Welcome. I'm Kevin Miller. This is a podcast for your personal evolution. In this episode,

we choose our responses and they define our lived experience. Here's a quote. 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 a quote by Holocaust survivor Victor E. Frankel that headlines

a new book that's titled Dealing with Feeling. Use your emotions to create the life you want.

The book comes from my guest in this episode, Mark 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. So Mark's 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 Victor Frankel that came from

his time in a concentration camp and what Mark has devoted

his life to is saying that no matter what happens to us, we get to choose how we respond.

My experience of humanity is that no matter what happens to them, us, even great traumas,

tragedies and victimizations, what harms us more than the incident or the event is how we conceive of it and how we ultimately then respond, choose to respond.

My concern is that culturally, we've come into a place where we just don't really believe this or we don't want to.

We feel it's our right and it's just

to respond to our pain with pain and to say otherwise is actually offensive. Looking at the

mental health stats today, I don't think this perspective is helping us that it's working.

Well, this is the conversation you're about to hear with Mark Brackett.

Mark previously authored the bestselling book, Permission to Feel.

And most recently, along with Pinterest co-founder Ben Silberman, Mark and his team co-created the Apple award-winning app, How We Feel, that was designed to teach emotional skills

and enhance our well-being.

...