Quotes from Daniel Goleman

If you do a practice and train your attention to hover in the present, then you will build the internal capacity to do that as needed - at will and voluntarily.

The other thing is that if you rely solely on medication to manage depression or anxiety, for example, you have done nothing to train the mind, so that when you come off the medication, you are just as vulnerable to a relapse as though you had never taken the medication.

The more time you put into practicing, then, the greater the payoff.

Positive work environments outperform negative work environments.

Emotions are contagious. We've all known it experientially. You know after you have a really fun coffee with a friend, you feel good. When you have a rude clerk in a store, you walk away feeling bad.

Well, any effort to maximize your potential and ability is a good thing.

The near cousin of optimism is hope: knowing the steps needed to get to a goal and having the energy to pursue those steps. It is a primal motivating force, and its absence is paralyzing.

One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us.

One aspect of a successful relationship is not just how compatible you are, but how you deal with your incompatibility.

Research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important an ingredient of outstanding performance as cognitive ability and technical skill combined.

IQ and technical skills are important, but emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership.

I don't think focus is in itself ever a bad thing. But focus of the wrong kind, or managed poorly, can be.

The best leaders don't know just one style of leadership—they're skilled at several, and have the flexibility to switch between styles as the circumstances dictate.

Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.

It is difficult to spread the contagion of excitement without having a sense of purpose and direction.

We learn best with focused attention. As we focus on what we're learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know making new neural connections

But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.

Western business people often don't get the importance of establishing human relationships.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.

A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt 'Don't bother me - I've got important work to do.'

Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages.

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings. This is part of teaching emotional literacy - a set of skills we can all develop, including the ability to read, understand, and respond appropriately to one's own emotions and the emotions of others.

I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example.