Social Emotional/BehavioralWellbeing/Mental HealthSkill BuildingResilience/Compassion

Dr. Ethan Kross with Donna Jackson Nakazawa

Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You

noon CST 7 pm CST

12:00 pm CST 7:00 pm CST

When

Tue, Dec 2, 2025 @ Noon and 7pm CST

Where

Virtual Event

Program Takeaways:

Parents and educators face a “double challenge”: they must manage their own emotions and help children manage theirs, knowing that emotions are contagious in families and classrooms.

Negative emotions aren’t toxic or “bad” by default; the key is learning when to engage with them and when to give them space, using tools like strategic (not chronic) avoidance and the passage of time.

Talking about feelings isn’t one-size-fits-all: venting alone can strengthen relationships but often leaves us just as upset; effective support combines empathic listening and gently helping kids (and ourselves) reframe and see the bigger picture.

Practical frameworks like WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) help adults and young people turn good intentions into action, making healthy emotional responses more automatic in heated moments.

Everyone can build a personalized “toolbox” of shifters—music, movement, smell, touch, mental time travel, and perspective-taking—so families and classrooms become places where emotional regulation is modeled, practiced, and shared.

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Kross will come to GPS with a fresh look at how we can regulate and better understand our feelings so they don’t take over our lives. Participants will learn simple strategies to master emotional decision-making for a happier, healthier and more productive life. Kross will also dispel the myths and provide a framework for how we can best navigate emotions without them controlling us—and help others do the same.

Anxiety, anger and disappointment are difficult emotions, but Kross asserts that rather than being good or bad, emotions can be our superpower providing information to help us navigate our lives better. Based on groundbreaking research, he will explain the mechanics of emotions, why we have them and how we can manage them effectively. Kross will present an array of simple tools we can use for greater happiness and success.

Kross is the two-time national bestselling author of “Shift” and “Chatter” and is an award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top-ranked Department of Psychology and its School of Business. He is the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New England Journal of Medicine and Science.

Please share information about this event with friends and relatives. All are welcome to the free weekly GPS events, and no registration is required.