Marc Brackett is the founding director at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He’s got 45 minutes in front of an audience of international school directors and administrators at the International School of Stuttgart.

He’s engaging. He’s got the crowd on his side right off the bat. 

We start by looking at a grid titled How are you feeling? Energy is on the Y axis, Pleasantness on the X axis. You can be, at your worst, at a -5, -5 (major bummer!) and at your best at a 5, 5 (oof, that seems energy sapping to me). We’re all somewhere in between, in reality. I’d have a hard time saying where I am at the moment … perhaps a cautious upper right quadrant. 2, 3 or 3, 2. Doing okay. 

Marc asks us if we are in a good place for learning. I think I am. Feeling rested, laptop out, talking with you and organizing the thoughts as they come. Listening to an engaging speaker with a successful career, who at this very moment is talking about his own need to constantly figure out what he is doing, why he is doing what he is doing, and what he should be doing. Good to have company!

He shares with us that about 80 percent of folks across the world are in the left hand quadrants, the ones on the negative side of 0 on the Pleasantness axis. Described by words like stressed, anxious, exhausted, lonely, overwhelmed. 

And students? In his studies, the most frequent adjectives students use, about themselves, during school, are tired, bored, and stressed.

Ouch. 

The theme of this conference is Human Flourishing. Tired, bored, and stressed are probably not the first adjectives we would associate flourishing, and certainly not the type of profile we would want for our students.

Marc may be going a different direction for his presentation than my thoughts. My thoughts are going here:

What would the parallel school universe look like in which it is the minority of students who feel tired, bored, and stressed? A universe where it would be odd to be excited when class is cancelled, when a snow day keeps you at home. A place where students wouldn’t find alternate activities during classes to keep their interest. Maybe it’s a place that doesn’t have classes, I’m making an assumption there, aren’t I? It’s so hard to think outside of the box, even in a parallel universe.

On the other hand, maybe I’m still tracking with Marc. The slide “Emotions Matter for Learning” is really the core of the message, isn’t it? It’s not that we want our students pegging out at 5, 5 all the time. We want our students to be comfortable in the space that they are. We want them to be able to manage their emotions. And to do that, we probably have to give them, as goes the title of one of Marc’s books, “permission to feel.”

Marc shows us data on where children learn about emotions. It isn’t encouraging. Some learn something in the home, most learn less at school. He backs this up by showing us US data, lined up with a survey he asked us to fill in before coming to this conference. The results are the same: ⅓ of us reported that we had a “feelings mentor,” ⅔ said they did not – and that is true here in the room and for the US as a whole. 

And the characteristics we cited that our feeling mentors’ have? Well, the top three, again in the US and in this room, are empathetic, non-judgemental, and good listeners. The opposite? People who are judgemental and instill fear.

I’m going to jump to my conclusion, which I think is Marc’s, too, or at least one of his conclusions. 

We can’t build an education system based on judgement and fear and expect students to describe themselves without using the adjectives tired, bored, and stressed. Those are reactions to being judged and being manipulated by fear. Sorry to say it, but, well, schools are really good at judging and using fear (of failure, of bad grades, of being highlighted in class as not knowing, of appearing that you don’t know, of not being prepared) … The list is long. 

Perhaps we should focus more on being co-creators with students? Empathetic listeners?

To finish, Marc tells a story of sharing his research for colleagues at Yale. He tells us that there was some disappointment in the room that Marc focused on emotions, on the need to be nice, on permission to feel, to put it succinctly. He says he finished and one colleague said, literally:

“We produce Nobel Laureates, not nice people.”

And Marc tells us he thought this, standing there in front of this colleague:

“We’d produce a whole lot more if we worked in an emotionally healthy space.”