We recently connected with Marcelle Waldman and have shared our conversation below.

Marcelle, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

The name of my company is FeelLinks. Everything that I have created and intend to create in the future, is related to our ability to ‘link to our feelings and others feelings’ (feel links- get it?). The validity and normalization of all of our emotions, whether they are positive or tough, is vital to our mental, emotional, and physical health.

FeelLinks mission is to create a kinder, more compassionate, equitable, and inclusive world through resources that nurture and strengthen each individual child’s social-emotional connections and confidence.

My mission was created from the sadness, fear and heartache I feel about the staggering statics around the mental and emotional health crisis we are facing. With my roles as a mother, teacher, and parent and community educator, my deep passion focuses on the health and well-being of all children. I knew that I needed to do something to support our youngest generation by swinging the pendulum in a new direction. What could I put out in the world to nurture a more empathetic, kind, compassionate, equitable, and inclusive generation? Who will then pay it forward, use their skills, and raise the following generations to come?

FeelLinks tools and resources target a variety of social-emotional skills. One area that I focus on in particular is nurturing emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is our ability to understand our own feelings and the feelings of others, and how to use this information to guide our thinking, and actions. This serves us in four specific areas, including: self-awareness, social-awareness, self-management, and relationship management.

Self-awareness is our ability to understand and label our own emotions, our intrinsic motivation, perseverance, and self-confidence.

Social-awareness is our ability to sense and understand the feelings of others, read others voices, tones and expressions, and gain empathy.

Self- management is our emotional emotional self-control, optimism, growth mindset, and flexibility.

Relationship management is our ability to build bonds with others, manage interactions, collaborate, effectively manage conflict, teamwork, and leadership skills.

These are all vital life-skills that play important roles in various facets of daily life, including: performance in school and work, mental and physical health, social interactions, relationships and connections with others.

If we can all take the time to nurture growth in emotional intelligence in ourselves and our future generations, we will be working towards a common goal of a kinder, more compassionate, empathetic, equitable and inclusive world. YES WE CAN!

One of my favorite quotes by Dr. Susan David, says it beautifully:

“Acceptance of all our emotions, even the messy, difficult ones, is the corner, stone to resilience and thriving, and true, authentic happiness.”

Marcelle, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I live in a beautiful mountainous town just East of Seattle, called Issaquah, Washington, with my husband and two children, ages 10 and 12. I have been in the education field for over 20 years. I am a certified K-5 teacher, having the opportunity to teach some of our youngest learners in kindergarten and preschool, and also served as preschool director. I am am Youth Mental Health First Aid certified, have extensive coursework in psychology, and child development and continue to be a life-long learner.

When I think about where I am today and how I got here, I go back to my childhood. I lived with my mother and brother in a small town, in fact on an Island, not far from where I reside today. The school district we attended was one of the top in the State of Washington. While my mother had us there to attend these great schools, unfortunately I never really felt I fit in very well. Our family circumstances were quite different from those around us. I lived in a single parent home, and our socio-economics were quite different from my peers.

As I reflect back on my teenage years, I realized that I did not have any one person at my high school ask me how I was feeling, engage in any dialogue around emotions, or even simply check-in on me. This is not a dig on the staff; I just felt that academics were number one and there was little focus around emotions.

Everyone in my city talked about college; that’s what you were expected to do where I grew up. I was not well versed on the application process, nor was I in a financial position to go on college visits. I ended up applying for two schools – I am proud to say that I got accepted to both. At that point in time, I was adamant, I knew what I wanted for my future.

I chose to attend the University of Arizona for their elementary education, psychology, and dance programs. I completed courses in all three of theses areas, just as I set out to do! I graduated with an elementary education degree with a substantial number of credits in psychology and dance. My college years brought me another incredible piece of my life, I met the man that I would eventually marry. Here we are, 23 years later, married for over 16 years, two children, one dog, and a fulfilling life!

After returning from college, I began substitute teaching in order to find the right fit School District to settle in. However, my plan was quickly derailed when I suffered a large medical scare. At the age of 23, I suffered a stroke. I was effected on the left side of my body from head to toe. The doctors ended up finding that I was born with a patent foramen ovale (PFO), a hole between the left and right upper chambers of the heart, and a blood clotting disorder. These two factors together are what caused my stroke. I won’t get in to all of the details – but what I can tell you is that I felt defeated and very scared – but again, I did not express myself in the way I should have. I fought hard through tons of physical therapy, blood work, and heart procedures, and never communicated my feelings. As you can see, the lack of expressing my feelings, had become a theme for me.

When I became healthy enough to seek a teaching job, I began my career teaching Kindergarten in the very school district that I grew up in. I wanted to be the teacher that saw every one of my students, supported the “Marcelle’s” that felt they did not fit in, or have the confidence to speak up; I wanted to go back to my roots and make an impact.

My goal as a kindergarten teacher was to give all of my students a love for school and a love of learning, while guiding them socially, emotionally and academically. It was evident from the very start that social and emotional learning skills were going to be my number one focus. I created my own social-emotional lessons with puppets, dolls, role play, daily journal writing, and read alouds. As an additional bonus, our school held the District Autism Spectrum Program. This gave me a beautiful opportunity to learn new techniques to teach ALL learners. My teaching evolved, I changed, and my confidence as an educator grew. This was my place and I felt proud within these school walls – a very different feeling than growing up in the same four walls. My self-created toolkit for social-emotional learning skills was my treasure trove and I was impacting my students each and every day.

I had the great opportunity to teach kindergarten in that same classroom for many years – that is until I had two children of my own, Stella and Jack. Once my second child, Jack, was born, I left the classroom to spend a few years at home. Once he began preschool, I followed along and became lead-teacher and director of the preschool. When I began at the preschool, I implemented additional social-emotional resources, tools, and curriculum. The tried and true social-emotional learning activities that I created with my kindergarteners, were now being used with my preschoolers. Once my son graduated preschool, I graduated as well! He ventured off to Kindergarten, by that time my daughter was in second grade, and I was ready to begin creating something special from my ‘why’…

I created a business from my experiences as: a child, daughter, sister, educator, wife, and mother. These roles have driven my passion in creating something meaningful and tangible, nurturing mental, emotional and physical health in our youngest generation. Helping parents, teachers, counselors and therapist to support children from all walks of life.

In 2020, I founded FeelLinks. FeelLinks mission is to create a kinder, more compassionate, and inclusive world through resources that nurture and strengthen each individual child’s social-emotional connections and confidence. While FeelLinks was in my heart and mind before the pandemic began, it gave me time to put in to developing my business. At that time, I did not know how extremely vital these tools would be for our children after experiencing the trauma that brought on with Covid. I continue to feel great concern for the staggering numbers of depression, anxiety, behavior concerns and troubles in school – I have hope that we will support the next generation to have greater self-awareness, strong social skills, empathy, self-compassion, compassion for others, strong relationships, flexibility, attainable goals, leadership and teamwork skills. I want to see a world that is kinder, more compassionate, and always inclusive!

I continue to educate myself, listen to the struggles of parents and teachers, and witness the mental and emotional health surveys. Each of these are significant motivators in driving my work even further. This is why FeelLinks began with the creation of hands-on tools including a feelings journal and emotion plush dolls and has now expanded to include: free resources, parent and community courses, podcasts, Parenting Upstream Youtube Channel, Feel Trip: a journey through ordinary emotions children’s book, and more!

I will continue to put my heart and soul in to my passion business. I hope that you will follow along, share, learn, ponder, ask questions and educate others, and continue on this journey with me.

Since my years of growing up, I have certainly learned a lot about the need to express our feelings and how vital it is to our mental, emotional and physical health. I do not want children to find this out when they are adults. Let’s all work together to nurture our children’s emotional intelligence, helping them grow in self-awareness, social-awareness, self-management and relationship skills.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

One of the most special parts of FeelLinks is the connections with my customers. For that reason, I conduct all sales from my website; direct to the consumer. It is important to me to know and understand my customers; What are their roles? What do they want to hear? What resources will support them best? What collaborations and partnerships can be created? I send weekly newsletters, write articles, create and post other free resources- all of which are found on my site at myfeellinks.com. It is important to me to drive traffic to my site so that I can support as many individuals as possible.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Contact Info:

• Website: myfeellinks.com
• Instagram: @myfeellinks
• Facebook: @myfeellinks
• Linkedin: @myfeellinks
• Twitter: @myfeellinks
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv9x8A5uCtXAKYWlImHX5ag

Image Credits
Genevieve Kathleen Photography (images 2-5)