“Emotion regulation is not a luxury. It’s a core life skill we can all learn” says Marc Brackett, PhD, Founding Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in his book, Dealing with Feeling: Use your Emotions to Create the Life you Want, 2025. He proceeds to avow “It is essential for ….. thriving personally and professionally.” His words are a distinct clarion call to sit up and take notice.
Seriously, feelings you say? We all know what it is like to experience emotions on a wide spectrum of mild, medium to heightened arousal. We have been on a roller coaster ride of feeling emotions from uplifting joy or hope to neutral tolerance or indifference, to plunging sorrow or fear. It is a very fundamental aspect of human experience. Yet, we respond to them awkwardly. Some of us view them with
suspicion, apprehension, or embarrassment. Feelings seem to be outside of the scope of our control.
For all the sophistication that human beings have mastered over the ages, emotional regulation continues to stump us. What does it mean to be able to ‘regulate’ our emotions? Growing up we learned that it is inappropriate to wear our feelings on our sleeves. We were taught that airing them out loud to others is uncool or improper. What is a person to do? We cannot not have feelings. Are we expected to control, normalize or adjust them? The understandable inclination is to ignore, minimize, deny, or suppress them. At least, the negative ones anyway.
Therein lies the danger of slipping into unhealthy behavioral trends of bottling up feelings till you explode in a fitful rage, or spiral down into depression, or churn into a tailspin of anxiety. None of these are reasonable or desirable alternatives. To prevent these developments, we want to be able to accept and manage our emotions in a healthy and purposeful manner.
“Emotion Regulation is 100% learned”, declares Marc Brackett.
This is critical for our personal wellbeing, healthy relationships and …… lo and behold, for success in the workplace. Many are loath to consider emotions as being a valid part of the work culture. Yet the relevance and necessity cannot be understated. It is a crucial ingredient in a winning recipe for flourishing at work. This is in stark contrast to a losing formula for floundering at work.
Brackett offers us an easy to remember formula that he calls RULER. He promotes social and emotional learning (SEL) for people of all ages, from K-12, college students and adults in any and all settings.
5 skills of Emotional Intelligence in the acronym RULER:
- RECOGNIZE emotions that are coming up for you and others
- UNDERSTAND why they are happening, the cause and consequences
- LABEL them as accurately as you can, fine-tuning your vocabulary of emotions
- EXPRESS them carefully being mindful of place, time and social context
- REGULATE and manage them learning and using helpful strategies listed below
Strategies for Regulating:
- Quieting your Mind and Body
- Redirecting your Thoughts
- Cultivating emotional strength through relationships
- Optimizing your Emotion Regulation Budget
These are fancy, alluring terms that can leave us curious as well as somewhat perplexed. What do they all mean? We shall deconstruct these strategies for regulation in the next blog post.
For now, get started by beginning to apply the skills of the RULER rubric that are easy to understand and translate into action. Imagine being able to employ your unpredictable emotions to enhance the life of your choice. How empowering is that concept?!