Daniel Goleman Quotes - Page 2

Cognitive skills such as big-picture thinking and long-term vision were particularly important. But when I calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels.

Risk taking and the drive to pursue innovative ideas are the fuel that stokes the entrepreneurial spirit.

The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.

One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us.

When I say manage emotions, I only mean the really distressing, incapacitating emotions. Feeling emotions is what makes life rich. You need your passions.

In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding.

Emotional self-control is NOT the same as overcontrol, the stifling of all feeling and spontaneity....when such emotional suppression is chronic, it can impair thinking, hamper intellectual performance and interfere with smooth social interaction. By contrast, emotional competence implies we have a choice as to how we express our feelings.

People who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can succeed next time around, while pessimists take the blame for the failure, ascribing it to some characteristic they are helpless to change.

Simple inattention kills empathy, let alone compassion. So the first step in compassion is to notice the other's need. It all begins with the simple act of attention.

School success is not predicted by a child's fund of facts or a precocious ability to read as much as by emotional and social measures; being self-assured and interested: knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with other children.

Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.

Whenever we feel stressed out, that's a signal that our brain is pumping out stress hormones. If sustained over months and years, those hormones can ruin our health and make us a nervous wreck.

Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike.

Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.

A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.

There is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy... They're controlled by different parts of the brain.

Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages.

Doggedness depends on emotional traits - enthusiasm and persistence in the face of setbacks - above all else.

Emotions are contagious. We've all known it experientially. You know after you have a really fun coffee with a friend, you feel good. When you have a rude clerk in a store, you walk away feeling bad.

Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood.

The near cousin of optimism is hope: knowing the steps needed to get to a goal and having the energy to pursue those steps. It is a primal motivating force, and its absence is paralyzing.

There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all emotions, by their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act. The root meaning of the word emotion, remember, is "to move.

There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.

Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.

Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival.