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

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

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

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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. 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. 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 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 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 stopped me anything, 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, 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 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. 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? 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. 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. Well, as I said a moment ago, I do have this kind of audacious goal of creating an emotion revolution. And I say that with pride and some trepidation, because there is a lot of resistance to people being self-aware,

which blows my mind. It's hard to imagine there's a resistance to having what I think is a human right, which is self-awareness. 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 people's lives, including their teachers and parents.

And my hope is that this will become a permanent part of the way we educate children and adults. to be integrated into the way we kind of see education and we're not there yet. 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 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, you know, the very fabric of how we live, this is a permanent thing that, you know, it 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 very much debatable right now. 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. You just, I mean, you know, and it's like, 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? 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 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. I mean, I'm on a similar mission as a layperson, you know. 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 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 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 them 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 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 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 yeah it's uh it's a it's a tough nut to crack uh 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 enter into this, maybe we should just define what emotions are. Like, what are emotions and how are they different from thoughts and how do they show up in our lives and confuse us? Like, what do we get wrong about them? 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 maybe talk about moods and talk about dispositional affect and even clinical diagnoses. Affect, emotion, feeling, mood, emotional disposition. These are all different things. They are. And, you know, I'm a psychologist, so I'm like particular about these things.

Does everybody need to know the differences? I don't think so. 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 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. 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 press lips, it really impacts me. Where not everybody might have that same experience with that emotion. That's an emotion. A mood is, 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. 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, you're Mr. Happy all the time. Are you more green, kind of content, more Zen-like? Are you more 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 matter. because we have to deal with all of our feelings, whether they're little feelings or big feelings. 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 words, 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. Exactly. I think one of the key elements of an emotion is it's impermanence. 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 over time those even those dark moments are not as dark as they were There's a saying in AA, like feelings are not facts and, you know, this two shall pass. Like, there's one certainty, which is that whatever you're feeling right now 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, you know, kind of bad behaviors to get yourself out of it. Well, the thing is that, you know, these catchphrases are sometimes tricky. They're not facts, but they are data. They are evidence of something. 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.

in memory. They just drive where you pay your 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. That pretty much covers everything. Exactly. Like is anything it's like my little trick of saying emotions matter for everything. 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 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. Well, they do come, you know, unbidden. They come without asking. 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 what the feeling is. 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 to you know conjure you know what 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 high stress situation so that you can take the better action.

The meta-emotion thing is important because that dad who wouldn't want to speak to his son about anxiety is he has a feeling about his feeling he feels shame or embarrassment 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 is our feeling about the feeling. Is that clear? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The feeling about the feeling. The feeling about the feeling is like a lot.

And the feelings that we have about the feelings become data points in this story that we tell ourselves about who we are and why we are the way that we are. 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 um 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 that are helpful to them as opposed to hurtful. And the process of developing that is what you call basically essentially like cultivating emotional intelligence. So what is emotional intelligence and why is it so important that

we develop an awareness and understanding of it and work towards, you know, engendering more of it into our lives? Great question. 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?

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. 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 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?

Sure. All right. The psychological difference between anger and disappointment. Anger is an extreme reaction to something not going your way. whereas disappointment is more of a lament about, like, how it could have gone. Okay, you're pretty good. 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. You've got a B plus. 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 injunction.

justice. The injustice piece is what's critical to anger. How could you say that? That's not fair. You lie to me. We get angry when people lie to us. We get disappointed when people let us down. Now, why does that matter? 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. 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 the socialization piece which is that a kid who is growing up in a family where maybe a dad is saying having this kind of toxicly masculine way of developing his kid

the kid will come, I hate skull, 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. It has nothing to do 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, 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 what happens if you have an expectation of justice that goes unmet. That's both disappointing and angering. 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 it going to go? I have no idea where it's going to 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. Exactly. Yeah. 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 understand. 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. It's not a trick question. Go talk in your little groups, define these concepts.

One's high energy, one's this. I mean, I said, no, I want definitions. Like, what is a 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 pandemics here oh my go 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. 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? 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 you.

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. Said perfectly. And labeling it is important. Why?

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... Well, everyone's in armchair, you know, psychologist these days, right? And my argument is that when you can label it, you can regulate it.

I've got to 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 not just about coaching your kid you got to have a conversation with the teacher to see what I'm saying so that the precision there is important another piece of this is that it's a lot easy

to deal with little emotions and big emotions. When Mark is peaved, Mark's like, Mark, take a breath, Mark, take a walk, move away from the 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 and emotional challenges and this one teacher said to me competentially

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. 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.

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 hands and say, I'm feeling that feeling right now. That's where you can teach a kid a strategy. 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 emotional illiteracy. Like even like, like I would consider myself, you know, pretty high up as a lay person 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 of 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, you know. 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 R-U-L. Right. So R-U-L.

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. Yeah. One thing. Or express.

Express. Express, right? I was going to, like, do a gentle correction. Okay, it's okay. You can call me out. You know, I was listening to other episodes, and I was just really absorbing what people we're saying about self-awareness and 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. 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, 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, 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, what happens is that your brain is gonna 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 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,

we find is extraordinarily helpful. 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, you know, that obsession with your own kind of like emotional disposition, you know, like the-gold to move forward. The Woody Allen who's walking around

just incessantly talking about his anxiety. Like it becomes a whole story and a self-defining kind of identity around like all of your, you know, emotional peccadillos. And it's not emotionally intelligent because it's not helping you to achieve your goals. It's keeping you stuck in that experience. Or, yeah, being used at times even as something to excuse your behavior.

Well, I do this because, like, I have, you know, this disorder, you know, this is, blah, blah, this happened to me and that's why I do this as almost as if you get a pass. 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. 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 rollercoaster 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. 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. It 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,

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when those 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 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. 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. I just say, Mark, yeah, you're a little worried about this. Okay. So what? 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? It's a discomfort and it's a mindset that we were, that was cultivated within us. We've been told anxiety, bad, anxiety, week, 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 eyes are dotted and the T's crossed and the

grammar is right and I want that anxiety before I hand in a proposal. But only with emotional literacy can you distinguish that anxiety from the pernicious variety? 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 the way of my goals? Is it getting the way of my well-being, 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 reflex that was crazy. My father died, he died. He died, but he had his first quadruple bypassed at 48. I was 48 or like 47. And I'm thinking to myself, like, this is it. I'm done. I'm like hypergandriacal. I'm like, and the doctor's office like this. Like, I know my heart's raising.

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 out for tenure. So here's the deal. I'm going to give you a pile of sex for your heartburn and here's some ad of hand for your anxiety. It was a 10 minute conversation.

I think I'm dying and anyhow but I left that doctor's office I was pissed because A this is what I do for a living and I was not really self-aware of what I was actually experiencing

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

and 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. 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 what's causing your quote unquote anxiety and stress. It is overwhelm. 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 would schedule like this 15 in here and this time in here and then 15 in 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 yeah 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. 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 I started saying, this is ridiculous. You need space. 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 heartburn went away and within weeks.

But part of the understanding is what the need is that's being fulfilled by whether it's saying yes or 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, 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. Well, this is why I think it's important,

again, going back to being an emotion science, is that once in a while, we've got to 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 going to make this segue to 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 a disappointment in someone that we think they're not going to love us anymore, or they don't want to be with us anymore, or the colleague isn't going to want to have lunch with us anymore, we're going to 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. Is there a distinction between repressing those emotions and avoidance? There is. I mean, repression technically speaking is like I'm going to push us so deep down under the surface

that it's going to become unconscious. Or 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. And what happens when we repress our emotions over time?

They have to go somewhere. 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 want to just say that the first three, R-U-O, 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 where you felt inhibited expressing your emotions? Sure. I mean, there's plenty of times that I 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. It's available. However, I think what most people haven't learned is how to communicate it in a way that's effective.

There's always a way to communicate, I believe. The problem that we have is that we think that, you know, that expressing anger means I'm angry and they're going to listen to me. If I had to tell you one more time, like, who said that's how you express anger? You know, 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 for 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. That way I won't have to have the hard conversation. But seriously, I'm just going to quit my job because I'd rather not have a difficult conversation.

Extreme avoidance. It is, but I'd tell you, I would put my bet on. More people are going to do that than have the comfort level to have the conversation. Yeah, I mean, it requires strategies, skills, self-awareness, composure. You know, there's a when, you know, for all of these things and a way of doing them.

But that gets back to emotional literacy. it goes back to you to explicit instruction are we giving are we teaching people the skills they need to navigate their lives and we're not no we're not period and this is why look at you know the surgeon general's data the former surgeon general of evick murthy's data and the research is out there i have this huge phenomenon like 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 and people and when we make that commitment from a government level to a state level to a school level to a company level we'll see the decreases in those you know unpleasant experiences it's a systemic problem because there is a lack of incentive alignment.

You know, 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 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. 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 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. And your argument for that is... 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 have you invested $100 million in schools? And I found in my little analysis that for that one company's chat bot 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 8 to 9 million children. I mean, it's, and 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 even say that out loud, to be honest. Do you think that there is an argument, that these AI tools could be beneficial in that they are 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. But that person has chat GPT, and they're like, here's what's happening. Like, 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 they're not getting at school or anywhere else. 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. 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 the difficult conversation, but then you've 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, AI 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.

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 defile 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 in hiring more and more psychologists than counselors to treat people. Because you're just dealing with the other end of the spectrum

rather than at the outset. Prevention is way more cost effective than intervention. 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, you know, 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. And there still is this embedded idea that if you're going to see a therapist,

it's because there's something wrong. 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? Oh, completely.

When I was a lawyer, I mean, just, you know, absolute lunatics. very difficult personalities for many years. And I was, I, I'm sure on some level I had some kind of like 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 literally, my whole body would like seize up. 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 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 was that both the intra and the intro were important,

meaning that a leader who people said, you know, Mark's, let's say 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. Which downstream reduces everyone's anxiety because they feel like you got this.

You're in control. We're in safe hands. Exactly. 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. Not true. We're going to go through all of these. Second, it's not really that important. Like, it's not really considered, you know, at the top of the, yeah, it's this soft skill. It's not a hard skill.

science. So I wanted to, 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. My formula there. This formula? I need it. Sometimes I have to feel, make myself feel smart. 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, thank you. Help us understand what that mathematical equation means. Well, this is getting to now with the E and the R. So we're, we did RUL. We're self-aware. We're all over the place. today for some reason 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 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 is like writing a poem like Amanda Gorman, complicated. You've got to 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 going to have to learn how to regulate your emotions. I mean, you have said point-blank, like emotional regulation is the most important skill that a human can possess. I agree, since I wrote it. Yeah. 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 scale, period. And the good news is we can learn. It's 100% learned. 100%. Were you born with a pocketful of evidence-based strategies to regulate your emotions? No, they're still not in my pocket mark.

Exactly. Well, we're going to 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 will 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 and 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 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. Overwhelming has come back, though. I got the new book coming out. I've got to run around. I've got to talk about it. I've got to make decisions. That's, you know,

I'm ready seeing my schedule get crazy. So my point is, though, that I've got to, my overwhelm 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 right. Like, for example, after this is over, I'm going to Santa Monica, not to party, but 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 strategy. it's 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. You could, we could take a break. 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. I'm imagining inside out, like, you know, this big control panel

where there's all these toggle switches that you're solving this equation that you have by turning dials. And that begins with this self-aware and his understanding and giving yourself permission to express these emotions. And 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, this very Adam Grant kind of idea that you have. 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 I think back and I'm like, how is it possible that no one identified my feelings? How is it possible? 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 is 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've got to give yourself and you've got to give everyone else the permission to feel. 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. 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 And 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? Active listening. I wrote it down somewhere. I don't have it in front of me, so I know what they are. You actually read it. But yeah, like it's it's active listening, you know, non-judgment and

empathy. Yeah. Okay. So it's empathy. As opposed to, you know, all of the critical. Yeah, being critical, trying to fix it or, you know, vilifying people for. for how they feel. 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, significant differences in life satisfaction, purpose and meeting 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. Sometimes the things we think are good enough, suddenly get better in ways we did not expect. That's what happened when AG1 launched three new flavors.

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and a scoop that's drinkag1.com slash rich roll to get started i'm in the process of recovering from a pretty major surgery and this has left me thinking a lot about legacy the relationship between what we do now and what we're actually leaving behind for future generations. Well, my friend RJ, who founded and runs Rivian, thinks about this constantly. Sure, he builds electric vehicles for all kinds of adventures and amazing ones at that. His mission, however, is way bigger than that, a mission that is informed by asking a pretty deep question, which is, how do we keep the world adventurous forever? Adventure is only possible with a thriving planet.

You can't have one without the other. Sustainability and adventure, these are not opposing forces. They're simpatico, their partners. Every generation deserves wild places to roam, to climb higher, to be transformed by the journey. But that only happens if we're designing for a future where exploration doesn't come at the expense of nature, but actually inspires us to protect it.

And it's for all these reasons that I'm just so thrilled and honored to join forces with Rivian, to partner with them in support of building the momentum they have already created to move toward a more optimistic, regenerative future. 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 person's headed in the wrong direction, they're behaving in certain ways,

and you know that some type of intervention, you know, 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.

Well, you bring up, remember earlier, we said emotions are approach, avoid. For kids, it's always approach. You never avoid. Say more. Even when they're sending you avoiding signals, 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. As a parent, you know, I've run into those situations where you're getting all of those signals 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 gonna intrude upon that. And, you know, I respect that also.

Like I wanna allow them their space and if they say back off, like I'm not gonna trample on that. But then it becomes, if something is really awry, like then you have to insert yourself despite that. 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? You're 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. 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 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 left it and I said, you know, lady, could be you. I know, she's trying to, she's not seeing, you know. She just missed it. It's like, obvious. It's outsourcing, like there's your karate teacher, there's your Uncle Marvin.

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. See, it's a mindset again. That's messy. Is it not, Mark, a way of cultivating a deeper emotional intelligence with yourself by engaging 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 in Uncle Marvin. This is also, you know, feedback that's helping you with your own emotional intelligence and regulate. This is a bilateral kind of. Well, here's the beauty of the permission to feel concept. 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 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 Manasel, 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 in 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 on you and your life

and your work and your everything. I said, 100%. And then he said, well, so for whom are you in Uncle Marvin? I'm a scientist. I like to study this stuff. 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 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

is a, you know, is a personal endeavor 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.

this 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

that kind of long line of generate, whether it's, I mean, trauma is 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. 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 of 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 because you don't have to be the expert Nobody wants to be around that.

They're looking for presence. It seems so simple. Really, really what moves the needle the most is can you just sit with somebody and listen. And listen to what they have to say and make them feel seen and heard. And that's like 90% of it. 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 another thing 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 percent of people say yes 40 to 50 percent say no. When I ask people to describe their emotional allies in the workforce, what do you think of the top three characteristics? Empathetic, compassionate, patience, good listener. It's the same. Non-judgmental, good listener, empathy, 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

judge 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. 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.

I'm rehearsing all of the typical parenting, yeah, butts that come up. Yeah, but 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 gonna 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. 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 work at Yale, So believe me, 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 to country that no one ever heard of to get into a great university, go for it.

And they end up at Yale and they're all fucked up and then they have to. You can say I can. You can. 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 well there's two things there's like an incorrect understanding or definition of happiness correct that that idea of happiness is premised upon achieving all of these things that and these things will deliver that right so 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. Exactly. And back, 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 context. This is why it's a cultural shift we have to make. As someone who has done this work for so many years, I have for going back to the school situation, there are schools that I work 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 principals are very excited that I'm visiting the school and they'll have the kids who are interested in the work want to meet with me and ask me good questions. And this one kid asked me recently, she said, you know, why did you, why was this so important to you? Like, why are you running around doing this work?

And I share 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 the 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 wanna see, like, Professor Brackett crying. Wow.

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. That's beautiful. Wouldn't we all be so lucky, right, to have that? It's out there. It just needs to be scaled.

more rapidly. And 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. So it depends. If it starts in high school, it's tougher. Middle school is 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 high school, it's part of the way they operate. Yeah. Do you know Lisa DeMore? I do. 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. It's like she loves, she is so curious about their lives and 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 that allows them to open up and confide in her.

Exactly. Are we ready to talk about like more strategies here? Like, there's building blocks and their 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, everybody is following along. 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 emotion regulation standpoint,

what it does is it causes you to pause when you're being activated to reflect. To have that meta moment. Yes. I have another AV tool here. Look what I created for you, Mark. Thank you, you're amazing. So this is the mood meter,

which is a helpful tool in trying to identify, you know, where your emotions reside in the heat of a particular moment. Okay, I am really becoming a professor today. I know, look at that. So two axes, four quadrants, pleasantness and energy. So pleasantness is, you know, 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 got yellow, red, blue, and green. Yellow, high-energy, pleasant emotions. 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 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, especially when they've not been taught how to label their feelings. And to just ask themselves some questions, where am I in 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. 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. Correct. 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 it. 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. And that's when people say it's so time consuming.

What's so time? Learning it is time. You've got to learn it, but applying it is really simple. It takes 30 seconds to do this of that. So, for example, this morning, I was at my hotel. I'm a coffee person. Coffee wasn't so great. I was trying to map out if I can get an Uber to stop at a coffee shaft.

I decided that was way too much. So someone was very kind to make me this coffee. But right before I was welcomed into. your office space, which is beautiful, I paused. And I thought, how am I doing right now? Got a good night's sleep. Feel grateful for that. 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 this point. But my point is that I took a moment to pause. pause and how am I feeling and how do I want to feel 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 an experience with you how many

people do you think think about that not enough I mean that's some blended version of setting an an intention and also a visualization practice. Yes. And also a mindfulness practice. 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. Exactly. That took me, I mean, I'm so you. 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. Was that on your calendar or was that a spontaneous? 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. That awareness, when married to these strategies,

helps to expand that meta moment. 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. You can call it being triggered. That's another word that gets thrown around

pretty cavalierly, but a more mild version of that is we're kind of running on an 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 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. You really know this stuff. 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. Yes, you do. And so the meta moment, which is kind of

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 had 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 some 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. Yeah, that's the AA version of that is self-awareness will avail you. nothing. These things, you know, you can read the books, but unless you're translating it into behavior, it's not doing anything. 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, this quieting your mind and body is so important, as you know. I mean, this is background that you have and mindfulness and breathing. I always say you have to deactivate

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

Even if it's just like a microsecond. Microsecond. It makes a huge difference. And also, not for nothing, the half-life on whatever enervating emotion you're feeling gets reduced significantly. Yes. The space matters, the breathing helps.

I think that some people have gone overboard with breathing. It's sort of like breathing. There's a lot of breathwork guys out there. And breathwork 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 flights. And I would take these breaths. I'm even clear why you need to get out of my house. Like my clarity of 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, I think many of us, from when we were young, today have been gas-lighted. 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. 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. To question it, to deconstruct it, it just became this story that you self-affirmed Self-ful proposition.

Yeah, through and buttressed with all of this negative self-dog, this inner monologue. And I mean, it has to be the most common of human experiences. Self-criticism. Well, it comes from the judgment, the not listening, and the lack of empathy and compassion, because we don't have these Uncle Marvin's raising us. And it comes from at 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. So walk me through the cognitive intervention. 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 that. So 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. That's amazing.

But I was a terrible student. I couldn't focus in school. I was so worried about getting home safely. It was getting spit on on the bus. How could you be expected to focus? When the kids next to you were drawing faggot on your jacket. If your safety needs aren't met, your learning needs are not going to have.

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 a tough enough? Well, Mark's not a tough guy. Mark has a fifth degree black belt. Just to let you know. But I like how you slotted that in there. But it was the 70s, Mark, you know. Yeah, well, it still happens today. 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. And Uncle Marvin was

older, you know, than that teacher. So somehow another Uncle Marvin got the emotion education to be an intervener. 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 and 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 does your self-talk go when you're sitting in a classroom in that room when you feel like you're by yourself, you see an adult that's not intervening and kids are being meaningful 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're being abused by someone else. I mean, your brain is just an emotive defeat. So we have to help people go from self-talk that's negative to more compassionate self-talk. It's critical. We have to be kind to ourselves.

That's the first step. And there are just 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. So I think everything's expensive. And I can afford more things now in my life, but I still think everything's a rip-off.

And that was just my father ingrained that into me. And so when I'm out shopping, I'm like, you got it. 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 is this really right 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, oftentimes I'll send a little text message like, oh. 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. Because 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 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, right? 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, and it's just like, how is that possible? It's there. And it just speaks to how deeply ingrained these patterns are. Well, they'll learn. 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 70s.

So I would come home. Hysterical. 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 going to have a breakdown and she'll lock herself in a room

and I'd be like I'm the one having the breakdown like 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've got to go help you but you know that's a whole other

that's a whole other story but anyhow I caught myself a couple years ago I'm on a flight I'm overwhelmed I got so much going on I'm doing a presentation in a place I didn't want to go and someone I was with someone

and they say, hey, I'm going to break down. Of course. There it is. It rears itself up. It comes in. It doesn't go away. 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. 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, I'll, I'll, This is the show to do it, Mark.

This is why you're here. 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. Yeah. And then I got a job at Yale, which is like you couldn't go. My father grew up, you know, in, you.

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 one when he get triggered by me, he's like, oh, now you think your shit doesn't stink. That was his, like, phrase to, like, dig. It's like a tall poppies thing.

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 and I would talk to myself as if I'm watching a movie like wow

this is a really funny movie you're watching all in the family and it's Archie Bunker 100%. And in that moment of him 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 an 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. 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 often we go right for the jugular, we go right for blaming. And just take a moment and think, is there an 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 i and i make this clear in my book which is that um 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 to you can use it as an escape sure to never have a difficult conversation i'm just going to go to gym i'm going to work it out yeah and then you never deal with the feeling so the same thing comes with cognitive strategies you can make it 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 it's like I did this one podcast millions of people watched it and one guy wrote in the comment section that guy was pretty interesting but he doesn't have an ounce of testosterone and as you can see it hit me

and this is the one you bring up today exactly yeah 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. The selection bias of, you know, rooting out, looking for that one piece of evidence that will validate that old story that you can use to flog yourself and feel terrible about yourself. 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 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. 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's where, you know, it gets complex. But this is a practice, right?

It is. 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 pointed out, like there's no one-size-fits-all. Like, it's very situation and person-specific. 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. I know. This is what people want, though. Oh, totally. We're going to create the viral reel

and you're going to look at the camera and you're going to say, next time this happens, here's your solution. That's really all people want. 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 in the venue blah blah blah I get into this

as 1,59.9% 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 a I'm going to just show you, like, there were people that I was like, this is not going to go well.

And so, I, you know, I am willing to. Did I tell you that I'm into one that? Do you have a black belt? I was overcompensating. I was like, you know. And so I decided to like, this is what I'm just going to call it out and I'm going to reach them. I'm going to figure out a way in. and I did for a little while

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 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 going to tell me that I'm going to use it and I'm going to tell my family to use it and I was like this is where you're caught off guard and I'm like, be kind to yourself.

But that's what people want. Right, it's what they want. And obviously, you know, when you think about public safety and 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, 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. I could not agree more. So just 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 in our brains and reframe and engage in that

spatial and temporal distancing. And then we do need social support. Sometimes, 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've got this job and this person will work for me and this will happen and everything just works out. Not going to happen. Okay. So I can't control the world.

I can control some of the situations. I can not go, you know, into the, you know, office of this person who really is mean. All you can control is your behavior. Correct. Your relationship with your behavior. 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 wanted 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've got to 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 give speech? I did this one presentation recently. I had to get there. I was in Spokane, Washington, and it was coming from New York. I was in Denver for 12 hours. And I just said by 9 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 online with the person trying to change my flight and she was not helpful.

And like, you have to call United. I'm like, I don't call United. Like, you're right here. Like, yeah, you just, no, I can't switch it because you're trying to go back to a place so you didn't start from. I was out of my mind. 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 in this flight, this wasn't going to work 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. I came out of Newark. I went to the LaGuardia turn, you know, 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 my hunch is that 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 they went.

She put him on the flight. And so my point of that, of sharing that story is that, like, emotion 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've got to be kidding me. I'm a million mile, you know, let's just go. And that would not have gotten 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, engage in my positive self-talk, envision the best version of myself, and thought about what that person could do in that moment to get the outcome. I don't know, it doesn't feel like magic to me.

But the solution presents itself because you have the clarity of mine and the ground exists to not be reactive in that moment. I no longer cared about the person who wasn't helping me. I cared about the person who wasn't helping me. about A, I am, you know, I was joke, I am the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence. I do wanna have like-

You know, the pressure's on, right? So I do wanna 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 gonna build that space between stimulus and response, gonna go here, and I'm gonna 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 metamomom.

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, as my point,

as opposed to always in the moment. 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 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. 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 wanted 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 metamomomom, 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 very really asked her how she was feeling. I very really asked her anything about what her was. 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. 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 the the self-optimization naval gazing that goes into like our own investment in our well-being correct you mentioned earlier like there's 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 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. 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 the story I'm telling myself really helping me have what I want out of life, or is it keeping me stuck?

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? Yes. That is the not so great byproduct of all of this, you know, kind of self-help and self-improvement. 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 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. And at the same time, 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 these accommodations

and I need... The world needs to 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 seen this in many ways

that the parent who will do anything for their child to not be uncomfortable. Life is about discomfort. I mean, I don't know about you, but... And discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life.

I think Susan David is the one who said that. Yeah. And it's a great phrase because I don't know anybody who is 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 now we've talked about dealing with feeling the book and the strategies so 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 it predicts a lot about the quality of your relationships and it's importantly as we started off i think above them beyond your cognitive ability as someone who's worked with the smartest people in the world i mean literally from test corps 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 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 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.

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 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, and let's just take like the world of like self-improvement and self-optimization, 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. Sure. 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 plug-in to play in which scenario.

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. and 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 in college or wherever you go. And it's continuously developing. I really make the parallel to working out. One of the things, the gift to myself during the pandemic, was I hired an online trainer. And I was like, Mark, you're eating all this Thai food. You're getting kind of like, you're not feeling so great about yourself.

And this guy's great. And I actually write about him in my book because 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.

And I was like, what do you mean by that? He's like, you have to make fitness part of your identity. And I sat with 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 I get in my way. And that's my hope.

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 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? 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 i did a presentation he's 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 of meaning 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 I said, how old are you now? You know, 60s? 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've got to 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. 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'm in like aspects of who I am, and that's okay. Tomorrow is a, the next first day of my life. 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. And it's so freeing because I know I can just do better the next day. And it's just this continuous job. What is your sense of how mal, malleable this is. Like I'm imagining, you know, somebody, you know,

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 gonna behave that way in that situation. But in your experience of, you know, practicing this in working with people on, like what is the most extreme case of somebody overcoming some kind of pattern to handle it differently?

I wanna give people a sense of- hope 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 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 um 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. 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 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, they'll love this is funny.

I just remember this now. He goes, I learn that the cigarette was my strategy, 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 it somebody made a video of him telling me this because he wanted to share it with me?

And what 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's in more depth, is they realized they didn't know what they didn't know. They just had never seen the value and importance of building an emotionally intelligent workforce.

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, this is super important. But they just didn't, it wasn't part of their education. So they didn't even know it existed. 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? 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? There are a few personality traits, like grit and conscientious. 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 that one time when I got home from work and it, you know, it failed. And I said, well, after the 300th time,

then we'll try another strategy but you've got to practice this over and over and over again because part of building your emotion regulation kind of toolbox is also unlearning before you relearn and that's going to take time for people

and I just give yourself and with permission to feel comes permission to fail there's also the self-criticism, the judgment I mean it's back to that idea of scientist versus judge right can you be curious 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 like flog yourself for it like what is to be learned

it's already got you already made the mistake so you can you know beat yourself up first for 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 till that you know i mean a lot and it's mostly i think because i'm so overwhelmed and that something happens at home and it doesn't go the way I wanted it to and I'm like reactive. I had this deal, 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 they went, the first time the dogs went in the pool. And they're rolling around, you know, on this blank.

I'm like, I understand, like, now we take blankets out of the house to like for the dogs to roll. And we had company over it, 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. I mean, 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. of why we were going to break up. I'm joking, but anyhow, I did have, I took my post met a moment, you know, that evening, and of course I walked over and I'm like, that was ridiculous.

I'm so sorry. I'm glad you're sorry. You know, like, easy for you to say you're sorry. Yeah. 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. And I have another hopefully 30, 40 years left

to continue to get better. And maybe another fight about the blankets in your future. It'll be something else. But it is funny how we 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, you know, with all of your knowledge, like still at times,

you know, we're powerless over these things. Because 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. Well, of course it's not about the blanket. Yeah, exactly.

It never is. 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, some people might say, well, you should beat yourself over it. You were nasty. and I was not my best self but I think I'm a human

as as everyone who's listening and make mistakes own those mistakes and have the courage to talk about that and really discuss it and I did discuss it I explained you know my feelings

and that wasn't actually good enough to be honest with you because it was the behavior that I did that wasn't so cool and I just said listen I'm going to work hard to never do that again, I really apologize. 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 shit the bed here and like how can I make it right or modifying your behavior in the wake of it

to like make that kind of living amends. Yeah, I mean, I'm curious about you now. Do you have any of these moments in your life? Yeah, I've talked of these things, you know. Of course. 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, I could, I could, I could, you know.

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 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. Yeah. Like, this is just, you know, the bane of my existence, like these individuals who suddenly have a lot of control over your time and power

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. Yeah. When you're put on hold and have to push a lot of buttons and all of that. Yeah, so everybody's got their thing. I mean, none of us is going to break free of, things that get under our skin that are gonna make us be dysregulated.

The question is, are we aware of it and are we making steps to be better at over time? Yeah. I wanna end with returning to the school piece, like where we started. When I look at what you're doing with schools, I mean, 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 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 are implementing this curriculum that 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? Great question. I love that one. I think the, um, the first step is just going to our website, which is ruler approach.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 percent 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 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 emotion education to do the work. So the first year of integrating ruler into a school is working with.

the 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. You can't co-regulate. You can't be your uncle unless you learn how to self-regulate first. 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. 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. I think of what you're doing as analogous to what Jonathan Haidt is doing with phones and schools and he's obviously making progress

but there's a lot of work to go but there is a general like awareness of these things right now in a way that there wasn't even a few years ago. I agree. 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, you know, jokingly, but it is, the strategy is, I think, easy to implement for schools. It's binary and it's kind of dramatic. Yeah. Whereas agreeing to do ongoing professional development for teachers to help them. Yeah, who wants that?

See that? But that's what we need. Because everybody should have a PhD in emotional intelligence. intelligence. I like that. Well, the first way, the first step towards that is to pick up your book. Thank you. Dealing with feeling available everywhere and this is fantastic.

Thank you, Mark. Thank you. How do you feel now compared to when we began and how do you think we did? Oh, yeah, yoy. 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. All right, good, well, I feel good. And you? And I feel, no, I feel good. Good, whoa, whoa, whoa, oh, yeah, I can't say it. 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 it's one conversation but we 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 thank you 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,

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