Daniel Goleman Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Daniel Goleman.
Famous Quotes By Daniel Goleman
Not that leaders need to be overly "nice"; the emotional art of leadership includes pressing the reality of work demands without unduly upsetting people. — Daniel Goleman
Overloading attention shrinks mental control. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control. — Daniel Goleman
And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion. — Daniel Goleman
we have a bit of self-interest in relieving the misery of others. One school of modern economic theory, following Hobbes, argues that people give to charities in part because of the pleasure they get from imagining either the relief of those they benefit or their own relief from alleviating their sympathetic distress. — Daniel Goleman
The workings of the amygdala and its interplay with the neocortex are at the heart of emotional intelligence. — Daniel Goleman
In Japan, I learned the hard way that the moment of exchanging business cards signals an important ritual. We Americans are prone to casually pocketing the card without looking, which there indicates disrespect. I was told you should take the card carefully, hold it in both hands, and study it for a while before putting it away in a special case — Daniel Goleman
What allows people to have such a strong inner compass, a North Star that steers them through life according to the dictates of their deepest values and purposes? — Daniel Goleman
If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far. — Daniel Goleman
The task of worrying is to come up with positive solutions for life's perils by anticipating dangers before they arise. If we are preoccupied by worries, we have that must less attention to expend on figuring out the answers. Our worries become self-fulfilling prophecies, propelling us toward the very disaster they predict. — Daniel Goleman
People learn what they want to learn. If learning is forced on us, even if we master it temporarily, it is soon forgotten. — Daniel Goleman
Character, writes Amitai Etzioni, the George Washington University social theorist, is "the psychological muscle that moral conduct requires."14 — Daniel Goleman
Gifted leadership occurs when heart and head
feeling and thought
meet. These are the two winds that allow a leader to soar. — Daniel Goleman
Worries typically follow such lines, a narrative to oneself that jumps from concern to concern and more often than not includes catastrophizing, imagining some terrible tragedy. Worries are almost always expressed in the mind's ear, not its eye - that is, in words, not images - a fact that has significance for controlling worry. — Daniel Goleman
Evolutionary theory holds that our ability to sense when we should be suspicious has been every bit as essential for human survival as our capacity for trust and cooperation. — Daniel Goleman
The amygdala in the emotional center sees and hears everything that occurs to us instantaneously and is the trigger point for the fight or flight response. — Daniel Goleman
What seems to set apart those at the very top of competitive pursuits from others of roughly equal ability is the degree to which, beginning early in life, they can pursue an arduous practice routine for years and years. — Daniel Goleman
The act of compassion begins with full attention, just as rapport does. You have to really see the person. If you see the person, then naturally, empathy arises. If you tune into the other person, you feel with them. If empathy arises, and if that person is in dire need, then empathic concern can come. You want to help them, and then that begins a compassionate act. So I'd say that compassion begins with attention. — Daniel Goleman
In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding. — Daniel Goleman
The social brain is in its natural habitat when we're talking with someone face-to-face in real time. — Daniel Goleman
When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences - the first person - with what the measurements show - the third person. — Daniel Goleman
Empathetic people are superb at recognizing and meeting the needs of clients, customers, or subordinates. They seem approachable, wanting to hear what people have to say. They listen carefully, picking up on what people are truly concerned about, and respond on the mark. — Daniel Goleman
We transmit and catch moods from each other in what amounts to a subterranean economy of the psyche in which some encounters are toxic, some nourishing. — Daniel Goleman
Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin psychologist. He discovered that people who have greater activity in the left frontal lobe, compared to the right, are by temperament cheerful; they typically take delight in people and in what life presents them with, bouncing back from setbacks as my aunt June did. But those with relatively greater activity on the right side are given to negativity and sour moods, and are easily fazed by life's difficulties; in a sense, they seem to suffer because they cannot turn off their worries and depressions. In — Daniel Goleman
Ordinarily, small children learn much about emotions by looking at the other person's eyes, while those with autism avoid the eyes and so fail to get those lessons. — Daniel Goleman
Positive work environments outperform negative work environments. — Daniel Goleman
Emotional self-control
delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness- underlies accomplishment of every sort — Daniel Goleman
In short, out-of-control emotions can make smart people stupid. — Daniel Goleman
Doggedness depends on emotional traits - enthusiasm and persistence in the face of setbacks - above all else. — Daniel Goleman
Visionary leaders help people to see how their work fits into the big picture, lending people a clear sense not just that what they do matters, but also why. — Daniel Goleman
Emotional self-control is NOT the same as overcontrol, the stifling of all feeling and spontaneity ... when such emotional suppression is chronic, it can impair thinking, hamper intellectual performance and interfere with smooth social interaction. By contrast, emotional competence implies we have a choice as to how we express our feelings. — Daniel Goleman
Even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige,
or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on
academic abilities, ignoring the emotional intelligence that also
matters immensely for our personal destiny. — Daniel Goleman
Though they are quick to put others down, unhealthy narcissists view themselves in absolutely positive terms. They — Daniel Goleman
the fine art of relationships - requires the ripeness of two other emotional skills, self-management and empathy. With — Daniel Goleman
Great leaders, the research shows, are made as they gradually acquire, in the course of their lives and careers, the competencies that make them so effective. The competencies can be learned by any leader, at any point. — Daniel Goleman
School success is not predicted by a child's fund of facts or a precocious ability to read as much as by emotional and social measures; being self-assured and interested: knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with other children. — Daniel Goleman
One of the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term memory - patients feel better because they can't remember why they were sad. — Daniel Goleman
People tend to become more emotionally intelligent as they age and mature. — Daniel Goleman
Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses. — Daniel Goleman
Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work. — Daniel Goleman
The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing. The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes. There's an algorithm for this, a data mining method called "automated social hierarchy detection," developed at Columbia University.8 When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person's emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures. — Daniel Goleman
Happy, calm children learn best — Daniel Goleman
In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them. — Daniel Goleman
When I say manage emotions, I only mean the really distressing, incapacitating emotions. Feeling emotions is what makes life rich. You need your passions. — Daniel Goleman
Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy. — Daniel Goleman
Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety? — Daniel Goleman
goal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification" is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. His finding underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a meta-ability, determining how well or how poorly people are able to use their other mental capacities. — Daniel Goleman
At last, psychology gets serious about glee, fun, and happiness. Martin Seligman has given us a gift-a practical map for the perennial quest for a flourishing life. — Daniel Goleman
The guiding visionary behind Project Spectrum is Howard Gardner, a psychologist at the Harvard School of Education.7 "The time has come," Gardner told me, "to broaden our notion of the spectrum of talents. The single most important contribution education can make to a child's development is to help him toward a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor. And we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will help you get there. — Daniel Goleman
Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings. This is part of teaching emotional literacy - a set of skills we can all develop, including the ability to read, understand, and respond appropriately to one's own emotions and the emotions of others. — Daniel Goleman
This harkens back to Freud's famous question, "What does woman want?" As Epstein answers, "She wants a partner who cares what she wants. — Daniel Goleman
My hope was that organizations would start including this range of skills in their training programs - in other words, offer an adult education in social and emotional intelligence. — Daniel Goleman
Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else's toxic state. — Daniel Goleman
and how toxic emotions put our physical health at as much risk as does chain-smoking, even as emotional balance can help protect our health and well-being. — Daniel Goleman
For the high achievers, studying gave them the pleasing, absorbing challenge of flow 40 percent of the hours they spent at it. But for low achievers, studying produced flow only 16 percent of the time; more often that not, it yielded anxiety, with the demands outreaching their abilities ... The low achievers found pleasure and flow in socializing, not in studying. — Daniel Goleman
We do not compete in our careers with people who lack the requisite intelligence to enter and stay in our field - but rather against the much smaller group of those who have managed to jump the hurdles of schooling, entry exams, and other cognitive challenges to get into the field in the first place. — Daniel Goleman
One aspect of a successful relationship is not just how compatible you are, but how you deal with your incompatibility. — Daniel Goleman
Rapport demands joint attention - mutual focus. Our need to make an effort to have such human moments has never been greater, given the ocean of distractions we all navigate daily. — Daniel Goleman
Motivation aside, if people get better at these life skills, everyone benefits: The brain doesn't distinguish between being a more empathic manager and a more empathic father. — Daniel Goleman
Experience, particularly in childhood, sculpts the brain. The — Daniel Goleman
Life without passion would be a dull wasteland of neutrality, cut off and isolated from the richness of life itself. — Daniel Goleman
Scheduling down time as part of your routine is hard but worth it, personally, even professionally. — Daniel Goleman
Brain studies of mental workouts in which you sustain a single, chosen focus show that the more you detach from what's distracting you and refocus on what you should be paying attention to, the stronger this brain circuitry becomes. — Daniel Goleman
From the vantage point of the brain, doing well in school and at work involves one and the same state, the brain's sweet spot for performance. The biology of anxiety casts us out of that zone for excellence. "Banish fear" was a slogan of the late quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming. He saw that fear froze a workplace: workers were reluctant to speak up, to share new ideas, or to coordinate well, let alone to improve the quality of their output. The same slogan applies to the classroom - fear frazzles the mind, disrupting learning. — Daniel Goleman
There is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy ... They're controlled by different parts of the brain. — Daniel Goleman
Power dynamic operates in emotional contagion, determining which person's brain will more forcefully draw the other into its emotional orbit. Mirror neurons are leadership tools: Emotions flow with special strength from the more socially dominant person to the less. One reason is that people in any group naturally pay more attention to and place more significance on what the most powerful person in that group says and does. That amplifies the force of whatever emotional message the leader may be sending, making her emotions particularly contagious. As I heard the head of a small organization say rather ruefully, When my mind is full of anger, other people catch it like the flu. — Daniel Goleman
However, I began meditating at about that time and have continued on and off over the years. — Daniel Goleman
There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. — Daniel Goleman
While there I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind. — Daniel Goleman
When the eyes of a woman that a man finds attractive look directly at him, his brain secretes the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine - but not when she looks elsewhere. — Daniel Goleman
Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist who has done much of the research on self-efficacy, sums it up well: "People's beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong."24 — Daniel Goleman
The other thing is that if you rely solely on medication to manage depression or anxiety, for example, you have done nothing to train the mind, so that when you come off the medication, you are just as vulnerable to a relapse as though you had never taken the medication. — Daniel Goleman
Emotions are contagious. We've all known it experientially. You know after you have a really fun coffee with a friend, you feel good. When you have a rude clerk in a store, you walk away feeling bad. — Daniel Goleman
Stress makes people stupid." On — Daniel Goleman
Attention is a little-noticed and underrated mental asset. — Daniel Goleman
Others point to data showing that even as toddlers, 40 percent of American two-year-olds watch TV for at least three hours a day - hours they are not interacting with people who can help them learn to get along better. The more TV they watch, the more unruly they are by school age. — Daniel Goleman
Once when I was about 13, in an angry fit, I walked out of the house vowing I would never return. It was a beautiful summer day, and I walked far along lovely lanes, till gradually the stillness and beauty calmed and soothed me, and after some hours I returned repentant and almost melted. Since then when I am angry, I do this if I can, and find it the best cure. — Daniel Goleman
Simple inattention kills empathy, let alone compassion. So the first step in compassion is to notice the other's need. It all begins with the simple act of attention. — Daniel Goleman
When we focus on others, our world expands. — Daniel Goleman
Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness. — Daniel Goleman
But the arbitrary cuts, edits, and other changes the studio bosses made before releasing that movie were a bitter lesson for my friend, who valued creative control of his work as paramount. When he went on to make a movie based on another script of his own, a big Hollywood studio offered him a standard deal whereby the studio financed the project and held the power to change the film before its release. He refused the deal - his artistic integrity was more important. Instead my friend "bought" creative control by going off on his own and putting every penny of his profits from the first film into this second project. When he was almost done, his money ran out. He went looking for loans, but bank after bank turned him down. Only a last-minute loan from the tenth bank he implored saved the project. The film was Star Wars. — Daniel Goleman
Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - this is not easy. ARISTOTLE, The Nicomachean Ethics — Daniel Goleman
we learn the emotional habits that can undermine our best intentions, as well as what we can do to subdue our more destructive or self-defeating emotional impulses. Most important, the neurological data suggest a window of opportunity for shaping our children's emotional habits. — Daniel Goleman
But there has also been a notable increase in recent years of these applications by a much wider slice of psychotherapists - far greater interest than ever before. — Daniel Goleman
Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action. — Daniel Goleman
Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival. — Daniel Goleman
Green is a process, not a status. We need to think of 'green' as a verb, not an adjective. — Daniel Goleman
We're exposed and carry in our bodies multiple chemicals, and we have to understand how they interact. Both how they individually interact and the thousands of effects they can produce when they interact with the receptors that run our bodies. — Daniel Goleman
Empathic, emotionally intelligent work environments have a good track record of increasing creativity, improving problem solving and raising productivity. — Daniel Goleman
Although traditional incentives such as bonuses or recognition can prod people to better performance, no external motivators can get people to perform at their absolute best ... Wherever people gravitate within their work roles, indicates where their real pleasure lies - and that pleasure is itself motivating. — Daniel Goleman
As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the ancient systems of psychology and meditation practices of Asia. — Daniel Goleman
Emotional intelligence accounts for 80 percent of career success. — Daniel Goleman
Want a happier, more content life? I highly recommend the down-to-earth methods you'll find in 'Mindfulness.' Professor Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman have teamed up to give us scientifically grounded techniques we can apply in the midst of our everyday challenges and catastrophes. — Daniel Goleman
I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example. — Daniel Goleman
When I went on to write my next book, Working With Emotional Intelligence, I wanted to make a business case that the best performers were those people strong in these skills. — Daniel Goleman
The worst period I ever went through at work," a friend confides, "was when the company was restructuring and people were being 'disappeared' daily, followed by lying memos that they were leaving 'for personal reasons.' No one could focus while that fear was in the air. No real work got done." Small wonder. The greater the anxiety we feel, the more impaired is the brain's cognitive efficiency. In this zone of mental misery, distracting thoughts hijack our attention and squeeze our cognitive resources. Because high anxiety shrinks the space available to our attention, it undermines our very capacity to take in new information, let alone generate fresh ideas. Near-panic is the enemy of learning and creativity. — Daniel Goleman
The sweet spot for smart decisions, then, comes not just from being a domain expert, but also from having high self-awareness. — Daniel Goleman
Compassion begins with attention. — Daniel Goleman
Our brain comes hard-wired with an urge to play, one that hurls us into sociability. A child's play both demands and creates its own safe space, one in which she can confront threats, fears, and dangers, but always come through whole. Play offers a child a natural way to manage feared separations or abandonment, rendering them instead opportunities for mastery and self-discovery. — Daniel Goleman