Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science of Optimal Performance—at Work and Beyond | Daniel Goleman

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

How to boost productivity, empathy, and focus, while reducing burnout. From the godfather of Emotional Intelligence. If you have any degree of ambition, one of the things you probably think about is how to perform at your best, or somewhere close, every day. How to keep your energy up. How to get into flow. How to stay focused and productive. How to play well with others.Daniel Goleman— his friends call him Danny—-has been thinking and writing about optimal performance for decades. He’s perhaps best known for his book, Emotional Intelligence. He’s a Harvard trained psychologist who also wrote in the New York Times for a while. And in his youth, he spent many years studying meditation in Asia, alongside many of today’s most intellectual meditation teachers like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg.He’s got a new book called Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day, co-written with Cary Cherniss.In this episode we talk about:How to train your mind for optimal statesHow to reduce burnoutHow to develop and deploy empathy in a work settingHow to give feedbackA productivity hack that involves only doing the easy stuffThe 4 parts of emotional intelligence—and how to get better at eachAnd the future of EI in a world of AIThis episode kicks off the latest installment of our occasional series, Sanely Ambitious. Over the next two weeks, we will be posting episodes on: how to focus in the midst of a pandemic of distraction, how to fail well, and when to quit. It’s a great lineup. Daniel Goleman’s online Emotional Intelligence ProgramRelated Episodes:A Radical Approach to Productivity, Self-Compassion Series | Jocelyn K. Glei#494. How to Speak Clearly, Calmly, and Without Alienating People | Dan Clurman and Mudita NiskerThe Science of Emotional Intelligence | Daniel Goleman#523. A Masterclass in Handling Yourself When Things Suck | Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Daniel Goleman#436. Brené Brown Says You're Doing Feelings WrongSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/daniel-goleman-716See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. How we doing? If you have any degree of ambition, one of the things you probably think about is how to perform at your best or somewhere close every day. How to keep your energy up, how to get into flow, how to stay focused and productive, how to play well with others, et cetera. Daniel Goldman, his friends, and I consider myself one of them, call him Danny,

has been thinking and writing about optimal performance for decades. He is perhaps best known for his book Emotional Intelligence. He's a Harvard-trained psychologist who also wrote for the New York Times for many years. And in his youth, he spent many years studying meditation in Asia alongside many of today's best known meditation teachers like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. Danny has a new book called Optimal, How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day, co-written with Kerry Churnis.

In this conversation, we talk about how to train your mind for optimal states, how to reduce burnout, how to develop and deploy empathy in a work setting, how to give feedback. We talk about a productivity hack that involves only doing the easy stuff. We talk about the four parts of emotional intelligence and how to get better at each and the future of EI in

a world of AI. This episode kicks off the latest installment of an occasional series we do here on the show called Sainly Ambitious. Over the next two weeks we will be posting episodes on how to focus in the midst of a pandemic of distraction, how to fail well. I found that very interesting. And I also found this interesting, when to quit. It's a great lineup of guests. Many of the nuggets from these interviews have already worked their way into my daily routine.

Danny Goldman kicks it off and he's coming up right after this. When you visit Audible, there are endless ways to ignite your imagination. With over 750,000 titles, including bestsellers, there's a listen for every type of listener. One of my favorite types of audiobook is a memoir read by the author. So I'm currently enjoying Walking in My Joy in These Streets, written and narrated by the one and only Jennifer Lewis. Discover all the best in audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, featuring authentic Canadian voices and celebrity talent.

You might want to try some new Audible Canadian originals like The Downloaded, a sci-fi adventure featuring Brendan Fraser and Luke Kirby, or Mistletoe Murders 2, a cozy mystery featuring Kobe Smulders. A first listen is waiting for you when you start your free trial at audible.ca. My family and I use Airbnb's all the time, especially when we take beach vacations. I love being able to get a spot

that is super close to the beach, but way less expensive than staying at a beachfront hotel. Don't get me wrong, I like hotels now and again, but being able to have your own house, especially on a beach vacation where you've got tons of stuff, buggy boards, et cetera, it's really nice to have a house

you can cook for yourself, have your friends over. We love Airbnb's. Speaking of beaches, maybe you want to go somewhere warm over the winter while you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money for the trip. Whether you could use some extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnbbnb.ca. The ultimate giant of modern art, everyone has heard of or seen a Picasso work, or the

Picasso brand on something. But a man with a complicated, difficult, personal side too that makes us look at his art in a different way. He was a genius and he was very problematic. Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge entire seasons of Legacy ad free on Amazon Music or by subscribing to Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Daniel Goldman, welcome back to the show.

It's always a pleasure to be with you, Dan Harris. So the new book is called Optimal. What do you mean by that? Well, Optimal, I mean it in the sense of being at our best, having a day that we consider, wow, that was a good day. Feeling good about it, being productive by whatever standard makes sense for you, feeling connected with whoever you're working with,

all of those things. That makes it optimal, I think. And you're basically talking about an optimal life. Exactly. So when you say you could extend it, you're mostly thinking in this book about professional life and the health of an organization, but one could extend it to all of life.

Optimal applies to any domain of our lives, any domain. Actually, when I used optimal, I was using a database that was collected at Harvard Business School when they asked people to keep a journal of their work day. That's why I think about work. But Dan, your point is well taken. Let's stay with work for a second. When you talked about being productive and you did very helpfully added by whatever standard you set I think productivity is an area where a lot of us suffer quite a bit We beat the shit out of ourselves about not being productive enough. There's a great phrase that was coined by one of my fellow podcasters Jocelyn K. Gly

she's got a podcast called hurry slowly and I'll put a link in the show notes of her interview on this podcast. And she has a great phrase, which is productivity shame, which I think a lot of us feel a shame. I know I do about not being productive enough. But I just wonder if you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I sure do. I think that too many of us are perfectionists. We hold a high internal standard and judge ourselves against it, particularly people who are very successful. Perfectionists tend to drive themselves harder than anyone else, but they have a certain cognitive bias

which I think is really harmful and that is they see what they did wrong, not what they did right. They see where they can improve, which is helpful, but they don't see what they did really well. So what I'm saying with optimal is, hey, you know what, relax a little. Maybe lower your standards, don't be so self-judgmental. You're doing things really well.

Notice that, applaud that. And when I say productive by any standard, I mean it works, it might be folding the laundry, it might be getting the kids to school on time, it might be, you know, managing a carpool, working out, it could be something at home, it could be something at work, it could be doing computer code. It's the same thing. Is it good enough by, well, by whose standard? If you're a little perfectionist, it's gonna be too high a standard. That's what I think.

I think the question a lot of people would have when they hear you talk about perfectionism and the perfectionist tends to focus on what they did wrong, not what they did right. I think a lot of perfectionists, and I'm not saying this with any judgment because I am one would say, well, what has allowed me to succeed is that I so viciously focus on what I did wrong. Well, another way to say that, you focus on how, where you can improve, right? When you say, here's what I did wrong, that implies, well, I could do it right another time. I could do it righter, so to speak. But you could be more relaxed about the same thing.

You could say, oh, well, I blew that, but maybe I can practice it, maybe I can get better at it, maybe there's something I can learn. I think that a lot of perfectionism goes back to childhood and conditional love. There's research that says preschool kids are very compassionate, very kind to each other. Once they enter school, they drop that, they become very competitive. You want to be like the smartest kid in your class. And parents, when you come home,

don't say who we kind to today. They say, how'd you do on the test? In other words, we learn through countless small encounters as kids to beat ourselves up if we don't do better. Particularly kids who are toward the top of a game and in school the game is academics. So I think that the culture shapes us to be perfectionists and it rewards perfectionists. You're right. People who are the best at X are people who drove themselves. And in a way that's very laudable, but the question is, did they beat themselves up in the process? Or did they do it in a way where they had fun?

And I think another question is, does the beating yourself up and the driving yourself so hard actually help? You think it does, but does it really help? I'm just gonna let that question hang there I once heard somebody ask our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein the meditation teacher Yeah on a meditation retreat Beethoven was so miserably unhappy if he wasn, he probably wouldn't have made such great art. And Joseph was like, how do you know?

Maybe if he was happier, he would have made even better art. Exactly. And in fact, there's some data that suggests that when people are in a positive mood, they're more creative. It may be that Beethoven was so fabulous in spite of himself. I don't know if he was a perfectionist or not,

I have no idea. But let's look at someone like Mozart, at least the way he's depicted, he was having a good time and he was fantastic. So the move here for us perfectionists to harken back to something you said earlier is instead of being hyper vigilant for our mistakes and framing them as mistakes, things that went wrong, to reframe it as areas for improvement.

Exactly. You know, in the book, I say thinking about that one time you were in flow when you outdid yourself and you were so fabulous at whatever it was, that's too high a standard. That's like you can't make that happen. It just happens. You can't let that be the standard for your performance. You need to relax a bit and say, you know, having a good day, a day when I'm satisfied with how I did,

that's what I call optimal day. And I think that's good enough, particularly if you have day after day like that. What is the difference? You referenced flow. Some people might not know what flow is. Could you just define it and maybe also provide some delineation between flow and, you know, optimality?

Sure. The flow research was done at the University of Chicago, headed by a guy named Sixit Mahai. It's unspellable. It's a Czech name. We used to call him Chick, actually, for short. Anyway, his researchers would ask people, tell us about a time you outdid yourself. You're at your absolute best.

And they found that it didn't matter if it was a basketball player or a ballerina or a surgeon. Phenomenologically, it was the same state matter if it was a basketball player or a ballerina or a surgeon, phenomenologically it was the same state underneath whatever it was they were doing, whatever performance was involved. It was a state where they were very focused, where they felt really good about what they did, when they lost all self-consciousness, you know, thoughts of I, me, and mine, not there. Where time seemed to collapse or lengthen, it was an altered state of consciousness. And they did their best at whatever they were. And in optimal, what we're arguing is that, you know, it's great to be in flow, but you can't make it happen. Optimal is what's just beneath that, you

know, this 70 or 80% of the time or whatever percent of the time, when you do a really good job and you should congratulate yourself, celebrate it, because you were very productive at whatever it is you're trying to do. And by the way, we see focus, concentration, as a doorway into that. The more focused you are on what you're doing, the better you'll do it, whatever it is. And by the way, mindfulness of the breath is one of the ways to develop that kind of focus. In other words, meditation is an attentional workout. And that's definitely a pathway to probably letting optimal states occur more often. The more we can tune our brains and our minds to pay attention, to be awake, to be out of

autopilot, the more likely we will be to have optimal days. And maybe even though we can't really control it, reach flow states once in a while. Correct. Well said. So let me just amplify that a little bit, Dan, by saying that what keeps us out of those states are our usual state of mind, distractedness. You know, if you watch your mind, and this happens a lot when you start to meditate, you see how scattered you are, how random thoughts come, how random impulses come. It's just

part of the flow, the ongoing flow of the reality we create for ourselves. But if you learn to tune out of that and focus on the present, on what you're doing, then you overcome the usual state of mind. And as you know, in the meditative pathways, that can lead to absorptive states, to states where you don't have any other thoughts other than what you're focusing on, which is a state that said to have a lot of equanimity and pleasure, a lot of bliss actually.

So I would say the more focused we are, the more likely we're going to be in that optimal state whatever we're doing, and that in fact, there are methods of mind training, which will get you there more often. What are those methods? I'd say one-pointedness, however you do that, often it's just focusing on the breath. And when you start to focus on your breath, you realize how distracted we are so much of the time. I mean, I'd have to ask someone who was maybe a little fidgety about it or a little skeptical about it. I know that fidgety skeptics seem to think

that meditation can be very hard and it can be at first, but actually it's like learning any new skill. The more you practice it, the easier it gets. Are there other forms of mind training that can help us nudge us toward an optimal state? I know that in sports, for example, a lot of coaches will use some functional equivalent of meditating on your breath like a pitcher. Just focus on the mitt, the catcher's mit. That's the same thing. You're just using the mit as the point of focus.

Yeah, I mean, the people, I mean, it's possible for there to be, then there certainly are, many esoteric forms of meditation that are, that do involve lots of rituals and special training, but really at its core meditation to the extent that I understand it is about focusing on one thing. And then every time you get distracted, start again and again. So a catcher's mitt is in this way just as good as your breath, as it is a visualization of some deity,

as it is a mantra repeated in the mind. It's all just the same. It's all different flavors of the same exercise. And the exercise is letting go of distractions and bringing your mind back every time you notice that you wandered off. And by the way, that's called mindfulness, noticing when you're distracted and bringing your mind back. But when you bring your mind back back you're practicing that full focus

Yes, cannot say that enough I've come to see this kind of as my job on the planet because so many people think they cannot meditate That they're bad meditators and I'm here to say if you think you're a bad meditator That means you're doing it right because or probably doing it right because the whole goal is to sit there and have this accumulating experience of seeing how wild your mind is and you know, waking up from distraction over and over and returning to the breath and in that way you get less, first of all, you're training the brain to be less distracted and second, you're becoming familiar with how the mind works so that all of your random thoughts, urges,

and emotions don't own you. And the more you do it, the easier it gets, as with any skill. What you're doing is practicing a mental skill. And at first, it seems impossible. You're right. Because the mind is, you know, we've spent years and years in distracted mind. That's the way it's used to work. And so when we start to try to keep it in one place,

we notice how distracted it's on. That doesn't need to be humiliating. That's maybe a judgment of yourself. It can just be, oh, that's how the mind works. Yes. Yes. You're right. Absolutely. It just my description of it. I'm having to be funny and in the process being glib, which is not so helpful. I mean, it can be humiliating if you're doing, if you're judging it, but you can see the judging too. Anything can be beautiful. Because that's just another thought. Oh, I'm thinking it's humiliating.

Yes. Back to the breath. That just means you're distracted. Yeah. So in the book, there are four parts. And each part is helping us get closer to having an optimal workday and an optimally functioning organization. Part one is called the emotional intelligence path

to optimal performance. You've been on the show many times. You've defined emotional intelligence for to optimal performance. You've been on the show many times. You've defined emotional intelligence for us many times. May I ask you to do it again because I think it will help with the rest of this conversation? Of course. So, emotional intelligence has four parts, the way I see it. The first is self-awareness, knowing what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, how it shapes your perceptions

and your way of thinking and your impulse to act. The second part is managing your emotions in a way that works for you. So you might want to calm, disturbing emotions, things that upset you. You might want to stay more positive. You might want to be flexible instead of rigid. You might want to be able to recover. You know, we don't determine what we're going to feel. Emotions come unbidden.

But once we feel it, once we get angry, once we get anxious, we have a golden opportunity. And that is to let go of it, to recover. The operational definition of resilience in psychology is how quickly you go from the peak of upset to back to calm baseline. And it turns out, for example, the longer you've been a meditator, the quicker that recovery will be. But it's probably true of any kind of training where you let go of distractions.

Then the third part is empathy, tuning into other people and noticing what they feel, how they're thinking and caring about them. I think that's really crucial, particularly for leadership, for parenthood, for friendship. It's not enough to know, oh, he's upset now. The question is, do you care that that person is upset and do you wanna help that person get into a better state?

And then the fourth part is relationship, social skill, being adept, being connected, influencing people in a good way toward their better selves, helping other people get into the optimal state, inspiring them towards some greater goal as part of that sometimes, resolving conflicts in a way where it's like a good enough compromise.

If you have two people who are at odds, it's never one or the other. It's got somewhere in between is where you want to be. And then being a team member, working with other people in a harmonious way, you know, turns out this is ironic. That Google, they discovered that a higher IQ of group members, that doesn't predict teams output or performance.

What does is there's sense of psychological safety, which is what emotional intelligence helps you promote. And that's a key to an optimal performance as a team. which is what emotional intelligence helps you promote. And that's a key to an optimal performance as a team. And then putting that all together, like if you're leading an organization, I would say don't try to hire people who are emotionally intelligent. It's very hard because people put on their best face

when they're trying to get higher. It's better to offer people ways to get better. And, you know, for example, emotional intelligence training that works, a lot of it doesn't. And also to let it be known that it matters here. Like in the performance review, you know, everybody talks about hitting their numbers.

But the question is, how did you get those numbers? What kind of team leader were you? Are you the kind that people hate and they want to quit and find a job somewhere else? Are they the kind of leader that people love, that people feel supported, guided, cared about? And they'll stay, they're more engaged. So we have a lot of data now to support this. When I wrote the book in 95 Dan, there was very little data about emotional intelligence. It was a brand new concept. Now 25 years later, my co-author and I, Kerry Churnes, have gathered together the best data on emotional intelligence

and turns out, guess what? It works. This emotional intelligence sounds great. The four parts, self-awareness, managing your emotions, empathy, social skills or relationship skills. Oh, absolutely. I've got an online training program in what we consider the key competencies based in emotional intelligence. This comes from research about what makes someone outstanding at work, star performer in some sense. And what we found is that you can upgrade all of these. There's skills that can be learned and can be improved. So what are some of the mechanisms and modalities for upgrading these skills?

Well, the first thing is to become aware of how a skill operates in your life. Like, one of the skills is emotional balance or resilience, recovering from upset. Well, let's start with what triggers you. You know, you can keep a triggering journal and see what got me really bugged, what upset me today. And that helps you get more in touch with what your vulnerable spots are. And then the question is, once you feel that way, what can you do?

Once you are triggered, how can you recover? Obsessing about it isn't gonna help, but dropping it is gonna help. If you can find a way to, for example, just step back from what's happening, be mindful in that moment, it short circuits the upset. What about the social skills part of this? This strikes me as incredible.

I mean, I'm writing a book that touches on a lot of this stuff, so it's salient. It's top of mind for me. And I often think about the fact that we are, it's weird that we're social animals and yet nobody teaches us how to deal with other people. And so what do you recommend for developing empathy and then learning how to deploy it skillfully in a social setting or a work setting? Well, one of the interesting things about empathy is that we rarely get any feedback on whether the assumptions we make about what someone else is feeling or thinking is correct. So one of the first steps is to get that feedback, to ask for it.

You know, it seems to me you're feeling X. Is that right or not? I mean, that's a rudimentary way to develop empathy. But what it does is tell your brain whether it was accurate or not. And then when it comes to social skills, let's take teamwork. This is a really interesting one. It turns out that emotional intelligence operates at the team level, at the group level, but it operates by norms, by agreed-on ways of interacting. And one of the things that we do, this is based on decades of research by a woman at

University of New Hampshire, Vanessa Dreskat. She has an assessment where members of a team rate each other on things like, do you talk over other people? Do you listen to people? Are you accurate in your assumptions about people? They get a diagnosis of the team, their strong points, their weak points, and then they decide how to fix that.

In other words, they agree amongst themselves on what the norm is gonna be here. I'll give you an example of a norm. There's a research lab that has about 3,000 PhDs. And at that lab, the director told me, we have a norm that when somebody offers a new idea, creative idea, the next person who speaks has to support them, has to be an angel's advocate.

It's so easy to destroy an idea and say why it won't work, but that's an idea, a new idea is a fragile bud. Support it. Let's see if it's going to blossom. So that's how that lab operates. I don't know who started that norm, but it's very important here. How do you reinforce a norm? That ideal, which is a creativity consultancy, one of the branches, if you break a norm,

one of the norms there is you don't interrupt other people, you don't talk over other people. And so if you break that norm, you get pelted with toy animals by other people in the group, which is a fun way of reinforcing a norm. It doesn't have to be a dire thing like, oh, you broke a norm. You can just point it out. That's all you need to do. On this subject of what are sometimes referred to as soft skills or people skills, I don't like soft skills just because it seems like it's diminishing it. But you write a few interesting things about this

in your book. Other terms for it include leading teams and people development, executive presence and influencing skills and relationship management. But it's now something that is seen as crucial at work just like cognitive abilities. So we are now moving into a world where it's not enough to be smart.

Yes, and the evidence I cite for that actually is interesting. There's an article in the Harvard Business Review that looked at almost 20 years of ads for people in the top level of management, top leaders. And it showed that over two decades, the demand for soft skills had increased 30% and hard skills went down 40%. And by hard skills, what I mean is cognitive abilities

that you would think matter like business expertise. What companies are seeing and organizations are seeing is that people skills, which I like better than soft skills, emotional intelligence matters more for effective leadership than whether or not you happen to have a history in that particular business. In fact, I have a friend who used to be the head of research for an executive recruitment

firm and he did a study worldwide of times that their company had recommended someone strongly and then that person had been fired and they want to know why. And what he found out was that invariably the people they recommended were hired for hard skills, business expertise, smarts, and fired for a lapse in emotional intelligence. I think, Dan, it might help to understand the way both of those matter. I don't think that IQ and cognitive ability doesn't matter, but here's the paradox. If you go to an organization like Google,

where they hire people only in the 99th percentile of IQ, there's what's called the floor effect for IQ. It's not a big differentiator, but there's no particular pressure to hire for emotional intelligence. So people who have the ability to emerge as a natural leader end up leading teams, end up getting the promotions, end up being the star performers. And this is a really important distinction between threshold abilities, like everybody who has that position

needs to have coding expertise or needs to have a certain business background. But what's going to set them apart? Isn't that because everybody has those? It's things like you tune into people, do you empathize? Do you build relationships? Do you inspire? Those are the things. Can you manage your own emotions well? That's what's gonna distinguish people in the workplace. There's a great quote, another great quote

from the book right on this point, which is over the course of your career, IQ's predictive power for success wanes. Why? Because the smartest person in the room can be an interpersonal idiot. And, you know, I've seen it over, I've been that guy. I've been, I don't know if I'm the smartest person

in the room, but I've been a reasonably smart person in the room and a total idiot. Exactly. And I doubt that you were, but I'll take your word for it. But we've all known interpersonal idiots at in the workplace. They often get promoted and sometimes they're promoted because they're perfectionists. For example, you might be a star individual performer and get promoted to the head of a team or of a unit in a business or in an organization. But then if you're an interpersonal idiot,

people aren't gonna love working for you. People are gonna actually wanna go somewhere else. People tend to leave bad bosses and interpersonal idiots are that. The quote that I just read comes from a book where you're discussing a 360 review for people listening who've never heard of a 360 review. It's basically an anonymous survey that is run within a workplace usually where an executive or somebody in the workplace, that person's bosses, peers, and

direct reports are surveyed again anonymously and given feedback on this, on the person's strengths and weaknesses. I've had it, I've you know talked at Nazima about my own 360 reviews which have been hard. What's your view on this tool? Is this something that everybody should consider doing? I don't know that everyone should consider doing it. I think if you're motivated to get better, in some sense, it can be helpful. But it shouldn't be seen as a judgment. It should be seen as information to use. I actually co-designed a 360.

It's called the Emotional and Social Competence Inventory. I designed it with a friend of mine from my graduate school days, Richard Boyonsis, who now teaches at the School of Management at Case Western. And it assesses people systematically on behaviors that demonstrate these crucial competencies. And you may find that you're really other people's, let me emphasize something you said, Dan, people fill this out anonymously.

You get to select who the 10 people are who are gonna rate you, people whose opinions you trust, but you won't know what they said about you. You get the data as an aggregate. So you get a profile, it's like a physical, you know, how's your lipids, how's your HDL and so on. So how's your lipids, how's your HDL and so on. So how's your empathy, how's your teamwork, how's your managing emotions as other people see you day to day. And that

gives you a diagnostic, but it's the worst way to use that is to say, well, you suck at this and this, The worst way to use that is to say, well, you suck at this and this, because that's very demotivating and demoralizing. The best way to get it is, well, let's think about where you want to be in five years, your ideal self, where are you going in life? And what of these abilities would help you get there? And is there, does this show that you could get better

at one of those? Big one. And then come up with a learning plan that will help you remember like, be a better listener. This is a big one. I know you've worked with our mutual friends, Dan Clerman and Medita Nisker on communication skills. And one of the big ones is listening.

But the common cold of poor leadership, poor management, poor friendship is not listening. In other words, we're thinking about what we're gonna say or we talk over someone, you know, in the doctor's office. This was actual study. People in the waiting room are asked, how many questions do you have your doctor for on average? You ask afterwards, how many did you ask? One and a half. What happened? After 18 seconds, the doctor took over the conversation and

I didn't have a chance to ask the rest. Well, that's life. That's what happens. But what it takes to learn to listen better is to listen to the other person out, to restrain yourself, listen to what they think, maybe say it back to them in your own words, did I get it right? And then say what you think. That's like, that's major and why is it major? Because A, it makes the other person feel listened,

heard and cared about. And B, what you're doing is retraining your brain. You're getting your brain to stop doing the knee jerk thing of like interrupting the person taking over and hearing them out and then saying what you think. That takes advantage of neuroplasticity, that the brain changes with repeated sequences. This is just the way the brain works. So the more you do it, the better you get at it until you do it automatically without thinking about it, which means it's

become a new habit. And you need to practice and practice at every naturally occurring opportunity, which by the way, may not be at work, maybe with your spouse, with your partner, with your kids, could be with anyone else. Just to put a fine point on that, if, because we've all heard, listening skills are really important, what specific technique would you recommend for people to become better listeners?

I think that the main path to listening better is focusing on the other person instead of on what we're gonna say in return. That's what you're able to do if you listen to the person out. At least you have the space, the opportunity to do it. The question is, do you focus on the other person or just on your own thoughts about how I'm going to react? So can you make it a practice to focus just a little and set an intention every day to do your best to listen to what other people are saying?

And what you're saying is that over time, the brain will get better and better at this because you're giving it exercise. Exactly the case. So what you've just described is what I'm calling neuroplasticity, that the brain rewires itself the more you practice any sequence. But this is a really important one.

And it often comes up, by the way, in reviews of people at work or what people are hearing that they would do well to do better at. Yes. Well, so that was true for me in my 360 that I was dismissive, for example. So that implies a lack of listening. The technique that, and I've talked about this before in the show, but it's maybe worth repeating

that Dan Clerman and Mudita Nisker, who you referenced before, the technique that they gave me. And by the way, I'll put a link in the show notes to the interview we did with them on the show. but the technique they gave me is called reflective listening, which means that not only do you train yourself to listen, but that you then train yourself to repeat back, and you reference this, repeat back the bones of what the person has said to you sort of in a paraphrased fashion in your own words to repeat it back to them. And that actually having that assignment,

and it's a kind of a journalistic assignment, I find forced me in a nice way to listen because I knew that I was gonna want to repeat back to them what they had said. So I really listening like a reporter at a press conference and that skill has been transformative for me. I think that's a great testimony to how practicing something can make a difference.

And so when you do this emotional and social competence inventory, this 360, you get a diagnosis of all the different areas where you might want to improve. But my advice is just pick one, one at a time. But by the way, I mentioned in passing that a lot of emotional intelligence workshops and so on don't really help. And that's because they're too short. They don't involve ongoing practice. It's the practice that someone once said, practice makes perfect. Actually, it's true that the more you do it,

the more the brain changes. And so in order to get there, you need a program for emotional intelligence and development that's gonna help you and support you as you keep practicing and practicing. Sometimes people deal with coaches. Sometimes they do it on the road. There's the Daniel Goldman Emotional Intelligence

online learning program. I hope you'll put it in your show notes. Which helps people do this with any of the competencies of emotional intelligence. So it's not enough to just go to, you know, if I'm lucky enough that my employer brings Danny Goldman in to give a speech to at a convention, it's not enough to just go hear a great speech or to go to a workshop that somebody's

putting on. These are skills, you know, they're rewiring the brain and it takes a little while. You have to practice them in an ongoing way. Exactly and many many companies or organizations will offer people a chance to go to a one day retreat, so-called, or workshop on emotional intelligence or a two day, or to hear a talk by someone, by me. I often say in my talks, you know what? This is not gonna help you get better at emotional intelligence.

It might motivate you to get better, but it's gonna take practice. Boyotzis, who I've worked with for years, does this with his MBA students for a semester, and he finds that when he tracks them down up to seven years later in wherever it is that they're working now, and has people there do a 360 on them,

that actually the skill they worked on in their MBA course has stayed with them. And that shows that neuroplasticity actually works if you work at it. Coming up, Danny Goldman talks about compassionate candor, how to give feedback, and the three kinds of empathy. Hi, I'm Anna. And I'm Emily. We're the hosts of Wanderies podcast Terribly Famous, a show where we bring you outrageous true stories about our most famous celebrities. Our latest season is all about the catwalk queen Naomi Campbell.

The years Naomi had to fight to be treated fairly in an industry that was overwhelmingly white. That drive saw her break down barriers and reached the pinnacle of high fashion. But it also got her into some dangerous situations when it spilled over into an anger she couldn't control. In our new season, Naomi Campbell's model behaviour, we tell the story of how a young girl from South London became a trailblazing black icon, but had some very public falls, of how she stood up to the British tabloids and won, and the lengths she had to go to to be the first black woman in history to make the cover of French Vogue. But she risks losing it all when her explosive

behavior lands her in court. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad-free on like never before with Bet MGM. Download and try the Bet MGM app during the biggest Sunday of the NFL season. Even if you can't be in Las Vegas for kickoff, a huge variety of parlay selection features and player props make the Bet MGM app the next best thing for Super Bowl excitement. Download the app today and find out why.

Bet MGM is not only an official sports book partner of the National Football League in Canada. They're also the king of sports books. Watch Super Bowl 58 with a Vegas vibe you'll only find at BetMGM Sports Book. Visit betmgm.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact CONNECTS Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Quick reminder, we're offering subscriptions to the 10% Happier Meditation app at a 40% discount until February 1st. Go to 10%.com slash 40. That's 10%.com slash 40 for 40% off. We've been talking about 360 reviews.

So let me ask a sort of small practical question and then a much larger practical question. The small question is you said that you've designed an emotional and social competency inventory, which is kind of a 360. Is that something that people can go in and sign up for on the web and do on their own, or do you need to be working with a coaching firm

that runs the 360 for you? Both. Some organizations will offer this particular 360 to people, but also coaches can use this too. So it's possible to work with someone with this inventory. If you find a coach who has access to it, they have to get some training on how to use it. I think particularly important, Dan,

and you brought this up, is learning how to give the feedback on the 360 in a way where it's helpful and people don't feel it's just a criticism. That's very important. You want people to stay motivated or to get motivated to do something about it, not to feel frozen about it like, oh my God,

people think I'm an interpersonal idiot. Right. Well, I certainly thought that after reading my first 360, but what I was lucky, I mean, the criticism of 360 reviews is that they're often dropped on people like a Daisy Cutter bomb, and then they're just, you know, they either go into denial or depression or whatever. Sure. I had a really good coach. I've been on the show many times, Jerry Kelowna, and I mean, I worked with him. I have worked with him for years, and it's really helped me integrate these devastating

learnings into my life. But I guess the larger question for me is that most people are not going to get 360 reviews. I recognize that. But we can all ask for feedback. And I'm curious what you recommend in that department, asking for feedback and then integrating it into your life. Well, you know, there are different ways to give feedback. Some of them I think are a little destructive.

Like maybe the most destructive is being indifferent, not giving any feedback. Sometimes people use feedback in a aggressive way and give it in a way where you can't really hear the feedback, but you hear is the aggression. Sometimes people can decode it so that you don't really feel there's anything wrong with it. I really favor compassionate candor, being honest with the other person,

but caring about them and making sure they understand you're not criticizing them. You're just saying, here's an opportunity to learn to get better. And that's what a good coach does. This is another area where I've been weak. One of the criticisms in my first 360 review was had to do with honesty. And I read that and I was like,

wait, I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a liar. But what the critique was not that I was a liar, it was that where I wasn't lying by commission, but I was lying by omission. I wasn't taking the time to sit down and give people calm, thoughtful feedback. I might snap at them, which is suboptimal, to be a little cute,

but I wouldn't actually sit down and give thoughtful feedback and guidance like a coach. And that's something I'm actually still working on, because it is a hard thing to do. It takes emotional energy You're risking people getting upset at you and so the easier path is to keep it to yourself and judge them silently That is the easier path, but I don't think it's the most helpful path because then you end up not telling them anything So if there's something someone else needs to know that you can tell them, the question is how can you let them know that?

What is the, how do you contextualize that information for the person so they don't get defensive, so they don't get angry back, so they really hear it. And I think it's not just possible, but important to do. Well, to go back to Dan and Mudita, one of the techniques that they've given me to deliver feedback is, this is gonna sound a little technical,

but they call it stating your positive intention. So, and that can sound a little jargon-y, but it really just means telling somebody why you're going to tell them what you're about to tell them. So I might say to a team member or to my child or to a friend or my wife, hey, you know, I want to give you some feedback if you're open to it. And I just want you to know the reason why I'm doing this is because this relationship is really important to me. So I'm doing this because I'm hoping that we can work better together, live better together, etc. I care about you. And that usually, in my experience, opens people up to hear whatever

you've got to say. Dan, I think that's very beautiful. And that reminds me of a point that I think is important about empathy, that there are three kinds of empathy, each of which is based on different brain circuits, actually. The first is cognitive empathy. I know how you think. I know the categories you use to talk to yourself about whatever reality it is. And that means you can be effective as a communicator

because you know language the person will understand, then the other kind is emotional empathy, which is based in the emotional circuitry of the brain. You feel with the person. So you not only know how to put it, but you know how they feel about it once you say it, for example. But the third kind I think is the most important

and that's concern, caring about the other person. And the way you put it was in that context. You said, I'm going to tell you this because I care about you. This relationship matters to me. And I think that makes it so much more palatable to the person hearing it. And that third kind of empathy, I think, is the basis for not just caring and concerns, but it's the basis for compassion.

And I don't think we can have too much of it. However, there is the danger of out of too much, quote, compassion, thinking, I'm not going to bring it up because it's going to upset the person, which is not candid. So it's a combination of candor and compassion that you want. Brené Brown, whose work I admire says, clear is kind. And so even though it might be a little tough to hear, if you're clear with somebody,

that truly is the kindest move. I would go a step beyond. I would meld what she said with what you learned from Dana Medita, which is to make it clear that you're being explicit because you care. Yes. And I think that is less likely to have the person closed down to what you're about to say. Right. But if you view compassion as it's the most compassionate thing is not to upset the person. So you're not going to tell them all the things they're doing that are destructive. I disagree completely. No, I know. I agree with you, but if you're

under the misapprehension that the kindest thing to do is not to tell them, I think clear is kind is a good antidote to that misconception. Absolutely. Clear means be candid, but I would add be caring and candid. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mentioned before that there are four parts to the book. The first is the emotional intelligence path to optimal performance. The second is emotional intelligence. The details, we've talked a little bit about that. The third is emotional intelligence, the work.

Now we've talked a little bit about doing the work of emotional intelligence, but before I move on to the fourth part of the book, I wonder if there's more to say about specifically anything coming up in your mind about the actual work we can do to get more emotionally intelligent. I'm interested in how an organization, whether it's a nonprofit or a company, can create a culture that enhances or encourages emotional intelligence. And I think there are a lot of things that need to happen.

One is that a leader, a prominent leader, it helps if that person will make it explicit that this matters here in whatever language. And by the way, different organizations language this differently. As you said, they might talk about leadership presence. That means being fully present, means being empathic. But it doesn't use the word empathy, it uses the word presence. That means being fully present, means being empathic. But it doesn't use the word empathy,

it uses the word presence. So in the language of whatever the organization is, make it clear that emotional intelligence by whatever name it goes by in your context, matters here, and then make it part of a performance review. it's not just, as I said, it's not just did you get the numbers, but how did you do it? Do people love you as a leader or hate you as a leader? That matters very much. And also to provide opportunities to get better at it. And I don't mean having a talk by someone like me or a one day or two day workshop, but having a program that actually works and we do know what works.

And what works? What do we know? What works is supporting people to practice, but putting, getting their motivation out front first, not yours. You don't wanna impose it. You don't wanna say to me, you need to be a better listener and we're gonna make you go to this workshop on listening, but rather you want to find out what that person wants for themselves,

what matters to them and put the learning in that context. This is going to help you get there and then go from there. And whatever the learning plan is that you come up with, or a coach comes up with for you or a partner, you want to practice that until it becomes automatic, because that's the neuroplasticity part. That means it's going to stay with you, not just, you know. The half-life of one-day seminars is astonishingly short, no matter what it is, whether it's accounting

or emotional intelligence. You wanna do the work that's gonna make it stick. In this third part of the book, you also mentioned that emotional intelligence can help reduce burnout. What's the mechanism there? Well, if you remember, I talked about competencies and emotional intelligence ability that is called emotional balance or managing disturbing emotions.

It's the key to resilience. So the opposite of the sequence of burnout is you have too much to do, too little support, too little time, you're stressed out of your mind, it happens day after day after day. The body has a recovery mode, parasympathetic nervous system arousal. When we sleep, when we have sex, the body restores itself. It's in that mode. But if you're day after day, you never get there, you get emotional exhaustion, and that's the prelude to burnout.

And people often quit. That happened during COVID, a lot of nurses quit, because they were burned out, for example. So the question is, what can you do to sustain yourself, no matter what the stress? And one of the things you can do is better manage disturbing emotions, strengthen relationships that you find nourishing, find private time for yourself to do the things that matter to you that help you feel sustained yoga or meditation or exercise, whatever it may be. But build that into your day and make sure you do it. Don't skip it, it matters, even though it

looks like you're not, quote, doing something useful, doing something really important. Those are the kinds of things that help you recover and get and not go into that downward spiral of burnout. Coming up, Danny talks about why compassion does not lead to burnout. The future of emotional intelligence in an era of AI, artificial intelligence, and his directive to only do what is easy. only do what is easy.

Being an actual royal is never about finding your happy ending, but the worst part is, if they step out of line or fall in love with the wrong person, it changes the course of history. I'm Aresha Skidmore-Williams. And I'm Brooke Sifron. We've been telling the stories of the rich and famous on the hit Wondery Show Even the Rich. And talking about the latest celebrity news on Rich and Daily, we're going all over the world on our new show, Even the Royals.

We'll be diving headfirst into the lives of the world's kings, queens, and all the wannabes in their orbit throughout history. Think succession meets the crown meets real life. We're going to pull back the gilded curtain and show how royal status might be bright and shiny, but it comes at the expense of, well, everything else. Like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Follow Even The Royals on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Even The Royals early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. the best one yet, or as we call it, T-Boy. This is Nick. This is Jack. And we picked the three most interesting

business news stories every day for the perfect mix. 20 minutes each morning, you're gonna feel brighter. We call it Pop Biz, don't we, Jack? Where pop culture meets business news, and we've done it for over a thousand episodes. Yeah, remember we did the one on Airbnb's party band. They're a party pooper with a purpose. Yeah, remember the one where Airbnb evicted me when When we were doing the pot in New York City?

I could never forget it, Jack. Never forget. So whether you want to kick off a conversation with your buddies, or you're going for that promotional work, or you just want to know the trends before your friends, feel brighter by starting your morning with us every weekday. Listen to the best one yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your pot.

You can listen to the best one yet, ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. There may be people listening who think, okay, you guys have been talking about empathy and compassion and now you're talking about burnout, but if I've got too much empathy and compassion, isn't that what is going to lead me to burnout because I'm too worried about everybody else?

I think that's a misunderstanding of empathy. I think you need to know that the word compassion is a little screwy in English language. In other languages, compassion starts with yourself. It's not just about other people. It's what we now call self-compassion. And so that means taking care of yourself as well as other people.

And it might mean having that candid conversation that we talked about earlier. It might mean standing up for your rights, being assertive about what matters to you. Maybe you need better pay, maybe you need more time off, maybe you need flex time. But letting that be known, not just staying quiet, that's a misunderstanding of empathy and compassion. That's buying harmony at the expense of your own well-being. That's not compassion. One of the things that's helped me in this regard

is understanding and that you can think about empathy strictly, and I think this is reductive, but you could think about it as feeling other people's feelings, and compassion as feeling other people's feelings, plus the desire to help. And when you add on the desire to help, it's ennobling, it gives you a sense of agency,

and so you aren't swamped by the other person's emotions, because you're doing something about it, or at least you want to. Yeah, the Dalai Lama is a great champion of compassion. And he says that, first of all, the person whose compassion is the first one to benefit. And the science backs that up, actually. But he also says that if you're compassionate,

if you're acting out of compassion, you feel self-confident, you feel strong. It's not weak, it's not a lame way of being. It's an assertive way of being at its best. Part four of the book is The Future of Emotional Intelligence, which is very interesting. And you talk about in a world of artificial intelligence, as opposed to emotional intelligence, which is very interesting. And you talk about in a world of artificial intelligence, as opposed to emotional intelligence, as we head into the future where the robots are super empowered, that EI will become more important in the era of AI. Can you explain?

Well, no matter how AI changes the workplace, we're gonna need people. We're gonna need leaders. And we're gonna need leaders who have emotional intelligence, who can inspire, who can guide, who can influence. I don't think that's gonna go away. And by the way, AI, it's interesting paradox. AI is basically a bunch of computer code and algorithms. That's what it comes down to.

AI has no emotion. It doesn't have emotional self-awareness. It doesn't have real empathy. It can mimic empathy, maybe. It can probably read emotions from facial expressions. There's already a coding system for that. But that doesn't mean that AI can inspire. It doesn't mean that AI can sense someone else's real feelings

and then act on that. So I think AI can't really replace humans at that level. Yeah, I just, I agree. It may replace humans in many ways though. And so that if we know that the one area where it really cannot replace us is true empathy and compassion, then it makes developing those skills all the more important.

There's a big debate in the AI world, you know, about making AI compassionate. In other words, years ago, I think in the 40s, Isaac Asimov wrote about robots, and he said, every robot followed a law that they would never harm a human. And our current AI doesn't have that constraint and needs it. That worries me, actually,

because what it says is that AI could be used for warfare, for really super smart killing, and that is not a pleasant prospect. But I think that compassion is, at least in a formal sense, not harming others, caring about others, should be part any any AI program. I would agree Just back to this the future of EI emotional intelligence you also write about how you know given that we're heading into a very uncertain future Some people describe our era as poly crisis You know with climate change war inequality bigotry and loose nukes, lots of crises out there.

You argue that EI will become increasingly important. Can you say more about that? Well, I think that these human abilities will continue to matter and maybe matter more, as we said. But that emotional intelligence alone, I don't think will be enough to meet the challenges of the world that's coming and that we have early signs of already. I think we need to be able to understand systems, economic systems, political systems, geological

systems, ecological systems. And in order to do that, I think we also need to have a shared sense of purpose, a sense of doing better together for a greater good. That's in other words, doing something beyond our self-interest that's for the good of everyone, for the good of humanity. And also it's going to take a lot of creativity and innovation going into the future. I'm having a slightly different thought about what I think may be a false dichotomy between an individual working on their emotional intelligence,

personal development and big structural problems. Because you said before, EI is not gonna be enough. We've got these huge structural problems, but structures are generally made by humans. And so we need humans who are a notch further down the evolutionary scale, a little bit more enlightened than we were before to help us unravel some of these knots that we've tied. And in fact, that's gonna be the challenge for the future is untie those knots.

It's also finding a sense of purpose which is greater than my own self-interest. It's encouraging creativity, being receptive to innovation. It's understanding the systems that were embedded in and finding leverage points. So it's been 25 years since you wrote a landmark book, Emotional Intelligence. What criticism have you heard in that time that you've tried to incorporate into how you talk about Emotional Intelligence now?

Well, the biggest criticism in 1995, which I think was quite justified, is that you don't have any direct data about emotional intelligence, and of course we didn't. It was proposed in 1990 in a kind of obscure journal by Peter Salovey, who is now the President of Yale and is then graduate student, John Mayer. Now, the book that I wrote, Optimal, I did with Kerry Churnas. He and I were co-chairs of a consortium for research on emotional intelligence and organizations. So we've harvested decades now of research, which turns out to support the concept that it does make a big difference and it matters differently than IQ.

Not that IQ doesn't matter, but it's not enough. It matters enormously during school years. It predicts who's gonna be like the head of the class pretty much if you control for how much homework you do, how much extracurricular stuff you do. But when you get into the workplace, it's not such a big differentiator. It determines what level you can get a job in, but it doesn't determine whether you'll

be outstanding in the job. That's where emotional intelligence starts to come into play. So the biggest criticism you've heard in the 25 years was, hey, there's not enough data for this, and now you feel like actually there is data. Yeah, they're actually within the first five years or so of that book coming out. There were other books coming out saying, hey, there's no data for this.

And they were right. It takes time. You know, IQ has been around for more than 100 years and there's tons of data about IQ. But now there's beginning to be a critical mass of data on emotional intelligence. That's what we harvested. So do you view this book as kind of your last word on this subject in some ways? I hope so. I don't think I have it in me to write another book on this subject.

On this subject. I may write another book, yes. Oh, I know. Proprietary information, Dan's got other books in him. But this is kind of the summation of 25 years of what you've learned on this subject. Precisely, now I'm able to go back with confidence and face off with the critique that there's no data and say, hey, there's actually very good and very strong data.

So I'm curious, just to go back to where we started, you're calling for not some perpetual state of flow, which is out of most humans reach, but rather as many good days as we can put together. For you, after so many years of studying psychology and practicing meditation, what is a good day and how consistent are you at stringing them together? I could be better at having more good days, but for me a good day, I'm a writer basically. So if I have a day where I wrote for an hour or two, that's satisfying.

If I have a day where I do something special with my wife or my partner or my family or my grandkids and kids, that's a good day. If I go for a walk with a friend, that's a good day. So I would say it's both a combination of connection and doing what I love, which is writing that makes a good day for me. So I would say it's both a combination of connection and doing what I love, which is writing, that makes a good day for me. And I think everybody's recipe for good day

is a little different. It's unique, it's individual. Speaking of writing, you gave me a piece of writing advice years ago that, I don't even know if you'll remember saying it to me, but I really, I think about it a lot. Do the easy stuff first. Actually, what I remember saying is only do what's easy

on any given day. Interesting. And so the idea is that if you accumulate enough winds, you're creating a momentum where everything's easy, rather than diving right into the hearts. What I've found, I've done like a dozen books or so, Dan. And what I found is that if I do what comes most easily, what flows, what's optimal, if you will, what happens is I have a tapestry. And then it's connecting all that

within a framework that makes the book. And then at that point, that comes more easily too. It's, what I can't do is an outline that says, I'm gonna do A, B, then C and D. That kills me. But on a given day, I have a flash like, oh yeah, I should say this about that. So I say this about that day, that's satisfying.

And then I put it all together at the end, and that's a book. Yeah, I mean, that strikes me as really wise and not at all what I do, which is I march dutifully and militaristically and through my to-do list or whatever structure instead of bouncing more gleefully and joyfully and creatively among the areas that I have energy and creativity to work on. It sounds like you know what to do.

Yeah, well in so many areas of my life I know what to do, I just don't fucking do it. Isn't that the truth? Yeah, well in so many areas of my life I know what to do, I just don't fucking do it. Isn't that the truth? It reminds me, I remember having a conversation with Joseph Goldstein that I recorded and so it's very funny, went to listen to it, where I'm talking about productivity and you know, I talk about how I moved through the day kind of lurching grimly from one item of my to-do list to the next, you know, clenched up and he's like, hey, the good stuff doesn't come from the clench. And then he said, that's just you being stupid.

And starts to laugh in his galloping high-pitched laugh. And you know, because he wasn't really calling me stupid, but it is stupid to do what I'm doing. And I think much smarter to do what you're calling for and what Joseph's calling for is relax a little bit. Even when you're in the middle of a tough thing, for me now, and I try to remind myself, I kind of talk to myself when I'm in the middle of a tough chapter on my next book or a tough email,

I'm looking to write, okay, just do the easy stuff, do the easy stuff, it doesn't have to be perfect yet. You can come back to it. You can come back to it tomorrow. Just do the easy stuff. And if you just do the easy stuff enough, it's all easy eventually. That was a lesson I learned for the years I toiled

at the New York Times. Everything I wrote would be edited by at least three people. And I had to give up my sense of, oh, it has to be this way. I saw they actually were improving it. It helped to have that second look. And now writing books, I see that, okay, I'll do what's easy, but then maybe I'll punch it up later.

Maybe that will be the easiest thing, easier thing on a later day. Before I let you go, can you please remind everybody of the name of your new book and any other resources that you've put out into the world that you want people to know about? Oh, I don't know the name of my book. Okay, well, I know the name of it.

What's the subtitle? Do you know the subtitle? Yes, Optimal, Colon, How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day. Beautiful, it was a subtitle, How to sustain personal and organizational excellence every day. Beautiful. It was a subtitle. I wasn't sure if it's changed a couple of times. Thank you, Dan. Always a pleasure. It's such a pleasure. I'm lucky to count you as a friend. Thank you for coming on, Danny. My pleasure. Really, truly. Thanks again to Danny. Always great to talk to him.

We have all of Danny's appearances on this podcast, linked in the show notes, including his interview with Sokni Rinpoche from a series we did called The Art and Science of Keeping Your Shit Together. That was a series where we brought together Buddhist scholars and respected scientists. Go check all of that out if you want more, Danny Goldman. Before I let you go, thank you and an ask.

Thank you for listening. Genuinely, we could not do this without you. And the ask is, if two things, if you've got a second to go give us a rating or a review, that's super helpful. And go sign up for the newsletter, where we sum up the learnings from the week's episodes. So you've got your podcast, TLDR, right there in one email.

You can sign up in the show notes. Thank you most of all to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin, Davey, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor. Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post production. And Kimmy Regler is our executive producer. Alicia Mackey leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our Director

of Podcasts. Finally Nick Thorburn of Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do. You can listen early and add free right now by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen and add free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com.