Marc Brackett On How To Talk About Your Feelings When You're a Leader

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0:42Marc Brackett: There's a business book that you really need right now, and it's called Life at the Speed of Play. Launch Products People Love by Mark Pincus. He's an entrepreneur's entrepreneur, known in Silicon Valley as one of the most prolific idea generators. I guarantee you've played one of the games that he has invented. And he's going to give you his book, two for the price of one. If you go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious, he will send you a second copy for free. If you're thinking about starting an online business, launch before Black Friday, a time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy.

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2:18Marc Brackett: That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash achiever and try Notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Hi, I'm Maura Aarons-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever. Today, I'm going to bring you one of our most downloaded and one of my most favorite episodes from our archives. It's a classic. The Anxious Achiever has been at it for a long time. We have over 300 episodes, and honestly, they're all still more relevant than ever. You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time, but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before.

3:06Marc Brackett: If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.

3:21Marc Brackett: Perhaps my favorite moment in today's interview is when our guest, Mark Brackett admits that people with entitled attitudes really, really set him off. I'm triggered easily, he says. He just puts it out there. Mark has a lot of triggers based on his upbringing. And here's a newsflash. Your boss gets triggered too. It happens to most of us. We're triggered consciously and unconsciously all the time at work. And although we use the term colloquially, In psychological terms, a trigger is something intense. It's a stimulus. It could be a smell, a sound, a sight, another person's actions that triggers feelings of trauma.

4:04Marc Brackett: You may recall my interview with Afghan war veteran Jason Kander, who talked about his inability to sit down with anyone in back of him at a restaurant, for example, until he got treatment for his PTSD. But in smaller ways, many of us are being set off all day long and reenacting bad habits or old defense mechanisms with our teams and at work. You know, triggers can be small. You might notice that your stomach flips or you feel a feeling of dread when you see a certain word or someone's name pop up in your inbox. They might be bigger. when unemployment numbers skyrocket, you might feel nauseous and unable to focus, even though you still have a job and nothing in your life has changed.

4:48Marc Brackett: So here's a challenge. When an interaction or a situation sets you off, examine why. The unresolved business from your past, as we'll hear from Mark Brackett today, is present in and relevant to how we all work and lead. Mark Brackett, PhD, is the founder and director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center of Yale University. He is the lead developer of RULER, an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning that's been adopted by nearly 2 ,000 schools globally. And it's great for adults, too. His book, Permission to Feel, is one of my favorites.

5:27Marc Brackett: Well, how are you, Mark? And of course, I asked that. I should probably ask maybe where you are on your on the mood meter right now. And maybe you could explain what that is and why it's important to be specific.

5:38The Anxious Achiever Host: All right. That's going to take the whole hour. I have to say, like, I am personally, emotionally kind of all over the place. I feel right now in my life, I'm chronically overwhelmed, angry at a lot of things, sad at other things, anxious about other things. And so I'm glad I have a sophisticated emotion vocabulary so I can communicate, you know, effectively. Not that everybody wants to listen, which is getting at, you know, your question, really. You know, this question, you know, how are you feeling? It can be a loaded question, right? Because there's assumptions made, right? That A, the person asking really cares.

6:22B, that the person who is being asked is self-aware.

6:28The Anxious Achiever Host: And C, that the person who asked the question is willing to listen and support what they hear. And so I think that's why many of us go through life kind of saying, how's it going? And then we say, fine, and we move on. but for me granularity in terms of being emotionally self-aware is really important because you have to label your feelings to know what to do with your feelings and that's why we have the tool like the mood meter which is the key tool to our approach to teaching emotional intelligence and you know put simply the mood meter is you know a box that has you know four color boxes in it.

7:10The Anxious Achiever Host: As I tell people, it's a deceptively simple tool because to really use it wisely, you have to understand the core principles of emotional awareness. So first on the X axis is the word pleasantness. And think about it. You wake up in the morning and you're doing some kind of reflection typically, right? Do I want to approach the day? Do I want to avoid the day? Do I feel safe? Do I feel unsafe? Do I feel pleasant? Do I feel unpleasant? And then you're checking in with your body a little bit, like, do I feel energized today or do I feel really tired and depleted today? And it's those two axes that together form the four quadrants.

7:49The Anxious Achiever Host: We got the yellow, the red, the blue and the green. So yellow, high energy and pleasant, right? Emotions like happy and excited and jubilant and elated and ecstatic. The green, pleasant, but lowered energy, calm, content, tranquil, peaceful, relaxed. and then the blue and the red i just want to say up front they're called negative emotions which i think is a bad term they're not bad emotions they're just unpleasant feelings so the red quadrant right unpleasant high in energy so you know the anxiety family the anger family and then the blue you know which is that lower left are the emotions that are unpleasant but low in energy so you can think about sadness loneliness you know depression despair etc

8:31Marc Brackett: So explain how understanding how to understand and label how you feel is a leadership skill. Because I think that that is one of the most important messages that I took away from your book. And there's a lot of data here.

8:48The Anxious Achiever Host: There is. And so, you know, for leaders that are listening, what I would say is, you know, I've done a lot of consulting for big companies, whether they be tech companies like Microsoft and Google and Pinterest and Twitter. financial companies, I won't mention them. You know, the attitude is wide ranging. You know, I remember going to this one, you know, very elite hedge fund. And, you know, I think the person said to me something like, interesting talk, you know, Mark, but like, I don't need these skills. I mean, look at my office. It was big, I take it. Yeah, it was a big corner office, you know, on the Hudson River.

9:28The Anxious Achiever Host: And I was like, tell me more, You know, and, you know, he's like, maybe I'll bring in to train the people who work for me because then they'll have the skills to deal with me. And I remember thinking, like, I cannot wait to do these interviews. You know, people have this like misconception of emotional intelligence, oftentimes because of its popularization. Right. That it's like about charisma. You know, it's about, quote unquote, being successful.

9:55Marc Brackett: It's about sales. I think that people understand the role of sort of EQ in sales, but they don't necessarily see beyond that.

10:04The Anxious Achiever Host: Exactly. My question for people is, do you know how the people feel who work for you? Most people are like, what are you talking about? Well, you know, I look around, you know, and I say, well, looking at people's facial expressions and body language is like you're, you know, you're going to probably get it wrong more than 50 percent of the time. In a big study that we did with about 15 ,000 people across the workforce, we looked at supervisor emotionally intelligent behavior. Like really about how skilled was the supervisor in, you know, demonstrating that they care for others? How skilled was the supervisor around regulating their own feelings when they were stressed out and overwhelmed or angry?

10:47The Anxious Achiever Host: And then we were curious, you know, were there differences in groups when the supervisor had higher versus lower emotion skills? And it was remarkable. I mean, like, honestly, 50 % difference in feelings of inspiration among the employees. Wow. They were 50 % higher when you work for someone who was higher in emotional intelligence. And so by way of example, people said they felt inspiration about 25 % of the time when they worked for someone who was low in emotional intelligence. And 75 % of the time when they worked for someone higher in emotional intelligence. I mean, think about how inspiration might play out in a company in terms of creativity, productivity, relationships.

11:32The Anxious Achiever Host: Energy. Energy, all of that. And then we found frustration was the opposite, right? It was like 60 % to 70 % of the time they felt frustrated. And only 30 to 40 % of the time in, you know, the groups where there was an emotionally intelligent supervisor. And then we looked at things like engagement and burnout, intentions to lead the profession, ethical behavior, and all in the expected directions. You know, organizations that have leaders with higher emotional intelligence have companies and employees who function better and perform better.

12:06Marc Brackett: So I have a sort of nitty gritty question, which is something I think about, because I think that there's, to me, there's the emotional intelligence of understanding how people react to me in a work setting. Then there's the larger situation of how people who work for me feel outside of me, right? Are they anxious in their everyday life? Are they going through a hard personal moment? What does a leader need to focus on first? Like if you're kind of like, all right, I'm going to become an emotion scientist. Do you start with really understanding yourself and how you might make other people feel?

12:44Marc Brackett: Or do you think about how do I understand the whole lives of the people who work for me? Does that make sense? Yeah.

12:50The Anxious Achiever Host: And I love that you use the term in my book, emotion scientist, because that's my goal is to make or help everyone become an emotion scientist as opposed to what I call the emotion judge. I'm going to go into a different arena for a minute. Parenting. You know, parents come to these trainings that we do and they say things like teach me how to make my kid more emotionally intelligent. And then they leave saying, oh, crap, I got a lot of work to do on myself. Because they think that I'm like, it reminds me when I have my other background is in martial arts. Parents used to drop off their kids to my martial arts studio and say, teach my kid discipline.

13:28The Anxious Achiever Host: And I'm like, you know, I got them for one hour a week. how about I teach them martial arts and you teach them discipline exactly you know in the workplace it's the same thing is that we as managers as leaders we have to be emotionally intelligent role models you know that's hard it's hard because we haven't had an emotion education you know since most people who are managing companies and leading companies didn't have that emotion education we got to start where they're at so with that said you know firstly it's never too early, never too late to start working on these skills. So I just want to put that out there.

14:03The Anxious Achiever Host: The areas of our brain responsible for building emotion, vocabulary, and learning strategies to manage our feelings are there and ready for us to, you know, fill it in.

14:14Marc Brackett: You know, the other day I was talking with my friend who is both certified financial planner and a financial therapist. We were talking about money and emotions. Money is way more than dollars and cents. It's emotional, right? And I'm trying to teach my kids to have healthier emotions around money than I did. But I'm getting better every year. And part of it is that I use Monarch. Monarch simplifies, identifies, and helps me have a plan for my money. Monarch is like having a financial advisor in your pocket. It has easy to read diagrams that help me visualize exactly where my money goes each month.

14:58Marc Brackett: And it has investment views so I can compare my portfolio, say to how the S &P is doing. All kinds of great tools that help me frankly take some of the emotions out of money and make it more practical and working for me. Most apps only tell you what you've already spent, but Monarch helps set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. You can write your own money story with Monarch. Use the code achiever at monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core at half off just$50. That's$50 off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever.

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18:36The Anxious Achiever Host: so a role model right be the role model right do you create the space for your own emotions but you also create the space for other people to talk about their feelings and it's a good example actually that i have um from my own center and i'm talking behind my executive directors back right now who is from the business world and he's a friend and he knows that i'm going to say this story because it's one of our little jokes so um scott is a great guy and he's been my you know I was my co-director, but he comes from Wall Street. And after his like first month, he came to my office and he said to me something like, all right, what's the deal here?

19:11The Anxious Achiever Host: How much time do I need to spend in meetings checking in with how people are feeling? And, you know, like a lot more than you're used to. And so that's an important point, though, because, you know, there's a lot there can be too much feeling. Right. Like we do have work to do. Right. it's not my job to deal with all of your emotions like we are in a workplace and we have to learn how to manage our own feelings and but of course we have to create environments where people feel safe and connected and supported and valued and heard because that just exacerbates negative feelings if it's not there and so you know my argument to most leaders as a matter of fact i just did this maybe two days ago with a very big company.

20:03And I had the C-suite and I built what I

20:07The Anxious Achiever Host: call the emotional intelligence charter with them because we're going to be doing this project for a long period of time. And I said, tell me, how do you want to feel? Like, how do you want to feel working on this team together? And people were like, what are you talking about? I'm like, I really want to know, like, this is hard work and we're going to be doing like major things together. How do we want to feel working on a team? And we came up with very interesting words like connected, supported, heard, valued, creative, inspired. And then the next question is, well, what do we got to do to get there?

20:47The Anxious Achiever Host: So what are the indicators for that? How are we going to evaluate how our team is functioning? You can imagine, you know, that not everyone would be comfortable facilitating that conversation. Right. You need a little bit of emotional intelligence to be comfortable even leading that conversation. Yeah, I just think that we miss so much by not making sure that we check in with feelings in the workplace.

21:13Marc Brackett: When you're working on this stuff with big companies, do you feel like you have to spend time convincing them that this is good for their bottom line? Or do they sort of get it that like, oh, emotions might make it better to work here? Like, what's the balance?

21:30The Anxious Achiever Host: It's a normal distribution.

21:33Marc Brackett: So with that bell curve. I failed. Okay, thanks. I was going to say did not do that well in statistics. So it's okay.

21:39The Anxious Achiever Host: I've taught statistics so I can actually explain it. What I mean by that is that it's like a third kind of like, get out of my face. A third are kind of neutral and a third are like, give me more, give me more, give me more.

21:53Marc Brackett: And does it have to do with the level of power? Because you say actually in your book that people with more, I want to read it because I actually have the page open, page 234. Research shows that high power individuals tend to be less responsive to the motions of people around them. So is it the high power people who are like, nah, don't need this? or do they just follow all along the bell curve?

22:14The Anxious Achiever Host: There's probably, you know, if you do the bell curve, you know, within the high power people, it's a little skewed. And I think it's interesting when you think about power, right? Because high power people don't necessarily think that they need people. Like when you're lower on the totem pole, you really need a lot of resources, right? And supports to get to where you are. But once you reach the top, you're kind of on the top. It's totally wrong thinking because what you don't realize is that you've got, you know, 40 ,000 people that report to you that, you know, actually are really making a difference or not in terms of, you know, your company's success.

22:51The Anxious Achiever Host: But we don't think of it that way because we're very individualistic in our society.

22:56Marc Brackett: But one of the coolest things that you say, and I loved this, is that you talk about how understanding emotions can help with leadership emergence. And I don't know if I read that right. But I liked to think about that as when people are newer leaders, they could have an edge and gain more influence even than their stodgy boss, if they do have that emotional intelligence and can understand feelings better and, and work through that.

23:26The Anxious Achiever Host: You know, as an aspiring leader myself, you know, I consider myself always being in learning mode. You know, I became a professor because I wanted to walk around campus and, you know, talk with my students about life. And, and now, you know, I don't really teach very much anymore. And I run a center with 60 employees. Right. You know, when you're younger, and you're newer in your work, dealing with conflict is not as challenging. But now, you know, have a leadership team, and you want to use more distributive leadership. And, and then you have people who don't agree with each other and have people have different personalities and people who want to be heard more and people want their voices and the list goes on and you're stuck with these like what do i do how do i manage this and can i just make the decision because i'm like don't want to wait any longer right these are all like emotion focused challenges right they're not cognitive

24:17Marc Brackett: challenges and i just don't think that we prepare people enough to reflect on that um you know what

24:25The Anxious Achiever Host: I'm reminded of is how many years ago I had someone working with me who was difficult let's put it that way and and essentially what I learned was that that person told the people who reported to the person that like if you have a problem with me like you deal with it with me like you don't go to Mark. He's too busy. So a lot of dysfunction happened on this one team that I was completely unaware of. And then when this person ended up leaving, all the people that reported came to me and said, oh my God, you know, we were so unhappy and, you know, we wanted to speak to you, but we were afraid we're going to lose our jobs because of it.

25:09And so in many ways, I feel bad, you know, that I didn't develop this person better or, you know, had more, you know, time to spend with this person to develop, you know, their emotion skills.

25:23The Anxious Achiever Host: Because as an emerging leader, you know, in our center, A, you know, it ended up not working out for this person, but B, like employees really suffered and they were spending a lot of time looking for other jobs. I didn't know any of it.

25:38Marc Brackett: And I think that's the thing is that this stuff is hard and people are a pain in the ass, you know, like it takes effort. And when life is hard and you're tired, and sometimes you just want to go home. You don't want to hear someone else's problems. You have an anecdote in the book I wanted you to talk about. You had a student who was really arrogant. She wrote you a crummy note and didn't do her exam. And then she said she wanted to work for you. And she was really entitled. And you decided to chase her down and try to figure out what was going on. um why did you do this like why did you spend time figuring out what was going on with this one arrogant and entitled student and like what parallels does that have for managers well

26:22The Anxious Achiever Host: you know it goes back to like mark what is your job oh you're the director of the center for emotional intelligence okay so you know i you know because i have you know i grew up in with very humble roots you know my neither one of my parents went to college you know my father was an air conditioning repairman. So, and now I work at an Ivy League university where, you know, people's upbringings were mostly very different from my own. And so I don't, I don't relate well to entitlement. Like I had a really, you know, you know, bust my, you know, what, you know, you know, my whole life, you know, and nothing was really given to me.

27:01The Anxious Achiever Host: And I didn't even know what Yale was, to be honest with you, when I was growing up. It's just like a foreign country. And I never would have thought, even if I knew what it was, I didn't think I was somebody who belonged there. And so now I'm a full professor there and I'm triggered easily, you know, because, you know, I'm 51. Entitlement triggers you. It's one of my big triggers. And so this particular student basically just was dismissive and, you know, and then she didn't show up for the exam. And I said, you know, you know, I'm not sure what's going on here. And she said something, you know, like, well, I think it was something like, well, you're just such a fun professor.

27:42The Anxious Achiever Host: I didn't think you would really care. I'm like, really? And then wrote me a letter where it said, I am so effing this and effing that. And I'm like, I cannot believe this is happening.

27:52Marc Brackett: I cannot believe that she put that in an email.

27:54The Anxious Achiever Host: Crazy. And so I think that where this can be a teachable moment for people is that I have a lot of triggers, you know, based on my upbringing. we all do whether we're conscious of them or not and so entitlement is one of my triggers another one of them because i grew up you know very low middle class i didn't have a lot of money is like being ripped off like going out for coffee right now is a trigger for me spending 575 on a cappuccino could make me you know like become like a i don't know what so anyway but i take my breath i'm like mark you can afford it but i don't want to spend it and i get angry and it's like a whole thing but anyway this is too psychodynamic no i love it i love it

28:37Marc Brackett: because imagine i would imagine if your staff orders like a really extravagant catered lunch

28:42The Anxious Achiever Host: for something does that like trigger you totally yeah i'm like you gotta be kidding me even when my partner does it i get irritated i'm like i'm like you know peeling sweet potatoes at home while you're traveling and like going out for your like lobster and you know i'm like this is like there's something wrong here anyway um you know i don't need your audience to to manage help me manage my feelings but going back to this example i think that we don't realize as leaders and managers that we are triggered either consciously or subconsciously all the time at work by the way someone talks by this the way someone acts by the way someone you know shows up later and doesn't say anything the list goes on and what happens is it builds up inside of us right it's like you accumulate this debt you know of anger or anxiety or whatever it might be and then it shows up in weird places like at the bar every night having your fifth you know martini or in displacing that anger you know with your partner yeah totally and so like this is life The reason why I bring these examples up is that, A, like my student, A, maybe she's suffering, which I found out she was.

29:59The Anxious Achiever Host: You know, but the story of the student was that she grew up in a family where it was like a mom who was just way overly attached and had these like fears of death. And her mother was calling her regularly, checking in with her because her mother's mother died while she was a college student. And so this particular mother was afraid that she was going to die before her daughter graduated college. So she just wanted to connect with her every single day and control her. And so you wonder why this kid is freaking out every day and doesn't know her, you know. So all of a sudden, my anger for her turned into deep empathy and compassion, which then, you know, helped me to problem solve with her a little bit.

30:37The Anxious Achiever Host: And, you know, I feel obligated as a professor at my university. I want our graduates to leave, you know, making a great impression on people. and I want her to achieve her dreams. So what can I do, right, to help her become more aware of the impact that she's having on other people? Every leader should make that their goal because A, like you sleep better at night when you help other people out and B, it's gonna just help you have a better organization.

31:06Marc Brackett: You know, the other day I was talking with my friend who is both certified financial planner and a financial therapist. we were talking about money and emotions. Money is way more than dollars and cents. It's emotional, right? And I'm trying to teach my kids to have healthier emotions around money than I did. But I'm getting better every year. And part of it is that I use Monarch. Monarch simplifies, identifies, and helps me have a plan for my money. Monarch is like having a financial advisor. in your pocket. It has easy to read diagrams that help me visualize exactly where my money goes each month.

31:51Marc Brackett: And it has investment views so I can compare my portfolio, say to how the S &P is doing. All kinds of great tools that help me frankly take some of the emotions out of money and make it more practical and working for me. Most apps only tell you what you've already spent, but Monarch helps set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. You can write your own money story with Monarch. Use the code Achiever at Monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core at half off just$50. That's$50 off your first year at Monarch.com with code Achiever.

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33:56The Anxious Achiever Host: You know, I love mushrooms.

33:58Marc Brackett: I am fascinated by them. One of my favorite things to do is in New Hampshire to go on mushroom exploring walks with a renowned naturalist, Riley McHugh. Riley has taught me to put on my seeing eyes. And when I do, I see purple mushrooms and red mushrooms, big mushrooms, gross mushrooms, cute mushrooms. And I was thinking about the holidays upcoming and how we use mushrooms as a decorative theme. Think about it. You probably have a mushroom ornament or a little mushroom figure that you may put out sometime in the fall or holidays. Mushrooms. If I had an online store, I would sell all manner of decorative mushrooms.

34:41Marc Brackett: I know it sounds silly. And I would do it on Shopify. Shopify is the platform for a record-breaking, reliable holiday selling season at every stage. There's a reason why so many businesses thrive on Shopify. You can easily sell everywhere people shop, online, in person, across social media, even in AI chats. If you launch your store before Black Friday, a time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy, you can take advantage of the extra online traffic. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to shopify.com slash anxiousachiever and start your free trial shopify.com slash anxious achiever to hear your first you say that the thing that keeps you up at night is how your employees feel not not if your grants will come through or if your center is doing a good job but if how your people feel because i know if they're feeling

35:37The Anxious Achiever Host: more pleasant than unpleasant feelings not they're not going to get nobody's nobody's not going to be anxious right now right so that's okay but i want them to feel more pleasant than unpleasant emotions at work because I know that how they feel drives everything from their attentional capacity to their decision making to the quality of their relationships I mean think about it you know how many of us like to work with a dysregulated colleague and like when you wake up in the morning you don't say to yourself oh I want to be productive today I want to be creative today. I'm going to create a new vision for my team.

36:16The Anxious Achiever Host: No, you say to yourself, oh, I got a stomachache. I can go on late or, you know what, let me look on Facebook or, you know, I'm going to look on, you know, whatever site to see if there's other positions like mine somewhere else.

36:27Marc Brackett: Right. Or you avoid them, right? You just totally avoid them.

36:30The Anxious Achiever Host: All the time. I've had it for years because I'm conflict avoidant. That's one thing I've learned about myself. One of my favorite, you know, examples of emotional intelligence in my organization years ago i had someone as an intern who has like a major personality disorder and you know empathize with that but at the same time it can be very disruptive to an organization and long story short is we're in a meeting and this person looks at me and he goes if you don't start listening to me i predict your center's gonna crumble right and i was like okay like what's going on here and then my assistant at the time she's got a lot of agency and she said if she goes you can't talk to mark that way thinking to myself like i gotta go to lunch or something like i'm out of here and um anyway it was like one of those moments in my career i'm like what is happening in here and who's in charge by the way like and how's this what's going to happen with this person like how am i going to get them out of here how am i going to deactivate them and what am i going to do with my assistant like it's it was a big deal what'd you do?

37:36The Anxious Achiever Host: The truth is I was so caught off guard and I didn't really want to deal with it because I didn't know how to deal with it in the moment. I just, I said, oh my goodness, I had a lunch meeting and, um, and I was like, you know what, we really can't go there right now, but well, you know, I'll come back. And I went for lunch and I called my friend, Doug, who is a clinical psychologist. I'm like, Doug, help me out. I don't want to go back to my own office. and anyway you know and again i needed that space i needed the space and that's another lesson is that you can't always solve your emotional challenges in the moment especially when you're really activated you got to step back you got to breathe and sometimes you just need some help and i worked through it and i went back and i was like we got to talk about what happened you know like there's a lot of layers to this and then it didn't work out and i had to let this person just know that they were not welcome back in the center ever again.

38:31The Anxious Achiever Host: Because it was I didn't realize there were things happening again. That's another example. Like, then my assistant said, you know, a lot of people having difficulty with him. He's very, you know, like, not a good listener and, you know, challenges people without really knowing what he's talking about. So.

38:45Marc Brackett: But did that make you feel guilty? Also, like you're supposed to be this master of emotional intelligence. And you run, you know, I mean, and yet this person still had to go like you couldn't fix them?

38:58The Anxious Achiever Host: Well, we can't fix people. We can't fix ourselves either, right? And, you know, part of it is, is this is hard. It's hard to make decisions in life. And, you know, this was an intern who, you know, wasn't a full employee. So it was a little bit easier. You know, one thing that I've learned through my own personal life is that sometimes we stay in relationship with people for too long you know that's when emotional intelligence becomes self uh it's not even it's not emotional intelligence it's when we become in many ways self-saboteurs because we make excuses oh you know maybe this would happen and maybe that and maybe this and maybe that and then it's five years later we don't want to go to work or we you know don't talk to our significant others.

39:53The Anxious Achiever Host: I think that part of being emotionally intelligent is recognizing that sometimes you have to make really difficult decisions that don't benefit everybody. And I didn't do it in a nasty and I didn't yell at this person and say, you're this and this. I was very clear, you know, this is not behavior that is accepted here. And, um, and because I had learned there was a history of it that again, people didn't tell me. And it drives me, it actually drives me crazy. I just had to say this because like, I feel, and again, this is my self report, which might be overrated that, um, like I try to send messages all the time to my team, like, tell me what's going on, please.

40:34The Anxious Achiever Host: I want to hear. And I just think that people have been born into this culture, at least in America, where it's like, they just don't want to do it. They don't want to share the negativity. They don't want to. Maybe it means that they don't know how to deal with it and they don't want to look like they're not skilled. And that's why I try to, I use millions of anecdotes of my own experiences to let people know, this is really hard and it's okay to mess up.

41:10The Anxious Achiever Host: So, and I think in many organizations, like for example, at a place like Yale where I work, Um, like there's this like thing that you have to be brilliant, you know, and that you can't let, like, how could I let the professor know that I don't understand something? That means that I'm like, you know, inferior and I don't really belong and I'm an imposter. You know, I just think this is why we need all this work on emotional intelligence is because we've been nurtured in systems that make us think that being anxious and angry, you know, are bad things.

41:50Marc Brackett: What's the beauty of understanding how you feel? Does it inspire creativity or passion? Like, like how can really understanding how your emotions feed into all your other systems make your work life richer?

42:10The Anxious Achiever Host: Because emotions are information. They're a guide. And when we become compassionate emotion scientists, as opposed to critical emotion judges for ourselves and other people, right, opens up all the possibilities. you know and for a leader you know for me by way of example being granular and specific about my feelings is information it says you know mark maybe this is you're not going you know this is the wrong path for you but don't just go with your gut instinct really like dissect a little bit is it just your fear of failure showing up here or is this really something that you just don't want to do and believe is a dangerous way, you know, forward.

42:56The Anxious Achiever Host: Or if I notice that I'm not feeling inspiration or excitement for a while, it's like, all right, well, how is that impacting, you know, my creativity in the writing that I'm doing in the way I'm managing people? And what do I need to get there? So the reason why labeling your emotions is so important is that it gives us a clue into, you know, what's happening for us. And then we have to ask ourselves questions as those emotion scientists like is this feeling helpful for my task at hand for my writing today or my running a meeting or when i do a presentation you know what i was telling somebody the other day is that you know someone like me who's been doing this for a while um like what i do oftentimes is redundant and it's not exciting just to be straightforward you know like the mood meter for example i love the mood meter but do you know how many times I've talked about the mood meter.

43:52The Anxious Achiever Host: You know, I could have nightmares about the mood meter. But yet, you know, your readers or listeners, I should say, you know, they don't know about it necessarily. So then I have to reframe, you know, like I may enter into something, you know, where I'm like, oh, and I have to say, all right, Mark, how is that going to impact the podcast? How is it going to impact the performance? How is it going to impact my evaluation of this person's grant proposal or whatever it is? And then I sit with it and I'm like, all right, what feeling is going to best serve the audience? What feeling is going to best serve the meeting?

44:37The Anxious Achiever Host: and that tells me whether I can stay or shift and if I need to shift then I have to find out what that journey is going to look like do I need to do like listen to some you know music to pump me up do I need to engage in a reappraisal like for example I'm making this up right now because I'm actually really enjoying this um but if I were really like dreading it I might say well listen like wow Mark you're going to get a whole new audience of people to hear about your work That's cool. Yeah. So let me think about that. Not the, you know, I have to talk about the same thing for the 15 ,000th time.

45:14The Anxious Achiever Host: Do you see what I'm getting at?

45:15Marc Brackett: Well, it's so funny. And A, I'm so glad you said that because I think we all feel that, especially at a certain point in our career. But I want to share with you that before we spoke, I was feeling really depressed. It's been a really hard time, I think, for all of us. And I actually thought about canceling because I was feeling so low. I thought, how am I going to be able to fake my voice?

45:37The Anxious Achiever Host: Yeah.

45:37Marc Brackett: But being, but learning from you, even though it's the 35 ,000th time you've talked about this, it's new to me and I'm so drawn in by it that my mood now is renewed. That's the label I would put. I feel full of inspiration and I want this to be a really good podcast and I care again. And that's just because I just spent time with you. So -

46:00The Anxious Achiever Host: Well, thanks for that. Now I'm going to leave here feeling like satisfied and relieved and, you know, like have I have renewed purpose. So thank you.

46:16Marc Brackett: That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.