How can we enhance our emotional intelligence and avoid burnout in a changing world? How can we regain focus and perform in an optimal state? What do we mean by ecological intelligence?
Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist, author, and science journalist. Before becoming an author, Goleman was a science reporter for the New York Times for 12 years, covering psychology and the human brain. In 1995, Goleman published Emotional Intelligence, a New York Times bestseller. In his newly published book Optimal, Daniel Goleman discusses how people can enter an optimal state of high performance without facing symptoms of burnout in the workplace.
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Optimal. What does that mean for you?
DANIEL GOLEMAN
We started our book Optimal reviewing research done at Harvard Business School, where hundreds of men and women kept journals of what their day was like at work, how they felt, what happened. From that emerged a composite of an optimal state; a state when people are fully engaged in what they're doing, they're very focused, they feel good. They're highly productive, because they're at their best, and they feel very connected to people around them. It's a very positive state, and we feel that it's a state people can enter voluntarily—unlike flow, for example, which is that one time you outdid yourself. You were spectacular, but you can't make it happen. It's like grace, it falls from the sky. But optimal is, we think, attainable—by people who just focus on what they need to do, on what's important right now. That's one way to get into the optimal state.
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And another way for you has been your long relationship with meditation.
GOLEMAN
If you look at meditation, and you strip away the belief system, you find that essentially every meditation is attention training. It might be bringing your mind back to a mantra; some sound, or to your breath, or to a particular attentional stance. I like mindfulness of breathing, where you pay full attention to your in-breath, and to your out-breath, and then the next breath, the in-breath, and the out-breath. At some point, your mind is going to wander off. That's the way our minds are wired. But here's the key: When you notice your mind has wandered and you bring it back to the point of focus—to the next breath, for example—that's the moment of mindfulness. It’s the equivalent for the brain circuitry and attention as going to gym and lifting weights. Every rep with a weight makes your muscle that much stronger. Every time you bring your mind back, it makes the circuitry for paying full attention stronger. Attention training of this kind is really a beautiful avenue into the optimal state, where you're fully focused on what you're doing. And in this state, which is one of high creativity, people experience themselves as part of a web of connection. The connection may be to the artists who have gone before you, whose work you imbibe and build on, or the writers whose thoughts you're building on, or the people who are doing this with you, in whatever context that might be. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this interbeing; being fully connected and interdependent.
Attention Training in Youth
I'm also a big advocate of teaching attention training skills to kids in school. This can help them develop focus, become more self aware, better able to manage their unruly emotions, more able to tune in to those around them, and to understand that their actions matter. All of these things can be instilled in kids, and there are programs in social and emotional learning that are very good at doing this. I think it's great to give people that scaffolding for life early on. If you learn how to handle anxiety early on in life, then eco-anxiety, for example, won't be as big a problem. You'll still be able to do what needs to be done, and you'll be able to do it better because you're less anxious. You’ll have clarity and calm, which is the better state in which to be effective.
Emotional Intelligence and Self Compassion
There's one study that I love, where engineers are asked to rate other engineers on effectiveness as engineers. As it turns out, their IQ doesn't matter, cognitive ability doesn't matter—emotional intelligence matters. Emotional intelligence is how you manage yourself and how you handle your relationships. Are you aware of what you're feeling? Can you use that awareness to handle emotions, to be positive, to be sure your upsetting emotions don't overwhelm you? This then helps you to tune into other people's emotions, to be empathic, and to put that all together to manage relationships well. It turns out that's what makes an engineer highly effective. I think it's what makes anyone highly effective.
Emotional intelligence has four parts. The first is emotional self awareness, but the second is also really important—emotional self management. I think you need that if you're fully empathic, because being very present to anyone else means you're kind of washed over by the feeling you pick up from them. If that person is very angry, or very anxious, you may start feeling that yourself. But emotional self management means that you know how not to let yourself be overwhelmed by any particular set of feelings, and you can manage it. You can stay optimistic. You can keep focused on what matters; the big picture, rather than what's happening in the moment. Some people, and I've heard this often, complain about being too empathic. They take on the feeling state of the other person rather than taking care of themselves, too. I remember a dialogue from years ago, in the 80s, with the Dalai Lama and a group of psychologists, where he said: In my languages, Tibetan and Sanskrit, the word for compassion implies for yourself as well as for others. In English, it only focuses on others. He said, you need a new word in the English language—self compassion. Today, there's a rather robust field of research on that, but the Dalai Lama saw that gap way before, because he realized that our view of compassion didn't include first taking care of ourselves.
AI is having a significant impact on various aspects of our lives, including work. According to Bill Gates, the only individuals who won't be affected by it are those who are creating AI. In light of this, what are your thoughts on how emotional intelligence can be fully incorporated into our work, especially during these times of rapid change?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
AI is having a significant impact on various aspects of our lives, including work. According to Bill Gates, the only individuals who won't be affected by it are those who are creating AI. In light of this, what are your thoughts on how emotional intelligence can be fully incorporated into our work, especially during these times of rapid change?
GOLEMAN
AI is brilliant at cognitive empathy. However, the next kind is emotional empathy. Emotional empathy means: I know what you feel because I'm feeling it too. And this has to do with circuitry in the fore part of the brain, which creates a brain-to-brain circuit that's automatic, unconscious, and instantaneous. And emotions pass very well across that. I think AI might flunk here because it has no emotion. It can mimic empathy, but it doesn't really feel empathy. The third kind is empathic concern. Technically, it means caring. It's the basis of love. It's the same circuitry as a parent's love for a child, actually. But I think that leaders need this very much.
AI has no emotion, so it doesn't have emotional self-awareness. It can't tune in. It can mimic empathy, I would say, but I don't think it can be empathic because AI is a set of codes, basically. It doesn't have the ability to manage emotion because it doesn't have emotion. It's interesting. I was just talking to a group at Microsoft, which is one of the leading developers of AI, and one of the people there was talking about Inculcating love into AI or caring into AI as maybe an antidote to the negative potential of AI for humanity. But I think there will always be room for the human, for a leader. I don't think that people will find that they can trust AI the same way they can trust a leader who cares.
Can we work with our economy to save the planet?
I wrote a book at one point, Ecological Intelligence, on how the environment and human psychology interact in a rather sad way, which is this: Everything that we buy and use has a negative impact on the systems that support life on this planet. That’s a sad fact. Our material world is destroying our natural material world, and we deny it. But I have a strategy, which I'm putting forward everywhere I can. I don't think we're going to change the system of capitalism, at least not in time to save the planet. So the question is: Can we use economic incentives? Can we use the leverage in our economic system for better rather than worse ends? What I argue is that younger people will see the impacts on the planet of what they buy and use as an imperative—not as something they don't want to think about, but as an essential. If that's the case, then a smart business strategy in the next 10 or 20 years would be to apply a believable, objective assessment methodology, like Life Cycle Assessment, to products and services in order to show that we are lessening their negative impact. As competitors try to keep up, this would make improving impacts a competitive domain. I think that would matter enormously to business, because you'd win market share, and the game is all about market share in the business universe. Our economy needs us to be in denial so that it can continue to grow as it destroys the planet, slowly eroding it. That's why I like this other way of thinking. A circular economy is good, so far as it goes, because that means you're not making and buying new stuff. You're using what exists already. What the circular economy ignores is the embodied footprint of whatever it is that you're reusing. If you have a Tesla, it's nice that during the use phase, you're using electricity rather than fossil fuels. But how is that electricity being made? Is it a fossil fuel burning plant, or is it solar? And what happened to the planet when that Tesla was made? In other words, the circular economy says buy a used car, because you're not making a new car. Every car has done damage to the planet, but I think it's better to buy a used car than a new one anyway. That's part of the answer.
Nature as Recovery
There's a lot of data showing that spending time in nature is good for us emotionally and physically. We don't really know the mechanism from a scientific point of view, but we know the correlation where spending time in the woods, or in a meadow, or with an animal, has soothing effects on us. It counters stress. The body needs time to recover from stress; it needs recovery activity. The problem with life today is that stress is unremitting for many. And it's all too easy to say, well, I'll skip that walk in nature—I've got stuff to do, and that stuff to do is stressful. But this eventually leads to emotional exhaustion, and that's the prelude to burnout. So I really encourage people to schedule a recovery activity every day, whether it's playing with a pet, or a walk in nature, or meditation, or yoga, whatever works for you. Do it every day. Even though it looks like a waste of time from that get-things-done point of view, it's not a waste of time. It's restoring yourself so you'll be better able to handle whatever it is you need to do.
I would like everyone, including young people, to remember that the classic traditional human capacities, like paying full attention to yourself and to other people, and caring about yourself and those people, matter enormously. As does spending time in nature to feel at home, to feel calm, to feel good.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Maya Bell with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Maya Bell.
The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Associate Text Editor was Sofia Reecer. Additional production support by Katie Foster.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
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