Daniel Goleman Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Daniel Goleman. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships)
In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
Anyone can become angry —that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way —this is not easy. ARISTOTLE, The Nicomachean Ethics
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
Daniel Goleman
There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
Emotional self-control-- delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness- underlies accomplishment of every sort
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
people's emotions are rarely put into words , far more often they are expressed through other cues. the key to intuiting another's feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels , tone of voice , gesture , facial expression and the like
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. HORACE WALPOLE
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
the brilliant book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman describes seven key abilities most beneficial for human beings: the ability to motivate ourselves, to persist against frustration, to delay gratification, to regulate moods, to hope, to empathize, and to control impulse. Many of those who commit violence never learned these skills. If you know a young person who lacks them all, that’s an important pre-incident indicator, and he needs help.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
Benjamin Franklin put it well: “Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.
Doris Kearns Goodwin (Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln)
Feelings are self-justifying, with a set of perceptions and "proofs" all their own.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
When the eyes of a woman that a man finds attractive look directly at him, his brain secretes the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine - but not when she looks elsewhere.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships)
But the rational mind usually doesn't decide what emotions we "should" have !
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
Our emotional mind will harness the rational mind to its purposes, for our feelings and reactions-- rationalizations-- justifying them in terms of the present moment, without realizing the influence of our emotional memory.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
out-of-control emotions can make smart people stupid.
Daniel Goleman (Working With Emotional Intelligence)
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Albert Einstein once said. “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when the emotions hold sway.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be content and effective in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that foster their own productivity; people who cannot marshal some control over their emotional life fight inner battles that sabotage their ability for focused work and clear thought.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. The monk replied with scorn, "You're nothing but a lout - I can't waste my time with the likes of you!" His very honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled "I could kill you for your impertinence." "That," the monk calmly replied, "is hell." Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight. "And that,"said the monk "is heaven." The sudden awakening of the samurai to his own agitated state illustrates the crucial difference between being caught up in a feeling and becoming aware that you are being swept away by it. Socrates's injunction "Know thyself" speaks to the keystone of emotional intelligence: awareness of one's own feelings as they occur.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
When we are in the grip of craving or fury, head-over-heals in love our recoiling in dread, it is the limbic system that has us in its grip.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
Fear, in evolution, has a special prominence: perhaps more than any other emotion it is crucial for survival.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
Emotional intelligence does not mean merely "being nice". At strategic moment it may demand not "being nice", but rather, for example, bluntly confronting someone with an uncomfortable but consequential truth they've been avoiding.
Daniel Goleman (Working with Emotional Intelligence)
We transmit and catch moods from each other in what amounts to a subterranean economy of the psyche in which some encounters are toxic, some nourishing.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
many people with IQs of 160 work for people with IQs of 100, if the former have poor intrapersonal intelligence and the latter have a high one.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
Martin Luther King Jr. observed that those who failed to offer their aid asked themselves the question: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But the Good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man what will happen to him?
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings—anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness—is a form of disease prevention. Since the data show that the toxicity of these emotions, when chronic, is on a par with smoking cigarettes, helping people handle them better could potentially have a medical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
As Marcus Aurelius said millennia ago, pain “is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence)
Though they are quick to put others down, unhealthy narcissists view themselves in absolutely positive terms.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships)
Mindfulness helps especially for those of us for whom every setback, hurt or dissapointment creates endless cascades of rumination
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
If there is a remedy, I feel it must lie in how we prepare our young for life.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled. Start to subtract sevens successively from 100 and, if you keep your focus on the task, your chatter zone goes quiet.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
The antidote for mind wandering is meta-awareness, attention to attention itself, as in the ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correcting your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.12
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
1. Knowing one’s emotions. Self-awareness—recognizing a feeling as it happens—is the keystone of emotional intelligence. As
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
As Erasmus, the great Renaissance thinker, reminds us, “The best hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth.
Daniel Goleman (Primal Leadership, With a New Preface by the Authors: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence (Unleashing the Power of Emotinal Intelligence))
Stress makes people stupid.” On
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
the fine art of relationships—requires the ripeness of two other emotional skills, self-management and empathy. With
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
when we hope to be a You, being treated like an It, as though we do not matter, carries a particularly harsh sting.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence)
The most powerful form of nondefensive listening, of course, is empathy: actually hearing the feelings behind what is being said.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
Indeed, laughter may be the shortest distance between two brains, an unstoppable infectious spread that builds an instant social bond.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships)
The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today. That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.) Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. 'Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,' Kagan notes, 'they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.' This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, 'is a biological feature of our species.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships)
From the vantage point of the brain, doing well in school and at work involves one and the same state, the brain’s sweet spot for performance. The biology of anxiety casts us out of that zone for excellence. “Banish fear” was a slogan of the late quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming. He saw that fear froze a workplace: workers were reluctant to speak up, to share new ideas, or to coordinate well, let alone to improve the quality of their output. The same slogan applies to the classroom—fear frazzles the mind, disrupting learning.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence)
goal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification" is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. His finding underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a meta-ability, determining how well or how poorly people are able to use their other mental capacities.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
[Sadness] enforces a kind of reflective retreat from life's busy pursuits, and leaves us in a suspended state to mourn the loss, mull over its meaning, and, finally, make the psychological adjustments and new plans that will allow our lives to continue
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
Emotional aptitude is a "meta-ability" , determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have , including raw inellect .
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
The neocortex allows for the subtlety and complexity of emotional life, such as the ability to have feelings about our feelings.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
Dreams are private myths; myths are shared dreams").
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding. An
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
This harkens back to Freud’s famous question, “What does woman want?” As Epstein answers, “She wants a partner who cares what she wants.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence)
In short, out-of-control emotions can make smart people stupid.
Daniel Goleman (Working with Emotional Intelligence)
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.
Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
Forthrightness is the brain’s default response: our neural wiring transmits our every minor mood onto the muscles of our face, making our feelings instantly visible. The display of emotion is automatic and unconscious, and so its suppression demands conscious effort. Being devious about what we feel—trying to hide our fear or anger—demands active effort and rarely succeeds perfectly.22
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships)
Once when I was about 13, in an angry fit, I walked out of the house vowing I would never return. It was a beautiful summer day, and I walked far along lovely lanes, till gradually the stillness and beauty calmed and soothed me, and after some hours I returned repentant and almost melted. Since then when I am angry, I do this if I can, and find it the best cure.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
A Persian fairy tale tells of the Three Princes of Serendip, who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”7 Creativity in the wild operates much like that.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
أننا لا شعورياً نقلد الانفعالات التي يظهرها أمامنا شخص آخر عن طريق محاكاة حركية لا واعية لتعبيرات الوجه وإيماءاته ونبرات صوته والمحددات غير اللفظية الأخرى للانفاعلات، وبهذه المحاكاة يعيد الأشخاص في داخلهم خلق هذه الحالات المزاجية للشخص الآخر. وهي صورة مبسطة من طريقة ستانيسلافسكي والذي كان يطلب من الممثلين أن يتذكروا الإماءات والحركات والتعبيرات الأخرى لانفعال أثر فيهم بقوة في الماضي من أجل استثارة هذه المشاعر مرة أخرى.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
Others point to data showing that even as toddlers, 40 percent of American two-year-olds watch TV for at least three hours a day—hours they are not interacting with people who can help them learn to get along better. The more TV they watch, the more unruly they are by school age.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships)
Social rejection—or fearing it—is one of the most common causes of anxiety. Feelings of inclusion depend not so much on having frequent social contacts or numerous relationships as on how accepted we feel, even in just a few key relationships.20 Small wonder that we have a hardwired system that is alert to the threat of abandonment, separation, or rejection: these were once actual threats to life itself, though they are only symbolically so today. Still, when we hope to be a You, being treated like an It, as though we do not matter, carries a particularly harsh sting.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence)
The sweet spot for smart decisions, then, comes not just from being a domain expert, but also from having high self-awareness.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
It is with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, The Little Prince
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
In the calculus of the heart it is the ratio of positive to negative emotions that determines the sense of well- being.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
channeling emotions toward a productive end is a master aptitude. Whether it be in controlling impulse and putting off gratification, regulating our moods so they facilitate rather than impede thinking, motivating ourselves to persist and try, try again in the face of setbacks, or finding ways to enter flow and so perform more effectively—all bespeak the power of emotion to guide effective effort.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
In the original form of the word, to worry someone else was to harass, strangle, or choke them. Likewise, to worry oneself is a form of self-harassment. To give it less of a role in our lives, we must understand what it really it is. Worry is the fear we manufacture—it is not authentic. If you choose to worry about something, have at it, but do so knowing it’s a choice. Most often, we worry because it provides some secondary reward. There are many variations, but a few of the most popular follow. Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter. Worry is a way to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something. (Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.) Worry is a cloying way to have connection with others, the idea being that to worry about someone shows love. The other side of this is the belief that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about them. As many worried-about people will tell you, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action. Worry is a protection against future disappointment. After taking an important test, for example, a student might worry about whether he failed. If he can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens. But there’s an interesting trade-off: Since he can’t do anything about it at this point anyway, would he rather spend two days worrying and then learn he failed, or spend those same two days not worrying, and then learn he failed? Perhaps most importantly, would he want to learn he had passed the test and spent two days of anxiety for nothing? In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman concludes that worrying is a sort of “magical amulet” which some people feel wards off danger. They believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening. He also correctly notes that most of what people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take action about those things we feel are likely to occur. This means that very often the mere fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely to happen!
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
Decades before we began to drown in a sea of distractions, cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made this prescient observation: “What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.
Daniel Goleman (Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body)
In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
It’s the most important relationships in your life, the people you see day in and day out, that seem to be crucial for your health. And the more significant the relationship is in your life, the more it matters for your health.”43
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
Other research has shown that in the first few milliseconds of our perceiving something we not only unconsciously comprehend what it is, but decide whether we like it or not; the “cognitive unconscious” presents our awareness with not just the identity of what we see, but an opinion about it.7 Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets. People who are highly resilient—who bounce back right away—can have as much as thirty times more activation in the left prefrontal area than those who are less resilient.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be content and effective in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that foster their own productivity; people who cannot marshal some control over their emotional life fight inner battles that sabotage their ability for focused work and clear thought. A
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
But there is virtually no relationship between being an expert and being seen as someone people can trust with their secrets, doubts, and vulnerabilities. A petty office tyrant or micromanager may be high on expertise, but will be so low on trust that it will undermine their ability to manage, and effectively exclude them from informal networks.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
It’s not enough,” one senior manager at Eastman Kodak told the author Daniel Goleman, “to be able to sit at your computer excited about a fantastic regression analysis if you’re squeamish about presenting those results to an executive group.” (Apparently it’s OK to be squeamish about doing a regression analysis if you’re excited about giving speeches.)
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
Threats to our standing in the eyes of others are remarkably potent biologically, almost as powerful as those to our very survival.
Daniel Goleman
[Sharmayne Williams:]...puoi avere tutte le emozioni possibili, ma non devi permettere che siano loro a manovrarti.
Daniel Goleman (Lavorare con intelligenza emotiva)
And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
Rumination can also make the depression stronger by creating conditions that are, well, more depressing.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
It demoralizes people just to hear that they are doing “something” wrong without knowing what the specifics are so they can change.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
For leaders to get results they need all three kinds of focus. Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions. Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the larger world. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
You see it in jazz musicians, who never rehearse exactly what they do, but just seem to know when to take center stage, when to fade into the background. When jazz artists were compared with classical musicians in brain function, they showed more neural indicators of self-awareness.15 As one jazz artist put it, “In jazz you have to tune in to how your body is feeling so you know when to riff.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
A child's readiness for school depends on the most basic of all knowledge, how to learn. The report lists the seven key ingredients of this crucial capacity—all related to emotional intelligence:6 1. Confidence. A sense of control and mastery of one's body, behavior, and world; the child's sense that he is more likely than not to succeed at what he undertakes, and that adults will be helpful. 2. Curiosity. The sense that finding out about things is positive and leads to pleasure. 3. Intentionality. The wish and capacity to have an impact, and to act upon that with persistence. This is related to a sense of competence, of being effective. 4. Self-control. The ability to modulate and control one's own actions in age-appropriate ways; a sense of inner control. 5. Relatedness. The ability to engage with others based on the sense of being understood by and understanding others. 6. Capacity to communicate. The wish and ability to verbally exchange ideas, feelings, and concepts with others. This is related to a sense of trust in others and of pleasure in engaging with others, including adults. 7. Cooperativeness. The ability to balance one's own needs with those of others in group activity. Whether or not a child arrives at school on the first day of kindergarten with these capabilities depends greatly on how much her parents—and preschool teachers—have given her the kind of care that amounts to a "Heart Start," the emotional equivalent of the Head Start programs.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ)
we have a bit of self-interest in relieving the misery of others. One school of modern economic theory, following Hobbes, argues that people give to charities in part because of the pleasure they get from imagining either the relief of those they benefit or their own relief from alleviating their sympathetic distress.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships)
«El recurso más precioso de un ordenador no está en su procesador, en su memoria, en su disco duro ni en la red, sino en la atención humana», concluye un grupo de investigación de la Universidad de Carnegie Mellon.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: Desarrollar la atención para alcanzar la excelencia)
The guiding visionary behind Project Spectrum is Howard Gardner, a psychologist at the Harvard School of Education.7 “The time has come,” Gardner told me, “to broaden our notion of the spectrum of talents. The single most important contribution education can make to a child’s development is to help him toward a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We’ve completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor. And we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
Like Stockdale, resilient people have very sober and down-to-earth views of those parts of reality that matter for survival. That’s not to say that optimism doesn’t have its place: In turning around a demoralized sales force, for instance, conjuring a sense of possibility can be a very powerful tool. But for bigger challenges, a cool, almost pessimistic, sense of reality is far more important.
Harvard Business Review (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence (with featured article "What Makes a Leader?" by Daniel Goleman)(HBR's 10 Must Reads))
Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist who has done much of the research on self-efficacy, sums it up well: “People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.”24
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
Why should caring for others begin with the self? There is an abundance of rather vague ideas about this issue, which I am sure neuroscience will one day resolve. Let me offer my own “hand waving” explanation by saying that advanced empathy requires both mental mirroring and mental separation. The mirroring allows the sight of another person in a particular emotional state to induce a similar state in us. We literally feel their pain, loss, delight, disgust, etc., through so-called shared representations. Neuroimaging shows that our brains are similarly activated as those of people we identify with. This is an ancient mechanism: It is automatic, starts early in life, and probably characterizes all mammals. But we go beyond this, and this is where mental separation comes in. We parse our own state from the other’s. Otherwise, we would be like the toddler who cries when she hears another cry but fails to distinguish her own distress from the other’s. How could she care for the other if she can’t even tell where her feelings are coming from? In the words of psychologist Daniel Goleman, “Self-absorption kills empathy.” The child needs to disentangle herself from the other so as to pinpoint the actual source of her feelings.
Frans de Waal (The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society)
Our sense of well-being depends to some extent on others regarding us as a You; our yearning for connection is a primal human need, minimally for a cushion for survival. Today the neural echo of that need heightens our sensitivity to the difference between It and You—and makes us feel social rejection as deeply as physical pain.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships)
power dynamic operates in emotional contagion, determining which person’s brain will more forcefully draw the other into its emotional orbit. Mirror neurons are leadership tools: Emotions flow with special strength from the more socially dominant person to the less. One reason is that people in any group naturally pay more attention to and place more significance on what the most powerful person in that group says and does. That amplifies the force of whatever emotional message the leader may be sending, making her emotions particularly contagious. As I heard the head of a small organization say rather ruefully, “When my mind is full of anger, other people catch it like the flu.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence)
The goal of attunement is not simply continual meshing, with an utter entrainment of every thought and feeling; it also includes giving each other space to be alone as needed. This cycle of connectedness strikes a balance between the individual’s needs and the couple’s. As one family therapist put it, “The more a couple can be apart, the more they can be together.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence)
Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin psychologist. He discovered that people who have greater activity in the left frontal lobe, compared to the right, are by temperament cheerful; they typically take delight in people and in what life presents them with, bouncing back from setbacks as my aunt June did. But those with relatively greater activity on the right side are given to negativity and sour moods, and are easily fazed by life’s difficulties; in a sense, they seem to suffer because they cannot turn off their worries and depressions. In
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
Add the sounds of silence to the list of emotional risks to health—and close emotional ties to the list of protective factors. Studies done over two decades involving more than thirty-seven thousand people show that social isolation—the sense that you have nobody with whom you can share your private feelings or have close contact—doubles the chances of sickness or death.37
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing. The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes. There’s an algorithm for this, a data mining method called “automated social hierarchy detection,” developed at Columbia University.8 When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person’s emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
A series of studies by Marian Radke-Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler at the National Institute of Mental Health showed that a large part of this difference in empathic concern had to do with how parents disciplined their children. Children, they found, were more empathic when the discipline included calling strong attention to the distress their misbehavior caused someone else: “Look how sad you’ve made her feel” instead of “That was naughty.
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
The worst period I ever went through at work,” a friend confides, “was when the company was restructuring and people were being ‘disappeared’ daily, followed by lying memos that they were leaving ‘for personal reasons.’ No one could focus while that fear was in the air. No real work got done.” Small wonder. The greater the anxiety we feel, the more impaired is the brain’s cognitive efficiency. In this zone of mental misery, distracting thoughts hijack our attention and squeeze our cognitive resources. Because high anxiety shrinks the space available to our attention, it undermines our very capacity to take in new information, let alone generate fresh ideas. Near-panic is the enemy of learning and creativity.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence)
Our memories are in part reconstructions. Whenever we retrieve a memory, the brain rewrites it a bit, updating the past according to our present concerns and understanding. At the cellular level, LeDoux explains, retrieving a memory means it will be “reconsolidated,” slightly altered chemically by a new protein synthesis that will help store it anew after being updated.40 Thus each time we bring a memory to mind, we adjust its very chemistry: the next time we retrieve it, that memory will come up as we last modified it. The specifics of the new consolidation depend on what we learn as we recall it. If we merely have a flare-up of the same fear, we deepen our fearfulness. But the high road can bring reason to the low. If at the time of the fear we tell ourselves something that eases its grip, then the same memory becomes reencoded with less power over us. Gradually, we can bring the once-feared memory to mind without feeling the rush of distress all over again. In such a case, says LeDoux, the cells in our amygdala reprogram so that we lose the original fear conditioning.41 One goal of therapy, then, can be seen as gradually altering the neurons for learned fear.
Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence)
Bereavement is useful; full-blown depression is not. William Styron renders an eloquent description of “the many dreadful manifestations of the disease,” among them self-hatred, a sense of worthlessness, a “dank joylessness” with “gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, a stifling anxiety.”14 Then there are the intellectual marks: “confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memories,” and, at a later stage, his mind “dominated by anarchic distortions,” and “a sense that my thought processes were engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.” There are the physical effects: sleeplessness, feeling as listless as a zombie, “a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility,” along with a “fidgety restlessness.” Then there is the loss of pleasure: “Food, like everything else within the scope of sensation, was utterly without savor.” Finally, there was the vanishing of hope as the “gray drizzle of horror” took on a despair so palpable it was like physical pain, a pain so unendurable that suicide seemed a solution. In such major depression, life is paralyzed; no new beginnings emerge. The very symptoms of depression bespeak a life on hold. For
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)