Feel Your Best Self with Dr. Sandy Chafouleas, Emily Wicks, and Dr. Christopher Conners
56m | Sep 23, 2026Some of the most impactful innovations don’t fit neatly into the traditional technology transfer model. Feel Your Best Self began during the COVID-19 pandemic as a collaboration between educational psychology and puppetry at the University of Connecticut, with a simple goal: give children practical, research-based ways to understand and cope with big feelings. What started in a single classroom has since grown into an award-winning toolkit reaching families, educators, and communities far beyond UConn.
Joining us to share the story are Dr. Sandy Chafouleas, Emily Wicks, and Dr. Christopher Conners. Sandy is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Neag Endowed Professor in UConn’s Department of Educational Psychology and co-founder of the Collaboratory on School and Child Health. Emily is Manager of Operations and Collections at UConn’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and Director of Puppetry Education for Feel Your Best Self. Chris is Director of Licensing for Life Sciences at UConn’s Technology Commercialization Services Office, where he helped guide the project through its intellectual property and commercialization journey.
We talk about how an unexpected collaboration between psychology and puppetry became Feel Your Best Self, why creativity and joy are such important parts of teaching emotion-coping skills, and how the team designed the program to remain flexible and accessible. We also explore the university-wide collaboration behind the project, the decision to license a social innovation and create FYBS and Co., and what this experience can teach technology transfer professionals about recognizing valuable innovations that may look very different from the technologies they usually encounter.
In This Episode:
[04:21] We discover the origins of Feel Your Best Self and how a pandemic-era collaboration brought educational psychology and puppetry together.
[07:19] Why they decided to explore an unconventional partnership and how rigorous science and creative expression proved to be a natural fit.
[09:03] The earliest virtual classroom sessions, including puppet kits, short videos, and feedback that helped the team keep the program simple and adaptable.
[12:04] Early responses from teachers and students helped Sandy and Emily realize Feel Your Best Self could become much more than a temporary response to the pandemic.
[15:05] The research behind the program’s Calm, Catch, and Connect framework and why different emotion-coping strategies work for different people and situations.
[18:18] The team discusses the four values that guide Feel Your Best Self credibility, accessibility, joy, and creativity and how those principles shape the program.
[21:09] How puppet making gives children and adults a chance to explore coping strategies together rather than simply being told what they should do.
[23:04] Puppets can lower the stakes around difficult conversations, giving children another way to express emotions that may be uncomfortable to discuss directly.
[25:00] Their surprise at how strongly middle and high school students responded to puppetry and continued using their puppets after the workshops ended.
[27:25] The Feel Your Best Self toolkit includes videos, storybooks, activities, educator resources, puppet-making materials, and other tools that families and professionals can customize to their needs.
[31:11] The thoughtful design process behind creating three characters children could recognize and relate to.
[34:47] How the team turned evidence-based coping techniques into memorable three-step strategies with names children can easily understand and use.
[37:05] Translating Feel Your Best Self into Spanish required the team to think beyond individual words and consider how language and context vary across cultures.
[38:18] UConn’s technology transfer role and why copyright-based and social innovations can create meaningful public impact alongside more traditional patentable technologies.
[41:03] How collaboration with UConn’s Proof of Concept Center transformed puppet-kit production from a labor-intensive manual process into something that could scale.
[44:25] Philanthropic support helped Feel Your Best Self move from small classroom experiments to professional video production, broader dissemination, and national reach.
[46:25] The team explains why UConn licensed Feel Your Best Self to FYBS and Co. and how they balanced free access to the program with physical products and other services needed for continued growth.
[49:23] The unexpected path from a grant-funded passion project to entrepreneurship and the learning curve that came with building a company.
[50:25] Awards and media attention have helped expand the program’s reach, but some of its most meaningful impact comes from seeing educators, families, and communities adapt the resources in their own ways.
[52:25] Reflections on how Feel Your Best Self changed the way UConn’s technology transfer office views social innovations, copyrights, and other projects that fall outside its traditional STEM portfolio.
Resources:
Dr. Sandy Chafouleas - UConn - Neag School of Education
Dr. Sandy Chafouleas - LinkedIn
Emily Wicks - UConn - Ballard Institute and Museum
Dr. Christopher Conners - UConn - Technology Commercialization Services
Dr. Christopher Conners - LinkedIn
