Caring for and protecting companion animals involves strong emotions. Understanding how we feel and harnessing our feelings for productive solutions, recognizing and respecting how others feel so that we can bring them along is equally as important as we navigate lifesaving change across the nation.

Emotions impact every facet of the human experience. Decades of research shows that as we improve our emotional intelligence (EI), we can boost our decision-making, attention, memory, creativity, and relationships.

One of the producers of the Best Friends podcast, Aimee Charlton, chatted with Dr. Marc Brackett, the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and explored his work in emotion skills and his new book, Permission to Feel.

Just like the Best Friends goal of ending the killing of dogs and cats in our nation’s animal shelters by the year 2025, Dr. Brackett has the audacious goal of starting an emotional revolution. He is leading an initiative to shift the mindset of the nation around the value and importance of emotions.