I was devastated by that.

And to make matters worse, I have a terrible sense of direction.

Now I'm not sure if you're familiar with the UC Santa Cruz campus, but if not, I want you to imagine a huge forest with a bunch of classes stuck in different parts of it.

As a joke, my high school friends actually gave me a watch with a compass on it so I get from place to place.

And you know, they were right.

I needed a compass that year, but not one that would get me from class to class.

One that would help me find my way to live a more happy and more fulfilled life.

You see, when I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz, I was lost and unhappy.

I was taking courses in computer science that I hated because I was told, major in computer science, you'll get a good job, you'll make a lot of money, and you'll be rich and happy.

I was following this motto, suffer now so you can be happy later, and most importantly, don't question it.

But my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, she did question it.

And she asked me, why are you taking these courses?

And I was like, what do you mean?

I have to take these courses.

And she's like, no, actually, you don't have to take these courses.

You can choose to drop these courses and major in something you enjoy learning about.

And to me, this was a moment.

Because you see, up until that point, I never asked myself what I enjoyed learning about.

To me, that question seemed indulgent.

Luckily, she pushed me to take a class called Personal Empowerment, taught by Professor

Frank Andrews.

And Frank taught me that paying attention to what makes me feel alive, what makes me feel happier, is not wrong, and it's not a luxury.

It's actually critical to my happiness and also to my success.

Most importantly, Frank taught me that paying attention to my emotions and using this information to make decisions in my life was the compass that I needed to live a more fulfilled and happier life.

I thought getting into UC Santa Cruz was the worst thing ever.

It turned out to be the best.

Because after that class, I started to live a more fulfilled and happier life.

I actually started to do things that I enjoyed more, that I was drawn to.

And I decided to become a teacher.

Now fast forward about 10 years, I find myself teaching AP Economics to 17 and 18 year old kids who are really smart, really hard working, and a lot of whom are actually also really detached from their emotions.

All of whom are really stressed, and some of whom lack social and interpersonal skills.

Now here's the thing.

I don't teach a discipline.

I teach people.

And I wanted my students to have the skills that so fundamentally changed me.

These skills that amount to what Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence.

And he defines emotional intelligence as the ability to monitor one's own and other people's emotions, to label these emotions appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide our own thinking and ultimately our behavior.

It includes components such as these, self-awareness, social skills, empathy, self-regulation, motivation.

Take a look at these for one moment.

If you haven't used at least one of these in the last 24 hours, we really need to talk.

Because we use these things all the time.

Ten minutes ago, when I was backstage, I looked like this.

Because it's scary to speak in front of a thousand people and be recorded, right?

I had this negative self-talk telling me, oh, no one's going to want to listen to this, you're going to make a fool out of yourself, no one cares about this, right?

So I had to take a deep breath and remind myself why this is important to me, try to shift my focus as much as I can away from that voice.

And I decided to visualize something that makes me feel calm and centered, that puts me in the present moment.

And for me, it's the incredibly cute pictures of my kids.

Yeah, thank you, I appreciate that.

And so they helped me remember why this message is so important.

So this is my way, right, of self-regulating to do this.

But look, these skills come in handy in so many different ways.

Have you ever procrastinated because you didn't want to do something, right?

Motivation comes into play.

Have you ever been in conflict with someone?

What skills do we need in conflict?

We need to notice when we're triggered, when we're flooded.

We need to be able to actively listen to the other person.

We need to be able to empathize with their emotions and their feelings.

We need to be able to assert ourself in a non-blameful way.

These are all skills.

And by the way, these are skills that companies such as these highly, highly value, okay?

In education, teachers around the world ask themselves, do we provide 21st century skills to our students?

But this question is never answered in the world of education.

All the conferences I go to, it kind of like floats there.

And I'm curious, I want to know.

And so I ended up going to a conference where top HR executives from these companies listed the skills that they want people to possess before they work for them.

And here they are.

And this is in order of importance.

They want people who can work well with others.

That's hard to do.

Who can creatively solve problems.

They want people who have basic knowledge of subject matter.

They want people who can persevere through adversity.

And they want people who can be ruthlessly intentional with their time.

They also said that it's very, very difficult to find people who possess these skills.

And these are rooted in emotional intelligence.

Very difficult to find people who have these skills.

And so let me paint this picture to you right now.

These companies are offering emotional intelligence courses, like at Google, they offer a course called Search Inside Yourself.

And they're offering these courses because our educational system is failing to provide these courses that offer the skills the private sector so dearly wants.

But what if we did offer these skills in our education?

What if we offer these courses in schools?

Imagine the benefit to our society well beyond the workforce.

Imagine the benefit to our society, like for marriages and child rearing, if we had emotionally intelligent parents who could attune to their kids' needs, who could emotion coach their kids.

Imagine the benefit to our nation if we had lawmakers who actually knew how to self-regulate and be empathic and active listen.

And the thing that's crazy to me is that these skills are completely trainable.

You know, we assume that second-graders don't know how to multiply, how to divide, and how to read, and that's why we teach it to them, as we should.

Why do we assume that second-graders know how to self-regulate or self-manage or even be empathic?

You see, schools across the nations have embraced something called the Common Core Standards.

And with Common Core, you know, if you go to their website, there's actually a section in the Common Core Standard that says, what is not covered by the standards?

And in that section, there is a line that says, social, emotional, and physical development are not covered in the standards, which can only make sense if you live alone in a cave.

So why are we not offering, why is there not in the Common Core?

Maybe the research isn't robust enough.

Well, it turns out that Goleman writes in his book that there was a meta-analysis of 668 schools that implemented SEL programs, social and emotional learning programs.

Dr. Weisberg at the University of Illinois found that schools who do implement SEL programs see up to 50% of children improving achievement scores, 38% improving GPAs, suspensions dropping by 44%, and kids showing 63% significantly more positive behavior.

These results are remarkable.

Students are learning more, and schools are safer.

And they're remarkable to the point that the state of Illinois decided to implement SEL standards.

So in Illinois, every student is taught to recognize and accurately label their emotions, and to identify non-verbal clues as to how someone else feels, amongst many, many other things.

What happens in the other states?

Well, students in the other states spend about 1,700 minutes or so per week in the classroom, instructional minutes.

And if you were to ask a student explicitly, how many minutes are you trained in emotional intelligence?

They'll tell you.

The answer is either zero, or really, really close to it.

So I decided to take a leap of faith.

And I wanted to start to incorporate emotional intelligence lessons into my econ class.

And I wanted to start with something called mindfulness, because a mindfulness practice allows you to pay attention to your thought patterns.

And since what we're thinking about affects what we're feeling, it was a natural place to start.

So I made a decision that my students are going to meditate in the beginning of class.

First three to five minutes, my students are going to meditate.

And as soon as that thought came into my mind, I looked like this again.

And here's why.

That negative self-talk came back and said,

Ronnie, you're crazy. Your students are going to hate this, number one.

Number two, their parents are going to think you're initiating them into a cult.

And number three, you're going to lose instructional minutes.

So I had to take a deep breath again.

And remind myself why this was important to me.

And I actually sought social support.

I went to my friends and dear colleagues, supportive colleagues, who were encouraging me to do this.

And the next day, my students meditated for five minutes at the beginning of class.

And we did it for the rest of the semester.

And here's why.

Students loved it.

And they loved it because it was the only time in their really, really hectic day, and stressful day, that they could feel at peace.

They could have five moments of feeling centered.

And I actually ended up gaining instructional minutes.

Because with less time in the classroom,

I was able to cover more material because the students were present, were here.

Now, the most important thing, I think, out of all this, is that my students began to notice their mental chatter.

What was going on in their head, the comments, the questions that they asked themselves.

This is incredibly important because when students don't do well in school, they have a tendency to beat themselves up.

And I know this because I read their journals.

And we have one-on-one discussions.

And in my classroom, we have discussions.

And I want to just give you a sense as to why paying attention to our questions is so critical in the comments in our head.

And to do that, I'm going to take you through an activity that I do in class and that Professor Tal Ben-Shahal used to do at a class at Harvard.

I'm going to show you a picture.

And you have 20 seconds.

The question is, how many geometrical shapes can you see?

Do the best you can.

20 seconds.

Five more seconds.

Okay. So, any answers? Real quick.

Yes.

Seven.

Fifty.

Forty-three. Okay. You know what?

Here's the thing.

This is a very hard question.

I actually don't know the answer to it. I'm sorry.

But I have another question for you.

How many kids were on the bus?

Yeah. Some of you guys are like, well, hold on, hold on.

What kids? What bus? Right?

Some of you guys are like, what bus are you talking about?

All right. Let me go back real quick, okay?

There are five students on the bus.

And here's the bus.

Now, to my point, though, here's the thing.

When I asked you to pay attention to geometrical shapes, your brain did a very normal thing.

It focused on one thing and filtered everything else out.

Questions lead to focus, which leads to reality.

When our students ask themselves, why am I so stupid?

Why is everybody else smarter than me?

Why can't I never do this?

Their questions lead them to focus, which leads them to one reality, which completely filters away another reality of how can I improve?

When can I see my teacher to work this out?

Just like you didn't see the students on the bus.

These questions are not...

So, attention training exercises allow our students to notice what types of questions they're asking themselves.

And the amazing thing about this is that

I notice my students choosing to not beat themselves up and to actually say, okay, like, I'm going to stop that and I'm going to, you know, focus on how to improve.

So, I wanted to give more of that to my students, but I was limited with time because I was teaching AP econ.

So, I created a new course called Positive Psychology, which is an emotional intelligence course.

And I was hoping that 25 students will sign up because it's an elective course.

107 students signed up.

And the reason is because people care about this stuff.

People want to know how to become more emotionally intelligent and happier.

I want to share with you some quotes from some of my students' messages that they wrote the students who took the class.

So, I had a student really worried about a science test.

And what she said was basically, on my way to class, I noticed my anxiety and I was able to catch my negative voice telling me that I'm so stupid and I'm not good at science.

I told my voice that I can't give it the attention it wants right now.

I need to focus on the test.