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

Morra Aarons-Mele (0:00)

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Hi, I'm Morra 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 added 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. 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.

Perhaps my favorite moment in today's interview is when our guest, Marc Brackett, admits that people with entitled attitudes really set him off. I'm triggered easily, he says. He just puts it out there. Marc 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.

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. 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 Marc Brackett today, is present and relevant to how we all work and lead.

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