Daniel Goleman's Blog, page 17

What Helps Kids Focus Better – and Why They Need Help

The other day a kid rode by, texting while riding down the street on his bike. I saw a group of kids in a fast-food joint having lunch. Instead of talking and just having fun together they were each absorbed in a tablet or smartphone. They may as well have been alone.

A middle-school teacher complains her recent crop of students haven’t been able to understand the textbooks nearly as well as those in previous years.

Our tech – tablets, texts, Facebook, tweets, you name it – has changed childhood. And that has huge implications for how our kids’ brains develop the ability to pay attention – and to learn.

Kids learn best when they can maintain sustained attention, whether to what a teacher is saying, their textbook, or their homework. The root of learning is keen focus; distractions kill comprehension. But the new normal for young people continually interrupts their focus with distractions.

This is particularly alarming in light of very strong research results showing that a child’s ability to resist the temptation of distraction and stay focused predicts how she will fare financially and health wise in adulthood. Some call it “self-control”, others “grit” or “delay of gratification.” It boils down to the tenacity to keep your eyes on your goal (or schoolwork) and resist impulse and distraction.

Neuroscientists tell us this crucial mental ability hinges on the growth of a neural strip in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead, which connects to circuitry that helps manage both attention and unruly emotions. This circuitry grows with the rest of the brain from birth throughout childhood and the teen years.

The more a youngster can practice keeping her focus and resist distraction, the stronger and more richly connected this neural real estate becomes. By the same token, the more distracted, the less so.

This mental ability is like a muscle: it needs proper exercise to grow strong. One way to help kids: give them regular sessions of focusing time, the mental equivalent of workouts in the gym.

I’ve seen this done in schools, with second-graders becoming calm and concentrated with a daily session of watching their breath – the basic training in bringing a wandering mind back to a single focus. And parents who help kids do this at home will be doing them – and their prefrontal cortex – a favor.

Learn some guided exercises to help young people sharpen their attention skills with my CDs Focus for Kids: Enhancing Concentration, Caring and Calm and Focus for Teens: Enhancing Concentration, Caring and Calm. 

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The Two Biggest Distractions – And What to Do About Them

Distractions are the enemy of focus. Being able to keep your focus amidst the daily din of distraction makes you better able to use whatever talents you need to apply – whether making a business plan or a cheese soufflé. The more prone to distraction, the worse we do.

Yet we live in a time when we are more inundated by distractions than ever in human history. Tech gadgets and apps invade our concentration in ways the brain’s design never anticipated.

Scientists talk about two broad varieties of distractions: sensory and emotional. The sensory ones include everything from that too-loud guy at the next table in the coffee shop while you’re trying to focus on answering your emails, to those enticing pingy popups on your computer screen.

We are constantly ignoring sensory distractions – that’s the essence of paying attention. William James, a founder of America psychology, wrote a century or so ago that attention comes down to the mind’s eye noticing clearly “one of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”

Notice, for instance, the feeling of the chair as it supports you. That sensation has been there all this while, though included among the vast amount of mental stimuli you’ve been ignoring.

Much harder to ignore than these random sensory inputs are emotional distractions. If one of those emails you’ve been working through happens to trigger a strong reaction – annoyance or anger, anxiety or even fearfulness – that distraction will instantly become the focus of your thoughts, no matter what you’re trying to focus on.

The brain’s wiring gives preference to our emotional distractions, creating pressing thought loops about whatever’s upsetting us. Our brain wants us to pay attention to what matters to us, like a problem in our relationships.

There is one key difference between hopeless rumination – the kind of thought that awakens you at 2 am and keeps going until you finally drift off again at 4 am – and useful reflection. The key: whether we can come up with some solution or new understanding that at least tentatively solves the difficulty so we can let go of it and get back to whatever we were supposed to be doing.

So what’s a strategy for dealing with distraction? Here’s one of mine: as a writer, my job comes down to producing a certain amount of useful text regularly. So my daily routine starts with a cup of tea, breakfast with my wife, and then a meditation session where I gather my focus. Then I write.

I don’t look at emails, take phone calls, or otherwise let distractions creep into my focused time. That keeps the sensory kind out, and the emotional kind to a minimum. I’ve got the whole rest of the day to deal with those.

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A Leader’s Primary Task: Guide Attention

The news recently that RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, may be looking for a buyershows once again that how leaders guide attention can make or break a company.

The term “strategy” can be understood as referring to how a leader directs the focus of an entire organization. Each division – finance, marketing, R&D – focuses on that strategy in its own way. A change in strategy reorients where everyone’s attention should go, and how.

The best leaders sense when and where to shift the collective focus, getting it there at the right time – for example, to capitalize on an emerging trend.

While any one person’s attention has a limited capacity, an organization’s attention bandwidth can be immense. But if that huge bandwidth has no direction, the result will be confusion. Some of the signs of organizational attention deficit include a lack of data that leads to bad decisions and a paucity of reflection on where long-term forces are heading, and so a lack of strategic wisdom.

Blackberry was founded and led to success by co-CEOs who were brilliant engineers. Their focus on excellence in engineering made the Blackberry a winning technology in its time. But they kept the company’s focus there too long, missing fundamental market and tech changes like the shift to faster networks and the rise of the iPhone and Android.

At one time Blackberry sales captured more than half the U.S. market for mobile phones. Today their market share hovers around three or four percent.

At RIM that reorienting of focus came too late. By contrast, consider Intel under the leadership of Andrew Grove, the legendary CEO who built the company to the top of its market. At one time, early in its history, the company faced what Grove calls a “valley of death,” where a company can disappear.

From its earliest days Intel had focused on making computer chips – and it failed to notice that Japanese manufacturers were undercutting its sales. As Grove candidly admits, that failure of attention to marketing realities almost torpedoed the company.

But Grove deftly shifted the company’s focus to what was then a side-business, making sophisticated micro-processers. Within a few years during the peak of the popularity of PCs and laptops, the vast majority of those machines displayed a sticker, “Intel Inside.”

Intel’s leaders had seen an opportunity coming, and focused on how to seize it.

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Amy Elizabeth Fox interviews Daniel Goleman on Focus

In your new book, Focus, you talk about great leaders needing to engage Exploitation and well as Exploration.  Why are these two functions so critical and how are they different?

These are the two main approaches to business strategy actually.  In Exploitation you take something you are very good at  and you get better and better at it.  You progress and you find success in fine-tuning  what you do .  This is what made Microsoft so profitable for so many years. The problem is that the world in which what you do so well paid off doesn’t stay still. Things move, things change and Exploration is what you then need.  Exploration is the strategic approach that says “What’s new?  What’s innovative? What is the unfilled niche today?”  It is Apple in the years that it overtook Microsoft. It means coming up with new ways of doing things with innovation, with creative insights, and with new approaches to business that are going to pay off in new ways in a new reality.

What would make organizations very good at Exploration as that seems to be a key strategy task in times of fast paced change?

One of the difficulties of getting to Exploration is the seduction of Exploitation.  It is so comfortable and easy and pleasing to keep making money in the same old way.  In a sense this is a trap because as with Mircosoft or Blackberry the ways that you made money that are so pleasing aren’t going to last.

What helps an organization be better at Exploration and what helps key individuals who are strategic thinkers get better at it is to realize that they have to detach, to let go of what seems such an obvious path to success.  They need to start looking at creative alternatives and that means from an intentional point of view, from a focus point of view, not just concentrating on what has been working but letting your mind roam free and gathering as much information as you can, as much input as you can, about the new reality.

In the creative process there is this paradox in that our best ideas come to us from the bottom up brain. This is a part of the brain that works automatically, that is a voracious information processor but is out of our awareness.  That’s why our creative insights come to us in off times because when we are really focused and effortfully concentrating on a goal or on a task or on a problem our focus suppresses this part of the brain. We don’t get the messages.

But in our downtimes, our off moments such as when we are taking a shower or going out for a walk or when we’re meditating, whatever it may be then we hear the small voice that says “Hey, put these two things together, these two elements and you’ll have a novel combination”.  That is a creative insight and we are only going to let it reach our awareness if we get into another mode of focus.  That is when the creative innovations , the Exploration starts to bear fruit.

I love how much of your work focuses on neuroscience and how it can inform our views on leadership development.  Through your work on emotional intelligence many of us have come to understand the amygdala and its role in fight or flight protection. Dan., you were just talking about the bottom up part of the brain.   In the new book you focus on this different aspect of brain functioning, this bottom up part of the brain, especially the insula.  Why is the insula important for leaders to understand?

The insula is extremely important in understanding how attention works in the brain and  how to use it in the most effective  way.  The insula is the part of the brain that monitors  our organs and  our entire body, so when you tune into your “gut feeling” you are using your insula.

The bottom up brain, this enormous information processor, has no direct connection to the verbal cortex, the part of the brain that thinks in words.  However, it has enormous connectivity to the GI tract, to the gut.  We get its input often as a felt sense, an instinct that “this feels right” or “this doesn’t feel right.”    The insula is a rudder in life and it’s a rudder in business too because no matter how good the numbers may look there may be something in your life experience that tells you “Hey wait a minute we shouldn’t go ahead with this deal” and that’s information too. So the insula helps us track that. It’s absolutely crucial for very effective self awareness .

In the book you talk about self-awareness as the one meta-ability that all leaders need to have.  And you posit a link between high self -awareness and smart decision-making.  Can you explain how this works?

It’s counter intuitive because self-awareness is the most elusive of all the leadership competencies we find.  In fact many organizational competence models neglect self-awareness.  You just don’t see it but it is absolutely crucial. There was just a study published of traders in London and it showed that those with the highest self awareness made about half million pounds a year and those with the lowest self awareness about one hundred thousand.  I believe that self-awareness makes a huge difference in business. What’s hard is that we cannot see it explicitly in another person the way you can see relationship skills; these are the most obvious in the leadership set. With self-awareness you have to deduce it from how   people behave.

But in our own lives it is extremely important that each of us have a heightened Self Awareness because it’s crucial for self-management.   For example. it is key to being able to keep your eye on the goal and not get distracted by all of today’s technology interruptions: emails, texts, cell phones. We have this  barrage of temptations and distractions coming to us because of our apps and our tech devices .   That’s a new business reality.  It means we are besieged, and our attention and focus on that one thing that we are supposed to do at any given moment of work  is continually threatened.  Its having strong self awareness that lets you monitor that and see , “Is my attention drifting off into that thing that’s seductive or interesting but not important, or can I stay on task.?”  So self-awareness is  fundamental to getting the job done.

You said the emergent research on focus has caused you to rethink emotional intelligence.  Specifically in the new book you talk about the importance  of a leader attuning to an inner emotional reality and to that of those they seek to inspire.  Can you share with us what’s new in your understanding of emotional intelligence for leaders?

The brain intermingles its circuitry for attention and emotional intelligence. This made me realize my model of emotional intelligence could be reformulated in terms of attention: Inner focus includes self-awareness and self-management; Other focus include social awareness and relationship management.

Highlighting the hidden role of attention in these competencies can help with coaching and cultivating strengths in them, by more explicitly assessing and training the underlying attention abilities.

You introduce the notion of three areas of focus:  inner, other and outer.  Can you elaborate on each?

Inner focus includes self-awareness and self-management, which of course is half of Emotional Intelligence.  Other awareness refers to empath and relationship management – social intelligence — which is the second half of Emotional Intelligence. I co-designed a 360-degree assessment tool with the HayGroup, the Emotional and Social Competence inventory, for helping executives get better at these abilities.

And then I describe Outer focus, mainly systems level awareness. I argue that all three kinds of focus are essential to leadership. Outer focus is being aware of the larger forces that are at work that impinge on what you are doing, and that determine the success or not of what you are trying to do and the way you are trying to do it.  So it might be organizational dynamics. It might be new technologies that are going to shake up your market. It might be new environmental realities.  For example, earlier today I read in the Times that the movement among institutions like universities to divest companies that are upping the carbon in the air is really gaining traction. In certain sectors you better be aware of this and think about sustainability and investment risk.  In other words leaders don’t just need inner awareness and empathy and getting along and managing other people but also a keen sensitivity to the larger forces at work.

This notion, that companies need to be alert and scanning their external environment, is well summarized by a recently developed assessment instrument used by McKinsey & Company that they call the Organizational Health Index.  One of the key measures McKinsey & Company uses to measure organizational health is “external reference” which they describe as, “ XXX (amy to fill in)

In the book you took about organizations struggling with a negative climate.  What is a negative climate and how do so many organizations wind up with one and at what costs?  What can one do about that?

Negative climates develop on teams within divisions and within entire organizations.  We see so many organizations struggle when employees lose focus and get disengaged.  There are two main internal states in people who report feeling negative in an organization.  One is being so stressed that you are continually frazzled and the other is that you are so alienated and disinterested that you are constantly bored.

Alienation may come for example from having a run-in with a superior where the boss is rude, abrasive, demeaning and so on  and then thereafter you are alienated. You just don’t feel that you belong in this family anymore although you are still occupying a desk .. Or it may be that you are underchallenged – that your job does not engage either your best abilities nor what you care about most.

Of course the antidote to these two negative climates varies according to what the particular diagnosis is.  In the case of the employee who is disinterested or alienated it’s quite different from the employee who is overwhelmed.

So to start with the people who are disengaged, the answer is to find something that will bring them back in, that will motivate them, something that will have them bring their whole selves to work.  It may be changing the definition of what they are doing, of what their job is or finding something they have a personal passion for and helping that become part of what it is they do.  Or it may be a leader who can articulate an inspiring mission that actually resonates with that person, but it has to be an authentic resonance from the heart to the heart.  There are various strategies for disengaged employees.

There has been a whole movement in the organizational literature in the last decade helping organizations to identify what their employees strengths are, what kind of tasks give them energy, and to let them inform their career path.  Many companies these days are helping manager’s to investigate the natural strengths of their employees and to use these to inform their career path.  There may be a leader who can articulate an inspiring vision that actually resonates with that person and you assign the employee to one of the leaders active projects.

For those who are overly stressed you have to ask the question are we really giving them enough support or are we asking too much of them.  Is there a way in which we can lower the bar and actually get better productivity…questions like that.

There has also been some wonderful work coming out of Tony Schwartz and the Energy Project on how to help employees manager their energy (mental, physical, emotional and spiritual) to stay engaged and invested in their work over time.

I loved the notion of a leader’s aperture.  Why is cultivating a strong scanning ability so important for leaders and what is its role in innovation?

Aperture is using your attention like the aperture on a camera, zooming in or zooming out.  It means you are flexible about what you see and you are not stuck out there or in here.  You can switch as needed. Zooming in is seen, for example,  when you make a presentation and you are picking up how the people are reacting so that you can fine tune what you say or how you say it or when you say it.  Zooming out is absolutely crucial as well.  This is taking a wide scan and learning to pick up on the environment, on what is going on in the outer world to make sure your team, your unit or your company is responding to the changing eco-system in which the organization exists.

What happened personally that led you to write this book on Focus?

A couple of things led to my interest in this area.  First, I noticed personally this tension that I mentioned between getting what you have to do accomplished and all the temptations of email and texts and so on, all the seductions of attention that are constantly pulling at us.  And also noticing how it intrudes in relationships.  You go out to a restaurant and you can see a couple spend much of the dinner reading their texts and emails.  Or you can see an entire family and everyone is looking at an electronic screen the entire time. Or at least half of them are. I wanted to understand what is happening and I realized that our attention is being besieged..

As a science journalist, which is my background, I am also tracking new research and in the last two or three years there has been a real explosion of findings about the attention circuitry in the brain.  And I thought this had huge implications.  And this is very similar to why I wrote Emotional Intelligence because at that time there was a wave of new research findings on the brain and emotions, which to that point had been little understood — and yet were crucial in our lives and in our work places.  Here I am doing the same thing for attention that I did for emotions in Emotional Intelligence.

Let’s follow up on this theme of attention, of focus.  I can’t help but think of one of your earliest books, The Meditative Mind,.  In that book you wrote about mindfulness practice and its power to improve our ability to direct our attention.  How can mindfulness help with Focus or in building the skill of directing your attention?

Well in that first book which I wrote way back in 1980s I said that meditation is a retraining of your attention.  That is the way cognitive science looks at what you are doing when in meditation you make a pact with yourself to focus your attention on this one thing, or to maintain a mindful attentional stance to whatever arises in your awareness .  If you think of the mind as a mental gym, the basic move in meditation is a direct analog to working on a Cybex machine and doing reps to build your bicep muscle.  Every time your mind is wandering and you bring it back you are strengthening the neural circuitry for attention Meditation is a very direct method for upping your ability to focus.

For close to thirty years you have been a champion of mindfulness and the importance of mindfulness for leaders but also for society at large.  In the last number of years, in part due to your pioneering scholarship and teaching, many companies are increasingly teaching mindfulness to their employees.  What do you hope will be the benefit of this and what is the link between this and your new work on focus?

Dozens of companies now offer mindfulness training to their employees, and the research suggests this makes good sense. It not only strengthens the neural circuitry for attention, but also tends to make people more empathic an helpful. And that can only lead to a more positive, productive organizational climate.

But apart from work, I also hope that schools will include attention-enhancing exercises for kids. In preschoolers, this increases a child’s learning readiness: they are more able to pay attention to the teacher, concentrate on their work, an manage their emotions and feelings so they are better behaved. This cluster of abilities – called cognitive control –turns out to predict their health and career success better than their childhood IQ or even the economic status of their family of origin.

Beyond just individual capacities to increase focus I wondered, too, if there was an application of these principles to the effectiveness of teams to work together and generate collective intelligence and to organizations as a whole?

It is not just teams but organizations as a whole that share attention and distribute attention. If you think of the different divisions of a company — marketing, finance, R&D and so on — you are talking about different ways people deploy their attention and then share across those siloes what they do, what they learn, to create a collective intelligence which is the intellectual capital of that group. Teams are a kind of microcosm of that where the attention of everyone on the team creates a collective intelligence that is greater then any one person.  There is a Japanese saying that “All of us are smarter then any one of us” because of this ability to expand the collective bandwidth of  attention and to share what we learn from these different channels.

You see attention operate at the group level in a team.  Self-awareness means that a team can understand its own dynamics and self-correct.  For example a team can see that a problem is simmering and deal with it rather then let it blow up, or it can use its self-awareness to create high level of harmony and collaboration which is one mark of high performing teams.  It can use the analog of empathy to understand other parts of the organization or key groups that impact the team, and understand those people’s point of view, so that you can interact more effectively or mesh with them more smoothly or influence them to get what you need.  So attention operates.at every level whether it’s a team or a company or society as a whole.

Its very touching for me that even as your new book, Focus is being published our President Erica Ariel Fox’s new book, Winning from Within, will also be published by Harper Business this Fall.

I know you and Erica conducted a wonderful conversation last Spring about her work that is now part of the Leadership: A MasterClass Series produced by our media partner More Than Sound.  I know, therefore, that you are familiar with Erica’s model of the “inner negotiators” and her focus on negotiating first with yourself.

Can you explain how this critical inner monologue among the Big Four (Thinker, Warrior, Lover and Dreamer) all play out as leaders try to maintain their focus and get results in the world?

As Erica suggests, each one of these parts of us has a different kind of focus.  Each of the Big Four has a different expertise.  In order to operate on all cylinders we need to be as good at each of these as is possible and to integrate them.  To bring the information that each of them gathers into a central understanding and to marshall that information for whatever decision may be at hand.  This is why I I believe Erica’s method will make a great contribution to leadership development helping people to move fluidly among these dimensions of focus and develop a more centered and integrated approach to how to deploy them.

 

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Secrets of habit change

When you’re trying to help someone else (or yourself) get over counter-productive patterns and adapt new ones, it helps if you understand the neuroscience of habit change.

In my wife Tara Bennett-Goleman’s new book, Mind-Whispering: A New Map to Freedom from Self-Defeating Habits, she explains recent neuroscience research on how our habits form in  the first place, why they are so hard to alter, and smart tactics for replacing dysfunctional ones with more effective ways of being in the world.

One concept that helps us understand how habits operate is “modes.” These are overall orchestrations of emotional habits that include how we perceive situations and kneejerk ways of acting and interacting.

We each have our personal set of triggers that unleash these modes. In the anxious mode, for instance, we are hyper-sensitive to anything that suggests an important relationship is being threatened, and over-react.

Every mode makes us a different person for the time being. In a controlling mode, for instance, we dictate to others what we think they should do, oblivious to how this makes them feel.

Such modes of being are counter-productive in a leader, parent, or spouse.  But because habits are so strong once we learn them, people are often at a loss about how to stop themselves from going through the same self-defeating routines all over again – or don’t even see that there’s anything wrong.

But the neuroscience of habit also tells us how we can go about changing them. To learn more, you might want to look at Mind Whispering. It will be released tomorrow, April 23.

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It’s modes, not traits

I know a woman who at work seems emotionally reactive, needy and dependent – everyone says, “That’s just her personality.”

But then when she was part of a group touring the labyrinths of Europe, a friend from her workplace who also went reported – a bit shocked – that the woman was nothing like her usual self. She took initiative and explored strange cities on her own, was emotionally stable, and fun to be with.

All of us are different people in different situations, or with varied groups, or from time to time, and at various stages of our lives. The old personality model, that we have fixed traits that stay with us throughout our lives, doesn’t do justice to how flexible our behavior can be.

Traits have long been used to pigeonhole people in the workplace, for everything from hiring to placing people in the “right” job.

But today brain science tells us our brains are “plastic” – they can change with the right development experience – and they are far more elastic than the trait idea gives credit to.

“Modes” are a new concept that lets us understand how and why we actually are diverse people at various times. A mode orchestrates our entire way of being: how we perceive and interpret the world, how we react – our thoughts, feelings, actions and interactions.

For example, there’s the avoidant mode, where we try to distance ourselves from feelings and people; the anxious mode, where we over-worry our relationships – and the secure mode, where we can take in emotions with calm, feel secure in ourselves and are able to take smart risks, and can focus in ways that help us be at our best.

The liberating effect of thinking about modes rather than “personality types” is that modes come and go. We can learn what triggers our modes, what makes some self-defeating ones so sticky, and what can help us loosen their grip and get into the best modes for top performance.

Modes and how they work for or against us is the topic of Tara Bennett-Goleman’s new book, Mind Whispering: A New Map to Freedom from Self-Defeating Emotional Habits. The mode concept builds on a recent proposal by the founder of cognitive therapy, Dr. Aaron Beck, who suggested that what we call depression or anxiety disorders are modes that can change for the better.

Seeing someone else – or ourselves – through the lens of a label like “depressed” or “introvert” can have a subtle negative impact, suggesting a permanence that modes belie. The mode idea builds around what we can do to release the grip of our dysfunctional modes and build a wider set of emotional choices for ourselves.

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Mindfulness: an antidote for workplace ADD

Some consultants tell me that the number one problem in the workplace today is attention. People are distracted. They’re in a state of what’s called “continuous partial attention” where even at meetings, your body is there but your mind is somewhere else. You have countless gadgets constantly sending you information: texts, phone calls, emails, and reminders. All buzzing and dinging for your attention.

People not being fully present is a big problem because the most effective interactions occur when two people are mutually present to each other. That’s when rapport happens. That’s when chemistry happens. That’s when you’re going to have the most powerful communication and mutual understanding. If your attention is over there, it means you’re not over here with the person you’re with.

Lack of attention also impacts your performance. Your ability to do your job on your own is directly related to how well you can concentrate and focus. If you’re continually distracted, you just can’t get it done, or get it done well.

That’s why one of the most important things to learn in the workplace today is how to focus. Mindfulness meditation techniques can help you strengthen your attention.

I’ve found that if you do these exercises, for example, 10 minutes before you go to work, you are changing your brain. You’re heightening your ability to concentrate hours later. If you can find a way to practice strengthening your attention every day, it’s like going to the gym and building your muscles, but it’s a mental muscle.

Here’s an exercise from the concentration family of meditation. It’s a good introduction to mindfulness.

Sit upright, close your eyes and bring your attention to your breath.
Don’t try to control your breath, just let it be natural and easy but be aware of your breath.
Notice the full inhalation, the full exhalation.
See if you can feel it coming and going through your nostrils, or feel the rise and fall of your belly.
When you notice that you’ve been distracted, simply start with the next breath.
Tune in to any sensation any way you can. Be fully aware of the breath. Just keep your attention anchored there.
Keep breathing in, and breathing out.
Whenever your mind wanders, just bring it back to your breath.
Watch the full inhalation, the full exhalation. Stay with the breath. Use it as your anchor for attention.
 Try it on your own for a few minutes.

It’s really so simple and in some ways so hard, because the mind wants to wander. In a way the basic movement of mindfulness is anchoring your attention, keeping it there, noticing when your mind wanders because it’s going to, bringing it back and starting over. What we find is that if you can keep doing this, and the longer you stay with your breath, the more relaxed your body becomes. It’s a side effect of that full attention and letting go all those worries that keep us on edge and distracted.

For more about mindfulness in the workplace, watch my recorded webinar with Google’s Search Inside Yourself adviser, Mirbai Bush. You can also learn more mindfulness-based techniques for work with Mirabai’s latest CD Working with Mindfulness.

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Mind Whispering

Ever notice that sometimes you – or your partner, or someone you work closely with – are caught in reactions that torpedo things, but which you or they can’t seem to stop? And other times you (or they) are in great shape, clear and effective, connecting to people and ideas? Those two distinct ways of beings are called “modes,” and we can choose our better ones more often, if we know how.

The “how” is in my wife Tara Bennett-Goleman’s new book, Mind Whispering: A New Map to Freedom from Self-Defeating Habits. She’s drawn on several strands of understanding about upgrading the human mind, from Eastern psychologies and mindfulness, to neuroscience and cognitive therapy – and even some lessons she’s learned from studying with a horse whisperer.

I’ve found her analyses of what can go wrong in our lives, and how to put it on the right track, personally useful, and helpful in my relationships – and marriage. It’s made me more mindful of how I’m being, and by giving me tools for changing in the moment, helped me stay on a better track.

For coaches, Mind Whispering offers a new template for working with your clients, and a solid menu of methods for helping them. Same for counselors and therapists – and anyone who wants to improve their life in general.

Tara and I will be giving workshops on Mind Whispering in the next few months in Lenox, MA; Minneapolis; Los Angeles; the San Francisco Bay area; Rhinebeck, NY; and Oxford, England for those who want some hands-on experience with this new approach to working with our minds.

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Developing emotional intelligence

You may have heard that we’re born with a huge amount of brain cells, and then we lose them steadily until we die. Now, the good news: that’s neuromythology.

The new understanding is what’s called ‘neurogenesis’: Every day the brain generates 10,000 stem cells that split into two. One becomes a daughter line that continues making stem cells, and the other migrates to wherever it’s needed in the brain and becomes that kind of cell. Very often that destination is where the cell is needed for new learning. Over the next four months, that new cell forms about 10,000 connections with others to create new neural circuitry.

The state of the art in mapping this will be coming out of labs like Richard Davidson’s that have massive computing power, because new, innovative software tools for brain imaging can now track and show this new connectivity at the single-cell level.

Neurogenesis adds power to our understanding of neuroplasticity, that the brain continually reshapes itself according to the experiences we have. If we are learning a new golf swing, that circuitry will attract connections and neurons. If we are changing a habit – say trying to get better at listening – then that circuitry will grow accordingly. On the other hand, when we try to overcome a bad habit, we’re up against the thickness of the circuitry for something we’ve practiced and repeated thousands of times.

So what are the brain lessons for coaching, or for working on our own to enhance an emotional intelligence skill?

First, get committed. Mobilize the motivating power in the left prefrontal areas. If you’re a coach, you’ve got to engage the person, get them enthused about achieving the goal of change. Here it helps to draw on their dreams, their vision for themselves, where they want to be in the future. Then work from where they are now on what they might improve to help them get where they want to go in life.

If you can, at this point it’s helpful to get 360-degree feedback on the emotional intelligence competencies. It’s best to use an instrument that measures the emotional intelligence abilities, and lets you ask people whose opinions you value rate you anonymously on specific behaviors that reflect the competencies of star performers and leaders. A trained consultant can help you use this feedback to determine what competencies you would most benefit from strengthening.

Next, get practical. Don’t take on trying to learn too much all at once. Manage your goal at the level of a specific behavior. Make it practical, so you know exactly what to do and when. For example, say someone has “smartphone syndrome”. You have to break the habit of multi-tasking. So the person might make up an intentional learning plan that says something like: at every naturally occurring opportunity – when a person walks into your office, say, or you come up to a person – you turn off your cell phone and your beeper, turn away from your computer, turn off your daydream or your preoccupation and pay full attention. That’s gives you a precise piece of behavior to try to change.

What will help with that? Noticing when a moment like that is about to come, and doing the right thing. Doing the wrong thing is a habit that you have become an Olympic level master at – your neural wiring has made it a default option, what you do automatically. The neural connectivity for that is strong. When you start to form the new, better habit you are essentially creating new circuitry that competes with your old habit in a kind of neural Darwinism. To make the new habit strong enough, you’re got to use the power of neuroplasticity – you have to do it over and over again.

If you persist in the better habit, that new circuitry will connect and become more and more powerful, until one day you’ll do the right thing in the right way without a second thought. That means the circuitry has become so connected and thick that this is the brain’s new default option. With that change in the brain, the better habit will become your automatic choice.

For how long and how many times does an action have to be repeated until it’s actually hard-wired? A habit begins to be hard-wired the very first time you practice it. The more you practice it, the more connectivity. How often you have to repeat it so that it becomes the new default of the brain depends in part on how strong the old habit is that it will replace. It usually takes three to six months of using all naturally occurring practice opportunities before the new habit comes more naturally than the old.

Another practice opportunity can occur whenever you have a little free time: mental rehearsal. Mental rehearsal activates the same neural circuitry as does the real activity. This is why Olympic athletes spend off-season running through their moves in their brain – because that counts as practice time, too. It’s going to increase their ability to perform when the real moment comes.

Richard Boyatzis has used this method with his MBA students for years at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. And he’s followed these students into their jobs as much as seven years later – and found the competencies they had enhanced in his class were still rated as strong by their co-workers.

Learn more about the latest scientific research on EI in my book The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights from More Than Sound.

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Bonding creates high-performance teams

The emotional intelligence model can be looked at in terms of what it means to be intelligent about emotions, which is being self-aware, knowing your own feelings, and why you feel that way. It’s about managing those emotions. But it’s also sensing how other people are feeling, knowing the other person’s emotions, and then finally managing all those emotions in the way that is best for everyone.

How does managing emotions come into play when building high-performing teams? I spoke with IMD professor, George Kohlrieser for my Leadership: A Master Class series about the importance of a leader’s EI skills in creating solid, dynamic bonds within a team.

“Managing emotions is how you build a team, an organization. It’s the ability to get team members inspired. It’s about dealing with emotions, building high emotions and creating an inspired team. If you’ve ever been in a high performing team, it just inspires, even though there’s stress and challenge. And there’s always going to be a leader, as part of that process, to build that creativity. So it’s essential for leaders to understand how team bonding works, and how bonding in a team will build energy.

Sense of belonging

The leader has to make everybody feel like they belong – even if you don’t like them. Of course, typically after creating a bond you learn to like the person. You discover some part of them that brings you together. With team members who don’t want to belong, you have to put the fish on the table and say, “Do you really want to belong to this team? If you are ambivalent, it’s going to be a source of conflict.”

Build mutual respect

Again, if you don’t like somebody, it’s OK, but you have to show respect, and you create high energy by being respectful. Use your mind’s eye like a flashlight to look for what you can learn from somebody.

Offer choice

People want to feel they have power over themselves. That’s why asking a question is so important in any leadership activity, and being able, where possible, to give people choice and power over what they can do. When you delegate, you open up possibilities to let people shine. Think of it like your children. You want your children to be smarter than you. You want the people who follow you to be smarter than you, to do better than you. If you create that sense of support, that foundation, then you have these explosions of creativity.

Empathy in bonding

Being able to understand grief is very important. When people don’t get over something, there’s going to be a negative consequence somewhere up the road. Help everyone – including you – get over whatever happened. The future is the future. The past is the past. Put the fish on the table to deal with conflicts. Understand that it’s better to be slapped in the face by the truth than kissed by a lie. Be a leader who says the truth, but say it with empathy. Say it with bonding, because tough leaders who bond get good results from their teams.”

Learn more emotionally-intelligent leadership skills in my Leadership: A Master Class video series from More Than Sound.

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