How can we teach kids about emotional intelligence? (Emotional Intelligence part 2)

In part one of this conversation, Marc Brackett, the founder and director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and the author of Permission to Feel, talks about why emotional intelligence matters and how we can use that knowledge to help better understand and express ourselves. 

Here in part two, Marc shares how to become more emotionally intelligent, where people struggle with emotions, and how to teach kids about emotional intelligence.

Most people want to be more emotionally intelligent, but what is a good way to do that?

I use the acronym RULER to talk about five essential skills.

• The first R is recognizing emotions in myself and others. That’s paying attention to my physiology, to where my brain is taking me. It’s paying attention to your facial expressions, vocal tone, and body language—trying to make meaning out of that.

• The U is understanding emotion—the causes and the consequences of feelings. What makes me feel angry? What makes you feel angry? Anger is about injustice, but what I see as an injustice and what you see as an injustice might be different.

• L is labeling emotions—having that precise word. Once you can share exactly how you feel, you can start to recognize patterns that brought you to your present mental state and identify triggers to bring forth or get out of certain mental states. 

• E is expressing emotions—knowing how and when to express emotions with different people across contexts and cultures.

• And then the final R of RULER is the regulation of emotion. These are the strategies we use to help us prevent or reduce unwanted emotions and initiate the ones that we want to have.

Where do you think people have the most trouble?

Labeling. Most people have not been brought up with an advanced emotional vocabulary, and even when they learn words, they don’t really know what they mean. Everybody’s stressed. Or anxious. But do they know the difference? My research shows that most people clump together the anxiety, the stress, the fear, the pressure, the overwhelm, and the worry. It’s all one big clump of red on our mood meter. That makes it hard to find the best strategy to regulate those feelings.

How can we teach kids about emotional intelligence?

Be a role model. Parents want me to teach them the tricks of raising an emotionally intelligent child. And what they don’t realize is that the real trick is their development of the skills and modeling them. Your kids are not going to talk about their feelings unless you talk about your feelings. Not when your head is spinning out of irritation. But maybe at breakfast, you can say, “Hey honey, how are you doing today? Last night, I didn’t sleep so well, and I was a little irritable this morning. I want to let you know that if I look a little off today, it’s not because of you. It’s just that I’m trying to get myself together. Talking about feelings daily is just part of who we are. We talk about feelings in our household.”

If you missed part one, click here. To dive deeper into this topic, here is a link to some great resources at Character Lab.