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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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