Emotion Surfing is a nonprofit delivering interactive, hands-on emotional intelligence workshops for elementary, middle, and high school students, advised by researchers from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
Emotion Surfing exists to give students real command over their emotions. Not fixed rules, but skills they can ride like a wave: recognizing what they feel, understanding why, and choosing what to do next. Through student-led workshops, peer mentorship, and a curriculum grounded in the Yale RULER approach, we equip students to navigate the emotional complexity of adolescence with confidence.
Students learn to name and recognize emotions as they arise, building the vocabulary to notice what's happening internally.
Understanding the root cause of a feeling, the trigger behind it, so it stops feeling random or overwhelming.
Turning insight into a concrete, healthy response. The regulation strategies that make emotional intelligence usable in real life.
Research published by Harvard Business Review has found that leaders with stronger emotional intelligence build more engaged teams, collaborate better under pressure, and retain talent longer. Emotion Surfing teaches these same self-awareness and regulation skills early, well before someone is ever managing a team of their own.
TalentSmart, one of the largest providers of EI testing worldwide, found in a study of nearly a million professionals that emotional intelligence was the single strongest predictor of performance, outweighing experience and technical skill alone.
Daniel Goleman, the psychologist and science journalist who popularized emotional intelligence with his 1995 bestseller, synthesized decades of research to argue EI can matter more than IQ in determining real-world success, reshaping how schools and workplaces think about skill-building today.
Adriana's presentation at the SFERE Conference, "Miami's Rise of Emotional Intelligence Education," examined how EI education could shape Miami's economy through 2035: worker productivity, healthcare cost savings, reduced turnover, and student future earnings.
of U.S. high schoolers report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, a figure that has climbed steadily over the past decade. This is the generation Emotion Surfing is built for: kids who need real emotional skills now, not after the fact.
Source: CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 2023An evidence-based social-emotional learning curriculum developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, shown to strengthen students' emotional skills. Emotion Surfing's curriculum is built alongside this framework.
Developed by Dr. Daniel Siegel, psychiatrist and founding co-director of UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center. Noticing and labeling an emotion as it happens measurably reduces the stress and reactivity it causes in the brain and body. This is the core technique behind every Emotion Surfing workshop.
Studies on near-peer education and stage-environment fit theory point to something beyond trust: teens are simply better positioned to model real emotional scenarios for other teens. The same circumstances, pressures, and generation, made current and relatable in a way adults can't replicate. That relationship-first bond is the research basis for Emotion Surfing's student-led model.
Most SEL curricula are written and delivered by adults. Emotion Surfing is designed and delivered by a student, for students. That's not a marketing angle; it's the research-backed reason a near-peer model works.
Partnered with Hope for Miami to deliver a two-day Emotion Surfing workshop at their Wayside Baptist Church location, with age-adapted activities from balloon breathing to scenario cards.
Partnered with Achieve at Riverside Elementary, delivering six 45-minute workshops across grades 1st through 5th.
Presented the EI curriculum to a global Catholic youth group (YFC, part of CFC), speaking to high school students, college students, and their parents.
Delivered an additional workshop at Xishiku Cathedral in Beijing, China, connected to the CFC organization, bringing the same curriculum to students on the other side of the world.
Adriana was born in Spain, spent her infancy in China, and her toddler years split between Italy, Spain, and Japan before settling in Miami, where she's lived for the last seven years. Growing up across four countries and three languages, she saw firsthand how differently people are taught to name, express, and manage their emotions from one culture to the next, and how rarely that skill is taught deliberately anywhere at all. Emotion Surfing grew directly out of that observation: a platform built to close that gap, equipping students and communities with the emotional intelligence skills they need, informed by a genuinely multicultural view of how emotions are understood and taught around the world.
Lisa Reese was a certified coach who spent her career helping others build emotional intelligence skills. A mentor, a former Girl Scout Leader, and a Girls on the Run Co-Leader in her community, Lisa was one of the first people to believe in Emotion Surfing. Her belief in this work, and in the students it serves, carries through everything the organization does.
Workshops are tailored by grade level, from balloon breathing with 1st graders to real-scenario regulation practice with high schoolers. Student-led, hands-on, and built on research your administrators can stand behind.
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