Daniel Goleman

Brief Biography

Daniel Goleman was born in 1946 in Stockton, California, into a Jewish family. His parents were both college professors.

Goleman received his bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in 1968 from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. While at the school, he took part in its Independent Scholar program, through which he was able to attend classes at the University of California at Berkeley. It was in Berkeley that Goleman developed a deep interest in traditional Indian philosophy, spirituality, and meditation practices.

Goleman was then admitted to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied with David C. McClelland.

During his graduate studies, Goleman won one of Harvard’s generous traveling fellowships, which permitted him to spend a year in India studying traditional systems of psychology and meditation.

Goleman obtained in master’s and doctoral degrees in Clinical Psychology in 1972 and 1973, respectively.

After graduating from Harvard, Goleman obtained a postdoctoral grant from the Social Science Research Council to return to South Asia for the 1973–1974 academic year. He carried out further research on Indian psychology and meditation in India and Sri Lanka. He eventually published this research as his first book, The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience

In 1974, Goleman was hired by Harvard as an Assistant Professor of Psychology.

The following year, in 1975, Goleman left academia to take up the position of Associate Editor of the popular magazine, Psychology Today, in New York City. In 1979, he was promoted to Senior Editor.

In 1984, Goleman was hired by the New York Times as a regular science writer reporting on new developments in psychology, cognitive psychology, and related fields—a position he held for the next 12 years, until 1996.

Goleman has also worked as a business consultant, as well as an Adjunct Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase.

Goleman is best known for his contributions to the field of personality psychology, especially the relationship between affect and cognition. He coined the term “emotional intelligence,” or “emotional quotient (EQ),” as a correlate to the traditional concept of “intelligence quotient (EQ).”

Goleman’s work has stressed the importance of treating depression, borderline personality disorder (BPD), and related pathologies by enhancing the patient’s innate capabilities for self-awareness, self-control, meditation, empathy, responsiveness to nonverbal cues, and interpersonal skills more generally.

Goleman has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and reviews. In addition, he is the author of more about 20 books, several of which have been bestsellers, most notably, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

Emotional Intelligence has been translated into more than 40 languages and has been hailed by Time magazine as one of the 25 most-important books in the domain of business management.

Just this year (2024), Goleman released a new book entitled Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day.

Notable Quotes

Note: The original sources of the following quotations attributed here to Daniel Goleman are provided where known. If no specific source is mentioned, then the attributed quotation may be assumed to derive from or (perhaps via paraphrase) be inspired by Goleman’s many academic and popular writings.

Body and Mind

Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings—anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness—is a form of disease prevention. Since the data show that the toxicity of these emotions, when chronic, is on a par with smoking cigarettes, helping people handle them better could potentially have a medical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

When we are in the grip of craving or fury, head-over-heals in love or recoiling in dread, it is the limbic system that has us in its grip.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences – the first person—with what the measurements show—the third person.

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.

Children and Social Media

Some children naturally have more cognitive control than others, and in all kids this essential skill is being compromised by the usual suspects: smartphones, TV, etc. But there are many ways that adults can help kids learn better cognitive control.

Compassion/Empathy

True compassion means not only feeling another’s pain but also being moved to help relieve it.

Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work.

When we focus on others, our world expands.

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (2006).

Compassion begins with attention.

Empathetic people are superb at recognizing and meeting the needs of clients, customers, or subordinates. They seem approachable, wanting to hear what people have to say. They listen carefully, picking up on what people are truly concerned about, and respond on the mark.

Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence (2013).

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.

Development of Emotional Intelligence

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.

Culture and Emotional Intelligence

Companies in the East put a lot more emphasis on human relationships, while those from the West focus on the product, the bottom line. Westerners appear to have more of a need for achievement, while in the East there’s more need for affiliation.

Emotions and Emotional Intelligence

In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

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

If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.

As much as 80% of adult “success” comes from EQ [emotional quotient].

For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when emotions hold sway.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

Emotions are contagious. We’ve all known it experientially.

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

Our emotional mind will harness the rational mind to its purposes, for our feelings and reactions—rationalizations—justifying them in terms of the present moment, without realizing the influence of our emotional memory.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

Feelings are self-justifying, with a set of perceptions and “proofs” all their own.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

Emotional intelligence does not mean merely “being nice.” At strategic moment it may demand not “being nice,” but rather, for example, bluntly confronting someone with an uncomfortable but consequential truth they’ve been avoiding.

Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998).

People who are emotionally adapt—who know and manage their feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people’s feelings—are at an advantage in any domain in life, whether in romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

There is an old-fashioned word for the body of skills that emotional intelligence represents: character.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

Our emotional intelligence determines our potential for learning the practical skills that are based on its five elements: self-awareness, motivation, self-regulation, empathy, and adeptness in relationships.

Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998).

“Emotional Intelligence” refers to the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships. It describes abilities distinct from, but complementary to, academic intelligence, the purely cognitive capacities measured by IQ.

Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998).

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

The social brain is in its natural habitat when we’re talking with someone face-to-face in real time.

People tend to become more emotionally intelligent as they age and mature.

Goleman on Goleman

Every morning, I go off to a small studio behind my house to write. I try to ignore all email and phone calls until lunchtime. Then I launch into the sometimes frantic busy-ness of a tightly scheduled day.

As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the ancient systems of psychology and meditation practices of Asia.

While [in India] I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind.

I began meditating at about that time and have continued on and off over the years.

Human Nature

The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today.

That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.)

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (2006).

Job Performance

Research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important an ingredient of outstanding performance as cognitive ability and technical skill combined.

Empathic, emotionally intelligent work environments have a good track record of increasing creativity, improving problem solving and raising productivity.

Leadership

Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal.

The most effective leaders are all alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence.

Gifted leadership occurs when heart and head—feeling and thought—meet. These are the two winds that allow a leader to soar.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

CEOs are hired for their intellect and business expertise—and fired for a lack of emotional intelligence.

The best leaders don’t know just one style of leadership—they’re skilled at several, and have the flexibility to switch between styles as the circumstances dictate.

IQ and technical skills are important, but emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership.

“What Makes a Leader?,” Harvard Business Review, November–December, 1998.

There are many leaders, not just one. Leadership is distributed. It resides not solely in the individual at the top, but in every person at every level who, in one way or another, acts as a leader to a group of followers—wherever in the organization that person is, whether shop steward, team head, or CEO.

Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence (2013).

Every businessperson knows a story about a highly intelligent, highly skilled executive who was promoted into a leadership position only to fail at the job. And they also know a story about someone with solid—but not extraordinary—intellectual abilities and technical skills who was promoted into a similar position and then soared. Such anecdotes support the widespread belief that identifying individuals with the “right stuff” to be leaders is more art than science. After all, the personal styles of superb leaders vary: Some leaders are subdued and analytical; others shout their manifestos from the mountaintops. And just as important, different situations call for different types of leadership. Most mergers need a sensitive negotiator at the helm, whereas many turnarounds require a more forceful authority.

“What Makes a Leader?,” Harvard Business Review, November–December, 1998.

Effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: They all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. It’s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter, but mainly as “threshold capabilities”; that is, they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions. But my research, along with other recent studies, clearly shows that emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership.

“What Makes a Leader?,” Harvard Business Review, November–December, 1998.

Mindfulness and Meditation

Mindfulness isn’t difficult, we just need to remember to do it.

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

I don’t think focus is in itself ever a bad thing. But focus of the wrong kind, or managed poorly, can be.

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

If you are doing mindfulness meditation, you are doing it with your ability to attend to the moment.

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.

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.

Nonverbal Cues

[P]eople’s emotions are rarely put into words. Far more often they are expressed through other cues. The key to intuiting another’s feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels: tone of voice, gesture, facial expression, and the like.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

Optimism and Pessimism

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.

Relationships

One aspect of a successful relationship is not just how compatible you are, but how you deal with your incompatibility.

The more socially intelligent you are, the happier and more robust and more enjoyable your relationships will be.

Interview with Sharon Jayson, “Sociability: It’s all in your mind,” usatoday.com. September 24, 2006.

Self-Absorption

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection – or compassionate action.

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (2006).

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is not just relaxation and not just meditation. It must combine relaxation with activity and dynamism. Technology can aid that.

The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.

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

Self-Confidence

People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

Self-Control

Emotional self-control is NOT the same as overcontrol, the stifling of all feeling and spontaneity.

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

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

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

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

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be content and effective in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that foster their own productivity; people who cannot marshal some control over their emotional life fight inner battles that sabotage their ability for focused work and clear thought.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

[O]ut-of-control emotions can make smart people stupid.

Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998).

[G]oal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. His finding underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a meta-ability, determining how well or how poorly people are able to use their other mental capacities.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006).

It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled. Start to subtract sevens successively from 100 and, if you keep your focus on the task, your chatter zone goes quiet.

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (2013).