Quotes by Daniel Goleman

Educators, long disturbed by schoolchildren’s lagging scores in math and reading, are realizing there is a different and more alarming deficiency:  emotional literacy.  And while laudable efforts are being made to raise academic standards, this new and troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school curriculum.  As one Brooklyn teacher put it, the present emphasis in schools suggests that “we care more about how well schoolchildren can read and write than whether they’ll be alive next week.”

Four separate abilities Thomas Hatch & Howard Gardner from Spectrum school, identify as components of interpersonal intelligence:

Organizing groups – the essential skill of the leader, this involves initiating and coordinating the efforts of a network of people.  This is the talent seen in the theatre directors or producers, in military officers, and in effective heads of organizations and units of all kinds.  On the playground, this is the child who takes the lead in deciding what everyone will play, or becomes team captain.

Negotiating solutions – the talent of the mediator, preventing conflicts or resolving those that flare up.  People who have this ability excel in deal-making, in arbitrating or mediating disputes, they might have a career in diplomacy, in arbitration or law, or as middlemen or managers of takeovers.  These are the kids who settle arguments on the playing field.

Personal connection - ... makes it easy to enter into an encounter or to recognize and respond fittingly to people’s feelings and concerns – the art of relationship.  Such people make good “team players,” dependable spouses, good friends or business partners; in the business world they do well as salespeople or managers, or can be excellent teachers.  [They] get along with virtually everyone else, easily entering into playing with them, and are happy doing so.  These children tend to be best at reading emotions from facial expressions and are most liked by their classmates.

Social analysis – being able to detect and have insights about people’s feelings, motives, and concerns.  This knowledge of how others feel can lead to an easy intimacy or sense of rapport.  At it’s best, this ability makes one a competent therapist or counselor –or, if combined with some literary talent, a gifted novelist or dramatist.

            However, if these interpersonal abilities are not balanced by an astute sense of one’s own needs and feelings and how to fulfill them, they can lead to a hollow social success – a popularity won at the cost of one’s true satisfaction.  Such is the argument of Mark Snyder, a University of Minnesota psychologist who has studied people whose social skills make them first-rate social chameleons, champions at making a good impression.  Their psychological credo might well be a remark by W. H. Auden who said that his private image of himself “is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.”  That trade-off can be made if social skills outstrip the ability to know and honor one’s own feelings: in order to be loved – or at least liked – the social chameleon will seem to be whatever those he is with seem to want.  The sign that someone falls into this pattern, Snyder finds, is that they make an excellent impression, yet have few stable or satisfying intimate relationships.  A more healthy pattern, of course, is to balance being true to oneself with social skills, using them with integrity.

            Social chameleons, though, don’t mind in the least saying one thing and doing another, if that will win them social approval.  They simply live with the discrepancy between their public face and their private reality.  Helena Deutsch, a psychoanalyst, called such people the “as-if personality,” shifting personas with remarkable plasticity as they pick up signals from those around them.  “For some people,” Snyder told me, “the public and private person meshes well, while for others there seems to be only a kaleidoscope of changing appearances.  They are like Woody Allen’s character Zelig, madly trying to fit in with whomever they are with.”

            Such people try to scan someone for a hint as to what is wanted from them before they make a response, rather than simply saying what they truly feel.  To get along and be liked, they are willing to make people they dislike think they are friendly with them.  And they use their social abilities to mold their actions as disparate social situations demand, so that they may act like very different people depending on whom they are with, swinging from bubbly sociability, say, to reserved withdrawal.  To be sure, to the extent that these traits lead to effective impression management, they are highly prized in certain professions, notably acting, trial law, sales, diplomacy, and politics.

            Another, perhaps more crucial kind of self-monitoring seems to make the difference between those who end up as anchorless social chameleons, trying to impress everyone, and those who can use their social polish more in keeping with their true feelings.  That is the capacity to be true, as the saying has it, “to thine own self,” which allows acting in accord with one’s deepest feelings and values no matter what the social consequences.  Such emotional integrity could well lead to, say, deliberately provoking a confrontation in order to cut through duplicity or denial – a clearing of the air that a social chameleon would never attempt.

Setting the emotional tone of an interaction is, in a sense, a sign of dominance at a deep and intimate level:  it means driving the emotional state of the other person.  This power to determine emotion is akin to what is called in biology a zeitgeher (literally, “time grabber”), process (such as the day-night cycle of the monthly phases of the moon) that entrains biological rhythms.  For a couple dancing, the music is a bodily zeitgeber.  When it comes to personal encounters, the person who has the more forceful expressivity – or the most power – is typically the one whose emotions entrain the other.   Dominant partners talk more, while the subordinate partner watches the others face more – a setup for the transmissions effect.  By the same token, the forcefulness of a good speaker – a politician or an evangelist, say – works to entrain the emotions of the audience.  That is what we mean by, “He had them in the palm of his hand.”  Emotional entrainment is the heart of influence.

One of the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term memory – patients feel better because they can’t remember why they were sad.

The work of worrying – when it succeeds – is to rehearse what those dangers are, and reflect on ways to deal with them.  But worry doesn’t work all that well.  New solutions and fresh ways of seeing a problem do not typically come from worrying, especially chronic worry.  Instead of coming up with solutions to these potential problems, worriers typically ruminate on the danger itself, immersing themselves in a low-key way in the dread associated with it while staying in the same rut of thought.  Chronic worriers worry about a wide range of things, most of which have almost no chance of happening; they read dangers into life’s journey that others never notice.

Worries typically follow such lines, a narrative to oneself that jumps from concern to concern and more often than not includes catastrophizing, imagining some terrible tragedy.  Worries are almost always expressed in the mind’s ear, not its eye – that is, in words, not images – a fact that has significance for controlling worry.

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.)

Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness.  “Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,” Kagan notes, “they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.”  This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, “is a biological feature of our species.”  - Daniel Goleman, pp. 61-62, Social Intelligence

While there is ample room in [Martin] Gardner's descriptions of the personal intelligences for insight into the play of emotions and mastery in managing them, Gardner and those who work with him have not pursued in great detail the role of feeling in these intelligences, focusing more on cognitions about feeling. This focus, perhaps unintentional, leaves unexplored the rich sea of emotions that makes the inner life and relationships so complex, so compelling and so often puzzling. And it leaves yet to be plumbed both the sense in which there is intelligence in emotions and the sense in which intelligence can be brought to emotions. -Goleman, Emotional Intelligence

…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. -Daniel Goleman, p.54, Social Intelligence