Emotional literacy | Daybreak Note #208 | Monday, August 1, 2021
How often do we identify emotions in ourselves and others?
Good morning, dear!
Happy August! Oh, the happy season of summer. I hope you’ve found ways to take a break and relax, to unknot your shoulders and take in deep breaths of outdoor air. Earlier this summer, we took a long stretch of time off work, longer than we have managed in years, and oh, it felt good. I felt calm, rested, hopeful.
One emotion surprised me, when I paused long enough to think through these new feelings flooding my body after 2+ weeks off. At first, I couldn’t name it. What is this buoyancy, this lightness, this curiosity that lines the edges of what is possible? What is this feeling?
When I realized it was (I think!) a feeling of hope, I also realized how long I must have been going without hopefulness. The pace of modern life can squeeze out the mental time and space necessary to believe that more and different things are possible. When you are simply running from one task to another, and trying not to miss any, doing more feels impossible. Even the idea of doing things in a new way can feel claustrophobic, rather than exhilarating. Getting through the day’s list is enough.
I hope my feeling of hopefulness stays. I like being hopeful. I like believing that there is room in life for new ideas and new possibilities, and the space and time to make them happen. There’s a happiness to hope, a built-in joy.
Noticing my renewed hopefulness reminded me of the very concept of understanding and naming your emotions, which was mentioned in a book I read over my break, Dare to Lead by Dr. Brené Brown. Brené is a researcher who delves into the very human side of leadership and connection. Her books are full of stories and data-backed insights, which makes for easy and fascinating reads.
A small but potent sliver of the book touches on emotional literacy — being able to understand and name emotions in ourselves and others.
She writes :”Understanding emotions in others and communicating our understanding of these emotions require us to be in touch with our own feelings. Ideally, it also means that we are fluent in the language of feelings, or, at the very least, conversational and somewhat comfortable in the world of emotions. The vast majority of people I’ve interviewed are not comfortable in the world of emotions and nowhere close to fluent in the language of feelings.”
Brené’s research points to there being 30+ core emotions that we should be able to name in ourselves and others to be emotional literate.
The average number of emotions people can actually identify in themselves and others, according to her research?
Three.
“I call it the ‘mad, glad, sad trilogy,’ Brené tells Marc Brackett, a Yale professor and author of Permission to Feel, in this terrific podcast episode.
In her research, she has identified 30+ distinct emotions we should be able to notice and name. (You can download the List of Core Emotions at Brené Brown’s website.) They include emotions you might expect, like joy and disappointment, and also other ones we might not think of as emotions, like judgment and belonging. (Oddly to me, hope is not on the list. Brené is working on more research on emotions, so maybe hope will be added.)
Brené points out that we can confuse our emotions. For example, guilt, shame, humiliation and embarrassment are distinct, with different meanings and reasons behind them, and yet when a feeling akin to one of them floods us, we may not know which it is. But if we don’t even know what we are feeling, how can we trace back why we are feeling that way, and regulate and respond well in that moment?
All this is making me wonder — So how does one gain emotional literacy?
I imagine we have to start, like so much else, by noticing.
What are you feeling today? What are they feeling today?
Let’s notice our emotion. Let’s name it.
With love,
Brianne