Daniel goleman quotes

The more time you put into practicing, then, the greater the payoff.

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

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.

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

One of the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term memory - patients feel better because they can't remember why they were sad.

There are a host of surprises among longer-term meditators, like a boost in the immune system from a day of practice, which is not seen in beginners, and a rapid recovery from stress or pain. At the "Olympic level" we find there is no anticipatory anxiety when the stress of pain is certain to come, and no lingering aftereffects - unlike the stress reactions in ordinary folk.

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.

The task of worrying is to come up with positive solutions for life's perils by anticipating dangers before they arise. If we are preoccupied by worries, we have that must less attention to expend on figuring out the answers. Our worries become self-fulfilling prophecies, propelling us toward the very disaster they predict.

There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all emotions, by their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act. The root meaning of the word emotion, remember, is "to move.

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.

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

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

Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.

People who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can succeed next time around, while pessimists take the blame for the failure, ascribing it to some characteristic they are helpless to change.

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.

Simply paying attention allows us to build an emotional connection. Lacking attention, empathy hasn't a chance.

It is difficult to spread the contagion of excitement without having a sense of purpose and direction.

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.

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

Attention is a little-noticed and underrated mental asset.

The act of compassion begins with full attention, just as rapport does. You have to really see the person. If you see the person, then naturally, empathy arises. If you tune into the other person, you feel with them. If empathy arises, and if that person is in dire need, then empathic concern can come. You want to help them, and then that begins a compassionate act. So I'd say that compassion begins with attention.

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

School success is not predicted by a child's fund of facts or a precocious ability to read as much as by emotional and social measures; being self-assured and interested: knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with other children.

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.

The best leaders don’t know just one style of leadership—they’re skilled at several, and have the flexibility to switch between styles as the circumstances dictate.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Cognitive skills such as big-picture thinking and long-term vision were particularly important. But when I calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels.

We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those.

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.

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.

Happy, calm children learn best

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

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.

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

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.

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

In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels

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.

The Harvard Business Review recently had an article called 'The Human Moment,' about how to make real contact with a person at work: ... The fundamental thing you have to do is turn off your BlackBerry, close your laptop, end your daydream and pay full attention to the person.

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

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.

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

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.

Green is a process, not a status. We need to think of 'green' as a verb, not an adjective.

Leaders with empathy do more than sympathize with people around them: they use their knowledge to improve their companies in subtle, but important ways.

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

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.

Simple inattention kills empathy, let alone compassion. So the first step in compassion is to notice the other's need. It all begins with the simple act of attention.

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.

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

Gifted leadership occurs when heart and head--feeling and thought--meet. These are the two winds that allow a leader to soar.

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.

Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.

Women, on average, tend to be more aware of their emotions, show more empathy, and are more adept interpersonally. Men on the other hand, are more self-confident and optimistic, adapt more easily, and handle stress better.

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

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.

Want a happier, more content life? I highly recommend the down-to-earth methods you'll find in 'Mindfulness.' Professor Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman have teamed up to give us scientifically grounded techniques we can apply in the midst of our everyday challenges and catastrophes.

Remember, empathy need not lead to sympathetically giving in to the other side’s demands—knowing how someone feels does not mean agreeing with them.

Research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important an ingredient of outstanding performance as cognitive ability and technical skill combined.

Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Emotional self-control-- delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness- underlies accomplishment of every sort

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.

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.

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.

People learn what they want to learn. If learning is forced on us, even if we master it temporarily, it is soon forgotten.

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

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.

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.

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

Although traditional incentives such as bonuses or recognition can prod people to better performance, no external motivators can get people to perform at their absolute best. . . .Wherever people gravitate within their work roles, indicates where their real pleasure lies—and that pleasure is itself motivating.

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.

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

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.'

There are some surprising payoffs with only a few minutes' practice, like eliminating the loss of concentration that multitasking usually brings. Short daily mindfulness practice in beginners also improves memory, to the point that a group of students who volunteered for a study got significantly better scores on their graduate school entrance exams.

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.

....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.

When we focus on others, our world expands.

Great leaders, the research shows, are made as they gradually acquire, in the course of their lives and careers, the competencies that make them so effective. The competencies can be learned by any leader, at any point.

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

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

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

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

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.

In the new workplace, with its emphasis on flexibility, teams and a strong customer orientation, this crucial set of emotional competencies is becoming increasingly essential for excellence in every job in every part of the world.

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

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

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.

IQ and technical skills are important, but emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership.

Empathetic people are superb at recognizing and meeting the needs of clients, customers, or subordinates. They seem approachable, wanting to hear what people have to say. They listen carefully, picking up on what people are truly concerned about, and respond on the mark.

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.

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

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

Positive work environments outperform negative work environments.

There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.

Educators, long disturbed by schoolchildren's lagging scores in math and reading, are realizing there is a different and more alarming deficiency: emotional literacy. And while laudable efforts are being made to raise academic standards, this new and troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school curriculum. As one Brooklyn teacher put it, the present emphasis in schools suggests that "we care more about how well schoolchildren can read and write than whether they'll be alive next week."

Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.

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

What really matters for success, character, happiness and life long achievements is a definite set of emotional skills - your EQ - not just purely cognitive abilities that are measured by conventional IQ tests.

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

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.

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

As much as 80% of adult "success" comes from EQ.

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.

Doggedness depends on emotional traits - enthusiasm and persistence in the face of setbacks - above all else.

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.

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.

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.

Compassion begins with attention.

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

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.

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.