“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” This is the quote by Holocaust survivor Viktor E Frankl that headlines a new book titled, Dealing With Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want. The book comes from my guest in this episode, Marc Brackett. Mark is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine at Yale University. Marcs research for over 25 years has focused on the role of emotions and emotional intelligence in learning, decision making, creativity, relationships, health, and performance. The quote from Viktor Frankl that came from his time in a concentration camp, and that Marc has devoted his life to, is saying that no matter what happens to us, we get to choose how we respond. And my experience of humanity is that no matter what happens to them, even great traumas, tragedies, and victimizations, what harms them more than the incident or event is how they conceive of it and how they respond. My concern is that culturally we have come into a place where we don’t believe this. We feel it is our right and it’s just, to respond to pain, with pain. And to say otherwise is actually offensive. Looking at the mental health stats these days, I don’t think this perspective is working. This is the conversation you’re about to hear with Marc Brackett. Marc previously authored the bestselling book, Permission To Feel and most recently, along with Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann, Marc and his team co-created the Apple award-winning app, HowWeFeel, that was designed to teach emotion skills and enhance well-being.

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