Daniel Goleman Quotes

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

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

....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.

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.

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.

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

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

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.

For the high achievers, studying gave them the pleasing, absorbing challenge of flow 40 percent of the hours they spent at it. But for low achievers, studying produced flow only 16 percent of the time; more often that not, it yielded anxiety, with the demands outreaching their abilities...The low achievers found pleasure and flow in socializing, not in studying.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Attention is a little-noticed and underrated mental asset.

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.

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.

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.