The Pioneer of "Emotional Intelligence" Daniel Goleman on a Balanced Life

[Music] So Daniel Goldman thank you very much indeed for joining us honor it's my pleasure thank you can I start by asking you about this title optimal but more how to sustain Excellence every day people's immediate reaction to that might be that it sounds quite a stressful goal um Excellence every day you know is something that many of us perhaps just think sounds much too much of an effort to sustain you know actually um if you think of Excellence as your very best performance ever the time you were in flow for example I think it is too high a standard what we're talking about as Excellence is having a really good day at work for example uh being very engaged being absorbed in what you're doing being very productive having uh small winds toward a larger goal solving problems that come up connecting with the people around you and feeling good uh that's uh that's what you might call having a good day and I think that's a more reasonable goal that's what we mean by excellence and is that what you mean to Define by Optimal that word the word optimal um is a handy way of talking about such a a day and the data for it comes actually from Harvard Business School from a study where hundreds of men and women were at asked to keep a log a journal of how they felt that day how things went how productive they were how they solved problems what they call small winds toward a larger goal and the composite portrait that emerged was of an optimal day feeling good and doing well so you've you've mentioned a day uh here you you've talked about a day where you do everything to your idea of Excellence to your optimal but presumably if the goal is to have an optimal day it's also to have an optimal life in doing so I suppose you could extend it and I think that it's a a natural impulse to do that so if you know how how to be engaged how to pay attention how to empathize with other people the people in your life the people you care about I think that it would extend to your life generally absolutely so who who then is this book for anybody everybody I think so yeah and I think it's important to ask as you ask in the book and you both question why now why this Theory now the theory of seeking an optimal day an optimal life um is it something that coincides with the world in which we're living increased digitization perhaps a postco world in which we work in very different ways you know uh surveys show that loneliness for example is higher than ever uh people feel more isolated I don't know about in the UK but I have many friends here who work say two days a week in the office instead of five and there's a lot of zooming and transactional uh in you know interplay but what we've lost is the kind of easy socializing that happened when we were seeing friends more often when we were at work uh with our workmates because you got to know people in a way that I think doesn't occur so uh I think it's in that context Reinhold neber made a very important distinction it was between the things in our lives that we can change and the courage to do that and the things that we can change that we have to put up with and many of us have to put up with an existence whether it's at work or in the conditions of our life uh which aren't optimal but we can do the best we can within that and that's what we're encouraging people to do to take control not to let the circumstance of your work life or your life generally dictate how you feel but to be more active more proactive in terms of uh being sure to do the best that you can internally that will show itself externally yes I mean and there's so it is such a it is a book full of practical tips and advice H and nothing is forever if you think listening that you're not a certain person and you can't can't be a certain way you show us that actually everything is flexible and malleable in our characters so let I mean just before we move on to that advice there are just I think some clarifications that you make at the start of the book and perhaps most importantly is how this links with emotional intelligence which it does um how how o obviously um how optimal and living in the way you advocate making every day uh feel a success links in with the capacity for an emotional for emotional intelligence well let's talk about first what emotional intelligence is a good place to start me uh there are four parts the first is self-awareness knowing what you're feeling often we don't even pay attention to what we're feeling knowing how those feelings uh shape your perception your thinking your impulse to act uh that's emotional self-awareness and I think is very important it's the Keystone in emotional intelligence from that you can then manage your emotions better and by manage emotions I don't mean control or subdue emotions are important messages they're telling us what uh what's going on in our life but if our emotions are upsetting us if we're waking up at 2 in the morning and ruminating about them then they're out of control and we may want to manage them better be more resilient actually resilience means uh the time it takes to go you go from Peak upset to back to calm and clear and not only uh the second part of emotional intelligence is about how we manage emotions it's not just the rocky emotions it's also uh keeping in touch with our sense of meaning and purpose what matters to us what motivates us what our real goals are in life not being distracted from them the third part of emotional intelligence is empathy uh understanding how the other person thinks about things the language they use uh by the way AI would be very good at that uh but then something AI don't think would be good at it's resonating with people emotionally knowing how that person feels because you feel it too and then the third part is really important that's car ing it's called empathic concern it's like a parents love for a child you care about the person you not only know how they think and feel and then the fourth part is putting that all together in managing relationships well effectively harmoniously or settling differences for example so that's what emotional intelligence is and the data that we have uh shows that for example when a company looks through its lens at emotional intelligence one of the things it values and employs is what they call engagement well actually being absorbed being involved that's one of the components of that good day it turns out as we show in the book that uh from uh a an organization's point of view that good day that we feel is what they want and it correlates very highly with emotional intelligence can I ask uh from your perspective how you feel the idea of emotional intelligence has changed since it first came into common pance because of course you say in the book um that there are of many controversies now over you know what it means within the field because it is so widely used and of course the similarities as you've just laid out but how has it changed or how has Society changed because of it well you know those are two very big questions let me answer the first how has emotional intelligence change when I wrote the book uh emotional intelligence was very little direct research in fact it was a brand new idea since that idea became very widespread there are many many different models of emotional intelligence uh most of them agree on those four parts but how they fill in those parts is very different yeah so I would say one of the big changes is that uh there different schools of thought on emotional intelligence just as by the way there different schools of thought on IQ which has been around for more than a hundred years emotional intelligence is a relatively new idea we wrote this book now uh my co-author Carrie chernes and I uh were co-directors of a research Consortium on emotional intelligence we wrote the book now because now there's a critical mass of data showing that uh this helps people in their Liv lives it helps them at work it helps managers and leaders be the kind of boss you love instead of the kind of Boss You Hate by the way I've asked I've asked organizations and and groups around the world tell me about a boss you loved and a boss you hated and it doesn't matter where you ask the answer is I want an emotionally intelligent boss I don't want one who's tuned out who doesn't care who's aloof uh and people leave Bad Bosses so one of the ways uh I think that bad bosses are hurting organizations and businesses is by pressuring people to get results instead of inspiring them and motivating them to get those results so this means that people are burning out when they shouldn't be and they're the best people are more likely to quit so anyway I think I'm rambling why didn't you direct me again yeah no you're not rambling at all and I as you say I asked very big questions two of of them but how it's changed um emotional intelligence since it came first came into being we get a sense of and I mean when I listen to you say that the immediate question which I expect you get asked a huge amount which you don't necessarily address you know um head on in the book but is are are women generally better at um generally more emotionally intelligent than men or is there no gender divide in your research you know when you talk about gender differences in Behavior you're talking about two largely overlapping belt curves so women generally tend to do much better than men uh on uh elements like um empathy we talk to girls about relationships we talk to boys about things generally so they're socialized differently in our culture uh women tend to score better on tests of emotional intelligence uh than men do but uh this is largely because of women's social skills which are better than men's generally but it doesn't mean that any given man couldn't be as good as any given woman on social skill and men tend to be better for example than women on handling upsetting emotions but it doesn't mean that any woman any given woman couldn't be as good as any man at handling those emotions and you talk a lot uh in the book about how to differentiate and why it's important diff to differentiate between the type of Engagement that you're trying to teach your readers how to um learn and another thing that is talked about more and more and I'm sure our howto Academy listeners uh and viewers will know about Flow State but it's important isn't it to Def differentiate between what you're advocating and hoping to bring into people's lives it's very different from Flow State which is often something very hard to grasp and you can't predict when it's coming well yes so flow is that one time you outdid yourself at whatever matters to you and it it's uh not something you can predict it just happens to us and it's wonderful but it's very rare so uh we argue that it's not helpful to expect to be in flow uh any given day that it's better to uh try for what we call the optimal range which is below flow but still very good uh and it's something you can do something you can get better at or you can there are ways and I hope we'll talk about how to do how to get into that optimal State let's talk about that then so the ways in which we do that are very much in sync with the ideas of emotional intelligence the the pillars that you've outlined mind and the first way that you encourage and advise people to to help help get into the optimal zone is through what you described as self-awareness it's the personal that we address first if I'm right H and one of those important key pillars of that is self-awareness so could you explain what self-awareness as you describe it looks like and and why it's so important and then we can go into your self-awareness helpers well uh you can say it's self-awareness I think of it as Focus which is an aspect that's like applied self-awareness the question is uh what's on your mind right now you know when they did research at Harvard where they uh gave people an app that rang them at random times of day and asked what are you doing now and what are you thinking about people were actually distracted about 50% of the time up to 90% at work meaning you're thinking about something else so what the first uh Avenue We Believe into an optimal state is to pay full attention there are many so-called mindfulness techniques now that are popular actually they're really attention training when you get used to or train your mind to notice when you're distracted and bring it back to a point of focus that is an extremely valuable skill and it means you can become absorbed in what you're doing right now now and we find that that is a key to getting into your optimal State because it means you're fully engaged you're fully committed you're fully involved in what you're doing and the rest of it comes as a concomitant so perhaps you could give us some tips as you do about how to do that how how do we uh you know attention train how do we um put things into our lives so that we become absorbed so that we're aware which is what you're talking about so consistently so that we're aware when our thoughts drift and we know how to refocus our attention well you know the the good thing here is that the brain operates the same way your muscles do you know when you go to the gym every time you do a rep with a a weight a repetition you're making that muscle that much stronger it's the same with our minds that every time you bring your mind back from being distracted you're making the neural circuitry for uh Focus stronger so there's a simple exercise uh you can do it anywhere any time I recommend doing it maybe 5 10 minutes whatever you can afford before you go to work for example before you start your day and you might you can do it this way you pay full attention to your in breath and to your out breath and the space between the breath and again with the next breath and then when you know notice your mind has wandered off and it will I guarantee when you notice it's wandered you bring it back to your breath that is the mental repetition that builds the neural skill of paying full attention to what matters right now and you want to bring that with you to work or whatever matters to you during the day so on a practical level perhaps I could ask your recommendation is that that's a practice you you compared this to ex exercise that is the similar similar thing to going for a run in the morning or or doing your weights and that sustains you throughout the optimal day it isn't that every time should you know should you repeat that through the day or is that an exercise a training how do you draw on that when you need it well you know you go to the gym once a day I would suggest you try this because what you're doing is building mental Fitness and it happens gradually it happens slowly you're not going to have a magical first day I did this uh it was better it's going to happen slowly and if you work at it steadily so I recommend starting with five minutes and extending it to whatever is comfortable for you whatever you make time for in your day but make it a priority the same way you make your physical exercise a priority uh and this is going to help you at work just as getting physically fit helps you through the day this mental Fitness will help you pay more attention to what you need to be doing right now you also talk about a very important aspect of this which is um checking your selft talk I've actually spoken to a lot of people about this recently it feels like a very um worthy recurring theme in some of the interviews I've been doing lately I was interviewing a a psychoanalyst talking about this very small number of words we used to criticize ourself and he said it's an actual a front to our intelligence how can we do something about that it's very important that we do so your selft talk refers to that ongoing monologue we all have inside our our head and when that selft talk is critical of something you did or about to do or your abilities generally it's very destructive uh as any therapist will tell you and so uh you can reframe your life you can reframe your performance and say instead of what did I do wrong what can I learn from what happened to do better and what do I do right in other words look at what's working not just focusing on what's not working you also talk in the book about um the added VA value of self-awareness a sort of SE second application of self-awareness further than what we're discussing and I perhaps you could explain that say a little more Hana I don't you talk about the second application sensing the subtle Sensations that tell us whether what we're doing gives us the feeling of opt optimal state or not you say think again about the estimate as you discuss um by the McKenzie Consultants being optimal State can result in feeling we are as much as five times more effective as we are in our usual state well yes there there two elements here one is tuning into what the neurologist Antonio damasio calls somatic markers yes I found that fascinating a gut feeling gut feeling uh because it turns out that our life experience is stored in a part of the brain that has no direct access to uh the part of the brain that thinks in words it has lots of connection to the to our GI tract as you say gut feeling so does it feel right or does it it feel wrong uh this is really important for staying on track and also for seeing uh is what we're doing helpful or not so each one of your points I feel we could probably spend an hour on and and very happily have at least four hours discussing this but in the interest of time um you also talk about Beyond self-awareness again on the personal front you talk about self-management and what does self-manage this is where you talk about the ability to uh manage yourself to have strength and self-control what does self-management look like and how does that help us to have an optimal day and an optimal life let me clear up one common misconception which is that self-management doesn't mean no emotion it means appreciating emotion and being aware of when emotion for example sadness or anxiety or anger is overwhelming and being resilient we can't determine what we're going to feel when we're going to feel it how strongly we're going to feel it but once we have a feeling we have a choice point which is are we going to let that feeling run us if it's very UPS if it's passion motivation if it's a positive feeling sure but if it's high negative if it's disturbing uh if we can't stop thinking about it that thing that upsets us then it's better if we're resilient and resilience means technically the time it takes you to recover from Peak upset to getting back to a calm and clear state which is facilitates that optimal that we've been talking about uh and so uh self-management means on the one hand not letting your upset overwhelm you managing it but also remembering what has meaning here for you what where's your sense of purpose what matters to you about what you're doing what motivates you uh can you see the positive as I said before rather than just zoning in on that negative selft talk all of this is part of self-management and you talk about the importance uh that we perhaps of a of a skill we perhaps gain as we grow older but many of us and and you know don't necessarily manage all that well which is to leave a pause and time between your first impulse whether it's anger or upset or whatever it might be offence H and and your reaction you know uh Danny Conan wrote a book Thinking Fast and Slow about system one and system two as he called it one of them is very fast and can get get us in trouble uh and one of them is relatively slower in brain time and that means we can be more skillful in what we do and you've put it very well Hana I think we need to pause uh and be sure that what we're about to do is the more skillful response I'm G to hope that I can articulate a quandry I have when I was reading this chapter which is you advocate of course you talk about the marshmallow experiment and the importance of not acting on impulse and having that um self-control uh and you say that if you have that you may not be um so prone to anxiety and worry and I feel like actually there are a lot of people who have an enormous amount of self-control and actually that enormous amount of self-control leads to uh them being prone to anxiety and worry because it sort of forms a sense of a perfectionism it's not a relaxed quality in a lot of people the need to uh have such a such a rigid sense of self-control I I hope that I've articulated that query yes let me clear that up because I'm glad you brought this quandry to light uh perfectionism is what we were talking about earlier when we were saying you focus on what you did wrong not what you did right in fact there's a leadership style where people people who are perfectionists that is who drive themselves like 120% do better and get promoted to a management position but they don't know how to lead they just see other people through that same critical lens so they give critiques failing grades not positive grades and if you do that with yourself if you're a perfectionist uh it is very debilitating because you don't appreciate the good side you don't appreciate what's helping you so I think that managing selft talk or monitoring selft talk and seeing am I doing that again and when you say enormous self-control perhaps you means uh someone who's suppressing emotion which I don't think is helpful at all I think it's just wanding watching the emotion to see when is it debilitating and what can you do about it rather than removing all feeling which I don't think is helpful in the in the first place because you need your motivation you need your passion you need to care uh and these are all emotions that are very helpful and before we move on I suppose to um empathy which obviously forms a huge part of this and bringing others in and P inter personal relationships and just um really interested by the changes we spoke about earlier in emotional intelligence and the language around it you talk about uh the word grit that is essentially a large relabeling of of the achieve competence in your model and what do you make of of grit how important is is this idea of having a sense of grit and persistence if you're going to attain a large goal whatever it may be for you uh you need to persist you need what has been called grit and uh from my point of view it's the the goal to rather the motivation to achieve a goal and this is part of self-management too because every day is going to bring distractions and you know the crisis of the day the question is can you keep moving toward that larger goal one of the elements of that optimal State or the op the good day at work is that people have small winds toward a larger goal I think this is very important you're not going to achieve it overnight it's a large goal but you can do something daily or most every day that moves you closer to it so is it fundamental to this sense of optimal and to have an optimal day that you are enjoying what you do one of the elements of that good day is you feel good so uh if you feel good I was talking to someone about cust customer experience for example if you encounter someone uh in a store a retail Clerk or a call center whoever it might be who's having a bad day and treats you in a way where they communicate that emotion to you and by the way emotions are very communicable very transmittable uh it's going to make you feel bad if you encounter someone who's having a good day who feels good they're going to make you feel good and you'll feel better about that company or that organization this is fundamental this is a positive function uh in a business for example of people being in that optimal State and one of the things that strikes me about the optimal state is that it's it's a circle of positivity so instead of a vicious circle once you one element clicks into place the the rest sort of rolls on I would call it a virtuous circle virtual Circle I was looking for that because we're told we have much more negative words in the English language and I know the vicious circle is often used and I was thinking of the virtuous circle well what you're talking about now really is leading in isn't it to empathy um and we all have an idea of what empathy is but you you clarify these emotions and these feelings and these ideas better than most so what is the empathy that we are seeking in order to reach an optimal State I think that there are three kinds of empathy uh and they seem to be based in different parts of the brain one is cognitive empathy understand uh how you think about what's going on the labels you use to yourself uh this is empathy that AI could be very good at because it's a language model this means you can be very effective at messaging however there's a second kind of empathy uh which is very different that's emotional empathy that means I know what you feel I I feel it to or I sense it I resonate with you and this is very positive in terms of keeping our interaction uh on the same page so to speak and the Third Kind of empathy is technically called empathic concern it means I care about you and I think it's maybe the most important I worry about AI for example because they're not programmed to care necessarily about the well-being of people uh and in in a relationship in a close relationship especially your spouse your co-workers your boss your friends you want this kind of empathy and you want to show it do you think that perhaps that's a reason not to worry about AI the fact that they can't do this and the fact that they can't do this means that we shouldn't fear them entering the workplace in the places where this is so important uh that's a I think rather you to opian vision for AI which I don't really agree with I think that AI should be programmed to care uh because otherwise it could be very destructive okay so that's interesting you think that that is the way to deal with AI is inevitable therefore come and it needs to be programmed to care and that's possible there's a debate in AI circles about this right now and I don't know which way it will go okay interesting um and in terms of how empathy we've talked about uh how important empathy is what it is but as with everything in the book there are ways to boost these qualities so how do you Advocate then that someone who knows that empathy is something they need within their workplace which is everybody I would say uh and they feel perhaps it's not a quality in which they are strong H what are your methods of of boosting empathy so first of all you have to realize we almost never get feedback about how other people actually feel yeah we imagine how they feel so one of the correctives is to try to get that empathy try to get that feedback rather about how a person is feeling you can ask someone we rarely do uh but you could say you know I sense you're feeling X is that right or not that already tells the brain something we don't ordinally know and there's a larger lesson here which which is that emotional intelligence unlike IQ is learn and learnable and we can enhance it at any point in life that we're motivated to do so I have a Daniel gemman emotional intelligence online program that's one way uh there are many ways many companies for example offer emotional intelligence programs to help people become better so when it comes to empathy I think the the prime way to boost empathy is to do what the brain hungers for which is to get feedback and to see if you're right or you're not about how the other um actually you remind me of a part of the book that I highlighted with interest which is of course that emotional intelligence you said you know you can learn it at any stage of your life and you also write that emotional intelligence in fact perhaps improves with age emotional intelligence uh seems to improve with age people as people mature they become more calm more in charge of their lives hopefully survey data seems to show that emotional intelligence unlike IQ by the way uh does improve with age and and just Mo moving back to a question in fact I addressed at the very start uh when you talk about the importance of feedback um and these relationships that are so important to establishing empathy and understanding empathy it makes me think again how much I question what the world of work which has changed so much in the last few years does to that and the ease of that because so many of us now do not work in a place where we interact in person with other people uh you know what has that done to emotional intelligence to empathy to relationships in the workplace and the way and the way we work and what the future looks like in that sense yes this is really important Hana and I think that uh to the extent that we don't spend five days a week with our co-workers very few people do anymore uh that uh we don't have the naturally occurring opportunity to get to know them we don't go out for a drink after work we don't have lunch together we don't find out about other people's family situation uh and that's very very important in terms of empathy because you you understand the whole person you sense more of the person at any rate than you can if you only on Zoom for example becomes very transactional or you just have two days a week in the office uh rather than five so I think that what's happened is that the way we work together is thinning out uh the kind of naturally occurring empathy that happened in the old format and how do you think that we can compensate for that or is the only way to encourage getting back to a a workplace environment you know I I think that uh it behooves us to reach out to people that matter to us and do that more to you know have a phone call or get together apart from the work situation and ask about the person not about the job but what do you want from Life what do you want from career you know just the kinds of things you'd want to know know about another person that we no longer have the opportunity to ask in a naturally occurring situation well before we started talking I did say to you that our how-to Academy viewers and listeners um have such perceptive questions and I I hope I might have time to come back to some more of mine at the end but I'm reluctant not to ask them so I'm gonna just uh just jump in because um someone who calls himself RS says Thank You For This brilliant dialogue I'm learning a great deal please could Daniel elaborate on how AI is effective at the language of empathy a real world example or practical example would be very helpful I mean I think you said it needs to learn but perhaps you do have examples well you know AI is a learning machine the fact that it's a machine means it has zero emotion it can only imitate what it's like to have emotion when it comes to language AI is extremely proficient so I I don't know that I can give off the top of my head a real life example but anyone who uses AI knows it can be really fantastic at uh imitating the language of someone about some topic it's instantaneous whether it can resonate emotionally I don't know but I think AI can learn to maybe read emotion from tone of voice or from facial expression those are uh channels that Express emotion uh and then to imitate someone who's empathic and empathic in all senses not just the language sense uh Sarah very good question which um I know people will be interested in how organizations cultivate a culture of emotional intelligence amongst their leaders and ensure this is sustained I mean a brilliant question thank you Sarah thank you for asking that in fact much of the book is about exactly this uh because we studied a few uh case examples of companies that were uh in terms of their culture quite emotionally intelligent one thing we found was that they had a visible champion from the business side not from the resource you know the human uh resources side someone for example a senior vice president who said this matters here and they let that be known in for example uh their selection process so people would self- select they'd want to come company that was emotionally intelligent they also embedded it in the performance review it wasn't just did you hit your numbers for the quarter but how did you get them did you bur people out did you pressure them uh do people hate you or the most talented going to leave that's the bad way or did you inspire people did you influence people uh did you coach people that's the better way to get the best performance to get people into that optimal State and uh they also offered training programs training that works not just like um you know a two-hour seminar but an ongoing practice in some element that a person wants to get better at of emotional intelligence those were all uh typical of the emotionally intelligent organizations and by the way one of the companies we looked at uh I don't know if it's in the UK it's in the states it's called Progressive it's used to be insurance it's Financial now uh and U they had a champion of emotional intelligence and the director of their customer relations unit which actually was all of the insurance agents and he said you know we're in a relationship business this really counts and their profit was uh just increased extraordinarily during his tenure do you think overall Society has got better at this I I I feel um positive that workplaces are more sensitive and empathetic than perhaps they used to be I hope you're right but I'm not sure I think it's quite uneven uh you know emotional intelligence programs have been introduced in many schools but the way they're implemented makes all the difference if you don't have a teacher who cares about it not gonna work uh if you don't have a boss who cares about it it's not going to work and I would say that the uh forces that determine the culture of a company are multiple and uh emotional intelligence may or may not be part of it so I'm guess I'm not as sanguin as you are uh well Peter asks if there are exercises and another good question I'm sure many of us will be interested to hear your answer to help us to pause and inhibit that knee-jerk reaction we were talking about earlier you know it's called Uh technically cognitive control it's the ability of the brain to man manage impulse and if your uh impulse to act is very very strong it may not operate well so uh practicing a pause is part of developing attention uh developing that Focus because the pause is built into the ability to see some a thought or an Impulse as a distraction and to go back to what you're focusing on so I would say that exercise I described where you pay attention to the breath and when you notice you're distracted you bring it back will help you also with a pause and remembering about the pause particularly in the heat of a moment is going to help too but that may not always occur I should bring in here because you also address um really large issues at the end of the book uh that that can cause more um sort of anxiety than perhaps a kneejerk uh sense of worry things like climate change poverty political corruption that we look around and see and that really do trigger emotionally many people um how can you improve you know how can you use emotional intelligence to to feel calmer in the face of those sorts of things that we have no control over or we feel we have no control over well let me uh first talk about what makes us angry and then what makes us anxious I think what makes us angry for example is corruption uh may be the the rich pour Gap getting larger uh and here my model is the Doyama he says anger is a useful emotion if you remove the hatred and you keep the focus and the motivation and the persistence and channel your anger in a positive reaction uh this is very similar to what Danny conman would say about thinking fast and slow the anxiety uh of climate change which is greater among younger people uh I think is very very important and one uh way I look at this is to use our present economic system whether you feel it's fair or not in a kind of Judo I argue that uh people now are blind to how the the things we do and buy and use are uh creating great uh problems and disturbances not only in the climate in carbon but in terms of biodiversity palatable poble drinking water uh you know there there are eight great systems that support life on the planet almost all of which are being degraded by how we live and what I'm saying is that Smart Companies will be uh more transparent about ways in which they're improving things things versus their competition which may not be doing that I think this will become a Competitive Edge as things go on and hopefully one day the lines will cross and the improvements being made uh in how we make and do uh will uh start to lower the cost for the climate um I me again as I said TR truly fascinating and so much to discuss on that but I'm going to ask a bring in another audience question at this stage um Andrew says it's a privilege to hear you in person I've benefited and used your teaching professionally over many years and now I'm retired does your research share any insights about Optimal Performance emotional intelligence in the third age well as I said uh we tend to get wiser uh with age we tend to become more emotionally balanced with age and I think that the uh the third part of life after retirement is a wonderful time to do something that helps other people I think that's a a lovely uh lovely answer to the to the question um I suppose an anonymous attendee says um and I'm sure this again is is a is a issue and a consideration for many the idea of being open and honest is a very one we all want to to achieve and and and a way that we all want to be but um this person says what if I'm hesitant to be open honest at work because of a fear of losing my job or the fear may be being criticized or you know being told that you shouldn't speak your mind which many of many people feel inhibited like that at work yes and I think that's quite right remember I made a distinction between what the things that you can change and the things you can't change and have to adjust to and I think a an atmosphere of fear at work is may be something you can't change the question is hey why let them dictate how you feel why don't you take control over your inner life how you feel at work yes I there two things there you don't let others control the way you feel um and also this sort of Serenity Prayer essentially you've mentioned quite a few times to control and and be be able to control what you can but to let go what what you can't um and Antonio says thank you so much for such a brilliant and inspiring talk it's a joy listening to you live I'd like to ask um with so very interesting again something you address in the book with so many training and leadership development programs around the world and on the web why disengagement and burnout and mounting and still so many bad and low empathetic great leaders around in organizations and outside uh there is a plethora of ways to train in emotional intelligence as I said I have my own there are many many however I think that the portion of people who go through such programs is quite small relative to the portion of people who are suffering from the larger forces at work that create alienation that create disenchantment uh that um make it difficult for people in many many ways and many organizations pay no attention to emotional intelligence in who they promote who they hire that's a reality and as I said you we adjust to the reality that we have to and we take control over our inner life um kmen asks Daniel how best to cultivate emotional intelligence in younger generations and in children I've been a champion for years of what we call social emotional learning uh there's a website c.org uh which is uh says what the best programs look like and I advocate seal but it needs to be implemented well it turns out and I wouldn't say to a a school system I think in the UK you have a uniform system uh I believe anyway many nations do I don't think it works to just tell teachers or administrators you've got to do this it's better if people adopt it because they believe in it because it helps them many teachers in schools where there are successful seal programs are happy because kids are better behaved in the class so it's easier for them to teach what they need to teach but I think that it should come from within not be imposed from without um hannaman I hope I've pronounced your name right hannahan Das from godic says how did the Indian Saint neim Koli Baba influence your thinking on optimal living if indeed it did and how can we use optimal living to reduce violence in the world so um Anand Das must be a kind of Insider uh when I was in India I was with a an amazing uh teacher an old Yogi named Nim CI Baba uh who was fantastic he was more than empathic and more than uh Center he kind like a paragon of emotional intelligence but he's a rarity and so so the question is how can we spread that capacity that is why I wrote the book optimal I think it's important to meet people where they are and to take them from where they are to where they can be and that's what we're trying to do in the book optimal how how would you Advocate people listening to spread this spread the word apart from of course telling them to read your book other ways of of spreading this idea into the world I think the most most powerful way is to model it yeah use it yourself um Marie asks if you have recommendations um on how to boost emotional intelligence if living with and and I think you know two separate things but autism uh and CPM TSD this is a very profound question uh and I don't really know the answer but it may lay in workarounds uh in overcoming whatever uh neural deficit a person may have and finding a way to manage relationships uh well uh that don't depend on those capacities because um one of our listeners has missed this and because I think it is hugely important so simple but so important I might ask you to repeat it for their benefit and for all of ours which is um somebody says I missed the mental exercise for training the Mind simple but effective and just before we come to the next question perhaps we could all just uh remind ourselves of that it's very simple it's the mental equivalent of going to the gym and strengthening a muscle it strengthens the neural circuitry for paying attention and you can use your breath uh as a focus so you start by being in a place where you're not going to be disturbed turn your phone off and uh pay full attention to the in breath and full attention to the out breath and the pause between and then the next breath and when your mind wanders off and it's certain to notice that it wandered and bring it back to the breath and start again with the next breath it's very simple that's the full instruction of course many people who start this say I just can't do it because my mind wanders everywhere I'm crazy my mind is just nuts but everyone's mind is what you're doing is training your mind to pay full attention when you want it to uh and the benefits of that happen slowly gradually and inevitably start with five minutes if that's all you can spare and then work up to a longer time do it once a day uh and the benefits will acre in the rest of your day well I feel instantly relaxed and Cala just doing it now but I that probably is not optimal for your interviewer so I I need to uh be in a much more alert state name says um hi Daniel do you think the AI will be able to identify excellence and emotional intelligence in Recruitment and if so how a recruitment is very tricky because people always want to look their best when they're going for a job I think the uh best way the best information you can get about a person thinking of hiring is to ask people confidentially who have worked with them uh but this is not always possible so I don't know that AI will be any better than a human interviewer uh at something that's quite difficult you just then I actually mentioned something I think again is so interesting in the book which is the difference between the calm the importance of staying calm and self-aware and managing your emotions but also the sense that you need a certain amount of good stress and adrenaline uh to keep you going and for example people might relate to uh a feeling that their optimal state is one in which they are quite wired and sort of their their body is quite stressed in a certain way where's the balance in that well first of all recognize there are huge individual differences Yeah in our nervous system I was talking to a guy who used to be a jet fighter pilot and he said you know uh our reaction time has to be in the top 99th percentile or or we don't get the job and we run on adrenaline those are fighter pilots that's a rare thing a lot of people uh make a a common mistake which is to assume that you need to be in a wired state to do well which I really I would challenge the question is are you focused maybe you depend on getting wired to focus but can you learn to be calm and focused uh so you can think more clearly when you're calm and that exercise I just showed does two things nly one is it sharpens attention the other is the same circuitry calms you down so you become calm and clear I would argue that people can do very very well uh if they're calm and clear and may not have to be wired all the time because being wired all the time is not good for you physiologically it's not good for you in the rest of life so what are you sacrificing uh in order to stay wired all the time to have calm and to be calm and clear as you as you say to find tranquility and Clarity Focus would you say it's important you you mentioned turning off your phone when you're doing this particular exercise but to be in that optimal State even with others is it advisable to try and minimize all distractions Music phone uh digital do do you need is that a is that an important Focus for for optimization for being optimal I I think that's important for the practice uh but you bring it to life and life is full of phones and noise and distractions yes exactly so it's about being able to find that with all the distractions of life and that's the concentration you need presumably for example if you're with someone else are you really focusing on that person or are you distracted by whatever is going on around you that person wants to feel felt that person wants to feel that they're listen to that they're heard and that demands that you focus on them not on the distractions and you say that multitasking is a myth so also in terms of uh being you know living uh optimally as you would Advocate it's better to focus on one task at a time I say multitasking is a myth because although people feel they do things simultaneously the brain doesn't work that way it does one thing at a time uh attention is a defined capacity we can pay attention here or there or there we can switch very rapidly uh but if you're uh very interesting if you do this exercise the breath exercise and develop a focus uh and then you go to work say and your focus is very good on what you're doing then you get distracted on my email or they pinging me or whatever and then you go then you end up you know uh Doom scrolling on on your phone and then you go back to that task your attention is now much lower much less and you need to ramp it up uh however if you practiced an attention strengthener that I describ cribe uh you are much less uh de atttention if you will yeah and get back to full focus more quickly you're much less thrown by things that would otherwise throw you uh our time is very sadly up um I reiterate um our audience's reactions to say it was a a huge pleasure listening to your wisdom hearing your wisdom Gathering your wisdom uh we're very grateful to you for that uh thank you so much if you've um signed into this you can of course um watch the video back or you if you missed anything uh you can recommend it to friends and at some stage in the future we will also be releasing the conversation as a podcast um but for now thank you very much indeed to all who signed in and Daniel thank you so much to you honor my pleasure thank you for having [Music] me

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 1,411

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Id: v3o5PdvrdOI

Length: 58min 50sec (3530 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024