Daniel Goleman Quotations

If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.

But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.

Smart phones and social media expand our universe. We can connect with others or collect information easier and faster than ever.

One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us.

The other thing is that if you rely solely on medication to manage depression or anxiety, for example, you have done nothing to train the mind, so that when you come off the medication, you are just as vulnerable to a relapse as though you had never taken the medication.

Emotions are contagious. We've all known it experientially. You know after you have a really fun coffee with a friend, you feel good. When you have a rude clerk in a store, you walk away feeling bad.

Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike.

True compassion means not only feeling another's pain but also being moved to help relieve it.

The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.

As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the ancient systems of psychology and meditation practices of Asia.

I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example.

When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences - the first person - with what the measurements show - the third person.

When I say manage emotions, I only mean the really distressing, incapacitating emotions. Feeling emotions is what makes life rich. You need your passions.

Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages.

In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding.

People tend to become more emotionally intelligent as they age and mature.

But there has also been a notable increase in recent years of these applications by a much wider slice of psychotherapists - far greater interest than ever before.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.

The social brain is in its natural habitat when we're talking with someone face-to-face in real time.

We need to re-create boundaries. When you carry a digital gadget that creates a virtual link to the office, you need to create a virtual boundary that didn't exist before.

Brain studies of mental workouts in which you sustain a single, chosen focus show that the more you detach from what's distracting you and refocus on what you should be paying attention to, the stronger this brain circuitry becomes.

Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.

If you are doing mindfulness meditation, you are doing it with your ability to attend to the moment.

Western business people often don't get the importance of establishing human relationships.

The amygdala in the emotional center sees and hears everything that occurs to us instantaneously and is the trigger point for the fight or flight response.

My hope was that organizations would start including this range of skills in their training programs - in other words, offer an adult education in social and emotional intelligence.

Making choices that improve things for all of us on the planet is an act of compassion, a simple act we can do any time we go shopping.

Whenever we feel stressed out, that's a signal that our brain is pumping out stress hormones. If sustained over months and years, those hormones can ruin our health and make us a nervous wreck.

A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt 'Don't bother me - I've got important work to do.'

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings. This is part of teaching emotional literacy - a set of skills we can all develop, including the ability to read, understand, and respond appropriately to one's own emotions and the emotions of others.

Scheduling down time as part of your routine is hard but worth it, personally, even professionally.

When I went on to write my next book, Working With Emotional Intelligence, I wanted to make a business case that the best performers were those people strong in these skills.

Companies in the East put a lot more emphasis on human relationships, while those from the West focus on the product, the bottom line. Westerners appear to have more of a need for achievement, while in the East there's more need for affiliation.

The more socially intelligent you are, the happier and more robust and more enjoyable your relationships will be.

Some children naturally have more cognitive control than others, and in all kids this essential skill is being compromised by the usual suspects: smartphones, TV, etc. But there are many ways that adults can help kids learn better cognitive control.

Emotional 'literacy' implies an expanded responsibility for schools in helping to socialize children. This daunting task requires two major changes: that teachers go beyond their traditional mission and that people in the community become more involved with schools as both active participants in children's learning and as individual mentors.

I don't think focus is in itself ever a bad thing. But focus of the wrong kind, or managed poorly, can be.

Motivation aside, if people get better at these life skills, everyone benefits: The brain doesn't distinguish between being a more empathic manager and a more empathic father.

Well, any effort to maximize your potential and ability is a good thing.

I think the smartest thing for people to do to manage very distressing emotions is to take a medication if it helps, but don't do only that. You also need to train your mind.

Every morning, I go off to a small studio behind my house to write. I try to ignore all email and phone calls until lunchtime. Then I launch into the sometimes frantic busy-ness of a tightly scheduled day.

Buying phosphate-free soap allows you to say, 'My detergent doesn't have the harsh chemicals others do.' The question is, how are you washing with it? The very worst thing for the Earth about detergent is that we heat water to use it.

Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.

Once shoppers become empowered, we will facilitate industries thinking in completely new terms; for example, making products that are totally biodegradable.

The basic premise that children must learn about emotions is that all feelings are okay to have; however, only some reactions are okay.

However, I began meditating at about that time and have continued on and off over the years.

While there I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind.

In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them.

If you do a practice and train your attention to hover in the present, then you will build the internal capacity to do that as needed - at will and voluntarily.

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.

The book is a dialogue between The Dalai Lama and a group of scientists about how we can better handle our destructive emotions and how to overcome them.

The industrial processes in use today were developed at a time when no one had to consider what the environmental impact was. Who cared? But making ecological concerns matter to a company's bottom line will help it do the research and development that will reinvent everything we buy.

We're exposed and carry in our bodies multiple chemicals, and we have to understand how they interact. Both how they individually interact and the thousands of effects they can produce when they interact with the receptors that run our bodies.

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.

There is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy... They're controlled by different parts of the brain.

Threats to our standing in the eyes of others are remarkably potent biologically, almost as powerful as those to our very survival.

Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.

Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.

Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else's toxic state.

Shipping by sea produces 1/60 the emissions of shipping by air and about 1/5 that of trucking.

Happy, calm children learn best

For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when emotions hold sway.

Attention is a little-noticed and underrated mental asset.

Fear, in evolution, has a special prominence: perhaps more than any other emotion it is crucial for survival.

There is a newly coined word in the English language for the moment when the person we're with whips out their BlackBerry or answers that cell phone, and all of a sudden we don't exist. The word is 'pizzled': it's a combination of puzzled and pissed off.

Comparing the three domains, I found that for jobs of all kinds, emotional competencies were twice as prevalent among distinguishing competencies as were technical skills and purely cognitive abilities combined. In general the higher a position in an organization, the more EI mattered: for individuals in leadership positions, 85 percent of their competencies were in the EI domain.

Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood.

Feelings are self-justifying, with a set of perceptions and "proofs" all their own.

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.

At last, psychology gets serious about glee, fun, and happiness. Martin Seligman has given us a gift-a practical map for the perennial quest for a flourishing life.

Empathic, emotionally intelligent work environments have a good track record of increasing creativity, improving problem solving and raising productivity.

Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.

Evolutionary theory holds that our ability to sense when we should be suspicious has been every bit as essential for human survival as our capacity for trust and cooperation.

Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it.

The near cousin of optimism is hope: knowing the steps needed to get to a goal and having the energy to pursue those steps. It is a primal motivating force, and its absence is paralyzing.

Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival.

But the rational mind usually doesn't decide what emotions we "should" have !

CEOs are hired for their intellect and business expertise - and fired for a lack of emotional intelligence.

The ability to handle stress increases with the practice of meditation. In a culture like ours in which inner, spiritual growth is totally neglected in favor of materialistic pursuits, we might have something to learn from the Hare Krishna devotees' meditational practices.

Our brain comes hard-wired with an urge to play, one that hurls us into sociability. A child's play both demands and creates its own safe space, one in which she can confront threats, fears, and dangers, but always come through whole. Play offers a child a natural way to manage feared separations or abandonment, rendering them instead opportunities for mastery and self-discovery.

When the darkness is seen as a necessary prelude to the creative light, one is less likely to ascribe frustration to personal inadequacy or label it as bad.

IQ and technical skills are important, but Emotional Intelligence is the Sine Qua Non of Leadership.

One aspect of a successful relationship is not just how compatible you are, but how you deal with your incompatibility.

Risk taking and the drive to pursue innovative ideas are the fuel that stokes the entrepreneurial spirit.

The emotional brain is highly attuned to symbolic meanings and to the mode Freud called the 'primary process' - the messages of metaphor, story, myth, the arts.

Emotional self-control is NOT the same as overcontrol, the stifling of all feeling and spontaneity....when such emotional suppression is chronic, it can impair thinking, hamper intellectual performance and interfere with smooth social interaction. By contrast, emotional competence implies we have a choice as to how we express our feelings.

Life without passion would be a dull wasteland of neutrality, cut off and isolated from the richness of life itself.

What seems to set apart those at the very top of competitive pursuits from others of roughly equal ability is the degree to which, beginning early in life, they can pursue an arduous practice routine for years and years.

Daydreaming defeats practice; those of us who browse TV while working out will never reach the top ranks. Paying full attention seems to boost the mind's processing speed, strengthen synaptic connections, and expand or create neural networks for what we are practicing.

The people we get along with, trust, feel simpatico with, are the strongest links in our networks

Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety?

When we focus on others, our world expands.

Worries typically follow such lines, a narrative to oneself that jumps from concern to concern and more often than not includes catastrophizing, imagining some terrible tragedy. Worries are almost always expressed in the mind's ear, not its eye - that is, in words, not images - a fact that has significance for controlling worry.

The human brain is by no means fully formed at birth. It continues to shape itself through life, with the most intense growth occurring during childhood.

We learn best with focused attention. As we focus on what we're learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know making new neural connections

Overloading attention shrinks mental control. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control.

Sheree Conrad and Michael Milburn bring a much-needed sanity to that confusing and unruly terrain, our sexual lives/

Even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring the emotional intelligence that also matters immensely for our personal destiny.

Positive work environments outperform negative work environments.

For the High Achievers, Studying Gave Them The Pleasing, Absorbing Challenge of Flow Percent of the Hours They Spent as It.