Hey, Y’all—I’m Dr. Tracie! *waving*

I’m an educator and facilitator who uses emotional intelligence to help people, in the words of Toni Morrison, “give up the sh*t that weighs them down.” As a long-time global citizen, what grinds my gears most about life is how otherwise sane adults—myself included, in the past—get crushed down by the weight of our own emotional immaturity. Whether its engaging with family in person, arguing with bots and professional trolls online, or telling the truth to ourselves in our own heads, I believe we as a society have an extremely hard time taking responsibility for what and how we feel, wreaking havoc to our minds, bodies and relationships in the process.

In the workplace this happens all the time! In the U.S. especially, many businesses maintain a professional culture of emotional inauthenticity for the sake of “productivity”—much to the detriment of the organizational effectiveness being sought. While we value teams that observe camaraderie and joviality, we demonize and/or run from when there’s conflict and disappointment, failing to recognize both sides as normal, cyclical aspects of the working experience. And to me that SUCKS, since I’ve seen otherwise powerful groups and organizations completely fall apart from the simplest of interpersonal disagreements—not because emotions were activated, but because people lacked the skill, guidance and support for addressing them appropriately.

I get it: as a general rule, emotional regulation is the name of the game these days. And while I don’t think that’s a bad thing, my job is to help folks avoid that from being conflated with emotional suppression—which only leaves people with hurt, blocked, or insecure about showing up to the world (whether work or outside life) with open minds and hearts. In a world where empathy seems a dying art form, we need people who are in tip top shape with their emotional intelligence capacity. That is where I come in.