Daniel Goleman's Reading List

"Let me start with a new study just published in the last few months – this is really, by the way, heresy in the academic world, but nevertheless – the data shows that after an IQ of 120 there’s no relationship with leader effectiveness . Above 128 there’s actually a negative relationship, perhaps because instead of motivating people they are framing things in too abstract a way, a way that other people find difficult to understand. The paradox is that it’s important that we study – that will help us get a job – but once we’re in a job, what seems to matter most, and I’ve based this on internal studies done by organisations of their star performers, what matters more than your academic background or your IQ – your cognitive abilities – are your emotional intelligence abilities. Are you self-disciplined? Can you get along with other people? Those two things are far more important as you go through your career. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As you become elite, as you go up the hierarchy, the higher you are, the less the cognitive abilities matter because you can hire people that have those abilities. It’s said that the art of leadership is getting things done through other people. So, basically, Peter Senge and I make the argument that we should be teaching children, as well as academics, how to handle their emotions, how to empathise: social skills. In other words, skills and abilities that will matter to them throughout their career. In a way, it’s grooming people to be leaders in the future. We also propose in Triple Focus that in addition to these core emotional intelligence skills, the book details that there are three other abilities that young people would benefit from developing over the course of their lives. One is skills of attention, better focus, to enable them to keep their mind on their math , and not on their phone all the time. Another is caring about people – concern, compassion. And the third is systems understanding, because it’s a complex world. If you’re going to do well in it, it would be better if you understood the particular system you’re operating. In business, of course, it involves economy , technology , culture, a very complex web of interacting systems. It could be, too, that environmental changes are going to affect everyone in the following decades."

"The book I did with Peter Senge builds on the research of others. The Handbook offers all the new research for those who are seriously interested in helping students develop and acquire these skills. I think it’s important this be empirically based. And changes we bring to something like children’s education must have sound research to back it up. That’s what the Handbook does. It pulls together all of that research, and it gives educators and educationists a better sense of what is really the most well-proven way to apply this science to education – because it’s still very new. I actually find the educational sector to be a little retrograde, particularly schools of education, the graduate schools that train teachers. There too is the problem of getting the curriculum changed, which is often tangled in bureaucracy. But the data presented in the Handbook shows that students not only learn better, but they also score better on academic achievement tests when they have social and emotional learning. They behave better. They pay more attention. Teachers generally are happy because they spend less time simply getting their students to sit still and pay attention."

"Well, as I mentioned, one of the categories of emotional intelligence is empathy : social awareness, understanding the other person’s feeling. But there are three kinds of empathy. One kind of empathy is where you sense how the other person thinks. So this can help you be a very effective communicator because you can put your message in terms that person understands. The second form of empathy is emotional empathy, where you feel along with the person. You pick up their feelings, and actually experience them yourself. This also helps tune into the other person quite effectively. The third kind is now getting into the realm of compassion. It’s called empathic concern. Each of these is based on a different set of circuits in the brain, and empathic concern activates the parental care-taking circuitry. Every mammal has this. It’s a parent’s love for their child. And it means you truly care about the person. It’s not just that you understand them but you feel as them. “Everything from politics and policy on down to our personal lives benefits from the attitude of caring for other people around us” I think this is absolutely crucial going forward in the world today. As Burt Bacharach said: “Love, sweet love / It’s the only thing / that there’s just too little of.” I feel that everything from politics and policy on down to our personal lives benefits from the attitude of caring for other people around us. It might be that the Oxford Handbook , just as the Handbook of Social and Emotional Learning , are emotional intelligence books that bring together the best research in the area. Because it can sound very squishy and soft – ‘oh, compassion, there’s no hard metric for it’ – well, actually, there is, and the Handbook offers up the best summary of what we know about compassion."

"Tara was the first person to bring together mindfulness – now a very popular technique for cultivating attention – with cognitive therapy, a very popular therapy. Mindfulness means people track their thoughts and their feelings and their actions in real time. Not just in therapy sessions but in their lives. Cognitive therapy helps you talk back to misguided beliefs and ideas which often are at the core of the ways we act that we regret. It helps you change them on the spot, so mindfulness helps you get by when this is happening; the cognitive therapy helps you to change it in a better direction. The book Emotional Alchemy helps the reader learn how to bring mindfulness to those moments but also offers a kind of diagnostic menu for the common equivalent of emotional dysfunction, things like emotional deprivation (‘nobody really cares about me’) or social exclusion (‘I don’t fit into this group’). There are around ten that are very common, and she describes what they are, how to know if you’re feeling them, and what to do about it. It’s a very practical book, unlike my own, which tend to be more science-driven. Yes. The foundational ability of emotional intelligence is awareness, and mindfulness actually amplifies a person’s ability to be self-aware. So I see them as one and the same really, in that if you become more mindful, you’ll be more self-aware. I just published a book with my old friend, the neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who’s at the University of Wisconsin. In the UK and Commonwealth, it’s called the Science of Meditation: How to Change Your Brain, Mind and Body . In the US, it’s called Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body . Davidson and I were graduate students together at Harvard, a long time ago, and we were isolated and joined at the hip. Joined at the hip because we were interested in meditation; isolated because none of our faculty and friends were. And at the time, there were only three articles in the scientific literature on meditation. Fast-forward to now and there are more than 6,000. But Davidson, who has a crew of about 100 people at his brain lab at the University of Wisconsin, was able to sift through those 6,000 and ended up with 60 that were bulletproof. They used the methodology; they’re A-level journals. And the book Altered Traits puts them together in a way that tells a story for beginners and sets out what the benefits are. Things like better attention, being less triggered emotionally, how to recover faster when under stress. The longer you do it, the stronger the benefits become. That’s essentially the message of the book. Some people say you write about what you need to learn! So, I would say that thinking about emotional intelligence, looking into it deeply, has helped me become more aware of my failings and my strengths and helped me work on them. My wife is also helping me in that. So, I don’t separate the two actually, but yes, it’s a work in progress. My wife is the emotionally aware one."

"Well, the book is less about the sister’s bone cancer, and of Elizabeth’s being the perfect match, than a story of emotion and of clearing the air. Sisters can be very close, but often there is a lot of tension too. And I found it a very compelling read and also quite honest, rather frank. Unfortunately, Lesser’s sister died. But the fact that she donated her marrow brought them very close. Closer than they had ever been before. I thought the book was really emotionally intelligent and shared not only how they felt as they went through the process, but how they dealt with how they felt. And for that reason I see this is as a gripping example of a book showing how to practise emotional intelligence. Well, you can start almost anywhere. You could start with the characterisation of someone who knows you well, someone whose opinions you trust and value. What do they say about you in those four domains of awareness, self-mastery, empathy, social skills? Where are your strengths? Where could you get better? Once you get a sense of where you could get better, then mindfulness is a powerful first step, seeing how you habitually act, think, and feel in a particular way, and then seeing how you can change for the better."