"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." -- Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman (born March 7, 1946) is an author, psychologist, and science journalist. For twelve years, he wrote for The New York Times, specializing in psychology and brain sciences. He is the author of more than 10 books on psychology, education, science, and leadership.
"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.""But there has also been a notable increase in recent years of these applications by a much wider slice of psychotherapists - far greater interest than ever before.""However, I began meditating at about that time and have continued on and off over the years.""I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example.""If you are doing mindfulness meditation, you are doing it with your ability to attend to the moment.""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.""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.""Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.""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.""My hope was that organizations would start including this range of skills in their training programs - in other words, offer an adult education in social and emotional intelligence.""People tend to become more emotionally intelligent as they age and mature.""Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.""The amygdala in the emotional center sees and hears everything that occurs to us instantaneously and is the trigger point for the fight or flight response.""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.""The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.""The other thing is that if you rely solely on medication to manage depression or anxiety, for example, you have done nothing to train the mind, so that when you come off the medication, you are just as vulnerable to a relapse as though you had never taken the medication.""Well, any effort to maximize your potential and ability is a good thing.""When I say manage emotions, I only mean the really distressing, incapacitating emotions. Feeling emotions is what makes life rich. You need your passions.""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.""When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences - the first person - with what the measurements show - the third person.""While there I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind."
Goleman was born in Stockton, California, where his parents were college professors. His father taught world literature at what is now San Joaquin Delta College, while his mother taught in the Sociology department of the University of the Pacific. Goleman received his Ph.D. from Harvard, where he has also been a visiting lecturer. Daniel Goleman currently resides in the Berkshires. He is a co-chairman of The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, based in the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University, which recommends best practices for developing emotional intelligence abilities, and promotes rigorous research on the contribution of emotional intelligence to workplace effectiveness.
In addition, Goleman was a co-founder of The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning at the Yale University Child Studies Center (now at the University of Illinois at Chicago) which has a mission to help schools introduce emotional literacy courses. Thousands of schools around the world have begun to implement such programs. Goleman is also a member of the board of directors of the Mind and Life Institute, which fosters dialogues between scientists and contemplatives. His book, " Destructive Emotions" contains an edited selection of dialogues from The 8th Mind & Life Conference (Dharamsala, India from March 20-24, 2000} between the Dalai Lama and neuroscientists.The same with his book Healing Emotions which is an edited selection of dialogues from The 3rd Mind & Life Conference (Dharamsala, India, November 5-9, 1990). In both of these conferences Goleman has been the Scientific Coordinator.
Goleman authored the internationally best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence (1995, Bantam Books), that spent more than one-and-a-half years on the New York Times Best Seller list. Goleman developed the argument that non-cognitive skills can matter as much as I.Q. for workplace success in "Working with Emotional Intelligence" (1998, Bantam Books), and for leadership effectiveness in "Primal Leadership" (2001, Harvard Business School Press). Goleman's most recent best-seller is Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (2006, Bantam Books).
The following quote is widely misattributed to R. D. Laing but appears in Goleman’s (1985) book Vital Lies, Simple Truths: "The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds." The following introduction prefaces the quote: “To put it in the form of one of R.D. Laing’s ‘knots’:” (p. 24): “Knots” being a reference to an earlier text by Laing (1972):. So it is in the form of Laing, and is consistent with Laing's thought, but is not by Laing. It is informed by Goleman's clinical psychotherapeutic experiences, but it speaks to the field of conflict psychology and facilitation as well. Goleman's book, "Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor," (2008, Jossey-Bass), co-authored with Warren Bennis and James O'Tool, argues for the benefits of transparency in organizations.
In his first book, The Varieties of Meditative Experience (1977), republished as The Meditative Mind in 1988, Goleman used sequential chapters to describe almost a dozen different meditation systems. These included Sufism, Transcendental Meditation, Patanjali's Ashtanga Yoga, Indian Tantra and Kundalini Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, the teachings of Gurdjieff, and the teachings of Krishnamurti. He wrote that "the need for the meditator to retrain his attention, whether through concentration or mindfulness, is the single invariant ingredient in the recipe for altering consciousness of every meditation system" (p. 107). Noting that most methods of meditation were intended to foster concentration, he also wrote that "powerful concentration amplifies the effectiveness of any kind of activity" (p. 169).
Goleman has published a series of dialogues with More Than Sound Productions entitled "Wired to Connect" on the applications of social intelligence. Those already published include conversations with Psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, renowned brain researcher Richard Davidson, Clay Shirky, an expert on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, film director and Educational innovator, George Lucas, and Paul Ekman, world renown psychologist on emotions. A topic of his discussion with Ekman was how to empathize with others, and how we can understand other's emotions as well as our own. Goleman suggests that in light of tragedies like Hurricane Katrina, we must learn how to empathize with others in order to help them. Goleman and Ekman are both contributors to Greater Good magazine, Greater Good Science Center, University of California, Berkeley.
Goleman has received many awards for his writing, including a Career Achievement award for journalism from the American Psychological Association. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in recognition of his efforts to communicate the behavioral sciences to the public. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.
Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything (2009) Broadway Business. ISBN 0385527829, ISBN 978-0385527828
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Social Relationships (2006) Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0553803525
Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (2003) Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0553381054
Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance (2001) Co-authors: Boyatzis, Richard; McKee, Annie. Harvard Business School Press. ISBN 978-1578514861
The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace (2001) Jossey-Bass. ISBN 978-0787956905
Harvard Business Review on What Makes a Leader? (1998) Co-authors: Michael MacCoby, Thomas Davenport, John C. Beck, Dan Clampa, Michael Watkins. Harvard Business School Press. ISBN 978-1578516377
Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998) Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0553378580
Healing Emotions: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mindfulness, Emotions, and Health (1997) Shambhala. ISBN 978-1590300107
Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (1996) Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0553383713
Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self Deception (1985) Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-0747534136
The Varieties of the Meditative Experience (1977) Irvington Publishers. ISBN 0-470991917. Later republished as The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience (1988) Tarcher. ISBN 978-0874778335.
