Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence Skills For Success

[Music] A Listener Production Hello, a life of greatness listeners. I wanted to let you know about my private Facebook group called Live Your Life Greatly. It's a space for our community of like-minded people to give advice and tips on how to live a life of love and meaning. Search Live Your Life Greatly in Facebook Groups. You can also join me on Instagram @seragrimberg for daily inspiration, videos, and behind-the-scenes footage. Search @seragrimberg on Instagram. Daniel Gollman is an internationally known psychologist and as a science journalist reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for the New York Times for many years. Daniel is one of our wisest voices on emotional intelligence and the spiritual aspect of social healing. At the heart of his work is a fascination with human behavior and the way we manage our emotions. Daniel says in a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels. This conversation traverses many realms, the power of quietening the mind, leading with empathy and the importance of relationships. There I saw that we could do much more with our minds than the psychology of the day was allowing. That we could be self-aware. That we could manage our negative emotions and not let them run us. That we could tune into other people and empathize. In a sense what they're feeling and use all of that for relationship. That became the model of emotional intelligence that I wrote about. I'm Sarah Grimberg and this is a life of greatness. Working as a podcast and radio producer I have been fortunate enough to cross paths with many intriguing people who have had a profound impact on me. In this series I share stories and experiences from the people who have brought inspiration to my life and hopefully yours too. Daniel Goldman is the author of many New York Times best sellers including emotional intelligence and social intelligence, the new science of human relationships. In its essence this conversation is about transcending the illusions that hold us back, how to manifest the better self within and the true power that lies in being emotionally connected with ourselves and others. May this conversation shine a light on all those who never thought they were book smart and allow them to realize that even without those attributes their emotional IQ is the most powerful gift they could ask for. Daniel Goldman you are well known for your work in emotional intelligence and we will get to that but I wanted to start by hearing about your days at Harvard University when you first met Rambdas. So I first met this guy who called himself Rambdas quite by accident. It was my first year, it was our cold winter vacation, it would be warm for you. And it was snowy and it's very attractive, woman came to my door and said I've just come back from Nepal and I came from my sister's wedding and she backed out but I have another mission which is to give you this letter from a friend of yours I met in Delhi and to visit this guy up in a farm in the hamster I heard about so I went up with her I gave her a ride and there was this guy sitting in a room with Indian posters plastered on the wall you know deities very garish. He was all in white he didn't say anything when we came in that was weird and he didn't say anything for a long time but she didn't either so I just like went along with it and then he started talking and turned out he he said introduce himself as Bob Rambdas and I never heard of Bob Rambdas and later in the conversation turned out he was Richard Albert. He had just come back from India where he changed his name. Well Richard Albert had been a professor in the very department I was studying at at Harvard and he was well known because about five years before I got there there was a big scandal with Tim Liri and Richard Albert giving psychedelics to undergrad and Albert got fired for that but I actually liked him quite a bit. You went to India and you met Maharaji who was Rambdas spoken a lot about can you tell us a bit about how that experience was? It was interesting because I was studying clinical psychology and we were we got very good at categorizing people in terms of the diagnoses what was wrong with them we had no way of classifying what was right with people so I happened to have a traveling fellowship in my fellowship to Harvard a year of traveling study abroad that's how I got to India and I went there to meet this guy named Crowley Baba who Rambdas called Maharaji and when I got there I saw that he was like super well he was someone that we didn't he was off the charts from point of view of Western psychology at the time he was always upbeat he was very present very loving we had no category for someone like that I couldn't see what was wrong with him and also there was a great contact high being around him so I felt really good when I was with him and it was hard for me to explain this when I got back to Harvard. And so obviously you've gone into the work of emotional intelligence what did you learn about that when you were with Maharaji who seems like from what I've heard everyone says that being around him was like feeling unconditional love. How have you been able to explain how he's he's way of being was knowing what you do about psychology. Well it's only in the last few years that psychology has talked about positive states. Yeah. For example well being is a hot topic now but 10 years ago nobody mentioned it and I would say that at the time I met him psychology didn't have any categories for what was going on. I think now it is better able to handle it but it made me actually when I was in India I started going to meditation courses, Papasana courses, insight meditation what's popularly called mindfulness these days and there I saw that we could do much more with our minds than the psychology of the day was allowing that we could be self-aware that we could manage our negative emotions and not let them run us that we could tune into other people and empathize and sense what they're feeling and use all of that for relationship. That became the model of emotional intelligence that I wrote about and still talk about actually. So I would say that there was probably a direct and an indirect influence on my work on emotional intelligence from my time in India. You talk about wanting to know how someone could evolve in such a way that they are constantly living in the space and embodying I am loving awareness. How have you found that that's possible? Well interestingly Rondas who I've known well now until he passed away recently went through a real metamorphosis because when I first met him he had a wonderful persona of being this very centered, very loving person and that's how most people knew him as Rondas. He was quite charismatic as a lecture he had been before but before he wasn't it so loving before India he wasn't as centered perhaps. By the time he passed away last year his mantra was "I am loving awareness" and he pretty much embodied that. He was someone who was just totally loving and he did that through working with his own mind, his own emotions and through a real devotion to Niem Krolybaba who was his guru as he said. So I would say that someone who was in his state at the end who really embodied the notion that I am loving awareness still doesn't have a category of psychology. We haven't gotten there yet. When you were in India you obviously said that you were exposed to meditation and I know that you have written about it in your books before. From your scientific mind because you are a psychologist as well as being obviously a deeply spiritual person what do you believe are the positive effects that people can have from doing meditation? meditation. Well, actually in the book that I did with Richard Davidson, who was a graduate student with me at Harvard, who I've known since then, who's now actually a world famous neuroscientist at University of Wisconsin. Richie and I, everyone calls him Richie. Richie and I did a book where we looked at all the best scientific research on meditation and pull it together. And we found a lot of things. We found that it does make you more calm, makes you more stress resistant, makes, helps you pay attention more fully and longer. People can become more compassionate, particularly if they do a practice that aims at that, and that there's a dose response relationship generally. The more you do it, the better the results. So when Richie flew 14 yogis to his lab from Europe and India and Nepal and looked at their brains, he found that these people who are at like the Olympic level, they had done 12,000 to 62,000 lifetime hours of practice. That's probably an underestimate because at some point practice becomes something you do all the time, not just when you're sitting on the cushion. So when he looked at their brains, he found, oh, guess what, their brains are act differently. And there seems to be a real effect from heavy doses of meditation. Your book, emotional intelligence, which spent one and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list was called one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It was very interesting when I did read your book, what it made me realize is that you don't have to have a high IQ to have emotional intelligence that is high as well. You can succeed very well in life by having high EQ. It's very important. It is such an important thing in every day. It also made me realize that I am good at my job because of my emotional intelligence and the compassion I feel deeply for people and empathy. When you decided to write the book, in writing the book, what made you want to pursue that line of psychology? At the time I wrote the book, I was a science journalist at the New York Times and I had been covering lots of new research that uncovered how emotions operate in the brain, the advantages of teaching kids, what was called then emotional literacy, being self-aware and how to manage or upsetting feelings and how to empathize with other kids and how to get along. That was like a new idea then. I felt that if I put all of this together under the rubric of emotional intelligence, which by the way is not a term I invented, I had come upon that rather obscure article by a psychologist who's now the President of Yale University, Peter Salave, and his then graduate student, Jack Mayer. I thought this is a great concept because at first it seems like an oxymoron. You can't put emotions and intelligence together. Then I realized, well, it's really being intelligent about emotion. I wrote the book using that framework and pulled it all together. Then in a subsequent book, I started, I went back to my roots as a graduate student where I'd worked with a psychologist named David McClelland. He had been one of the first to look at what makes people outstanding in various jobs. As you point out, it's not the right cue necessarily. You can have a very, you know, the smartest person in the room can have like zero empathy and be a real nerd. So, you know, they're based based, you know, in two different parts of the brain pretty much. So you can have a high IQ. What turned out was that for most jobs, like technical jobs, being an executive, being a lawyer, being a nurse, things like that, you need a high enough IQ to master the technical content. But to be a standout, you needed an addition emotional intelligence. You needed to manage yourself well. You couldn't be blowing up at people. You couldn't be bummed out all the time, you know, anxious. You needed to tune into the people, as you say, to empathize, to care. And if you brought that to your work, you were likely to be the kind of person people wanted to work with. And for, you're the kind of boss people loved instead of one they dreaded, for example. And that's very important over the course of the career. How do people develop their emotional intelligence? I think emotional intelligence is developed in life, not in school. We have introduced something called social emotional learning, which helps kids with their self-awareness and managing their emotions and empathy and so on. And, you know, it's a K through 12, you know, from five years old to 17. And in schools, you introduce aspects of it according to a child's cognitive ability, they're where they are in their growth, or where they are in terms of the brain circuits to manage emotions. You want to hit the right point. But if you don't get it in school, you get it in life. You know, your parents are your first teachers. They're your mentors and coaches in emotional intelligence. When you pick up a crying baby and help soothe her, you're actually teaching her brain how to calm down. So it happens in life. And if it didn't happen fully, say you want to get better at it, it's never too late. Because the brain is plastic through life, meaning the more you exercise aspects of the brain circuit, the stronger the circuitry becomes. So do you believe that emotional intelligence is all nurture? Every behavior is a combination of nature and nurture. Yeah. So people very genetically, some kids have six grandchildren. Some of them are very outgoing, some of them are a little introverted. And they were like that from day one. That doesn't mean they need to be like that all their lives. Or they can't learn abilities that they weren't born with. But they need to pick that up. That's the nurture part of it. And if you're a parent, what would be the best way to nurture your child's emotional intelligence for them to succeed? Probably by modeling. Yeah. That is being someone who is self aware of your emotions. Being someone who manages your upset and recovers quickly from there, being someone who tunes in with empathy and cares about other people, being the kind of person who other people like to be with. All of that means that your kids are picking that up from you all the time. Your book, as we spoke about, shatters that your IQ won't mean you'll be a good leader or have the biggest salary or life satisfaction or happiness with friendships or family. EQ is obviously very important for that. What kind of leaders have you seen that have the most developed EQ? Well, I would say that the Paragon is the Dalai Lama. He's really amazing. Yeah. He's fully attentive to everyone that he confront. He encounters. He doesn't, I relate to them from, you know, I'm the Dalai Lama, like a big deal, but his person a person. He tunes in with empathy. You can see it in his face, but he doesn't get stuck there. He recovers quickly from whatever place he picks up in the other person. So I would say he's really remarkable. I hesitate to name a business leader because I don't know them that well. My wife's pretty good. That's good. Can you tell us what traits make up emotional intelligence? Yes. There are four parts. There's emotional self-awareness knowing what you're feeling and how that's affecting what you're doing or how you're perceiving. Being able to manage disturbing emotions so they don't get in your way, keeping your eye on your goals, staying positive, no matter what happens, being agile and adaptable, is all part of emotional intelligence. Being able to tune in to other people without they're telling you in words what they're feeling because people don't. They tell us in facial expression, in tone of voice, in nonverbal signals, and putting them all together to have effective relationships. Those are the parts of emotional intelligence. What's the difference between emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence? Because as we said, you are a scientist but obviously very spiritual as well. So what do you mean by spiritual intelligence? I think aware that we are more than just our bodies, that there is a higher intelligence at play. I think there what's called technically orthogonal, which is to say they don't have a necessary relationship. You can be very. spiritual and have a higher low emotional intelligence. Like you can have a high IQ or low IQ and your motion intelligence is the same. So I think having a spiritual dimension to your life, which I think is terrific, does it necessarily mean you have a high emotional intelligence? You say your IQ is pretty fixed, but your EQ is learned and learnable. How do we improve it? Well, I've often talked to business groups about this, because people in different job situations sometimes find out they're not very good at aspects of this and they see that if they got better, they would do better. And there are about five steps to enhancing emotional intelligence. The first one is to ask yourself, or the other person, do you really care? If you don't care, forget about it. It's not going to happen because it takes time, it takes effort. Secondly, do you really know what your strengths are or your limits in this area? It helps to get feedback from other people. I co-developed a measure. It's called the emotional social competence inventory. It's called what's called the 360. The person who's the target, who decides who can't do this, asks people who they really respect, whose opinions they trust, to evaluate them anonymously. And they get a pool of eight or ten. And those scores are average. They don't know who said what? This means that the person evaluating them could be very candid. They don't have to hold back. And once you get that profile of strengths and weaknesses, then think about, well, where would I like to be in five years? Where am I heading? How could improving on something I'm not that good at help me get there so that you have more motivation? You care to really do the work. And the work is to develop a learning plan for yourself. Maybe the common cold of these days is being a poor listener. You know, cutting people off, taking over the conversation, not letting someone really speak their whole piece before you respond. So if you wanted to get better at that, be a better listener, you have to restrain yourself. You have to be mindful of the fact you're about to cut someone off. And then substitute a better way of listening. Like, okay, I'll hear them out. And then I'll say what I think, you see what I think they said. And you want to practice that at every naturally occurring opportunity. That's basically the way to do it. Yeah, I think listening is a big one. And when you give people the space to listen to them, it's always so appreciated. You talk about the importance of mindfulness and being able to focus. How do you suggest we best do this with all of our technological distractions? Well, if you practice mindfulness, it's actually direct exercise of the circuitry for ignoring distractions. For example, let's say you're mindful of your breath. That means that you pay full attention to each and breath, the whole in breath, and then to the whole out breath. And do it with the next breath. Be fully aware of, you know, maybe the sensation of the nostril or rise in the fall of your belly. Somewhere you can put your attention and keep it there. And then your mind is going to wander. That's what minds do. Well, when you notice your mind wandered off from the breath, then you bring it back to the breath. That is the basic repetition in this brain training. It's like when you go to the gym and you lift the weight every time you do a rep, you're making that muscle just a little bit stronger. Every time you bring your mind back, presumably you're doing the same with the circuitry for paying full attention. And we do know that mindfulness of the breath, that really simple exercise, makes people better concentrators, less disturbed by distractions like, you know, you're at work and you're doing this really important thing. And then you think, oh, I just got a text. I better check it out. Then you check your email, you go online and you do this and that. And then you go back to the thing you were doing after some time, that's called multitasking by the way. You know, where your concentration is pretty high, now it's pretty low and it takes you a while to ramp up again. Unless you did mindfulness breathing, then it actually, it shortens the time. It takes to get fully concentrated again. We know that mindfulness of the breath makes students score better on exams. Interesting. That means they're working memory is stronger and they're paying more attention with the teachers saying or what their homework is or, you know, they remember while they're taking the test with their supposed to remember. So it has benefits. And as I said, there's a dose response relationship. The more you do, the stronger it gets, better it gets. Do you find that people who are more mindful are happier? Well, this is one of the other payoffs. It turns out that the more you are inattentive, the more you distracted, the less happy you get. So there's some correlation between being able to tend fully and happiness. Turns out too that if you do a different kind of meditation, meditation on compassion and concern for other people, it activates circuitry for happiness. Who knew? But the dog that Alhamd has said the first person to benefit from compassion is the one who thinks that who has the compassion. You say we can always use an interaction to help another person. What I mean by that is this. I'm talking about how emotions are contagious and how, particularly from a person who's really important to the other person, like a teacher to students or parent to kids or Boston employees. What happens generally is that the mood of the important person gets transmitted unconsciously to the other people. And the challenge is to be in a state where you're sending positive emotions. That's the sense in which you can lead people feeling a bit better than they may have originally. You have mentioned the Dalai Lama quite a few times and he's obviously a good friend of yours. You wrote a book together. You say you admire him the most out of any person on this earth today. What are the attributes you admire so much in him? I've done a lot of things over the years with him. I convene some meetings with scientists on different topics with the Dalai Lama. And for his 80th birthday, he's 85 now. I wrote a book on his vision for the world in which for which I interviewed him fairly extensively. And so I've been around him in different situations. And one of the things I admire, as I said, is his ability to be fully present to everybody he meets. I have another friend, Paul Eckman, who has been the world's authority on the facial expression of emotions. And when he first saw the Dalai Lama, he was very impressed because he had never seen, first of all, a face that doesn't suppress some range of emotion. We learned to do it in our family of origin or our culture. He was open to the whole range. And whatever the person he was meeting was feeling, his face immediately reflected that, which meant that he was immediately empathizing with him. And I think that that is quite admirable. Quite admirable. You talk obviously a bit about empathy. And I think that's a very important attribute to have. Because I feel that empathy comes quite naturally. So for myself, I'll obviously talk, when I'm interviewing someone and they talk about something that's sad, I'll start feeling those emotions. To the extent, well, I will tear up or I really kind of really think about what they're saying in a really emotional way. How does some people have that and some don't? There are individual differences in every dimension of emotion that tells you some from birth. And so some people are born that way. The very open and receptive some are not. I think women tend to be more empathic in that sense than men. But think about it. A parents talk to mothers, particularly talk to girls about relationships and feelings. They don't talk that way to the sons generally. Boys get talked to about things, not people, more than people, as a topic or emotions as a topic. So there's a kind of a nature, nurture combination going on. By the way, this may be culture specific. There may be some cultures in which that gender difference is not true in how kids are parented. and the consequence for adult empathy may be very different. We just don't know. You spoke before about being obviously positive and trying to bounce back from situations that might occur faster if something negative in you perceive something negative to have occurred to try and get back to that happier place faster when we are disarmed by something and we are lying in bed ruminating over it. What are the best ways to move through that to get back to that happier space? Well one thing you can do when you are ruminating and ruminating means you are overwaring. You are thinking about that thing in the middle of the night. Why did she say that to me? Or why did I say that to them? Or why did I say that? I was wondering if we were to be happy with that. Right. So things happen that we regret or that we worry about. And if we find we are not recovering from that initial upset which means we are ruminating. We are still worrying about it when we didn't. There are several things you can do. One is recognize that this is not helping me. And then if you can do that, you can talk back to your thoughts. You can remember all the things that happened with that person that disconfirm. You know, my granny loves me. She wasn't upset. I don't have to fear for that. In other words, that's a rumination. And what you might do is a rumination. The other thing is the more you do mindfulness, the faster you'll be covering from such things. Meaning you're more resilient. Resilience is defined as the time it takes you from the peak of upset to get back to calm. So when you're lying there ruminating, you're at the peak of upset. And you want to be able to calm down. So that's another way you can do it. Another thing you can do at that time, which helps shift your brain state, is name it. Say, oh, I'm ruminating now instead of being caught in the thought. Usually we're just caught in the thought. We don't even recognize it. But if you can step back, if you can what's called de-centering in cognitive therapy, and see what's going on in your mind, then you actually at that moment have already, if you can name it, you shifting energy from the centers of the brain that are keeping it going, the worry to part of the brain that can calm it. Compassion is obviously part of emotional intelligence. What's the difference between empathy and compassion? There are three kinds of empathy. One is cognitive empathy, where you know how the other person thinks about things. You know the terms they use. It means you can communicate effectively with them, because you know the language you don't understand. The second is emotional empathy. As you said, when someone's very sad, you feel like crying yourself. You know what they feel, because you feel it too. The third kind of empathy is empathic concern. It's actually based on the same circuitry as a parent's love for the child. So your love for your son is based in that circuitry, but compassion too is based in that circuitry, because if you can tune into someone and care about them, then that opens the joy to compassion. Why are the stories that we tell ourselves so important? You know, we're our best storytellers. We believe our stories. And so the story you tell yourself is super important, because it's in a determined what state you're in. It determines what your goals are. It determines whether you have the energy and motivation to attain those goals. It determines whether you want to get out of bed in the morning. It's extremely, extremely important. What are the stories we shouldn't be telling ourselves? I think it's easier to say the stories we shouldn't be telling ourselves. Yes. I think we shouldn't be telling ourselves stories that say, "I'm no good at this. It's hopeless. I should give up." Those are the stories to press people tell themselves. You want to tell yourself, well, it's a new day, it's a new start. See what happens today. Something great could happen today. You want to tell yourself stories that are motivating, that help you keep your sense of meaning and purpose in mind. I did a preface recently for a book written from talks given by a man named Victor Frankl. His most famous book is Mancer's Meaning. It's about his four years in Nazi concentration camps and how having a sense of purpose helped him. He developed a psychotherapy where one of the aims was to get people in touch with their own sense of meaning and purpose. Because he said, "If you have a why to live, you can endure almost anyhow." Getting in touch with that why? Telling yourself a story that reminds you of what actually has meaning for you. The purpose of what I'm doing is extremely motivating. That's the kind of story that I think is very good to tell yourself. What's your why, Daniel Gorman? I think it has to do with helping people find their better self. How important do you think having a purpose is? I think everybody does have a purpose, whether they've articulated it for themselves or not. I think having a purpose that is for the good of people, not just yourself, but everyone, is better than having one that's just about your self interest. We used to talk some decades ago about brand me. How important it was to think of yourself as a brand and to market yourself. I think it's a very limited sense of purpose if it's all about you. I think that the more motivating kinds of purpose are to help other people in one way or another. And more and more companies, for example, are trying to articulate a purpose that's greater than just like we make a lot of money. What's the best advice that you've ever been given? I remember when I was in college, I got a. Someone gave me a card with a very happy looking guy on it and it said, "Don't worry, be happy." That was also the slogan I think of Alfred E. Newman, who was the mascot of Mad Magazine. It's not that bad as advice. What are your daily spiritual practices? I spend a lot of time in the morning meditating. And since my college years, I've been a meditator on and off. And as the older I get the more, I like to do it. What's your favorite prayer? I don't know if it's a prayer, but I liked it a lot. It's something that actually the Dalai Lama said, which was, you know, if things are really hard and you can't do anything about it, why were it? I love that. What's the lesson that has taken you the longest to learn? Probably not to care so much about material matters. How am I going to pay my bills? I've got to do that. What is your greatest hope for society today? Well, I think that the most urgent crisis has to do with the climate. I mean, Australia has had these horrible wildfires. And they're Siberia. The Permafrost is melting. And it's not going to get better. So my hope is that people around the world will do the things that will slow this down and help people adapt. Otherwise, it's very grim. It's going to be a university's environmental research center. And scientists there tell me that in the some point in the future, there will be many days in many parts of the world where sweat no will no longer cool the human body, which means that people will die because they can't cool themselves down. And there are major crops that feed most of the people in the world, corn, soy, wheat, and rice will no longer be global in parts of the world where they're we now depend on them. So things look pretty dire and we're going to have to be very adaptable, very inventive and very determined. to face that crisis in a good way. And that's my hope that we will. What is a life of greatness to you? I think a life of greatness is someone, like I say, Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, where you dedicate your life to the well-being of others and live that. Fabulous. Daniel, thank you for all the work that you have done and the lovely conversation today. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. If you've enjoyed this episode, then I'd love you to join my community on Instagram at Sarah Grimberg, where we post videos and behind the scenes footage of each recording. You can also join my private Facebook group, Live Life Greatly, where we discuss the content in this episode and many more, as well as give advice and tips on how to live a life of love and meaning. To purchase my ebook, find in greatness head to Sarah Grimberg.com. And if you love what you heard, then we'd love you to hit subscribe on our podcast or your favorite podcast app and leave a fire star review. It will help us share this wisdom with others. A life of greatness's executive producer is me, Sarah Grimberg, audio producers, Matt Curry and Nicola Sitch. Special thanks to Grant Tottele for bringing this dream to life. For more episodes, search a Life of Greatness podcast, download the new Listen app now and listen for free. Listen up.