The Whole Parent Podcast

The Science of Feelings (with Dr. Marc Brackett)

• Jon Fogel - WholeParent • Season 2 • Episode 2

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Episode Description:

In this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast, Jon welcomes Dr. Marc Brackett, the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of Permission to Feel. Together, they dive into why emotions matter, how to raise emotionally intelligent children, and the essential skills parents need to model emotional regulation effectively.

Jon and Marc discuss the misconceptions around emotions—especially the temptation to suppress unpleasant feelings—and how these unresolved emotions often resurface in unhealthy ways. Marc shares his guiding principle of giving ourselves “permission to feel” and explains the difference between being an emotion scientist and an emotion judge. Whether you’re navigating tough parenting moments or learning to process your own feelings, this episode will equip you with practical tools for building emotional intelligence at home.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Why Emotions Matter:
    • Emotions are critical for attention, decision-making, relationships, mental health, and overall performance.
    • Suppressed emotions don’t go away—they often intensify over time.
  2. The Role of Emotional Intelligence:
    • Developing emotional awareness and regulation starts with parents.
    • Kids learn emotional intelligence when parents model vulnerability, self-reflection, and healthy coping strategies.
  3. Becoming an Emotion Scientist vs. Emotion Judge:
    • Emotion Scientists: Curious, open, and exploratory when processing feelings.
    • Emotion Judges: Critical, dismissive, and reactive to emotions.
    • Marc introduces his How We Feel app to help individuals and families develop emotional awareness and vocabulary.
  4. Practical Regulation Strategies:
    • Proactive emotional regulation (e.g., pausing at the “doorknob moment” to prepare for emotional triggers).
    • Modeling emotional honesty with kids, even during challenging moments.

Other Amazing Resources from Marc:

Connect with Dr. Marc Brackett:

Connect with Jon and the Whole Parent Podcast:

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Jon @wholeparent:

Welcome to the Whole Parent Podcast. I am so excited for those of you who are tuning in. I have a person who I've been a fan of for a long time from a distance, but who I'm just getting to meet today. It's Mark Brackett. Dr Mark Brackett from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Mark, welcome to the Whole Parent Podcast.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here with you.

Jon @wholeparent:

Yeah, no, well, your work is so transformative for so many parents and I think a lot of us know your work but we may not know that it's you who's kind of been behind a lot of the emotion regulation stuff. So you, yeah, you are kind of the the the hero behind the scenes. For for me, I know that emotional intelligence has been a really big struggle for me and I definitely was one of those people who, just in my own parenting journey, was way more interested or just my life journey way more interested in just avoiding all of the negative emotions. And you know I don't often talk about her on the podcast, but my wife, even to a greater extent, for her, you know, she's a I don't know how much you know about Enneagram, but she's like an Enneagram type three and she, she, just she feels lots of big emotions but she's not a fan.

Jon @wholeparent:

And so when we came across your work and we were like, oh man, and then we had children, when we had started having kids, our first child is extremely emotional and how do we support and how do we do that well, instead of just kind of squashing that down? And a lot of it came from understanding why emotions are important, and so I wonder if you can just speak to that, because I've talked a lot about that on the podcast. But I would love to hear your perspective Like why emotions? Why should we be encouraging our kids to experience, feel, their feelings?

Dr. Marc Brackett:

Yeah, I mean that could be our whole time together. You know, I think it's nice to think about. Like what would life be like without emotion? I mean we'd have no joy, we'd have no grief. We'd have no grief. We'd have some people would say, okay, that's good, I don't want any grief, but we'd have no pride, we'd have no excitement, we'd have no contentment. It would just be like Dr Spock's walking across the world and a more serious kind of way of thinking about it.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

I like to think about emotions as being data and their information, and so there's five reasons I'm like a broken record about this. The first is an emotions drive our attention, memory and learning. So, for example, if your listeners are bored with us right now, they've got serious issues, but they're real, you know it's. We're not engaging them right, so we're not creating an emotional climate on this podcast that is making them feel like they want to keep going. You know listening, and so emotions are the drivers of our attention. So that's why it's so important at school and at work how people feel matters for where they pay attention. The second is decision making. You think about it like your choice of where you want your kid to go to college. Your choice of what you wear, it's all about feeling, it's all about how it makes you feel. We'd like to think of ourselves as being these irrational creatures, but the truth is whether or not we get up and exercise in the morning or what we decide to eat is often rooted in our feelings.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

The third is relationships. I talk about emotions as being kind of signals to either approach or avoid. So, for example, like when we first started talking, you're like a really nice guy, you're warm, you're engaging, and so it's like all right, I want to talk to this guy. And there are people that I meet and that you meet and that your listeners meet, who kind of had facial expressions. That facial expressions that are signals like stay away, you know, like I'm more powerful than you. That's not an approach, that's an avoid, right? So that's facial expression, it's vocal tone, it's body language.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

The fourth is just for our physical and mental health. You know that our emotions drive, that so little feelings, if they're not dealt with, become big feelings. You know, I talk about emotions as being, you know, these automatic kind of experiences, and when they're intense and for long duration, it means we have to do something about it. And if we don't have the skills to do something about it, our mental and physical health can decline. The final is just performance.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

You know, as someone who teaches at a very high powered university, every one of my students I always say, has higher grades than I ever had and they have better test scores than I ever had. I grade their papers and you know I just had a lot of imposter syndrome when I first started working here, because I just, you know, I grew up with. You know, my father was an air conditioning repairman, my mother had various jobs. Neither one of them had graduated from college. And here I am now working at an Ivy League university.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

It was just a lot of weird feelings and I just had this belief system that every one of my students was a superstar, which they kind of were on paper, but they also were all going to be enormously successful. Sure, and that has proven to be wrong. And because I always joke with my students, you know your IQ gets you in but it doesn't get you out. People really want to be around people that are emotionally intelligent, no matter how smart they are. People want to be around people that have these skills, and so those are the five reasons why emotions matter from my perspective.

Jon @wholeparent:

No, I love that for all of the five reasons that Mark just identified and the way that I talk about in the book a couple things that I heard just pop out in those five reasons, and you might think that you sound like a broken record, but I've never heard you articulate those five in that exact way. So it's not a broken record to me and I feel like I've heard quite a lot from you. The big things that I heard that pop out to me are number one unresolved emotions or unexpressed emotions, unlabeled emotions. These are not benign, right Like these metastasize in us, and the quote that I use is actually one from somebody in my counseling program, my master's degree. I had to take some counseling courses at the School of Professional Counseling and the therapist who was there said if you don't work through your trauma, your trauma works through you. And so I kind of recontextualized that and said if you don't work through your emotions in general, your emotions work through you.

Jon @wholeparent:

And I think that that's the first piece is that people who are terrified of being run by their emotions and therefore they don't want to express their emotions, are paradoxically way more likely to be run by their emotions, and I think that that's a big thing for parents who are like man, I can't figure out why I'm always losing it on my kid and it's like, well, actually the reason that you're losing it on your kid is because you're not having any outlets, you're not getting the exercise that you need, you're not doing all of these other things that help with emotional regulation. And so that was the first thing that that just popped out to me. And then the second thing you mentioned and I think that this is a really big point and I just would love to sit here for a moment is this idea that we have this false perception that humans are rational most of the time, or that we're logical creatures, that we live in our prefrontal cortex. And I think, at least from how I understand it and if you tell me I'm wrong, man, I got to email my publisher immediately, but the way that I understand it is our brains really work much quicker in our emotion centers.

Jon @wholeparent:

Our emotions are much quicker to respond to a situation, and so most often, what we're actually doing is justifying or rationalizing our emotions or lack thereof, like we're suppressing our emotions, we're not thinking about things logically and then having emotions about those things that we think about logically, we're actually feeling first, and that's part of the really important data that you're talking about. If you don't let yourself feel, then you're actually only perceiving, you know, 10% of the world, or something like that, and I think that that's essential for understanding the performance aspect as well, of saying like, yeah, the most successful people are not the people with the highest IQ and Daniel Goldman says this in his kind of mid-90s big EQ stuff. Is that really? The driver of success is how well you communicate with people, and I certainly see that out in the world today, or maybe I wish I did.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

You might have to rewrite your chapter. Just kidding, I thought I would just put that out there. I'm just kidding. Good, good, good.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

What you say makes a lot of sense. You know, I think bifurcating our emotional life from our cognitive life is tough, right, because, you know, it creates a feeling. You have a feeling, it makes you think a certain way. So I would just keep it broader than that. You know, sometimes I'm just like sitting around, you know, and I'm like a memory of my father or mother who have passed pops into my mind and all of a sudden I had that feeling of nostalgia this past weekend. You know, I have two brothers and we're very close but we don't see each other a lot. They took the train up to my house and we spent the weekend together. We had a great time and we were reminiscing, and that reminiscing led to lots of feelings about our upbringing and our relationships and our parents.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

And you're also I mean you're right about the idea that I think the hardest piece is that oftentimes people have been taught that emotions make you weak and that when you're having strong, unpleasant feelings, the job that you have is to ignore, deny, repress, suppress, which goes back to what you were saying, which doesn't work for you.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

That's why we eat the things we don't want to eat, it's why we don't get enough sleep or good sleep, it's why we drink too much alcohol, it's why we blow up with our friends, it's why we can't say I love you to someone in a beautiful, in a way that makes them feel loved, or apologize, or apologize or ask for forgiveness, Because we have these feelings about our feelings also, which is a whole nother concept of called meta emotions.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

As a kid, you know, when I was being bullied terribly, I was feeling shame for a variety of reasons, but my father was that kind of tough guy who was, you know, toughen up son, and so I was also afraid to tell my father about my bullying, because there's just layers and layers of emotion, and the point of all that is that we need to have a new attitude about emotion, and because our beliefs about feelings drive what we do with our feelings, and so I think you're in the same boat as I am, which is that emotions are data, they're information, they're everyday experiences. Let's embrace them, let's love them all and let's learn how to use them wisely so that we can have good relationships and make good decisions and have our dreams come true.

Jon @wholeparent:

Yeah, and I think that this is I mean, that's actually I mean I've started to now that I've done the page person like giving away too much about the book and people aren't going to buy it because they're just like, ah, I just heard it on the podcast.

Jon @wholeparent:

But I think that this is actually a really good point that, like so the chapter title is emotions are your superpower, and it's because of this concept of all, emotions are data that we can use in our lives to actually make better decisions, to have better relationships, and that if we don't leverage that, that we are just leaving data on the table and we're just saying, hey, I'm going to make my decisions, avoid of the best available input that my body, my physical body, is giving me, physical body is giving me.

Jon @wholeparent:

And I think that this is a really yeah, I that was probably the biggest thing that I've taken away from your work, and I quote you in the book as saying you know the difference between being an emotion scientist and an emotion judge, and I I think a lot of people don't understand what a scientist is, and so I adjusted a little bit to say an emotions detective, because I think people have a really clear idea that like an detective is like a person who's investigating things, but people don't often realize that a scientist is actually. That's your term is actually more true, right? Detectives actually do come into things, oftentimes trying to prove something right Versus the scientist in the best way, the scientific method is expressed as yeah, you know what if I'm right or I'm wrong, those are both good pieces of information. Like those both teach me something about the world, and so can you speak to that a little bit Like why is it so important that we teach not only ourselves but also our kids to become people who are emotion scientists instead of emotion judges?

Dr. Marc Brackett:

Yeah, I want to take a step back first, which is, you know, I have these guiding principles to my work and you know, as you mentioned, the title of my book is permission to feel, and I think it's important to start there, meaning that I feel like the first goal that we have to have for ourselves and for our children is we have to give ourselves and we have to give our kids permission to feel. And what I mean by that is that we just have to acknowledge that we are feelings creatures and that our emotions are driving all aspects of our lives and that, whether it's happiness or anxiety, or serenity or despair, that is life. And we're going to give ourselves and we're going to give our kids the permission to have all those feelings. And then, once we have that permission and I say people give me a little bit of pushback on that whole thing who are you to give me permission to feel? Well, the truth is and you know this is probably from reading my book I had a pretty tough childhood.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

You know, I had abuse in my childhood sexual abuse and a lot of bullying from a neighbor who that was the abuse and then bullying in school, and I did not have a happy childhood, and I grew up in a family where my mother was having kind of nervous breakdowns all the time and my father was the toughen up guy.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

And so here I was, at five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years old, being terribly abused and not feeling good Like I could tell anybody about my experience.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

That's a parent's worst nightmare, just to tell you for the most part, and it's also the worst nightmare for a child right to have to be living through horrific circumstances and not feel like they can say hey mom, hey dad, this is happening, I'm scared or I feel disgust or whatever. It is Right. And I say that just because I just feel it's so important for people to recognize these signals and I know that I was emitting signals as a child Help me, I'm not happy, something is wrong. But because of my parents' own challenges with their own emotional lives, they miss those signals. And so I just I have to say that, whether it's uncomfortable or not for people, and so we have to be a step ahead of our kids in terms of creating the conditions for them to be their true, full feeling selves, and we can't do that until we are for ourselves. It's really hard to do that for our kids when we don't do that for ourselves?

Jon @wholeparent:

Yeah, I think Brene Brown even says that's impossible, right Like Brene Brown even goes as far as to say, like you cannot give your kids what you cannot give yourself, and I think that that's yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt that, I just think that's such a good.

Jon @wholeparent:

that's like a foundational principle. And I think that that's where so many parenting related voices do miss is that they are so focused on the child and what's happening in the child and how to correct the behavior in the child, how to prepare the child for resilience or for the long term, or that they fundamentally miss. And what your experience kind of speaks to is your parents would not have allowed for that to happen but because of their own stuff they had no knowledge or awareness.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

They weren't attentive to my emotional needs, they didn't ask questions, they didn't notice. You know the signals. It's hard to notice, and when you're anxious yourself and you're kind of like freaking out every day, worrying about your own survival, or you're angry at the world, you know you're not looking for these details, you miss the details. That's why we need an emotional intelligence, because how do you pause and pay attention and process and respond accordingly? But you really asked the question about the emotion scientist versus the emotion judge, and so you see what I'm getting at, though.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

The permission to feel is kind of the foundation, like just allowing ourselves to feel and allowing our kids to feel, and then we have to become curious explorers of those feelings, our own and other people's. We have to know like what am I really feeling? Why am I feeling this way? Am I feeling sad or am I feeling hopeless? Am I feeling happy or am I ecstatic? Am I down or disappointed? Am I angry, frustrated, overwhelmed or panicky? And you know, obviously you know that I'm a big emotion vocabulary guy which I have to plug. Just a quick aside my new app I don't know if you've seen it yet, but it's called how we Feel.

Jon @wholeparent:

I have not seen it yet. Okay, I'm downloading this like as soon as we get off this how to Feel, and it's a related to emotional how we feel. Okay, I'll try and I think I have a way in the show notes to have people have a direct link, whether they have a google or it's on both okay, I think I can do that great.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

Well, you can just find it. It's called how we feel and it was co-developed with the co-founder and former ceo of pinterest. So ben silverman and I and our teams worked on this for three years and we have about a million people who use the app and it's really. I mean, I don't want to brag about an app that I built because I feel like it's a little off, but I'm bragging about it. It's really freaking cool.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

It's beautifully designed 144 emotions that you can choose from with the words. It's got about 40 evidence-based regulation strategies built into it that people can practice. You can track your emotions over time and look for patterns at home, at school, at work. So check it out.

Jon @wholeparent:

Mark, how did I not know about this? This is the coolest thing.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

I was not prepared.

Jon @wholeparent:

I was not prepared, wait. So this app has has a hundred and you said 144, or roughly 144, emotions.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

Actually, it has more than that it has 144 on the interface and then, if you do, you can actually search for another 500 feelings.

Jon @wholeparent:

This is so good. So, like most adults and this is, you know I'm I usually don't like quote one person so much, but Brene Brown, again, atlas of the Heart, which I'm sure you've read and is very, very well-versed. It's kind of the layperson's version of an emotional vocabulary. Right In that book she talks about how most adults are experiencing basically a half dozen emotions at most, emotions at most. And so to have a place where you can go and, in your ruler framework, actually be able to accurately label which is such a profound coping mechanism in and of itself, I mean that's a regulation strategy. But then you have on top of that another, you know three dozen regulation strategies that you can do as well. That's super, super cool.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

So that was my little side plug for the app, which, by the way, will always be available for free. There's a special fund that was created, so it'll always be free, so cool. But going back to, so I'm going to just bring people back to where we're at. We're going to give ourselves and everyone we love, and even the people we don't love that much, permission to feel. We're going to strive to be emotion scientists, be curious explorers, as opposed to critical judges. So what does that look like? Well, the emotion scientist says tell me more, I'm curious. You know, what I'm hearing you say is that you're frustrated, but from my frustration is about a goal being blocked, and what I'm hearing is an injustice in your story. So it sounds like you might be feeling angry.

Jon @wholeparent:

Yeah, anger.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

And, importantly, the emotion scientist recognizes that failure is inevitable. So I talk about this endlessly because, you know, this next book I work is strictly on emotion regulation, and so I've been like thinking about emotion regulation for three years now and let me tell you, my family's been thinking about it too and they've been witnessing my dysregulation from writing the freaking book Because, like, if I'm not getting the words out that I want to get out, it's everybody else's fault. Just so you know. It's unbelievable.

Jon @wholeparent:

That's helpful. Can I just take a? I know that we just keep getting sidetracked. That's so helpful to hear that, like Mark Brackett, this is one of the things that I try and do all the time is talk about like if you saw me in Target not using any of my parenting hacks and just like you know being like, just get my friggin cart like to my kid, like you would realize that, like, parenting is definitely the marathon, not the sprint. But to hear that Mark Brackett gets dysregulated and then misplaces his frustration as you know anger at other people or whatever dysregulation just makes me feel so good about my own dysregulation.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

Can I just say that I'm happy to share my.

Jon @wholeparent:

It was just like it's just such a human thing. It's just such a human thing and I think that, like one of the downsides of the social media you know, generation, whatever you want to call it is that we have this picture that some people haven't figured out. And the truth is, the more you dig into the people like you who are actually on the ground, doing the research kind of, some people might be more advanced because of practice and journaling and using your app, but not like nobody's perfect and failure is inevitable.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

I will tell you I'm way better at dealing with my emotions today than I was five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Way better. I know more strategies, I've practiced more strategies, but when I get triggered, you know at home, and it's a rough one. There are days where I'm like Mark, take your moment, mark, take a breath, walk out of the room, say kind things to yourself. Remember this feeling is impermanent. And then I walk back to them. I'm like, if I have to tell you one more time, I'm like Mark, what are you doing right now? And it's like in that moment I'm just like forget it, but who cares that? I'm the director of a center for freaking emotional intelligence.

Jon @wholeparent:

Anyway, it's, you gotta give yourself permission to feel, Mark. You gotta give yourself permission to feel in those moments.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

my man A permission to feel doesn't give you permission to be a jerk. Yes, yes.

Jon @wholeparent:

Good point.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

My goal is to prevent myself from being as nasty as I could be. Sure, and I've gotten a lot better and we can all get better at it and it is life's work and I just think that's it's very relieving for people because, like you said not that I'm some like guru, you know about emotions, but you know I'm a scientist who's written curriculum for 30 years and written books and practice it, and I'm still struggling. And so I always think to myself gosh mark, if you're still struggling, like good luck for the rest of the world, yeah, but the rest of the world needs to just learn more practice, more refine and you get better.

Jon @wholeparent:

But you're never going to be perfect, that's okay you know, practice makes better, practice makes better and I think that that's, you know, with an emotion, being an emotion scientist, like even in that, there are moments when all of us aspire to be. For those of us who are aware of this paradigm and of course I'm sure that you would agree with this, none of us are all or none right Like. This is variations of gray. We're not always an emotion scientist, we're not always an emotion judge. This is just a paradigm that helps us frame our own emotional intelligence. But, like, we all exist on this continuum where, when life is hard, when we're triggered, when, you know, I've also lost my dad and it's we're coming up on the anniversary, you know, I just start to get a little bit less patient with my kids. I start to get a little bit less emotionally aware with my spouse. Like those, I realize that sometimes the best I can do is kind of being in the middle.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

You know, the best example I have for that is, my mother-in-law got stuck here during the pandemic. It was unexpected. She came up from Panama for a wedding and a very close friend of mine, who she likes, was getting married on March 3rd of 2020. Little did we know that no flights to Panama would occur. She was going to stay till like March 15th. On March 13th, all the airlines shut down and they didn't open up to go to Panama until September.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

So April, may, june, july, and it was like you know, I love her, she's great, I speak Spanish so we can communicate well. But let me tell you, by April 15th I was like what is happening? And then we had a real family blow up and she yelled at me and I yelled at her and she said nasty things and I said them back and then I did go to bed that night and going back to this joke about you know my profession, I'm like walking up to my bedroom thinking, mark, you're the freaking director of a center for emotional intelligence, like you are a terrible, terrible role model. So let's do some scientific investigation here. Let's go to bed and let's ask yourself some questions what's going on?

Dr. Marc Brackett:

I hated being at home. I didn't like working from home. Two my mother-in-law was a little codependent. You know she didn't want to make her own coffee in the morning. She wanted me to make her coffee. I'm like you know you learn how to make your own coffee. I don't like people in the morning. I'm not a morning. You know. Make your own coffee. I don't like people in the morning. I'm not a morning. We're going to work on that.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

Three is I'm always traveling.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

I travel 50% of the time and that was like a long time I hadn't been traveling and I'm like the routine was like monotonous. I wasn't going to my hot yoga class, like all these things, and but I had a pause to just gain an understanding of what were all the reasons, all the things that were behind my unpleasant emotions. And then I had to set a goal, you know, which is how do I want to be seen by my mother-in-law? Sure, how do I want to be experienced by my mother-in-law. And that really helped. And you know, I walked down the next morning and made her a cup of coffee and I just I shifted my brain. I had a new attitude, and I'm going to tell you something that I think is helpful for people is I started making emotion regulation a game. I love that and a creative process, and so I started thinking to myself, like Mark, you're going to come up with the most fun ways of dealing with your mother-in-law's emotions, or you're going to figure out a way to like not be so freaking narcissistic.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

You know, and actually realize that, like do you think she's 81 years old? I think she wants to be trapped in your house with you. Like let's get real here For sure.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

For sure. Anyhow, my point behind all this is that I started like I'd go for walks and before I'd come into my home, I would grab the doorknob and I would pause and say, Mark, how do you want to show up tonight? And that would help me get into the right frame of mind to be the person I wanted to be. And then I would strategize, you know, just start thinking what do you need to do? What do you need to show up that way? All right, you need a longer walk today. You need to reframe, you need to take a few deep breaths, you need to be curious about her life instead of just so focused on your life.

Jon @wholeparent:

So yeah, I think, yeah, we're, we're, I think I, I I'm sure I've heard you say something to this effect, but one of the things that I've been lamenting on social media lately is that the way in which I get the most engagement interaction from parents is by parent telling parents what to do in the responsive moment, like when your kid does this dysregulated thing. What should you do? And what I've been lamenting to the very few people who actually see the videos that aren't viral, which is one of those things right is you know, most of the best parenting we do is actually proactive, not reactive. What I'm hearing from you is that the real work of emotional intelligence is not what you do in the moment. It's not what you do when your kid starts hitting, starts biting, starts, whatever right. When your teenager has a mental health crisis, it's actually in the preparation. Like it's really easy for parents to prioritize mental illness when they're sitting in an ER. It's really hard for those same parents to prioritize mental health and mental illness when their child's seven and showing no signs of anxiety, depression, even though they know, statistically speaking, like there has never been a time in recorded history when teenagers have greater mental health risk.

Jon @wholeparent:

How do we actually start to become proactive in how we're teaching emotion regulation? How do we become people who stand at the doorknob whenever that is in our lives and say, okay, how am I going to respond to my kid when not, if they trigger me today? Am I going to respond to my kid when not, if they trigger me today? How do you? You know, like know, when you're standing at the doorknob, whatever that place is, when you're drinking a cup of coffee in the morning? What are my strategies, what are my go-tos? And so you've already said the app as we wrap here in the next two to three minutes. How can we connect with you and learn how to be proactive emotion scientists, to be prepare ourselves before we're triggered, to become emotion scientists with our kids and teach our kids to do the same?

Dr. Marc Brackett:

yeah, I appreciate that setup. Here's the thing when you have a mindset as an interventionist, right, you're always waiting for the bad thing to happen to fix. When you're a prevention scientist, which is what I like to call myself, you're thinking about what needs to happen to fix. When you're a prevention scientist, which is what I like to call myself, you're thinking about what needs to happen in advance to reduce the number of new cases that go into the system. Let's say it's the prison system, let's say it's the mental health system, let's say it's every system. And it's always more cost-effective. It's always easier for ourselves and others.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

When we think prevention, the challenge is that we have not raised the skills of emotional intelligence high enough that people pay attention to them early on. Right, we're still obsessed in education with literacy and math and other subject areas which are important. But I'm not going to sleep until emotional intelligence becomes the other side of the report card, because it's critical that we start teaching children these skills as early as possible. Everyone, it's a human right to be self-aware. It's a human right to have skills that you need to navigate your emotional life, because you can't have a life worth living if you can't deal with your emotions. It's just you struggle way too much and it's not fair when it can be prevented. So you know, I always say that when I, if I do workshops for families which I do quite a bit of them if I call it how to raise an emotionally intelligent child who gets into an Ivy League university, 5,000 people show up. If I call it how to become an emotionally intelligent parent, two people show up and it's again. You know, it's always about like the teachers think about I'm adopting a curriculum to make the kids learn something. The parents think I'm reading this book to teach this to my kid, and the real challenge is that people haven't worked on themselves first. And so for me, you know, my recommendation to your listeners is ask yourself do you really give yourself permission to feel? Do you give your kid the permission to feel? Are you the scientist or the judge with your kid? If you have multiple children, are you a scientist with one of your kids and a judge with the other? Are there certain days of the week where you're more judgmental? Are there certain emotions that you're more judgmental about? And then I think the big one, based on where we went today with our conversation, is are you the best possible role model for your child in terms of healthy regulation, best possible role model for your child in terms of healthy regulation.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

So when you come home from work and you're frustrated, do you say, like leave me alone. Or do you just go into the kitchen or the bathroom or your room and lock the door and just say, you know, daddy needs time? Or do you come home and say, you know, son, you know daddy had a rough day at work and I actually said something that was mean to a colleague of mine and I feel terrible about it, and so I may look a little off tonight and I just want you to know it has nothing to do with you. I said I'm really upset with myself and I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to say to this colleague of mine tomorrow to fix the situation, cause I just don't want to have that in my relationships. And so I just want you to know that honey and I need about 15 minutes to myself just to get myself kind of make that transition home, and then we're going to go outside and take our walk or do something together.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

And so in that moment what I've done is I've shown I'm vulnerable, I show I care about people, I've shown that I'm introspective, I problem solve, I mean, the list goes on, and so that's my final recommendation for people that listen to your work is that it sounds like it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work when you don't know what it is, but once you know what it is, you can start thinking about the kind of bite-sized practices that you can employ. You know, as in at home, you know and everywhere else.

Jon @wholeparent:

Right, all right, mark, where can we find you? Yeah, this has been such a fruitful conversation. You know if I very rarely like plug my book, but one of the one of the foundational principles of what has become the book Punishment, free Parenting, which comes out in January, is that most of our good discipline is done by modeling. So you really put the ball on a tee. There you go. Well you put the ball on a tee there.

Jon @wholeparent:

Yeah, I know my four like pillars of parenting. I won't give you all four, but one of the four is modeling. So yeah, put the ball on the tee for me. But you know people are going to know where to find my stuff because they're listening to this podcast. But where can we find your stuff?

Dr. Marc Brackett:

your stuff. How can we get in touch? You know I'm on all the social media channels. That easy to find me, like Instagram is, you know, I guess the one I'm primarily on, which is just at markbracket, and my website is markbracketcom. It's M-A-R-C-B-R-A-C-K-E-T-Tcom. Two other things is you know well, three things. One is obviously, my book is Permission to Feel. The app is called how we Feel and then, because all I do is stuff with feelings, I have this new web series where I interview the leading experts as well as artists to learn about how they deal with the feelings, and it's called Dealing with Feelings on YouTube.

Dr. Marc Brackett:

And so I'm delighted for people to participate in all those things.

Jon @wholeparent:

Fantastic. All of those resources will be linked in the show notes for anybody who's listening to this. Wherever you're finding it, you will find those resources linked below. Mark, thank you so much for all of your time today. You were so generous with us and, yeah, let's go give ourselves the permission to feel. Thank you again to Mark for being on the podcast today.

Jon @wholeparent:

I just wanted to say, if you have not followed his work yet, make sure that you go find his stuff in the show notes. Get his book Permission to Feel. I know that he's going to have another book coming out soon. Obviously, we're going to have to have him back on the podcast to talk about that work. Obviously, all the stuff he does for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence as well. Make sure that you're interacting, engaging in that. His work is something that I reference as much as any other individual person in my upcoming book. It comes out in January of 2025. We talked about it a little bit here, but, yeah, I just want to say thank you, mark. You're one of my heroes.

Jon @wholeparent:

Thank you so much for sharing with all of us and, if you love this episode and you love the types of guests that we're able to get on the Whole Parent Podcast. Make sure that you like this, that you subscribe to this podcast. Make sure that you write a review. Your reviews are how I know that these podcasts are not just going out into the abyss. That they're helping you. They're helping you to parent more effectively, that they're helping you to understand your child's brain and their emotions and build emotional regulation and build emotional intelligence with your child. All of that, if you want, if you love this, make sure that you are letting me know that I read every single review that I get and rating the show five stars so that you can get out to as many parents as possible. Until then, this is all we have for you on this episode. Thank you again, mark of the Whole Parent Podcast.

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