still been answering questions and DMs and you've been still responding to things, yeah, of course, because that's our paid community. But to the general population of, like Instagram, tiktok, podcasting, podcast audience, all the amazing podcast subscribers if you haven't subscribed to this podcast, please do so and the email list I've taken basically a two month break, with a couple of exceptions, and the reason why I chose to do that is basically threefold.

Speaker 1: 6:24

Number one there's something really big going on in our life that I'm not going to share on this episode but that I will share in a future episode. So that's number one. There's big stuff going on in our life and challenging things going on in our life and because of that, that's been taking up a lot of my energy and time. Number two I never intended to take a break, but my mental health and my just physical exhaustion related to posting constantly for basically two years caught up with me and all of a sudden I realized you know what I haven't posted in a week and I feel great.

Speaker 1: 6:58

And for the next, then subsequent like seven or eight weeks I basically did a couple of you know here are their posts but otherwise didn't, and so it wasn't something I really planned. It was something that my body told me hey, this is what's going on, this is what you need right now. And then I listened to my body and that's a big part of why I'm doing this episode as the first one coming back is because part of that is awareness. A lot of people don't have that awareness. That's actually an awareness that I've had to build over time. That's not something that I, you know, innately had to like know when that was happening. And then the last aspect of of the break, or why I did the break, is because I really wanted to spend some time and I didn't know that this was going to be the time. But then, when, the longer I went without creating content and creating podcasts, the more I realized I had the space to do this, to plan break from all things, whole parent, because I still had deadlines with the book and I spent countless hours working diligently on that. And so if you're excited for that book coming out in well, roughly, probably six months now, maybe seven months now then you know it's a time well spent for you. And so that's the last two months.

Speaker 1: 8:22

If you've been like, oh, where's this guy been? Why is it, you know, does he not just care about us anymore? Does he not care about parenting anymore? No, nothing can be further from the truth. I did need to take some time for me, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 8:34

I hope that you guys appreciate and respect that it allows me to show up in big ways for you, in the same way that if you're not taking time to care for your own mental health, your own physical health, your own emotional health, you're not going to be able to show up for your kids. And I don't mean to sound patronizing in this way, but you can't pour into other people if you can't pour into yourself. That's what I'm trying to say with this. And so, as just as much as you know that to be true, I hope that you'll appreciate that those of us who are creating in this way need that space to do that too, that those of us who are creating in this way need that space to do that too. And so you know a couple of different reasons why, but I did want to give you a heads up, because it's kind of weird to just ghost, and maybe you didn't notice. Maybe, like I, have this idea that people are keeping tabs on me and and wondering why I'm not posting it in reality, like you don't have any clue and you didn't even realize that. And if that's the case, you know, hey, I'm. I'm glad that your life is not lived on the social media places, wondering whether your favorite creator is going to post today or not, or if I'm your favorite creator, or if any creator is going to post today or not. Please don't do that. And so it probably is a good sign of your boundaries and mental health that you're not.

Speaker 1: 9:41

But in this time I have gotten to pour into my kids in an incredible way, and that's why it wasn't a four-week break, it was an eight-week break, or a seven-week break is actually because as I was doing it, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm becoming such a better parent. Like sometimes helping people parent better makes me a worse parent, not because I don't think about it I do it wrong, but because I spend so much time thinking about and doing this and on my phone that I'm not present with my kids as much as I could be, and so I really appreciate the last couple of weeks of just they've not been a lot of soul searching, they've just been a lot of fun with my kids and really appreciating that. So thank you for those who are listening to this episode and who didn't just like unsubscribe and tune me out because I was gone for a minute, all right. So we're talking about emotional intelligence today and I'm going to try and do that in a not two hour episode. I'm going to try and break this down into something that you can take away in the next 15 or 20 minutes here, not going on and on and on forever because I could talk about this forever.

Speaker 1: 10:43

Number one many of us and on and on forever because I could talk about this forever. Number one many of us were conditioned by our parents, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether they knew they were doing it or not, to not feel certain feelings. We were conditioned to believe that having certain emotions and having certain internal world experiences were worse than not having them. And if you grew up in a religious framework, this is all the more the case. And I'm not going to get into religion today. I don't think that that's helpful in general, but just know that if you grew up in a religious framework and you're saying, man, this is so true for me, and maybe your partner didn't. And your partner says, well, I don't know, maybe it's kind of true for me, that's not uncommon.

Speaker 1: 11:27

So, generally speaking, people wind up learning as children that certain emotions are to be sought after, not just because they feel good and they're nice to have, but because their adult caregivers tolerate and or celebrate those positive emotions, while other emotions are just to be avoided, to be ignored, to be repressed, and the fruit of that becomes that as adults, we often do not know what we're experiencing. And so if you want your child because ultimately this episode is still talking about parenting, we're not just talking about ourselves but if you want your child to be able to express emotions in a robust way and name those emotions and understand those emotions, what we're going to talk about is being an emotions detective, which, by the way, comes from Dr Mark Brackett, and he is the one who I'm trying to get on my podcast. So if you know him, please hit me up and let me know If you have a contact so I can get Mark Brackett on my podcast, because he has this concept of being an emotion scientist, what I call being an emotion detective and the idea behind this is that you become a person who is scientific about your emotions, not totally removed from the, that you don't feel them, but that you're analytical about your emotions. You ask the question what are my emotions trying to tell me? And if you want to do that for your kids, you have to first begin by understanding that you probably were conditioned to not do that yourself, and even if it wasn't your primary caregivers who did that, it may have just been society.

Speaker 1: 14:42

Certainly, for men there is a very harmful cultural stigma that men are not supposed to be emotional. Sometimes there are certain expressions of emotion that are deemed societally okay or tolerable, but crying grief, sadness, for men especially, is very, very frowned upon historically in what you might call toxic masculinity. Even though that may be the case, it's important to understand that even if it wasn't your parents, many people have been conditioned to not experience emotions. Similarly, women experience this in different ways. Women are not supposed to be aggressive in any way or assertive often and those are outward expressions, often of inward experiences, and those are often demonized you look prettier with a smile, which is this very harmful thing that many people tell to not only adult women, but also young girls, and so the idea that all emotions are valid or that, as I say in my book, there are no bad feelings, that this is the first aspect that you have to internalize yourself. And you have to internalize this because if you don't internalize it, you will not be able to teach it to your children.

Speaker 1: 15:55

One of the other principle concepts for my book is whatever is modeled is mirrored, and so your kids, the primary way that they're going to learn to be emotions detectives, that they're going to learn to experience the broad range of emotions and then express those things in healthy and not destructive ways, are by watching you do it. And so the first thing that you have to take away is that all emotions have a place. Unconvinced of that, up until this point in the episode, all I'll say to that extent is what we know is that if you do not process certain emotions, if you avoid, repress certain emotions, that that repression is not benign, it is not unharmful, over time that will build up and it will come out in some way, whether it comes out in some sort of explosive outburst or whether it comes out in some sort of self-destructive behavior or numbing those emotions that go unprocessed, do not just go away because we don't process them. And so I'm not saying that you have to lean into every single sad feeling and make yourself cry over everything, but if you are purposefully ignoring and repressing any emotion that you deem to be undesirable, eventually that will have consequences. That bill will have to be paid eventually, and the way in which it will be paid is often well out of your control. And so if you're a person who doesn't want to be seen or who fears being seen as overly emotional or out of control, emotional or not acting rationally or logically, understand that the most irrational people, the most illogical people, are the people who don't express their emotions in a healthy way and then eventually express them in an unhealthy way. In other words, if you do not work through your emotions, they're going to work through you and you're not going to have any control over that at all. So, with that being the case, with the truth being that there are no bad feelings, how can we effectively help kids other than just simply modeling emotional intelligence and emotional resilience and emotional expression to them? How can we help them do it? And I am going to offer you a three step method to helping your kids process their emotions and become more emotionally intelligent.

Speaker 1: 18:28

All right, before we get into emotional intelligence and the three-step process, I want to take a really, really quick break here, super, super short, to just say, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, if you haven't gotten email updates I don't know if you knew this, but you can actually sign up for email updates to this podcast where, when every single new episode is released, there's an automatic email that goes out to people who are on that list. Just let me know if you want to get on that. If you're already on the email list, there'll be a link at the bottom of the next email for you to join that email, the podcast notification list. If you haven't subscribed and if you haven't shared this with a friend, please do that. And the reason why I say that is not just because I want the podcast to get out and get to more people so that we can have a keep doing it and have a positive impact on the world.

Speaker 1: 19:11

I truly believe that there are probably dozens of people in your life who would greatly benefit from listening to a podcast like this, from hearing from the guests that we have on this podcast, hearing some of the different ways in which we process these things, to learn to process their own emotions. In fact, if you have a young adult in your life 20 years old, 18 years old, 30 years old even who doesn't even have kids, you can share this episode with them and say, hey, you know what? This is a show about parenting and you're not a parent yet. Maybe this will be relevant to you someday, but we're. This is an episode about emotional processing and labeling and becoming more emotionally intelligent, and I thought that you could be benefit from that. So if you have not done that yet, please do that. Subscribe, make sure that you're rating it and reviewing it on whatever podcast platform you're getting it on Apple podcast, spotify, whatever I'll give an update, hopefully in the next episode, of whether Apple or Spotify is winning on reviews. You guys have been doing a good job of competing against each other. I don't think that we should make our kids compete against each other all the time, especially not siblings. But, hey, members of the whole parent nation, if you guys want to compete against each other and see who can get the most reviews, then I think that's fantastic, but I'll let you know who's winning in the next episode of the podcast, but in this episode, you know, get to jumpstart on that rate and review If you haven't already. Share this with a friend, whether they're a parent or not. I really think that so many people would benefit from a message like this.

Speaker 1: 20:35

All right, let's get back to the episode. All right? So step one of becoming more emotionally intelligent is to recognize and understand your emotions. So, with everything I'm going to say here, I'm going to give you an example of how you can do that with yourself first, and then how you can do this with a child, because if you can't do it with yourself, it's going to be incredibly hard for you to do with your child. In fact, I would say it's almost impossible for a kid to learn to be emotionally intelligent when their parent is insistent on remaining emotionally ignorant. And at the very end of the episode, I'm going to tell you why emotional intelligence is so important. I probably should have done that at the beginning of the episode, but yeah, first, first episode back, so you guys can give me a little bit of a break here, okay, so recognizing and understanding emotions the first step to to understanding any emotional expression is to recognize that you're having an emotion.

Speaker 1: 21:40

A lot of times parents, when I talk about this, will kind of like snarkily say oh yeah, I know when I'm having an emotion. I don't think that that's always true. In fact, if you've ever come home from a really hard day at work and taken out your frustration on your partner, that was the result. I'm not saying that that's not normal. I'm not saying that every partnership has experienced that in some ways. I'm not saying that you're a bad person, but that is an example of a person who has not recognized their emotions.

Speaker 1: 22:07

So until you realize or recognize that you are having an emotion, that you are experiencing emotions, you cannot begin to process those emotions. And so a lot of times that looks like just checking in with yourself and trying to identify the physical manifestations of that emotion. Do your shoulders feel tight? Are you clenching your jaw? Are your fists balled up tight? Are you clenching your jaw? Are your fists balled up?

Speaker 1: 22:37

Whatever the physical manifestations of your feelings are, you have to recognize those first. This is why, when I counsel people who are in deep grief environments, say they lost a child or a parent or a partner, one of the first things I tell them is to begin to check in with their body and how their body is responding to that grief. A lot of times people will be in shock. They won't even realize what they're feeling. They're feeling deep loss and grief and despair even, but their body knows it, so they'll get really tired or they will not be able to sleep or they will not be able to eat. These are the physical manifestations. Your body often knows what's going on. Your physical body will know what's going on Even when your neocortex, your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain, the logical part of your brain that's trying to be consciously aware of your environment and surroundings and internal feelings, is not aware.

Speaker 1: 23:29

And so if you feel that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, I mean that's a really classic one that most people can learn to identify. But there are so many others. And so beginning to recognize like, oh, I am having an emotion, that's the first step fix for this. There are plenty of grounding exercises that you can use to get your prefrontal cortex back online and move through these emotions and process them adequately and effectively. But just the way to recognize it is just do a body check. So just start at your toes, start at your fingertips, whatever works for you, start at your head, start at your neck and just work your way around your body and feel how your different bodily systems feel, check your pulse, check your heart rate, check your different bodily systems feel, check your pulse, check your heart rate, check your breathing.

Speaker 1: 24:17

A lot of times, when we are in high stress environments, when the emotions that we're experiencing are producing a fight or flight response in us, whether or not we realize it, we'll start to breathe unconsciously out of our mouths. We'll stop breathing out of our nose, we'll stop breathing slowly, our heart rate will increase. Those are the ways in which you can check in with your body, and even if you wear like a little heart rate monitor, you can just look is my heart rate elevated right now? You know, there's simple stuff like that and you may not even be aware that you're having an emotion, but oftentimes you are, and so the first step in understanding, recognizing, gaining emotional intelligence is realizing that you are having emotions all the time. In fact, your emotional processing center as a human being works much faster than your logical brain, which means that, basically, you're just going through the world, feeling things and then rationalizing what you're feeling or creating, justifying, in some cases, what you're feeling or creating, justifying in some cases what you're feeling as a response. And then the flip side to that, which could be part two. Not only are you going to recognize I am having a feeling, but then you're going to check in with your body and say, okay, which feeling am I having? And that's going to take a little bit of introspective awareness. So that's not only checking in with your body in the moment. It may be.

Speaker 1: 25:32

Looking back into the past A couple minutes, what just happened? That coworker just came up and told me something. How did I experience that? Oh, I just got this email from this person and I find the thoughts, the sentence from that email, that was kind of a shot at me. It's just kind of bouncing around in my head. My partner just came home and said something kind of snarky about how the house looks or how, or how I look or whatever. Like how, how am I appreciate you know, taking that in, I mean, I, I'm having an emotion, I'm having feelings. Okay, what feelings are they?

Speaker 1: 26:08

It is very hard, especially with those very disorienting feelings that send us into our fight or flight response, to be able to check in in the moment and say what is this coming from? And sometimes it can be coming from things that that happened a long time ago. I had a pretty disorienting early may that that was part of my taking time off. One of the things that kind of spurred that on late April, early May, was that in early May is the anniversary of when my best friend from my childhood committed suicide, and so that time of year, even though it's not something that happens in the moment, is experienced in my body and I will have emotions of grief and loss and I'll have to understand those emotions. And oftentimes I will not realize that those emotions are associated to something that happened years ago, but something in the weather. Realize that those emotions are associated to something that happened years ago, but something in the weather, something in the time or season, something in my subconscious recognizes the time of year and I have those emotions and so I have to realize that. But I often can't understand those feelings in the moment. But first we have to recognize. You don't have to be able to very specifically name it and label it yet, because that's step two.

Speaker 1: 27:15

Before we get there, let's talk about how we can do this with kids, so with a kid, instead of having them identify when they're having an emotion, which can be a very, very difficult thing for a child to do. We are going to be the ones who say oh, I see that your face looks really mad right now. Oh, I see that you're crying. Are you sad? Oh, I see that, and actually I asked that as a form of a question. You want to try and avoid asking open-ended questions, but you can kind of ask more closed questions like that. But oh, I see that you're kind of tense. Are you feeling a little frustrated right now? You're, you know, kind of tense. Are you feeling a little frustrated right now?

Speaker 1: 27:54

And you know, the thing is we actually can see the things that happen to our kids, oftentimes, not all the time. You know your kid might be at school or something. You might not know what the impetus for that frustration is, but kids, kids can be kind of open books if we're willing to see them. And a lot of parents struggle to do that and I understand that, like we're not with our kids all the time and kids can kind of be closed off, especially older kids middle school, late grade school, high school but if we're pretty attentive and if we can kind of put our cell phone down, which I know. I know I'm not trying to criticize anybody's parenting. I understand I the last two months I've spent a lot of time away from my phone, but even in just the last week or so, getting back in whole parent, I found myself on my phone more with my kids.

Speaker 1: 28:36

It's harder to process with them and check in with them. I know that's just true for the age and generation that we live in. But the more we can be attentive to that, the more we can see the emotions that our kids are having. And then the much easier cases are the ones where we know what happened. And so when we see that our kid's tower just got knocked over and they're really frustrated about it, or our kid's ice cream fell on the sidewalk and they're very sad about it, or we say no to getting that toy at the grocery store that our kid really wants and we know that they're going to be disappointed about it, we can actually say like, oh, I see that in your body, this is what you're experiencing. And kids sometimes push back and say no, I'm not, and that's okay, you don't have to. Yes, you are, and create a power struggle out of nothing but just drawing their conscious awareness to the ways and the actions of that their body is going through can be extremely helpful. So instead of asking them to do that in the short term, we're going to do that Now. If you want a way to help your kids recognize their emotions, the other way that you can do that is you can go through this three-step process after the emotion is passed, with your kids, and this is the thing that we're going to talk about. Kind of another piece of all of this is that you can always process later, and in fact it's way more solidifying, educational with your kid when you do that, so you can recognize it in the moment. I can see that your fists are balled up and your face is kind of scrunched up and you look very frustrated. You can start to do that in the first part and then an hour later, two hours later, even the next day.

Speaker 1: 30:13

Kids have pretty good memories, at least in the short term. They can usually remember what happened yesterday pretty well, even young kids and people don't think that, but that's true. If you're willing to engage a kid at their level, they can remember usually, and so I have a kid that goes to my church. He knows every single logo of every single car. This kid's not even four years old and he can name every single car logo. Right, my own kids have crazy things. My, my son, my oldest, at two years old, could name every single dinosaur, like Ankylosaurus. You know Pachycephalosaurus, like, he knew the entire name. He knew like what they were like, he knew what they sounded like. According to some YouTube video, they can do that. You know the kids. Kids know every character. You know my, my four-year-old. Some of the first things that he ever told me about are like his creative prophecies, right, like that. That. That can be.

Speaker 1: 31:02

Kids have incredible memories, if, if we allow them and focus in so we can process later to do you remember yesterday when you were tense, when your body got all you know tight, when your body got all tight, when your fists balled up and when you wanted to hit right? We can say those things in the looking back in the future and those can help our child to learn to recognize emotions, which again is the first step to emotional intelligence recognizing. Now that we've done that, the next aspect or the next piece of this is to name those emotions and the way that Mark Brackett says this at the Center for Emotional Intelligence, is called labeling. The way that Dan and Tina say this in Whole Brain Child is name it, to tame it. And the idea is that when we put our physical feelings into words we actually process those with our whole brain. That's why their book is called the Whole Brain Child. That's my favorite parenting book, if you didn't know and Tina was the last episode that we had before I took the break, but in that episode we didn't really talk about this.

Speaker 1: 32:07

But their first book that they wrote 12, 13 years ago whatever that book, the Whole Brain Child was around this concept that you can actually connect kids' whole brains, that the brain can kind of be fragmented we talk about this a lot in the podcast with the limbic system and the neocortex or the prefrontal cortex interfacing. You know your emotional center versus your logical center, but also you have your left and right brain and you have kind of the part of your brain that puts things into language and the part of your brain that's just kind of abstractly feeling and that through that process of reintegration, that loop of connecting the feelings to words, for those feelings that can become incredibly powerful. And we know from therapy and from years of research into therapy, that the ability to put things into language transforms the way the brain manages those emotions. This is why some of the primary ways in which you process trauma with a person, what therapists do, what counselors do, is they get people to tell the story of that experience, including naming and labeling the emotions that are felt during that traumatic experience, and that actually allows them to move through it. Well, on a much smaller scale, if you're going to be in control of your own emotions and if you're going to teach your child to be in control not to not feel, but to be in control of and express that's where we're going with step three, in a respectful and controlled way their experiences of emotions they have to first be able to label them so that they don't become blowups, and so labeling or name it to tame it again, as Dan and Tina say in Whole Brain Child, is this process by which we actually put words to those emotions.

Speaker 1: 33:48

Well, john, why is that difficult? That shouldn't be difficult. No, I'm frustrated right now. Well, it is difficult because most people's emotional IQ, or emotional or EI, emotional intelligence, as Dan Gold, or is it Dan Goldman yeah, dan Goldman who came up with a lot of the emotional intelligence stuff in the 90s. As he says, a lot of people really have a very small emotional vocabulary.

Speaker 1: 34:14

And then Brene Brown studied this in Atlas of the Heart, which is her book, where it's like an atlas of emotions and she goes through labeling all of these different emotions that people experience and giving anecdotes about it. It's a great book, not about parenting, but just about life. And in Atlas of the Heart she does some research where she realizes that most adults can only name a handful of emotions, and so the reason why labeling can be so difficult for many of us is because we don't even have an emotional vocabulary where we know what a feeling is and putting it to words. Now, if somebody else expresses to us a feeling in words I was disgusted or I was jealous or whatever we usually know what that means. We're not unintelligent people who don't know what words mean, but very often adults will not know what jealousy feels like in their body so that they might be able to label that, and so things usually just get lumped into I'm happy, I'm sad, or I'm angry, I'm mad, and or I'm afraid Right, and sometimes afraid isn't even in there, it's just mad right, like sometimes when I get afraid it feels like anger, because it's only recently that I've been able to start to label emotions effectively through therapy, through journaling, and so the process to learning how to label your emotions is actually pretty pretty much harder than you might think it is going to be.

Speaker 1: 35:34

And my, my hack for that is either, number one, you can go to therapy with with a therapist who's going to walk you through the emotion labeling process, or you can go and just get yourself a pen and paper or write in your notes app on your phone and just write out a conscious stream of your experience and thoughts, because oftentimes putting things down into words, whether that's in the context of a trusted therapeutic relationship, which I also should say could be with a trusted friend. And I'll tell you from personal experience I've had a therapist, I have several friends who are trusted emotional processors who I can kind of word, vomit my feelings onto and try and make sense of them. Even though I am a verbal processor and I am an auditory learner, I learn things best by hearing them, even though I am obviously a very talkative person. I have a podcast where I just talk to myself, for sometimes, you know an hour. Even though those things can be true, putting it down on paper is by far the most effective form that I've ever experienced. And I'll go so far as to say I don't know a single adult, certainly children. There are children who for whom this is not effective because of developmental level. I don't know a single adult for whom, when they really invest in the journaling process, this does not become their best way of processing emotions, say, for example, hey, you really need some skills development around labeling of emotions.

Speaker 1: 37:02

But once that therapist colleague, whomever, builds that repertoire and language, oftentimes it's through journaling that the most good work can be done. And I'll give you a window into me. This is very kind of intimate personal detail, but I actually have scaled down my therapy, where I don't go to therapy as much anymore. I journal more, because I've found that if I replace the time that I was in therapy, which was like every other week, with a journal, a prolonged journaling session, my mental health as a whole is better and my therapy sessions that are less frequent wind up being more fulfilling and more helpful too, because I'm not just coming up with stuff to bring to my guy, who's also a Dr Dan. I've talked to three Dr Dans on this episode, which is funny. Anyway, all of this to say, journaling is one of the really, really amazing hacks, and you can teach your child to do that.

Speaker 1: 37:53

Oftentimes, with a child, it might be easier to draw out their emotions, to draw out what it feels like to be angry or disappointed, but those are the types of kind of secondary, complex emotions that you want your child to be able to label and that you want to be able to label yourself, because once you can put words to those things, then they can become. You gain so much power over them. Our brain doesn't exclusively process through words, but does a great amount of its processing through storytelling and images and words, and so maybe it's painting out your feelings, if you're a particularly visual person. But those processes by which you can label your emotions, put words to what you're feeling, become incredibly profound experiences. And so that's step two.

Speaker 1: 38:41

If step one is to recognize, step two is to really understand by putting a label on that emotion, and then step three and this is really important is to express that feeling. And so how do we express that feeling? That can look a whole lot of different ways for a whole lot of different people and I'm not going to tell you how to express your feelings. What I am going to say is that, with you and your child, expressing your feelings is different than letting your feelings completely pour out of you and run you. If you're getting to the point where your feelings are overwhelming you and blasting out of you and you're hurting people and breaking things, you're doing things that you regret later. You put your hand through the drywall or something like. We got it. We got to get back to step one recognize and label before we get to that point and sometimes walk away. Part of recognizing and labeling is knowing when you've had enough and you got to step back right. This is an important part of parenting, but understanding that recognizing and labeling are one and two. Now we're going to go on to expression.

Speaker 1: 39:44

Expression can look a lot of different ways. Expressing looks like controlled expression. So it looks like I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to work out. It looks like you know I need to go for a walk after work. It can look like processing with your partner hey, you know I need to go for a walk after work. It can look like processing with your partner. Hey, you know I'm feeling all these things. I've done all this journaling and now you know I don't know what to do. But can you help me to come to a conclusion?

Speaker 1: 40:09

It can look like confrontation, going to a person and saying you've wronged me. You know, this hurt. I didn't like that. Those can be good things. That can look like crying right, we, we should cry.

Speaker 1: 40:20

If you're a person who finds that you can never cry, let we got to talk about that. Right, we got to figure that out. What's that coming from? Feel like you're not allowed to, or where's that? You know, if you can't cry at a sad movie, that's one thing. If you can't cry when you lose your, lose a parent, or lose a best friend, or lose a beloved pet, then like, then, then we got to, we got to figure out why. That is what's going on there, cause there are no bad feelings and so expression's going to look a lot of different ways.

Speaker 1: 40:48

But understand this it's not an outpouring, it's not a bubbling up, it's not an explosion, it's, it's a, it's a very thoughtful way of going out and seeking the appropriate outlet for that now recognized and labeled emotion. And this is where we get into. Hey, if you find yourself constantly getting to that explosive level of like it just builds up and builds up, and builds up and builds up and you can't take, you can't do any more. And so then you just drink yourself to sleep. Or you can't do any more and so you binge watch Netflix, not one time, but every night, for a month. Right, you can't take anymore. You exploding, your partner exploding your boss, or you drive 115 miles an hour down the, down the highway. Those are are ways in which we can see already we haven't recognized, we haven't labeled. We have to do more work around that, because those are not expressions, those are explosions. So those are your three-step processes and with your kids, with this last one, the key here is to give options.

Speaker 1: 41:48

Hey, are you so mad right now? Yes, I'm so mad. How about you stomp your feet? That's a good one. How about you rip up some paper? How about you draw a picture? How about you go run as fast as you can? Right?

Speaker 1: 42:01

Mr Rogers has a song about this. You know, I'm, I can stop, stop. Stop when I'm mad. Because he's, because it's about expression, I can go out, I think. In his song he says like I can go gather a few friends to play a game of tag, right? Maybe that's what you need to do. That's what I do with my kids Sometimes. When I'm beat, I just need to run with my kids. That's not an explosion. I'm not throwing them around, I'm not hurting them, right, I'm playing with them. But I'm playing hard. And the reason I'm playing hard within reason is because I need that outlet. And so, again, this is the way in which we can walk our kids through. Hey, what do you want to do when you're upset? Do you want to cry? That's okay, crying is okay.

Speaker 1: 42:39

I will say if you don't know how to do all this stuff, you are never going to be able to be empathetic. And that is, in my experience of counseling couples, the biggest predictor of a couple's success. People say communication. Sure, that's true, but really it's empathetic communication, it's empathy. Can you perspective take for your partner? If you can, you're going to have a successful relationship. Personality has almost nothing to do with it. In my experience, there are personalities that make it easier for a couple to last or not. Shared interests that can make it easier or not. Job, healthy work-life balance can make it easier or not. But empathetic communication rises above A person who is truly able to take the perspective, in other words, outside of experiences of abuse or profound mental illness, which may make it impossible for both partners to do that effectively. When you have two partners who are both able to empathetically communicate, that's the greatest predictor of lifelong compatibility. And so empathetic communication is massively important, not only for your child's long-term relational success, not only for your long-term relationship with your child, not only for your child's long-term business, entrepreneurial, career success.

Speaker 1: 43:54

Basically, in every aspect of life, emotional intelligence is going to lead to positive outcomes for you and your child. So don't remain emotionally ignorant. Take all the things that we've been saying here. Take this three-step process. You can learn more about it. I'm sure you can Google it, read some good books about it. Take this three-step process and begin at very least doing these three steps with your kids, and I promise you the result is going to be profound. All right, that's all we have for you, or I have for you.

Speaker 1: 44:20

It was no. We today, just me on this episode of the whole parent podcast, all about emotional intelligence and teaching your kids emotional intelligence. If you want to know more about this, I do have an upcoming book, if you're not on my email list yet, please be on that email list. I talk about this extensively in the book, as well as a lot of other amazing things. I talk about this extensively in the book, as well as a lot of other amazing things, so that book will be available at some point in the next six to eight months and, yeah, until then, this has been the Whole Parent Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and I am glad that we are back.