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.

Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.

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.

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

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

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.

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.