287 Quotes by Daniel Goleman

Happy, calm children learn best.

If you do a practice and train your attention to hover in the present, then you will build the internal capacity to do that as needed – at will and voluntarily.

You see it in jazz musicians, who never rehearse exactly what they do, but just seem to know when to take center stage, when to fade into the background. When jazz artists were compared with classical musicians in brain function, they showed more neural indicators of self-awareness.15 As one jazz artist put it, “In jazz you have to tune in to how your body is feeling so you know when to riff.

The industrial processes in use today were developed at a time when no one had to consider what the environmental impact was. Who cared? But making ecological concerns matter to a company’s bottom line will help it do the research and development that will reinvent everything we buy.

Emotional self-control – delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness- underlies accomplishment of every sort.

But there is virtually no relationship between being an expert and being seen as someone people can trust with their secrets, doubts, and vulnerabilities. A petty office tyrant or micromanager may be high on expertise, but will be so low on trust that it will undermine their ability to manage, and effectively exclude them from informal networks.

I think the smartest thing for people to do to manage very distressing emotions is to take a medication if it helps, but don’t do only that. You also need to train your mind.

The most powerful form of nondefensive listening, of course, is empathy: actually hearing the feelings behind what is being said.

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.