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Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Our Selves, and Our Society Thrive by Marc Brackett. Brackett is the founding director of the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence, and this book is both the accessible account of his RULER framework for emotional intelligence and a quietly personal examination of what the failure to develop emotional literacy in childhood actually costs in adult life. For the entrepreneur who grew up learning to read others’ emotions with precision while receiving very little support in understanding and naming their own, Brackett’s research maps the specific asymmetry: the emotional perception capacity and the regulatory capacity are not the same thing, and an exceptional development of one does not automatically produce the other. The RULER framework is practically applicable in ways that much EI writing is not — it gives the reader specific tools for the emotional recognition, understanding, labelling, expression, and regulation that the hypervigilant developmental environment required them to develop in service of others and rarely in service of themselves. What Brackett ultimately describes is the difference between emotional intelligence as a survival strategy deployed outward and emotional intelligence as a self-regulatory capacity deployed inward — and why the entrepreneur who grew up reading rooms needs both.