— This video is one of a series designed to spark a conversation about emotional expression and relational intelligence. Emotional intelligence or emotional quotient (EQ) is commonly understood to mean emotional self-awareness, the ability to name, understand and manage our emotions. We’re also talking about Relational Intelligence. That is, the acknowledgment that emotional connection happens…
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The Relational Book for Parenting, Part 7: Do We Focus on Roles or Relationships?
When we shift from roles to relationships, we shift from acting on others to acting with them
All parents hold uncertainty. All parents play. Relational capacities like these are already active in millions of homes across the world. When we practice relational capacities in a mindful way, we center our relationships. The choice to center relationships holds a powerful promise: It is what ultimately can get us unstuck in all aspects of…
The Relational Book for Parenting, Part 6: Why Is Play The Answer for Businesses and Families Alike?
Both families and buisnesses can focus too heavily on hierarchy, roles, control, and risk-averse decision making
One of the most generative ways to leverage the power of play in our lives is by seeing it as a force for making organizations more lateral. Play is equally powerful in small organizations, like families, or big organizations, like companies. In either case, play shifts our daily interactions away from roles and more toward…
The Relational Book for Parenting, Part 5: Tracking the Powerful Influence of Context
Understanding the role of context helps our kids to take a wider view of their relationships
Part 5: Taking context into account is a central capacity for understanding the ups and downs of our relationships. From our book, The Relational Book for Parenting. “Considering context invites us to track stories, events, and ideas around us that impact the meaning of what we are experiencing. Contexts can be emotional, familial, social, cultural, historical,…
The Relational Book for Parenting, Part 4: We Live the Stories We Tell
What can we do when a story we carry about ourselves is harming us?
Part 4: If we want to live more fulfilling lives, sometimes we have to change our stories. Relational intelligence grows in the back and forth of relating, of conversation. But there can be challenges in how we relate. We can hold stories about ourselves and other that are not helping us. One of the most…
The Relational Book for Parenting, Part 3: Witnessing Our Children’s Difficult Emotions
Is rushing in to fix our children's emotional challenges about ending their discomfort, or ours?
Part 3: Witnessing and supporting the difficult emotions of our children helps them learn to self-regulate in the back and forth of relating. Frustration, sadness, fear or rage are difficult emotions to witness, but the people we love sometimes need for us to witness and hold difficult emotions for them. We can grow our capacity…
The Relational Book for Parenting, Part 2: Labeling Our Emotions
How we name our emotions determines who we are becoming
Part 2: We can learn to identify our emotions, but we should always do so with care. We live in a culture that suppresses emotional expression in boys and girls alike. As such, helping ourselves and our children learn to identify the full range of emotions we are feeling is important work for all of us.…
The Relational Book for Parenting, Part 1: Where Are Our Feelings Created?
We assume our emotions are born inside us, right? Yeah, well, not so fast there, my friend…
Part 1: So, where do feelings get created? Here’s a comic strip from The Relational Book for Parenting. There is a lot of great work being done to grow our collective awareness of the central role emotional expression plays in our lives. Social emotional learning programs in schools are helping children grow their emotional intelligence.…
The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer
Mark Greene explores how in American culture, men avoid all contact rather than risk even the hint of causing unwanted sexual touch.
Mark Greene explores how in American culture, men avoid all contact rather than risk even the hint of causing unwanted sexual touch.
The Man Box: Why Men Police and Punish Each Other
“Every time you do this, you become less free. A rat in a cage. A dog on a chain. A prisoner.”
Parenting in the Age of Uncertainty
Of all the capacities we have for managing change and chaos, play---the one we knew so intimately as children---still serves us best.
Of all the capacities we have for managing change and chaos, play—the one we knew so intimately as children—still serves us best.
What Powerful Capacity is Our Culture Stealing From Our Children?
We owe our children their birthright. Namely, their natural ability to form authentic, emotionally vibrant relationships.
Children are born with amazing capacities for forming relationships. This ability is what many parents see as the sweet emotional openness of their little ones. The challenge isn’t that we fail to teach our children how to form relationships, they are born knowing how. The challenge is we live in a culture that intentionally…
Five Terrors of Being a Man
Mark Greene explores how men’s wide ranging fears remain hidden behind a facade of false confidence.
How the Man Box Can Kill Our Sons Now or Decades from Now
Bullying and murder are bad enough, but the meta risk factors of the Man Box can kill our sons decades in the future.
Masculinity is Not Toxic
Our culture's narrow, conformist, violent, bullying version of it is.
Our culture’s narrow, conformist, violent, bullying version of it is.
9 Things Men are Not
Mark Greene believes men are not any one thing.