Reflections on Marc Brackett: “Emotional Intelligence as a Superpower”

Recently I was sent a You Tube video featuring Marc Brackett, the Director of the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence, speaking at Google. The title of the talk is “Emotional Intelligence as a Superpower”.  I had heard Marc Brackett give the keynote speech at the 2017 Emotional Intelligence Congress held in Oporto.  Much of the content of the two talks overlapped.

Marc spent a considerable time in the beginning of his talk on the Mood Meter.  This is a simple 2×2 quadrant using two axis: high & low energy and pleasant-unpleasantness resulting in four coloured quadrants yellow, green, red and blue is very popular. (See http://moodmeterapp.com/).  According to Marc we all under go 3-5 emotional shifts/minute or around 4000 different emotions/day.  How you can be empathetic towards someone undergoing that many emotional shifts defies belief.  That is why I prefer to work on temperament which is a person’s emotional predisposition and stays relatively constant.

Another section was spent on the done extensive surveys of schoolchildren, first year university students, and teachers he and colleagues had done.  According to Marc all three groups said they suffered from Stress, Fatigue and Boredom and what students really hope to feel is not happiness, excitement or motivation but “being loved”.  He also reflected on his own student life where he said he was frequently bullied.  When he gave a presentation to an audience containing his two older brothers and related his bullied upbringing, both brothers post the talk accused him of being weak.

Finally Marc talked about the RULER EQ model.  The RULER skills are: Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating emotions.  Again the Mood Meter was pitched as helping you recognise and understand your emotions.  However the section on Regulating Emotions was shallow.

If you do watch the video you can play it at 1.5 speed as Marc speaks slowly.  My immediate reaction to the video is how much Marc resembles Woody Allen.  Not only has he had seven therapists he makes the wonderful quote “I worry about worrying about how I worry so much.”

Marc is a wonderful example of the Doublechecker in action.  If I was Marc’s therapist here are four themes I would try to get him to adopt:

1. The greatest tragedy of all is to feel that at the end of your life you have missed the boat: Carpe diem.
2. Don’t be anxious about your anxieties. Remember anxiety can be energising.  Resist the tendency to blame others and try some optimism.
3. Don’t try to build too much safety into your environment. Remember the only constant in the world is change.
4. To the man who is afraid everything rustles.

I would also get him to watch this webinar The Secret to Lifting Your Level of Emotional Intelligence.

This blog was first published on LinkedIn 16 July 2018.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reflections-marc-brackett-emotional-intelligence-superpower-golis/?published=t