Daniel Goleman's Blog, page 2

Daniel Goleman: Why Mindfulness Matters for Habit Change {Upcoming Workshop}

This article introduces a topic on which I will be co-leading an in-person workshop at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health on January 5th. Full workshop details available here. They were professional peers, both physicians. But he was a bully. They’d be in a staff meeting, and each give their diagnoses and treatment recommendations for patients at their hospital. And whenever they disagreed, he would press his view and ignore hers – and she let him. “My habit,” she admitted, “was to go quiet whenever someone strongly voiced an opinion I didn’t agree with.” Her passivity made her deeply unhappy – she invariably regretted her kneejerk acquiescence. This was a habit she wanted to change. We find ourselves repeating such habits over and over, without having consciously decided to do so.  Our emotional habits are too often hidden from us. The reason: these habits are stored in the deep dark recesses of the mind, in the basal ganglia, a structure buried deep in the ancient bottom of the brain. These circuits operate out of our conscious awareness. For the most part this arrangement works for us. Take learning to ride a bike – or to walk for that matter. At first these are perilous actions, opportunities to fall. But as we gain expertise and assurance the brain shifts that particular sequence from the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive center, to the basal ganglia. Once there, when we pick up a bike that habit will pop up in our repertoire on cue, with the whole sequence unfolding without our having to think about it. Habits are automatic, spontaneous – and hard to change. Habits persist in large part because we don’t see them coming, nor even while we are in their grip. Unless we bring mindfulness to bear. By turning our focus inward, to our own stream of thought and feeling, we shift what usually operates behind a curtain of awareness into the spotlight. As my wife Tara Bennet-Goleman has shown in her theory of “Mindful Habit Change,” with mindfulness we can better track the cues that trigger the habit, and pause. In that pause we have a choice point that did not exist before. We can change how we react. That’s what happened with that physician who gave in too easily, as Tara tells it in her book Mind Whispering: Then, one day, she applied what she had learned about mindfulness and changing patterns in a workshop that she had done with Tara. Her colleague was his usual blustery, domineering self. But, after he was done, she paused, collected her thoughts—thought of an antidote to her subjugation pattern and with assertiveness, calmly told him, “I don’t agree with you. People can have their own opinions. I respect the way you do things but prefer to do things differently.” Taken aback, he walked off without a word. The next day, she said, he thanked her, saying other people had told him he was too overbearing. She told me he was never the same bully with her again. Tara’s integration, “Mindful Habit Change,” combines mindfulness with a system for identifying emotional habits, with an understanding of the underlying cognitive neuroscience. This will be part of the workshop we'll be leading together right after the New Year. It was this integration that made the difference. Neuroscience explains why. As we acquire a habit of any kind, at first the sequence may be clear to us. Remember when you learned to ride a bike, for example. This clarity means the prefrontal cortex, the mind’s executive, has an active role, and so what we do remains in awareness. But the more we practice a habit, including our emotional ones, the less awareness we have of it. By the time the basal ganglia hosts the habit, we typically lose awareness; that habit, when next triggered, will roll out spontaneously and automatically, largely without our knowing.    But with mindfulness, what was hidden by the basal ganglia gets seen by the prefrontal cortex. An automatic sequence, previously outside awareness, becomes viewable. Mindfulness allows us to gain clarifying insights into the habit – its history and why it has the particular cues that trigger it. Once we know that, we can make wiser choices: shape an alternative, more constructive way of reacting. Join Tara-Bennett Goleman and I in our upcoming workshop, Mindful Habit Change: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart on January 5th to explore these concepts further and learn to apply them in your everyday interactions.

Daniel Goleman: 4 Keys to Being an Inspirational Leader

Take a moment and think about inspiring l leaders you know personally or who you’ve heard about. Most of them probably didn’t start out thinking “I’m going to inspire others through my leadership.” They just set out to harness their skills, knowledge, and passion to do work they thought was important. And, by doing that and succeeding, they inspired others along the way to join them in realizing a particular vision. If you are in a leadership role, part of your job is to inspire the people with whom you work. And while your IQ likely helped you get that role, recent research reveals that there are limits to how much intelligence alone makes a leader. The higher you go in an organization, the more emotional and social competencies distinguish the average from star leaders. This means you’ll need to employ a new set of skills in order to mobilize an effective team to work together to meet the objectives you put forward – being able to inspire and motivate foremost among them. Can you develop your capacity to inspire? Is being an inspirational leader a learnable skill? From the perspective of the model of Emotional Intelligence that Richard Boyatzis and I created, the answer to that question is YES. Inspirational Leadership is one of 12 Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competencies, each of which are skills you can develop. Recommended Reading: Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence: 12 Leadership Competency Primers The Inspirational Leadership competency is the ability to inspire, to guide people to get the job done, to bring out their best. With inspiration, you can articulate a shared mission in a way that motivates, and offer a sense of common purpose beyond people's day-to-day tasks. To inspire, a leader must be strong in other EI competencies, including emotional self-awareness, emotional self-control, positive outlook, organizational awareness, influence, and teamwork. Four Key Qualities of Inspirational Leaders Along with these other specific EI competencies, here are four key elements that distinguish inspirational leaders. Such leaders must: 1.    Focus on the group/organization and its larger mission, not on their own success 2.    Walk their talk 3.    Be trustworthy 4.    Be able to think outside the box 1.    Focus on the group, not just your own success Leaders who want to inspire those around them need to focus on something larger than their own personal success. Team members or other subordinates can sniff out a “I’m just trying to look good so I can get ahead personally” attempt to be inspiring. An inspirational leader needs to demonstrate both a clear understanding of the team or organization and its mission, and have a compelling message about how to further that mission, and why it’s important. 2.    Walk your talk In the Primer on Inspirational Leadership I recently co-authored, my colleague, Richard Boyatzis of Case Western Reserve University pinpoints the importance of a leader’s credibility. He says that before leaders can inspire, they must themselves be inspired. If you are trying to galvanize a team or organization, your actions will be closely scrutinized. Showing your team that you are living what you want them to live will go a long way toward convincing them to join you. 3.    Be trustworthy To really sign on to follow a leader’s direction, especially in high-stakes environments, people want to know that they can trust a leader. They want to know what the leader’s track record is for following through on their commitments and recognizing accomplishments. How well has the leader supported their team? How accessible are they to people within the organization? How well do they know the individuals and groups with whom they work? 4.    Think outside the box Sometimes, what makes a leader able to inspire others in an organization is their ability to “think outside the box,” to consider alternatives or perspectives that don’t follow whatever is the norm. That kind of boldness is what attracted my friend and colleague, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz to his long career working with a global executive search firm. He was drawn to how his company developed a revolutionary fee arrangement and collaborative approach, one inspired by their founder. That leader saw the need for a change in how things had been done in his field, and took the risk to make those changes in his firm. That boldness and committed follow-through fostered great engagement from his staff. It’s a tall order to become a truly inspirational leader, drawing on a broad range of competencies and personal qualities. What would your colleagues and team members say, if asked, about how well you embody these four key elements? Consider asking a trusted colleague for some honest feedback, then work on developing some foundational competencies of Emotional and Social Intelligence to lay the groundwork for Inspirational Leadership to emerge. For more on how the Inspirational Leadership competency ties into Emotional and Social Intelligence, see Inspirational Leadership: A Primer, or view the full collection of primers exploring each of the 12 Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competencies. I authored this collection with Richard Boyatzis, neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson, and 12 other exceptional researchers, leaders, coaches, and experts on each of the topics.

Daniel Goleman: How to Create a High Performance Team

Whether on a long-term team or one pulled together for a short-term project, almost everyone in today’s workplaces spends time working in a group. And most of us have a story about people in a team who hindered the work of the group. Here are just a few examples of characters you may have met on one or another of your teams: The one who derails the group from its planned agenda into a focus on their less-urgent pet issue. The person who continually interrupts and talks over everyone else. Those who have key content knowledge but are so shy that they are unable to share what they know even when it could be most helpful. Those who commit to completing a crucial task, then don’t do anything about that task - and don’t tell anyone until just before the task completion is due. Team leaders who are poor at handling people with these problems. In the face of these dysfunctional types, what can a leader or team member do? And if you realize that you are one of these characters, how can you improve your ability to work well in groups? Emotional Intelligence and Teams Each of these are examples of people lacking in some aspect of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence matters greatly at work, especially in team settings. Many of the Twelve Emotional Intelligence Competencies I identified as vital for workplace effectiveness with my colleague, Richard Boyatzis of Case Western Reserve University, make people more high performing as team members. For example, people who are adept at the emotional self-awareness, emotional self-control, empathy, and conflict management competencies help a team work well together, whether they are team leaders or team members. One of the competencies, Teamwork, specifically addresses skillful team behavior. Teamwork is the ability to work with others toward a group’s goal, participating actively, sharing responsibility and rewards, and contributing to the capability of the team. You empathize and create an atmosphere of respect, helpfulness, and cooperation. You can draw others into active commitment to the team's effort. Leaders skilled at teamwork build spirit, positive relationships, and a pride of identity on the team. Emotionally intelligent team leaders know when it’s time to focus the team’s attention, and when to relinquish control and listen. And it's not just teams. This competency holds the key to collaboration of any kind, personal or professional. How Do You Function in Group Situations? What does it take to improve your skill at the Teamwork Competency? First, you need a realistic sense of your behavior in group settings. In the new Teamwork Primer I wrote along with several colleagues and researchers, Richard Boyatzis describes research done at Case Western Reserve’s school of management with MBA grad students put into teams. The teams were videotaped as they worked toward an assigned goal. At first the videos were coded by trained professionals to identify functional and dysfunctional team behavior. But the researchers quickly realized the best way to help the students understand their impacts on the team was to show them the videos. Sometimes cringing when they watched themselves in action, the students could quickly see when their behavior impacted the team for the worse. They recognized when they hogged the air time in group discussions, ignored the quiet members of the team, or were themselves quiet and unassertive. The videos showed that early in the students’ time in the MBA program, they approached team situations as a setting in which to compete with other students, assuming that competing for air time was the best approach. Later in the program, the students understood the value of working together more cooperatively. If you can’t get that kind of direct “watch yourself on video” feedback, or even if you can, ask others you trust for their impressions of how you act in group settings. Ask them what you do that helps the team move forward toward its goals, and which of your behaviors are not helpful for the group. That kind of feedback is invaluable. Build Your Teamwork Skills After you have a sense of where you need to improve your teamwork skills, take time to try out different behavior. If you’re someone who normally takes up a lot of the group’s airtime, try a “Stop, Look, Listen” experiment. In a team meeting, intentionally step back from your typically active role. Notice who speaks and who doesn’t speak. Pay attention to the direction of the conversation. Consider whether it would help for someone to reflect on where the discussion is going and how that does or doesn’t relate to the goal of the meeting. What do you notice in your observations of the group? Talk with a trusted colleague about what you saw and how you might change your own behavior or try to influence the behavior of others. Effective teams depend on skillful participation from everyone, not just the person who happens to be the team leader.   For more on this topic, see Teamwork: A Primer. I released this primer with a team of excellent contributors, as part of a 2017 collection of the 12-part Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence series. The series first defines Emotional and Social Intelligence, then presents the details of the Emotional and Social Intelligence in Leadership model that I developed with Richard Boyatzis, and then goes on to define each of the 12 individual competencies, what they are, why they matter, and how to develop them.

Daniel Goleman: Managing Conflict With Emotional Intelligence

From small disagreements about the text for a company communique to large differences in priorities for the coming year, leaders at all levels find themselves handling conflict. While the easy assumption might be that “handling conflict” means what you do during a tense confrontation, just as important is what you do long before the conflict surfaces. Conflict Management shows up on the list of the twelve emotional intelligence competencies that distinguish outstanding leaders from average. But managing conflict draws on several other EI competencies, particularly when it comes to laying the groundwork that helps you handle hot encounters. How is Conflict Management a Competency of Emotional Intelligence? Here’s how I describe the Conflict Management Competency in Conflict Management: A Primer: “…the ability to help others through emotional or tense situations, tactfully bringing disagreements into the open, and defining solutions that everyone can endorse. Leaders who take time to understand different perspectives work toward finding a common ground on which everyone can agree. They acknowledge the views of all sides, while redirecting the energy toward a shared ideal or an agreeable resolution.” Let’s pull that apart. “Helping others through emotional or tense situations” implies first that we can both recognize and manage our own emotions. That takes Emotional Self-Awareness and Emotional Self-Control. “Take time to understand different perspectives” requires Empathy and Adaptability to recognize different viewpoints and to be able to adjust your own outlook to consider alternatives. In many situations, leaders also need strong skills in another competence, Organizational Awareness, to recognize how the specific conflict relates to overall organizational dynamics. Honing your skill at these five EI competencies may seem a tall order, but it may be essential to be successful as a leader handling conflict. The good news: you can improve your skill with the competencies. Build Your Capacity for Managing Conflict First, it helps to have a realistic sense of your current abilities. That’s where a 360-degree assessment tool like the Emotional and Social Competencies Inventory (ESCI) can be very useful. Along with assessing yourself, the ESCI gives you a chance to get feedback from colleagues you trust. Based on the results of your assessment, you can decide which areas to focus on. Working with a coach can be a very effective way to maximize your learning. To build Emotional Self-Awareness and Emotional Self-Control, scientific research shows that mindfulness meditation helps enhance your ability both to be aware of your feelings when they happen and hit the pause button between feeling an emotion and how you act. Research also indicates that another form of meditation, called lovingkindness, helps build our awareness of the feelings and experience of others – and the inclination to help them if needed. How adaptable are you? Being able to hear, understand, and respect different viewpoints powers effective conflict management. So does adaptability, being able to change your mind about something you previously thought. To fully grasp an alternative to your own view, you need to have a clear sense of what your view is and why you hold it. “Because it feels right” or “I just know why it is the best” is not good enough. What are the values and beliefs that undergird your view? What assumptions is it based upon? What are the facts and data that support it? What arguments would you use in supporting your viewpoint over others? These are the same questions you can ask to understand different perspectives. Another key factor is larger than the particular confrontation at hand: the overall organizational dynamic in which it takes place. What power dynamics are at play in the conflict? Is the conflict really about whatever its purported topic is, or is it an arena for acting out a power struggle within the organization? If one person or department “loses” the conflict, how will that impact their status in the organization? Recognizing the subtext behind the conflict empowers a leader to work at managing the conflict in a way that comes to the best outcome for everyone involved. We can’t always control when or how conflict will show up, but we can control how we show up to help resolve it. For more on this topic, see Conflict Management: A Primer. I released this primer with a team of excellent contributors, as part of a 2017 collection of the 12-part Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence series. This primer is created with fellow EI professionals, including Richard Boyatzis, Amy Gallo, George Kohlrieser, Matthew Lippincott, and George Pitagorsky.

Daniel Goleman: Why Being a Coach and Mentor Pays Off for Leaders

Coaching is not just for the folks at the sidelines guiding players on the basketball court, or just those professionals hired to help an executive up his or her game. Smart leaders know they can be coaches in most any business situation. Every leader can be a coach and mentor, regardless of their formal role or level in an organization. High-performing leaders know the effort they put into coaching and mentoring others pays off not only in the productivity, job satisfaction, and career growth of subordinates, but also in their own status within their organization.  What I Mean by Coach and Mentor In the context of my model of emotional intelligence, coaching and mentoring aren’t just roles - they’re skills, a frame of mind, and an approach to working with others. And, like all skills, the Coach and Mentor Competency is an ability that leaders can develop. It comes down to the ability to foster the long-term learning or development of others by giving feedback and support. In this competence, you have a genuine interest in helping others develop further strengths. You give timely constructive guidance. You understand the person's goals, and you try to find challenges for them that will provide growth opportunities. Support That Works Think about one of your direct reports and an area where they could stand to improve. What’s the best way to help that person move forward? To point out where they’re lacking skill? Or to talk with that person about how gaining skill in that area could help them progress toward their own goals? Keep in mind, it’s not about dictating what you think they should do, it’s a collaborative process where both parties are open and on board with such development. See Coach and Mentor: A Primer, by Daniel Goleman and fellow EI professionals Research done by my friend, Richard Boyatzis of Case Western Reserve University, and his colleagues, provides some insight into the strategy that will be most effective. They looked at coaching sessions focused on a person’s hopes and aspirations versus on their deficiencies. For some of the sessions, they asked people to describe their dreams for where they’ll be in ten years. For other sessions, they asked people about their difficulties in accomplishing their current work and assignments. Different parts of their subjects’ brains were activated depending on which type of coaching they received. Focusing on future possibilities, hope, and strengths that help us move toward a desired end activates a part of the nervous system that eases stress and is generally calming. That positive approach stimulated sections of the brain related to being open to new situations. On the other hand, focusing on problems, fear, or apparent weaknesses stimulates the part of our nervous system associated with our body’s stress reactions. The subjects in the “how is your work going” sessions had brain areas activated that are known to indicate self-consciousness and guilt. What happens when brain areas related to stress are activated? People close down and narrow what they can perceive or the range of options they entertain. Worst of all, they become cognitively impaired, thinking with less clarity. Coaching that focuses on a person’s negatives—poor performance and weaknesses—creates stress and hampers the coachee’s ability to perform well. In contrast, a focus on a person’s strengths, dreams, and aspirations has the opposite effect, energizing and motivating that person to learn better. It’s not that we should ignore performance lapses, but that the overall negative-to-positive feedback should pitch to the positive. Start with Yourself How can you develop the Coach and Mentor Competency? Start with yourself. Ask yourself or talk with a friend about these questions: What are your goals? How might developing the Coach and Mentor Competency help you move toward achieving those goals? What strengths do you bring to this effort? Who nurtured your dreams and helped you develop yourself? What did they do to support you? What concrete step would that supporter encourage you to take toward enhancing your skill in being a coach and mentor? By starting with yourself, you’ll get practice providing coaching and mentoring to someone else and experience what it is like to receive this kind of support. When you’re ready to take it a step further, be open to conversations of inquiry with your subordinates. You cannot force your advice on people, but you can have genuine conversations where you ask questions and offer support in a way that fuels growth.  For more in-depth information about this topic, see Coach and Mentor: A Primer. This Primer was written with Richard Boyatzis, George Kohlrieser, and fellow respected colleagues in the fields of Emotional Intelligence, research, and leadership development. It offers a concise overview of the Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competency Model, and goes on to define how to develop the coach and mentor competency regardless of your formal role.

Daniel Goleman: Multitasking isn’t making you more efficient, it’s frying your attention span

We all suffer from the digital-age version of life’s “full catastrophe”: incoming emails, pressing texts, phone messages, and more, storming in all at once – not to mention the Facebook posts, Instagrams, and all such urgent memos from our personal universe of social media. Given the ubiquity of smartphones and such devices, people today seem to take in far more information than they did before the digital age. Decades before we began to drown in a sea of distractions, cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made this prescient observation: “What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.” Then, too, there are the ways our social connections suffer. Did you ever have the impulse to tell a child to put down her phone and look in the eyes of the person she is talking to? The need for such advice is becoming increasingly common as digital distractions claim another kind of victim: basic human skills like empathy and social presence. The symbolic meaning of eye contact, of putting aside what we are doing to connect, lies in the respect, care, even love it indicates. A lack of attention to those around us sends a message of indifference. Such social norms for attention to the people we are with have silently, inexorably shifted. Yet we are largely impervious to these effects. Many denizens of the digital world, for instance, pride themselves on being able to multitask, carrying on with their essential work even as they graze among all the other incoming channels of what’s‑up. But compelling research at Stanford University has shown that this very idea is a myth – the brain does not “multitask” but rather switches rapidly from one task (my work) to others (all those funny videos, friends’ updates, urgent texts. . .). Attention tasks don’t really go on in parallel, as “multitasking” implies; instead they demand rapid switching from one thing to the other. And following every such switch, when our attention returns to the original task, its strength has been appreciably diminished. It can take several minutes to ramp up once again to full concentration. The harm spills over into the rest of life. For one, the inability to filter out the noise (all those distractions) from the signal (what you meant to focus on) creates a confusion about what’s important, and so a drop in our ability to retain what matters. Heavy multitaskers, the Stanford group discovered, are more easily distracted in general. And when multitaskers do try to focus on that one thing they have to get done, their brains activate many more areas than just those relevant to the task at hand – a neural indicator of distraction. Even the ability to multitask efficiently suffers. As the late Clifford Nass, one of the researchers, put it, multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” which hampers not just concentration but also analytic understanding and empathy. Cognitive control, on the other hand, lets us focus on a specific goal or task and keep it in mind while resisting distractions, the very abilities multitasking harms. Such steely focus is essential in jobs like air traffic control – where screens can be filled with distractions from the controller’s main focus, a given incoming airplane – or just in getting through your daily to-do list. The good news for multitaskers: cognitive control can be strengthened. Undergrads volunteered to try ten-minute sessions of either focusing on counting their breath or an apt comparison task: browsing Huffington Post, Snapchat, or BuzzFeed. Just three ten-minute sessions of breath counting was enough to appreciably increase their attention skills on a battery of tests. And the biggest gains were among the heavy multitaskers, who did more poorly on those tests initially. If multitasking results in flabby attention, a concentration workout like counting breaths offers a way to tone up, at least in the short term. But there was no indication that the upward bump in attention would last – the improvement came immediately after the “workout,” and so registers on our radar as a state effect, not a lasting trait. The brain’s attention circuitry needs more sustained efforts to create a stable trait, as we will see. Still, even beginners in meditation can sharpen their attention skills, with some surprising benefits. For instance, researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara gave volunteers an eight-minute instruction of mindfulness of their breath, and found that this short focusing session (compared to reading a newspaper or just relaxing) lessened how much their mind wandered afterward. While that finding is of interest, the follow‑up was even more compelling. The same researchers gave volunteers a two-week course in mindfulness of breathing, as well as of daily activities like eating, for a total of six hours, plus ten-minute booster sessions at home daily. The active control group studied nutrition for the same amount of time. Again, mindfulness improved concentration and lessened mind-wandering. A surprise: mindfulness also improved working memory – the holding in mind of information so it can transfer into long-term memory. Attention is crucial for working memory; if we aren’t paying attention, those digits won’t register in the first place. This training in mindfulness occurred while the students in the study were still in school. The boost to their attention and working memory may help account for the even bigger surprise: mindfulness upped their scores by more than 30 percent on the GRE, the entrance exam for grad school. Students, take note. Another way cognitive control helps us is in managing our impulses, technically known as “response inhibition.” As we saw in chapter five, “A Mind Undisturbed,” in Cliff Saron’s study the training upped a meditator’s ability to inhibit impulse over the course of three months and, impressively, stayed strong in a five-month follow‑up. And better impulse inhibition went along with a self-reported uptick in emotional well-being. Daniel Goleman is the author of Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, from which this article is excerpted.

Daniel Goleman: 3 Science-Based Benefits of Mindfulness

“We take ten minutes together in mindful silence before we start our day,” the CEO of a boutique investment firm tells me. “We’re more connected the rest of the day.” Mindfulness has swept through the business world, riding on the momentum of scientific findings that show benefits. But mindfulness has its critics. One of the loudest objections says the practice is over-hyped, that the research does not support the claims being made. Which is it? I share some of the definitive answers in my new book Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body. My co-author, neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, heads the largest science lab that studies meditation. His group has helped us sift through the more than 6,000 peer-reviewed articles on meditation and find the 60 or so bullet-proof studies. To be sure, we found many so-so studies that have been hyped by those selling mindfulness to the business world. But even so, the news here for that CEO – and anyone else intrigued by or already practicing mindfulness – is positive. Three big take-homes: · Stress Resilience. Mindfulness and other kinds of meditation calm the amygdala, the brain’s trigger for anger, anxiety and a host of similar disruptive emotions. The more you practice, the less reactive your amygdala becomes. And if you do get hijacked from time to time (and who does not?), you recover more quickly – the very definition of resilience. · Focus. Mindfulness strengthens concentration, and every related aspect of attention from keeping your mind on one thing amidst a sea of distractions, to being more present to what’s going on around you. “Whenever my mind wanders in a meeting, “ one executive told me, “I wonder what business opportunity I just missed.” Less mind wandering, better focus even when multi-tasking. · Connection. A cousin of mindfulness, lovingkindness meditation, makes you more open to the needs of the people around you, and more likely to help them out. This kind of leadership builds great loyalty, so people will feel they want to do their best for you, and show up even when the pressure and stress are mounting. When I ask executives around the world to name the traits of the boss they have liked the most, kindness always comes up high on the list. Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body So is mindfulness the key to greater success? Yes and no. It definitely helps in these ways. But when Dr. Matthew Lippincott at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed in-depth interviews with 42 executives who practiced mindfulness and had positive outcomes, he found that their success was not directly due to mindfulness. Although they thought so, in fact they were getting better performance by honing the emotional intelligence competencies that distinguish outstanding leaders. Mindfulness helped directly with self-awareness and with managing their disruptive emotions. But when it comes to competencies like keeping a positive outlook or inspiring others, mindfulness was not that relevant. If you want to try mindfulness, the basic instructions are simple. Start by finding a quiet time and place and sit up in a comfortable chair, your spine relaxed but straight (this is so you don’t fall asleep). Bring your attention to the natural in-and-out of your breathing. Don’t try to control it, just watch. When your mind wanders off, and you notice it wandered, bring it back to your breath. Seems super-easy, but that’s deceptive. Our minds wander half the time, on average. You’ll notice this more as you try to change that habit – don’t give up. It can help to listen to instructions, especially at the start. This simple routine amounts to a mental fitness exercise. Just as a regular workout keeps us physically fit, regular practice of mindfulness makes us more fit mentally. But as with your gym routine, you need to keep at it regularly. As with any workout, the benefits grow the more you practice. See my new book for more research-based findings on mindfulness and meditation.

Daniel Goleman: Influence: 4 Keys to Open Doors

Think you need to be in a position of power to have influence? Think again. While true that executives have influence, don’t assume you need to work your way into a C-suite position before you can be influential. No matter what your position, you can have a powerful effect on those around you, if not the whole organization. Influence is one of twelve Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competencies in the model I developed with Richard Boyatzis. Influence as a competency refers to the ability to have a positive impact on others, to persuade or convince them, or to gain their support. With the Influence competency, you build buy-in from key people. It’s important to note that influence is not about getting people to do what you want because you hold the moral high ground. If your ideas are bad or would be detrimental to people, then ultimately your efforts will be less convincing. But if your ideas are strong, could be beneficial, or have the potential to get agreement, then influence will help you mobilize the resources necessary to make things happen. What Does It Take to Have Influence? Like many EI competencies, influence requires skillful use of other competencies. Emotional Self-Awareness and Emotional Self-Control help you avoid leaping in prematurely and pushing for your objective without fully understanding the viewpoint of those who would be impacted by your decisions. With such awareness and control, you know how your feelings impact your actions and can choose better how to further your goals. Empathy and Organizational Awareness are also key to developing influence. Each are forms of social awareness, one at the individual level, the other at the organizational level. Empathy starts with good listening, to better understand the other person’s concerns. As for organizational awareness, to be influential in any group or organization you need to know it well. That takes not just listening, but active observation, a systems awareness, and openness to differing perspectives. What Influence Looks Like in Action In Influence: A Primer, the new publication I co-authored with Dr. Boyatzis, Peter Senge, and other colleagues, I shared the story of someone who was adept at using the Influence competency to achieve his goal. Here’s that story: ------------------ A water engineer from an African country worked for a global energy company. He remembered his own native town where there were repeated droughts. There was always a water crisis throughout his country. They didn’t drill wells deep enough and many villages didn’t even have them. He thought his employer could set up a division that would help countries like his own with water management, but such an idea was not likely to gain traction within the company unless there was a way for it to yield significant revenue. The engineer spent time thinking deeply about how he could present this to the leaders of his organization in a way that would be appealing to them. First, he went from person to person in his company, explaining his vision and how to make it work. In each conversation, his task was influence—to persuade that person that his creative vision was both helpful to the company and the right thing to do. He asked his peers for their thoughts on how to present this idea to company leadership and got valuable feedback. Next, he spent time speaking to members of the community who would most benefit from better well engineering in that area. He learned that economic gain could be had because farmers would increase their crop yields, the local economy would thrive, and the energy company would be positioned in a good light for helping to make this happen. Finally, the engineer incorporated all of the feedback and ideas into a well-crafted presentation for higher ranked company leaders. He proposed a way that the company could recoup their investment and have some great PR to boot, making both shareholders and small-scale farmers happy. He anticipated all the potential questions they might have and prepared responses in advance, even drawing up some engineering blueprints. He was patient, driven, and thoughtful, and most importantly, he listened to all the stakeholders in such a way as to make everyone believe that his idea was a win-win for all. As a result, the company decided to start a division just like he had envisioned. ------------------ The engineer exhibited a high level of the Influence competency in action. He didn’t simply share his idea as soon as he thought of it, when it would come off as half-baked, with little research or support. He took the time to consider the perspectives of stakeholders and decision makers to present the idea in a way that considered each party’s objectives and so, eventually, brought everyone on board. Influence lets us get enough buy-in to make our dreams real. What idea would you bring to light - with the right dose of Influence? For more in-depth information about this topic, see Influence: A Primer.  This Primer was written with Peter Senge, Richard Boyatzis, and several respected colleagues in the fields of Emotional Intelligence, research, and leadership development. It offers a concise overview of the Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competency Model, and goes on to define how to develop influence regardless of your formal role.

Daniel Goleman: In Meditation Claims, Check Your Sources

“Lose 30 Pounds by Meditating” “Meditation Makes You Look Younger” “Meditation Boosts productivity” You’ve probably seen headlines like these touting benefits of meditation. Whether in your news or social media feed, the article invariably mentions some bit of research that “proves” the claims. Such claims are particularly rampant among those bringing mindfulness to business. Having been a meditator since my college days I know there are many benefits to be gained from meditating. And I also know that many claims made for meditation are just wrong, unsupported, or exaggerated. If meditation where a consumer product you might look to objective ratings for guidance. But there’s no Consumer Reports for meditation. How can you evaluate the soundness of the many claims being made? Considering the Science of Meditation I first explored the benefits of mediation while I was a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1970s. My experiences on a Traveling Fellowship to India, and my own meditating, had convinced me there were many benefits to meditation. But where was the hard evidence? At Harvard I met my long-time friend and colleague, neuroscientist Richie Davidson, and we both did research on the impact of meditation.  At the time there were just two journal articles we could cite on the benefits of meditation, both of them a bit sketchy. Today there are more than 6000 peer-reviewed articles on the topic. For our forthcoming book, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Body, and Brain (in print and audio), Richie and I sought out the best science among those thousands of studies. We asked questions like, Which studies used rigorous scientific methods? Which had conclusions based on faulty methods or inadequate data? What We Found Net result: Meditation can benefit your mind, your body, and your brain. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s what rigorous scientific study has shown. For instance, mindfulness meditation can sharpen your ability to concentrate rather than being distracted. Meditation focused on compassion makes you more likely to actually help someone in need, and may help ease symptoms for people who have experienced trauma or PTSD. After thirty hours spread over eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction practice, the “fight or flight” part of our brains (the amygdala) reacts less strongly to stressful events. And these are just the benefits at the outset, among beginners.  Seasoned meditators (who have meditated for thousands of hours over their life) show long-term lasting impact from meditation. For instance, one day of meditation among longterm practitioners shuts off genes that create inflammation throughout the body. How to Evaluate Claims Made About Meditation But mindfulness, or any other kind of meditation, does not do everything that has been touted. In Altered Traits, Richie and I evaluate the methods used in studies that such claims about meditation’s benefits are based on. How many people did the researchers observe? What techniques did they use for assessing changes in the brain or other parts of the body? Did they use a control group? For example, if a study claims that meditation helps people relax, did the researchers also test people who had similar demographics but did not meditate? Or who used a different method to try to relax? Some of the best studies compared one group of people who meditated and another group of people who did some comparable activity like exercise. Remember, of the more than 6000 studies on meditation that have been published in journals, we found only about one percent met the top standard for sound research. It’s important to evaluate your sources before arriving at any definitive conclusions, and certainly before touting any claims you haven’t truly vetted. That’s where Altered Traits will help, or at least start you in spotting the true benefits most meaningful to your work or life.  To be sure, mindfulness and the many other kinds of meditation have their benefits – just not all those that some folks claim. It’s another case of “buyer, be aware.” Altered Traits is available for pre-order now in Hardcover and Audio, releasing on September 5th.

Daniel Goleman: Powering the Circuits of Emotional Intelligence

A four-year-old’s mom told him he had to put on sunscreen before he went outside. At that, the kid threw a tantrum, absolutely refusing, melting in tears and shouts. That went on for a minute or two. Then he picked himself up and, still crying, went to his room. After a few minutes he came out calmly, had the sunscreen applied, and was about to go outside to play. At which point his puzzled mom said, “What just happened?” “Oh,” the four-year-old said, “My guard dog got upset. So I went into my room and had my wise owl talk to him.” The ‘guard dog’ is the name given the amygdala in that child’s preschool class. The ‘wise owl’ refers to the prefrontal cortex. This basic bit of neuroscience, plus methods to act on it, are a regular part of that preschooler’s learning – and have immediate implications for everyone in the world of work, from ground-level employee to highest level executive. We all take these crucial brain circuits with us to our job, and their smooth functions are essential for getting work done well. Anytime anyone at work has an amygdala hijack – when our ‘guard dog’ gets upset – whatever work we are doing suffers. A key part of emotional intelligence lies in managing this circuitry well. Upcoming Event: Connecting Emotional Intelligence and the Wisdom of Awareness Emotional intelligence powers the most effective managers and high-performing leaders. But what powers emotional intelligence? The prefrontal-amygdala circuits underlie the first part of emotional intelligence, self-awareness and self-management. Now the good news: there are mental workouts that boost the ability of the prefrontal cortex to manage the amygdala. The basic brain science behind these workouts comes down to neuroplasticity, the relatively new understanding that the more we used a mental skill, the stronger the circuitry for that skill becomes. When it comes to mental fitness, practicing the skill makes all the difference - just as with athletic prowess where regular aerobic and strength-building workouts are a must. As I review in my new book “Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Transforms Mind, Brain and Body” (available for pre-order in print and audio), the regular practice of mindfulness strengthens the connectivity between the prefrontal area and the amygdala – and so provide a neural platform for self-awareness and self-management. Then, when it comes to the social skills effective teamwork and leadership demands – the second part of emotional intelligence, empathy and relationship management - the circuitry of the social brain offers the same kind of neural platform. And as research at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, shows, regular mental practice of positive thoughts toward other people actually grows the circuitry for caring and concern. This is the kind of empathy that people want in their co-workers and their boss—not to mention their spouse! The best news: all these neural circuits can be strengthened, with the right kind of mental workouts. Interested in learning more? I’ll be co-leading an in-person workshop on Connecting with Emotional Intelligence and the Wisdom of Awareness at Omega Institute in August.