Daniel Goleman on Emotional Intelligence

After the Bear episode yesterday, I had to listen to this:

"Question: What is emotional intelligence?
Daniel Goleman:Emotional intelligence refers to how well we handle ourselves and our relationships, the 4 domains.  Self-awareness, knowing what we’re feeling, why we’re feeling it, which is a basis of, for example, good intuition, good decision-making.  Also, it’s a moral compass.  Say, in part, is self-management, which means handling your distressing emotions in effective ways so that they don’t cripple you, they don’t get in the way of what you’re doing, and yet, attuning them… to them when you need to so that you learn what you must.  Every emotion has a function.  Also, [marshalling] positive emotions, getting ourselves, you know, involved, enthused about what we’re doing, aligning our actions with our passions.  The third is empathy, knowing what someone else is feeling.  And the fourth is putting that altogether in skilled relationship.  So that’s what I mean by emotional intelligence.  There’re many definitions out there. The part of the brain, it turns out, that supports emotional and social intelligence is actually the last circuitry of the brain to become anatomically mature.  And because the neuroplasticity of the brain shapes itself according to repeated experiences, so my argument is, hey, we should be teaching kids regularly overtime, in a systematic way, self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social skill.  Executive function, which is mediated by the prefrontal lobe, both helps you manage your emotions and helps you pay attention.  So as kids learn these skills, they also learn learning… basic learning skills.  I think that the fact that that was an argument was one thing that caught people’s attention.  Then, there was a little chapter on… called managing with heart, which argued that leaders who were sons of a bitch were actually defeating the company’s own mission.  And I think that made a lot of people happy because they work for people like that.  I don’t know… Some people gave it to other people because they thought they needed help in this domain.  I’m sure there’re a zillion reasons why people like the book.

Question: What should corporate leaders understand about emotional intelligence?
Daniel Goleman: Well, the classic problem is the 2 kinds of leadership.  They tend to be slightly rapid.  One is someone called the pace setter, who typically was a very gifted individual performer, the very good at the technical side of what they do, whatever that may be.  And because they’re so good, they get promoted to lead a team or a division.  And all of a sudden, the skill for which they were so good is no longer sufficient to the task at hand, which is dealing with people.  Leadership, what is leadership?  Leadership is influencing, persuading, motivating, listening, communicating.  None of those skills necessarily have to do with how good a software programmer you are, whatever the skill may be.  So pace setters tend to lead by example.  And they also tend to be perfectionists.  The thing about perfectionist is that no matter what they do, they see that it could be better, which is why they get so good, why they become the top of the game.  But you get that good by focusing on what’s wrong with what you did, not what’s right so you could learn to do better.  And they tend to look at other people, people they’re leading through the same lens of negativity.  So they give failing grades.  They don’t understand an intrinsic part of any leaders’ task is to help other people get better at what they do.  They just criticize.  So that… that doesn’t work.  The other is the kind of command and control kind of the military model.  I’m the boss, do it because I say so.  Think nothing, blowing up at people or humiliating them and so on.  And those 2 styles are disasters.  So very often, I’m asked to come to a company or I just was spent 2 days in London with the National Health Service there.  They have 2 million in the health service, with leaders at different levels, talking about leadership styles and what the emotional intelligent styles are and why… Particularly in health service, it’s important for leaders to be emotionally supportive so that the people who are at the frontlines, who really have to deliver and be there for patients have the emotional reserves themselves to do it and don’t get burned out.

Question: What does meditation do for the brain?
Daniel Goleman: Well, the Mind & Life Institute catalyze these experiments where high, you have to say, Olympic level meditators came to brain imaging labs in the West and have their brains studied while they did different meditation practices.  And what they’re finding is brain configurations that they’ve never seen before.  These are different brains.  For example, the left prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead, is the center of positive emotions or part of the key… key part of the circuitry for that.  And when these monks meditate on compassion, it lights up, it activates to a level that just never seen in ordinary life.  And they’re finding, you know, a range of specific… state specific effects like this.So it’s mental training, basically.  It’s a mental gym.  

Question: What can eastern thought teach the west?
Daniel Goleman: There’s a village in the Himalayas in Tibet that has had about the same population in the same place under dire climatic conditions.  It’s very high and really cold much the time.  There’s no electricity, no heating.  People have lived there successfully for a thousand years.  How?  They’re very finely attuned to their environment.  Inuits, you know, in the Arctic circle, have lived for thousands of years very successfully.  Bushman live well in the desert very successfully.  All of these groups have high ecological intelligence.  They are highly sensitive to their own environment and they have learned how to adapt to it without destroying the environment so it persists over centuries.  And so, they can thrive.  That’s what we need to learn.  We have been modern people, have become deskilled in this.  We’re so out of touch with our environment.  We depend on artificial means, on heating, on cooling, on this, on that in order to survive.  If we were put in the Arctic, you know, in the outback in Africa or in a little village in Tibet and had to survive on our own resource, we probably die in a day or two.  So what we need to do is learn how to find equilibrium with our own ecosystem, which is a global one now and which we seem to be bent on destroying at present."