Daniel Goleman's Blog, page 15
November 11, 2013
Daniel Goleman: Attention Regulates Emotion
Extremes of every kind of attention are a problem. It’s important to find a balance between too narrow a focus, and attention that's too widely dispersed. Attention too far in either direction can throw you off your game.
Many consider flow to be an ideal state. That’s when your concentration is utterly absorbed – and you're most likely being challenged. You’re better able to tune out your mental chatter because you’re fully engrossed in a task. That can feel great since you’re not only being productive, but you’re also not distracted by negative self-talk or ruminations.
Of course, we’ve all experienced the opposite: an emotional hijack. That’s when we’re absorbed by a trigger, and we can’t stop thinking about something hurtful or upsetting – even at two in the morning. For so many of us, our emotions control our attention. Emotion is the brain's way of saying: “Don't think about that, think about this.” And when we're hijacked, we lose control of our attention.
Fortunately, the more we strengthen our circuitry for concentration, the easier it becomes to let go of emotional hijacking and return toward a flow state. Resilience is defined as how much time it takes to recover from being upset. The quicker your recovery, the more resilient you're going to be.
Strengthening attention helps you let go of stressful circumstances because the brain economizes our circuits. Being compelled to pay attention to your emotions is the opposite of being able to choose where you put your attention. If you're counting your breath, you choose to focus on the breath and let go of all other distraction. The circuits that strengthen attention also allow you to let go of the hijack.
When you're upset, you often have no idea how to extricate yourself from that mindset. You feel trapped because it’s difficult to use emotion to change emotion. But we can all develop ways to manage attention, and ultimately our emotions. One technique I recommend is mindfulness.
Mindfulness allows you to look at what's going on in your mind from the balcony. You can see, or become aware of the "I'm trapped" feeling. If you can get to the point where you notice that you're trapped, you're less trapped already. You can remind yourself, “there I go again,” which helps you detach yourself from difficult thoughts, which lead to difficult emotions.
After some practice, you'll build a muscle that's strong enough to ward off emotional distractions.
Watch my conversation on YouTube with Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project to learn more about the benefits of training your attention.
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Daniel Goleman’s new book FOCUS: The Hidden Driver of Excellence and CD Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence are now available.
His more recent books are The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights and Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence – Selected Writings (More Than Sound).
Leadership: A Master Class is Goleman’s comprehensive video series that examines the best practices of top-performing executives.
Related articles:
How to hold anyone's attention
The role of attention for creativity
Think about the benefits of unplugging
Photo: Bellurget Jean Louis / Getty Images
November 8, 2013
Systems Blindness: The Illusion of Understanding
Here was the dilemma and opportunity for a major national retailer: its magazine buyers were reporting that close to 65 percent of all the magazines printed in the United States were never sold. This represented an annual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the system, but no one party in the system could change it alone.
For years no one could solve this problem; everyone just shrugged. But for the magazine industry, squeezed by the digital media and falling sales, the matter was urgent. So the retail chain — among the biggest customers for magazines in the country — got together with a group of publishers and magazine distributors to see what they could do.
“There was a huge amount of waste, whether you look at it from the perspective of sheer cost, trees cut, or carbon emitted,” Jib Ellison, CEO of Blu Skye consulting, told me. Ellison, who helped convene the group, added, “We find this in most supply chains: they were built in the nineteenth century with a view toward what can be sold, not with sustainability or reducing waste in mind. When one part of the chain optimizes for itself, it tends to suboptimize the whole.”
One of the biggest dilemmas was that advertisers paid according to how many magazines their ads appeared in—not how many were sold. But a magazine “in circulation” might just sit on a shelf for weeks or months, and then be pulped. So publishers had to go back to their advertisers and explain a new basis for charging them.
The retail chain analyzed which were its best-selling magazines in what stores. The chain was able to adjust where magazines went by where they were wanted. All in all, the various fixes reduced waste by up to 50 percent. This was not only an environmental plus; it also opened shelf space for other products while saving beleaguered publishers money.
Solving such problems takes seeing the systems that are in play. “We look for a systemic problem that no one player can solve — not a person, a government, a company,” Ellison tells me. The first breakthrough in the magazine dilemma was simply getting all these players together — and getting the system into the room.
“Systems blindness is the main thing we struggle with in our work,” says John Sterman, who holds the Jay W. Forrester chair at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
One of the worst results of system blindness occurs when leaders implement a strategy to solve a problem — but ignore the pertinent system dynamics.
“It’s insidious,” says Sterman. “You get short-term relief, and then the problem comes back, often worse than before.”
The problem gets compounded by what’s called the “illusion of explanatory depth” where we feel confidence in our understanding of a complex system, but in reality have just superficial knowledge.
Try to explain in depth how an electric grid operates or why increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide ups the energy in storms, and the illusory nature of our systems understanding becomes clearer.
How do you overcome systems blindness in your work? Please share your insights in the comments section, or tweet them to @DanielGolemanEI (#focus).
*****
Daniel Goleman’s new book FOCUS: The Hidden Driver of Excellence and CD Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence are now available.
His more recent books are The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights and Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence – Selected Writings (More Than Sound).
Leadership: A Master Class is Goleman’s comprehensive video series that examines the best practices of top-performing executives.
The post Systems Blindness: The Illusion of Understanding appeared first on Daniel Goleman.
Q&A: Daniel Goleman, author and psychologist, on finding focus in a world of distractions
Nearly 20 years ago, New York Times science reporter Daniel Goleman wrote a book that reshaped offices, classrooms and interpersonal relationships around the world. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ became an international sensation. It topped bestseller and “most influential books” lists and sold five million copies worldwide. Goleman had a hit on his hands.
But he didn’t stop there. A Harvard-educated psychologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, Goleman has continued to write books on social intelligence and other human-centered subjects. His most recent work — Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence — hit shelves earlier this month. We spoke with Goleman about finding focus in a world packed with distractions, the type of attention required to create and innovate, and how the topic of emotional intelligence has changed since he first began studying it 20 years ago.
Read the full interview at smartplanet.com
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Just Like Me: Understanding the Common Human Condition
At a time when the news offers a steady stream of ways people battle because of the differences between them, there’s an antidote sorely needed: an understanding of the ways someone else shares our common human condition. Call it “just like me.”
That’s the attitude that counters the we-and-they thinking epidemic in the kind of cliques in schools that foment fights or bullying, in the biases against diversity in the workplace and in the wars being fought between groups worldwide.
It was called the “narcissism of small differences” by Freud. Vamik Volkan, a Turkish psychiatrist, saw this at work in his native Cyprus, where for generations, Cypriots and Turks waged a war against each other when, to the eye of someone just visiting the island, they were one and the same people. He recognized that each group had seized on some small custom unique to the other group and demonized them for it, all the while ignoring the vast number of ways they were similar.
That’s the story of all too many wars throughout history, of too many arguments against letting people of all backgrounds have a fair chance, and of too many instances of bullying in high school hallways.
Read the full interview at the Huffington Post
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Daniel Goleman talks with CASEL about Focus
Among the key points that you make in Focus, which do you think are most important for educators to know about in their role as facilitators of young people’s learning?
One of the main concepts in Focus that every educator should know about is cognitive control. It’s the ability to focus on one thing and ignore distractions, to keep your mind from wandering. Cognitive control is the basis for delaying gratification and emotional self-regulation. The strongest evidence for the importance of cognitive control was a longitudinal study done with more than 1,000 kids born over the course of a year in one New Zealand city. The children were assessed for cognitive control between the ages of 4 and 8 using a sophisticated battery of measures as well as teacher and parent reports. Then they were tracked down in their thirties. Cognitive control turned out to be a better predictor of their financial success and their health, and also whether or not they had a prison record, than their IQ or the wealth of their family of origin.
Read the full interview at http://www.casel.org
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November 5, 2013
Daniel Goleman: Focus on How You Connect
We’re not going to eliminate technology from our lives anytime soon. Nor should we. Smart phones and social media expand our universe. We can connect with others or collect information easier and faster than ever. But they also expand our spectrum of attention. In this instance, too much of a good thing can become a distraction, even a false reality – sometimes at the detriment of our relationships.
Spreading ourselves too thin across an ever-growing number of platforms of interaction can weaken our personal bonds. We shouldn’t confuse all of our social media connections with the rich personal world of real-time relationships. Granted, our hyper-connected world – even with people we rarely see or speak with regularly – can offer very valuable sources of information. They expand what you can know: you may find out about a job opening, or get introduced to someone you might date.
But getting lost in a world of too many digital connections can be very unfulfilling and isolating. That’s why when it comes to close personal connections, try to prioritize your communication methods. When possible, make the interaction face to face – especially if you need to discuss something important.
The social brain is in its natural habitat when we're talking with someone face-to-face in real time. It’s picking up information that it wants in the moment. It's reading prosody in voice, emotions, and nonverbal cues. And it's doing it invisibly, doing it constantly, out of our awareness – and then telling us what to do next to keep things smooth and on track.
The problem with communicating too much via email or text is that they have no channels for the social brain to attend to. You have nothing for the orbital frontal cortex, which is dying to get this information to latch onto, to inhibit impulse and tell you, “no don't do that, do this.” We’re essentially flying blind.
But if you have to communicate electronically, try to create more presence in your interactions. Take a few seconds to reflect on your intention and message. Is it clear? Will the tone be misinterpreted? That brief pause can save you a lot of back pedaling and hassle for an intentionally (or unintentionally) snarky comment.
For more about the importance of attention in our day-to-day lives, watch Daniel Goleman’s interview with Mindful editor, Barry Boyce.
How do you stay focused in conversations - face-to-face or online? Please share your insights in the comments section, or tweet them to @DanielGolemanEI (#focus).
*****
Daniel Goleman’s new book FOCUS: The Hidden Driver of Excellence and CD Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence are now available.
His more recent books are The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights and Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence – Selected Writings (More Than Sound).
Leadership: A Master Class is Goleman’s comprehensive video series that examines the best practices of top-performing executives.
Related articles:
Mindfulness: when focus means single tasking
The two biggest distractions - and what to do about them
Think about the benefits of unplugging
Photo: Henrik Sorensen / Getty Images
October 24, 2013
Mindful interviews Daniel Goleman on Focus
Since the devices we depend on have “built-in” seductions, we need to be more mindful of when our attention wanders off, says Daniel Goleman. In conversation with Mindful‘s Editor-in-Chief, Goleman talks about why the social brain suffers when we trade face time for screen time, and how we can preserve focus when it comes to relationships and interactions. Get the full interview at mindful.org.
The post Mindful interviews Daniel Goleman on Focus appeared first on Daniel Goleman.
October 15, 2013
A Parent’s Full Focus Is a Form of Love
An editor I know takes her work home (and who doesn’t these days?). She too often sits for hours in front of her laptop trying to keep up with her workload, while also trying to keep an eye on her 3-year-old.
And that toddler, whenever she has the chance, closes the lid of the laptop.
That gesture symbolizes a battle children fight daily for full attention from parents. Having a parent look you in the eye, watch you do a somersault, or just listen fills a deep need in children: it’s reassurance that someone cares.
Every child, developmental experts tell us, wants to feel that someone attunes to them, senses their feelings, and will take care of their needs. The British child psychiatrist John Bowlby called this a “secure base,” and saw that having one let a child explore the world: learn, take risks, attempt something new. That secure base represents a safe haven, a place to return to when things out there get scary or overwhelming.
Children who have that secure base, who know someone attunes to them and cares, are most ready to learn by the time they get to school: they can pay attention to the teacher, better manage their impulses, grasp the concepts they are learning.
Earlier in life, as toddlers, studies find, when a grown-up and a toddler share full attention to a third thing — say, the word for that animal over there — that is when the toddler’s brain best registers that new word.
And its not just kids who need attention — love manifests as full focus. It says, silently, I am here for you. We all crave it from the people in our lives who matter most.
But attention is a fixed mental capacity. We only have so much to give. The challenge for parents: make sure enough of that precious commodity is going to your child — and to each other.
Mutual focus — paying attention to each other — is the key ingredient in rapport. We can’t have chemistry with someone without such full focus. And given the zillion distractions we all face, the need to make a conscious effort to create these rich moments has never been greater.
An executive tells me that she and her husband have a pact. The moment they get home they put their phones and tablets in a drawer and spend time with each other. It’s always one of the best parts of her day.
Daniel Goleman’s new book FOCUS: The Hidden Driver of Excellence and CDs Focus for Kids: Enhancing Concentration, Caring and Calm and Focus for Teens: Enhancing Concentration, Caring and Calm are now available.
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Forget Delayed Gratification: What Kids Really Need Is Cognitive Control
By now, we’ve all heard about the famous marshmallow test, in which 4-year-olds are told they can either have the juicy one in front of them now, or two later. The 40-year-old experiment, which has been replicated using a variety of enticements, purports to prove that children who can delay gratification will meet with the most success in life. But fighting off impulses is just one part of a much broader and more predictive mental skill, one that scientists call cognitive control or the ability to manage your attention.
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How Focus Changed my Thinking about Emotional Intelligence
In a second-grade classroom at a school in Spanish Harlem, the teacher told me that a child had come to class very upset: Someone she knew had been shot. The teacher then asked the students how many of them knew a person who had been shot—and every hand went up.
The children’s school was right next to a massive housing project were most of these children live. On top of the difficulties of such a childhood, half of the children in this class had “special needs,” ranging from attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder to the autism spectrum. I expected the atmosphere to be chaotic. Instead the students were quiet, focused, and calm.
The secret? I watched the children have their daily session of “breathing buddies,” where they lie on the floor, each with a favorite stuffed animal on their belly, and count 1-2-3 as their breath rises and as it falls. This simple exercise strengthens the brain’s circuits for attention—and it has changed my thinking about emotional intelligence.
The prefrontal circuitry that focuses the mind has another role: It also calms the body from stress arousal. These children were training their brains to be both more concentrated and to recover more quickly from upsetting emotions (which is the operational definition of resilience).
Those two skills heighten a child’s readiness to learn. They also enhance their emotional intelligence (EI). Here’s why.
EI refers to two kinds of focus. First: an inward awareness of our thoughts and our feelings, and applying that in managing our upsets and focus on our goals. Second: a focus on others, to empathize and understand them, and on the basis of this to have effective interactions and relationships.
What I had not realized until now was how essential the basic skills of attention—focus—are in building these skills.
Linda Lantieri, head of the Inner Resilience Program, which brought the breathing exercise to the school along with a host of other emotional intelligence skill-builders tells me that when children strengthen their focusing abilities in this way, it speeds up by a year or two their acquisition of the rest of the EI skill set.
When I spoke to the teacher of these second-graders, she told me about a day when scheduling glitches made them skip the breathing exercise. The result: the kids were all over the place.
With young people growing up in a world of distractions as never before, it’s time to teach attention skills, the fundamental ability in readiness to learn.
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