Emotional Intelligence: From Theory to Everyday Practice

I guess my job is to say welcome welcome everyone I'm delighted to be here to talk to you about this work we've been doing at Yale for about 20 years on emotional intelligence and uh as you can see here my name is Mark breett I'm the new director of the Yale Center for emotional intelligence uh there's a pretty rich history hisory to this work uh yel as many of you may know our president who is being inaugurated today Peter uh was the originator of the theory of emotional intelligence and he and my doctoral adviser Jack

Mayer back in 1990 wrote this seminal article on emotional intelligence that uh nobody read I was lucky that I did read it uh but you know how most academic articles go if you're in the real world you don't get access to this information so so uh the idea went pretty much unknown for about about 5 years and then uh there was a popular book written on the topic by Daniel Gman uh that many of you may know how many of you are familiar with that book on emotional intelligence how many of you are familiar with

my book on emotional intelligence yeah look around the room now you know why I have low self-esteem um yeah anyway the theme is that emotions matter and now you know more about that but uh more seriously back in 1985 when that book was written people started hearing a lot about emotional intelligence and then Peter and Jack and some other researchers like myself started revising the theory of emotional intelligence developing measurement tools for it uh and then studying it to show that it made a difference so my job today really is to share with you some

of the research we've done and also talk with you about the programs that we developed that we are now disseminating throughout the world so with that note um I want to to share with you what the vision of our Center is uh the we've just converted recently from what we called the health emotion and behavior laboratory uh which was a mouthful uh where we studied emotions and uh health behavior but now we've relaunched just this week officially as the yell Center for emotional intelligence and the idea behind our Center is to use the power of

emotional intelligence to create a more healthy effective and compassionate Society so we're interested as you can see in mental and physical health how emotions help or hinder uh that life outcome uh being effective in the workplace and certainly making it the world a place where people get along and can get ahead and along with our vision we have a mission which uh coincides essentially just adding in the ideas that we conduct rigorous research and develop Innovative educational programming so our goal over the next 100 years is to continuously do rigorous research but also create Innovative

educational approaches so that we can teach people of all ages the skills that we believe they need to succeed so it's my job uh I think you've been here it's this is a pretty amazing weekend for all of us and uh how many of you have been asked how are you feeling like one person so I guess my job is to ask you how you're feeling so I'd like you to take a moment and think about this is a wonderful weekend it's a beautiful day got great people here in the audience bring together the the

past the present and the future of Yale the first dimension on our mood meter is called pleasantness it's what's going on for you here in your mind's eye it's your internal psychological State and basically we can rate ourselves from minus5 to plus 5 plus 5 right now today is the most amazing day of your life there's nothing more than you'd rather be doing than sitting listening to some guy talk about feelings minus five you know you're like I think I'm supposed to go to that other Workshop right now uh not sure please give yourself a

number from minus 5 to + 5 and now I'm going to ask you to take your attention away from here and bring it here to your body what is your energy like right now are you low energy you feeling like you need a triple cappucino or are you full of energy and feel activated minus 5 would mean that you're about to fall asleep plus five would mean that you'd love to just jump out of your seat and take over my presentation and of course we're going to cross these two dimensions and create our mood meter

has four colors yellow red blue and green how many of you in the yellow right now you're feeling Pleasant with a lot of energy raise your hands okay how many you in the green today feeling pleasant but lower in energy for some reason mostly the people are sitting in the back sort of reminds me of my teaching days right if you're low energy how many of you are somewhere in the red or blue today something's not going right a little bit red high energy and unpleasant okay we're going to keep our eye on you for

the day uh blue would be low energy unpleasant so most of you are in pretty good shape today yellow and green just for curiosity is that the reality of your everyday life for some of you yes for some of you like no I'm never yellow or green I'd like you now for a moment to think about the word in whatever language is your mother tongue that best describes how you're feeling at this moment take three seconds to find that word and then we'll go dancing freeze quick raise of hands how many of you had some

trouble finding the best word put your hands up really really high really high look around the room please so over 50% of the room had challenged had was challenged finding the best word any hypotheses about why that might be the case yes hard up it's hard to sum them up okay other thoughts yeah think about it high energy with a lot of pleasantness jazz jazzed happy elated ecstatic so here we go we're going to build your vocabulary now you've already learned something write that in your evaluation other hypotheses yes back there sure so you might

be having mixed emotions like when you lose your luggage when you're traveling right you're like annoyed at the airline you're fearful that you're going to have to go without your clothes Etc one more assum oh now you're challenging me so that's possib a possibility maybe we just don't have access to our emotional life because why I'm putting it back on you now yeah it's way it's possible or perhaps maybe we've just never been formally taught to go deep into our emotional lives just for curiosity how many of you drink wine wow okay how many of

you like are really into wine yes so so uh sir like what kind of wine do you like uh Italian wi Italian wines and what about the Italian wines do you like I just like the range the range what does that mean exactly various different fruits the fruits anything else smoothness smoothness any particular notes or flavors or dryness like style okay so you can see you know if you like something a lot you pay more attention to it and uh you'll develop a sophisticated vocabulary about it my hope is after today perhaps you'll develop a

bit more of a sophisticated understanding of your inner lives now perhaps if I had asked you the reason why you're feeling the way you are you would have had a little more clarity so take a moment now and think about you chose a quadrant yellow green blue or red and I'm going to ask you to ask yourself the question why what's your reason that you put yourself in that quadrant who can share who's in the yellow raise your hand again okay I'm going to use the front audience sir why you in the yellow because I

feel that way just because you feel that way you feel happy full of energy but is there a reason I just had a long trip had a good trip and everything's fine the weather's nice you're not so there's nothing do with my [Laughter] presentation you just randomly showed up today it's okay all right how about for you ma'am you happy and motivated the inspiration the progress great well that's a nice thing to do so there are underlying reasons why we feel the way we do labeling is important how about expressing emotions how many of you

believe that you are skilled at masking your true feelings raise your hand how many of you believe that even though you're skilled most people read through the mask okay so that's a little bit of a conundrum there right uh we'll talk about that a little later finally I'm going to ask you to think about your strategy so I'll be here for about an hour talking about this work on emotional intelligence and maybe you'll go on a roller coaster ride of emotions maybe you'll get feel inspired then maybe you'll get a little bored hopefully not maybe

you'll get irritated with something I say you'll disagree my question for you is what is your strategy for sort of my goal for you is somewhere between yellow and green I don't want you to be too excited in jumping out of your seats nor do I want you thinking sort of being the Deep green maybe like sitting you know on the dock by the bay drinking a glass of wine i' like going to be sort of moderately energetic and uh moderately Pleasant so my question to all of you is what's your strategy yes look at

the posi things look at the positive things in your life very good other thoughts how about for this presentation remember to breathe remember to breathe that's a good thing any other strategies yes ma'am in the red pay attention pay attention that's an interesting I want to just go to that for one second how many of you have ever told your child to pay attention yeah how many of you have even done it like this pay attention yeah uh how many of you believe uh and how many of your children like immediately just pay attention yeah

yeah so one thing I'm going to challenge with you challenge you today to think about is when we say things like how many of you have said something like I need you to to calm down anyone yeah and how many of you have shown in your own research that that really works well it tends not to work very well pay attention I need you to focus focus the question is what are we actually doing to focus what are the strategies what are the underlying mental processes that we're teaching children and adults to focus to calm

down to pay attention what I've done for you so far is really taken you through the components of emotional intelligence I asked you to plot yourself I ask you to think how you feeling then I ask you to think about the word and the reason for your feeling State I ask you to consider how you expressing this what is the how are you showing it to the world around you how many of you believe that where you are on the mood meter is correlated with how you're expressing yourself right now raise your hand if you're

in the yellow please okay so just to give you a little bit of feedback some of you yellow high energy Pleasant you know I'm not totally yeah there we go yellow is yellow yeah here right and then I'm asking you now at the end to think about the strategy so my hope that for you during this weekend is that you're going to be experiencing ing lots of pleasant emotions Joy contentment excitement maybe even go to uh feelings of ecstasy so what is this thing emot about emotional intelligence the historical view of emotional intelligence doesn't look

so great does it this is what ancient philosophers stoic philosophers even psychologists Educators said about emotion passion and reason are antithetical rule your feelings lest your feelings will rule you so the idea of an emotional intelligence Millennia ago or even just a hundred years ago probably would not have occurred as a matter of fact even more recently I was taking a car service back from the airport and the driver asked me he said you know what do you do for work and I said I studied this thing called emotional intelligence and he said emotional intelligence

that's an oxymoron and that is the way most people think about emotional intelligence how can you be intelligent about your emotional life when your emotions are these idiosyncratic impulses that drive you to different sides maybe the dark side what we now know is a much different story is that emotions matter and they matter a great deal for multiple aspects of our daily lives from our attention memory and learning has anyone here ever experienced anxiety how many of you are being treated for you we we know when we're feeling anxious that it's hard to concentrate I

mean by definition you know our brains are we're either ruminating or we're obsessing on something think about for example a child who's being bullied in school what it's like for that child worrying about going from class A to class B worrying about going from school to home when your brain is focused on dealing with very strong unpleasant emotions how can it be available for learning think about it now that's a negative example but the same thing goes with positive examples when you're so focused on your upcoming vacation you just can't wait to go away that

weekend very hard to focus unless of course you have effective strategies decision-making and judgment just for curiosity how many of you have ever uh made a bad decision how many of you made a bad decision in the last week so we we're making decisions every day of our lives every minute pretty much and what our research shows is that emotions are behind a lot of our decision-making for example we now study Educators the lives of Educators and most recently we publish a study looking at how teachers emotional states affect their evaluation of their students so

how many of you I'm going to this is a trick question now believe that grades are objective nobody raises their hand of course um if I hadn't primed you you might have changed your mind so we did a study where we showed that if we put teachers in the yellow versus the blue just by having them think about a good versus a bad day that after that few minutes of writing when we gave them an essay a Middle School student's essay to grade there were one to two full grade differences between the teachers grades who

were in those different mood States so what's interesting about that is not necessarily I knew that was going to happen because that's what I study negative moods are going to shift you to be more narrow positive moods are going to make you more expansive but for me the most important piece was this after the study was over we asked teachers do you believe that your emotion State influenced the way you evaluated your student what percentage of the Educators said of course zero you're so pessimistic again most 90% said there's no way that my emotions would

have changed the way I thought about this essay but yet when we showed them the the bar graphs there was a full grade difference so what's interesting about that is what what's interesting is that emotions are affecting our judgments and decision- making but we're not conscious about it we're not aware of it more soon relationship quality how many of you um when you're at work or even in your own family love to be around the angry disgruntled disregulated family member anyone like you see that that person at work who's always irritated and kind of nasty

and you say that's who I want to go for coffee with today most of us don't want to be around people that display a lot of negative AFF um nor do we want to be around people who misread us constantly Lots in the relationship quality area finally physical and mental health when you think about what emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand and regulate our emotions how can we be healthy physically or and U mentally without having effective strategies and self-awareness so those decades ades of research LED Peter salv and Jack Mayer to

come up with this idea of emotional intelligence as a matter of fact the history of this work is kind of fun they were both doing independent research projects that were along the same lines and they became close friends and Peter and Jack were painting Peter's house when he was an assistant professor here living in Fair Haven and all of a sudden they were having this conversation there talking about their research and each one the story is nobody knows who really said it first I'm my guess is that they don't want to tell anybody about it

and all of a sudden this idea says well what if there were this thing called emotional intelligence and then the AHA happened and the idea was that there are two things one individual differences that some people are just going to be gifted in terms of their emotional life they're going to read people like that they're going to have effective strategies to manage their emotions other people will not be so skilled in this area and the other piece of it was that it could be seen as a mental ability that there would be a way to

measure it and a way to sort of study it to show that it made a difference in people's lives more recently we've narrowed these skills down to what we call the ruler skills the first is recognizing emotions so for example looking at all of your facial expressions and I'm thinking wow this is not going so well um I am looking at your facial expression thinking okay are you interested are you bored B are you tired are you questioning my what I'm saying that's a natural thing for me as someone who studies this all of you

now will just walk around I imagine you leaving here going to the inauguration like this become paranoid about everybody's facial expressions understanding emotions where are they coming from why do I feel angry what is the theme for example around anger versus sadness versus Pride labeling what are the words expressing how do I express myself in appropriate ways in different contexts and then finally regulating emotions so let's break these down a little bit when we talk about recognizing emotions we're we're thinking about it in terms of identifying emotion in oneself so my own physiology my own

thoughts and others by looking at data facial expressions body language posture gesture vocal intonation how many of you you can tell how someone is Feeling by a conversation on the telephone you get that Vibe don't you let's try it right now let's imagine that you want to show the world on the telephone or in person the feeling of compassion but you're not going to say anything you're not going to use words you're just going to use a sound are you ready on the count of one the group everyone in here is going to make the

sound for compassion through 3 2 1 go that's nice so there is something unique about compassion right all right now we're going to do a like you're an awe I have to be careful because I'm from New Jersey a uh you're G to the sound of awe you're an awe of someone or something ready 3 2 one go compass that sound a little bit like despair let's go back to awe all right we're going I have there's some we have some work to do understanding of emotion where do our feelings come from how do they

influence our thinking our judgments our decision- making our behavior that study I showed you earlier how when you're in that yellow yellow mode do you just sort of like say that's a great essay versus when you're in that blue modood you say uhuh you missed that little you know semicolon or Ah that's not the best word to describe that feeling state right there so we know that our emotions are constantly affecting our thinking and judgment as a matter of fact you can see from our mood meter now we can move away from language and start

thinking about how the brain works and what are the activities that we might want to engage in in a classroom in each of these quadrants because there is a bias in our culture right everybody wants to be happy all the time um how many of you believe it's realistic to be happy all the time that's good nobody raised anyone our hand it's not realistic there's death there's breakups there's all these things in life yellow is great for creative writing and brainstorming for example I want to get people in a group and have generate ideas for

a topic let's go put on loud music everyone gets together generating ideas not the best place for deciding on what you're going to move forward with though is it think about it you're feeling really Pleasant everything's fantastic someone ask you a question go for it without really thinking about it the green is wonderful building for building consensus for getting people's opinions together nice calm energy so what do you think H blue some people say blue why would I want ever be blue well has anyone here ever wanted someone to express empathy to them please raise

your hand empathy is a good thing empathy tends to be a blue feeling you're expressing your concern you're expressing your feelings you're walking in their shoes so we want children to be able to generate a feeling of empathy a lot of people say red Ang anger why would I want anger well think about it there's injustices in this world as a matter of fact my anger for the way our state not just this state but our nation is dealing with bullying it infuriates me it infuriates me that people think that you can solve problems by

creating Zero Tolerance policies or by telling people you have to give bystanders you know the courage to stand up to the bully I was one of those kids who was bullied in school and guess what you know I may look pretty confident now but at 13 I was pretty introverted and and and not and quite sensitive so the idea that someone is going to tell me to stand up to somebody who's bigger than I am and tougher than I am and say leave me alone it's pretty scary doesn't really take into consideration a lot of

knowledge about Child Development or individual differences in personality so that anger that I feel about the way our world manages constructs and ideas motivates me it motivates me to work harder to go down to Washington DC and make speeches to lobbyists so you can see here that from our perspective from an emotionally intelligent perspective all emotions are valid and important it's what you do with them think about it that red is useful but if you're disregulated in nasty not useful if you convert it to Passion now you have a difference labeling emotion building that vocabulary

to describe ourselves clearly so I do this a lot and I'm going to do I'm going to ask all of you right now you have 10 seconds to work with someone at your where you are and I'd like to know from you what the difference is between jealousy and envy 10 seconds go okay time is up who feels confident who feels like absolutely confident that they can share yes sir is is when somebody something andad okay jealousy okay so jealousy is more negative than Envy you're saying any other thoughts this is Yale by the way

you're supposed to be thinking come on people yes sir I associate jealousy with the life of a couple ah marriage and asso EnV was wanting to have what someone else interesting so are you a couple no no okay well well that's good come here come here come here by the end of the weekend it what's your name Dana Dana would you mind coming up oh no come on no no I need I need you it take two seconds I promise stage so you're not going on the stage so everyone Dana and I just you know

we've we're going on a date and we're walking down the street and all of a sudden what's your name again sir and Andre she sees Andre just take a look at Andre very handsome he nice yeah but I I want you to give him a look like you've never given another man see it's going to happen um now I notice Dana right yes looking at Andre that way how do I feel jealous so now it's obvious so jealousy is about relationships jealousy has to do with Rel I'm jealous that you have a nicer tie than

me I'm envious but jealousy is about Dynamics it's about relationships thank you Dana thank you now my question is you know some people say oh well this is like intellectual Jon Babble you know who cares about the difference I mean we just use these terms why would I want a child or a teacher to understand the difference between jealousy and envy yes Envy might Inspire the child to take to achieve yes jealousy self yeah jealousy can cause more violence more aggression so the strategies that I might use or teach a child who is feeling jealous

and a classroom will be very different than the strategy I might teach a child who's feeling envious expressing emotion for curiosity does anyone here know anyone who is socially inappropriate anyone yeah um that's where this skill comes into play it's not knowing like the how and the when to express your emotions um I won't give you any personal stories in this herea because they're not appropriate but my point here is that there is that level of appropriateness that has to do with context and culture um I'll never forget when my other career is I'm a

martial artist I know I don't look like one but uh I have a fifth degree black belt in a in a martial art called hubido and when I've gone to Korea when I went there the first time I remember very vividly my American teacher said don't look at anybody in the eyes right it's rude and you know inappropriate so I remember meeting my teacher saying hello you know hello and of course he thought I was like some weirdo from America you know it's not that extreme right there's subtle things um here right when I when

I teach in my martial art studio everybody you know bows you know I don't think any of you are going to bow to me at the end of this presentation although it's not a bad idea the so there are cultural rules that we have to be sensitive to There Are Rules between New York and Connecticut I mean I remember when I was a student in New York City I would work in coffee shops on the Lower East Side my friends would come and say Mark I'm depressed I'm bloated I'm tired I'm irritable you know now

I live in New Haven Connecticut and it's sort of like hello it's a little different here emotionally I always say I haven't gotten a hug in 10 years um I'm exaggerating a little bit but there are differences there are differences in the way people communicate about emotions regulating emotions how many of you believe that your lives would be somewhat healthier happier even better if you had more strategies to regulate your own emotions raise your hand most people agree with that it's interesting another question how many of you believe you'd be healthier and happier if everyone

who you lived with had more strategies to regulate theirs yeah yeah yeah this is when you know Coupes therapy begins after this part what we want to make sure we do is give people teach people effective strategies for managing their emotions and there are a lot of them most of us know the negative ones like negative selft talk rumination worry abusing substances what about positive selft talk what about positive reappraisal what about visualization what about other more active strategies like doing some yoga or exercise or taking a walk and what we know is that emotion

regulation is more complex than we originally thought it was it's not just about downregulating the negative emotions like anger management and Stress Management how many of you have ever taken a course in optimism induction think about it it'd be nice to teach a little bit of strategies to be more optimistic wouldn't it or happiness maintenance the way we think about emotion regulation is in terms of helping people prevent unwanted emotions reducing unwanted emotions initiating emotions that may be necessary to achieve a goal a good leader for example has to be skilled at inspiring his team

or her team you got to be able to generate a feeling in a room so that people can be thinking in the way that you want them to think like getting in that yellow for that brainstorming session or in that blue for that that reflection maintenance to me is interesting how do you maintain emotions I always joke that I like to do work in coffee shops it's just the way I like to do my work and uh often times I do my writing in in different coffee shops around town and my brother will call me

and he'll say things like you know how you doing say I'm doing fine well I hear all that noise in the background where are you I'm in a coffee shop oh so you're working in a coffee shop yeah so the university pays you to sit in coffee shops um sort of um and like that's okay and all of a sudden like you're in that flow State you're feeling really positive you're working you starts maybe I should be in my office you know am I doing something wrong maybe I should be out of here so you

have these Pleasant emotions that people try to pull away has anyone ever had a dream still in their life someone who like you know wow it's great that you get to work in coffee shops you should come work where I am and my question is how do we bring people back up how do we keep them there so when I get off the telephone I'm feeling irritated and annoyed at my brother that I can go back to that place where I was feeling flow and focused we spent a lot of time thinking about how do

you measure this thing called emotional intelligence and you can do a number do it a number of ways first is you can ask the person directly we're going to try that right now as a matter of fact we're going do it a little differently I want you to look at the person or the people um that you came with just take a look at them for a minute anyway look at somebody else look at look at a stranger somebody you might know and I want you to just ask yourself this question how much more emotionally

intelligent are you than that person raise your hand if you think you're more emotionally intelligent than the person you're with no nobody's going to do that now here's the interesting thing about that when I've done research on this like paper and pencil like secret with my even yellow undergraduate students 80% say they're more intelligent and emotionally intelligent than their neighbor than their partner for those of you who are familiar with like probability and statistics you know 80% can't be smarter than the other 80% so asking the person directly is probably not the way to go

that self-report is complicated right well if you ask me like how emotionally intelligent are you I say well compared to my father I am an emotional genius compared to the Dal Lama you know I need some work so there's no reference point it's very complex our our knowledge first of all where have we learned to be emotionally intelligent you can ask other people how many of you would rely on your children's rating of your emotional intelligence uh we won't go there today but we tend to find that informant reports or sometimes people call it 360

reports are really not about your skills but about your reputation whether or not they like you or not not necessarily how skilled you are at something and then finally you can ask the person to solve emotion related problems which is the way our Center manages the study of emotional intelligence so Peter and Jack Peter salv and Jack mayor and David kuso developed a test years ago called the mosquite which was an ability-based assessment tool it was asking people to solve problems look at facial expression decode them give you complicated vignettes and say what would be

the best way to manage that situation what we're doing now in our Center is working with gaming companies to build virtual tests we're using avatars so we're going to bring people into a world and having uh requiring you to sort of look the world and make judgments about expressions and deal with emotions which we're very excited about but unfortunately self- knowledge is quite limited and it's interesting because our world has tried to move towards very sort of simple ways of doing this and uh what our research shows is that measuring emotional intelligence by asking people

like how good are you regulating your emotions and things of that sort just doesn't have any validity everybody wants to know what does this predict about people's lives we've done a lot of studies on students young adolescen what we know is that children with higher emotional intelligence tend to experience less anxiety they tend to have less depression they tend to be less likely in middle school and high school to abuse alcohol drugs and cigarettes they tend to be less aggressive and less likely to engage in bullying Behavior they also are perceived by their teachers and

their peers as being better leaders they're more attentive and less hyperactive and what's important in our nation right now is economic performance and what we should show is that children with higher emotional intelligence just do better academically they have those skills to manage those challenging moments what's interesting to me about this work is how powerful that skill of emotion regulation is in determining the quality of your academic performance and my my own life is an example I was unfortunately um and not well when I was in my early 20s my mother passed away right before

I came and went to graduate school school and I remember being in that room taking the Jes to go to graduate school and it was just a few months after my mom had passed and just literally like this who's the protagonist who's the antagonist I mean I was so just in The Grieving space that I couldn't focus I couldn't take the test well and I I realized it had now as an adult a bigger adult that it had nothing to do with my ability to problem solve it's just that my emotional life was interfering at

that moment in my life with my cognitive ability and what I hope happens is that people take that more seriously that people understand the nuances that some people have anxiety around testing um some people are um in a place in their life where they're not capable of doing complex problem solving because of outside influences like that child who is being bullied in school we've worked on emotional intelligence among Educators themselves and look what we know they're more positive about teaching they receive more support from their principles go figure they even report greater job satisfaction have

less burnout we've moved beyond the study of emotional intelligence in children and adults and gone into studying the Dynamics of classrooms so what we do is we work with other researchers to develop systems of coding the quality of interactions between teachers and students and then what we do is we use those data to predict performance so for example a teacher who uses more positive non-verbal Behavior a teacher who regards a students perspective and brings them into the learning environment who uses less cynicism and sarcasm and when we code that using videotaped analysis and then we

use it to predict things we find the following students in those classrooms are just more engaged Learners they have better quality relationships with their teachers they're more pro-social and they perform better academically so how many of you are starting to have more buyin for the power of emotional intelligence anyone if you don't raise your hand you have to leave we've also had the opportunity to study managers and leaders of organizations because people want to know well what does this have to do with the real world you know when someone's in their 20s 30s 40s 50s

and Beyond in the workplace and as you can see here adults managers of organizations are just better off when they have these skills as a matter of fact um we did a study with a Fortune 100 company recently where we had the hundred managers of this of this company take our test of emotional intelligence and we had the CEO the CFO and the COO of that organization do a rating of The 100 managers and that last question was one I just experimented with which was this if you had leave this company tomorrow would you do

anything to take that person with you and to rate every one of those 100 managers on that particular question that was the strongest corlet of emotional intelligence people just want to be around people that have these skills and it's interesting for me because when I'm here I am at y University working with some of the brightest students in the world and I have teach I used this is my first day teaching was in this classroom actually and I had about 380 students in my class and I looked at all of them and I said wow

in four years from now on paper you're all going to look exactly the same you have great SAT scores you have perfect GPA you've studied abroad in a country that I've never heard of you play an instrument that only three people know how to play but you're going to go apply for this job and you know when you I get about 30 40 50 applications a year to work in our center now I don't look at their grades I mean who cares at this point I know they're smart enough to do the work so what

are the things that I'm looking for it's can they work in it as a team do they make you feel comfortable I actually because I like coffee shops I have what I call the coffee shop criteria which is in the first 30 seconds if I say to myself I would love to go to have a cup of coffee with this person and just shoot the breeze that's my decision making and because I get that feeling that they're going to be interesting they're going to be creative they're going to they're going to know how to ask

you questions all the things that we tend not to really teach people always ask how does this thing called emotional intelligence develop and of course you have nature and nurture simple psych 101 how many of you just for curiosity are biologically predisposed like me to be more anxious and worried about things anyone okay the front row so you must really want they're like we we came to learn we want those strategies so that's the nature piece right we all have a temperament a personality and some of us are more just prone to being attuned and

aware of emotion we also all grew up in a family some of us grew up you know were raised by wolves some of us were raised by people who really knew a lot about emotion I have a question for all of you how many of you believe as you think about your own childhood for a minute you didn't think you were going to have to do that today like don't do that to me believe that you grew up in an in a family environment where emotional intelligence was nurtured please raise your hand so a few

of you that's my goal is for that number to be much larger in the next decade every parent should be learning these skills every parent needs to know how to talk to their students about emotions I did a training I was at a boarding school yesterday in Upstate New Hampshire and I had about 150 200 parents and one parent said so you mean it's okay for my son to be sad you know I'm like yeah it's okay what do you mean like what do you mean by that she's like well like you know I just

wanted to be happy all the time I said that's great but the reality is that he's going to have some disappointment in his life and you know sometimes being there for a little while think about the some of our most creative people are the artists of Our Generation that sadness is what inspired them to develop their products as a matter of fact we now have a study that shows that people who are more creative just biologically who are more um open to experience only are rated in terms of their products as being creative when they're

high in emotional intelligence and think about it why is that because when you're creative and you're trying things out you're going to fail a lot you're going to have disappointments a lot and unless you have those strategies to manage that disappointment that creative potential just will not be Unleashed our goal is to make sure as I say everybody with a face gets trained in emotional intelligence because what we know is that when you have that training from preschool to high school and Beyond you have those important outcomes in life so I think we're here I

asked you this question already you know most of us didn't get this training and most of us don't have concrete tools so I want to share with you for my last few minutes is what do we do in schools and other organizations about this thing called emotional intelligence and we've developed an approach that we call ruler people in New Hampshire tend to call it ruler makes me crazy but it's okay and the idea behind ruler is that educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all not in an original quote by the

way Millennia ago this was said my question is why is it taking till 2014 for our nation's education system to take this seriously still pushing we have a lot of work to do we have what we call the anchors of emotional intelligence how many of you remember when you were in school that there were rules classroom rules school rules right no running keep your hands to yourself only talk when you know this years ago is probably you know only talk when spoken to I mean all these crazy rules what we find is that how many

of you like to break rules I hate rules I love finding a way to break those rules we decided to move away from rules and say let's think about the environment that we want to create knowing that that positive climate in a classroom matters so much how can we be in um not what's the word I'm thinking of how can we be intentional about creating it so we ask kids and students how do you want to feel in school you'd be blown away by what they say they say I want to feel respected I want

to feel supported I want to feel valued I want to feel empowered I want to feel inspired and then we say well what do you have to do on a daily basis in order to have those feelings what are the behaviors that you can engage in to make sure that everyone in your learning environment feels that way and knowing that there's going to be conflict and aggression what can we do to prevent it and manage it and that's done from the leadership down to to the student level we all we've learned that mood meter already

building that self-awareness the third tool is called the metam moment as you can see it has six steps this is our tool for self-regulation we make very strong claims in our research that if you take the six steps of the meta moment seriously you can avoid the 12 Steps later um apologies for those of you who I just offended Step One is something happens how many of you have triggers like you know my triggers right like if you think about your home life it's like didn't we agree that you were going to do that remember

that or at work people who trigger you littlest things right the littlest things some big things too we want to teach people to be aware of their triggers we know that all emotions affect the way we think our physiology and our Behavior so what we're doing is giving children and adults that knowledge of how our emotions are affecting the shift in our thinking how many of you have been angry in the last month about something anyone how many of you know when you've been angry like you're angry about everything do you know what I mean

by that like I'm not just angry remember three years ago when we were on a vacation do you remember that time do you remember that do you remember last week you promised you were going to pick that up for me do you remember that and do you remember when our child was born I mean you it's like you just go back and you just start digging for that you know because anger is one of those emotions you just search for all the reasons we want to stop that from happening so you go to step three

and you take that breath you activate your parasympathetic nervous system and you take that breath and you bring that hijacked experience down a little bit so that your prefrontal cortex can help you to problem solve and and make sense out of it and do something CU When You're hijacked how many of you experienced that hijack honestly and there's no coming back I'm going for the jugular step we have see it's this is evoking a lot of emotions step four is seeing your best self for us it's important to have motivation to be regulated you know

I I joke a lot I say sometimes I take that breath try to come down and I say to myself wow how am I going to just rip your head off so it's not enough to just breathe you have to know how to shift your mindset and that's where our best self piece comes in where we teach children what does your best self look like what does it look like for you you know this bring this this lecture is bringing back memories because I got the idea for this best self piece working with my colleague

Robin and also by teaching a course where one of my students wrote an article about my course on emotional intelligence and the article title was the feelings master and I started I was a little embarrassed by of course you know like the feelings Master but then I started thinking like you know wow like how's the feelings master walk you know I have the feelings master has good posture I tend to be a schlepper you know no feeling and then the fing master has students you know I get some of those winners you know like Professor

bracket I've got a question but I'm not sure you're going to know the answer love those students you know and you know that feelings non-master is like all right you're kiding me right like you're kidding me you're kidding me did you know about the research that I do on emotions and judgments and Grading do you remember that so I can't go there I got to be the feelings Master the feelings Master says this is a teachable moment let's talk about that do you think that's the best way to approach your professor to engage him in

the process of higher order thinking and then when we have have that best self activated we can strategize effectively we can choose and use adaptive versus maladaptive strategies and then have more success in our social interactions knowing that sometimes problem solving doesn't work that you try it in the moment but you fail even I you know I've been working on this stuff for years even at home sometimes I think Mark you're the feelings master and then that that that piece from here says and he doesn't care right now go for it and then of course

you know I'm sleeping alone on the couch that night but you never regret taking a at a moment I can promise you that you never regret being your best self you always regret being disregulated problem solving we have to teach our children from our perspective to empathize to build perspective taking skills to not just look at it from the me me me me but from the we and the US Us in the hour so when we have conflict in schools what we do is say it's not just about you uh-uh how did you think the

other person felt what were they feeling just before that whole argument um got started and get them to really think about the dynamic in the relationship and that's our blueprint and very importantly we train everybody with a face I don't care who you are in a school whether you work in the front office or whether you work in the back office or whether you're the superintendent or the preschooler everybody's learning this stuff and we have a theory for why that makes a difference we don't just sit in coffee shops all the time by the way

we actually do do science and what we know is that when you train leaders teachers and staff when you train the classroom and give that curriculum in that classroom and when you bring in families and teach parents the same skills and the same tools that their children are learning great things happen you get to enhance the skills of all people in that environment and that also helps to shift simultaneously the culture so there's a Common Language so a superintendent can walk into the preschool and say hey how you feeling today the little boy will say

I'm in the yellow and me too what's your strategy I'm going to stay there and then we show in our research that when you enhance people's emotional intelligence and shift the culture and climate you get those important outcomes that we all care about for our children and the adults and involved in their education better engagement and achievement better relationships less bullying and aggression greater health and well-being do that at the end we've done a number of research studies to show that this stuff really matters experiments in schools to show that when schools can adopt this

approach these are the kinds of outcomes you can expect less anxiety and depression children become better problem solvers have greater social and Leadership skills experience fewer attention and learning problems and they also perform better academically that climate that I said matters so much we've shown that we can shift that as well we shift between 10 and 50% in just one year all three of these the emotional climate children feel more engaged they want to be there the instructional climate teachers become better instructors in general better modeling of language better classroom management so I'm going to

wrap up today by showing a short video um I have had the privilege to travel around the world to do this work and right now our approach called ruler is in about 700 schools throughout the world and many years ago I was in England where I began a lot of my International work and I had the opportunity to uh really do some interesting studies in England as well as create a um a a lab in a school and there was a little boy in this school who I never met until after he had been trained

in emotional intelligence his name is Gareth and Gareth was a little boy uh who was horrifically bullied in his elementary school and then went to this Middle School that was very different they had embraced emotional intelligence and this is a poem that he wrote in his class on emotional intelligence about his experiences of bullying and the way he thought about it now as a little bit different than he thought about it previously you're ugly I know I have been told this you're silly I know I realized this you look like an alien I know this

has been pointed out to me you have big eyes I know I have looked in the mirror you can't be a pilot you're not smart enough it is possible I have considered this if every insult you invent it's St but it's true you point out my many failings and help me to improve as you highlight my many weaknesses you also highlight my strengths my ug needs to my kind personality my silliness brings laughter to the world my resemblance to movie Els only highlights my intelligence my big eyes betray my feelings and widen my view I

may not make it as a pilot but I could be you see every insult you invent gives me a view into your mind and know I have many problems I feel sorry for you why oh why do I feel sorry for you because your mind cannot breake free the wall of insults you build limits your mind and feelings so soon if you don't stop you'll turn in human and have the biggest problem of all learn this think about it so you know as we think about this boy's life in school how was he able to

get he was a CD failing student in fifth and sixth grade how could he have been successful ful when that's the way he felt about his life when that's the way he felt he thought other people felt about him Gareth went into the school where he was feeling much safer more confident he was developing skills and he wrote this poem and originally he you know they were doing public speaking and he said I just I'm not ready I'm I'm scared to share it because I don't know what's going to happen if I share it and

the teacher of course having been trained said well you know what Gareth that's okay you don't have to share it right now but is it okay if I share with other teachers he said that would be fine so here is now in this new Elementary Middle School the poem has been brought around and teachers come out Gareth my goodness you're so articulate Gareth that poem how meaningful how wonderful that poem was his self-esteem is building he says to his teacher a few weeks later I'm ready to read it to the class he reads it to

the class lo and behold he get the standing ovation from his peers they say we wouldn't treat anybody like that here that's not the way we do business in this school' and what's interesting about Gareth this is about three or four years ago now I've gone back to this school he's in high school now and uh I remember sitting just about two years ago in the cafeteria working you know having meetings and he came up sir do you remember me I said of course I remember you I've been exploiting you throughout your America um and

um I said of course I remember you and he goes you know I want to be a poet I said that's fantastic and I said he goes and I have a girlfriend now I said great and he says do you want to read some more of my pumps and absolutely and he's like brings me this pile of things and he walks away and he says you know sir look for me on the bookshelves you know I can take credit for Gareth CU I wasn't his teacher um and I get emotional just thinking about it because

when I think about what it was like for him like it was for me in elementary school not having that ability to connect not having that ability ability to feel safe and and valued how could you survive in that environment now he's in a place where he feels safe where he feels valued where he can succeed from the reading of his poem we know that he's academically gifted but you can't show your academic or cognitive ability if you're feeling oppressed or you're feeling unvalued or not valued so I will end uh today by reading a

poem but roomate that really gets out the value and importance of all emotions this being human is a guest house every morning a new arrival a joy a depression a meanness some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor welcome and entertain them all even if there are a crowd of Sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture still treat each guest honorably he may be clearing you out for some new Delight the dark thought the shame the malice meet them at the door laughing and invite them in be grateful for whoever comes because

each has been sent as a guide from Beyond so I want to thank you for your time and attention and I hope you have a wonderful wonderful weekend here at Yale it was uh an indeed a privilege and a pleasure to present to all of you thank you