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© 2015. MentorCoach LLC. Goleman Interview. All rights reserved. 1 4400 East West Hwy/Ste 1104, Bethesda, Md 20814 301-986-5688 * [email protected] * www.mentorcoach.com Subscribe to Coaching Toward Happiness here. For the latest on coaching and positive psychology, follow us on Facebook. The Daniel Goleman Interview Transcript (For the audio recording, submit your email here. For listener comments about this interview, see the bottom of this PDF. For multiple resources, videos, and links to Dan’s work, see the bottom of his Interview Webpage.) Ben: Hi everyone. This is Ben Dean of MentorCoach and this afternoon we’re talking with Daniel Goleman. This is one in a series of monthly interviews with thought leaders in positive psychology and coaching. You’ve all read Dan’s bio so I’ll just say that he holds a PhD in Psychology from Harvard where his doctoral research was on meditation as an intervention in stress arousal. He always thought he would be a college professor like his parents before him but after a stint at Psychology Today, he was recruited in 1984 by the New York Times to cover psychology and related science news.
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Page 1: The Daniel Goleman Interview Transcript - Ignite Business · The Daniel Goleman Interview Transcript (For the audio recording, submit your email here. For listener comments about

© 2015. MentorCoach LLC. Goleman Interview. All rights reserved. 1

4400 East West Hwy/Ste 1104, Bethesda, Md 20814 301-986-5688 * [email protected] * www.mentorcoach.com Subscribe to Coaching Toward Happiness here. For the latest on coaching and positive psychology, follow us on Facebook.

The Daniel Goleman Interview Transcript

(For the audio recording, submit your email here. For listener comments about this interview, see the bottom of this PDF. For multiple resources, videos, and links to Dan’s work, see the bottom of his Interview Webpage.)

Ben: Hi everyone. This is Ben Dean of MentorCoach and this afternoon we’re talking with Daniel Goleman. This is one in a series of monthly interviews with thought leaders in positive psychology and coaching. You’ve all read Dan’s bio so I’ll just say that he holds a PhD in Psychology from Harvard where his doctoral research was on meditation as an intervention in stress arousal. He always thought he would be a college professor like his parents before him but after a stint at Psychology Today, he was recruited in 1984 by the New York Times to cover psychology and related science news.

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He reported on the brain and behavioral sciences at the New York Times for 12 years. His 1995 book Emotional Intelligence was an outgrowth of his journalistic research on emotions in the brain. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half with more than five million copies in print worldwide. He’s written many other books over the years but most interesting for us today is his latest one, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence.

So Dan, welcome to the call!

Dan: Thanks Ben.

Ben: To orient everyone, can I ask where you’re located and what can you see as you

look around where you’re sitting?

Dan: I’m in my office, which is in a small village in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. It’s lightly snowing. I see snow-laden branches as I look out my window and I see immense clutter as I look around my office and about a thousand things to finish doing.

Ben: Would it be fair to say you must be fairly good at focusing yourself given all the

books you’ve written over the years and all the work you’ve done?

Dan: That’s why things pile up in my office. I see all of those things to do as distractions. I focus on my writing for the most part.

Ben: Plus you’ve been probably meditating since the ‘70s, correct? Dan: Since the ‘60s.

Ben: Since the ‘60s. So, if that in fact is one of the best ways to train your attention, you’ve had a lot of practice.

After all your previous books what got you interested in the science of attention and how is focus the hidden ingredient for excellence in our personal and professional lives?

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Dan: As a science journalist, which is the profession I’ve been practicing since having been trained as a psychologist, I follow trends in sciences, particularly the neurosciences. In the last year or two, there’s been just an explosion of findings about attention and the brain, which is quite parallel to what happened before I wrote Emotional Intelligence. There had been a new surge of findings on emotions in the brain. That was when things prompted me for that book, and the same for this book. At the same time, I feel it’s particularly timely because everyone is finding their attention under siege by digital distractions, and this is a problem.

I just spoke at a school yesterday a high school for kids, and teachers are telling me, they’ve banned phones in the classroom because kids are texting each other during class. That’s a very common practice now.

Last week I was at an office, an architectural and construction firm in Manhattan, where the CEO wanted me to teach everybody everything I knew about attention, and how they could focus both as a group and individually. In fact he wanted them to do a basic, I don’t call it meditation, actually, it’s really attention building exercises and so I taught them two or three ways to beef up your attentional muscle if you will.

I find that the book Focus is particularly timely because of that seduction of attention that we all face.

Ben: You write that there are three types of focus. Is that your unique formulation

and could you explain to everyone what the three types of foci are?

Dan: This is a new framework. It’s also the cover article in the Harvard Business

Review this month (Goleman, (Dec. 2013). The Focused Leader. Harvard Business Review). They extracted it from the book. Basically the first two kinds of focus are emotional intelligence. There is self-focus, focusing on your inner world, on your emotions, and on monitoring how your attention is at this moment, if you need to do anything about that, or using that same ability to manage your distressing emotions or mobilize your positive ones for motivation, or to recover from stress. Those are all self-awareness, self-management abilities. That’s the first focus.

The second focus is on other people. This would be in the emotional intelligence model, social awareness, particularly empathy, also handling relationships well.

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The third kind of focus is something that had shown up in my data for a long time and I realize now how important it was. This is focus on the wider systems that we operate in, whether they’re family systems, organizational dynamics, or for a company the economic and technological, and cultural forces, and so on that are shaping your competitive arena, and what you need to do strategically. Even beyond that, the interaction between human systems and global systems, and the problem of the degrading of the global systems that support because of our daily activities and what’s built into them the unfortunate side effects.

I see all of those as important. That last one had shown up in data on outstanding leaders. When I did the book, Working with Emotional Intelligence, which followed Emotional Intelligence, I looked at competence models from a couple of hundred organizations and I saw that in terms of discriminating competencies, the ones that distinguish stars from average - not threshold competencies, the ones everyone needs - but distinguishing ones. The higher you went in the organization the more emotional intelligence abilities mattered, and competence models for say, C-level people, often would have 80, 90 or 100% of the competencies that mattered in that organization for outstanding leadership, based on emotional intelligence within that domain.

There was one set that kept showing up over and over that had nothing to do with what we were calling emotional intelligence. It was pattern recognition or systems thinking, and I realized that’s that third focus. The ability to understand how a decision today matters tomorrow or how it’s going to ramify through a complex system, and move things here or there, or simply being able to detect patterns that other people don’t see that matter enormously. So, those are three.

Ben: I have a friend, whose father was a famous diplomat, author and cabinet officer in the ‘60s. I once asked him what had been the secret of his father’s great productivity. He said, “He had this astonishing ability to concentrate. You could have put his desk in Grand Central Station and he would have had no trouble focusing”.

Where does this type of task focus fit into the typology you’re describing?

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Grand Central Station, New York City

Dan: This is the type that most often is the hidden ingredient in excellence, which is the subtitle of the book. This is a hundred percent absorption or immersive concentration in a task. Whether it’s writing a book or a memo for the State Department, or getting a project done, or consulting with a client, you have to pay sustained attention in order to understand deeply, in order to gather all the information you need, and in order to express yourself effectively.

Those abilities you find over and over again predicting a person’s ability to marshal whatever cognitive or technical skills, whatever your talents may be, if you don’t have that ability you can’t display them at full force.

Ben: So where does that kind of deep task focusing fit into your three types of focus?

Dan: That has to do with the inner focus because managing attention is a byproduct of good self-awareness. Sometimes these days it’s called mindfulness. There’s a new vogue in teaching people mindfulness. What mindfulness really does is help people develop a tool kit that lets them step back from being caught up and carried away by trains of association and streams of thought, and to monitor the mind and see “well where am I? Am I concentrating? Oh, I’m surfing the web, what happened”, because we get swept away without realizing, and mindfulness lets us step back or step up to the balcony of the mind to see what’s going on, and make any changes we need to.

There’s interesting data now coming out of Emory, which is in the book, that the essential move in strengthening this concentrative, immersive, absorptive ability, is to put your mind where you need it to be, and then the mind will wander. A mind wanders on average 50% of the time. When you’re mind wanders you want to have that capacity to monitor the fact that, ‘oh my God it wandered’. That’s the mindfulness. Then move it back to where you need it to be. Every

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time you move it back it strengthens the neural circuitry, the connectivity between the brain cells that manifest this effective concentration. That’s the basic move in a mental gym. It’s just like in a gym when you go to strengthen your muscles lifting free weights every repetition strengthens that muscle a bit. It’s exactly the same in the mind.

Ben: Here’s a question from Anu Goldman at Google.

, Anu says, “I heard your talk at Google. Ming’s words about your integrity and writing speak volumes. I loved your talk but had to leave and did not ask about the larger context for focus. If the ability to focus “predicts the outcomes of top thought performers in every field from sports to business”, what else matters as well? If you focus deeply on the wrong things, for example, online bridge games and ignore what matters most, it’s not enough. What are the other success factors that matter along with the ability to focus?”

Dan: So another is, understanding salience. What’s more important that bridge game on the web or finishing the project, and that’s a sub-function of that mindfulness that I was talking about. I’ve been emphasizing concentration because that is a key skill in so much of performance. It’s not the only skill of attentions. If you want to foster creative insight, it’s important to concentrate. At first gather all the information, throw yourself into the problem.

If you can’t come up with a solution then you need to let it go and let your mind wander because it’s during that open time that the bottom-up circuits of the brain, which store vast information that we don’t have direct access to, can put together two discreet elements that have never been combined before, in a useful, innovative way that’s a creative insight.

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Then you have to go back to concentration to execute. That’s a different story but daydreaming turns out to be the kind of attentional span that fosters creativity so different aspects of attention have different uses.

Ben: Here’s a question from Sara Switzberg in Tel Aviv.

“I loved Emotional Intelligence and look forward to reading Focus. Are there exemplars of focus, people who worked on their ability to focus and went on to great success?”

Dan: Anyone who is at the top of their game, whether a great musician, an outstanding person in sports, anyone who has a domain of excellence that they have succeeded at enormously, has had mentors, coaches and teachers, along the way who helped them continuously improve.

In fact there’s this idea that ten thousand hours will get you to the top of the game. That’s actually only part of the story. If you have a bad golf stroke and you practice that bad golf stroke badly for ten thousand hours, you’ll still have a bad golf stroke. It’d just be more automatic and harder to change.

What you need and what people who are top performers almost always have, is the eye of an expert coach who can tell you what to improve and practice next.

Top athletes, for example, top stage performers, and top singers all have coaches who help them work on what will get them a little bit better. Amateurs work on something for about fifty hours and then they let it go to base brain, and they stop getting better. The difference between the amateur and the person at the top of the game is not just practice but it’s also coaching.

Ben: Do you, yourself, have a coach or have you ever had one?

Dan: I had coaches throughout my writing career. They’re called editors. In fact as you mentioned, I went from Harvard to Psychology Today. That was the big

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Psychology Today, 1976 shift in my career, and I had the worst writing habits from the journalist point of view because I was writing still in academe. I was writing the way I’d learned to write for academic journals. I actually had a two-year tutorial with a guy. I’d write an article and this top editor would sit down with me and go over every word in every line, and he’d change Latinate words to punchy Germanic words. He’d change passive to active. He’d help me get a story in there to make the point. In other words, he gave me the kind of tutorial that improved my writing enormously. It took me about a year before I realized that other people weren’t getting that kind of editing. It really was coaching.

I would say at the New York Times I wrote eight to nine hundred articles. Every one of those articles went through two or three rounds of editing. And I would say I continued to learn and continue to learn now with books from editorial feedback. It’s extraordinarily valuable. _____________________________________________________

Some Goleman articles from 1984, his first year at the Times: SOME SEXUAL BEHAVIOR VIEWED AS AN ADDICTION October 16, 1984, By DANIEL GOLEMAN - Science Desk

NIGHTMARES ARE LINKED TO CREATIVITY IN NEW VIEW October 23, 1984, By DAN GOLEMAN - Science Desk STUDIES OF CHILDREN AS WITNESSES FIND SURPRISING ACCURACY November 06, 1984, Tuesday - By DANIEL GOLEMAN - Science Desk _____________________________________________________

Ben: We interviewed Elliot Aronson who when he was at Wesleyan had one of the same mentors you had at Harvard—David McClelland. What did you take from your study with David McClelland at Harvard that has helped you in your subsequent work?

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Dan: David McClelland, who was my main professor at Harvard and was Elliot’s earlier on in his career, was a remarkable guy.

David McClelland

He was a crackerjack methodologist and he also was not afraid to innovate, to look at new areas that were outside the mainstream. I think that was one of the biggest lessons I got from him was to think about what really interested me not what was the safe thing to study within psychology. He actually helped me get a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India because I was very interested in meditation, and I thought meditation offered something to psychology that psychology didn’t realize it needed even, and in those years it was very true.

He encouraged me to look into it and I came back and did that dissertation you mentioned on meditation as an intervention and stress reactivity, and most of the people in the department thought I was nuts. This was a kind of career ending move because it was way ahead of the curve. There was actually no place for me to go with that interest in psychology at the time, which is probably a factor of my going into journalism.

Ben: Ed Diener said a similar thing. He said that in the ‘70s, happiness was not an

accepted subject of study so he couldn’t safely study it until he got tenure.

Dan: And Seligman with Positive Psychology. In fact there was no such thing as neuroscience in those days. We called ourselves psychobiologists if we were looking at that kind of measure. There were no good direct measures of the brain apart from EEG, which is rather rough. There was no brain imaging. It was really early days. My close colleague and friend, Richard Davidson who has stayed on in psychology and is now a top neuroscientist, had to be very quiet about his interest in meditation for a decade or so because it was kind of taboo in those days.

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Ben: Here’s a question from James Cross in Atlanta, Georgia.

James says, “If this is too personal, please sidestep it, but I’m just very curious: “How often do you meditate? How long are your meditating sessions? And what model do you use?”

Dan: That’s not a too personal question. I’ve been a meditator since the late ‘60’s because I’m now 67, so I started in college. I have drifted into a kind of Tibetan version of mindfulness, not mindfulness really, but Vipassana insight meditation which is the classical form from which mindfulness has been extracted. It’s important to understand the distinction between meditation and mindfulness is they’re applied in secular contexts and those that are embedded within the spiritual traditions. I think it’s important to strip these mental exercises of belief systems so that anyone has access to the brain benefits of them.

That’s the way I’m in favor of bringing them into schools and bringing them into businesses too because they’re of great benefit in terms of health and in terms of mental abilities like concentration and so on.

For example, when you practice that simple mental exercise I was saying of putting your mind on one thing like the breath when it wanders, bringing it back you’re also strengthening circuitry for managing emotions. The brain uses are intertwined for that circuitry for concentration and emotional self-management, but I think that in order for the maximum number of people to get the benefit, it should be separate from the original context.

That said, I’m kind of a heavy-duty meditator in the insight tradition within the Theravadan genre and also with Tibetan teachers. I like to do anywhere from ten minutes to an hour depending on what the day allows. Then I like to write immediately after that because my mind is calmest and clearest, and I write most fluidly. Then after that I have lunch, and then I deal with the day’s particular catastrophe.

Ben: Would you have already meditated today?

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Dan: Yeah. I did.

Ben: That’s impressive. This is from Daniel DeCamp in Geneva, Switzerland.

“Doctor Goleman I’m excited about this interview. I’m a long-time fan. Who are the leading psychologists studying attention and focus? Who has most influenced your work?”

Dan: My friend, Richard Davidson is doing lots of research on attention.

Richie is one of the leaders in the area but there are dozens and dozens of people studying attention from different aspects. I’m just starting to write an article for the science section of the Times. This is on something called cognitive control. Cognitive control is the technical term for that ability to keep your mind on the one important thing and to bring it back from wandering off. Cognitive control is also, depending on your orientation, called delay of gratification, working memory, learning readiness, the emotional self-management, in other words, this one ability is critical to both school and life success.

One of the pieces of data that I’ve mentioned in the book Focus, which I find very powerful, was a longitudinal study done in New Zealand of about a thousand and thirty seven kids, who were followed from ages four into their thirties. Between

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four and eight they were tested very rigorously on cognitive control and then looked up again, tracked down in their thirties, and they found the child’s cognitive control predicted very accurately their financial success and their health in their thirties and cognitive control the research also found is fluid. Some kids started very low but got better and if they got better they had all the advantages of the kids that always had cognitive control.

The conclusion of that study was that we should be teaching this to kids and this is something that I’m now advocating very strongly I think not just kids but adults by the way. I’ve been involved since Emotional Intelligence with a group called the Consortium For Academic Social And Emotional Learning, which has been extremely successful in bringing curricula covering the domain and spectrum of emotional intelligence into schools.

I was just talking to the Director of that group and it’s clear now that the next step will be attentional training for kids so that they can have these advantages. It makes them better achievers in school and better workers when they become adults.

Ben: Here’s a question from Mary Ashton of the Greater Chicago Area.

Mary’s question follows on your three types of focus. “Do all three focus types need to be engaged in order to achieve a state of flow? In other words how does flow fit into the three types?”

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Dan: Flow is a state of maximal absorption. Flow concentration. So flow for those of you who don’t know, is the state that people are in when they outdo themselves when they perform at their absolute best, whatever skill domain. It has several characteristics. It typically emerges when people’s skill set is challenged at the top of their ability so they have to make an effort to do their best. It’s a state of utter concentration, absolute absorption. It’s also a state that feels good. It’s intrinsically rewarding. A lot of the things we do in life voluntarily are things we love to do because they get us in a kind of micro-flow. The precondition for flow is that your skills match the challenge and second, that you have the concentrative ability to marshal those skills.

I would also argue by the way, and this is a hypothesis, that people who hone the skill of applying their concentration voluntarily, can get into flow whether or not the ratio of skill to challenge is optimal. In other words you can do it with everyday things. You can do it with being with your loved ones. You can do it with enjoying nature. It’s a state of immersion.

I was just reading an article in the Harvard magazine called the “The Power of Patience”. (Roberts, JL. (Nov-Dec, 2013) The Power of Patience. Harvard Magazine.) It’s by Jennifer Roberts, an art instructor there and she said she gives her students an assignment to go to choose a painting they love and go to the gallery where that painting’s being exhibited and study it continuously for three hours. Think about that. What they find is they learned and perceived more, and more, and more about that painting progressively. It’s like a text revealing secrets but it’s one application of that immersive concentration. I think it’s a great skill in life to be able to bring that to anything.

Ben:

On this call as you know we’ve got a fair number of therapists and coaches and one question I would have is: “Is there any obvious way you can think of that they can detect when they have a client who has attentional problems? A simple observation they can make when they’re talking to their client?”

Dan: I think I would frame it a little differently. I would say it’s interesting to know or get a sense of where on the spectrum of attention a client might be. Some people will tell you ‘I have ADHD’. ADHD is basically a statement about distractibility. It means that the person is highly distractible. Some people may not tell you that but you’ll sense that they can’t stay with the topic they’re always switching topics that’s another sign of distractibility. Some people will be laser focused and those are your high focusers, your high concentration folks. My feeling is that wherever you are in that spectrum you can get better, but in order to get better, as in any other skill set, you need to practice.

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The book Focus provides the “Why To”. For the “How To”, I did a set of audio instructions that are available from Morethansound.net, one word, morethansound, and I have Focus for adults, Focus for teens, and Focus for kids.

There’re half a dozen different focusing exercises. People need to choose which one they like and stick with that, and practice it ideally daily, five ten minutes whatever it is, because the benefit’s accumulative as in any other skill, your golf game, your bridge game, your work. The more you practice the better you get, and it’s absolutely the same as concentration.

This is a tool you might offer or try out with a client who needs a little help here. Focus, Morethansound.net, but there are many others.

You don’t need to get these particularly. You may in fact, depending on your own background, have a practice yourself that you want to share. Lots of people are doing mindfulness with clients these days or more and more. However you do it, I think offering it to a client adds to your own tool kit.

Ben:

This may be wrong but I would guess that one of the key tools you would suggest to adults would be meditation itself?

Dan: Yeah. Meditation in whatever form appeals to that person and I should say by the way, that if you have a client who is religious, there are meditations within every major religion from Islam, Christianity, Judaism through Hinduism and Buddhism. So you know they can find that one that works, but at base, this is interesting, at base every one of them is an exercise in training attention.

Ben: What are some of the other strategies for building focus that you recommend?

Dan: We’ve been talking about inner focus what about other focus, because one of the big problems, kind of a common cold of leadership, is empathy deficit. This

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is true for a couple of reasons but let me tell you about two common patterns. One is the person who’s an outstanding individual contributor maybe fabulous at writing computer code, and because of that excellence is promoted to the head of a team or a group, but lacks the social abilities and the empathy to tune into other people and lead them well. This is really common particularly in the tech sector but in other professions and other areas.

The second is a leader who just has never really tuned into other people but is promoted because of business expertise or because of intelligence. These are people who really need some coaching help with empathy and with tuning in to other people. Often they do not see that they lack the ability nor perceive the need for it. So, you’re also dealing sometimes with a blind spot in a client. Of course there are a lot of coaching techniques that can help you get through that but if you can help a person see the consequences of a lack of empathy, then the question is, how do you teach them?

Ben: Right.

Dan: And you may ask me then “How?”--right?

Ben: Yes! How?

Dan: It depends on the kind of empathy for one. There are three kinds.

One is cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is understanding how the other person thinks, how they see the world, how they perceive things, what their mental models are. This allows a leader to be effective in communicating with that person because you know how to put things in a way they will understand and care about. More effective communication comes from cognitive empathy.

A second kind of empathy is emotional empathy. Emotional empathy means that you resonate in your own emotions with what the person is feeling. This is a very automatic kind of empathy. It has to do with the social circuitry of the brain, which I wrote about extensively in the book Social Intelligence. This kind of empathy allows rapport, chemistry, very positive emotional bonding.

The third kind of empathy is called empathic concern. It means you not only understand how the person feels or what their situation is, how they see things, but if they are in need you will help them out. You predispose to and ready to support them in some way, and there’s an emerging leadership literature, particularly the books of George Kohlrieser at IMD in Switzerland. He has an excellent book called Care to Dare. It’s about what he calls secure base leadership. This comes from the work of John Bowlby a very influential developmental thinker who talks about children and how important it is for a child to have a parent who tunes in, who empathizes, who lets them know

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they’re understood and cared about, and will give them the sense that they’re protected or supported.

What Kohlrieser and others are saying is that a good leader has that same capacity. The leaders people love to work for, not the bosses they hate, the ones they love, are the leaders who make them feel exactly that. If you have a boss who you trust, who you feel is there for you then you’re going to give your best. Then you’re willing to take risks you know smart risks we hope. You’re willing to learn, you’re willing to expand. If you have a boss who lacks that, who’s the opposite, then people contract. They get defensive you know they don’t give their best. They do just what’s safe they do the minimal.

Those are three different kinds, and I think each kind calls for a different kind of coaching. One of the things you can do, by the way, to help people be better at reading emotions is to put them through a training exercise developed by Paul Ekman, who’s the world’s leading expert on the facial expression of emotions.

Paul Ekman He’s come up with a training program that helps people read emotions in another person accurately. That’s a very helpful tool that you can … he has a website where you can do this so anyone you’re coaching now could go through that exercise.

Ben: Here’s a question from Ely Bogues in Cairo.

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Ely is an architect who says, “Fascinating call. If this is not too off-topic, if the biggest foe of focus is digital distractions, do you think people a hundred or five hundred years ago were actually better at focusing? Any evidence for that?”

Dan: Well, we can only conjecture. I think that every major technological shift has brought great alarm about focusing ability. Someone told me that, it was either Socrates, Plato or Aristotle, was against writing, which was emerging as a new form at the time, because he thought it would destroy people’s ability to memorize. At that time in those days people memorized sagas, epic poems, huge long, long texts, and that was a critical mental ability. Of course as writing came in, fewer and fewer people bothered to memorize. He was right. On the other hand there have been many great advantages from the printed word that he didn’t foresee.

The same thing may well be true of the digital world. On the one hand it’s clear that our ability to sustain concentration is being threatened by digital distractions and our ability to empathize and focus on the person in front of us. If you go to, I’ve seen this so often now, go to a romantic restaurant, couple out to dinner, candle lit table, and they’re both looking at their phones not into each other’s eyes. The data on kids’ texting in class and so on is pretty compelling.

On the other hand the digital world expands our ability to distribute memory and access it enormously, prodigiously, and our ability to collaborate at a distance. So many things now have been improved so I think it’s rather mixed in that five hundred years ago, people had fewer distractions I’m sure. Life was pretty slow. I don’t think it’s just digital distractions by the way I think the pace of things also is pressuring us too. All of that simply says to me that a smart way to deal with these changes is not to turn away from all the technologies but to use them wisely. For instance, if you want to help your child with cognitive control you can help them develop better concentration but you can also simply make it a rule that you do your homework first and videogames after or texting after. In other words you delay the gratification.

I think we need more and more to carve out protected times. I think smart managers are realizing this. There was that work at Harvard Business School on people who were information workers who had projects they were working toward, and they said, basically this diary study of thousands of them showed the difference between a good day and a bad day was whether they had the chance to work focused and sustained enough to have a small win toward that bigger goal. If they were just so disrupted, too many calls, too many meetings, they never had that time, they felt that. It was a useless day.

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I think smart companies and smart managers more and more are going to help people manage their attention by giving them those protected times. “Well here’s an hour or two, take no calls, look at no email, just get this done”, is something I think more and more we have to collaborate on.

Ben: I will confess that I’ve been a bad offender on this and I notice lately that when I go to movies, I sometimes pull out my phone and start looking through email. So I must mend my ways.

Dan: We’re all susceptible to this.

Ben: Here’s a question from Adam Feiner, a clinical psychologist and executive coach in Philadelphia.

Adam says, “In addition to Paul Ekman’s work, I’d love to hear your thoughts on other key strategies that coaches can use to help someone who is extremely low on emotional intelligence, to develop greater insight into themselves and others”.

Dan: I’ve co-developed with The Hay Group a measure for this kind of development. It’s called the Emotional Social Competency Inventory. It’s a 360, “ESCI 360”, and it’s actually designed for coaches to use with executives where they evaluate themselves on about a dozen competencies for leadership across the emotional intelligence range and they also get anonymous evaluations from people whose opinions they value. That’s used as the baseline and then we have a methodology for helping people first think about their dreams where they want to go. That is, elicit some positive activation in the brain, then reverse engineer that to where they are now and what specific thing they could work on to help them get to where they want to go. That’s the motivating piece. I think you have to start there.

Then having focused on that help them develop a learning plan. One of the common colds of empathy is poor listening, so that’s one of the things that’s

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evaluated and if they choose that as a goal, they can come up with a learning plan. I’m thinking of one guy who was an engineer who wanted to get better at that but he wanted to do it to practice in a low-risk environment, so he became a coach on his son’s soccer team. He tried to focus on how kids were feeling and what they were thinking when he coached them and just generally through the game. That was his practice arena.

My colleague Richard Boyatzis who teaches at the Business School at Case Western has found is that if people are diligent about a learning plan like that, which means just practicing the new behavior as it naturally occurs, if they’re diligent for three to six months they generally get a noticeable change, get better in that. He’s followed them up now up to seven years later wherever they work, and had people evaluate them, and finds that change has stuck. Once they know how to work in this domain they’ve continued to improve others. That’s one methodology. We describe it in the book Primal Leadership, which is a Harvard Business School book. And The Hay Group has the ESCI. That’s my feeling about the best way to improve any ability in the emotional intelligence range.

Ben: Here’s a question from Kristin Nauth, a management consultant in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Kristin asks, “Does the importance of focus mean that people with ADD are at a permanent disadvantage?”

Dan: You know every person with ADD is different. Some are able to focus remarkably but it’s a battle for them. They use a lot work-arounds, notes and so on but it works. Some are just much better at being entrepreneurs and coming up with creative ideas and innovations. They use their strength. And yes, I’m just, as I said, doing this article for the Times and the grail in the ADD research area that everyone is searching for, is a way to help people strengthen their focusing abilities, which does not depend on medication. That is an intervention that which will last for them if they go off.

There are many reasons not to have people take those drugs all their lives, as unfortunately so many kids seem to be on track for. Problems like weight gain

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and what are called side effects of medications are not side effects, they’re actual effects. The brain economizes on molecules and uses the same molecule for many different purposes so when you intervene for one thing, or the targeted effect, it doesn’t mean that the other effects aren’t there. They just differ from person to person. Anyway, if we could get people off medications, the one promising area, and there’s a lot of university centers now working on this, is the kind of attentional exercise training that I was describing earlier because it seems to target the brain circuitry involved in ADD, and strengthen the circuits that are weaker in people who are so distractible. I’m still waiting for the data to come in on that. My bet is it’s going to be the more organic natural lasting intervention. Oddly enough in this society we have not tried to help people train attention. I think there’s going to be a vogue now in different ways and applications for attentional training.

Ben: It has become a key part of the training of elite athletes, right? I’m thinking of when they train the top tennis players to maintain their focus by going through rituals between points such as focusing intently on the strings of their racket, twisting it three times and so on. The top athletes have always known how essential that was.

Dan: At the top of any game, tennis--you name it--it’s a mental game. Everyone’s practiced as much as you have. I mean there’s very little difference in physical ability or technical ability. It’s mental state, which coaches will tell you that.

Ben: Here’s a question from Zurich, Switzerland from Christine Merzeder.

Christine says, “Bosses nowadays are narcissistic, even psychopathic. Should we not teach people about self-centered, dysfunctional bosses--not just try to teach bosses to have more empathy?

Dan: You know Switzerland has had two big shocks in this regard. There were two very high level executives within the last year that both committed suicide because they were being terrible pressured by their immediate boss. I think one was being a CEO who was pressured by the Chair of the Board, and another very

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high level one. It was this kind of boss. It’s someone who is … well narcissism is an interesting problem in leadership because narcissists can be very charming but they don’t listen to negative feedback, and that can put them out of touch with reality. They tend to surround themselves with ‘yes’ men and fire people who bring realistic news if it’s bad. That means they are susceptible to group think and making very bad decisions for the organization because it’s not founded on all the information that’s relevant.

Narcissistic bosses, there’s an interesting article, a very telling article about them, in the Harvard Business Review. It was called Leadership Run Amok: The

Destructive Potential of Overachievers. It’s about bosses or executives who are so focused on the numbers that they basically trample on people. They may make the numbers in the short term but they’re really weakening the organization. People want to leave and people feel alienated and so on. It’s a very big problem because in the economic downturn a lot of bosses of this type were promoted and it’s starting to show up in the organization in all kinds of measures and morale and so on, that indicate things aren’t working right. So I agree with you it’s not just a problem in Zurich, not just a problem in Switzerland, I think it’s a problem worldwide.

Ben: Here’s a question from Gayle Scroggs who’s a psychologist and coach in Argentina and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Gayle says, “Dan, I am halfway through your book. I’m totally fascinated by the original way in which you have attacked the question of attention. The stories are wonderful addenda to the science you present making the concepts come alive. But I have a quibble. I notice a total lack of diagrams or graphics except for one landscape photo to illustrate the concepts. I find myself stopping to try to visualize the brain connections and the sequencing of events even attempting to draw them myself. I’m curious about this lack of visual aids, which I think could enhance comprehension. Any comment?”

Dan: I’m all in favor of visual aids. My publishers tend not to be. It may be because they’re more expensive but at any rate, I think I would love to add visual aids if you can think of places that need them, send me an email. I’ll see if I can come up with them. I do use them in my presentations. I don’t do a lot of brain

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diagramming. I do some simple heuristics on the brain but not that many people are interested in the technical specifics, which I do mention here and there in the book, and mostly put in footnotes. It’s unusual for people to want more brain diagrams and also I’m a little leery of them because even though we’re learning more and more about the brain, the amount that we don’t know about the brain is much vaster. If we lock into premature understanding I’m not sure it would be that helpful because next year, or the next year, or the next year, we may find there’s much more to the story than we’re telling now. That gives me a little hesitation on that front but I’m open to any feedback. Thank you so much.

Ben: Here’s a question from Johanna Vanderpol from Duncan, British Columbia.

It’s a long question so I’m just going to excerpt it but she mentions at the beginning, your book in 1995, Emotional Intelligence, was a personal turning point in her life and as a result she wrote a book (Honouring Your Emotions:

Why It Matters) and has a five step theory or method of somatic awareness and processing.

Her question is this. “Chronic difficult emotions can distract us from our life goals and callings. What do you think we need to consider to build strong emotional self-regulation so we can focus and make our best contribution to society? Also, any suggestions for a University for a PhD in testing my model?”

Dan: The second question about a university PhD program may be the University of Wisconsin with Richard Davidson if it’s a brain model, or maybe Rutgers University, the program in Professional and Applied Psychology, which is very open to emotional intelligence, related works at Wisconsin. Richard Davidson is the key guy, and at Rutgers Cary Cherniss.

The general phenomena are really crucial. A third kind of attention, which I did not talk about, but it’s a huge problem in our lives and in the workplace, is when we are distracted by upsetting emotions. That’s the most powerful kind of attentional distraction. Much more than the web, much more than text, much more than emails, is our own upsets because the brain is wired so that the emotional circuitry, which flares up when we’re upset, controls attention. It

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takes over the prefrontal area where voluntary forced sustained attention operates, and it shifts the focus of attention from, say, the work in front of us to

that problem in that relationship that we’re having or whatever it may be. That thing we can’t stop thinking about because it’s emotionally upsetting. We’re still thinking about it at two in the morning.

The ability to let go of those emotional distracters is absolutely crucial to being able to put our attention where we want, when we want it. What I found in my dissertation was that people who had done this kind of mental exercise that I described earlier were better able to let go of the emotional distracter. The definition of resilience by the way, emotional resilience, is how quickly you can let go of an upset. You can recover to baseline. I think that’s a critical ability. It’s also one that we can get better at.

Ben: Here’s someone calling from one of my favorite cities, Giselle Nicholson from Barcelona.

Dan: Oh I love Barcelona! I was there last month.

Ben:

Giselle would love to learn more about how to develop wider systems focus at the group level.

Dan: Wider systems focus at the group level I think is a big and vastly important challenge. If it’s in an organization it’s encouraging people to explore widely, and explore in terms of what their particular role maybe. Marketing would explore in one way, R&D [Research and Development] another, Finance another, but to be open to inputs from the world around us and in order to do that you need to make that a cultural norm in the organization. It’s best if that is exemplified by C level types who then move it on down through the hierarchy and not only encourage it, but reward it.

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I think that at the societal level we have a terrible systems blindness, which is our imperviousness to noting or understanding or caring about the way in which human systems of transportation, energy, construction, industry, commerce, and so on, are systematically degrading the global systems that sustain life on the planet. A lot of that mismatch or misapprehension or miscomprehension rather, comes because the brain is designed in evolution for an entirely different range of threat. Our brains are designed for predators, things that ate us in the past, and now for symbolic threats like, I’m not being treated fairly. That’s how it’s been translated in modern life. What we don’t notice is the changes in planetary systems because they’re too macro or too micro for our perceptual system in the first place. Secondly our emotional centers for threat aren’t wired to care about them.

So, we have this enormous problem that our daily activities, whether we like it or not, are destroying slowly the systems that our children’s children’s children will need to have intact in order to survive and yet we don’t notice or care. My thinking on this in terms of how we could make people more aware of these wider systems has to do with education. I’m very interested in teaching children in schools systems thinking, and also a fine grain methodology that lets them analyze how any given activity or product degrades systems. There’s a metric for it called life-cycle assessment. I’d like to see all this embedded in all the courses in schools so the mental models are part of the way these kids grow up seeing the world so they make better decisions.

However, what I’m talking about is very depressing and negative and in fact it activates negative centers in the brain and people tend to want to tune out when you start talking about this. I’m also an advocate of not focusing on the footprint, which is the sum total of our negativities for the planet, but rather on the handprint, which is all of the good things that we do to lower our footprint. The handprint has a metric. It’s been developed at the Harvard School of Public Health, and I’d like kids to start measuring their handprint. Schools could compete on handprints. Companies can compete on handprints. It’s a much more positive way of engaging people, activates rewards centers in the brain and motivational systems that keep people moving.**

So thank you for asking. (NOTE: Handprinting” is described by Harvard’s School of Public Health’s Gregory Noris as in contrast to “focusing only on our carbon “footprints,” we can also look at the flip side and estimate our “handprints”—our net positive impact on the planet such as boosting human rights, improving literacy, or inspiring others to

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help improve the planet.” For more, see Daniel Goleman’s “Handprints“ also published in Time, 3/12/12.)

Ben: Here’s a question from Brian Branagan in Seattle Washington.

Brian says, “I coach software development teams to be more effective through the use of Agile team practices. Many of the practices require the full attention of every team member so decisions can be made quickly. This is becoming increasingly more difficult for team members to accomplish because of their seeming addiction to their smart phones and they should be listening to what others are saying. What would be an effective way to show people the price they are paying when they have their attention divided between their smart phones and their monitoring the flow of their meeting?”

Dan: I quote one executive who was telling me, whenever my mind wanders in a meeting and I realize it’s wandered, I wonder what opportunities I’ve just missed. There’s opportunity cost to that distractibility and what’s happened is that the social norms for meetings have quietly changed to allow people to bring their phones in and to look at them during a meeting. I was just at a school yesterday where I gave a talk and they told me the problem’s gotten so bad they simply banned phones from classrooms, and all of a sudden kids are paying attention again. I don’t think it’s a bad idea for a meeting either.

Ben:

So you could have everybody in the meeting put their phone in a basket until the meeting’s over.

Dan: Well you know, there’s something people do now I was hearing in Manhattan, friends go out to dinner at a restaurant everybody puts their phone in the middle of the table. The person who reaches for a phone before the check comes has to pay for everybody.

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I love it. Dan: There are companies that don’t allow laptops or phones in meetings for this very

reason. It lowers productivity and efficiency.

Ben: Here’s a question from Gabrielle Lockhart in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Gabrielle says, “I once completed eight days of silence and meditation at a retreat center. The eight days consisted of ten to twelve hours sitting on our cushions focusing on our breath. In retrospect I feel that this silent focus environment created an experience of breakthroughs. Serenity, focus energies, and insights into a lot of reruns in my life. How does focus result in this type of experience?”

Dan: That’s a great testimonial. That’s rather industrial strength meditation but if you’re up for it, I think what happens is by letting go of our distractions where our mind wanders, this obsession and rumination with things upsetting to us. We free up an enormous reservoir of positive energy. I’ve experienced this on retreats too. I’m looking forward to doing another one soon. It’s been too long for me. That’s one of the effects that people who are able to focus and sustain that focus for days at a time, and it’s really that you don’t sustain it continuously, it’s that process of bringing the mind back, which strengthens the ability. So if you do it very deeply I think the rewards can be greater. It’s a kind of ‘dose-response relationship’ as it’s called in medicine.

Ben: Okay going to Pennsylvania. James Abrahams says, “I’m an anthropologist I’m wondering how training and focus and attention can help with performance anxiety or stage fright. It seems that performance anxiety is partly a matter of allowing the mind to wander during performance. Thank you”.

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Dan: Yes that’s very good. I don’t know the anthropology angle here but there’s certainly a psychology angle. Performance anxiety often means that the person is thinking about how the people in the audience are evaluating them, which is an upsetting emotional thought. If you can stay focused in the here and now, I’m on the stage, and I’m in this character, and I’ve got to say this line, you’re not worrying about how people in the audience are thinking about you. The training and attention that works in other domains of expertise should work for actors too.

Also a little cognitive therapy wouldn’t hurt where people challenge their own undermining thoughts like that.

My wife has a very good book that integrates mindfulness and cognitive therapy. It’s called Emotional Alchemy (Tara Bennett-Goleman). She describes a number of a range of techniques including what she did to help some performers, actually some fairly famous performers, who had exactly that problem.

Tara Bennett-Goleman

Ben: Were there any key learnings that helped you to become such a good speaker? I’ve heard you several times and you are really great when you’re in front of an audience.

Dan: I like to be quiet before a talk to think over what I’m going to say and I tend to say the same things over and over, so it gets easier and easier.

You really get your script down? Dan: Yep.

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Ben: Okay. So I should try to come up with a question you haven’t heard before to give you a little stimulation (laughing). Here’s a question from Sara ThinSimons in London.

Sara, a psychologist and university lecturer, says, “You write that the myth of ten thousand hours is that it requires deliberate practice--not ten thousand hours of practice on the wrong things. You seem to endorse Erikson’s position that apart from certain sports, almost anyone can achieve the highest levels of performance with smart deliberate practice alone. “However, Angela Duckworth, the recent McArthur Genius award winner at Penn and the maven of grit research would say, the true myth is Erikson’s argument, popularized by Gladwell, namely that native ability is relatively unimportant. One simply has to do the appropriate deliberate practice. “She marshals convincing evidence across a wide range of domains that what

you say in your book is not true. That there is compelling evidence that both-- natural talent, and sustained practice in learning—predict high performance,. Any thoughts?”

Dan: I agree. I think it’s not that you can rise to the top, I wouldn’t argue that. I would say you would rise to the top of your innate abilities. If you are naturally talented within a domain and have an expert coach and practice and practice, you will rise very, very high. If you’re not naturally talented, if you’re a 5’3” basketball player, you’re not going to no matter how much you practice, you’re not going to be that good. That height has analogies and equivalencies in every other domain ability.

Ben: So you’re in agreement with Angela Duckworth on that?

Dan: Oh yeah, sure.

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Here’s a question from Kim Dalgleish. “What are one or two essential skills a parent should impart to young children to teach focus or other emotional intelligence skills?”

Dan: I think one is the delay of gratification as a routine habit. That you do the work first you get the reward later. And the second is anything that strengthens the concentration circuitry for that child.

Ben: And what are some ways you would strengthen children’s concentration circuitry?

Dan: I was at a school in Spanish Harlem, second graders from really deprived backgrounds.

Many had been traumatized. The teacher one day asked how many people know someone who’s been shot. Every hand went up. Half the kids were special needs, ADHD, even autism spectrum, learning disabilities. But the class itself was very calm and very collected. They have an exercise they do every day, which is they call breathing buddies where they get a little stuffed animal, they find a place to lie down on the floor, they put it on their belly, they watch it rise, they watch it fall, count one, two, three on the rise, one, two, three on the fall. It’s a simple concentration exercise but they also have something called the peace corner. The peace corner is a nice pillowed environment under a desk where you can go and be alone when you’re upset, and learn to calm down. I think all of these kinds of tools are the things that help children develop these abilities. It’s not just one thing it’s many things.

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Ben: A quick question from Mary Ashton in Chicago.

“Are the digital distractions actually causing a change in the brain’s chemistry,

i.e. dopamine and serotonin? If so, can we expect an even further decline in our society’s attention?”

Dan: I think that’s an open empirical question. The mind is distracted naturally. It’s wired to wander at least half the time. That suggests that there’s been some evolutionary advantage to having a mind that is wandering so one question is, are we wandering more? Is it just that the mind is wandering away when we need it not to or that it actually is wandering appreciably more. There’s also data that suggests when we do get that text or we do get that email, from someone that makes us feel good, it activates the reward circuitry so there’s more dopamine in such neurotransmitters in the brain. Those are very short hits. I don’t think they’ll have any lasting consequence.

But it’s a really good question. What are the neural changes that we go through as a result of a new digital environment? I don’t think anybody really knows yet.

Ben: Okay, here are two great questions. I’ll take them one at a time from Georgia Maxwell. First one is what do you think about our future on this planet, how will focusing help, and in what ways?

Dan: I think the systems focus I talked about is the kind of attention we need to bring to human impacts on the globe in order to ensure that we do have a future where we can flourish in future generations.

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Ben: Her second question is, which I’m interested in too is, what are your passions currently and what are your goals for the future?

Dan: Well I’m getting more and more interested in the attentional dimension and I’m going back to my early work on attention and stress and the physiological, and now neural changes that are associated with this training, and I think I’m going to pursue that. At the same time I’m very interested in how attention and attention training interact with the emotional intelligence abilities. So I hope to be unpacking that too.

Ben: What’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Dan: My website. Plus I’ll see emails sent to: [email protected]

Ben: At the bottom of your Interview Webpage, we’ve got links to most of your websites. I also would recommend you take a look at Dan’s Facebook page which has lots of valuable material in it.

For our final question, I would ask, “Where do you want to be with your life, say, five years from now? Are you the type that has a vision and works to develop it, or do you just take it step by step as you go along?”

Dan: I pretty much take it step by step. I don’t think that in any given point in my adult working life I could’ve accurately seen where I would be five years ahead. So, I really have given up on those kinds of projections.

Ben: Well, I want to thank you for a wonderful interview and for joining with everybody on the call in thanking you for the work you’ve done over your career. It’s really been important and we value it so much.

Dan: Well Ben I want to thank you and thank everyone who participated. Wonderful group and wonderful questions so quite a pleasure for me too.

Ben: Okay have a great weekend.

Dan: Okay. Be well every one. _________________________________

We are grateful to our professional transcription service. In addition, thanks to Amanda

Horne of Canberra, Australia and Ben Dean for light editing on this transcript.

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What People Are Saying About Dan Goleman’s Interview

Really enjoyed the lecture. I invited 2 colleagues to join me in my office. So,

there were 3 listeners. I particularly liked the beginning when he explained

how his Focus model related to his Emotional Intelligence model. Thank you

for being a good interviewer and keeping him on track. Best Regards,

Loved - The 3 types of empathy, the deficit of empathy in leadership,

mindfulness as 'balcony' of the mind and being able to redirect attention

where and when needed. Focus/attention needed for excellence.

Outstanding interview, Ben - read my notes to my husband this morning over

coffee.

In a word or two, Ben, I found the Goleman interview interesting and

potentially useful.

For me, the concept of focus falls under the umbrella of mindful awareness, or

simply mindfulness. How I found that particularly interesting is it brought up

more questions for me in terms of the active ingredient of mindfulness. Is it

awareness? Or being mindfully aware? Is it attention? Or not merely

attending but a particular way of focused attending? Or is it acceptance,

much as Cardaciotto teased out that additional aspect in her dissertation

(~2005) and later article on the Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale? Or does it

really get one back to a secure attachment from which one can safely explore

his or her world?

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I admit, much as you mentioned toward the end of the call, that I too have a

tendency toward multi-tasking and was not entirely focused on Goleman's

topic of focus. That said, the interview sparked in me a number of interesting

and possibly useful questions. Thank you, Ben.

Dan Goleman’s wisdom and comprehensive knowledge base is dazzling. His

ability to relate to your questions and provide insightful answers was very

impressive to me.

I felt a tremendous amount of hope during several discussion points and am

planning to listen again and take notes and share this interview with my

colleagues. I liked the discussion about how we need coaches along with our

hours we put in to develop the greatness of our talents in whatever field of

endeavor they may be. If this message could be internalized by teachers,

employers, parents, politicians etc. we could create huge change in the

development of those we interact with. It's really not about the standardized

tests and the drugs and the laws that will never make everyone equal. It's

about how we care about people and work to help them develop to their

Interesting, inspiring and reinforcing of the work I do. Thank you.

Clear, accessible, empowering message. A productive way to spend an hour

on a busy Friday. The distinctions between the types of empathy and the kinds

of focus were especially helpful to me. Ready to expand my own repertoire.

Dan Goleman's talk was one of the top three I've heard you interview. Great

job all around. Not only did he use science to inform his ideas but his candid

and honest responses to questions was very refreshing. Since I also write, I was

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interested in his process of meditating then writing before he takes on the

daily stuff of living. Thanks.

Your interviews are always engaging, but being “in the room” with Daniel

Goleman was a pleasure and a privilege. My plan was to check in – and check

out. Leaving town tomorrow, I intended to listen to the recording later. Once

you began, I couldn’t tear myself away. Amazing to be brought up to speed

with someone in touch with the neuroscience heavy hitters; even more

fascinating were moments in the history of the science with which he seasoned

his comments.

His work is brilliant and he was a gracious & delightful interview

subject. Thank you for bringing him to us this way.

Really loved his authenticity! Thank you for the interview!

It was a great interview: so rich and compelling. Needless to say, Goleman is

very focused. Reinforces my resolve to reconnect to meditation practice.

I thoroughly enjoyed the call with Dan Goleman. I was put at ease when he

said he meditated for “10 minutes to an hour.” Whew, the pressure is off. I’ve

always felt that I’d never be able to do this for hours and he gave me

permission to RELAX. The Hay 360 Emotional Competence Survey is a tool I am

going to Google. I am fascinated by the new brain and neuroscience. I had to

leave the call at five minutes before the hour but assure you I was more

focused today. And I visited Amazon and purchased his book. Thank you!

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He was the living example of his years of work and meditation. He showed a

calm and an easy sense of humor. His wealth of knowledge was inspiring along

with his humility.

I only had a short time to listen but I ended up staying on for the full call. Thanks Ben for giving us all the opportunity for such quality knowledge to

expand our abilities.

Felt I was in the presence of one the best communicators in psychology who

was speaking with a consummate interviewer. I liked it all!

I liked Daniel’s ability to zero in on applying emotional IQ learnings to critical

thinking and leadership in a language that hits home with the people who can

benefit from it the most.

Ben’s questions were thought provoking. I very much appreciated how

thoughtful he was when answering people's questions. The quality of the

questions was excellent and a value add for me as a listener. Thanks so much,

very insightful and a great opportunity to have first hand information. Very

grateful

I liked it. This was the first time I attended one of your events, so you have set

the bar pretty high! I'll plan to attend more events. Please add me to your

distribution list. I am an Executive Coach and former CFO/Controller/Head of

IT. My challenge is with a client base that is very numbers-oriented and

somewhat introverted. Dan's book, Focus, gives me a tool that I can take to

this audience that will help me help them to become better and more humane

leaders......

It was fascinating. I loved to hear about Dan's personal practices, and the

things he found interesting before there was a named field for them. I've

listened to a couple of these interviews and have always thought they were

worth making time for. Thanks for hosting some great people!

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Great to finally hear him "in person", after reading so many of his blogs,

articles and books. Thank you!

Very informative and helpful. I’m in the process of getting a dissertation

coaching business started, and found this to be a worthwhile investment of my

time.

I really enjoyed the Q@A session with Dr Goleman and how you facilitated it.

The man is highly intelligent and thoroughly understands his field. The

questions you selected were most revealing and insightful. Thanks.

Just wanted to leave a big "Thank You" for spearheading the interview this

morning. I took 4 pages of notes before having to scoot at 11 PST, and got so

excited about the material (its implications & potential applications) that I

needed a nap. Great job, Chief!!

Loved it! Clear, articulate, compelling, research-based – and fresh – take on

the vital role of FOCUS in every variety of success. Crucial knowledge for

coaches!

Aloha! It was very interesting Q&A’s from the participants worldwide. I like

the intellectual stimulation, a summary overview of Dan's books & practices.

Thank you very much for organizing an exciting interview.

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Excellent interview. Clarified some interdisciplinary concepts that were fuzzy

for me. Very resourceful and inspiring to take specific actions both personally

and professionally.

So much good information - this is worth listening to twice. It occurred to me

that Dr. Goleman has never experienced professional coaching and was not

interested in doing so yet was very positive about coaches. Thanks Ben for

providing such a good safe space where learning and exchange could

transpire!

Hi Ben, I think you did a good job of fielding the questions and Daniel did a

good job of answering them. I noticed that there were a few questions that

popped in to my mind that were asked and answered within minutes of my

thoughts. I felt delighted by that.

Thank you, Ben. Thought it was terrific. Initially, while billed as an interview, I

felt a bit disoriented, not having read the book yet, and wanting a bit more

background. But your opening questions helped to frame the discussion. The

questions from around the world were, indeed, great, and I think what I liked

most was Goleman's authenticity and groundedness. Thanks so much for

availing such a terrific learning opportunity.

This was an extremely helpful call. One of the things that I really enjoyed about

hearing him speak, rather than reading his thoughts in books or articles, was

his practice of pausing, taking time to reflect on his answer to those questions

that may be a little outside of his ordinary “schtick.” His cadence and way that

he presented his information was as informative as the information itself.

Undoubtedly, it is an outgrowth of his years of mindfulness and spiritual

training. In Buddhism there is a strong emphasis on Right Speech. It seems to

me that that is one of his long-term practices. His information about the

various types of focus was truly a helpful model. It beautifully articulated

something I’ve been speaking to for decades, but not nearly as elegantly. I

agree wholeheartedly with him that what is needed is systems thinking that

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takes us into a much larger field of inclusion. I look forward to re-listening to

the interview and reading his book.

He's a great interviewee. But I admit I was surprised that he doesn't do 5-

years-out for his own planning. His rationale was that you never get to that

specific planned place anyway. But for me it keeps my day in context of the

bigger picture, which he was otherwise advocating for. For example, he said

with kids teaching impulse control. That I'm immediately using for myself. Like

the way to build focus is to delay gratification just a touch longer than I do.