Author Archives: Rebecca Gotlieb

How are you feeling? We ask this question often because our feelings are an important source of information about our internal lives, yet too often we do not ask or answer with sincerity. Marc Brackett, a Yale professor and Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, argues that our emotions, though messy, make us human. Further, when we deny ourselves permission to feel, as we often do, we as individuals and a society suffer adverse consequences. In Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and our Society Thrive Brackett draws on his extensive research expertise and personal experiences to teach skills for recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions. This book will be of interest to readers wishing to improve their own emotional lives, parents striving to better support their children’s social-emotional skills, educators wishing to implement high-quality social-emotional learning initiatives, employers and employees wishing to improve both the culture at work and the bottom line, and those interested in working towards a more equitable, creative, and compassionate society.

Although western philosophical tradition contends that emotions interfere with rational thought, since Darwin we have understood that emotions are important for our survival, shaping our learning, memory, decision-making, and actions, and health. Brackett details the ways in which our culture of ignoring emotions is adversely affecting all of us, and especially young people. Fortunately, emotional skills (i.e., skills for magnifying our strengths and navigating through social challenges) can be taught Teaching these skills can improve well-being, creativity, academic performance, relationship quality, and leadership skills. Brackett and colleagues developed the RULER framework to summarize the critical skills for building emotional competency.

The first skill in the RULER acronym is recognizing emotions through verbal and non-verbal signals in ourselves and others.  Factors such as culture, personality, context, and technology can affect our ability to recognize emotions. A “mood meter,” which sorts emotions based on the degree of pleasantness and on the degree of energy or arousal, can be helpful in understanding the range of emotions that exist and how they relate to one another.

The second RULER skill, and perhaps the hardest to master, is understanding emotions or seeking to answer why one feels a certain way. We should listen to others’ emotional experiences not just to be sympathetic but also to discover the underlying causes of their experiences. Brackett suggests we act like “emotion scientists” developing and testing hypotheses about why we feel certain ways and seeking to gather evidence through question-asking that supports or refutes these hypotheses.

Although there are over 2,000 emotion-related words in English, in general Americans, know and use relatively few emotion words. Labeling emotions facilitates making sense of our emotional experiences, regulating emotions, and helping one another. As such, labeling acts as a hinge between the recognition and understanding components of RULER and the expression and regulation components.

Expressing emotions, including negative emotions, and listening to others’ expressions of emotion are key for understanding, empathizing, and helping one another. Expressing emotions can help build supportive relationships. The final component of RULER, regulating emotions, provides individuals power over which emotions they experience, when and how they experience them, and how they express their emotions. Brackett suggests a few helpful strategies for regulating emotions, including mindful breathing to calm the body and mind, reinterpreting the cause of an emotional experience to change the experience, and planning ahead to avoid triggers of unwanted emotional experiences. He suggests also shifting attention away from stressful encounters, engaging in self-talk, and taking a moment to pause before making decisions with long-term consequences based on short-term emotions.

Emotional regulation is a lifelong journey. Parents can support their children’s emotional skills by honing their own emotional skills and by initiating family conversations about the emotional culture and expectations in the family. Both teachers and students are experiencing a high degree of stress in school. Students will do better in the classroom when they have a strong relationship with their teachers and when they can learn material that feels relevant and important. Teachers understand the importance of social-emotional learning but many feel that they do not have the time or know-how to teach it. Based on his extensive experience introducing the RULER curriculum to schools, Brackett suggests that strong school-based social-emotional learning initiatives require buy-in from all staff, should be practiced daily in a proactive (not reactive) manner and should be integrated into the curriculum across all grade levels and developmental stages.

With the clear, personal, and research-backed insight Brackett strives for nothing short of creating a better society, by encouraging us all to give ourselves and others permission to feel.

Brackett, M. (2019). Permission to feel: Unlocking the power of emotions to help our kids, ourselves, and our society thrive. Celadon Books.

Letting go of the concern “am I good enough” and reducing self-focused thoughts are critical for building self-confidence, according to clinical psychologist and author, Eileen Kennedy-Moore. She suggests that supporting kids as they develop relationships, habits of perseverance, skills for learning, and their own value and voice are the key to building authentic self-confidence. Kennedy-Moore’s book, Kid Confidence: Help Your Child Make Friends, Build Resilience, and Develop Real Self-Esteem brings parents scientifically backed, clear, and actionable practices for supporting self-esteem in children ages 6-12.

Previous efforts to boost children’s self-esteem (e.g., by giving every child a trophy) were misguided and counter-productive, leading to narcissism, reduced empathy, depression, and anxiety. Self-esteem is shaped by both natural temperament and experience. Children tend to have relatively high self-esteem in the first several years of life and then experience a reduction in self-esteem and an increase in self-consciousness in the pre-teen and teen years, when they become more self-focused.

Strong and healthy connections with parents, siblings, and friends are a critical source of confidence for young people. Kennedy-Moore suggests that how parents respond to children’s mistakes matters for their self-esteem. She suggests sequentially taking time to cool down, then broaching a conversation with the child by offering an excuse for why the child may have made the mistake, describing why the mistake was problematic, and encouraging the child to think about how he can ameliorate the situation and move forward. Conversely when children do something well, parents should show pleasure, offer measured praise, especially for actions within the child’s control, and teach children how to graciously accept compliments. Parents should teach children that we are all developing and have room for improvement. Sibling relations can boost self-esteem, but when a child compares himself to his siblings, which is common to do, problems may arise. Kennedy-Moore suggests parents avoid comparing siblings and instead celebrate each child’s successes and focus on shared values and traits in the family. To make friends children need not to avoid off-putting behaviors (e.g., emotional outbursts and tattle-tailing), so teaching self-calming exercises can be beneficially. Additionally, they need to build connections, so it is important to teaching about the role of reciprocity, kindness, and common-ground in friendships.

To experience self-confidence, children need to feel competent, which comes when they persist at difficult but worthwhile endeavors and when they let go of perfectionism, according to Kennedy-Moore. Parents can promote persistence by normalizing the experience of struggling.  Stories of their own struggles or stories of the child overcome struggles when she was younger are effective. Parents can help children notice their own progress, guide children to engage in activities that will capitalize on their strengths, and help children find mentors. Parents can help counter perfectionism by: creating safe spaces to make mistakes; focusing on the learning process rather than performance outcomes; teaching the value of matching one’s effort to the importance of the task; and emphasizing that parents’ love does not need to be earned. Kennedy-Moore also suggests encouraging self-kindness by modeling kind self-talk and making time for fun activities.

Children with low self-esteem may struggle to make even simple decisions. Parents can deconstruct common myths about decision-making, e.g., teaching that there is no singular perfect choice to be uncovered if one simply analyzes the situation thoroughly enough. Parents can give kids opportunities to make simple choices and show that we need to make the most of the decisions we make.

Children with low self-esteem may also feel different than their peers. Parents can help by teaching children how to talk about their differences with pride and how to deal with prejudice. Offering examples of inspiring people with similar differences, helping the child see himself as a whole-person and not just someone with one difference, and encouraging children to contribute their talents to help others are ways to reduce feelings of “differentness.” Additionally, teaching children about media biases can reduce the extent to which the media exacerbates their feelings of differentness. If children are facing bullying, parents can help their children learn to be a less attractive target for bullying by caring less about the bullying behavior and learning to ignore mean gossip. It may be necessary also to enlist help from a teacher.

Kennedy-Moore concludes by suggesting that helping children move past the frequent self-evaluation that undermines confidence, involves them experiencing compassion, awe, and deep engagement with activities.  These experiences connect us to other people, make us appreciate the vastness of our world, and ground us in the present moment. As children come to have more and more of these experiences, they will develop genuine and enduring self-esteem, which will set them on a trajectory of success and fulfillment.

Kennedy-Moore, E. (2019). Kid Confidence: Help Your Child Make Friends, Build Resilience, and Develop Real Self-Esteem. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.

Teaching is an emotionally and cognitively demanding job, a fact that the public does not always appreciate. To cope with these demands and help teachers feel and do their best inside and outside of the classroom Tina Boogren encourages teachers to engage in self-care by attending to their physiological and emotional needs in their daily life and relationships. Boogren, an esteemed educator, instructional coach, and author of several books about teaching and student motivation, wrote Take Time for You: Self-Care Action Plans for Educators. This book, organized around Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, is full of helpful strategies and thought-provoking reflection questions for leading a balanced and fulfilled life. Examples are targeted to educators, but this guide can be useful for any individual wishing to better himself. Readers are encouraged to review strategies for addressing needs and opportunities for growth, select appealing strategies, create a plan to deploy those strategies, monitor progress, and reflect both independently and with supportive others about the experience of engaging in self-care.

Boogren first encourages those on a self-care journey to understand their needs and reflect about how they spend their time. The first rung on her self-care ladder involves attending to one’s basic physiological needs for water, food, exercise, rest, and shelter.  She suggests that people can better attend to their physiological needs by, for example, drinking more water, planning healthy meals, scheduling exercise, removing electronics from the bedroom, and washing hands frequently.

The second need to be satisfied relates to being and feeling safe. Predictability, fairness, and preparation all contribute to feelings of safety. To increase safety and feelings of safety one can keep a schedule, write about feelings, learn and practice emergency safety procedure, and regularly schedule medical appointments. Additionally, people need to feel as though they belong to a group or community. Boogren urges readers to intentionally build relationships with colleagues and focus on being present when spending time with loved ones. Finally, people have esteem related needs.  We all want to feel appreciate and recognized. Those with healthy self-esteem believe in themselves, know what they want in life, accept compliments gracefully, communicate well with others and can learn from their mistakes. They do not gossip excessively, compare themselves to others, brag, or take large and impulsive risks. To build esteem one can reframe self-relevant thoughts to be more positive, set realistic expectations, and recite self-affirmations, especially during stressful times.

While needs related to bodily comfort, safety, belong, and esteem all stem from avoiding negative experiences, the final two needs that Boogren discusses—self-actualization and transcendence—pertain to a desire for opportunities for personal growth, realizing one’s potential, and connecting to communities and ideals beyond the self. Am I living my best life? Reflecting on this question, according to Boogren, can help one achieve self-actualization. The self-actualized individual can accept uncertainty and emotional complexity, feel appreciation, and demonstrate creativity. Choosing work that one loves, removing distractions, and training focus can help people experience immersive flow states in which they are completely focused on and happily pursuing a clear goal. When one has sufficiently satisfied each of the preceding needs, one can engage in the transformational experience of transcendence, or connecting to a higher purpose. Although transcendent experiences are hard to achieve, Boogren suggests that feeling inspired by books, movies, or music, cultivating feelings of gratitude (e.g., through writing thank you notes), meditating, volunteering, donating, and being kind and compassionate can all help.

This guide to developing a personalized self-care plan can help prevent burn-out and help individuals feel good. Self-care aids educators and other professionals in bringing themselves fully to their work and relationships and realizing their potential.

Boogren, T. H. (2018). Take Time for You: Self-Care Action Plans for Educators. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

New York University Professor and National Academy of Sciences member Joseph LeDoux recently published The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. He argues that understanding the evolutionary history of life on earth, which began 3.8 billion years ago, can help us understand ourselves, including our emotions and conscious experience. LeDoux reviews the organization and interrelation of species and discusses major evolutionary breakthroughs along the way to human consciousness. All life forms share certain basic survival behaviors—including managing resources, warding off harm, and reproducing–that were passed on from the last universal common ancestor. Although our mental life and its connection to behavior may be evolutionary byproducts of other selection pressures, our cognitive abilities have emerged as our unique advantage. LeDoux argues that our ability to engage in conscious thought can make us selfish and greedy, but it is also our best hope for combating looming challenges in our world to support our continued survival as a species.

The Deep History of Ourselves offers an overview of evolutionary history that is at once thorough and approachable. It wades into our ongoing quest to understand human consciousness by advancing sophisticated ideas about what consciousness is, how we got it, and why it matters. This book will be of interest to a general audience seeking to understand how, evolutionarily, humans came to be creatures who can think and feel emotions, including about the self.

LeDoux reviews the science showing that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago and that the first life form emerged 3.8 billion years ago when inorganic elements exposed to tremendous heat became biological compounds. Bacteria, which emerged 3.5 billion years ago, are the evolutionarily oldest life forms that still exist today. Bacteria have developed the ability to survive and proliferate in a great diversity of contexts. Unlike bacteria, eukaryotes can reproduce sexually, which was a major innovation in that it allowed for greater genetic diversity.

LeDoux then discusses bilateral symmetry which about 99% of animals have at some point in their development. Bilaterality contributed to greater mobility and more complex predator-prey relations. Bilateral animals typically have neurons that facilitate communication across long distances in the body and integrate sensory-motor information. Neurons support more sophisticated and flexible learning.

Spines were another major evolutionary change.  Vertebrates, which have spines, are a diverse group who trace their origins to an aquatic animal. Some major evolutionary developments among groups of vertebrates including the ability to breath oxygen from air rather than water, the ability to reproduce through intercourse, the ability to gestate young in an internal placenta, the four-chambered heart, and improved color vision and smell. Charles Darwin helped us come to understand that humans are related to and exist along a continuum with other animals.

About ten thousand years ago Homo sapiens began to dominate. LeDoux describes the components of our central nervous system, including that the hindbrain may support evolutionarily old reflexive behavior while the forebrain is responsible for evolutionarily newer cognition, learning, and memory. Cognition, according to LeDoux, is a biological process made possible by the nervous system. Our ability to hold information in mind, recognize patterns, and deliberate about and select among possibilities are among our advantageous cognitive skills. LeDoux draws on the work of other prominent scholars to show that we have become so smart not only because of these cognitive skills, but also because of cultural tools and knowledge, especially language, which have allowed us to efficiently amass and share knowledge across generations. These cultural forces even shape our conscious awareness of the self.

Departing from other prominent consciousness scholars, LeDoux argues that our subjective feeling experience is equivalent to our emotions. He argues that we cannot have unconscious emotions, but that nonconscious factors do contribute to the experience of emotion. LeDoux argues that much of the time we are not consciously aware of what we are doing, but that being able to take conscious control of our actions, and use that to transcend the present moment and build an understanding of the self, is a powerful ability. The front most part of the brain—the frontal pole—plays a key role in these sorts of highly integrative, complex experiences. Although other animals do have minds that can think, plan, and remember, and although all species share certain survival-related activities, it is difficult to know which animals have consciousness. Emotions, according to LeDoux, indicate that something significant is happening to you. We have a sense of self because it allows us to build personally relevant meaning through our emotional experiences of dynamic situations.

The Deep History of Ourselves is an important book because understanding human consciousness is critical given that our future as a species depends on our ability to use our conscious minds to address imminent global and environmental threats.

LeDoux, J. (2019). The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York, NY: Viking