How to use Emotional Intelligence for an Optimal Day, Every Day with Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman - Psychologist, New York Times Best-selling Author, Science Journalist
Daniel Goleman is a Psychologist, NYT Bestselling Author of the ground breaking 1995 ‘Emotional Intelligence, which fundamentally changed the way we viewed intelligence, and a Science Journalist.
For twelve years, he wrote for The New York Times, reporting on the brain and behavioral sciences.
Daniel Goleman has transformed the way the world educates children, relates to family and friends, leads and conducts business.
We’ve been sold the candy that flow is the ideal state of being. But how often is it even possible to find flow, is this a realistic goal? Chasing flow is like trying to hold water in our bare hands – it’s possible, for a short while, but elusive and ephemeral in nature, and if we bank on it occurring regularly we’ll wind up disappointed. Instead our guest today argues we should concentrate on finding our optimal state instead.
Today we’re dive deeping into the world of emotional intelligence and how we can use our EQ to perform at our best with none other than Daniel Goleman himself.
His latest book ‘Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day’ Co-Authored with Cary Cherniss unpacks the optimal state: characterized by focus, cognitive control and purpose - three things we have direct agency over.
In this conversation we uncover the vital role emotional intelligence plays in fostering a productive and harmonious work environment. From understanding the intricacies of our own emotions to navigating complex interpersonal dynamics, Daniel shares invaluable insights and practical strategies for leaders looking to cultivate a culture of empathy, belonging and personal resilience.
Whether you're a seasoned Leader or just starting your leadership journey, this episode unpacks the tools need to optimize both your personal and professional growth. So, tune in and get ready to elevate your leadership game with none other than Daniel Goleman on the We Are Human Leaders podcast.
Learn more about Daniel Goleman, and find his new book here:
Connect with Daniel Goleman via Linkedin here.
Find some of Daniel’s resources on EQ here:
Emotional and Social Competence Inventory (ESCI assessment): https://www.kornferry.com/capabilities/leadership-professional-development/training-certification/esci-emotional-and-social-competency-inventory
Personal Sustainability Index (PSI assessment): https://www.keystepmedia.com/shop/psi/
Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence Courses: https://danielgolemanemotionalintelligence.com/
Get your copy of Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day here.
Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Alexis Zahner: We've been long sold to candy that flow is the ideal state of being. But how often is it even possible to find flow? And how realistic does this make it as a goal? Chasing flow is like trying to hold water in our bare hands. It's possible for a short while, but it's elusive and ephemeral in nature at best.
And if we bank on it occurring too regularly, we'll wind up disappointed. Instead, our guest today argues we should concentrate on finding our optimal state instead. Welcome to We Are Human Leaders. I'm Alexa Zahner and together with my co host Sally Clark, today we're deep diving into the world of emotional intelligence.
We'll be exploring how we can use our EQ to perform at our best with none other than Daniel Goldman himself. In his latest book, Optimal, how to sustain personal and organizational excellence every day, co authored with Kerry Churnis, he unpacks the optimal state, which is characterized by focus, cognitive control, and purpose.
Three things that we actually have direct agency over. Daniel Goleman is a psychologist, New York Times bestselling author of the groundbreaking 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence, which fundamentally changed the way we view intelligence. And he's also a science journalist. In this conversation, we uncover the vital role emotional intelligence plays in fostering a productive and a harmonious work environment, from understanding the intricacies of our own emotions to navigating complex interpersonal dynamics.
Daniel shares invaluable insights and practical strategies for leaders looking to cultivate a culture of empathy, belonging, and personal resilience. Now, whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting out on your leadership journey, this episode unpacks the tools needed to optimize both your personal and professional growth.
So tune in and get ready to elevate your leadership game with none other than Daniel Goleman on We Are Human Leaders. Let's dive in.
[00:02:28] Sally Clarke: Welcome to We Are Human Leaders, Daniel. It's a delight to have you with us today. We'd love to start really by getting to know you a little bit better and understanding the story of your journey that's brought you to the incredibly important work that you're doing today.
[00:02:43] Daniel Goleman: I think it was bad bosses. That is to say, you know, I've gone around the world talking to different business audiences and I often start by saying, think of a boss you've loved and a boss you've hated and one quality that made them so. And I was inspired to do that because I had been working at an organization, actually the New York Times, and I had a boss who was awful.
[00:03:08] Daniel Goleman: And it made me realize how important your relationship with the person who directs you and who you are accountable to actually is. And since then, of course, I found out that one of the main reasons people leave companies It's because they hate their boss. So I think it's important that leadership have, uh, positive qualities, shall we say.
[00:03:30] Sally Clarke: And I'm curious to know is that having had that experience with the bad boss back at the New York Times, Daniel, what journey did you go on? What sort of path, maybe what was the first question that you started to explore?
[00:03:40] Daniel Goleman: You know, there's Niebuhr serenity prayer, which encourages you to think about what you can change and change it if you can.
[00:03:49] Daniel Goleman: And you can't learn how to live with it. And I learned how to live with this guy. I couldn't get him fired. We finally got him promoted. And it was interesting that when that was announced, everyone in the department cheered and applauded. And I don't think he understood exactly why. So what I did was to manage my own feelings so that I can stay calm and clear and perform well.
[00:04:13] Daniel Goleman: And that's how I made it through. And I think that's probably good advice for anyone who has a kind of intolerable work situation. But on the other hand, for leaders, the question is, how can you be a better boss or the best boss? That's where emotional intelligence comes in, I think.
[00:04:30] Alexis Zahner: Yeah. Thank you for that, Daniel.
[00:04:32] Alexis Zahner: And can you help us, I think emotional intelligence is a word everyone has probably heard of at this point. I think it's something that does get bandied around a little bit. Can you help us actually unpack your definition of emotional intelligence? What does this mean?
[00:04:45] Daniel Goleman: The way I think about it, there are four key parts.
[00:04:48] Daniel Goleman: The first is Self awareness, knowing what you're feeling, how it shapes your perceptions and your thoughts and your impulse to act, that's the first thing. The second is being able to manage upsetting emotions and by upsetting, you know, every emotion is a message to yourself from yourself. It's not that any given emotion is unhelpful, but if your emotions are overwhelming, you can't stop thinking about that thing she said to me.
[00:05:17] Daniel Goleman: Why didn't he answer that email? Whatever it is that set you off. If that is going over and over in your mind, you really can't pay full attention to what's important right now, what you have to get done. That's when you need to manage your emotions to lessen them or put them aside for the moment, whatever it is.
[00:05:33] Daniel Goleman: That's part of my model of emotional intelligence. The second part is emotional self management. It includes not just not letting emotions overwhelm you, but also marshaling positive emotions, thinking about things in a positive way and being agile, being adaptable to whatever changes and challenges come along and keeping your eye on the goal that matters right now, despite the distractions of the day.
[00:05:59] Daniel Goleman: That's all part of self management. And then there's empathy. There are three kinds of empathy. You may think, oh yeah, I know what empathy means, but actually from a brain point of view, there's cognitive empathy, knowing the language a person uses to talk to themselves about what's going on. That helps be a very good communicator because you know what terms you can use in talking to that person so they'll understand AI is very good at cognitive empathy.
[00:06:29] Daniel Goleman: That's what it does. Then, however, there's emotional empathy. Emotional empathy means you know what the other person feels because you feel it too, you pick it up, you sense it, you know, your nonverbal cues, actually, from a neuroscience point of view, brains connect with each other when you make eye contact.
[00:06:48] Daniel Goleman: The brain of one person builds a bridge to the brain of another and over that bridge, which is invisible, automatic. Spontaneous and unconscious pass emotions, and so you actually in your body are picking up the emotions, not that it's the only thing you feel, but you sense what's going on with the other person.
[00:07:10] Daniel Goleman: I'm not sure AI can do that as well as a human being, but anyway, I think this is a key part of leadership. If you're only cognitive and you ignore the emotions, you're going to be off. I'm sorry, but it's true. So the third part though, is actually, I think maybe the most important for leadership. It's called technically empathic concern.
[00:07:31] Daniel Goleman: And each one of these three different kinds of empathy is based in a different circuitry of the brain. Empathic concern uses the circuitry that we share with all mammals. It's the parental caretaking circuit. It's you care about the people you lead as a leader. And that builds enormous trust in the people you're leading when they feel you actually have their back.
[00:07:54] Daniel Goleman: So the third part of emotional intelligence is empathy. And the fourth is putting that all together to manage relationships well, to be able to inspire people, to be able to guide them, to be able to resolve differences between people on your team. All of these matter enormously for a leader. And also, don't forget being a coach.
[00:08:18] Daniel Goleman: Many leaders ignore this. You know, you do your yearly performance review. It's just not enough. What I argue is that one of the key roles of a leader in an organization is grooming the next generation of leaders, helping people get better at what they're doing. So anyway, those are four parts of emotional intelligence as I see it.
[00:08:39] Alexis Zahner: Thank you, Daniel. And as the saying goes, change begins with awareness. Is this sort of the first piece of that four quadrant puzzle? There's this recognition and appraisal phase and then we can take action towards that or where do we sort of begin with that at an individual level?
[00:08:53] Daniel Goleman: Change begins with awareness.
[00:08:54] Daniel Goleman: I love that. I'm going to use that. Thank you very much.
[00:08:58] Alexis Zahner: So every day you say you can give Daniel Goleman something back.
[00:09:02] Daniel Goleman: Here's the thing. What we found is that if a leader is low in self awareness, even though the least visible aspect of emotional intelligence, They will have trouble developing strengths in other aspects of emotional intelligence.
[00:09:17] Daniel Goleman: If a leader is high in self awareness, they'll develop a range of strengths across the whole, and this is research based. This is what we find. So self awareness really is key. Knowing what needs to change and we all know people in leadership positions who are rather clueless about what it is they're not good at.
[00:09:37] Daniel Goleman: And truth to tell, no one will let them know. Nobody dares tell them you're an interpersonal idiot, but I'm not going to tell you. I'm just going to work around it.
[00:09:47] Sally Clarke: Yeah. Gonna end up being the boss that you had at New York times, you know, one did to sort of intervene with and ended up getting moved out in that way.
[00:09:55] Sally Clarke: And it's interesting. I think there's. I imagine, you know, and there's a lot of research at this stage to show the impact of emotional intelligence also within the workplace. I'm curious, from your perspective, do you feel like in the years that you've been researching this and sharing this with leaders in organizations, has there been a change in, reception of the concept of emotional intelligence.
[00:10:15] Sally Clarke: Is it something that is now people are cognizant of and talking about and it's kind of in the language and in the behavior of leaders? How far have we come?
[00:10:25] Daniel Goleman: It's quite idiosyncratic, I would say. Some organizations have embedded emotional intelligence in one way or another into their culture. It's rather a given.
[00:10:34] Daniel Goleman: It may be called different things, you know, leadership presence. is empathy, tuning into the person in front of you, but you don't use the terms from emotional intelligence. It's quite widespread, I will say that. When I started, when I wrote the first book about it, people said to me, you can't use the word emotions in the workplace.
[00:10:54] Daniel Goleman: That was the culture of work then. Now it's understood that this matters for leadership. And one of the things that was quite influential, I'd say, was a series of articles in the Harvard Business Review saying that if you're going to be a leader, you need to be good at this skillset. It's a people skillset.
[00:11:11] Daniel Goleman: It's not just enough to be brilliant at strategy. You need to be able to lead and being able to lead means having effective relationships.
[00:11:19] Sally Clarke: And what are the outcomes do you think we can see sort of most obviously that really change things for leaders once they start to embrace those four components of emotional intelligence?
[00:11:30] Daniel Goleman: Well, I think the best proof of the effectiveness of emotional intelligence is in relatively hard measures. For example, the Gallup organization, assesses engagement in different companies. Engagement comes directly from emotional intelligence. How focused are you in what you do? We have this book Optimal, which is my most recent look at emotional intelligence, starts with research done at Harvard Business School, where they asked hundreds of men and women to keep a journal of what it was like at work that day.
[00:12:01] Daniel Goleman: And from that came a composite of what an optimal workday is like. It's a day when you're highly Engrossed in what you're doing, you're engaged, satisfied, your productivity is high, your mood is good, you feel very positively connected to the people you work with. These are the hallmarks of that and all of those mean that you're going to do a better job.
[00:12:26] Daniel Goleman: And the art of leadership is getting work done well through other people. A leader's success depends on the people he or she leads. So having people in the optimal state means that you're getting their best effort. And I think different leaders, different companies, different organizations are aware of that explicitly or not to varying degrees.
[00:12:49] Alexis Zahner: I would agree with that, Daniel. And you've made mention of your new book here, Optimal, How to Sustain Excellence Every Day. And you also made mention that EQ is a big part of this. Can you help us understand what that connection is a little more? How does EQ enable us to be in optimal state?
[00:13:04] Daniel Goleman: What we found when we looked at data, particularly meta analyses, these are aggregates of single studies, was that leaders who are high in emotional intelligence are more likely to produce that optimal state in the people they lead.
[00:13:19] Daniel Goleman: People who have emotional intelligence are more easily get into that state. Where you're at your best, basically. So I think it comes down to this. If you have a leader who's self aware, who manages his or her emotions well, and is very positive, keeps the eye on the goal, who's empathic, who lets you know not only that you are heard and seen, but cared about, you're going to give your best for that leader.
[00:13:48] Daniel Goleman: I would say the opposite is true also. If you feel, as I did at the Times, This guy doesn't care about me at all. I'm not going to give my best, but I did well enough to keep my job, frankly. That's not enough for a really outstanding leader or outstanding leadership. You want to be able to get the best out of people, not just good enough.
[00:14:08] Alexis Zahner: It makes me think, Daniel, that this EQ piece for individuals is actually a precursor to clarity. We can't be in an optimal state if we aren't actually clear on, firstly, what that looks like for us and what we're trying to achieve. Would you say that's true? Me?
[00:14:22] Daniel Goleman: Well, I would say the optimal state includes clarity.
[00:14:25] Daniel Goleman: I think it's being calm and clear. And when you're clear by, this is interesting, the circuits in the brain that help you focus do two things as side effects. They make you calm and they make you clear. So being fully engaged in what you're doing, focusing totally on what's important to you right now from a brain point of view is the best way to get into calm and clear state.
[00:14:50] Daniel Goleman: I was talking to an investor's group. This is a company that buys shares in other companies, and they have to make really smart decisions to do this. And they were most interested in that aspect of it, just what you raised, Alexis, the how is it we can be at our clearest, because that's when we take in information fully, process it deeply, understand it.
[00:15:13] Daniel Goleman: Analyze it fully and respond most effectively. And they wanted their people to be in that state. I think any company would want its people to be in that state.
[00:15:24] Sally Clarke: Yeah. It always brings to mind almost a sense of a meditative quality or a sense of grounding and presence that is also fairly key to having that ability to focus.
[00:15:34] Daniel Goleman: Well, you know, at heart, strip away the belief system. Every meditation is attention training, in essence. And I don't know about Australia, but in the States, there's a big surge of interest in companies in mindfulness, which I think is smart because The basic exercise in mindfulness is, you know, let's say you bring your attention, your awareness to your breath.
[00:15:57] Daniel Goleman: That's a neutral target. And you watch the full in breath and the full out breath and then the next in breath and the next out breath. And at some point, your mind's going to wander. That's what minds do. When you notice it wandered and bring it back to the breath, that's the actual moment of mindfulness.
[00:16:13] Daniel Goleman: And that is like going to a gym and every time you do a rep with a weight, you make that muscle that much stronger. Every time you bring your mind back to the point of focus, you make your circuitry for paying attention that much stronger. So people are able to get into that optimal state that way.
[00:16:31] Daniel Goleman: Actually, this is one of the methods that we encourage people to do because. If you can pay full attention to what matters right now at work, say, that brings the rest of it with it.
[00:16:44] Sally Clarke: Amazing. I know both Alexis and I could not agree and almost be more excited about that notion as well, Daniel. It's certainly something we see both where I'm based in Europe and in Australia, that the concept of mindfulness is certainly making its way into organizations, which is wonderful to see.
[00:16:58] Sally Clarke: Now I'm wondering, I can imagine that for a lot of people, the concept of flow state might seem conceptually similar potentially to an optimal state. Can you share with us the difference between those two?
[00:17:10] Daniel Goleman: Well, you know, there's a critical difference between them. Flow, which is fabulous, is that one time you outdid yourself, you were fantastic.
[00:17:19] Daniel Goleman: The problem with flow is you can't make it happen. It is like grace. It comes to you, whether you're playing tennis or golf or at work or sail, it doesn't matter. It's just that one time, you don't know how it happened. It just happened to you. With the optimal state, it shares a lot with flow. It's got the full focus.
[00:17:38] Daniel Goleman: It's got optimal performance, it's got feeling good, which is another sign of flow state. But you can do more to make it happen, to allow it. For example, one way is just paying full attention to what you're doing now, and not being distracted. Lord knows we have more distractions now than ever in human history, and we carry it with us.
[00:17:58] Daniel Goleman: It's our phone, it's our best friend, and our worst enemy, because it's got everything that distracts us on it. At a, you know, we can do it at a moment's notice. The question is, can you ignore it? Can you pay full attention to what matters right now?
[00:18:12] Sally Clarke: Such a great question. And I think for all of us, it's something that it is both an incredible, you know, having an entire encyclopedia.
[00:18:19] Sally Clarke: You know, I grew up in a time where you went to the encyclopedia if you didn't know something and it's all just there at our fingertips. I went for a hike recently and was offline for a few hours and even just not being able to Google something that I wanted to know for a few hours, it made me so uncomfortable that it was so interesting to observe.
[00:18:33] Sally Clarke: So thank you for sort of unpacking that difference because I think it does sound like there is a fairly fundamental difference there. It's not an elusive state that we can actually do quite a lot to set ourselves up to enter into optimal state. Can you share with us perhaps the skills that might help us to, to get there?
[00:18:50] Daniel Goleman: Well, one thing is strengthening attention. And voluntarily being able to control it and manage it and bring it to work with you. That's one thing. I suppose another is to monitor that voice in your head that got you out of bed this morning, got you to work on time or late or whatever, and that keeps going perpetually until you go to sleep again.
[00:19:13] Daniel Goleman: And that self talk, it can be highly helpful or highly negative and unhelpful. Too many people have a kind of perfectionistic view, which means that they tend to fixate on what went wrong rather than what they did right. And a more balanced view acknowledges what you're not doing as well as you might, but also has a growth mindset with it, which is to say, Oh, I could get better at that.
[00:19:41] Daniel Goleman: I can learn to do better. Rather than condemning yourself, like, what an idiot you are that you did X and Y.
[00:19:48] Alexis Zahner: Daniel, it's interesting. Something that we talk a bit about at Human Leaders is this idea of self compassion. And in a way, it sounds to me like this could be linked to this piece of that cognitive control and perhaps even further back, beginning with this self awareness, self mastery piece.
[00:20:04] Alexis Zahner: Could you tell us a little bit more in this narrative kind of idea here, where does this begin and how does that sort of reframe look like for us?
[00:20:12] Daniel Goleman: Well, I think self compassion follows from self awareness. If you don't have self awareness, you won't have self compassion. You need to tune into yourself. I was in a dialogue in the 1980s with the Dalai Lama, and he was talking about compassion.
[00:20:27] Daniel Goleman: He said, you know, in my language, the word compassion in Sanskrit and Tibetan, it's includes compassion for yourself. He said, English lacks this word, self compassion. This was before Neff started her research on self compassion. And I think it's a very important insight that tuning into what's going on in your head is the beginning of self compassion.
[00:20:51] Daniel Goleman: Is self compassion part of your internal narrative or not? Remember, I was talking about the perfectionist who blames himself or herself for doing wrong. That's a lack of self compassion. The growth mindset is an example of an aspect of self compassion, where you see yourself and other people too, by the way, as able to improve, to get better, rather than discarding them because they seem to be not so good at something.
[00:21:18] Daniel Goleman: Or you don't.
[00:21:19] Sally Clarke: And I think that also inherently ties into some of Amy Edmondson's recent research around the right kind of wrong and intelligent failure as well, that we can see, These things that we may label as failure, and I'm a former lawyer, so I'm very familiar with the sort of very negative, quite critical mindset that can often be inherent in that kind of work and starting to pull back those layers, which are very normalized of how we have self critical we can be, it's a very interesting process and being able to embrace failure is not the end, but a learning opportunity and a stepping stone to growth.
[00:21:51] Daniel Goleman: Well said.
[00:21:52] Sally Clarke: Thank you.
[00:21:53] Daniel Goleman: Great answer to whatever question.
[00:21:56] Alexis Zahner: Daniel, this optimal state, I'd love to dive back into this again, because obviously something that is a key outcome for many leaders in an organization is productivity and high performing team. Is the optimal state something that we can get into together?
[00:22:09] Alexis Zahner: Is this something that we can cultivate in an environment of the team?
[00:22:13] Daniel Goleman: Oh, sure. Yeah. In fact, I have a method called team EI. It comes from the book. Decades of research of Vanessa Drescott, who teaches in a business school now, but who looked at high performing teams and industries around the world and in sectors of all kinds.
[00:22:29] Daniel Goleman: And she found that what determined how productive a team was, was really the equivalent of emotional intelligence at the group level. So for example, self aware team. knows for each person what they're good at and what they're not so good at. The team is very candid. It can talk about it openly. You respect other people.
[00:22:50] Daniel Goleman: You don't talk over them. These are all based on team norms, agreed on ways of interacting. Most teams have norms that are implicit because they never thought about it together. In team EI, this is something Goldman Consulting Group does, but you can put it in show notes or something. Anyway, in team EI, you have the team itself think about how they are together and what they could do better and come up with a norm.
[00:23:16] Daniel Goleman: So for example, at IDEO, which is a creativity consultancy, At one branch, if you break the norm that they've agreed on, which is that you don't interrupt people. You don't talk over them. And this is a common cold of groups. And if you break that norm, you get pelted with small stuffed toy animals, reminding you that you broke a norm.
[00:23:39] Daniel Goleman: It doesn't have to be something onerous. It can be fun. But the team agrees on what the norms are going to be. What we need to do better at, and teams can learn this very quickly, but they need to be reminded.
[00:23:52] Sally Clarke: And I think also that example highlights a really beautiful and cute approach to accountability as well.
[00:23:58] Sally Clarke: That we're not just going to create these norms together and stick them on a wall, but we're actually going to hold each other accountable to them in an, in a gentle way. And again, I really love this idea of the stuffed toys, of this kind of fun grounding back into, Hey, this is their norm and we don't, that It's not how we treat each other.
[00:24:13] Daniel Goleman: I was talking to the director of a national laboratory in the U. S. He has 3, 000 plus PhDs working for him. And their mandate is to come up with, say, new alternative energies. So creativity is really important to them. And he said, we have a norm here, which is whenever anyone comes up with a new idea, the next person who speaks has to support it.
[00:24:35] Daniel Goleman: They can't be a devil's advocate. He says it's very easy and all too common to knock a new idea, but it's a fragile bud. You have to let it grow a little. He says, I don't know who established that norm, but it's lab wide now. Entire organizations do have norms, whether they know it or not. And it's helpful to think about what are they and are they really helping us be more productive or whatever our strategy implies we should be.
[00:25:00] Alexis Zahner: That's a really helpful way of looking in a Daniel. Cause I. I would imagine that potentially in an organization that has a lot of engineers or a lot of IT professionals or people who are in systems design and things like that, there may be fairly typical ways that they need to think just as a result of their work and potentially that risk mitigation or looking at all the facts without considering optimistic things or what could be It's just a way that often they get stuck in that, like, repetitive way of viewing ideas.
[00:25:30] Daniel Goleman: Yeah. So if you look at the whole organization as a culture that follows norms, unspoken norms, it matters. Also, it's funny, there's a study I saw recently of engineers at a global manufacturing company. They're asked to evaluate other engineers, how effective they are as engineers. And it turned out that engineering skill had nothing to do with it.
[00:25:51] Daniel Goleman: IQ had nothing to do with it. Emotional intelligence predicted it. In other words, if you're someone who's an engineer who's very abrasive with other people, you're not going to get your ideas listened. You're not going to be that effective. But if you're skilled in managing yourself and handling your relationships.
[00:26:07] Daniel Goleman: You're seen as a better engineer because you are, you're more effective.
[00:26:10] Sally Clarke: Amazing. Daniel, just to sort of shift gears again, we have a gazillion questions, so it's going to be a lot of gear shifting. I'm afraid. I'm imagining a leader listening now who's thinking an optimal state, and I'm experiencing this during the day.
[00:26:23] Sally Clarke: Do I have to sort of remove negativity? Is this a toxic positivity type experience? Well, how do I see an optimal state when things don't go my way or when there are challenges and negative emotions come up? How does an optimal state appear or sort of work in that context?
[00:26:38] Daniel Goleman: That's a really good question.
[00:26:40] Daniel Goleman: So you're saying that a leader is frustrated because things aren't going well and people in that leader's team are in a, you know, pretty good state. They feel pretty good. And I think that what's needed is reality testing. The leader needs to say, by the way, not with a tone of anger, but with a tone of importance.
[00:27:02] Daniel Goleman: This matters. This isn't going well. What can we do about it? that is turned to the team. And I would rather have a team that's in an optimal state responding to that than a team which is bummed out, which is really low energy. So I think that actually having a team in an optimal state is not a negative when things go wrong.
[00:27:21] Daniel Goleman: It's actually a positive. The team is more likely to come up with solutions.
[00:27:26] Sally Clarke: That makes a lot of sense to me, just in the terms of the way you've so beautifully described optimal state as being able to be very present and give attention. And I think also given the correlation between emotional intelligence and the optimal state, being able to be self aware and self managed and socially aware, and also translate that into our behaviors, translate that into how we're interacting with one another.
[00:27:47] Daniel Goleman: And I think from the point of view of the leader who's frustrated at how things are going, how you communicate that is matters because emotions are very contagious and they're most contagious from the leader outward. This is good research at Yale School of Management has shown this over and over that, for example, if the leader of a team is in a really up mood, people on the team catch the enthusiasm and energy and they do better.
[00:28:11] Daniel Goleman: If the leader is in a bad mood, People catch that and their performance actually suffers. This is important for leaders to know. So the leader himself or herself needs self management in order to be more effective as a leader. So if things are going wrong, you can't yell at people, you can't be angry at people.
[00:28:32] Daniel Goleman: They're part of the solution. They're not necessarily the problem itself. And often they're not the problem at all. Remember, leadership is the art of getting work done well through other people. So if you're going to undermine them, that's not going to help you.
[00:28:44] Alexis Zahner: I'm so glad you alluded to the studies at Yale there, Daniel, because I recall reading one particular study where they looked at, I'm not sure if it was a law firm, it was a corporate office environment, and they suggested that even someone locked away, even behind closed doors in their own cubicle or office, stress is something that can even permeate almost through walls and impact the team.
[00:29:04] Alexis Zahner: You know, I don't like to use the word vibe too often, but it's a felt sense of the energy in the room, even without anything having to be said. And I often think that we disregard that element of it, how we're actually sort of permeating our emotions into a room.
[00:29:19] Daniel Goleman: Yeah, Alexis, I think it's actually gotten worse recently.
[00:29:23] Daniel Goleman: Things are more competitive, fewer people are being asked to do more work than ever. And the research on burnout and stress is very clear. that the human body is built to have a fight or flight response in reaction to a stressful situation or an emergency and then to recover. And we skip the recovery part.
[00:29:45] Daniel Goleman: We just give stress after stress after stress. And too many people's work lives are like that. And that leads to emotional exhaustion, which is a physiological state and a neurological state. And that's And it's just a prelude to burnout and quitting, whether you leave your job or not, you quit. And that's not helpful for any organization.
[00:30:07] Daniel Goleman: The antidote is, um, for one thing, I, I really recommend that people schedule a recovery time every day, which may be, you know, going for a walk in nature or playing with a kid or a pet or meditation or yoga, whatever works for that person. Because the body wants it and the brain wants it. And it means you'll be better when you go back to that stressful situation rather than on a road to burnout.
[00:30:32] Sally Clarke: And should probably have disclosed in advance of our conversation, Daniel, that I'm a burnout researcher myself. Yeah. Experienced the burnout as a lawyer. And I think you've really nailed. One of the key aspects that when we're looking at sort of what individuals can do to protect themselves against the experience of burnout is really fiercely focusing on rest.
[00:30:50] Sally Clarke: And that's not just sleep, but it's building rest into our days. And I think the Nagoski sisters refer to it as closing the stress cycle. So you're really giving your body that beautiful signal. It's okay. We can relax and start to, you know, experience pleasure. And I couldn't agree more that we are for many people at this stage, the level of chronic workplace stress is unprecedented and very difficult to escape, particularly once we're in that state of chronic stress, it becomes even harder to take active steps to leave it.
[00:31:17] Sally Clarke: So,
[00:31:18] Daniel Goleman: which is why I say, I encourage people to schedule the recovery, to be sure you don't skip it. It's all too easy. It looks like it's a waste of time. It's not. It's really important. You may be interested, I have a colleague, Richard Boyatzis, who's at Case Western School Management. He and I designed something called the Personal Sustainability Inventory.
[00:31:38] Daniel Goleman: Where people can evaluate the stressors, this is all data based, evaluate the stressors in their lives, and then evaluate a range of research based, empirically sound recovery methods and decide what they will do if they don't have one. Maybe you can put it in the show notes, it's called the PFA. Yeah, we will.
[00:31:59] Daniel Goleman: Yeah. Some companies are offering it to everybody because they know that they're stressing them out.
[00:32:04] Sally Clarke: Well, and I think it's also, we've talked in our conversation a lot about leaders, and I think there's a real role and a responsibility that leaders have to look after themselves and to be modeling these behaviors to others as well, because we need leaders to be well, to navigate.
[00:32:18] Sally Clarke: these challenging times, and to be able to, you know, bring an optimal state to themselves, to their teams, to organizations as well, so that we really can see work becoming an area of life through which we thrive, that it doesn't have that stressful, draining impact on us as human beings, that it uplifts us.
[00:32:35] Daniel Goleman: That's beautifully said, and I hope people listen to you.
[00:32:40] Alexis Zahner: I hope so too. We are trying, Daniel. Now, Daniel, we could quite honestly speak to you and have endless questions for you all day. But I'll leave our audience with just one, and that is for leaders who are listening right now who, who want to take seriously this optimal state and everything that we've discussed today, where would you suggest is the logical first place for them to start on that journey?
[00:33:02] Daniel Goleman: Well, with themselves, I would say. What is your level of self awareness? By the way, here's another difficulty with self awareness. People who are least self aware realize it the least.
[00:33:15] Alexis Zahner: Isn't that fun?
[00:33:16] Daniel Goleman: So, you know, it's all too easy to be a leader who thinks, well, I've got it together, which is why I love 360 degree assessments.
[00:33:26] Daniel Goleman: And I'm going to give you another one for your show notes. It's the emotional competence inventory where people pick others to evaluate them, but anonymously. So people can be very candid. People won't be candid with you because you're like the boss or you're a peer and I don't want to offend you. But I can say it if I do it anonymously, you choose eight or 10 people to evaluate you.
[00:33:53] Daniel Goleman: This is used for leadership development, actually. And then you get the feedback as an aggregate. You don't know who said what, but it gives you a profile of your strengths and limits as a leader. and you know now where to work. Maybe you'll have a coach or something, but this gives you a baseline, and then you can do it at the end of the process, which is maybe a year or two later, I don't know, and see if you actually got better.
[00:34:16] Daniel Goleman: Boyacis has found that he has a methodology for doing this with his MBAs and executive MBAs, and he's found that having people rated blind seven years later, what they worked on seven years before has sustained, if you do it correctly, which is very unusual. You know, the half life of these, you know, we're going to do a one day on empathy, you know, it's like, forget about it.
[00:34:43] Daniel Goleman: It doesn't stick. They call it spray and pray. You spray it on them and you pray it's going to last, but it doesn't necessarily.
[00:34:49] Sally Clarke: Exactly. It washes off the next day.
[00:34:53] Daniel Goleman: Exactly. Exactly. So change in this arena of personal skill that lasts requires sustained practice. There's no way around it because you're basically changing brain patterns, you know, in a very deep way.
[00:35:07] Alexis Zahner: Yeah. I couldn't agree more, Daniel. We certainly in all the work that we do. Like to create that space and ongoing opportunity for integration, because that's really where we have the impact to change ourselves and the workplaces where we operate.
[00:35:20] Daniel Goleman: Well said.
[00:35:21] Sally Clarke: Daniel, it's been an absolute delight to talk to you today.
[00:35:24] Sally Clarke: Thank you so much. And thank you for your incredible work that you do. It informs so much of what we do. And we'd love to have you back sometime soon.
[00:35:32] Daniel Goleman: Lovely. I'd love to do it. Thanks.
[00:35:41] Alexis Zahner: We hope that you love this conversation as much as we enjoyed having it. Now, we certainly don't play favorites on We Are Human Leaders, but gosh, the opportunity to sit down with Daniel Goleman was totally a peak experience for us. To learn more about Daniel's incredibly important work on emotional intelligence, visit And find a link to his brand new book, Optimal.
[00:36:05] Alexis Zahner: Please check out our show notes at www. wearehumanleaders. com. And if you're serious about upleveling your leadership by deepening your EQ, come and work with us at Human Leaders. Find out how on our website. Thanks for being with us for this conversation and we'll see you next time.