Psychologist Marc Brackett On Why You Can't Name Your Emotions, Cognitive Strategies For Emotional Regulation, & Giving Yourself Permission To Feel

Dr. Marc Brackett is a Yale professor, founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and creator of the RULER program implemented in 5,000 schools worldwide. This conversation explores Marc's journey from childhood trauma to emotion expert, his RULER framework for emotional intelligence, and why dealing with feelings is a crucial skill most of us never learned. We discuss "Uncle Marvin" figures, the meta-moment between stimulus and response, and practical strategies for emotional regulation. In real-time, Marc helps me explore my own emotional patterns as they emerge. Marc offers valuable insights into navigating difficult moments. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉https://www.gobrewing.com On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style👉https://www.on.com/richroll Bon Charge: Get 15% OFF all my favorite wellness products w/ code RICHROLL👉https://www.boncharge.com Prolon: Get 15% OFF plus a FREE bonus gift👉 https://www.prolonlife.com/richroll AG1: Get a FREE bottle of D3K2, Welcome Kit, and 5 travel packs with your first order👉https://www.drinkAG1.com/richroll Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉https://www.rivian.com Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉 https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us@voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  Life is a roller coaster ride of anxiety and frustration and anger and sadness, and also elation and jubilance and contentment. And we should learn to just love them all. Once in a while, we gotta just pause and check in and say, is my life working for me? I have this audacious goal of creating an emotion revolution because feelings are things that people are afraid of. And that's not who we are. It's what we're feeling in the moment. And so if I wake up feeling anxious, it's not a signal, a void. For me, it's a signal to approach the emotion, ask myself why I'm having it, and then figure out what my strategy is for the day.

• 1:51Rich Roll?

  You know there's that saying, "He's his own worst enemy." Or, "If she would just get out of her own way." We've all heard some version of this. Getting in our own way. I mean, this is something I think we all do on some level, some of the time. We often know what the right thing to do is, but... Instead, we decide to do the other thing. We know we should sit on that email and not hit send for another 24 hours, but we just can't help it. In place of mindfully responding to life and its challenges, we often react and overreact in ways that lead our lives astray because we fail to match our behavior

• 2:33Rich Roll?

  with the better version of ourselves we're capable of inhabiting. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I'm becoming that the main thing that gets so many of us in trouble the most, the thing that really gets the best of us unnecessarily, impedes upon our goals, infects our ability to manage our relationships, and interferes with our ability to better manage our lives, is our inability to self-regulate our emotional states. Emotional regulation is huge because how we comport ourselves in the various dynamic and difficult scenarios our lives confront us with

• 3:13Rich Roll?

  in so many ways defines and determines the very quality of those lives. And if you can't, or you don't know how to deal with your feelings, especially our difficult ones, we're kind of doomed to living reactively, which means we're allowing external circumstances and other people to not only dictate our interior experience, but also determine the trajectory and destinations of our lives unnecessarily. The good news is that emotional regulation is something we can learn, and perhaps more importantly, teach and imbue in our children, the import of which is absolutely life-changing. Because if my experience has taught me anything,

• 3:58Rich Roll?

  it's that the courage and know-how to understand and manage our feelings is perhaps the single most important skill we can develop in today's world to navigate obstacles and move our lives forward. It's like this incredibly powerful lever to problem-solve, of course, but also like this portal to transform our lives in the direction of our aspirations, towards the goals that keep tripping us up, towards the relationships we unconsciously derail.

• 4:29Rich Roll?

  The intimacy that eludes us and the meaning and the purpose and the satisfaction, the fulfillment that we desire to manifest and make possible for ourselves. And so this is where Dr. Mark Brackett swoops in. Dr. Brackett is a Yale professor of psychology who has made teaching emotional regulation, something he's been researching for 25 years, his life's mission. Mark is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He's published over 200 scholarly articles on the role of emotional intelligence in learning, in decision-making, creativity, relationships, physical and mental health, and even workplace performance. He's the author of Permission to Feel, and his latest book, which I'll go so far as

• 5:14Rich Roll?

  to say is just a must-read for basically everybody, is entitled, "Dealing with Feelings", which is what we're going to do today, beginning with what emotions actually are and why it's so vital to understand how to manage them. But what you will get out of this conversation, I think, is more than just understanding, because Mark makes us privy to action steps, to strategies, to tools and takeaways that span from how to redirect our thoughts all the way to managing them mindfully and how to teach those tools to our children effectively. This is an important one. It's the kind of conversation you're going to want to take notes on and tune into attentively.

• 5:59Rich Roll?

  So let's get into it. Please enjoy this conversation and pick up Mark's brand-new book, "Dealing with Feelings", as soon as possible. Mark, how are you feeling?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Obvious opening question there. I am feeling excited, actually, really excited. I love talking with people like you about the work that I do. And I have this mission of creating an emotion revolution. And so you're going to be a big piece in making that happen.

• 6:33Rich Roll?

  Well, I'm happy to have you here. Let's start with a very broad question, which is basically, I'd like you to articulate this mission that you're on because there's a lot more going on than just your curiosity around human emotions and emotional intelligence.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Well, as I said a moment ago, I do have this kind of audacious goal of creating an emotion revolution. And I say that, you know, with pride and some trepidation because there is a lot of resistance to people being self-aware, which blows my mind. I just, it's hard to imagine there's a resistance to having what I think is a human right, which is self-awareness.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Most of my work is in schools. I've spent about 25, almost 30 years co-creating a curriculum called Ruler that's now in 5,000 schools. And we've reached about 7 million children, which is exciting and also creates a responsibility. I feel responsible for doing good work because we're impacting, you know, people's lives, including their teachers and parents. And, you know, my hope is that this will become a permanent part of the way we educate children and adults. It has to be integrated into the way we kind of see education, and we're not there yet.

• 7:51Rich Roll?

  It's so clear to me how much this is needed and how beneficial it can be. When you look at the school system, more than anything, what young people need is a, a structure to better understand themselves and how to interact with other people. Particularly now with all of the technology and the ways in which it's so rapidly changing, uh, you know, the very fabric of how we live. This is a permanent thing that, you know, needs to be addressed and is never going to go away. Like whether or not we need to memorize facts and learn in the way we always have is, is very much debatable right now.

• 8:35Rich Roll?

  But the key to living a successful, meaningful, connected life is understanding the complexity of our emotions, how to regulate them, and how to use them wisely, to use your words, so that we can interact with other people better. And Live better lives.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  You just sold my podcast.

• 8:57Rich Roll?

  Why is this such a massive blind spot in the way that we, you know, rear developing minds from, from, you know, what goes on in the home to the institutions that we send our kids off to?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  I think there's a number of reasons. The first is that feelings are things that people are afraid of. You know, we have this notion that when we're feeling a strong emotion, whether it's anxiety, or stress, or fear, or disappointment, despair, hopelessness, like that's like, that defines who we are. And that's not who we are. It's what we're feeling in the moment. And, but people just don't see it that way. I think the second is especially for men, and I'm on a mission, by the way, to get men to talk about their feelings. So you're going to talk about your feelings today?

• 9:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm on a similar mission as a layperson, you know?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  That's awesome. I'll give you an example. So I do a lot of public speaking, and I'm quite vulnerable about my past. I had a pretty tough childhood that included abuse and bullying. I was a very unhappy kid who just really experienced quite a bit of trauma, and it was not dealt with well. And I, it took me until I was around 49 to feel comfortable like being super public about that. Maybe it was I had tenure, maybe it was whatever, I don't know what it was. But at that moment, when I was writing my first book, I said, you know what? It's time for people to know a little bit more about why I'm so motivated to do the work I do. And so I get up and do these presentations, and some dad will be in the audience, and he'll say like, afterwards, you know, come

• 10:37Speaker 01

  up to me like, that was really powerful, but like, there's no way I could ever, like, say what you said, or talk about this with my own son. And I'll say, well, tell me more. And he said, this guy said, well, you know, my son would think I was weak if I told him I was anxious, or overwhelmed, or scared about something. And I had done a presentation that night on bullying and bullying prevention. And I just turned it back to this guy, and I said, well,

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Is it at all possible that your son might ever experience bullying? Yeah, I think so. And I said, do you think how you're approaching child development with your kid might impact their comfort level, talking to about their negative or scary experiences at school? And then he just like stopped and froze. You know, he froze and he's like, oh, wow, you know, I didn't think of it that way. So, you know, I have to find my way in and that's my goal.

• 11:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a tough nut to crack.

• 11:45Rich Roll?

  But the title of your book really says it all. It's like dealing with feeling like if we can't deal with our feelings like we're, we're lost in the wilderness, you know, living our lives reactively and most likely tremendously off course from where we could be. But I think to, to enter into this, uh, maybe we should just define what emotions are like, what are, what are emotions and how are they different from thoughts? And how do they, um, show up in our lives and confuse us? Like, what do we get wrong about them?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Well, just to be, I think what might be a good idea is to talk about emotions and then talk about feelings and maybe talk about moods and talk about dispositional affect and even clinical diagnoses.

• 12:33Rich Roll?

  Affect, emotion, feeling, mood, emotional disposition. These are all different things.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  They are. And, you know, I'm a psychologist, I'm like particular about these things. Does everybody need to know the differences? I don't think so.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Well, maybe I'll take that back. I think it would help because we have to deal with all those affective experiences. An emotion, the way we like to define it is a mostly automatic response to a stimulus

• 13:04Speaker 01

  that can come from something that happens in our minds or something in the world around us. So internal environment, external environment that causes shifts in the way we see the world that causes shifts in our behavior, our motivation. And importantly, is inextricably linked to our development and our culture. So we don't all experience emotions the same way. You know, and that's based on, for example, my Relationship with anger would be probably different from your relationship with anger, because I grew up with a really angry dad. And so when I see someone with the pierced eyes and the pressed lips, it really impacts me. Where not everybody might have that same experience with that emotion. That's an emotion.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  And a mood is, can be an after, can come after an emotion. So like, you have a fight at home, and then you're driving here to the beautiful studio, and you're ruminating about it, and then it becomes, it kind of lingers, and that becomes a mood. So moods are emotion states that are less intense, but longer in duration. And you wake up and you say, you know, I'm irritable today, or I'm feeling positive. Then we have a feeling. I would say that's just a private, subjective experience. Like, I don't feel like getting up today. I don't feel like going to the movies. I don't feel like talking to this person. It's a little less specific than an emotion.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Dispositional affect is more about kind of where you live emotionally. Are you someone who is that kind of in my work? High-yellow-activated person, that you're Mr. Happy all the time? Are you more green, kind of content, more zen-like? Are you more, you know, in that blue quadrant of my mood meter, which is more kind of low-energy, unpleasant? Are you kind of activated? And, you know, all this matters, because we have to deal with all of our feelings, whether they're little feelings or big feelings.

• 14:59Rich Roll?

  Before we can even begin to deal with them, obviously, we have to understand them. But doesn't understanding them begin with this, like, breaking the spell of self-associating with them? Like, in other, self-identifying with them? This idea that, like, I feel this way because this is who I am? Or confusing what you think for how you feel? Like, not having the vocabulary or the language to parse all of these things, and understand that the feeling isn't a defining quality of who you are as much as it is just an experience that you're having?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. I think one of the key elements of an emotion is its impermanence.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  And that is so beautiful of, it's very freeing because I've worked with a lot of people who are in that dark place, feeling sad and lonely. And I really push them to think about, tell me about a sunny day. And they have sunny days, but they don't remember those sunny days when it's a rainy day. And recognizing that even the sunny days are going to be impermanent too. You can't just latch on to trying to be happy all the time because something will happen that gets in the way of that. That impermanence piece to me is so important. And as we know, you know, over time, those even, those dark moments are not as dark as they were.

• 16:24Rich Roll?

  There's a saying in AA, like feelings are not facts and you know, this too shall pass. Like there's one certainty, which is that whatever you're feeling right now will, will change. It's just that when you're in it, you can't imagine that and you think you're stuck there forever. And the discomfort of it all, like, you know, this feeling that you're never going to feel differently than you are, just creates this cascade of, of, you know, kind of bad behaviors to get yourself out of it.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Well, the thing is that, you know, these catchphrases are sometimes tricky. They're not facts, but they are data.

• 17:03Rich Roll?

  They are evidence of something.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  And they do impact your behavior. And so I, in my work, I have come to argue or assert that emotions matter for five really important reasons. And like, I have the incontrovertible evidence for this. The first is attention and memory. They just drive where you pay attention, where you focus. The second is decision-making. They dramatically impact our decisions. The third is the quality of our relationships. The fourth is our physical and mental health. And the fifth is our performance, whether it's at school or in the workplace.

• 17:44Rich Roll?

  That pretty much covers everything.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:45Rich Roll?

  Like is anything untouched by that?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  It's like my little trick of saying emotions matter for everything.

• 17:49Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah. It's like, okay, but I can wrap my head around that. Yeah. And yet we feel like they are just things that occur, right? That, that, we have no agency over them. I just feel the way that I feel and it is the way that it is. And I'm behaving because I feel this way.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Well, they do come, you know, unbidden. They come without asking.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  That's good. If you are crossing the street and a car comes really fast, you want to jump out of the way. The fear response is actually helpful. So I think it's tricky there again, because our experience of emotion is not as controllable as we might think about it, but how we deal with the feeling is.

• 18:33Rich Roll?

  In trying to understand that, there's the feeling itself. And then there's this meta thing that you talk about, which is like how you feel about the feeling, like how you're processing that feeling. And it strikes me that that's sort of where the sausage is made in terms of like, how you're going to respond, like, are you going to react? Or are you going to take that that sort of meta moment, you know, conjure, you know, what the best thing to do is in this situation? And so much of your work is about like, finding that breathing space so that, and deploying these strategies that you've come up with, so that you can be more present and mindful in a very kind of like,

• 19:17Rich Roll?

  high-stress situation, so that you can take the better action.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  The meta emotion thing is important, because, you know, that dad, who wouldn't want to speak to his son, you know, about anxiety, is, you know, he has a feeling about his feeling. You know, he feels shame or embarrassment, you know, about that anxiety. And that's important to really understand, that the emotion sometimes that we need to deal with is not the actual emotion that we're feeling about the situation, it's our feeling about the feeling. Now, is that clear?

• 19:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The feeling about the feeling.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  The feeling about the feeling is like a lot.

• 19:59Rich Roll?

  And the feelings that we have about the feelings become, you know, data points in this, in this story that we tell ourselves about who we are and why we are the way that we are.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  And those are very cultural. They're cultural, they're environmental, they're taught. And that's another thing that I think is so important for people to know, is that biologically speaking, you know, the boys don't cry and girls are sugar and spice, or whatever these phrases are that people have come up with, that is completely learned. That is not, you know, we weren't born that way, as Lady Gaga says. It's just not the way it works. And...

• 20:40Speaker 01

  So that if we know that socialization is creating our emotional lives, that means that we can be more deliberate in helping people experience emotions in ways that are helpful to them as opposed to hurtful.

• 20:57Rich Roll?

  And the process of developing that is what you call, basically, essentially cultivating emotional intelligence.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 21:05Rich Roll?

  So what is emotional intelligence? And why is it so important that we develop an awareness and understanding of it? And work towards engendering more of it into our lives?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Great question. So in the framework that I've worked on, which is based on the framework that my mentors created, Peter Salavan, Jack Mayer, who were the original theoreticians, we talk about five key skills, and they're called the ruler skills. The first is recognizing emotions. So right now, I'm sitting across from you, and I'm looking at your eyes, you know, I'm listening to the tone of your voice, I'm watching your body movements, and I have to make inferences on that. Is Rich with me? Is he against me? You know, how is he feeling right now? How am I feeling right now? What's going on in my body and my brain? What are the automatic thoughts that I'm having about this experience? So it's self-awareness, social awareness.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  And it's tricky because for some reason, we want to be right. I want to be certain. I know Rich is curious. I hope he's curious. But I'm not in your head. I can't really tell what you're thinking. I can make inferences based on what I've learned about your facial expression and body language, but it's still a guess. And that's important for people to know. We're guessing, and we make a lot of mistakes when we read other people's emotions based on how well we know them, based on race and culture and lots of other things. The second is understanding emotion. What's the difference? Let me push you on this. Can we do a little game here?

• 22:37Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  All right. The psychological difference between anger and disappointment.

• 22:42Rich Roll?

  Anger, it's an extreme reaction to something not going your way. Whereas disappointment is more of a lament about like how it could have gone.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Okay. You're pretty good.

• 22:58Rich Roll?

  I don't know. Like I'm just pulling that out of my ass. Does that track? You know, I'm sure you have a much better.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  You got a B+. And you're in the right direction. Disappointment is about an unmet expectation. Everything is legit. It just didn't work out the way I thought it would. Anger is about a perceived injustice. The injustice piece is what's critical to anger. How could you say that? That's not fair. You lied to me. We get angry when people lie to us. We get disappointed when people let us down. Now, why does that matter?

• 23:33Rich Roll?

  It matters because unless you understand what is motivating somebody's reaction to a situation or to you, you're not adequately prepared to respond in the best way that you could.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. We can't help ourselves and it's hard to help other people if we don't really know how they're feeling. And we mask these things. This goes back to, you know, the socialization piece, which is that a kid who is growing up in a family where maybe a dad is saying, you know, like having this kind of toxically masculine way of developing his kid, the kid will go, "I hate skull," you know, yelling, screaming, pounding his feet. And the assumption is, "Son, calm down. You're angry." When it could be shame, it could be fear, it could be anything. And I always tell people, behavior is not feeling. Behavior is behavior. We're taught how to behave a certain way to get attention.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  It has nothing to do with what's going on on the inside, which is eye-opening for a lot of people because we assume that we know how people feel based on their behavior. That's understanding of emotion. Where is it coming from? What are the consequences of my feelings? I want to say something important there, which is that.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  We have to have agreed understanding of anger is about injustice and disappointment is about unmet expectations. But we also have to agree and understand that the things that I perceive as an injustice may not be the things that you perceive as an injustice. And the goal of all this work is to have empathy for the other person and to understand where their feelings are coming from, so we can be helpful and supportive.

• 25:14Rich Roll?

  What happens if you have an expectation of justice that goes unmet? That's both disappointing and angering.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  First, we never just feel one emotion. We can have 15 emotions. 15 is a lot, maybe three or four. Certainly, right here and right now, I'm excited to be with you. I'm getting a little nervous, you know, where is this gonna go?

• 25:35Rich Roll?

  I have no idea where it's gonna go. Are we doing okay? Are we locked in? It's always this thing of like, where are we headed? What's the next thing versus like, let's just be present with what we're talking about and it will take care of itself.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  So you can be overwhelmed, you can be present. At the same time, you can be anxious and happy. Like, that's life. That's understanding. But understanding of emotion is really getting at knowing, for example, I did this talk for a bunch of business leaders as I was writing my book, and it was best. It was just, I just, it was great. A bunch of lawyers and engineers and, you know, high performers. And I said to them, what's the difference between anxiety and stress and pressure and fear? And they all looked at me, and number one response was, there's no difference. I'm like, it's not a trick question. Go talk in your little groups, define these concepts. One's high energy, one's this.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  I mean, I said, no, I want definitions, like, what is the difference? And I push people on that because, you know, I hear on lots of podcasts, I hear in lots of, you know, magazine articles and people talking about anxiety, but is it really anxiety or is it stress? Or is it overwhelm? Or is it pressure? And there are big differences in the way we would help ourselves and help other people if we understood what these emotions really were in terms of their causes. So for example, anxiety is about perceived uncertainty around the future. So we get anxious, the pandemic's here. Oh my God, what's going to happen to my center? What's going to happen to the work I'm doing? That's anxiety. Can't make predictions about the future.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Stress is when you have too many demands and not enough resources. The stress was when I got 1,500 emails in one day saying, are you going to help us? What are you doing, Mark? Like, we need help. And I'm freaking out. I'm not anxious about that. I'm stressed because I got a lot of inquiry and not the bandwidth to take care of it. So when you think about what I would do to deal with those different feelings, very different action plans. Does that resonate?

• 27:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, sure. So we have to recognize, you know, the emotions that we're experiencing. We have to be able to recognize them in the person that we're interacting with and not make, you know, not be confused by the signals that we're receiving and understand our biases or whatever our past is that is putting a filter on those things. We have to understand them. That's the U. What does this mean? What's motivating it? What's behind it? And then we have to label it, the L in this acronym. And unless we understand the difference between anxiety and stress, to use your example, like, we're not going to be able to accurately put a label on it.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Said perfectly.

• 28:26Rich Roll?

  And labeling it is important. Why?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Because we have to communicate. We need a common language. If we don't have a common language, then we're never going to be able to have conversations that are clear, where we each understand each other. This is, I wrote an article, I think it was in the Washington Post a while back, where I, with a colleague of mine, Robin, talked about fuzzy words, gaslighting, you know, depression, anxiety. Like, people just throw these terms out there and...

• 28:57Rich Roll?

  Well, everyone's an armchair psychologist these days, right?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And my argument is that when you can label it, you can regulate it. I have my little phrases here. But it's important because, and also as a parent, as a partner, knowing that your partner is feeling disappointed is a pathway to saying, hey, what can we do to help you do better the next time? Knowing that your son is angry because the teacher lied to him about something, you know, it's such as about coaching your kid. You gotta go have the conversation with the teacher. Do you see what I'm saying? So that the precision there is important. Another piece of this is that it's a lot easier to deal with little emotions and big emotions.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  When Mark is peeved, Mark's like, Mark, take a breath, Mark, take a walk. Move away from stimulus. When Mark is enraged, it's tough. And so if you only have one word to describe the anger family, then everything, whether it's a little bit of anger or a lot of anger, is clumped into this one thing called anger. But if you know peeved and irritated and angry and enraged and livid, there's some nuances there in terms of how we feel in our bodies, the way we think. I'm thinking back about a school that I work with many years ago that served children who had severe learning disabilities and differences

• 30:26Speaker 01

  and emotional challenges. And this one teacher said to me confidentially, this is a while ago and there's no names here, that she used to leave work with welts on her body because her kids were so emotionally charged and had no strategies to deal with their feelings. And she never said anything about it because she loved these kids and didn't want them to get in trouble or expelled or put in prison. Lots of, these are really tough kids. And then we brought our work into that district. And she said, it's amazing to me because we'd only get help when they were in that enraged space. Once they threw the desk or the chair, oh, now it's time to regulate. No, no, no, that's the hardest time to regulate.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  It's a lot easier to regulate when the kid says, I'm irritated because of the thing that this person said next to me. They can raise their hand and say, I'm feeling that feeling right now. That's where you can teach a kid a strategy.

• 31:20Rich Roll?

  Or if the teacher can recognize it in the child before even the child has the wherewithal to raise their hand and identify it. There's so much.

• 31:33Rich Roll?

  Emotional illiteracy, like even like, like I would consider myself, you know, pretty high up as a layperson in terms of like what I understand because of this podcast and all the interesting people I've been exposed to. And you asked me directly, you know, what is the difference between, you know, these two emotions? And I had a difficult time like putting a finger on it. And if you had asked me, what's the difference between anxiety, stress, you know, or worry fear, all these things like, I would have struggled to really be able to articulate that those, you know, what distinguishes those. So there's a long way to go here.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  There is. And I'll just plug an app that I co-created with the co-founder of Pinterest called How We Feel, which is an app that's free to teach people emotional literacy. So it's out there. Just go grab it. It's been really quite, we have about 3 million people that are using it. So that's RUL.

• 32:25Rich Roll?

  Right. So, so RUL and with the L part, the labeling, like it's about getting granular, like the more specific and precise we can be, then we're in a better position to do what's next, which is to experience and then the R part, which is regulate, which we're working towards.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. One thing.

• 32:45Rich Roll?

  Or express.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Express.

• 32:46Rich Roll?

  Express, right?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  I was gonna like do a gentle correction.

• 32:50Rich Roll?

  Okay, it's okay. You can call me out.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  You know, I was listening to other episodes and I was just really absorbing what people were saying about self-awareness. And it's, it's interesting. There's a lot of alignment. But one thing I just want to say in the beginning about this is that self-awareness is a gift. Self-indulgence is a life that's going to be very difficult for you. And I want to distinguish that because there's the criticism out there is that, you know, Mark and other people with their programs that are teaching kids emotional intelligence, like we want just kids to think about their feelings all day long and ask everybody how they're feeling all day long. That is not what we're asking people to do. It is actually unhelpful. That causes rumination.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  That causes people to go down a rabbit hole of, you know, navel gazing. That is not what we want to do. But let's think about it. You know, you were home this morning, I'm assuming, and then you came into work to interview me. You probably, whatever happened, I don't know what happened at home. It's your business. But maybe it was a really great morning, or maybe it was a tough morning, or maybe you were just feeling overwhelmed about a family member. And it's helpful during that transition, before you come in to meet me, to just check in, say, you know, hey, Rich, how am I feeling? Why am I feeling this way? Because what happens is that it gives you some freedom. Once you attribute your emotion to its real cause, you can be more present. When you don't take that moment to build self-awareness,

• 34:21Speaker 01

  what happens is that your brain is going to be stuck with the feeling, and it may distract you. And that's an opportune moment. Transitions from home to work. Maybe it's if you're a teacher, it's during different periods. If you're a student, it's going from lunch back into the classroom. If you are transitioning after our episode and going back home, like you're going to have feelings about this episode. Hopefully, they'll be pleasant ones. But then, you know, your kid may ask you a question, or you're, whatever is going to happen after this is over, you're going to want to be fresh for that. And just pausing at those moments throughout the day to just check in, know how you're feeling,

• 35:05Speaker 01

  we find is extraordinarily helpful.

• 35:08Rich Roll?

  Self-awareness as a vehicle that will identify the strategy that you're going to deploy to alter your behavior. But when you talk about self-awareness versus self-indulgence, it is that obsession with your own kind of like emotional disposition.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  The goal to move forward.

• 35:27Rich Roll?

  The Woody Allen who's walking around, incessantly talking about his anxiety. Like, it becomes a whole story and a self-defining kind of identity around like all of your emotional peccadilloes.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  And it's not emotionally intelligent, because it's not helping you to achieve your goals. It's keeping you stuck in that experience.

• 35:47Rich Roll?

  Or, yeah, being used at times even as something to excuse your behavior. Well, I do this because like I have this disorder. You know, this is blah, blah. This happened to me, and that's why I do this. As if you get a pass.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  There was a school, which I will keep nameless, that after the last election, sent out a note to the kids. If you're too overwhelmed to come to school, you can take the day off. And I was two seconds away from writing an op ed about that is not emotional intelligence. That is not what we want to teach people. You have to learn how to live with your emotions. Life is a roller coaster ride of anxiety and frustration and anger and sadness, and also elation and jubilance and contentment. And we should learn to just love them all and not be fearful of them and experience them. Because I've lived with anxiety for I'm 55. And I've had anxiety my whole life. I've experienced anxiety.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  I worry about everything and I worry about why I worry. Even I have a new thing. I worry about why I worry about why I worry. And the truth is, I don't have that much to worry about. And when I tell myself that, it's like, oh, you're right, Mark. Your life is pretty good. And just because you're feeling a sense of anxiety or fear, whatever the emotion is, doesn't mean you can't be productive. Doesn't mean you can't go to work today. I never miss a day of work. I love what I do. And so if I wake up feeling anxious, it's not a signal avoid. For me, it's a signal to approach the emotion. Ask myself why I'm having it and then figure out what my strategy is for the day.

• 37:28Rich Roll?

  This approach avoid dichotomy is super important because I'm sure it was well intended when those, you know, people said, look, if you're feeling it, they're trying to like, they're thinking about the mental welfare of the students, right? And just, and assuming that that would be in their best interest to do that. When in fact, the goal really is emotional resilience, to be able to, you know, be in difficult situations and have enough self-awareness and tools and strategies to manage it. And then when you get to the other side of it, you are more robust for that experience.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Correct. I think one thing that's also important is that resilience or emotion regulation is not always about shifting out of the feeling. It's sometimes just being with. Just say, Mark, yeah, you're a little worried about this. Okay.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  So what?

• 38:24Rich Roll?

  Why is the human condition so hell bent on, you know, trying to get, trying to change those experiences? Like, what is it about the discomfort of that that is so intolerable for us?

• 38:37Speaker 01

  It's a discomfort and it's a mindset that we were, that was cultivated within us. We've been told anxiety, bad, anxiety, weak. That's, that's a person made phenomenon. That is not a real phenomenon. So I just think that we have to rethink the way we think about emotions. Emotions are experiences and they're beautiful experiences. My anxiety helps me to recognize the things that I really care about in life. I get anxious when I hand in a grant proposal and that's a good thing. It helps me be more detailed. It helps me make sure that all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed and the grammar is right.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  And I want that anxiety before I hand in a proposal.

• 39:23Rich Roll?

  But only with emotional literacy can you distinguish that anxiety from the pernicious variety?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Correct. And I think that, you know, these are complicated things that we're talking about. What I said earlier about living with the feeling. This is where I have a term I call being an emotion scientist. You have to be curious about your emotional life and ask yourself, is how I'm feeling getting in the way of my goals? Is it getting in the way of my wellbeing, my healthy relationships or not? And sometimes those emotions are. So I have this experience where back, it's about a decade ago. Here I was, the director of a center for emotional intelligence. I'm going up for tenure as a professor. And I was having heartburn and it was like really an acid reflux. It was crazy.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  I'm like, my father died, not him die, but he had his first quadruple bypass at 48. I was 48 or like 47. And I'm thinking to myself like, this is it. I'm done. I'm like hypergondralic, I'm like, and the doctor's office like this. Like, I know my heart's racing, there's something, my blood pressure's, you know. And the doctor said to me, this is what it's like for professors like you before you go up for tenure. So here's the deal, I'm going to give you a pylosac for your heartburn and here's some ativan for your anxiety. It was a 10-minute conversation. I'm like, I think I'm dying. And anyhow, but I left that doctor's office. I was pissed because A, you know, this is what I do for a living and I was not really self-aware of what I was actually experiencing.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  And B, I thought the doctor could have been a little bit more compassionate and asked me more questions about my life. So I went down my list of feeling words and I said, Mark, are you anxious? Eh, no, I'm like, I'm pretty productive. I got the grants, I got the papers. No. Are you stressed? Well, I have a lot of demands, but I have a great team. They're all, we're all working together. I'm not stressed. Are you afraid? No, there's no fear here, there's no danger. And then I had this moment of an epiphany. You are overwhelmed. You're saying yes to everything. You give yourself no breaks. And this is, this is what's causing your quote-unquote anxiety and stress. It is overwhelm.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  I can't tell you in that moment how like all of a sudden my, it lifted me because it wasn't, I'm a scheduled person. I have like a calendar that's very detailed and I have a schedule like this 15 minute here and this 10 minute here and then 15 minute here and then schedule my yoga and then schedule the time to think. I would even schedule time to think, which I actually think is a good idea.

• 42:03Rich Roll?

  There might be a little neurosis in there. I mean, the layer beneath this, of course, is like, why are you saying yes to everything? Like, what's motivating that? Right? And that's where the juice is.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  That's where the understanding comes in of ruler. And so I started trying to figure out, what am I, you know, what's the overwhelm all about? But the real point here was that I realized that the neuroses of like scheduling every single day and like, I'm the type of person that would, oh, I have a two-hour car ride? I can schedule six meetings and you can like phone me in, I can talk about this and then. And I started saying, this is ridiculous. You need space.

• 42:44Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  And I just started scheduling space, like the nature walk, or the time to just not do anything, or even watch a TV show. Totally changed my heart, my heartburn went away and within weeks.

• 42:57Rich Roll?

  But part of the understanding is, is what the need is that's being fulfilled by, whether it's saying yes, or, you know, take for example, somebody who just, no matter what's going on in their life, there's some catastrophe on the horizon, or something to worry about, or obsess about, you know, whether it's the news cycle, or, you know, it doesn't matter, right? So what is, like, understanding, you have to understand, like, okay, well, what is the fear beneath that, or the need that, you know, that type of behavior is, in what way is it actually serving that person? Because at some point, it was a coping strategy that was helpful. It's just no longer helpful.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Well, this is why I think it's important, again, going back to being an emotion scientist, is that once in a while, we gotta just pause and check in and say, is my life working for me? Is how I'm feeling each day, at home and at work, and anywhere else, helping me achieve my goals in life? Do I feel like my relationships are going in the direction I want them to go? I can't tell you how many people are so afraid, I'm gonna make this segue, to express, expressing emotions, to express emotions to the people they love the most. It's kind of mind blowing to me that we are so afraid of expressing disappointment in someone, that we think they're not gonna love us anymore,

• 44:17Speaker 01

  they don't want to be with us anymore, or the colleague isn't gonna want to have lunch with us anymore, we're gonna lose the deal. It is unfortunate, because the feeling is driving the quality of the relationship. And so if you're living with a feeling of disappointment, based on something somebody said or did, and you can't communicate that in a way that can build a relationship, where does it go? It goes into eating, cheating, denying, someplace else.

• 44:46Rich Roll?

  Is there a distinction between repressing those emotions and avoidance?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  There is. I mean, repression, technically speaking, is like, I'm gonna push this so deep down under the surface that it's gonna become unconscious. Where avoidance is like, that's intentional. It's like, you know, Rich and I are colleagues. Rich is on Mark's nerves. I come out one door, I see Rich, I'm like, no. You know, that's an intentional thing.

• 45:15Rich Roll?

  And what happens when we repress our emotions over time?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  They have to go somewhere.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  They go to physical health problems, mental health challenges, and other kind of things that are not helpful for our well-being. So, E, expressing emotions. I wanted to say that the first three, R, U, L, recognize, understand, and label. I'm going to say that's about self-awareness and social awareness. Because I need to both recognize your emotions, understand where your feelings are coming from, and know what you're actually feeling. Same thing for myself. The E and the R, a ruler, are about expressing emotions. So, a big deal here is do I feel safe and comfortable with you? Telling you who I really feel? I mean, can you think about past relationships

• 46:05Speaker 01

  where you felt inhibited expressing your emotions?

• 46:08Rich Roll?

  Sure. I mean, there's plenty of times that I've felt that way. And I'm sure people say to you all the time, like, I hear what you're saying, Mark, that's great. But, you know, I have this thing about my boss. But, you know, if I go into his or her office and I say it, like, I'm going to get fired. So, like, that's, you know, it's all very, you know, well and good. I understand the idea behind it, but it's not available to me.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  It's available. However, I think what most people haven't learned is how to communicate in a way that's effective.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  There's always a way to communicate, I believe. The problem that we have is that we think that, you know,

• 46:46Speaker 01

  that expressing anger means I'm angry and they're going to listen to me if I have to tell you one more time. Like, who said that's how you express anger? You can have a very clear conversation without my father's beaded eyes and pressed lips that are making you feel intimidated and afraid. You can really talk to someone about your disappointment without making them feel depressed. I just think that we have not spent time doing role plays as we're kids and young adults to have these kinds of rich conversations. And for that reason, it's easier to just get a divorce. Which is not easier to get a divorce, by the way.

• 47:26Rich Roll?

  That way, I won't have to have the hard conversations.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  But seriously, I'm just gonna quit my job because I'd rather not have a difficult conversation.

• 47:33Rich Roll?

  Extreme avoidance.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  It is, but I tell you, I would put my bet on more people are gonna do that than have the comfort level to have the conversation.

• 47:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it requires strategy, skills, self-awareness, composure. There's a when for all of these things and a way of doing them. But that gets back to emotional literacy.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  It goes back to the explicit instruction. Are we teaching people the skills they need to navigate their lives?

• 48:07Rich Roll?

  And we're not.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  No, we're not, period. And this is why, look at the surgeon general's data, the former surgeon general Vivek Murthy's data, and the research is out there. I have this huge thing that's bothering me these days because it's making me feel like I have no accomplishment, which is that I've been working harder than I've ever worked. There's more schools adopting our program than ever before, and the world's anxiety and depression and loneliness is escalating. And I'll say, the reason why is it's an implementation problem, that we have not made a commitment as a society to develop these skills in people. And when we make that commitment, from a government level, to a state level, to a school level, to a company level...

• 48:53Speaker 01

  We'll see the decreases in those unpleasant experiences.

• 48:57Rich Roll?

  It's a systemic problem because there is a lack of incentive alignment. You can say we're in a loneliness crisis. We have all these giant social problems, right? And you can make the argument that actually, if we address them, we will reduce our healthcare costs, we will increase productivity. But we're not a culture that does a very good job with like long-term ideas like that. We're looking at quarterly earnings, right? And so the amount of investment that has to go into doing something like that correctly, you can't see the payoff. It's all like in the clouds. It's this ephemeral abstract idea, and that's your biggest kind of obstacle and impediment to this.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  That's correct. I wrote an op-ed that I'll be submitting soon about this, about AI and mental health, because that's the new thing in terms of, you know, people will just be sitting at home with their chatbot, talking about their feelings, which to me is the end of the world as we know it. And the billions of dollars that are being invested into the technologies to do this work with AI, well, I'm for AI, there's lots of great benefits to it. However, it is not going to solve the mental health crisis. It will not solve the mental health crisis. I'll say that one more time. It will not solve the mental health crisis.

• 50:21Rich Roll?

  And your argument for that is?

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Prevention. So I did this cost benefit analysis. One company, I'll just, I won't mention the name of it. They got $100 million in VC to start their AI bot. And I did an analysis of what if you invested $100 million in schools? And I found in my little analysis that for that one company's chatbot thing that will probably not be in business in a year from now, because there's a million competitors, that you could work with about 13,000 schools and reach about eight to nine million children.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it's I I'm running around trying to beg, you know, philanthropists and others, you know, to invest in this work. And it seems like, oh, we're just going to throw cash at these technologies. But we're not going to throw cash at healthy development. It's really hard for me to to even say that out loud, to be honest.

• 51:27Rich Roll?

  Do you think that there is an argument that these AI tools could be beneficial in that they are

• 51:36Rich Roll?

  making emotional literacy more widely available? Like, I'm just imagining a young person who's never been to a therapist and is maybe in a chaotic home. And but that person has ChatGPT and they're like, here's what's happening. Like, what's can you decode this for me? And like, what should I do? You know, like, they're sort of because they're in the privacy of their bedroom. Like, maybe they're a little more open in a way that they can't be with another human being. And they're being introduced to concepts and tools that other they're not getting at school or anywhere else.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Like I said, there are some benefits, and I think in extreme situations, maybe that's helpful, but that kid is going to have to open their bedroom door.

• 52:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  They're going to have to live in the real world, and the real world is not going to be responding to them like artificial intelligence will. So you can do up all the scripts for having a difficult conversation, but then you got to go practice it. And humans are not linear. And you're going to need more skills than you're going to get from that artificial intelligence. And again, my argument, my AI is just is the new thing that people are concerned about. My issue is that we don't take development seriously, that we don't think that we should be developing these skills in people. And by the way, it's also you talked about cost benefit analyses and productivity.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Here's the challenge with all of these interventions, which is that the number of new cases that need to get treated are not going to decrease. It's just going to get default and there's not enough treatments. When I got to Yale, maybe there were 15 counselors. Now there's 30, 40 of them. You just can't keep on hiring more and more psychologists and counselors to treat people.

• 53:19Rich Roll?

  Because you're just dealing with the other end of the spectrum rather than at the outset.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Prevention is way more cost effective than intervention.

• 53:26Rich Roll?

  I know. So why do we struggle so direly in our culture to put into motion these prevented? I mean, I do feel like there is a greater awareness around these things. We're seeing more energy and investment in preventive medicine, in physical medicine. There is this discourse around mental health that we've never seen before. It doesn't feel like it's translating into an improvement in mental health. That's the problem. We're just sort of talking about it.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:57Rich Roll?

  And there still is this embedded idea that if you're going to see a therapist, it's because there's something wrong.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Correct. It's a mindset shift that we have to have. And I can easily spend the next four hours with you talking about the business case for this, if that's what it's going to take. Because you're an entrepreneur. Have you ever worked with someone who was emotionally dysregulated?

• 54:20Rich Roll?

  Oh, completely. When I was a lawyer, I mean, just absolute lunatics and very difficult personalities for many years. And I was, I'm sure on some level, I had some kind of PTSD to that. Like, there was a certain partner in a law firm that I worked for that had a very distinctive foreign accent. And for years afterward, he was incredibly challenging and difficult to work with, a very angry person. And for years afterwards, anytime I heard that accent, it would just, I'd literally, my whole body would seize up.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  It's like a post-traumatic stress response. It happens. My point of asking you that was, or is, that I have research to show that leaders of organizations who are higher in emotional intelligence have organizations that are way more productive. People who work there who are significantly less frustrated and overwhelmed and are more inspired and connected, less likely to be burnt out, less likely to want to leave their jobs. I mean, that is a huge cost benefit to an organization to have a leader who has these skills. And during the pandemic, I did a study in schools. And what we found

• 55:32Speaker 01

  was that both the intra and the inter were important, meaning that a leader who people said, you know, Mark's the same, I'm the leader of the school, Mark's dealing with his anxiety. Well, like he's handling, he's not freaking out, he's not burning out, he's got it. That was one piece of it. But the interpersonal piece around regulation was even more important, which is that Mark can hold this school. The leader can hold the organization. The leader is not afraid of the difficult conversation or the person who's freaking out. The leader has the skills and strategies to manage the emotions, or at least help the people in that group manage their emotions.

• 56:13Rich Roll?

  Which downstream reduces everyone's anxiety because they feel like you got this.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 56:18Rich Roll?

  You're in control. We're in safe hands.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 56:20Rich Roll?

  Part of the whole problem here is, is, is multifold. One, people believe that emotional intelligence is something that people either have or they don't. There are people that have it. This is not a learnable thing.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Not true.

• 56:38Rich Roll?

  We're gonna get, we're gonna go through all of these. Second, it's not really that important. Like, it's, it's not really considered, you know, at the, at the top of the, yeah, it's this, it's this soft skill. It's not a, a hard science. So I wanted to, and then, and then it's not learnable. And so I wanted to disabuse people of this. To me, this looks like hard science. Like you've come up with this equation.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  My formula there?

• 57:06Rich Roll?

  This formula?

• 57:07Speaker 01

  I needed, sometimes I have to feel, make myself feel smart.

• 57:09Rich Roll?

  For those who are on video, you can see I wrote it out on an index card. So I'm going to give you that and like,

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 57:14Rich Roll?

  Help us understand what that mathematical equation means.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Well, this is getting to now with the E and the R. So we're, I want to, we did R U L.

• 57:23Rich Roll?

  Right. We're still, we're all over the place here today for some reason.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  It's all in the right direction. We're self-aware, we're socially aware, we're thinking about whether or not we can express those emotions comfortably with whomever we're with. And now it's time to decide, what do I do with these feelings? Hence, my book, Dealing with Feeling. So, as I was writing the book and looking at all the science,

• 57:50Speaker 01

  you know, I get criticized oftentimes by like, Mark, you make things too complicated. And I said, well, I'm not that really, I'm not that complicated, number one. And number two is emotion regulation is complicated. Can we, and if we just own that, then we can let it like just done. So it was like, writing a poem like Amanda Gorman, complicated. You gotta dedicate your life to writing poetry to write like that. Well, if you want a life of sound decision making, a life with really healthy and positive relationships, and a life where you achieve your goals, then you're gonna have to learn how to regulate your emotions.

• 58:33Rich Roll?

  I mean, you have said point blank, like emotional regulation is the most important skill that a human can possess.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  I agree, since I wrote it.

• 58:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  I would say, you know, that along with general cognitive ability, like, we need to be able to think and problem solve. But aside from our general ability to reason in the world, emotion regulation is the master skill.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Period.

• 58:59Rich Roll?

  And the good news is, we can learn.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  It's 100% learned, 100%. How many, were you born with a pocketful of evidence-based strategies to regulate your emotions?

• 59:11Rich Roll?

  No, they're still not in my pocket, Mark.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. Well, we're gonna fill out today. So, emotion regulation, this is my little formula. ER is emotion regulation, is a set of goals and strategies. So, what I mean by that is, you have to want to regulate. Do you want to prevent an unwanted emotion? Do you want to reduce the difficult emotion? Do you want to initiate an emotion? Do you want to maintain an emotion? Or do you want to enhance an emotion? So, PRIME is an acronym I've created for that. Emotion regulation is a set of goals and strategies. Those strategies, we'll get into in a minute. Generally speaking, they're kind of thinking strategies or behavioral strategies. Mark, don't say it. It's a self-talk strategy versus, Mark, leave the room.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Go take a walk. And then I say, so emotion regulation is a set of goals and strategies. And that equals, is a function of the emotion you're feeling, who you are as a person, and the context. So, the emotion is, back when I was going up for tenure and I was feeling overwhelmed, that was the emotion of that year. That was my, "Ish, this is a tough one." Before that, it was anger. I was angry at my upbringing. I was angry at my parents. I'm 55 now. I've kind of let the anger go. It's like, it's not a salient emotion for me these days. So, that's not a troubling one for me. Overwhelm has come back, though. I've got the new book coming out. I've got to run around.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  I've got to talk about it. I've got to make decisions. That's, you know, I'm ready to see my schedule get crazy. So, my point is, though, that I've got to, my overwhelmed strategies are not the same as my disappointment strategies. Does that make sense? Sure. So, it's a function of the emotion, the person. So, people think of me as outgoing. I'm an introvert. I'm like, that's why I live in the countryside. And I like to speak to people. I'm a people person, but like in small doses. And then I want to go to yoga. I want to take a walk by myself. I want to go write. Like, for example, after this is over, I'm going to Santa Monica, not to party, but

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  to like, take a walk on the beach. And so, that's important, though, because if we, as a parent or a colleague or a partner, we believe that our strategies are the best strategies, then we try to push them onto other people. And we have to know who that person is in order to help them find the strategies best for them. And then finally, there's context. So I could joke about this right now. You know, I like yoga. I'm a very avid, you know, very, I used to be a martial arts teacher. I had to give it up for just reasons of like being a writer, I couldn't have a broken wrist anymore. And now I do yoga. Right now, if I'm like, oh, my gosh, I'm freaking out with Rich. I can't get up and start doing, you know, downward dog.

• 1:02:09Rich Roll?

  You could. We could take a break.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  You know, just let me know. That's very kind of you. But contextually speaking, if I notice myself like going too long on this thing, or wanting to edit myself, I gotta do it in my head. And so context really does matter for regulation. So that's a lot, but I think it's clear.

• 1:02:29Rich Roll?

  I'm imagining inside out, like, you know, the, this big control panel where you're, there's all these toggle switches that, you know, you're, you're solving this equation that you have by turning dials. And that begins with this self-awareness piece, this understanding and, and, and giving yourself permission to express these emotions. I mean, that's a big one. Like, people just don't feel like they can feel their feelings, or they feel ashamed, or if they feel this way, it means that they're a bad person, which gets into this scientist versus judgment, like this very Adam Grant kind of idea that you have.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Yes. And it's funny you say permission. That was obviously the title of my first book, which is called Permission to Feel. Because as a kid, with the abuse that I endured and the bullying that I endured, you know, I never did express it. And I went trapped in those feelings. And I had an eating disorder. And I had depression and terrible anxiety and fear, and the list goes on. And

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  I think back and I'm like, how is it possible that no one identified my feelings? How is it possible that nobody came up to me and said, hey, Mark, things don't look so great right now, you know, what's going on? Never happened. And then I had this uncle who was my hero, Uncle Marvin, who happened to be writing a curriculum to teach kids about emotions, who came into my life when I was 10 and completely turned my life around. And that goes back to the strategies of emotion regulation. So, permission to feel was a concept that I wrote about, but I realized it's actually a strategy. And it's actually the top strategy, which is you gotta give yourself and you gotta give everyone else the permission to feel.

• 1:04:18Rich Roll?

  It's this God-given right that we all have. So, as much as we feel like we're not allowed to feel the way that we feel, especially in public, you're giving people that permission, like, no, this is the human condition.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  The basic is, you know, it's okay. These are feelings, no problem. Now, I want to share with you this big study I've been working on. So, since the last five years, I've done about 70 studies on this. I do have a little bit of obsessive-compulsive research disorder, but, you know, I wanted to show cross-culturally that this permission to feel concept mattered. And what I found was no cultural differences, which is surprising to a lot of people. The core piece of this are about the people who give us permission to feel. So, I've asked people to describe, as I call it, their Uncle Marvin's. And there are three characteristics. Do you want to guess what they are?

• 1:05:17Rich Roll?

  Active listening. I wrote it down somewhere. I don't have it in front of me, so I know what they are.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  You actually read it.

• 1:05:25Rich Roll?

  But, yeah, like, it's active listening, you know, non-judgment, and empathy? Yeah, okay, so it's empathy. As opposed to, you know, all of this sort of...

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Critical.

• 1:05:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, being critical, trying to fix it, or, you know, vilifying people for how they feel.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. Now, what's fascinating to me is that only about a third of people across the world that I've studied say they had an Uncle Marvin, that they had permission to feel as a kid. Two-thirds say no. And then you look at the differences in the lives of the people who had permission to feel and who didn't, and as adults...

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Significant Differences in Life Satisfaction, Purpose and Meaning Life. My newest study found that people who had permission to feel as a child sleep better at night, better physical health, better mental health. So there are real long-term consequences for creating the conditions for us to be with our feelings and not run from them. That's the first strategy and I stand by it. It's the master strategy of emotion regulation.

• 1:06:35Rich Roll?

  Uncle Marvin's are kind of hard to come by. Like, I'm imagining the more typical situation of a young person who you can tell like this this person's headed in the wrong direction, they're behaving in certain ways and you know that some type of intervention, you know, is is kind of important to get this kid back on track. And well-intentioned, well-meaning people may attempt that. Maybe they're lacking, you know, all of the skills that you talk about in your book, but they try and they try, but the kid is shut down or resistant or recalcitrant to all of that. And so people tend to sort of then back off.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Well, you bring up, remember earlier we said emotions are approach avoid? For kids, it's always approach.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  You never avoid.

• 1:07:20Rich Roll?

  Say more. Even when they're sending you avoidant signals.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's saying, I need help. Please come give me a hug. Please come talk to me. Please find your way into my life. That's what they're asking for.

• 1:07:33Rich Roll?

  As a parent, you know, I've run into those situations where you're getting all of those signals and and part of me is thinking, well, they're trying to individuate and it's important that I, you know, let them know that they have a zone of privacy and I'm not going to intrude upon that.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:07:49Rich Roll?

  And, you know, I respect that also. Like, I want to allow them their space and if they say back off, like, I'm I'm not going to trample on that. But then it becomes if if something is really awry, like, then you have to insert yourself despite that.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Well, and back off means doesn't back off forever. And I think the follow through piece is really important is checking in. You know, yesterday we wasn't looking so great for you. How are you doing today? Like, what's going on? And just doing those check ins, I think, is really important. The interesting thing, you know, if we can jump into parenting for a minute. So I give these, I do a lot of parent talks. And what's really funny to me, I was giving this speech, I think it was in Chicago. And, you know, parents were kind of riveted to this Uncle Marvin phenomenon of like non judgment and good listening and empathy and compassion. And this one woman jumped out of her seat and she said, you know, I have a, you know, I'm having an epiphany.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  And I said, okay, I guess you want to share it. So she goes, I have two children and I know one of them has an Uncle Marvin and wasn't, one of them doesn't. And Mark, I am leaving here today and I'm going to find my kid his Uncle Marvin. And I looked at her and I said, you know, lady, it could be you.

• 1:09:05Rich Roll?

  I know. It's like, she's trying to, she's, yeah, she's not seeing, you know.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  She just missed it.

• 1:09:10Rich Roll?

  What's obvious.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  It's outsourcing, like there's your karate teacher, there's your Uncle Marvin.

• 1:09:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we don't, why do we, I don't want to deal with that messiness. You know, let's just find the right person for that.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  See, it's a mindset again, that's messy.

• 1:09:22Rich Roll?

  Is it not, Mark, a way of cultivating a deeper emotional intelligence with yourself by engaging in, in this process that you call co-regulation? Like, when you're with someone else, whether you're trying to help them with their emotional state, you're trying to help them, you're trying to be an Uncle Marvin. This is also, you know, feedback that's helping you with your own emotional intelligence and regulate. It's a, this is a bilateral kind of.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Well, here's the beauty of the permission to feel concept. You know, I'm going to tell you just a quick story, which is some, running around doing these speeches, talking about Uncle Marvin, which I never talked, I mean, he was my partner, but I never told the true story about how he came into my life with my abuse and how he really helped me get through it. And.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  I'm in Westchester, New York, and this guy jumps out of his, he's like, "You're talking about Marvin Moore, the sixth grade social studies teacher from Monticello, New York?" I said, "I am." He's like, "Mark, your Uncle Marvin was my Uncle Marvin." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "He was my teacher in sixth grade, and he's the reason why I'm a school leader today." Like, I'll never forget the twinkle in his eyes, and his smile, and the way he greeted us, and the way he taught us about feelings and history." The guy went on and on. And then, of course, I was moved by that. And so, at the end, he said to me, "It's clearly, it's clear that your uncle had a huge impact, you know, on you and your life, and your work, and your everything."

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  I said, "100%." And then he said, "Well, so, for whom are you an Uncle Marvin?" "I'm a scientist. I like to study this stuff."

• 1:11:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's a pay-it-forward situation. I mean, when you look at it from 10,000 feet, and you, you know, cast your gaze upon family dynamics, and the ways in which people are raised, and they internalize a set of behavior patterns, and then, without interference, you're going to pass those on to your kids, and, you know, this, this will just continue uninterrupted. And it's only when an Uncle Marvin can step in and run some interference on that, that you have a chance of that pattern interrupt and creating new strategies. And so, as much as dealing with our feelings and cultivating our emotional intelligence

• 1:11:46Rich Roll?

  is, is a, you know, is a, is a personal endeavor for, for well-being and living a more fulfilled, you know, kind of living our best lives, it's the greatest act of service. Like, this investment that you make is, you know, if you have other people in your life, and I assume everyone who's listening or watching does, like, this is the greatest act of service that you can give to the people that you care about. To become this Uncle Marvin where you can sit with people and listen to them and put into practice all of these strategies and tools that you talk about because they're so incredibly healing. And if that other person can be a pattern interrupt in their family dynamic, they are interrupting, you know, that, you know, kind of long line of

• 1:12:31Rich Roll?

  generate, whether it's, I mean, trauma as a word like gaslighting, it gets thrown around a lot, but, you know, whatever unhealthy behavior pattern that's just festering within that dynamic has a chance of getting rooted out and healed.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Couldn't agree more. And I want to say something about that, which is that in any of the research that I've done, never do I see problem solver, or fixer, or even smart. The Uncle Marvin's, the people who create the conditions for us to be our true selves are not the smartest people in the world. They're not the fixers, the problem solvers. They're the people who don't judge us. They're the people who show compassion and empathy and they listen. That's what people are looking for. So the fear that so many people have of being the Uncle Marvin for their own kid or someone else is an illusion

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  because you don't have to be the expert. Nobody wants to be around that. They're looking for presence.

• 1:13:35Rich Roll?

  It seems so simple, you know, like all you had, really, really what moves the needle the most is can you just sit with somebody and, and, and listen to what they have to say and make them feel seen and heard. And that's, that's like 90% of it.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  And listening is not just like sitting there like this. It's asking good questions. It's showing your interest. That's what listening is. But it's not fixing. So.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Another thing that I think is important is this paying it forward, as you said. And especially in the, so I've done this work, by the way, in the corporate sector as well. I call the people in the workplace emotional allies. Do you have an emotional ally at work? About 40 to 50% of people say yes, 40 to 50% say no. When I ask people to describe their emotional allies in the workforce, what do you think are the top three characteristics?

• 1:14:38Rich Roll?

  Empathetic, compassionate, patient, good listener.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  It's the same. Nonjudgmental, good listener, empathy and compassion. And to me, that goes to this universal need that we have when we're kids and when we're adults, to be surrounded by people who just, stop judging me. Think about it, really. We're judged from the moment we come out of our mother's womb. I mean, seriously, you're too fat, you're too skinny, you're too dark, you're too light, you're too feminine, you're too masculine. I mean, endless. It's, we're just judged constantly. And people are like, enough. Just let me be who I am. I'm good. Keep your opinions to yourself.

• 1:15:21Rich Roll?

  I'm rehearsing all of the typical parenting, yeah, buts that come up. Yeah, but, you know, we, you know, this person doesn't understand. And like, I have their best interest at heart and they need to get that like, in order to go from here to there, they're going to have to do this, that, and the other. And I don't need them to like me, you know? I'm the parent and this is what's happening.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  And I just always say, how's that working for your relationship? It tends not to be working well. You know, the parent who is, you know, pushing and pushing. I mean, I, this, I work at Yale, so believe me, I've, I've seen this phenomenon over and over again. And if you want to push and push and push and judge and not listen and not show you care and just make sure your kid takes every AP class and plays every sport and knows instruments that no one ever heard of and travel the country that no one ever heard of to get into a great university, go for it.

• 1:16:19Rich Roll?

  Then they end up at Yale and they're all fucked up. And then they have to, then they come into Yale. Yeah.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  But they end up not being as happy as you might want them to be. And so what's the goal? If we don't have well-being goals, I don't know what other goals are more important than that.

• 1:16:40Rich Roll?

  Well, there's two things. There's like an incorrect understanding or definition of happiness.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:16:45Rich Roll?

  Happiness, that idea of happiness is premised upon achieving all of these things that, and these things will deliver that, right? So that's upside down. And also, there's the trust piece. Like, you're talking about the workplace, and do you have an emotional ally in the workplace? Like, the workplace is fraught with politics.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:17:04Rich Roll?

  And backs, I can't trust, if I go tell this person like what I'm really feeling, they're gonna go tell somebody else and the like. And of course, trust is fundamental in the parenting, in the parenting context.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  This is why it's a cultural shift we have to make. As someone who has, you know, done this work for so many years, and I have for going back to the school situation, there are schools that I've worked with for 15, almost 20 years now. And so I've seen children grow up and come to, I've had my own students at Yale who went to schools that did my program 15 years ago, which is crazy. And it's interesting, because when I go visit these places, oftentimes, the principal is very excited that I'm visiting the school, and they'll have the kids who are interested in the work wanna like meet with me and ask me good questions. And this one kid asked me recently, she said,

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  you know, why did you, why was this so important to you? Like, why are you running around doing this work? And I shared with her a little bit about my childhood. And she goes, "I understand what you just said, but I have a hard time relating to it." And I said, "Well, why?" And she said, "Well, I'm in middle school now, and I've gone to this school since I was in kindergarten. And I can't think of a day that I've come to school that someone didn't care about me." I mean, you want to see like Professor Brackett crying.

• 1:18:31Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  Like, I was just like, oh, my gosh, like, imagine what it's like to be a kid growing up in those conditions versus feeling so isolated and lonely and scared.

• 1:18:42Rich Roll?

  That's beautiful. Wouldn't we all be so lucky, right, to have that?

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  It's out there. It just needs to be scaled more rapidly.

• 1:18:52Rich Roll?

  Do you find the kids receptive to these ideas? Like, if there's some assembly and it's like, okay, we got Mark coming in and he's gonna get, it's like, this is not a receptive audience.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  So it depends. If it starts in high school, it's tougher. Middle school's a little less tough, but still can be tough. But if it starts in preschool and kindergarten, by the time the kids get to middle and high school, it's just, it's part of the way they operate.

• 1:19:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Do you know Lisa Demore?

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  I do.

• 1:19:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, she, I can't help but think about her when you talk about this stuff. I mean, she is so gifted and part of her genius in terms of being able to communicate with kids is like she is so curious about their lives and

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:19:35Rich Roll?

  wants to know, and they can feel that. And they know that they're not being judged. And she just exudes this trust, you know, that

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 1:19:45Rich Roll?

  that allows them to open up and confide in her.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:19:48Rich Roll?

  Are we ready to talk about, like, more strategies here? Like, there's building blocks and there's strategies. So there's kind of two categories here. Like, not that we're doing a book report, but I just want to make sure that, you know, we're, everybody is following along.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  Thank you. So the building blocks, permission to feel, it's a basic attitudinal thing. It's a mindset shift. Then another building block is the labeling. The labeling, well, it's kind of a strategy itself. It's not a real strategy, but it's partly there. And sometimes that's enough. So we've talked about that quite a bit in terms of the role of emotion labeling for the power of regulating. The basics of that are two. One is that having the language. Gives you clarity of your experience, helps you to communicate. But B, in an emotional regulation standpoint, what it does is it causes you to pause

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  when you're being activated to reflect.

• 1:20:47Rich Roll?

  To have that meta moment.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:50Rich Roll?

  I have another AV tool here. Look what I created for you, Mark.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Thank you. You're amazing.

• 1:20:56Rich Roll?

  So this is the mood meter, which is a helpful tool in trying to identify where your emotions reside in the heat of a particular moment.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Okay, I am really becoming a professor today.

• 1:21:09Rich Roll?

  I know, look at that.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  So two axes, four quadrants, pleasantness and energy. So pleasantness is you wake up in the morning and you ask yourself, am I feeling unpleasant today? Am I feeling pleasant today? Do I feel like not approaching the day? Do I feel like approaching the day? Do I feel comfortable, safe? Or do I feel uncomfortable, unsafe? That's the X-axis. The Y-axis is about physical and mental energy. Do I feel depleted? Do I feel energized? Do I feel activated? Or do I feel like I need to go back to bed? And of course, those axes cross to create the four quadrants. We've got yellow, red, blue, and green. Yellow, high-energy, pleasant emotions.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  So that's happy, excited, optimistic, hopeful. Green, calm, content, tranquil, peaceful. I'll repeat myself from earlier. The red and blue are unpleasant feelings. They're not negative, they're not bad. They're just unpleasant. We don't want to feel them a lot, but we're going to feel them no matter what. Blue, down, sad, disappointment, lonely. Red is anxiety and anger, family. And so we find this, there's probably

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  half a million of these around the world that people have used in classrooms and organizations. The app, the How We Feel app that I told you is built upon this model. And it's extraordinarily helpful to help people take the complexities that are in their brain.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  Especially when they've not been taught how to label their feelings. And they just ask themselves some questions. Where am I, my pleasantness? Where am I, my energy? Oh, I'm in yellow? Well, what might be causing me to be in the yellow? Oh, I'm excited I'm on this podcast with Rich. So how are you feeling? Oh, I'm ecstatic. I'm happy. Or whatever it might be.

• 1:22:58Rich Roll?

  Just the process of engaging with that exercise, to have a forethought to say, let me locate my emotions right now on this, you know, plot it out.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:23:10Rich Roll?

  On this graph. So then I can get clues as to, you know, how I might respond best in this particular situation. And every one of those experiences gets lodged, like you have that experience and there's data and you kind of acknowledge. And then the next time it happens, you're like, oh, that worked, that didn't work. Here's how I'm feeling a little bit differently than I was that other time that this happened. And just attuning yourself in that way seems to me to be like, that's the whole portal into emotional intelligence.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  And that's when people say it's so time consuming. What's so time consuming? Learning it is time, you gotta learn it. But applying it is really simple. It takes 30 seconds to do this or that. So for example, this morning I was at my hotel. I'm a coffee person, you know, coffee wasn't so great. I was trying to map out if I can get an Uber to stop at a coffee shop, bring me here. I decided that was way too much. So I was, someone was very kind to make me this coffee. But, um, and I, right before I was welcomed into your office space, which is beautiful, I paused. And I thought, how am I doing right now? Yeah. Got a good night's sleep, feel grateful for that.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  And I was noticing as I was listening to myself do other talks that I'm, and how you pick up, I just said it, you know, you know? That is driving me out of my mind that I'm saying, you know, too much. And I'm like, Mark, do not say, you know? And of course I've said it probably 3,000 times. But my point is that I took a moment to pause and how do I want to, how am I feeling? And how do I want to feel?

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  And that's something else that's very important is what we'll call ideal affect. What emotion do I want to exude in this interaction with you? How do I want to be seen and talked about and experienced with you? How many people do you think about that?

• 1:25:08Rich Roll?

  Not enough. I mean, that's some blended version of setting an intention and also a visualization practice.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25:16Rich Roll?

  And also a mindfulness practice.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:25:19Rich Roll?

  I'm going to be present and make myself aware of everything that I'm feeling so that I can be grounded enough so that I can behave in the way that I'm setting an intention for and now visualizing. And that visualization is not focused on outcomes. It's focused on the emotional experience that you would like to have.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. That took me, I mean, I'm so used to doing it now, 20 seconds. And it just helped me create an intention for how I wanted to show up. And if I were in a place where I needed a strategy, I might have listened to a podcast. I might have listened to a particular song that I like. I might have called a friend. I did call my executive director and someone else. Am I over here? Because people like to cheer me on to do these things.

• 1:26:07Rich Roll?

  Was that on your calendar or was that a spontaneous?

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  That was a spontaneous call. Truth be told, it was a butt dial. And then she picked up and I'm like, oh, I just wanted to let you know. But the other one was intentional. And that person was busy. So I was like, okay, you can't talk to me right now. I want to share my excitement about going on the podcast. But anyhow, the point is that sometimes it's a social support strategy. Sometimes it's music. Sometimes it's a little talking in my head. And that's what this is about. This is not asking teachers to be therapists or emotional allies to be therapists. This is about skills that can help us perform better and relate better to other people.

• 1:26:54Rich Roll?

  That awareness, when married to these strategies, helps to expand that meta moment.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:27:02Rich Roll?

  So all of us would benefit from being able to pause when agitated, you know, or any variation of that. Because what we do is we react mindlessly most of the time.

• 1:27:18Rich Roll?

  You can call it being triggered. That's another word that gets thrown around like pretty cavalierly. But a more mild version of that is we're kind of running on autopilot more often than we realize. Right. And to the extent that we can have those moments that you intentionally set for yourself before coming in here, that buys us, it's like an insurance policy, right? Like when we're, when we're in a stressful situation, that awareness is more available to us and it allows us to pause, to expand that meta moment and to make a more conscious decision.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  You really know this stuff.

• 1:27:56Rich Roll?

  I mean, I don't practice it as well as I should. And to do that, you have to quiet your mind and your body.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  Yes, you do. And so the meta moment, which is kind of the ultimate strategy that I put at the end of the book, which is this process for becoming what I call the best version of yourself. And was a technique I built with my colleague, Robin Stern. We were both struggling. She's a clinical psychologist in New York City, working with couples. And she'd teach them strategies and then they'd not use them. And they come back saying, it doesn't work. And she's like, well, did you use it? No, it's like, well, go practice this freaking strategy.

• 1:28:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's the AA version of that is self-awareness will avail you nothing. Like these things, you know, you can read the books, but unless you're translating it into behavior, it's not doing anything.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. You need practice. You need to set goals and have, you know, really practice it. And I was coming at it from a researcher where I was just getting so much resistance. Like, why would we do this? And this is a waste of time. And so we both had this epiphany that the motivational factor wasn't there, that people had to see the outcome of regulation. Like, what will it do for you? And then maybe you'll want to regulate because people will like you more. People will want to be with you more, et cetera. And so before we get there, you know, this quieting your mind and body is so important, as you know. I mean, this is background that you have and mindfulness and breathing that you have to, I always say you have to deactivate before you can regulate.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Because if you can't bring down the nervous system.

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  You're going to go into that fight, flight, freeze mode. None of us are the best versions of ourselves when we're there. So if you can train yourself to go from automatic habitual reaction to automatic habitual step back and breathe and pause, that space that you're building is incredibly rich.

• 1:29:54Rich Roll?

  Even if it's just like a microsecond.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  Microsecond.

• 1:29:57Rich Roll?

  Makes a huge difference.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  Microsecond.

• 1:30:00Rich Roll?

  And also, not for nothing, the half-life on whatever enervating emotion you're feeling gets reduced significantly.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Yes. The space matters, the breathing helps. I think that some people have gone overboard with breathing. It's sort of like.

• 1:30:18Rich Roll?

  There's a lot of breath work, guys, out there.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  And breath work is great. However, I always joke about this. I tell the story in my book about my mother-in-law, who was stuck with us during the pandemic, not because of anything else, other than she couldn't get home because of enough lights. And I would take these breaths. I'm even clear why you need to get out of my house. Like, my clarity of like, what I was annoyed about was even clearer. So while the breath deactivated me, I needed better strategies to deal with the relationship. The breath did not help with the relationship. The breath helped me settle the mind. And that's why we need cognitive strategies. I think these are the most important. Because going back to gaslighting for a moment,

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  I think many of us, from when we were young until today, have been gaslighted. We've been brainwashed to believe a reality about ourselves that someone else created. And, I mean, I can't tell you for me how just my negative self-talk, which, as we know, a killer, was created for me. I didn't wake up one morning saying, "Mark, hate yourself." It was the kids in school who were meaning cruel to me. It was my mom who said things that were not helpful. It was the neighbors. It was all the people that were surrounding me that programmed me to believe I was not enough.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  And no one thought of saying, pause. Let's, are you saying, no one thought to teach Mark how to sift through all the information that was coming into my brain. Never had any intervention until Uncle Marvin.

• 1:31:58Rich Roll?

  To question it, to deconstruct it. It just became this story that you self affirmed.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Self fulfilling prophecy.

• 1:32:06Rich Roll?

  Through, yeah, through and buttressed with all of this negative self talk.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:32:11Rich Roll?

  This inner monologue. And I, I mean, it has to be the most common of human experiences.

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  Self criticism. Well, it comes from the judgment, the not listening and the lack of empathy and compassion. Cause we don't have these Uncle Marvins raising us. And it comes from different stages of development, control needs, power needs, lots of different things. But the key point here is that without the intervention, we have a life that's really difficult.

• 1:32:41Rich Roll?

  So walk me through the cognitive intervention.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  The basic is just watching yourself talk. When I look in the mirror, what do I say to myself? I have good hair, so I like my hair. You have good hair too. I get complimented on that side. I got self, I got self esteem about my hair. But you know, when I was younger, it was about my nose. It was about my masculinity, my femininity. It was just so many different things. And I was a failing student, which is hard to believe, I'm sure.

• 1:33:18Rich Roll?

  That's amazing.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  But I was a terrible student. I couldn't focus in school. I was so worried about getting home safely. I was getting spit on on the bus.

• 1:33:26Rich Roll?

  How can you be expected to focus?

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  When the kids next to you were drawing faggot on your jacket.

• 1:33:30Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  If your safety needs aren't met, your learning needs are not going to happen. It was tough and no one, even the teachers, I still to this day think how, you know, my sixth grade math teacher saw these kids writing nasty things on my jacket. You don't intervene? Like, what is that? Is that like Mark's got to toughen up? Well, Mark's not a tough guy. Mark has a fifth degree black belt, just to let you know.

• 1:33:55Rich Roll?

  But. I like how you slotted that in there.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  But I'm still not a tough guy.

• 1:33:59Rich Roll?

  It was the seventies, Mark, you know?

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it still happens today.

• 1:34:03Rich Roll?

  And, you know, how old was that sixth grade teacher? It's like, you know, when you realize like how young a lot of these people were and how untrained and there wasn't the awareness, you know, that we have today. It just, it was just, it was a time. And that doesn't excuse it. You know, my heart goes out to you.

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  It doesn't. And Uncle Marvin was older, you know, than that teacher. So somehow another Uncle Marvin got the emotional education to be an intervenor. And so I have, I have, just to be frank, I have like no patience for people who create unsafe conditions for people. And my firm belief is that every child in every school needs to be psychologically and physically safe, period. That is a rule that has to be made and everybody in the workplace should have that same experience. I think that the, and going back to kind of where we were with the self-talk piece of this is that, I mean, where, where does your self-talk go when you're sitting in a

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  classroom by your, in that room where you feel by your, when you feel like you're by yourself, you see an adult that's not intervening and kids are being mean and cruel to you. I mean, it just goes, you go right down that hole. And then you go home and parents are yelling and screaming and then you have, you're being abused by someone else. I mean, your brain is just in a mode of defeat. So we have to help people go from self-talk that's negative to more compassionate self-talk. It's just, it's critical. We have to be kind to ourselves. That's the first step. And there are, there's so many tricks to this. I have a few that I love. One is, I'm easily activated. I grew up kind of lower middle class.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  So I think everything's expensive. And I can afford more things now in my life, but I still think everything's a ripoff. And that was just my father ingrained that into me. And so when I'm out shopping, I'm like, you gotta be kidding me, you know? And, or something gets purchased and I see it on the credit card while I'm on the flight and I'm like, I can't believe this has happened. And then I have to take a breath and I'm like, Mark,

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  is this really?

• 1:36:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Does this really matter right now? Is this Mark, the son of Bill? Or is this Mark, the 55-year-old adult who's doing just fine? Let it go. This is not important. Do not make the phone call. And if I'm in a bad mood, often I'll send a little text message like, oh.

• 1:36:38Rich Roll?

  I take great comfort in this, knowing that, you know, you've devoted your entire life to this and still find yourself, you know, tripping yourself up. Cause it is amazing that no matter how much work we put into like, in my, you know, my version of that is, you know, just being so devoted to parenting my children in the, in all the ways that, you know, I felt like I didn't get right. And like just not doing the things that, you know, like to this day, I think about every day. But in my, you know, in my weaker moments or under stress or whatever, I will suddenly, you know, say the exact same thing that my, that my mother. And it's just like, how is that possible?

• 1:37:22Rich Roll?

  And it just speaks to how deeply ingrained these patterns are.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  Well, they're learned. So emotion regulation is learned. I have one, my mother, who was a beautiful woman and cared for me like no one else, but had no training, just had no background in psychology or education or mental health, was always having a breakdown. They called it back in the seventies. So I would come home like-

• 1:37:47Rich Roll?

  Hysterical.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  Hysterical and very stereotypical. And I'd say like, you know, I would try to share what was maybe happening with me, which would be overwhelming for my mother. And I can't handle it. I'm gonna have a breakdown. And then she would lock herself in her room. And I'd be like, I'm the one having the breakdown.

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  Wait a minute here, there's something wrong with this picture. Like, I'm the one asking for help and you're having a breakdown and I gotta go help you? But, you know, that's a whole nother, that's a whole nother story. But anyhow, the, I caught myself a couple of years ago, I'm on a flight, I'm overwhelmed, I got so much going on, I'm doing a presentation in a place that I didn't want to go. And someone, I was with someone, they said, "Hey, I'm having a breakdown."

• 1:38:31Rich Roll?

  Of course. There it is. It rears itself up.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  It comes in, it doesn't go away.

• 1:38:36Rich Roll?

  These cognitive strategies, there are, you know, applications in our everyday lives and then ones that we can deploy in those acute, like, when you're in an acute situation, like, you're just, there's a program that's running, it's very hard to, like, you know, intervene consciously in the heat of the moment, right? But among these, there are some really helpful, interesting things, like these ideas around spatial distance and temporal distance, you know, that can be helpful in kind of detaching from the intensity of an experience.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  I love this particular strategy, which I call the picture frame. So, going back to my dad, I think I'm overly disclosing today, but I'll monitor.

• 1:39:28Rich Roll?

  This is the show to do it, Mark. This is why you're here.

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  So, you know, my father had a lot of anger, as I shared, and then, once, I have two brothers, and all of us have doctorates, and my father never graduated from high school. And while he was very proud of us, there was a part of him that I think that was a little resentful and also...

• 1:39:47Rich Roll?

  Rotten.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then I got a job at Yale, which is like, you couldn't go, my father grew up, you know...

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  In the Bronx, New York, very difficult childhood. And now like his son's a professor at Yale, like this, very different lifestyles. And so I apologize to my team for talking this way right now. But he would say to me, once in a while, when he'd get triggered by me, he'd say, oh, now you think your shit doesn't stink. That was his like phrase to like dig.

• 1:40:20Rich Roll?

  It's like a tall poppy's thing.

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I would say, you know, it doesn't stink as much as it used to, actually. But no, in all honesty, it was a trigger for me because I'm like, I feel pride about where I'm at. And I'm recognizing, you know, now as a psychologist, that you're being triggered because of all your stuff. Like that has nothing to do with me, buddy. That's all your stuff. But he would get really activated. And in those moments, when he would get activated, what I would do is I would make him into a movie. And so my dad would make me feel really bad about myself. But the movie created that distance. And I'd literally make it into a TV screen or a movie screen.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  And I would talk to myself as if I'm watching a movie like, wow, this is a really funny movie.

• 1:41:10Rich Roll?

  Watching All in the Family in this Archie bunker.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. And in that moment of him, you know, going on and on and on, where I wasn't able to control him. I would be able to catch myself, I'd be able to deactivate my nervous system, take those breaths, think about my best version of myself. And then figure out a way to enter in or just escape the situation. But it was a game changer. And I really recommend it to people. Just take that moment, if you're in a really difficult place, and just make it into a movie so that you're not living it. You're observing it. And that's a big difference. That's a spatial one. I love it. The temporal one is example I gave a minute ago, like, will this purchase really impact our lifestyle in three months from now or a year from now? Probably not. Let it go.

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  You do stuff too, that you don't tell anybody, so it's fine. We all do, right? We all like, you know, have our things. And I think the other big one is reframing. So many, so often, we go right for the jugular, we go right for blaming, and just take a moment and think, is there a possible alternative explanation for this? Is this person really after you, or did they have a bad day? It's simple things like that. And so those cognitive strategies, to me, are game changers for people. And, and we apply them, you know, all the time. Now, I want to make a point about this, which is, and I make this clear in my book,

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  which is that all strategies are not created equal. And that every strategy, like physical activity, you're an athlete, physical activity, it's great, or you can use it as a way to never react, you can use it as an escape to never have a difficult conversation, I'm just gonna go to the gym, I'm gonna work it out. And then you never deal with the feeling. So the same thing comes with cognitive strategies. You can make, you can just make excuses cognitively your whole life. You can also become gaslighted, where you start believing, you know, the reality that someone else is creating for you, maybe they are, maybe I am too. Like, I get, what's fascinating to me, and I'll just share this because it was a,

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  it's like, I did this one podcast, millions of people watched it, and one guy wrote in the comments section, that guy was pretty interesting, but he doesn't have an ounce of testosterone. And as you can see, it hit me.

• 1:43:36Rich Roll?

  And this is the one you bring up today.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, you know, in those moments, when I'm questioning my own masculinity, when I'm questioning how I show up in the world, like, that will be the one that will pop up. Now, I'm secure enough, successful enough, to observe it, and be like, whose problem is it? But it's still, no matter what, it hits.

• 1:44:00Rich Roll?

  The selection bias of, you know, rooting out, looking for that one piece of evidence that will validate that, that old story that you can use to flog yourself and feel terrible about yourself.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  Crazy. So we need the cognitive strategies, because without those, we just start believing that, maybe I am too feminine, maybe I am not masculine enough, maybe I'm not a tough guy, maybe I should, you know, not be so vulnerable, talking about my childhood and my abuse and my bullying, maybe that's not the right way to go with your career. And then I have to say, Mark, that's their reality, not your reality.

• 1:44:36Rich Roll?

  There's the feelings, there's the feelings about the feelings, there's the self-awareness, and then there's the awareness of the self-awareness. Like, this is a, you know, these are Russian nesting dolls, right? That gets, that, that's where, you know, it gets complex, but this is a practice, right?

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:44:55Rich Roll?

  And to your point, you have all these strategies, you know, we've only touched on a few, but you're very clear, as you, as you pointed out, like, there's no one-size-fits-all, like, it's very situation and person-specific.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  Correct. And I think people need scripts, and I really was intentional to help people see, how do you engage in that reframing strategy? What do you need to do for yourself in that context with that feeling to support you? And I think that's the real work that people have to do. I can't tell you, Rich, how to talk to yourself.

• 1:45:28Rich Roll?

  I know. This is what people want, though.

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  Oh, totally.

• 1:45:32Rich Roll?

  We're gonna create the viral reel, and you're gonna look at the camera, and you're gonna say, "Next time this happens, here's your solution." That's really all people want.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  It is. It's funny you say that, because I was asked to give a speech to 1,500 police officers a couple of years ago, and I was, great, this is a great audience for me. Now, granted, I didn't know what they were told about who was going to be the presenter, and the venue, blah, blah, blah. I get into this as 1,599.9% men in their uniforms with their guns, and it's like, "And Mark's here to talk about feelings." It was like, you know, you couldn't make it up. It should have been filmed, because there was, I'm gonna just show you, like, there

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  were people like this, like, and it was really, I was like, "This is not gonna go well." And so... I, you know, I

• 1:46:29Rich Roll?

  Did I tell you that I'm, that I'm into that? Do you have a black belt?

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  Well, I was overcompensating. I was like, you know. And so I decided to like, this is, I'm just gonna call it out and I'm gonna reach them. I'm gonna figure out a way in. And I did for a little while and then, but then I'm talking about emotion regulation and the strategies. And this one like big police officer stands up and he's like, Doc, I got a question. I'm like, sure. He goes, you know, I don't have time for all this. What's the best strategy? That's the only one I want to know. And you're gonna tell me that? I'm gonna use it and I'm gonna tell my family to use it.

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  And I was like, you know, this is where you're caught off guard. I'm like, be kind to yourself. But the, that's what people want.

• 1:47:19Rich Roll?

  Right, it's what they want. And obviously, you know, when you think about

• 1:47:27Rich Roll?

  public safety and the, the police force, like emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, like this is key. This is like crucial. Like it's so valuable in a heated situation to de-escalate it and, and, you know, prevent violence and help them to do their jobs, like in the best way possible, that if you can get them on board, they're like, well, this is the whole game to policing.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  I could not agree more. So just to, to backtrack a little bit, we've given ourselves permission to feel and everyone else too, whether we love them or not. We've clearly labeled our feelings and there's a whole lessons in there to do that. We have recognized that we need to deactivate our systems and have more mindfulness and be more present. We have cognitive strategies. We can be kinder to ourselves and our brains and reframe and engage in that spatial and temporal distancing. And then we do need social support. Sometimes.

• 1:48:29Speaker 01

  You know, you just need a good friend to talk through things with. And I have a few people in my life that they're like my go to people to problem solve with. And it really makes a difference because they're the emotional allies, you know, out there. And we have to find those in our lives because no one, I have an expression, it's not my expression, but I use it, especially for kids, but all of us, no one should worry alone. Never worry alone. I mean, let's think about this for a minute. Ideally, we have ultimate control over everything that happens in our lives and we don't need to regulate. Like, everything is exactly the way Mark wants it to be. That doesn't happen. Like, we will have this election and we'll have, I got this job and this person will work for me

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  and this will happen and everything just works out. Not gonna happen. Okay. So I can't control the world. I can control some of the situations. I can, I cannot go, you know, into the, you know, office of this person who really is mean.

• 1:49:31Rich Roll?

  All you can control is your behavior, your relationship with your behavior.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  Yes. But ultimately, think about it, like, our, we would be in kind of this emotionally great place if everything just happened the way we want it to happen. Right? Can't rely on that. All right. So then, who's in my life that I can like connect with? Because we're born to be connected to other people. Who do I have as my emotional ally that I can say like, I'm really struggling right now. I'm afraid, I need help. So many people, as I said, don't have that person in their life. We gotta help people find those people. And then comes those cognitive strategies that we just talked about. Then, I'm sitting by myself. I mean, how many times have we traveled to gift?

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  I did this one presentation recently, I was, I had to get there. It was in Spokane, Washington, and I was coming from New York. I was in Denver for 12 hours. You know, and I just sat by nine o'clock at night. I had to call the people and say like, it's not happening. I'm just not getting there. And I want to go home. And they're like, well, maybe I said, there's no morning flight. It's just, I have to let you know, it's not going to happen. I'm very happy to do this through technology. I'm very good with my Zoom presentations. And I, you know, but I was, and then I was in line with the person trying to change my flight, and she was not helpful. And like, you have to call United. I'm like, I'm not calling United. Like, you're right here.

• 1:51:03Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, you just, no, I can't switch it because you're trying to go back to a place you didn't start from. I was out of my mind. And I didn't, I couldn't control it. I had no one to talk to. I sat in my seat. I did a few breathing exercises. I'm like, Mark, you know, this feeling is impermanent. Like, this is a really rough moment. You want to be a lunatic right now? Don't go there. How is the best version of yourself going to respond? And I just sat there and I paused. And I'm very proud of myself because I actually got what I wanted. I knew that everything wasn't going to work out. They said, you couldn't get on this flight. This wasn't going to work out. I'm like, this, I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to figure this out. I just sat, took a few deep breaths. I looked at the monitor. There was one flight going back to LaGuardia.

• 1:51:48Speaker 01

  I came out of Newark. I went to the LaGuardia turn, you know, the, whatever that's called by the gate. And I looked at this person that was there and I said, I've had a really, really long day. And I know that it's really difficult to do the change, but I, my hunch is that it's my, it might be possible. I just, I've been here for 12 hours. I would love to get home tonight. There's that last flight. Can you make it happen? And then went, she put me on the flight. And so my point of that, of sharing that story is that, like, emotional regulation really matters. Like, it helped me, like, take a really crappy day and kind of get the outcome that I was hoping for. If I were my old self, I would have been like, Adam, I would have been like, you gotta be kidding me. I'm a million miler. You know, just go.

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  And that would not have got me, you know, she would have been triggered. I would have been triggered. She would have been like, I'm not helping this guy. He's a jerk. Instead, I went to my little corner, did my breathing exercise, engaged in my positive self-talk, envisioned the best version of myself, and had, and thought about what that person could do in that moment to get the outcome.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  I don't know, it doesn't feel like magic to me.

• 1:52:54Rich Roll?

  But the solution presents itself because you have the clarity of mind and the grounding

• 1:53:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:53:00Rich Roll?

  to not be reactive in that moment.

• 1:53:03Speaker 01

  I no longer cared about the person who wasn't helping me. I cared about, A, I am, you know, I always joke, I am the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence. I do want to have like-

• 1:53:14Rich Roll?

  The pressure's on, right?

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  So I do want to like be the person that I'm supposed to be, which I'm not always. And in that moment, I took that meta moment, which is, I said, I'm going to build that space between stimulus and response, going to go here and I'm going to deactivate and find my solution. And I have, I can tell you that I have trained millions of people at this point on this technique, and it really works. But you have to practice it. And I'll say one thing about this just before you ask another question, which is, it can be a prevention technique too. So in that moment, it was very reactive. I'm like, Mark's freaking out, Mark's going to go breathe and do his meta moment.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  But when my mother-in-law was living with us, and I knew it was going to be rough in the mornings because I, you know, she wasn't going home, and I wanted some freedom, when I'd come down the stairs to have coffee, I would envision the best version of myself before, you know, meeting with her for coffee. So it can be forward-looking is my point, as opposed to always in the moment.

• 1:54:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The common version of that is like, okay, mother-in-law's in the house, I'm going to go down the stairs, she's in the kitchen, just tense up and get ready because, you know, it's going to happen the way it always happens and you're, you're, you're, you think that you're doing what you need to do to prepare yourself for a challenging emotional situation, but you're actually doing the opposite.

• 1:54:46Speaker 01

  I think you're bringing up something else that I, actually, when I was coming over here that I wanted to talk about is that I also recognized with the mother-in-law story that I was like so selfish. It's all about me and my house and she's stuck in my house and she's making my morning coffee more miserable than I want it to be and I want my freedom and space to be alone in the morning because that's when I can have my existential crisis and figure out my life. And I didn't have that space. And when I took my Metamoment and I thought about the best son-in-law version of myself, I had an epiphany that here was an 81-year-old woman who has been displaced from her home in Panama for months. And I

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  very rarely asked her how she was feeling. I very rarely asked her anything about what her needs were. I will tell you that radically transformed everything when I became other-oriented. And I have to say that in the world that we're living in today, if we can just have a little bit more other orientation, I think it would make a huge difference.

• 1:55:53Rich Roll?

  I'm really glad that you brought that up because I think, I mean, I agree with you. We're in a world that is sort of compassion and empathy deprived and starved at the moment. And I've been spending a lot of time thinking about like, what is contributing to that? And there's lots of social forces at play that are leading us in that direction. But I do think, and I'm curious what you think about this, that there is something to be said for the self-optimization navel gazing that goes into like our own investment in our wellbeing.

• 1:56:31Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:56:32Rich Roll?

  You mentioned earlier, like, there's self-awareness and then there is self-indulgence. There's also self-obsession. So all of this talk, it's all about me and how I feel and like, how can I feel better and how can I, you know, perform better? And these are all fine. Like, we should all be thinking about these things. But when they, when they blind us to what's really important and they become these sort of egoic obsessions, we're really missing the entire point of the exercise to begin with.

• 1:57:04Speaker 01

  I couldn't agree more. And I think it goes back to being trained as an emotion scientist about your life. And if you're honest with yourself, the navel gazing and the endless me, me, me is not actually helping you have great relationships, is not actually helping you achieve your goals in life. So I encourage people to just ask themselves that question. Is how I am, is the story I'm telling myself really helping me have what I want out of life? Or is it keeping me stuck?

• 1:57:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because at the core of it, you know, is there not this idea that really the only thing that is important is like, what's important to me, you know?

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:57:48Rich Roll?

  That is the not so great byproduct of all of this, you know, kind of self-help and self-improvement.

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  I agree that there's a, the self-help thing is, has been framed and it's been, you know, attacked in many ways. And I think in some ways that's good because it's going to make us look for real evidence-based strategies, you know, as we're both on social media, you in a big way. One of my, I mean, it drives me out of my mind are the, the self-help gurus on Instagram. You know, I just threw my anxiety out the door. Like, okay, like, I'm glad you threw it out of your Ferrari and, you know, this is ridiculous. You're not going to throw your anxiety out your door.

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  And the, and at the same time, the, that's like the quick fix thing, which doesn't work. And then you're talking now about the opposite end, which is this kind of like, I'm feeling this way and because I'm feeling this way, you know, I need this, these accommodations and I need

• 1:58:53Rich Roll?

  The world needs to

• 1:58:55Speaker 01

  Change for me. That's not going to go very far for most people. I think we have to, people need to be, A, that emotion education would change things because people would realize, A, your feelings aren't permanent. B, there are better strategies to get yourself out of these cycles. And unfortunately, this goes back to parenting too, which is the, I mean, we've, we've seen this in many ways, that the parent who will do anything for their child to not be uncomfortable.

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  Life is about discomfort. Like this, I mean, I don't know about you, but.

• 1:59:38Rich Roll?

  And discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life. I think Susan David is the one who said that.

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's a great phrase because I don't know anybody who is, who has reached a high level of success without, you know, a trust fund, who hasn't had huge obstacles. And going back to the performance piece, so let's, now we've talked about dealing with feeling, you know, the book and the strategies. So there's like, let's imagine there's a measure of how skillful you are in all these different strategies. And let's imagine that that was in a research study and we were doing predictions, like how good you were, how skillful you were in these buckets. What would that predict? It predicts a lot about your performance at work.

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  It predicts a lot about the quality of your relationships. And it's importantly, as we started off, I think, above and beyond your cognitive ability. As someone who's worked with the smartest people in the world, I mean, literally from Test Corp and grades and all that stuff, the people I get to work with are really smart. Does everyone achieve their dreams and goals? Absolutely not. Who are the people who don't achieve it? Mostly those who can't deal with their feelings. They can't deal with the disappointment. They can't deal with the frustration. They can't deal with the harsh feedback. They can't deal with the anxiety. And what happens is that if you don't have the strategies to deal with your feelings, the emotions win. So even the most creative people, I mean, how many of us know people

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  that are so freaking creative, so much potential, but they can't get out of their own way because they don't know how to deal with their emotions?

• 2:01:18Rich Roll?

  On some level, we're all getting in our own way all of the time. And the things that we struggle with and the impediments that we're constantly facing on our journey towards, you know, kind of actualizing whatever ambitions we have in our life are, you know, as I'm, as I'm like steeping myself in your world and your work, it's just so patently obvious that, that, you know, it's our struggle to deal with our feelings that is at the core of all of this. And the way in which we seem to do it generally, like if you look at a spectrum. Let's just take like the world of like self-improvement and self-optimization.

• 2:01:59Rich Roll?

  On the one polarity, you have the suck it up and go hard and like push all those feelings away and just get out there and you know, toughen yourself up. There's, you know, and there's something to be said for that because I think people are soft and they don't have enough of a relationship with their own discomfort. And then the other side of it is the touchy feely, like all that's important is, you know, indulging your feelings all the time. It's complex, right? Like you, you can't be the, you know, go hard or go home guy all the time. And you can't be the person who's indulging your feelings all the time. And there's a diversity of tools and a variety of ways to develop self-awareness around all of this that are crucial and important so that you know which plugin to play in which scenario.

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  And it's developmental. So the strategies that I would have learned in kindergarten, I mean, my anger from when I was five is not the same as my anger now that 55. Same thing with the frustration or the overwhelm. And so it's a muscle that gets built. You build that little muscle in the five-year-old and then you build that muscle in adolescence and that muscle gets bigger in high school and that muscle gets even bigger, you know, in college or wherever you go. And it's continuously developing. I really make the parallel to working out. One of the things, so my, the gift to myself during the pandemic was I hired an online trainer. And I was like, Mark, you're like, you're eating all this Thai food.

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  You're getting kind of like, you know, you're not feeling so great about yourself. And this guy's great. And the, I actually write about him in my book because I give him, I give him a lot of credit for my own wellness. And the one thing that Marco said to me that really radically shifted my view. He said, Mark, the day that you wake up and you see yourself as someone who works out is a day you don't need me anymore.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  And I was like, what do you mean by that? He's like, you have to make fitness part of your identity.

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  And I sat with that, that idea of identity and fitness. And I realized that what I'm really out for in life is to help people see emotional intelligence as part of their identity. Like, I see myself in the world as an emotionally intelligent person. And because of that, this is the way I respond to the people and the things that get in my way. And that's my hope.

• 2:04:31Rich Roll?

  So for the person who is listening or watching this, and this is a foreign language to them, they find themselves, time and time again, tripping themselves up by reacting in the same way, under the same set of circumstances, and feeling powerless to behave differently, and maybe doesn't have the vocabulary around, you know, the millions of words you can conjure with respect to all of these emotions. Like, not that there is one reductive way to do this, but like, what is your suggestion for orienting that person around a new approach? Like, how does that person begin this journey?

• 2:05:12Speaker 01

  Well, I think the first step is always going to be permission to feel. It's just going back to, and, you know, part of it, so, give this speech, and this is another speech, I do a lot of public speaking, as I said, and a friend of mine came, another friend of mine came to this one, and he, after the presentation, he was like, I hated that talk. Like, you hated my talk? Like, everybody else gave me an applause. And he's like, because, you know, I didn't have an Uncle Marvin, and now I know that's why my purpose and meaning of life is like, I'm, I'm freaking out because I didn't have my Uncle Marvin. I'm like, calm down. I probably shouldn't have said that, but I did. And, and I said, you know, how old are you now? You know, 60s.

• 2:05:53Speaker 01

  I said, you can, for the rest of your life, blame everyone and everything for where you're at right now, but at some point, you gotta give yourself permission to feel. You didn't get it as a kid, and maybe things would have been different if you did, but you can be non-judgmental to yourself, you can have good listening skills for who you are, and you can have some self-compassion and empathy.

• 2:06:20Speaker 01

  And it was a real important point for me to make for him, and I've actually included that now in my work, because that's where it's going to begin, it's going to, that radical self-acceptance, like, this is where I'm at right now. I may not like aspects of who I am, and that's okay. It's my, my, tomorrow's the, the next first day of my life. I really, I, I live my life that way, and I feel very blessed that I have convinced myself, at least, that that's the way to live. No matter how I feel about my body, or my work, or my relationship, when I go to bed at night, I'm like, tomorrow is the next best day of your life.

• 2:06:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:58Speaker 01

  And it's so, it's so freeing, because I know I can just do better the next day. And it's just this continuous job.

• 2:07:05Rich Roll?

  What is your sense of how malleable this is? Like, I'm imagining, you know, somebody, you know, we, we look at people, and like, well, that's just what they do. Like, this is who they are, it's part of their personality, and they're just always going to behave that way in that situation. But in your experience of, of, you know, practicing this, in working with people on this, like, what is the most extreme case of somebody overcoming some kind of pattern to handle it differently? I want to give people a sense of-

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  Of hope?

• 2:07:38Rich Roll?

  Of, of, of like, hope and possibility, because I do think that we have this calcified idea that, like, well, this is just what happens when I'm, when I'm in this context.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example of an extreme case. You're asking for that. So, in the work that I do, we work with businesses and schools. And this one company, it was a, a concrete company. Most of the people, you know, the people who worked there were not the college students, they were people who had, you know, jobs from after high school and got into this workplace, or into this career. And so, not a lot of education about emotions, or anything of that sort. And so, the company decided they were going to train everybody in emotional intelligence. And it was a big risk. They were, the, the CEO was really optimistic and hopeful. We were all a little nervous and skeptical that, you know, this group of people might not be that interested in our work. And-

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  We could not have been taken more by surprise. And I'm going to give you this one example of this probably maybe 65 year old man who was smoking a lot. And he started going through our training and using the mood meter and plotting himself. And he made a goal that every time that he was going to reach for a cigarette, he was going to plot himself on the mood meter. And he realized that every time he was smoking a cigarette, he was in that red quadrant, feeling anxious or overwhelmed. And through the training, what he said, he's like, well, Mark, you'll love this. This is funny. I just remember this now. He goes, I learned that the cigarette was my strategy,

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  but now I had replacement strategies I've learned from Mark and his work. How amazing is that? And he quit smoking as a result of being aware of his feelings while smoking. My favorite line is that somebody made a video of him telling me this because he wanted to share it with me. And my favorite line was, he's like, and that guy should be really rich. But my point is that when I work with leaders and managers of companies, when they go through this training, like we've talked about today, and obviously the training is in more depth, is they realize they didn't know what they didn't know. They just had never seen the value and importance of building an emotionally intelligent workforce.

• 2:10:03Speaker 01

  And then they see all these data on why a leader who is emotionally skilled has better outcomes and people who are more productive. And they're like, holy cow, like this is super important. But they just didn't, it wasn't part of their education. So they didn't, they didn't even know it existed.

• 2:10:21Rich Roll?

  What in your mind is the difference between somebody who can be introduced to a set of tools like this and a framework, who can take that, implement it into their lives and make these changes versus the person who is perhaps well intentioned about doing all of those things, but struggles and can't quite make it work or abandons it? Like, are there common characteristics, I guess is what I'm asking, shared by the people who are capable of making a change and sustaining it in their life versus the person who is constantly in this battle or struggle?

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  There are a few personality traits like grit and conscientiousness that do help people persevere more. Some people are more or less open to new concepts and ideas. That's a personality trait, too. I think that the largest problem in people giving up is that they don't give it enough time. And that self-talk strategy didn't work. And I say, well, how many times did you try it? Well, I just tried it that one time when I got home from work and it failed. And I said, well, after the 300th time, then we'll try another strategy. But you got to practice this over and over and over again.

• 2:11:40Speaker 01

  Because part of building your emotion regulation toolbox is also unlearning before you relearn. And that's going to take time for people. And with permission to feel comes permission to fail.

• 2:11:55Rich Roll?

  There's also the self-criticism, the judgment. I mean, it's back to that idea of scientist versus judge, right? Like if you fail or you screw up, and you talk about this in the book, like can you be curious about it rather than flog yourself for it? Like what is to be learned from this?

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  You already made the mistake. So you can beat yourself up if you want to. It's not going to help anything. And my theory is when I mess up, and I mess up a lot, just to let you know, I mean, a lot. And it's mostly, I think, because I'm so overwhelmed and then something happens at home and it doesn't go the way I wanted it to, and I'm reactive. I had this, we had guests over, I mean, I don't know why I'm sharing this. And we have two dogs. And my partner put out this blanket. That was like a nice blanket in our TV room for the dogs. Because the first time the dogs went in the pool. And they're rolling around on this blanket.

• 2:12:56Speaker 01

  I'm like, I understand, like now we take blankets out of the house for the dogs to roll? And we had company over, but I got so locked into this blanket thing. I was a lunatic. And I was like, I don't understand what's happening right now. And it was really ridiculous. And of course, you know, after everybody left and you know, my partner was like, I'm not talking to you for two weeks after this. Like this is not like, I'm done with the freaking blanket. And I'm like, of course you're done with the blanket because you don't care about the blanket. And this blanket became like the reason why we were gonna like break up. I'm joking, but anyhow, I did have, I took my post meta moment, you know, that evening.

• 2:13:41Speaker 01

  And of course I walked over and I'm like, that was ridiculous. I'm so sorry. So I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're sorry, you know, like easy for you to say you're sorry.

• 2:13:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:50Speaker 01

  And so I'm sharing this because this is life. Life is filled with these little triggers and whatever happens. And sometimes you mess up. And I think another part of emotion regulation is having the courage to apologize. And ask for forgiveness, not to forgive your behavior, but can we move forward? And can I show you that I really will try not to do that again? And I will say, and I think the data would, if we were calculating, you know, data over my life, over the last 30 years that I've been together with my partner, that I have gotten a lot better.

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  And I have another, hopefully 30, 40 years left to continue to get better.

• 2:14:36Rich Roll?

  And, uh, and maybe another fight about the blankets in your future.

• 2:14:40Speaker 01

  It'll be something else.

• 2:14:41Rich Roll?

  But it is funny how we, you know, let petty things like that, like activate us and agitate us. And again, it's something I take comfort in the fact that like, you know, it is like, uh, you know, with all of your knowledge, like still at times, you know, we're powerless over, over these things.

• 2:14:56Speaker 01

  Cause it brings up like, that was like all this whole thing, like you don't value things as much as I value things. That's a, you know, and is the blanket even very expensive? I don't even remember what it cost.

• 2:15:06Rich Roll?

  Well, of course it's not about the blanket.

• 2:15:08Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:15:09Rich Roll?

  It never is.

• 2:15:09Speaker 01

  So, but that awareness, you know, that day, for whatever reason, I failed. And I could, you know, beat myself up over it for weeks and months. You know, and some people might say, well, you should beat yourself up or you were nasty. And I was not my best self. But I think I want to be, I'm a human, as is, as is everyone who's listening. And make mistakes, own those mistakes and have the courage to talk about that and really discuss it. And, and I did discuss it. I explained, you know, you know, my feelings. And that wasn't actually good enough, to be honest with you, because it was, it was the behavior that I did. That wasn't so cool.

• 2:15:54Speaker 01

  And I just said, listen, I'm going to work hard to never do that again. And I'm really apologize.

• 2:16:00Rich Roll?

  There's an awareness around your motivations with these kinds of amends and apologies that I think is important too. Because if you go into it just looking to be alleviated of your guilt, that's very different than a sincere like, hey, you know, I, I shit the bed here. And like, how can I make it right? Or, or modifying your behavior in the wake of it, like make that kind of living amends.

• 2:16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I'm going to, I'm curious about you now. Do you have any of these moments in your life?

• 2:16:32Rich Roll?

  I mean, I, yeah, I've done these things, you know? Of course, I had, I had one the other day with my wife. Like I got agitated when she had some constructive feedback on my driving, you know? And this energizes, like I have all of these issues around being told what to do and control that I could, you know, I could, I could fill your brain with all the reasons why, right? Like, but, you know, just like that. And suddenly I'm reactive and I'm not behaving in my best self. And, and yeah, it's not great, you know? And, and.

• 2:17:11Rich Roll?

  And I didn't have the wherewithal to pause when agitated. I just allowed myself to say the thing and I could feel flush in my face and all of it, right? Like this is, the other one is customer service representatives.

• 2:17:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:25Rich Roll?

  Like this is just, you know, the bane of my existence, like these, these individuals who suddenly have a lot of control over your time and power in, in ways that make me feel powerless. That brings up like a lot of stuff and I don't always behave admirably on those very long phone calls.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:45Rich Roll?

  When you're put on hold and have to push a lot of buttons and all of that.

• 2:17:50Speaker 01

  Yes, everybody's got their thing. I mean, none of us is going to break free of things that get under our skin that are going to make us be dysregulated. The question is, are we aware of it and are we making steps to be better at it over time?

• 2:18:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I want to end with returning to the school piece, like where, where we started. When I look at what you're doing with schools, I mean, this is like, this is like the Lord's work. Like this is such important, vital work that can make such a huge difference in not just individuals' lives, but you know, writ large, like socially, like this is fundamentally at the core of like everything that ails us as a society from a mental health perspective, like begins and ends with understanding our emotions and, and learning how to better regulate them. And to the extent that this can be incorporated into school curriculums, like I'm, my heart is warmed by the fact that there already are so many schools that

• 2:18:50Rich Roll?

  are implementing this curriculum that you, that you've created, but there's plenty more schools out there. And so is there a way for the parent who is listening or watching to this, who's like, oh my goodness, like I would love to have this at my kid's school? Like, how do they get involved? What can they, what can they do?

• 2:19:09Speaker 01

  Great question. I love that one. I think the first step is just going to our website, which is rulerapproach.org. And Ruler is the acronym that describes the skills of emotional intelligence. And Ruler is the name of the model that we built. Obviously, reading books like mine are very helpful to kind of get the language right, to talk to people about it. And advocate. I'm at a point now, which is really cool. In the state of Connecticut, where I live, I'd say about 40, almost 50% of the schools are using our approach. And I'm getting phone calls from parents at my center saying, can you please tell me which districts have adopted your program? Because we're moving to Connecticut and we want to

• 2:19:52Speaker 01

  only move to a city that does this work. That's pretty freaking cool. And so the parents can ask their school leader, what are we doing in our school to develop the emotional intelligence of our students and our educators? Because importantly, we didn't get into the program very much. But our work starts with the adults, because the adults didn't have the emotional education to do the work. So the first year of integrating Ruler into a school is working with principals and teachers to build their R-U-L-E-R. So they're better prepared to work with kids to do it. And that includes parents.

• 2:20:28Rich Roll?

  You can't co-regulate. You can't be, you know, your uncle unless you learn how to self-regulate first.

• 2:20:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. So yeah, that's my vision is, you know, scaling up and bringing this work to more and more schools. It doesn't mean that it ends once kids graduate high school. I think companies need to adopt these practices, because emotions are pretty high at work. I always say to the, when I do these C-suite presentations, at the board meeting, everybody's got feelings. You just don't know it because you don't care. If you cared more about how people felt, you might get people to be more on your bus.

• 2:21:05Rich Roll?

  Well, any organization could benefit from it. You know, you could think of professional sports teams, or, you know, anything where emotions run high and tend to, you know, kind of derail progress in avoidable ways.

• 2:21:19Rich Roll?

  I think of what you're doing as analogous to what Jonathan Haidt is doing with phones in schools. And he's obviously making progress, but there's a lot of work to go. But there is a general awareness of these things right now in a way that there wasn't even a few years ago.

• 2:21:37Speaker 01

  I agree. And John's a friend and I'm really proud of what he's accomplished. In many ways, I'm jealous or envious of John because it's a little simpler. It's like just ban the phones and do these things and rethink child development in this way. And it's not I'm saying that jokingly, but it is, the strategy is, I think, easy to implement for schools.

• 2:22:01Rich Roll?

  It's binary and it's kind of dramatic.

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Whereas agreeing to do ongoing professional development for teachers to help them.

• 2:22:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, who wants that?

• 2:22:11Speaker 01

  See that? But that's what we need. Because everybody should have a PhD in emotional intelligence.

• 2:22:19Rich Roll?

  I like that. Well, the first way, the first step towards that is to pick up your book.

• 2:22:24Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:22:25Rich Roll?

  Dealing with Feeling, available everywhere. And this was fantastic. Thank you, Mark.

• 2:22:30Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:22:30Rich Roll?

  How do you feel now compared to when we began? And how do you think we did?

• 2:22:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I am feeling, I mean, the first one that came to me was relieved because it's like, I'm done. The second part, of course, now I'm going back over like, why did I tell that story? I shouldn't have said that. And I'm going to practice letting that go as I move on with my day.

• 2:22:50Rich Roll?

  All right, good. Well, I feel good.

• 2:22:52Speaker 01

  And you?

• 2:22:52Rich Roll?

  And I feel, no, I feel good.

• 2:22:54Speaker 01

  Good.

• 2:22:55Rich Roll?

  I too, I too. I can't say, I feel, all right, let me be specific. I feel connected to you. I feel confident about the conversation that we had and how it will be received. But of course, like you, I'm running in my mind like, why did I ask that? And we didn't talk about this? And you know, all of that stuff. And I too, I'm like, it's okay.

• 2:23:25Speaker 01

  It's one conversation.

• 2:23:25Rich Roll?

  But we had, you know, one of what could have been an infinite number of conversations. And I think there was a lot of wisdom and beauty in it. So, thank you.

• 2:23:33Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:23:41Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the

• 2:24:22Rich Roll?

  help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor. And of course, our theme music was created

• 2:25:03Rich Roll?

  all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.