We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH039: Optimal Performance w/ Daniel Goleman

Episode Date: January 7, 2024

In this episode, William Green brings back Daniel Goleman, author of “Emotional Intelligence,” an iconic book that’s sold over 5 million copies. Here, Dan talks about his new book, “Optimal: How to Sustain Personal & Organizational Excellence Every Day.” He explains how to master the skills of emotional intelligence to become more productive, more effective, calmer, & happier.  IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 04:55 - Why Daniel Goleman seeks sustainable excellence, not a “flow” state. 10:44 - How Peter Lynch illustrates the dangers of driving yourself too hard. 15:54 - Why companies need emotionally intelligent leaders. 17:23 - How to boost creative thinking by allowing yourself time to relax. 32:02 - Why EQ trumps IQ in the professional world. 34:21 - How to enhance the foundational skill of self-awareness. 37:08 - How to become a better listener. 48:39 - What the Dalai Lama told Dan about self-compassion. 49:27 - How emotional self-management enhances decision making. 50:42 - How to recover from stress & avoid burnout. 1:08:50 - How to build focused attention in a wildly distracting world. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Daniel Goleman’s website. Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence Courses. Check out Optimal by Daniel Goleman & Carey Cherniss. Check out Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. Daniel Goleman & Richard Davidson's book, Altered Traits. Tara Bennett-Goleman's book, Emotional Alchemy. William Green’s 2023 podcast interview with Daniel Goleman & Tsoknyi Rinpoche | YouTube Video. William Green’s 2022 podcast interview with Daniel Goleman | YouTube Video. William Green’s book, “Richer, Wiser, Happier” – read the reviews of this book. Follow William Green on X (AKA Twitter) Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here. NEW TO THE SHOW? Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Glengoyne Whisky NetSuite Shopify Toyota Babbel Salesforce Fundrise Fidelity Vacasa HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

You're listening to TIP. Hi there, welcome back to the richer, wiser, happier podcast. In today's episode, we're going to explore an extremely important topic that I think is critical for anyone who's trying to build a successful career, particularly in intensely competitive fields like business and investing. The question is this, how can you perform at an exceptionally high level in a way that's truly sustainable? I think we've all wrestled with this question at different times in our lives.

We know that we've got to push ourselves hard to succeed, but how hard? What if you drive yourself so hard that you become physically or emotionally exhausted and burn out? What if you perform fantastically at work and earn a fortune, but you're running so fast that you end up neglecting or sacrificing other aspects of your life that also matter, including your physical health or your peace of mind or your friends and family? Over the last three decades, I've interviewed a lot of great investors who've made billions of dollars in the markets, but have pretty awful personal lives that I wouldn't really envy for a minute. As I mentioned in my book, Richel Weiser Happier, one thing that's striking to me is just how many of the best investors have ended up getting divorced. So it's clearly not easy to achieve great financial and professional success in a balanced and sustainable way that allows us also to be calm and health.

and happy and pretty decent to the people around us. So what's the solution? Well, that's really the central focus of today's episode of the podcast, which is all about how to achieve sustainable excellence. Our guest is Daniel Goldman, who's a world-renowned expert on high performance. Dan earned a PhD in clinical psychology from Harvard and spent about 12 years as a science reporter at the New York Times. He then became famous as the author of a massive international bestseller titled Emotional Intelligence,

which has been translated into something like 40 languages. It's one of the most influential business books of all time, because it led millions of readers to realize that emotional intelligence or EQ may actually matter more than IQ once you're out of school and in the workplace. Dan has continued to build on those findings, studying outstanding performance. at some of the world's most successful companies, and also drawing on the latest research on behavioral psychology and the brain. He's also gone very deep as a practitioner of meditation over the last half century or so, and has written extensively about the scientific research

on how to use meditation to change your brain and body. The good news is that he's now co-authored a new book titled Optimal, which explores how individuals and organizations can sustain excellence every day. In today's conversation, Dan talks in detail about how we can apply this optimal yet sustainable approach in our own lives. Among other things, he explains how to handle stress and increase our emotional resilience, how to manage our emotions so we can make more rational and clear-headed decisions, how to enhance our creative thinking by allowing ourselves time to relax, how to become a better and more empathetic listener, how to give more effective feedback, and how to strengthen our ability to focus and remain calm and concentrated

in an increasingly distracted and fast-paced world where it's easy to lose our heads. Personally, I've found this conversation hugely helpful, and I hope you'll see why I've come to regard Dan as one of the wisest and most thoughtful people I know. Thanks so much for joining us. You're listening to The Richer, Wiser, Happier Podcast, where your host, William Green, interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life. Hi, folks, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome my friend Daniel Goldman back on the podcast. As you know, Dan published a seminal book, Emotional Intelligence, back in 1995, I think,

which has since since sold some outrageous number of copies, more than five million, I think, before people started to lose count. and Dan has now co-authored a new book on emotional intelligence, which is titled Optimal, How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day, which is being published on January 9th. So we're going to speak in some depth about how to harness the skills of emotional intelligence to become more productive, happier, more effective, and the like. Dan, it's wonderful to see you. William, it's so much a pleasure for me to be with you, even by Zoom, on a podcast.

and it's always a pleasure. Thank you. I really appreciate it. It's a delight. So I wanted to start by asking you what actually is an optimal state and how it differs, say, from a flow state, which is the ideal that I think a lot of us yearn to achieve. Well, let me start by describing attributes of the optimal state and then contrasting with the flow. You know, when you're in your optimal state,

you're most highly productive doing whatever it is you do. And, you know, for an executive, it's one thing for, you know, a single parent or four, it's folding laundry. It doesn't matter what it is. It's the internal state. You feel really good that day while you're doing it. You're satisfied with what you did. You're effective. You make good decisions. You're creative. You have a lot small wins towards some larger goal. These are all attributes of the optimal state. I contrast it with the flow state because flow is that one time you were fantastic. You outdid yourself, but you can't make it happen. It's not something that you can put together ingredients and be sure it will happen. And also, people get into kind of self-critical state around the fact that

they're not in flow, which I think is destructive. You don't find it. in the optimal state, there's no critical self-talk. You lose yourself in what you're doing. You're fully focused, which is also a characteristic of flow. But in the original research on flow, which was done at the University of Chicago, they saw that focus and concentration as an epiphenomenna, a side effect of flow. We see it, and when I say we, I'm talking about myself and my co-author Kerry Chernis at Rutgers, we see it as a doorway into the optimal state, focus. thing. We can all focus better. We can learn to focus better. And I think that's a key part of learning to be at your best. Yeah, I was struck. There's a line in the book where you say the optimal standard

lets us relax and enjoy what we're doing without constant self-judgment, just quiet that critical voice inside your head and focus on the task at hand. And I think about this a lot and wrestle with it a lot because there's a part of me the wonders about the benefits of how having this somewhat brutal, self-lacerating, critical internal voice, like this kind of extremism. And then on the other hand, and I see this with great investors, right? On the one hand, you know, I interviewed this guy, Rick Reeder, who manages something like $2.6 trillion. I think he manages more money than anyone else in the world. And he basically sleeps like four hours a night, and he's like an extreme athlete.

And then on the other hand, you have someone like Tom Gaynor, who I've mentioned to you before, who's the CEO of Markell, who says, no, steady incremental progress is much more sustainable. And so I'm sort of torn here. Like, how do you decide if, I mean, because some of these people who really want to be extraordinary, isn't it kind of helpful to be a little brutal to yourself, a little intense, or is that just not sustainable? Well, I think the key here is sustainability. If you're constantly self-critical, if you only look at how you screwed up, what you did wrong, and how to write, and that's actually a diagnostic for being a perfectionist. And perfectionism is great on the one hand and terribly self-destructive on the other.

The way it's great is you're always pushing yourself to do better. The way it's not great is you're always pushing yourself to do better. And what I mean by that is you see, you focus on what you did wrong, not what you're doing right. And sustainability means you do what you're doing right all the time and relax about it instead of getting. anxious or uptight or self-critical about what you could do better. It's not that you don't continually approve, but you don't beat yourself up. And it's beating yourself up. For example, if someone is sleeping four hours a night and working all the rest of the time, what's happening in their personal life? Do they have a series of marriages that end in disaster? Do they see their

kids? Do they see the people they love? Do they have time or schedule time to do the things they love to do? That's an important question because it has to do with how the body is wired. Our body is meant to arouse itself. The experiences maybe getting upset or getting maybe angry or dissatisfied or anxious. And then recover from that because it takes a toll. It takes a toll on your health directly. When you're upset, it means that you're secreting adrenaline, cortisol, stress hormones, and they eat away your immune system. They have very bad effects on your cardiovascular health. And they may help you get the job done in the short term,

but they're not sustainable in the long term. So I really advocate a sustainable best, that optimal state, rather than pushing yourself to be better than I ever could be. Clearly that applies for most of us who just want to be really, really good at what we do. Does this apply also to the sort of one-off, slightly freakish, brilliant types? Because if you're an Elon Musk or you're a Steve Jobs or you're a Serena Williams or something, do you not need to be pushing yourself to the absolute extreme? Or is it, I mean, are there rules where this almost doesn't apply? because you're so extreme as a high performer. Well, let me ask you a question, William. You have interviewed in your wonderful book, richer, happier, wiser, I think it's called.

Thank you. You know, you did way better than Charlie Munger, who said, richer, and so forth, which I thought was a lovely, a lovely. So you interviewed people who were enormously successful as investors. Are they uptight about it? Are they driving themselves? Are they more relaxed? Let me ask it a different way. Is this a very ingredient in success in that domain?

It's a very interesting conundrum because there are people like Peter Lynch, who's legendary from Fidelity, who really, he said to a friend of my Bill Miller, who's a legendary investor early in Bill's career, he said, look, there's really only one gear or maybe two gears. There's sort of full speed ahead and then stop. And so Peter Lynch went at this blazing pace for about 13 years. years, beat the market, had this legendary outperformance, and then was kind of done and had to retire and has been out of the game just as a sort of elder statesman and author for decades. And so in some ways, it's sort of, that example would affirm what you're saying, that it's

hard to sustain that blistering pace. But then there are people like this guy, Will Danoff, who's a legendary investor at Fidelity, one of Peter Lynch's successes, actually, who, I remember when he met Bill Miller, something like 30 years ago, Bill held out his hand, and they're good friends now, and he said, I will, nice to meet you. And Will Danoff didn't extend his hand and said, I'm going to beat you, man. I'm going to beat you. And so I think there is some aspect of that success that is this ferocious intensity and drive. And then, and so I'm really wrestling with this question. I don't have a strong bias either way. You know, it raises the question of what's true wealth? Is it just how much money you make or how you, what kind of life you live or both?

And can you make a ton of money and have a rich life? Or is it one or the other? Or is it, you know, I personally would rather have a satisfying life and satisfying accomplishments than be the like, tip top of the game. It's interesting because, I mean, in many ways you are the tip top of the game as a nonfiction author. You've had enormous success, but I wonder if, you know, you don't have the same intensity as some of the authors who are just sort of pumping out stuff and care about their brands and stuff. It feels like you've always had this meditative life, this balanced spiritual life. So you're an unusual case yourself, aren't you?

Perhaps so. I mean, many people who have a business bestseller, and I had a series of those, then start a company or try to market something based on that. I never did that. And I always thought it was more interesting and more satisfying to have time for retreats, have time for my family, than to go off and kill myself trying to get a business going. So, yeah, I might be an unusual case. On the other hand, I've studied companies, organizations that are highly successful. This is different than highly successful investors. This has to do with whether the leader is emotionally intelligent, whether they can pervade the organization at different levels of people being also emotionally intelligent. And it turns out that correlates with business success. I'm thinking of progressive, used to be progressive insurance, now just progressive.

And they're famous for this series of commercials that's been running for more than two decades with this woman, I forget her name, who represents progressive. But during that time, the person who was in charge of customer relations, the people that actually sell insurance, was a huge advocate of emotional intelligence. He said, look, this is a relationship business. we have to manage our relationships well. And I think that takes emotional intelligence. So we offered training to his people.

And what's important is he was someone from the business side saying this matters here. And I think that's crucial too. If it's only from HR, forget it. And by the way, this matters to investors. I'll tell you why. There was just an article in one of the recent Harvard Business Reviews aimed at investors that said, you know, it's not enough just to look at the nuts. numbers, which is very standard in investing, look at the people, too. Because if you want

long-term success, you're going to want to have effective leadership and you want to have effective people at every level. And it's human capital, too. That's what the article said. You can't, in this day and age, everyone's looking at the numbers, look more deeply. look in the organization and see what kind of leadership they have. Are they going to be there for the long run? It's kind of the tortoise in the hair. Can they have a spectacular quarter or quarters? Do they do it by burning people out?

In emotionally intelligent organizations, when you have a performance review, they ask not only did you get your numbers, how did you get your numbers? Did you do it in a way where you stress people out? Did you do it in a way where your most talented people are going to want to leave? they hate you. That's an important question. I thought it was interesting also. You mentioned briefly in the book, a dinner that you'd had with Mark Beniof, the CEO and founder of Salesforce. And he

talked about the four cues, right? I don't know if you remember this. So this in Q, it includes IQ, so obviously intelligence. And then he talked about EQ, obviously emotional intelligence, that's your great expertise. But then he also talked about CQ, creative intelligence. And then Eskew, which he talked about as purpose and spiritual intelligence. How do you, I mean, having spent time with someone like Benioff and spent time at Salesforce, sort of seeing a little bit of the culture there, how does he sort of lend credibility in a way to this argument that it's got to be about more than just sheer drive and intensity? So Mark is an interesting case because I think he has both strengths.

I think he drives himself, but he takes time to relax. He meditates every morning, and that's an important part. His spiritual life is important to him too. And I see that in data in terms of whether someone who's in a leadership position can articulate a higher purpose or mission that resonates that they believe in, that moves them, and articulate in a way that resonates with other. other people. That is inspiring. And we have data that shows it creates the most positive emotional climate. And that's how you get the best out of people. You also have a very interesting quote in the book from Cicero, the Roman statesman and author who I had to read as a teenager in Latin, no less. I can't remember any of it. So he was born, I think, about 160 BC or something. There's a

beautiful quote that's attributed to him. And like most quotes, we have no idea whether it actually was him. but he said, only the person who learns to relax is able to create. And for them, ideas reach the mind like lightning. I thought that was fascinating as well, that you, if you're so intense that you never take time off, it's actually, it's going to be hard to have that kind of creativity. The research on creativity says Cicero was right in this respect. If you ask successful entrepreneurs, and I've seen data on this, how do you make decisions? They say that they gather information widely, actually more widely than other people would.

Other people might not bother with things that don't seem relevant. You never know. So the first stage of creativity research shows is to get all the best information you can get. And then the next stage is counterintuitive. It's let go. It's relaxed. Go for a walk. because that lets another part of your brain engage, which actually has wider connectivity.

And then you're more likely to come up with two elements that are useful, that are applicable, that have never been put together before. That's the creative insight. And then you go back to that first mode to execute on it. So Cicero, when he says you should relax, is talking about letting this other part of the brain take over. and the research on creativity is very clear that it's in this other state, this relaxed state, where you're much more likely to have the creative insight, you know, during the shower while walking the dog or whatever it may be.

I don't know if you've come across this guy, Brad Stullberg, who wrote a book called The Practice of Groundedness, which I've only dipped into, but I gather is very good, but he was chatting to a friend of mine called Chris Stout on a podcast called Living a Life in Full. And Chris is a psychologist and a super, super smart guy, wonderful guy. And they were discussing the psychoanalyst, DW Winnicott, who you'll know infinitely more about than I do. And Brad was talking about this concept of good enough that he'd drawn from Winnicott, where Winnicott had said, you know, the best type of parent isn't a helicopter parent who's constantly kind of hovering and trying to prevent any misstep from the child.

but it's not a negligent parent either. And so I wrote down something from this podcast conversation between Brad Stalberg and Chris Stout where that I wanted to run by you, where Brad basically takes this philosophy of parenting from Winnicott. And then he says, I started to think that this philosophy can apply far beyond parenting. Imagine if we took that to all of the big projects in our lives and even our own unfolding. So instead of trying to always fix things and problem solve and immediately come in like the helicopter parent? What if we were good enough? What if we gave things a little more time and space

to unfold? And again, this doesn't mean being negligent, far from it. It doesn't mean not caring. It means releasing from the heavy weight of perfectionism and obsession in favor of good enough. And what the research shows unequivocally is that even if you are concerned with being great, the best way to be great is to be good enough over and over and over again. And then suddenly one day, you wake up and you're great. You know, William, that's just another way of articulating the main point of the book optimal, which is it's good enough to sustain excellence every day, not to kill yourself or kill the people who are working for you by pushing them and stressing them or stressing yourself

or criticizing yourself. And the good enough concept is pretty powerful. One reason it matters is that children and teenagers need to learn to individuate, which means take really. in their personal life as they grow, try something new. And if you're the helicopter parent, you don't let them. You want them to do the thing that, you know, the piano lessons, whatever lessons, after school until they go to bed or they do their homework for hours. But children and teens need to be able to explore, too, not just to do that routine that helicopter parent wants them to do.

and the good enough parent lets that happen. And I think a good enough leader lets that happen too. And it's interesting because I look at someone like Tom Gaynor, who I mentioned before the CEO of Markell, who talks about being radically moderate and just having steady incremental progress. And he's still pretty extreme. It's not like we're talking about not caring.

I mean, I think even when you're talking about optimal, it's not a low standard. It's just a more feasible and achievable standard than thinking we're going to achieve some sort of elusive, enigmatic state of flow very regularly. Well, what it means is that you're effective every day, you're productive every day. And just as with an investment, you want it to be effective and productive over time in a sustainable way. You don't want to have big peaks that then have big drops. And so I think that the wisdom about what makes people effective also applies to the market

what makes a stock pick effective. Yeah, it's in some ways it's about sustaining excellence over very long periods of time. I remember Rich Rowe, the extreme athlete who then became a lawyer, I think, and as a podcast, he said something that really struck me about how it's basically about being the who slows down the least, that you somehow have to just keep going for a hundred miles slowing down the least. And that is a little bit like being a CEO or a little bit like being an author, right? Because, I mean, I was very extreme in the approach to Richard Wise a happier, the book and didn't take a vacation in five years. And when I was done, I was just

spent. And it's actually quite hard to motivate myself to write another book because I was just so beaten up. And so in a way, I'm a good example of someone who both is getting the benefits and paying the price for being an extreme obsessive perfectionist. This is maybe why I'm belaboring this point, because it's something I really wrestle with a lot. So, you know, to put the question another way, can you be outstanding and not kill yourself, not drive yourself to desperation? You know, there was an article in the excellent journal Science called the neurobiology of Frazzle. And what it's talking about is what you sounds like you did finding this book, which is,

you know, every day you get stressed out and you don't schedule in recovery. You just keep going and keep going and keep going. Some people may be able to do that for a period. I don't know that anybody can do it all their life because, as I said, the stress hormones are going to eat away at your health and, you know, create kind of fuzzy decision-making, actually, I think it's counterproductive. But getting in that state all the time and never allowing yourself to recover means you become emotionally exhausted and burn out.

And how do you pursue excellence and not burn out? You know, the interesting question, for example, with these exemplars of driving themselves, is, well, what do they actually do in a day or in a week? Do they have some time to recover? Do they do something that helps them not get in defrazzle? Or do they just have a constitution? Maybe these are unique individuals genetically. We don't know that.

I somewhat wondered if Rick Reeder, the guy I mentioned before who manages the enormous amount of money at BlackRock, I wonder if there is something almost different in the way that he's wired. Like it is kind of extraordinary that he's managed to sustain it. And I wonder also if someone, I don't know, like an Elon Musk,

if they are just wired differently, if it is a little bit like being an extreme athlete. But I feel like for most of us, the realm of sustainable excellence is a, that's a happier and better goal to aim for. So anyway, I wanted to dig in much more deep to the book and the tools, because I think you've studied the four domains of emotional intelligence

in such detail, such depth over the last 30 years, and you've got a lot of data and a lot of practical experience how it works. And so in a way, I want the heart of this conversation to be helping our listeners to figure out how to build an emotional intelligence of advantage so that they can function well in work and in life by harnessing these ingredients of hyper, performance. But I figure it might be helpful before we go in depth for you just to give us a quick overview or review of what the four domains of emotional intelligence are so that then when we go into them in some detail, people will know, okay, this is where we are in this journey. The first domain is emotional self-awareness, knowing what you're feeling, why you're feeling

it, how it shapes your perception, your thinking, your impulse to act. Second domain is self-manage. That means getting your disruptive, distracting states under control. That's anger and anxiety, for example. And at the same time, marshalling the positive, which is keeping your eye on the long-term goal despite daily distractions, being nimble, agile, and adjusting to changing circumstances. Staying positive, and the mindset is very important. Seeing yourself is able to improve and other people is able to improve, not just dismissing yourself or others as you are today, but realizing, you know, I can get better. The third domain is empathy, and here it's important to realize there are three different kinds of empathy, each instantiated in different

circuitry in the brain. The first is cognitive empathy. I know how you think. I know the terms you use. I know how you see the world. And because I know the terms you use to explain reality or a situation yourself, I can talk to you effectively because I can use those terms. I know you'll understand. The second is emotional empathy. This is based on what in social neuroscience we call the emotional brain and the fact that brains are designed to link to the brain of the person we're with and create a silent, automatic, instantaneous, unconscious bridge, which tells you what the other person is intending and what they're feeling. So you know what the person feels because you sense it to.

And then the third kind of empathy, which is little discussed, but I think should be brought to people's attention more, is what's technically called empathic concern. It's not just that I know how you think and I know how you feel. That's great for marketing, say, I also care about you. That is the mark of a great leader. someone, if you feel that your boss cares about you, has your back, wants what's best for you, you're going to coach you or mentor you to develop further strengths.

You have intense loyalty. It really makes you feel good about the situation you're in. And the fourth domain of emotional intelligence is what you might call social skill. We think of it as relationship management. It means, for example, being able to inspire people, being able to coach them, being able to to mentor, being able to persuade or guide someone else, being able to sense when there's a disturbance in the room, there's an upset that you can, it's simmering that you can surface and help both sides come to some agreement. And also, it's being a great team player. Very important.

Teams exhibit emotional intelligence at the group level. It looks a little different, But it means that they have all of the key attributes of emotional intelligence and you can pick it up in how people on the team relate to each other. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year, bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world, many of them operating on the front lines of history.

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Go to Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. Before we dive into these things in some detail and figure out how to improve our performance in each of these four domains. I just wanted to step back and ask you about your really how the data has proven to you over the last three decades that these emotional intelligence strengths and skills actually matter

greatly in terms of personal success and effectiveness. Because when you started out, my sense is that this was a hunch that you had. It was a sort of intelligent guess, but you didn't have the data. And it seems like now you have an enormous number of studies and data that actually, for a former science journalist at the New York Times and the like and a science author give you kind of confirmation of what your hunch was? That's 100% correct. When I wrote the book in 95, Emotional Intelligence, it made intuitive sense, but we had no

data. It was only in 1990 that the first journal article called Emotional Intelligence appeared. It was written by a friend of mine, Peter Salivay, who's now the president of Yale. He was a junior professor then, and he wrote it with a graduate student. And it was highly speculative too because they had no measure yet of emotional intelligence. You know, IQ has been around for more than a century. There's tons of data showing that IQ is a terrific predictor of how well you'll do in school. Turns out to be a pretty poor predictor of how you'll do in life over the course of your career.

That's where emotional intelligence kicks in. Consider this. For a lot of professions, you need to get an MBA or in grants to say engineering. you need an advanced degree. That's the threshold ability, threshold competence. But it means everyone else is about as smart as you are. And for example, there's a study of engineers where they're asked, rate other engineers on how effective they are as engineers.

You do it anonymously. And it turned out that those ratings had zero correlation with IQ and very high correlation with emotional intelligence. How do you manage yourself? How do you handle your relationships? That's what makes you good in this. And I think that's what makes you a leader in an organization, at least effectively. I think it's what makes you an effective team member or head of a team.

So emotional intelligence matters more over the course of your career and over the course of your life than it does turn your school years when you're being graded on IQ. It's also really interesting that you mentioned in this new book that despite the fact that we now realize how important emotional intelligence is. MBA programs, for example, are really doing next to nothing to develop these emotional intelligence skills. And you cite one study that said that I think roughly four in 10 leaders had poultry strengths in these emotional intelligence competences. You know, a friend of mine was a research head at a executive head hunting firm, and they were interested in why people who looked really strong as candidates who they recommended got fired.

And they did a study around the world and they found, well, their business expertise, all of that. Analytics scale is very high. But they were invariably fired for a lapse in emotional intelligence. And, you know, this just tells you that you need both. It's not that it's one or the other. It's both end. And I think that many companies and or too many companies and organizations don't understand this. In the book, we look at some outstanding examples of companies where this really matters.

For example, M.D. Anderson, which is the world's number one place for cancer treatment. The head of that organization and the training people understand the value of emotional intelligence. I mentioned Progressive, where the head of the customer relations unit expouse the importance of emotional intelligence. It's very important, I think, that someone from the business side champions this, and that HR or the training and development people offer an opportunity to strengthen it. That's a winning combination, I think. Yes, SETI and Adela, you mentioned as well, that Microsoft came in with all guns blazing,

talking on his first day, I think, about the importance of emotional intelligence. Yeah, he called it empathy. That is another point, which is that the culture of organizations and businesses varies tremendously. And the emotional intelligence is pretty much embedded in the DNA of many organizations, but by different names. You know, you may call empathy leadership presence, not empathy, but it's basically the same skill.

All right. Well, we'll go through these four domains in some detail, talking about how to upgrade various tools that we can use to upgrade our own performance. So we become optimal. We may not be in flow, but we're going to be optimal by the end of this episode. So the first domain is self-awareness. And so if you could explain even before we start, like why emotional self-awareness is at the very core of emotional intelligence. Why is it the foundational skill that you need to activate all of the others? Because all the others depend on that. If you don't have self-awareness, you can't manage your emotions well.

They just come to you. You don't see them coming. You don't know what you don't even realize you're in the grip of, you know, anger, whatever it is. Empathy, same thing. If you are tuned out of a range of your own emotion, you're not going to pick it up in other people. And the relationship skills depend on all three.

They build on the other three with emotional intelligence as the foundation. We have research, for example, that shows of 12 competencies that are based on emotional intelligence, which you see in outstanding performers, outstanding leaders. If you are poor in self-awareness, you'll be poor in, say, 10 of those 12. you might be good in one or two. But if you're strong in self-awareness, you're likely to be good in many, many others. So there are various tools that you write about in order to build greater self-awareness. You mentioned things like an inner check-in, a body scan, monitoring, self-talk, naming your emotions. Can you discuss those in a little more detail, give me as a sense of what you

would do if, like me and many of our listeners, you're thinking, well, I'm reasonably self-aware, But how do I build this? How do I use these techniques that you're describing? So self-awareness requires a special kind of attention. It's not that we notice what we're thinking and feeling, but we have a platform from which we can kind of be meta and see it come and go. And one of the effective tools was actually developed at EAL.

They have a center for emotional intelligence where you practice naming what you're feeling. It turns out most people are pretty poor at that. We have kind of gross names. I guess I'm getting angry now, but we don't have a kind of refined vocabulary. But it turns out because of the way the brain functions that if you can name what you're feeling,

then the cortex, a different part of the brain, activates, and the part that's getting you so upset right now, is less active. So that's one way. And they developed a mood meter, right? I mean, there was this guy Mark Brackett from Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and I remember my son Henry has a T-shirt that has like pictures of something like 50 different moods.

You know, it's like, I am angry, I am sad. Exactly, exactly. And you can get better and better. And I think the fundamental of any of these development methods is practice. It's like developing any skill. And by the way, this is very important. The way you strengthen emotional intelligence is through skill building. It's like building, it's like practicing your golf stroke.

It is not like cognitive learning in academia. In cognitive learning, you have a pre-existing network, cognitive network of understanding, and you plug in the new thing, you know, how to subtract if you're a seven-year-old, or how to add if you're a five-year-old. And that's a different method of learning. But to get better at any aspect of emotional intelligence, I think you have to be motivated. It has to matter to you. One of the ways this is done sometimes is to ask someone where you want to be in five years.

What would help you get there? In other words, you want the motivation to come from within. You don't want someone to feel like, oh, man, my boss said I have to go to this training, you know, and you're already not going to learn anything if you have. So, first of all, you want to want it. Second, it helps to understand what would help you get where you want to go. Third, can you engineer that into a particular behavioral sequence? I'll give you a common example.

Many, many people, particularly leaders, are poor listeners. By poor listener, I mean, you interrupt people. You talk over them. They come in, they want to talk to you about X. You want to talk them about Y, and they talk for, you. know, 18 seconds. This is what they found with physicians and patients, by the way. And then you take over the conversation. That's terrible habit if you want to be a good listener, if you want to really be able to empathize and understand the other person. So you might have a behavioral

sequence to practice like when someone comes to talk to me and it could be your teenager, by the way, the brain doesn't really distinguish between work and life. I'm going to listen and then I'm going to say what I think they meant, and then say what I think. That is a new behavior, and it's like learning a golf stroke. At first, it's awkward. It doesn't feel comfortable. The more you practice, the more comfortable it gets, until there's a neural landmark where the new behavior is practiced so much, it becomes automatic.

That means a different part of the brain has taken it over, the basal ganglia, where habit is. and that's going to stick with you. That's not going to go away. I sometimes, you know, I'm often asked to give keynotes at companies and so on. And one of the things I have to say is, you know, you may learn something from this. You may get a little motivated. It won't last. This is not development.

This is why this matters. So you need to then, another step is practice at every naturally occurring opportunity, like with your teenager or with someone in your office and get support. You know, if you can get a coach, great, someone who's going to help you, because you're sure to have bad days. You know, the day you blew it,

I went back to my old way, I was pressured or whatever. Then you use that as a learning opportunity. What can you do next time this happens to be sure that you do it right? And then, but if you practice, you're going to hit that neural landmark where it becomes automatic.

I thought it was very interesting. interesting on this subject of becoming a better, more active listener that you said in the book, you described this one technique where you said in difficult situations, for example, where you're trying to understand the other person's perspective, you should really hear the person out, then repeat back to them in your own words, what you heard, and then ask, did I get that right or did I misunderstand, and then let them speak freely? Yeah, because the other person is then feeling heard, feeling felt. That's very important to that person.

It means they know you're paying attention. You respect them. Even if you may not agree with them, you want to know what their position is. And that validates the other person. And if you're the leader, that's very important. One of the things, by the way, about groups that we're fine in our research is that at Google, when they looked at their top team, They called it psychological safety in the work of my colleague, Vanessa Druscat, who studies

high-performing groups. She calls it belonging. If you feel you belong. So for example, if you have a diversity and inclusion goal in your organization, as many do these days, it's not enough just to have X number of Y people, because that's what the general demographic is in the population. That doesn't mean that those people feel they belong. It's much more important to be welcoming, to listen, to be respectful, and give that person

a sense that, yes, I belong here. That really accomplishes the goal. To finish off this idea of self-awareness as this foundational skill, there are other tools you mentioned, for example, doing some kind of inner check-in or scanning your body, which I, and obviously the famous neuroscientist, Antonio D'Amacio talked to about. about having a sense of your somatic markets. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because this also very much relates to investing where the best investors have this

really powerful sense of what their body is telling them about the state that they're in and whether they're in a state where they're maybe too emotional, maybe they're too fearful, or maybe they're overexcited, or they're hungry, or they're jealous, or something like, like that. And so they have these kind of, so they have to tune into their bodies and their emotions so that they know when they're in a suboptimal state to make a rational decision. The somatic markers is basically just sensing how your body is feeling. And here it's helpful to know what your triggers are when you're more likely to get into a state that isn't optimal for making a good decision because an investor has to be clear ahead. And

And so you want to sense something building before it takes you over. It might be, oh, I got that feeling in my stomach again. I'm getting anxious. Or I've got the sense in my knees and I'm getting angry. I think that's a skill. That is a skill of self-awareness for sure. And that helps you know when you're about to get into a state where your emotions are taking you over. And you should never make a decision, let alone an investment decision from those

States because it's not your clear-headed decision. Another way to another dimension of self-awareness has to do with how your sense of yourself matches with how people see you. And that means getting input from other people, usually anonymously. You don't, very few people will be candid with you, you know, and say you're this kind of person, or I think you're too uptight or you get angry too much. People don't want to tell you that. They want to preserve the relationship, particularly if they work for you. So anyway, there are many measures. They're called 360 degree measures.

I have one, the emotional and social competence inventory. It's managed by Corn Ferry. And it evaluates people anonymously. You get to pick, say, the half dozen or ten people whose opinions you respect, who know you well, who are going to rate you anonymously. So they can be totally honest. You won't know what they said about you,

but you get an aggregate. And it gives you a profile of what you're saying, strengths and limits are. And you can match that with how you rate yourself. And it turns out the better that match, the more effective a leader will be. Okay. So self-awareness also, I guess there's also this aspect of monitoring your self-talk so you can see when you're beating yourself up. I found this yesterday. I made a hash of my preparation yesterday and the day before for this interview. And I say, you know, And I just did it in a really inefficient way that meant I had to go and redo something for several hours. And I found myself yesterday literally like swearing at myself and being like, you idiot, you know, but with swear words, add it.

And it's really, I think I've become more aware over the years of when my sort of violent self-talk towards myself is a cue to be aware of like something's going on here. Something is amiss. Can you talk about that because it's very uncomfortable and it's slightly embarrassing, but I think it's such an important insight into our state. Another aspect of self-awareness is monitoring what you're telling yourself. You know, in cognitive therapy, they say something wonderful. You don't have to believe your thoughts. In other words, some of those thoughts like you really blew it, you're an idiot, just are not helpful. Some of those thoughts like, I didn't do that well.

try again is helpful and you want to make the distinction between whether your thoughts are helping you or hurting you. And the self-criticism is generally hurting you, but the ability to see where you could improve is helping you. I feel like it was some ancient technique that we figured out where probably we had disappointed our school teachers and our parents and then we beat the hell out of ourselves and we improved. And then everyone told us we were great after all. And so we somehow, when we were young, we internalized this idea of if I just beat myself up enough, I'm going to be really good. And then you get to a point later in life where you're like, really? Do I actually have to live that way? I hope you get to that point anyway.

At least now I notice that I'm doing it. And it's a way, I mean, I remember that Sylvia Borsstein, who I'm sure you're friendly with the great old Buddhist teacher, who I remember listening to her giving a talk where she said, I'm sorry, sweetheart, you're suffering right now. And she would say this to herself. And that's a little bit how I feel in that. It's a way of me pausing and saying, oh, God, I'm sorry. You're suffering right now. That's really wonderful as an antidote because what it says is you're, A, self-aware,

you're recognizing when you're beating yourself up. And B, you're applying an antidote, which is being kind to yourself instead of beating yourself up. And that's a wonderful skill, internal skill, to practice. And it's a skill of self-awareness because you can only do it if you recognize the moments when your self-talk is being destructive. And if I can put in a mention of a book that I actually think is terrific, again, probably by someone you know, Kristen Neff co-wrote this book, the self-compassion work book, that I think it, again, she's an academic at the University of Austin in Texas, or Texas

in Austin, and she's a Buddhist student and a psychologist and the like. And I just think she's really smart about using these gentle methods with yourself that I think make you more sustainable than using the self-lacerating approach that some of us learned growing up. I was once in a dialogue with the Dalai Lama when he was shot. to hear that people in the West were contemptuous of themselves. He did themselves. He didn't, in his culture, that wasn't really known. And he was shocked and he said, you know, you need a new word in English. This was in the 80s. The word is self-compassion. And that's exactly what Neff has then taken up. I don't know that she knew about that. I'd recommend a book by my

wife, actually, Tarbentic Holman, Emotional Alchemy, which talks about the 10 most common self-defeating emotional patterns on what to do about them, how to bring this kind of self-awareness to seeing when they're taking us over and then changing what we do and how we think about ourselves. I think that's very powerful. Yeah, I'll second that. She's terrific. I mean, I have the book and have met her many times, thankfully, thanks to you, and she's terrific. And also, it's worth saying that Tara has played a very important role in helping to shape Sokny Rimbusha's teachings about how to deal with these difficult emotions. And so the last time that I had you on the podcast was when we chatted with you and Sokne Rimbhéhéh this great Tibetan Buddhist master,

meditation master and teacher about this aspect of how to deal with what he calls your beautiful monsters and what Tara talks about a lot in her book. So, And these are all methods, William, for enhancing self-awareness. Yeah. And so let's get to Domain 2, which in a way I'd like to dwell on in more depth than some of the others, because I think it's so practical and so important to us, which is these techniques for self-management. And so can you start by giving us a sense of why this kind of emotional self-mastery is so critical? If you're, particularly if you're going into a field where cognitive skill counts very heavily,

like investing or writing or teaching, like, why is emotional self-mastery and balance so critical? So let's reverse engineer that a moment and look at the times and the state you get into when you're least effective, when you make bad decisions. It's times when your emotions are driving how you think. emotions are very critical in terms of self-mastery for several reasons. One is that emotions direct your attention. The thing you're upset about, the thing you're angry about, the thing you're anxious about is where the brain shifts your attention. If you're going to make a good decision, you want to be clear of that.

You don't want to be emotionally driven. You want to be balanced. It's not that you don't want your emotions at all. Of course you do, but you don't want them to take you over. You don't want them to be driving how you think about anything. And so emotional self-management, which is key in this second domain of emotional intelligence, means that on the one hand, you can manage upsetting emotions well. The definition in the lab of resilience is the time it takes you to recover from peak upset

to back to calm and clear. The faster you do that, the more resilient you are. You can't determine what you're going to feel or when you're going to feel it or how strongly you'll feel it. Emotions come unbidden from a deep part of the brain, but you can decide what you do once you feel it. That's where self-management comes in. There are many, many methods here, but it's not just handling disruptive emotions, distracting

emotions. It's also marshalling the positive emotions. It's like remembering what matters to you. What's your long-term goal here? You know, despite the distractions of the day, where are you heading? Also, are you handling the times that you get thrown off because of changing circumstances? And by the way, circumstances are always changing. Tech, you know, social trends, everything is changing all the time.

And you need to sense what's going on, but not be thrown by it. So that has to do with being agile, being adaptable, staying clear despite the changes. And then staying positive, basically, because a positive frame of mind is your best frame of mind for making good decisions. I don't mean being overly optimistic, but I mean not being downbeat, not being pessimistic, seeing that things always change, and tomorrow's a new day. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business.

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Where you know, you would get tortured or whatever. And at a certain point, you'd become, you know, like this, bummering us. And there was nothing you could do. And I had, I don't think, you know, that phrase obviously appeals to me. it's a very interesting concept. I never noticed the phrase that you mentioned in the book, which is learned optimism, which is sort of the opposite that Seligman talks about. And you talked about using phrases like, I can learn and grow better, or I can't do that yet. Or can you talk a little bit about how to, because obviously this is very related also to Carol Dweck's writings about the

growth mindset. These are all just sort of old old wines in new bottles. But it's really important this idea of how to develop a positive outlook so that you can be more resilient? So Seligman in his research found that there were certain categories of thoughts that made people depressed. Like, I can't do this. I'm worthless. Life is pointless. These are actually kinds of things. I did some research years ago with notes left by people who committed suicide. And they were full of this kind of thinking, which is depressionogenic. And what Seligman, him and realized was that he could help people counter those thoughts. This is, by the way, fits with Dweck's research on growth mindset. The idea that I'm no good, which is going to make

you depressed, is a fixed mindset. But he saw that you could have what Dweck would call a growth mindset, which is to see yourself as able to change, as able to improve, as able to be better. And in fact, you might, if you took stock, you might realize, oh, yeah, actually, I'm not so bad. People have told me this and that and that, which was good, which is thought you've suppressed when you were in that pessimistic depressed state. And so these are the kinds of countering. This is, by the way, a basic of cognitive therapy, too. And it was a cognitive therapy was developed at Penn also by a Seligman colleague, Aaron Beck. And the idea is simple.

It's that, remember, you don't have to believe your thoughts, particularly the depressionogenic thoughts, the one that are making you feel bad about yourself. And you can counter them by telling yourself, well, I'm not so bad when you're thinking you're bad. You may need, I know a cognitive therapist who has clients write down the counterthought because the down thoughts are so prominent and they'll have a little car that'll tell them, oh, actually I'm pretty good. Oh, I can grow and change. In other words, things you can remind yourself of in that moment that counter the depressing thought. I feel like this is particularly important at the moment in our era because there's almost an epidemic of gloom that you particularly see with the younger generation.

You know, my daughter who you've met, Madeline is 22, and my son, Henry, is 25. And I see their age group, not them in particular, but people they know who read the news and read about global warming and the like and wars and like. And they've almost like convinced themselves that everything is going to hell and it's all kind of pointless. And I was chatting actually to someone in the very nice cafe where you and I sometimes meet, the Red Barn Bakery, which I'm happy to advertise here in Irvington. I was talking to someone there, and she said one of the reasons why for that generation, for her generation, it's so hard for them to commit to a relationship, is they're almost like, well, what's the point?

Do you see that a lot, like that sense that there's so much gloom that it kind of has to be counteracted? You know, I think that gloom is understandable. I think that the news, the climate news, is full of bad reports. So if you're 20 and you're thinking of having kids by the time you're 30, that means by the time all these dire things are predicted, your kids are going to be in a very bad situation, which, by the way, gets me to an idea. I wanted to run by you, but here's an opportunity.

I think there's a smart business strategy here. I'll tell you what it is. Younger people, which is a demographic, companies want to capture as loyal customers over the course of their life, younger people, more than older people today, are going to value concrete moves that a product or company makes toward lessening their footprint, the carbon and so on. And if there were an impartial evaluator,

so I could compare this cup versus that cup or these snacks versus those snacks, for their climate or ecological imprint, and by the way, that footprint is not just carbon, it's eight systems that support life on the planet, all of which are in dire straits and getting worse, if you could see that this product is doing it better than the other product. If you knew that at point of purchase, just the way you know cost, I think it would create a market share improvement for those products that are doing something about it.

And companies have to chase market share. So that might be a way to use the existing system of incentives. and to change a system, you have to understand the incentives, to have companies rethink how they make their things, what services they offer, what their footprint is in a better direction. And I think the younger demographic would drive that I don't think that the data today shows it, but I bet it's going to happen tomorrow. Yeah, I tend to agree.

I see with people in their 20s and 30s, this tremendous. tremendous drive to live a more purpose-driven life. And I think for a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a big backlash against the environmental, social and governance movement that I think is a little bit crazy. The backlash, I mean, maybe the pendulum swung too far in one direction, or maybe Wall Street was too cynical and exploiting stuff where they promised and hyped things, but didn't actually live up to them. But I think this is here to stay, because when I, when I see this younger generation, I think, if you, if you want to, hire them and you want to retain them, they're less likely to go work for a company that doesn't

care about these things. They're more likely to stay loyal to a company that is slightly more idealistic. Or stay with a company that doesn't do it well now and help them get to doing it better. Yeah, I agree with you. I think a sense of purpose or a mission is more and more important. And with younger generation, that mission tends to be more and more around the environment. Yeah. Yeah. To get back to this issue of managing our emotions, which I think is so hugely important, but I mean, you do talk about the importance of having a sense of purpose as one way to deal with stress and the like and to become more resilient. But I wanted to talk a little bit about stress in general, which clearly there's an epidemic of.

And you quote a survey in the book showing that I think 38% of people in the workplace experienced high levels of burnout in 2022. Another study found that 16% have had to quit a job due to stress. And so clearly stress in many ways is a major enemy of getting into an optimal state. And so it's going to mess up our judgment. It's whether we're investors or business people or in our relationships with our family and friends going to mess up our health, it's going to lead to burnout, unhappiness, all of these habits that you mentioned, like, overeating and over-drinking and sleeplessness

or whatever, and absenteeism and low productivity and like. So it's clearly a scourge. So let's talk about how to deal with it. What your work in this arena of emotional intelligence tells us about how we can actually lessen stress and regain some sense of emotional balance. What can we do? Well, we're not helpless at all. But if we're driven to emotional exhaustion or driving ourselves in that direction, we need to notice that that's happening. That's where self-awareness comes in. And the body is actually wired for stress.

It's the emergency response. Everybody knows this. You know, their stress hormones make your limbs activate. They get more blood. Your organs, your immune system gets less blood during the emergency. Now, the problem is if that emergency is chronic, this is the nature of stress today, then you're lowering your immune resistance. You're ruining your health, basically.

And even though you may be able to arouse yourself to meet the stress of the moment, the body's not designed for that. The body's designed to have a big emergency reaction, stress arousal, we call it, and then recover. And if you slight the recovery, you're driving yourself to exhaustion. And one of the main ways to fight stress is, A, you know, the old, what can I change in the situation? Maybe you can change it, maybe not.

Maybe you can lessen it. Maybe if you're a leader, you can redistribute the load. I don't know. But the other is manage yourself, manage your internal reaction to the reality you face day in and day out. And that means do what it takes to recover. And it might be going for a walk. it might be meditating or yoga or spending time with someone you love or playing with your kids

or your pet. It doesn't matter what works for you. Schedule it. Make it part of your day. Make it part of your routine because it always looks like it's a waste of time. It's not. It's crucial because it lets you go back into the fray, restore it. And you can be more optimal than if you had never done it.

That's for sure. You can make better decision. You've gone deep on a lot of these things in your own life. I know that you've been meditating since you were a junior at Berkeley, I think, more than 50 years ago. And so you've thought a lot about meditation and breathing and the like. And you mentioned a bit in the book, a deep breathing technique that can actually shift your physiology, a 4-4-4 type of breathing. Can you talk about that? Because it's a very practical kind of intervention when you're in a state. Two things. One is meditation is really attention training. I'll get back to that. That's a kind of slower way of preparing yourself to handle stress. It's like going to the gym every day. It's like going to the gym every

day and working out, you become more fit. And if you practice an attention training method, you get more focused. So we'll get back to that. The 4-44 method is sometimes called box breathing is used by Rangers or, you know, military who are about to go into a stressful situation. They teach it. But the research shows it shifts physiology from what's called the parasympathetic nervous system arousal, I'm sorry, a sympathetic nervous system arousal, which is when you're stressed out and upset, to a parasympathetic, which is the recovery mode. And it goes like this. It's so simple. You breathe in. I teach a count of four, but I say breathe in as long as is comfortable. Hold your breath for as long as it comfortable. And then exhale slowly for as long

as you can. And if you do that six to nine times, it actually shifts your physiology from that stressed mode to recovery and relax. So that's one thing you can do if you know you're about to go into a stressful situation. On the other hand, I would say buff up your attention, your focus, because the more focused you are, it turns out the same part of the brain that helps you focus makes you more calm. So it's a twofer. And attention training can be as simple as, you know, saying, I'm going to pay attention to my breath, breathing in, breathing out, and full attention to every breath. And whenever my mind wanders, I guarantee it will. And I notice it wandered, I'm going to bring it back to the breath. That's like the brain equivalent of a rep in the gym.

every time you bring your focus back to that place you want it to be, your breath or task at hand, you're strengthening the circuitry for focus. And that's another way to manage stress. So you're less reactive. You know, there are three dimensions of a stress reaction. One is how often you get stressed, upset, and this makes people less often, likely to get upset. The second is how deeply it happens, how upset you get. And this method is people become more calm and less likely to have an extreme upset.

And the third, I mentioned, that's the quickness of your recovery, your resilience. And this helps people be quicker in recovering from the upset. I thought it was really interesting as well. You cite a classic study that I think is from something like 2010 that's called A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind. and that connection, that sense that we're sort of adrift so much of the day and that it's not, yeah, it's not just that it's unproductive. It's that it's actually a pretty miserable place to be in. This is a really interesting study. It was done at Harvard. They gave people an app for their phone,

which rang them at random times a day and says, what are you doing and what are you thinking about? Just those two questions. And how do you feel? And what they found was that people were, people were distracted from what was going on about 50% of the time. By the way, it was 90% three times during a commute, sitting in front of a video screen and at work. Sorry to say, it's true. People are thinking about something else. And if you're thinking about something else, you're not fully focused on what you're doing right now. And they also found that the more distracted you were, the less happy you were. When we're lost in our thoughts, we tend to, you know, the most distracting thoughts are the most emotionally powerful ones. That thing he said to me,

why did he say that? It's so upsetting. Why didn't she answer that email? You know, it doesn't matter what it is. That's where your mind is going to go. We're wired that way in evolution to reflect on what didn't go right. But on the other hand, that's not a helpful habit these days. So that's part of self-awareness, realizing where our mind is going. This Harvard study about the perils of a wandering mind is particularly timely in a sense because we're all wrestling with technology and the massive influx of distracting seductions. And I mean, I have a desktop computer. I have a laptop computer.

I have an iPhone. I have an iPad. And on them, I have instant access to my email, my text messages. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, I mean, everything, podcast, Spotify, FaceTime. It's kind of a marvel that I actually ever do anything. And so how given what you know about attention and focus, because you've written a book that I've read before about focus as well, which is on my Kindle as well, there's another device, how can I break this habit of falling down these rabbit holes and dividing my attention in just so many

unhelpful ways? Well, you know, when they did that study in 2010, not everyone carried a phone with them every moment of the day. Now, many, many or most people do. And phones can be very helpful. I love to Google things I don't know at the moment. and there are worst enemy because all of our seductions are right there in our hand. The things that turn you on, the things that anger you, the things that make you uptight and

anxious, you can get in a moment. And so phones feed distractedness. Remember, it's the emotionally laden thoughts that are the most distracting. And if you want to have a full focus on what matters right now, you want to put aside those distractions. So actually, I think this is one reason that it's important to teach kids today how to focus, how to handle emotions, how to, you know, basically emotional intelligence. And there are courses that are called social emotional learning SEO that's in many, many schools. I went to a classroom in Spanish Harlem, very impoverished part of Manhattan. And I was told half the students in that class had ADHD, you know, attention deficit disorder.

And I expected the class to be chaotic and it wasn't. And I asked the teacher why. And she said, well, every day we do this. And they did what the kids called belly buddies. One by one, the kids got their favorite stuffed animal from their cubby, found a place to lie down, put that animal on their belly and watched it rise on the in-breath. fall on the out breath. Rise on the in breath.

Fall on the out breath. When their mind wandered off, they noticed it wanted and they brought it back to the next breath. Basically, this is attention training for kids. And I think we need it today more than ever because the distractions are ever-present and more powerful than they've ever been in human history.

And I think we need to arm kids with better focus today, and much more so than when you and I were kids. You mentioned that in many ways one definition of maturity is being able to widen the gap between the impulse to do something and the act itself. And this is something I think Victor Frankel talked about, right? That in that gap, in that space is the choice as to whether we're going to do the thing that we kind of know is harmful to us, probably in the long run. and I'm kind of wondering in practical terms, given how much you've learned over the years from the science, but also how much you've learned from your meditation practice and studying Buddhism and the like, which you've drawn a great deal in your personal life, how you deal with this.

Because I find, like many of our listeners, I have a pretty stressful life, right? I'm juggling too many things. There are lots of things coming at me. I'm balancing multiple projects and always have a sense that I'm sort of dropping half the balls that I'm juggling and I'm probably not even aware of what they are. And I can see that there are times when that stress just is quietly, it's giving me a very, I'm surprised at how quickly I lose my temper and become irritable. And I think because I'm a sort of polite repressed Englishman, the anger seethes deep below the surface, the frustration.

And then I find there are certain situations where I'll be walking with my wife or something like that and we start to talk about, wait, so who's going to be here when Verizon comes and is putting in the new internet? And I'm like, how can I change all? How can I handle all this when I'm preparing for my interview with Dan? And I'm doing this. And I'm doing that. And suddenly I'm just sort of overwhelmed by these emotions.

And it's like the storm has come. And before I know it, I'm behaving in a way. that I don't like and then I feel guilty because my wife is so sweet and so patient and tolerant after 30 years with me. How in practical terms do you deal with these difficult emotions like anger, irritability or sadness or whatever it is that's your particular poison that's going to flare up in that moment so that you're widening that gap and not having to act on it? So, Frankel, I think, was the first two, as I know, to articulate the idea now commonly accepted that the longer the gap between impulse and reaction, the more mature a person is,

you could say. And the ability to manage impulses is technically called cognitive control. When you have kids, you can see this part of the brain coming on. line typically between ages five and seven. If you think about it's coming in late with me, Dan. I'll get there. If you think about a toddler, you know, they're all impulse. They're all whatever whim and they act on it. If you think about an eight-year-old, they're much better at managing emotion. Now with a kid, you can help them increase cognitive control through simple things, like saying, you know, you can watch this TV after you do your homework.

Delaying gratification is, in effect, a lesson in cognitive control. When we're adults, it's actually never too late. I find that I haven't by any means mastered. I never, it's not that I never become angry or never become anxious. It's just that I notice it's been happening less and less. And I think that's probably a result of, you know, practicing meditation every morning, which is what I like to do. And the data suggests, yes, that's true, that people who have a habit like that

tend to be better at managing their emotions. But, you know, there are a lot of individual differences, and I can't guarantee that, as I said, emotions come unbidden. We can't determine what we're going to feel, when we're going to feel it, how strongly. The question is, what do we do once we feel that way? So you also mention at some point in the book writing a trigger log, which I'd never really encountered as an idea, which I thought was very interesting of actually keeping a log where you're reflecting on what it triggered you and how you reacted and what would have been

a more effective response. I thought that was a really interesting idea. That's something they do. There's a Daniel Goldman, an emotional intelligence program. It's online. You can access it. It helps you develop these abilities, skills that really. And one of the things they do is start by getting a trigger, making a trigger log journaling. What is it that sets me off habitually? Why? What is it that keeps happening over and over again that makes me so upset? This is really useful information because then you can, if you see it's going to come, you can prepare for it better. If you see it just happened, you can think about it, well, how can I manage it better the next time?

When you realize you're in the throes of that, you know, you're upset because of that trigger. You can tell yourself, for example, remember that set of countering thoughts, because it's the thoughts that the trigger starts in your brain that come with the truth, that then create the feelings that are going to make you do something that you regret later. That's the hallmark of an emotional hijack. You have a very sudden reaction, emotional reaction. It's very strong. And when the dust settles, he said, oh, my God, why did I say that?

Why did I do that? And you have a lot of regret. So those are the things that you want to track because it turns out that we each have our favorite set of triggers. We probably learn them early in life. if we don't think about them, they just happen to us. But being able to see them gives you leverage over them that you've never had before. And you mentioned that the definition of resilience is how quickly we recover from upset. So in terms of actually recovering from that hijacked state,

when you've been overwhelmed by emotion and you're just sort of, you know, it's like the dust is kind of settling, what do you do actually to recover afterwards other than apologize to your wife. So before you have to apologize to your wife, you might do what they say is good in cognitive therapy, which is to remember the counterthoughts. So, you know, he's not treating me fairly. That's a common trigger in the workplace.

I'm not being given credit for my ideas. Well, maybe you remind yourself that, well, I'm not the only one that feels that way. It's kind of systemic here or whatever the counterthought might be. But it's going to be a voice in your head that calms the voice that's upsetting you. And it's important to know what your range of triggers is because that allows you then to come up with the internal strategies. They're going to help you when you see it's happened again. I think also there's a lovely lesson that I learned from a friend of yours, Sharon Soulsburg,

the great mindfulness meditation teacher. And actually I saw her a few months ago with you and sort of stopped her and said to her, thank you because this has helped me so much. She would say let go with self-compassion and begin again. And I find that so helpful in my own life. And I talk to my kids about this, like when you screw up to let go with self-compassion and begin again, because there's this, you were talking before about how, you know, every day you should have an excellent day and stuff.

And it's like, well, I'm constantly falling off track. And I'm like, and then I kind of mad at myself. And to give myself that clean slate of letting go with self-compassion and begin again, it's like, okay, yeah, I screwed up again. I'm human. And now we start again. Well, that's beautiful because you're not blaming yourself if you use that strategy. You're saying, yeah, I screwed up.

People do screw up. But I don't always screw up. You know, I'm actually pretty competent here. That's the self-compassion voice. and now I'm going to try again. I'm going to keep going. I'm not going to end it because I screwed up. So the third domain of emotional intelligence is empathy,

which we've talked about a little bit already as a critical component of optimal performance. And I was very struck by a story that you told in the book about someone called Dr. Helen Reese, I think, who's at Harvard Medical School. and you talked about how she would get medical residents to become more empathetic. Can you talk about that? Because it's such a beautiful example of, in a sense, practical ways to, I can remind you, remind you of the quote, because I probably read the book more recently than you. I'll hear what she does.

Well, I'll read you the line that she said, maybe then you can break this down for us. She said, residents are urged to make eye contact with their patients, recognize the patient's feelings by reading their facial expression and be more likely to mirror that expression on their own face, and listen attentively and without judgment, even better, and this is something you write, you say, even better, name what the patient feels and respond in a way that shows understanding in a soothing tone. That's good advice for any parent or leader. I rest my case. So what you're doing, by the way, this is really interesting. Paul Ekman, who's a world expert on facial expression of a model.

has come up with a learning exercise. It's online. Anyone can do it. Where in about 45 minutes, you retrain your brain to be better at recognizing feelings as expressed on the face. And Dr. Reese, Helen, uses this. I don't know if she uses Ekmans, but what she's doing is telling medical residents something that's easy to forget if you're rushed. And today in medicine doctors are more rushed than ever. You know, their time. It's pretty hectic. And that is to give your patient the sense that he or she is being listened to, being heard. This is that third element of empathy, caring. It's not just that I know what you're feeling and tell you, but you're going to feel that I care about you because I pay full attention to what you feel.

and I'm saying what I think that is. It turns out, a study that was in JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association, doctors who don't do this are more likely to be sued for medical errors than doctors who do. Given the same error, this is rather amazing. But it means that the patient feels the doctor cared. They're doing their best, and I'm not going to be angry and go to court with them. But I also think, and there's other data that suggests this, It means that the patient is more likely to do what's called compliance, to do what the doctor says you need to do between our sessions to take care of yourself.

Take your medicine. Don't eat food, act, whatever it may be. One of the big problems in medicine is that patients don't comply. They don't take their medicine. They don't do what the doctor tells them to do. And, you know, medicine is not medicine giving medicines, but it's also getting patients. to change lifestyle, to remember to take medicine, for example. So when Helen Reese is saying to medical residents pay full attention, she's also overcoming a habit, which is true of leaders generally, or I should say the most powerful person in any diet parents, which is you start listening to the person, the other person, and then you interrupt and you take over the conversation.

You had directed where you want to go, not where the person is concerned would let you go. And this is a very poor medicine. I saw a study. They asked people in a doctor's waiting room, how many topics do you want to ask your doctor about, average four? And after the session with the doctor, how many did you ask? Average, one and a half. Why? Because doctors and leaders generally have poor listening.

So good listening, paying full attention is at the heart of empathy. Yeah, and really hard increasingly with our phones there. There's something kind of distracting us. So often you're in a conversation with them. Their phone is on the table. And I don't know if you found this yourself, but I find increasingly when I meet someone who has a problem and they've gone through something difficult and you're talking about it,

in the past I would feel, well, there's nothing I can do about that. They just went through this really difficult thing. And then gradually over the years, now I'm in my 50s, where we got slightly wiser, I just realized just stopping and acknowledging it and being like, I'm so sorry you went through that. That's such a really difficult thing. It sounds like such an odd thing, but I think there's something about our deep need just to have our pain and our challenges, just noticed for someone just to sit and listen and say, oh yeah, sorry, that was your experience. I'm so sorry, that was your experience. I think that that in itself is rather healing for people.

The sense that you're listened to, cared about, understood, very powerful in any situation. Yeah, it's a weird thing because you feel almost impotent in helping people in most of these things. And actually, I think sometimes, yeah, we just wanted to be recognized that it was difficult that we were suffering. You know, when people are going through grief because someone they love died, it's not that you can change the fact that the person died, but you can listen to them and understand that they're grieving. That itself is helpful to the person. It's not that you've changed the situation, but you were empathic. Before we move on to the fourth topic, you mentioned an important technique for boosting empathy, and you describe it as an expanding the circle of caring exercise. And it's a mental

exercise that actually Sharon Salzberg is kind of a master of, and Buddhists will call it a meta exercise or a loving loving kindness meditation. Can you describe it how to how to use this mental exercise? Because I think it's a, it's a very powerful technique. And it's something that in your book alter traits, you could show really scientifically the impact of this kind of exercise, actually on the wiring of the brain. I like to think of it as the circle of caring, where you bring to mind someone who's been kind to you in your life who cared about you, a parent or a teacher or whoever it might be, a friend. And you wish them well.

You wish that they be happy, that they not have suffering, that they have a healthy, thriving life. You wish that silently with that person in mind. And then you bring that same focus to yourself. and wish that for yourself. And then to people you love, your closest circle, and then to people you know but are outside that circle, people in your vicinity, in your area,

and finally to everyone everywhere. Now, this is, you could say, an exercise in compassion, but we've found in research that the brain wants to have this kind of loving kindness attitude and that the circuits for it, get stronger pretty quickly, surprisingly quickly, and the more you do it, the stronger they get. And this book altered traits that I mentioned that you wrote with Richard Davidson, your old friend, who's a famous neuroscientist, I think, at the University of Wisconsin, he was doing brain scans of great practitioners using this kind of technique, people like Mingueur-Rempers

Sokny Rimposha's brother. For cynics who look at this and think, ah, this is kind of hokey, I'm never going to do this. What did you actually see in terms of the brain circuitry when people use this kind of empathy-building exercise? Well, we'll take Minger. He was rather spectacular. The circuitry for compassion in his brain

increased its activity by 7 or 800 percent, which has never been seen in neuroscience, before, that a voluntary shift in mindset could activate the brain to that great degree. And basically, we find that the more you do this kind of practice, the stronger the circuits for that, remember, the third kind of empathy, caring, become. One of the great lines from Charlie Munger, the Buffett's partner who just passed away just short of his 100th birthday, one of his great lines that I think about a lot is he just said, take a good idea, take a simple idea and take it seriously. And it strikes me when you come across a good idea like this, like doing this kind of circle of carrying, expanding the circle of caring meditation exercise, whatever you want to call it, or, you know,

doing an exercise to pay attention to your breathing so you become more focused. Like when you find these tools that are clearly powerful, that the data shows work, you want to find one or two of them that really deeply resonate for you and then go big on them and then use them kind of consistently over a long period of time. Can you talk about that? Because it seems to me there's with all of these things, as you would put it, there's a dose response. There's something about using them consistently over time that seems to be extraordinarily powerful cumulatively.

Well, what we found really underlines, underscores the importance of practice. we found that the more you do it, the better the effect, the more you do it, the better of the effect. One of the metrics that we used or has been used commonly is lifetime hours of practice. And you would ask the same of a tennis pro. You know, how many hours a day have you practiced your stroke? You're sure. And they can give you an answer to that. You ask a meditator, how many hours of the day and for how long?

over a month or year or whatever, do you meditate and you get a score? And we found there was a pretty strong correlation between the hours you put into practice and the impact, the way your brain functions, the many, many different metrics actually. The fourth domain and the final domain is relationship skills, managing relationships. and this is clearly very heavily related to leadership skills. You've written at some length in the book about how important it is for leaders to have more empathy, to become better listeners. One of the things I was very struck by in terms of how leaders need to get better with

emotional intelligence tools was how to give better feedback. And you wrote very interestingly about the regular difficulties, people get themselves into when giving feedback. Can you talk about that as a kind of emblem of how to be a better, more emotionally intelligent leader? Yeah. So the worst way to give feedback is the way it's most commonly done, which is a once-a-year performance review where you kind of sum up in a year. The best feedback is actually in the moment because if you can help a person see that what they're doing is counterproductive and what would be better right then, you're basically coaching.

them. You're helping them. It's the growth mindset. You're helping them improve. You're helping them develop their skill set. So I would say feedback that is not just critical, like, oh, you really screwed up that time, but acknowledges a weakness and then follows that with what would be better. That makes it a learning experience for the person. And that, I think, is a much more constructive kind of feedback. There are people who are, we call them pace-setters in our research, who, you know, they're those outstanding people, you mentioned a few maybe, who are just amazing individual performers who then expect everyone else to be as good as they are. Nobody else is as good as they are. By definition, if you're a leader in an organization, you have

unevenness. You have, everyone has their profile of strengths and limitations in this domain. And you do not want to give feedback, which is dismissive. You're bad at X and that's it. That is the, maybe that's the way you got so good because you looked at what you did wrong all the time. You didn't celebrate what you did right. But if you want to be a leader who motivates people, you want to celebrate wins and strengths as well as weaknesses. So you want feedback that acknowledges what went wrong, but also says what to do better. I mean, the worst way to start a meeting, it turns out,

is to ask for people to talk about the metrics of their performance. The best way is to remind people of the mission that matters to all of us about what we're doing. And we have interesting brain research done at Case Western that says that if you give performance feedback that focuses on what a person did wrong, which sadly is too common, they become very defensive. They're not creative. They don't want to take a risk. They get too cautious. If you tell people what they did right, you get quite the opposite effect. Then you get an opposite. state rather than people going into a crowd, defensive crouch. So again, in a way for organizations, and a big part of the book is how to create emotionally intelligent organizations, it's about creating some degree of psychological safety for people whether they're not feeling attacked and the like.

It's a sense of belonging, a sense of safety, a sense that you can make mistakes that you can learn and the like. And I think that last element is critical, too, that you give people opportunities to get better to improve. You have a training development program which is robust in this area rather than minimalistic, as it too often is, but where people can go through a systematic course of improvement, whether it's coaching, if they're at the top of the house or through a HR's program, if they're middle management, whatever it may be, you don't want to just say, you can get better at this, but you also want to say, and here's how.

When you look back on your own life, you've obviously had to handle a lot of partnerships, a lot of, I mean, you've co-written books, you've had business partnerships where people have commercialized your research, you've gone into companies to collaborate and give them advice as a consultant. You've, you've been married, you've had raised a son, I think. What have you figured out over the years in terms of your own ability to handle these relationships better, where you look back and you think, God, I wish I'd known this at the time. I would have done this much better. Like, what can we learn from your own experience in terms of getting better relationships and collaborations? I think I'm still learning. You're asking the wrong

person who should ask my wife. You know, because I have, and we all do, cognitive bias when it comes to thinking about my own strengths. So, for example, in working with other people, I found that it's very helpful to articulate implicitly or explicitly what matters to this group. What's the big meaning here? What's the underlying purpose of what we're doing? and also to celebrate that at the outset, which I think Marshalls people's best motivation.

You know, I have six grandchildren. I think I was what they call a good enough parent, not outstanding but not bad. And I'm very happy with how my grandchildren are turning out. It suggests that my kids either are doing okay or made very good choices in their wives. I have two sons. So I think that it's a learning curve and it's a learning curve for us all. I wanted to ask you about one final thing before I let you go down, where you talk at one point, you talk about joyful exploration and this kind of spirit of joyful exploration and creative thinking. And you talk about having met people like Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans

Memorial, who in some ways embodies it. Can you talk a little bit more about the importance of just this spirit of curiosity and joyful exploration, which I think must have run through your work over the last half century or so, because you've gone in somewhat unexpected directions over the years? Yes, joyful curiosity. I would say curiosity or looking into things I didn't know much about because it mattered to me as been a driver. I'm basically actually a writer, and you are too.

And I write about what I want to think about. And I think it's a great, I would say I'm lucky to be able to do this to explore where I want to go. And I find pleasure in it. So that curiosity itself is joyful. I feel in some ways when I look at your career, one of the things that I love about it is that you've also brought together these very disparate things as part of that exploration. So sort of in your own life away from work, you were studying a lot of Tibetan Buddhism and the like. And then in your work as a science writer, you were discovering all of the ways in which

these Tibetan Buddhists a couple of thousand years ago had figured stuff out about the mind and the brain that turned out to be true. I think there's a fascinating kind of underlying arc in your life where you've brought together these two great passions where you were very, you were so open-minded that you were exploring this thing that hadn't yet been proven scientifically about how these ancient practices, these meditative practices could benefit you. And then you wrote this wave of figuring out how the science backed up what these ancient paths had figured out. So over the years, actually I didn't start with Tibetan Buddhism. I started with probably TM or one of those

and segued to what's called Vapasana or mindfulness. And then I found Tibetan teachers to be particularly inspiring. But this is my next book, William. Well, I hope you're going to come back and talk about that. Is there any final word of advice you want to leave us with Dan for our listeners who are thinking about how to build emotional intelligence skills, like if they're really serious about becoming truly skillful about this, is there any last word of advice you'd like to leave them with? I think there are three aspects of emotional intelligence that matter to everyone. One is self-awareness.

One is managing your inner life. And the third is empathy, sensing what other people are feeling. and thinking. All of them matter and all of them can be improved. On that note, Dan, thank you so much. It's always such a delight speaking with you. And I really appreciate your patience in answering a million questions. Thank you so much. It's always a delight to talk to you, William. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you. All right, folks. Thanks so much for joining me for today's conversation with Daniel Goldman. If you'd like to learn more from Dan, you may want to check out our two previous conversations

on the richer, wiser, happier podcast. In 2022, we had an incredibly rich discussion that focused primarily on how investors can learn to manage their emotions more effectively, which is clearly crucially important for any investor. That episode was titled The Emotionally Intelligent Investor. Then in 2023, Dan returned to the podcast, along with a wonderful Tibetan Buddhist meditation master named Sokney Rimpershay to discuss a book that they'd co-authored titled Why We Meditate, although the book really deals with a lot more than that title would convey. I've included links to both of those conversations in the show notes for today's episode, along with links to various other resources that I hope you'll find helpful.

I'd also strongly encourage you to read some of Dan's books. He's written about 13 of them. The most famous, obviously, is his seminal book on emotional intelligence, which is great, and important. It's also worth reading his new book, Optimal, which I think is particularly valuable if you're in any kind of leadership position. I'm also a big fan of a book that Dan co-authored called Altered Traits, which explores the scientific evidence that meditation has a really profound impact on your mind and brain and body. Whenever I chat with Dan, it strikes me that he's a living advertisement for the many benefits of meditation, because he always seems, exceptionally calm and present and also very compassionate and amiable and cheerful.

He's become a really great role model for me, and I sometimes joke that he's what I want to be like when I grow up. In the meantime, please feel free to follow me on X or Twitter at William Green 72, and as always, do let me know how you're liking the podcast. It's always a real pleasure to hear from you. I'll be back very soon with some more fascinating guests, including Laura Gerrits, a renowned international investor who played a starring role in my book, Richer Wiser Havier. Until then, stay well and take good care.

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