Daniel Goleman, PhD, on Emotional Intelligence and Optimal Performance on

Living a life in full is a conversation you always wanted to have with that person who gave an amazing TED Talk or the author of one of your favorite books, or that inspirational Olympian you always wanted to know more about. It's graduate level conversations with those making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. This show brings you new ideas and approaches so that you can live a life in full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout and I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode is brought to you by the nonprofit I founded, the center for Global Initiatives. The center is an all volunteer organization so there are no salaries and thus all tax deductible donations can go to the work. While our key country partner is in Tanzania, our work is global and generally focused in the areas of education and healthcare. We also help others to get their nonprofits started or augment others project based initiatives. It's our goal to open source humanitarian intervention and to help make it easier for others to do more good in the world. We are proud to have been ranked a great nonprofit every year since 2011 and to have achieved a Platinum level rating by Guidestar Links. In this episode's show, notes will take you to published articles on our outcomes, a number of helpful tools, and downloadable resources which are all free always. Please Visit us at CenterForGlobalInitiatives.org and be sure to watch our video at Patreon.com DrChrisStout to learn more. Thanks welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. You've likely seen moments of peak performance. Perhaps an athlete plays a perfect game or or a business that has a quarter with a once in a lifetime profit. Perhaps you've experienced something similar yourself, playing a musical piece perfectly, making a faultless shot, or perhaps acing a final. But these moments are often elusive, and for every amazing day we may have 100 ordinary or even unsatisfying days. Now imagine your best day at work. You exceed the goals set for you. Your interactions with coworkers are productive and bristle free. The new system you implemented has boosted productivity company wide and you leave the office feeling on top of the world rather than crushed under the weight of it. What if your best day could be every day fulfillment or living a life in full doesn't come from isolated peak experiences, but rather from many consistent good days. While achieving this kind of flow might seem a rarefied, elusive occurrence, what if it was possible for individuals and teams to consistently work at peak performance levels while avoiding burnout and and maintaining balance. This is something that Dr. Daniel Goleman knows a lot about. Along with Dr. Carrie Chernis, they have written how to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day, which discusses how emotional intelligence can help us have a great day, any day, or said another way to consistently work at our optimal level. Daniel Goleman is a renowned psychologist, author and science journalist. For 12 years he wrote at the New York Times, reporting focusing on the brain and behavioral sciences. His 1995 book Emotional why It Can Matter More Than IQ was on the New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half, was a best seller in numerous countries, is in print worldwide in 40 languages and has sold over 6 million copies. Daniel attended Amherst College, graduating magna cum laude and he also attended UC Berkeley through Amherst's Independent Scholar program. He went on to earn a PhD in clinical psychology at Harvard University. He had a pre doctoral fellowship from Harvard and a postdoctoral grant from the Social Science Research Council and then used them to study in India. He then returned as a visiting lecturer at Harvard in 1993. Daniel Co founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning at Yale University's Child Study center and then moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago. A frequent speaker on campuses and to businesses, he has worked with organizations around the globe examining the way social and emotional competencies impact the bottom line. Daniel is ranked as one of the top 10 most influential business thinkers by the Wall Street Journal and his articles in the Harvard Business Review are among the most frequently requested reprints. He's won a number of awards including the Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award for Best Article of the Year and Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has awarded him with its Centennial medallion. Currently he co directs the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University and he serves on the board of the Mind and Life Institute. Daniel, it's great to have you on the show Chris.

Thank you. That was a very thorough

good. Well I hope I have all my facts straight because I really do. I have just long been a fan of your work also as a psychologist. So it's really a treat for me to have you on the show and really an honor and just a shout out tip of the hat to our mutual friend William Green for connecting us and putting us together.

Oh yeah. Well, I'm delighted to be here Chris.

Thank you, thank you. So you've done a great deal, but perhaps we could start with the concept of emotional intelligence. It's really kind of one of the hallmarks that you're best known for and Certainly popular with your writings. For those that may not know, could you walk us through a brief summary of how emotional intelligence is different than general intelligence or what we might know as iq? Sure.

They actually operate in different parts of the brain. IQ is pretty much a neocortical top of the brain, thinking brain ability. And it's of course very important, particularly important in school. It's the best predictor while you're in school of your income lifetime because it predicts what kind of profession you can get in, whether you get an MBA for example, or an MD or become a lawyer. However, once you're in a career, let's say you're an engineer, it turns out that your IQ doesn't really predict anymore. It's now your emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence are things like your self awareness, how you manage your emotions, how you empathize and tune into other people and how you put that all together to have effective relationships. And it turns out that set of skills becomes more and more important over the course of your career. You'll never hear this in school, but I'm telling you it's true. There's a study I just saw recently about engineers asking, asked to rate other engineers for their effectiveness as engineers. And it turned out IQ didn't predict the effectiveness at all. It was emotional intelligence that predicts whether you're going to be effective as an engineer. Sums it up.

It's really interesting too to see that because from my experience in readings about it, it really does cut across all disciplines and not just, you know, I know it gets focused on a lot in work life, but also in, in personal life too. Can you make mention of that?

Well, consider this. Would you want a mate or a lover who had no empathy?

Easy question, Daniel.

I mean people who are emotionally clueless are not people that we want as our co workers, as our boss, as our, as a romantic partner. It just is a turn off, you

know, as a parent, I have two adult children now and it seemed to me again as a psychologist parent, and my wife's also a clinical psychologist, that when our kids were young it seemed like there was not just our kids, but in toddler ages that there was a great deal of empathy, that there was a caring if someone got hurt, if someone was crying. There's almost like a sixth sense of those children kind of perceiving something not being quite right with one of their classmates or cohorts or playmates. So is it sort of like an innate human kind of characteristic? Is it something is present in most of us or varies like Other kinds of skills or how does it come about?

Well, I think like any human ability, it's a combination of nature and nurture. There's, you know, we're all born with, say, set points for various neurotransmitters that will predict, for example, how outgoing we are or how introverted. But in addition to that, and interacting with it is how we're raised or what our life experience tells us. And so, for example, when I was at Harvard, there was a professor named Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist, who did studies of kids who were shy. And what he found was that if you evaluate a kid at 4 who's shy, some turn out to be shy, you know, at 14, and some are not. And the difference is how their parents relate to them. If the parent, you know, encourages a kid who's a little inhibited to go ahead and try the new food or the new playmate, they'll go ahead and have fun or have a good time. That's a different learning than parents who say, well, she's shy, so we won't try to force her to do that or encourage her to do that.

I see. Gotcha. So what about as adults? Is it something that, you know, I know it's sort of like an innate thing vis a vis iq? I mean, you can certainly study and you can certainly have grit and ways to, you know, augment or work around, you know, if there's deficits or even learning disabilities. But is it something that, you know, after a certain set point that there might be just incremental benefit to it? Or what if someone feels like they this is something that they wanted to develop? Is it, you know, has the train left the station by a certain age, or is it always something that we can work on and improve?

I think the good news about emotional intelligence is that it's learned and learnable at any age. And so, for example, companies will offer courses in emotional intelligence for their employees, regardless of their age. So I don't think that unlike iq, which pretty much doesn't change over the course of life, emotional intelligence is quite plastic, quite improvable, if you will. So it has to do with the question of, are you motivated? Do you really care? That's the crucial point.

Gotcha. Well, let's maybe use this as a springboard and think about emotional intelligence as foundational to your new book that I want to spend some time with you talking about. So, again, it's called Optimal how to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence. Every day, before we dive into it, I just want to share A couple of reviews of what some other people have had to say about it. Marc Benioff, probably familiar to a lot of listeners on this show, chair and CEO of Salesforce, said, in an age of AI and machine intelligence, emotional intelligence is more important than ever for building a company culture that brings out the best in people and drives success. Anyone leading a team or organization should read Optimal. It will open your mind and show you the inner balance and skill set that we all need to face the future. And Oscar Munoz, former CEO of United Airlines and also the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Turnaround Time, said, powerful and deeply researched, Optimal offers actionable tools and insights that are essential to unlocking your potential, achieving stable success over time, and building high performing teams while cultivating the most important leadership quality of all, emotional intelligence. From now on, when I see a copy of this outstanding book on someone's desk, their stock will have risen in my eyes. So well deserved praise. Daniel so I know you've written at least over 13 other books and they've kind of varied in, in topic and domain, but what brought you and Carrie to write Optimal?

Well, Carrie Chernis and I were co directors of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence. We started it actually a little bit before my book Emotional Intelligence came out. When that book was first published, the idea was new. I had seen in 1990 an article called Emotional Intelligence written by Peter Salovey, he's now president of Yale, and his then graduate student student John Mayer. And I thought, wow, that's a great idea. You can be intelligent about emotion. So I used it as a frame for my book and we were justifiably criticized in the early years because there was very little direct research on emotional intelligence. It was a brand new concept. And you know, Chris is a psychologist. It takes some time to right, you know, plan a study, get funded, do the study. So right. So, you know, year, decades later, Carrie and I have been able to harvest a critical mass of very strong research showing that emotional intelligence fact does do the things we had a hunch it might do, which is to make people more effective in their lives and their work, to make leaders more effective and teams operate better. And that's why we wrote the book Optimal.

That's great. I think it's almost become kind of common parlance for people talking about optimizing certain kinds of things, their morning routines or certain more healthy habits or exercise or what have you. In the book you suggest that being optimal is really a more realistic and attainable goal than what Macaulay Csikszentmihalyi has written about in flow and that that serves actually as a better framework for achieving peak performance. Could you elaborate on what your thoughts are around that in particular, vis a vis the context of emotional intelligence?

Of course. So the research on the optimal state actually comes from Harvard Business School, where they asked hundreds of men and women to keep journals of their feelings and events of their workday. And there's a composite of best day at work, where you're completely engrossed and what you're doing, you feel really good and satisfied, you're productive, you're creative, you feel good and you're connected with the people around you. That's kind of an optimal state. The flow is on that spectrum, but it's an extreme. The group at the University of Chicago who did the study. And I want to congratulate you on knowing how to pronounce chicks at my.

Thank you. Big fan of his work too, Church.

You know, they began by asking people and all sorts of callings. Neurosurgeons, basketball players, ballerinas. Tell us about a time you outdid yourself when you're absolutely shocked by how well you did. And it's your best, all time best. And the problem with flow is it happens to you. You can't make it happen. It's grace, you know, falls out of the sky. So we felt it was more realistic to go a little notch below that, where you're still at your best, you're really performing well, but you can get into that state voluntarily, you can make it happen. And one of the most powerful ways to make it happen is simply to pay full attention to what you're doing right now. You know, Chris, today people are more distracted than ever. About a century ago, T.S. eliot had a line in a poem I love, distracted from distraction. By distraction. I mean, that's how we live our lives. That's what our phones are all about there. And I think there's a premium now on the simple ability to concentrate on what's important to you at the moment. And research at Harvard found that people are distracted about 50% of the time, up to 90% at work. So I think that being able to decide, I'm going to put aside distractions and become fully engaged and engrossed and concentrated on what's important to me at the moment. I think there's a premium on that now.

Well, and too there have been other authors that have written articles and as well as titled books around deep work and being able to get into that. Is that a variation or A component of the optimal state.

I think that many people are familiar with the optimal state. It's no doubt been written about in many different ways in many different frameworks. We found interestingly that emotional intelligence in people and in their bosses tends to promote that optimal state. And I think that's very important. So I looked at it through a lens of emotional intelligence, as we do in the book, and we found that that being able to be emotionally self aware and to manage your emotions well and to tune into other people well is a good formula for encouraging that state. And it's not that we can guarantee it, but we can think it's going to be more likely.

And so that makes me think. So let me check this out with you. So in the context of in, let's keep it in the workplace, so interacting with co workers, interacting with supervisors, leaders, founders, etc. That kind of expressing ourself in that way creates an environment or a space where those, our collaborators, our bosses, et cetera, may respond back to us in a similar way over time. And kind of creating that space to be able to, to do that. The psychological safety I've heard you talk about as well too around that is that. Am I getting that straight?

That's interesting that how you are may affect how your boss relates to you. That seems to be what you're applying. Chris. I think there's something else going on, but I think that too. Let me tell you what I think is going on here. You know, I've given talks around the world where I started by asking business audiences to think of a boss they loved and a boss they hated. One quality of each of those. And when you list the qualities of the boss people love, they're emotionally intelligent, they're available, they're empathic, they, they don't blow up at people, they handle their own emotions. And the boss they hate is exactly the opposite of that. And so I think that having a boss you like is very important. But also, you know, the serenity prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr's, that makes a distinction between that in my life that I can change and that which I have to adapt to, basically. And so I can't guarantee that your boss is going to be one you love. But that doesn't mean that your boss has to control your inner life, that you can be able to manage your emotions despite whatever is going on at work. And it may not be your boss, maybe your boss is great, but you know, all kinds of directives come up from higher up in organizations that create problems Lower down and the nature of organizational life. So today's obstacle, today's problem is a new challenge. But how you meet that challenge is up to you and the state you're in.

Gotcha. So for the, the intellectual aspect of choosing a frame of how to feel that, I mean, that's also sounds very cognitive, behaviorally oriented, where we can, you know, not feel so affected by others, but, you know, we choose how to interpret something or what have you. Is that also then another facet of maybe a tool for developing emotional intelligence or where might those kinds of techniques fit in with this?

It's interesting that you bring up cognitive behavioral therapy. My wife is a cognitive therapist. She was trained in a kind of psychodynamic model of it. But I, that, you know, Aaron Beck, the late Aaron Beck, was a genius really, in developing cognitive therapy. Right. And you know, he developed at a time when I was covering this for the New York Times, and a lot of therapists didn't like the fact that cognitive therapy seemed to work in empirical studies. Other therapies didn't necessarily do so well. And cognitive therapy is very important because it tells us, for example, we don't have to believe our thoughts, not every thought. Some thoughts don't help us. They may lead us to mess ourselves up. And so it's a very powerful way to work with emotional disorders like depression or chronic anxiety. And I think it might also be a good method for helping you stay in an op get or stay in an optimal state. I also recommend mindfulness. Like mindfulness, the breath, which is like a mental gym, basically, it's attention training. Every time you bring your focus to your breath, the in breath and the out breath, and then notice when your mind wandered and, and then bring it back to the breath, that's a moment of mindfulness. And I think that that strengthens the circuitry for attention. It's like going to the gym for physically, you know, every rep of a weight you're lifting strengthens that muscle just that much more. And I think the same thing happens in the brain, and it makes you more able to focus and concentrate on whatever you want, which I think is another doorway into the optimal state.

Got you. So in the context of then self awareness, are there certain kinds of examples that people might think about this in terms of applying it in their social relationships and their work with others vis a vis moving toward an optimal state?

Well, I think that emotional self awareness matters immensely for how you manage yourself. And I think if you add empathy, it matters enormously for how well your Relationships go. So the first part, self management. Take for example, being in a chronically stressful job situation. Sadly, too many people are. If you realize that you're being stressed out constantly, you wake up in the middle of night and you worried about work, for example, it's a sign that you may be heading toward burnout. You may be getting emotional exhaustion, which comes from unremitting stress. And you know, our bodies are designed to have that fight or flight response when there's an emergency. Not every day, all the time. And in fact the body wants to have a recovery period, a time, you know, it's the difference between sympathetic nervous system arousal, that's the fight or flight, or parasympathetic, which is the recovery mode. So I really advocate scheduling daily recovery activity, whatever it may be for you. Maybe it's playing with your pet or walking in nature or yoga or meditation. Whatever it is, make time for it. Because it looks like you could say, oh, that's a waste of time. It's not. It's helping your body restore itself so you can go back into the fray. That's a way, that's a strategy for self management under stress. And then you brought up the relationship question, which I think requires both self awareness and empathy tuning into the people around you. And here I want to say there are three kinds of empathy. Cognitive empathy, how the person thinks about things, language they use, language they use to themselves. That's what AI does, by the way, does it very well. Emotional empathy, which is feeling what the other person feels, feels resonating with them. That's different, very different in different part of the brain. And then finally there's empathic concern, which means you not only know how the person thinks and feels, but you care about them. And that's like a parent's love for a child. I think it shows up in every relationship, caring about the welfare of the other person. So the, the self awareness helps you manage yourself so you don't relate to someone out of distress or out of anger or some out of proportion emotion. You can manage your own emotional affairs. And then the second is tuning into them to see where they are and to be there for them, whether it's a workmate or just a friend or family.

I like that. I think that makes a lot of sense. And it's, it's sort of like the couple of cliched things with that of, you know, put your oxygen mask on first and then you, you have the ability to then be of help to others. I think a lot of times people get so frenetic with whatever it is that's stressing them out that you know that then they become short with others.

And that's exactly true. Yeah.

It's a cascade of negative things that follow that. It reminds me too, when you were saying that of like making the time. And I'm recalling Stephen Covey's point of, you know, the, you know, the time to sharpen your saw that the person was too busy driving to stop, to get gas. You know, that it's so hard for us, I think, when we're in these kind of stressful, frenetic, whatever, work situations, life situations, stressful situations to be able to say, yeah, I need to do self care. That's not. That will. That will be my fuel. That will help me function better, that will help me not damage a relationship inadvertently, et cetera. So moving from the interpersonal and maybe familial to more about organizations, because I feel like a lot of your book, you know, is very helpful in terms of, you know, some leaders, leadership skill development and stuff. In the book, you talk about organizational citizenship, which was a new phrase for me. I liked that. And you talk about becoming a good organizational citizen. Can you explain what you mean by that and how someone would go about achieving that?

Yeah. Well, Chris, there actually is a measure of organizational citizenship, and it means this. Your job has a particular description. Your duties are this, this, and this. But good organizational citizen looks around at the people around you and sees ways to help them out that go beyond your job description. It's that simple. Do you do things to help other people that isn't part of what you're being paid for. You know that you have an office. Part of you help clean up. Someone needs help, they're under a tight deadline and you could do a little to help them out. You take the time to do that, to offer help. It's that simple. And it creates enormous emotional glue. People appreciate it fantastically. It makes a difference. A lot of trust gets formed there and it strengthens any relationship.

Relationship, that's great. I would imagine too, just from a social psychology perspective, there might also be, you know, some reciprocity that goes into that. And as. As well as role modeling, you know, people, you know, seeing those kinds of things and hopefully they get recognized, you know, by other colleagues and would certainly be a boost to people's careers and probably just even to themselves, you know, to feel good about that and that, you know, to look forward to, to being, you know, at work and having those kinds of. Of opportunities in the Book you also talk about, I had mentioned leadership, but you give some really great stories that sort of exemplify some of the more theoretical kinds of concepts around emotional intelligence being used by leaders. Could you share a few of those with the time that we have?

Well, I think I want to start out by saying in our research we found that organizations that bring in emotional intelligence do it more effectively. If someone on the business side says this matters, hr, you know, people unfortunately too often get sent to a HR program because someone thinks they need help with X, Y or Z. It's much, much better if someone who knows how the business operates says, you know what, this is going to be a competitive advantage. We, we need to boost our emotional intelligence. So I would say that for one, it takes someone on the business side and they really need to mean it. One of the stories that Kerry Turner's my co author tells, he was asked to go to a company and do some development of emotional intelligence. And the CEO of the company, he came and he, he did that with the, and stayed by the way, through the whole session, which meant a lot to everyone there. They could see it mattered to him. Another time he went to a company and the CEO came, said how important this was and then he left. Very different message. Exactly. There needs to be a leader that shows it really matters. One of my, the people who impressed me the most was a guy named John Murphy who was the head of Progressive, we know it as Progressive Insurance, but it's now called just Progressive. Their CRM division, Customer Relation Management, that was all of the agents who sold insurance and it was a big profit center for the company and it did very, very well under his direction. And he was a champion of emotional intelligence. He said, hey, we're in a relationship business. This is all about relationships. And you know, the vast majority of his heads of regional divisions and agents themselves took courses in emotional intelligence because it mattered, that it mattered. And they did very, very well under his direction. And then at Amazon Web Services, this is interesting, there's a guy there, Rich Wah, who calls himself an emotional intelligence evangelist. And he's doing a grassroots emotional intelligence. Not like John Murphy was the director of the division, head of the division. Rich is an engineer who is now, he has hundreds, maybe thousands of people who are in, inspired by him to bring emotional intelligence to their part of the company. So that's kind of a grassroots ground up way of bringing it in. And he, he's another favorite of mine.

That's great.

You.

I just, I also want to just say it's it really kind of brings the concept alive to be able to read these kinds of stories. I'll tell you one that resonated with me was the person. Person that was the New York City bus driver. And, you know, it's sort of. Because a lot of times, you know, like, again, I'm full of cliches today. Like, thinking about the. What's said about the janitor at NASA, you know, what's. Your job description is like, you know, my job's to get a man in space. Person in space. And I felt that same kind of vibe with that. With the Govan Chauvin Brown, I think, is the name of Govin Brown. Yeah.

Can I tell the story, please?

Yeah. Queuing you up.

So I started the book Emotional Intelligence by talking about him because I was so impressed. I was on a bus in New York City on a hot, humid August day, and people don't want to talk to anybody, right? And I get bus. And the bus driver's very cheery. He looks at me, says, how's your day? Like, he really meant it. And then as I sitting on the bus, I realized he's talking to everybody on the bus. He was looking for suits. This department store on the left has this great sale. Or did you hear about the movies? And Cineplex on the right? I like the one in Cinema three. On and on like that. People get off that bus and he. He transformed their mood from grumpy to, you know, really pleased. And he'd say, well, I hope you have a wonderful day. And they'd be. And they, you know, they greeted him back that way, too. And years later, I happened to find out about him because he had an obit in the New York Times. His name was Govan Brown. He had fans. People would wait bus. He got 3,000 letters of commendation, not one complaint. Over the course of his career. He was the pastor of a church in Long island, and he saw the people on his bus as part of his flock. Wow. He was, you know, tending to his block, and it really mattered. And he had a purpose that was larger than just driving a bus in New York, which is not a great job. It's very stressful and hard to do, and he didn't mind it. He was doing something else. And I think that we've done some research on what you call purposefulness. Feeling a strong sense of purpose and no matter what you're doing, and it makes things go better, too.

That so resonates with me. That's so neat to hear the other kinds of aspects. With that, with his background, I just was fortunate to be invited to do a commencement address. And I talked a lot about purpose and doing some of my research. I found that you may already know this too, but for listeners that the government of Japan sees having a life purpose is such an important factor that now it's part of their Ministry of Health's public health initiatives and things. So I think, you know, being in an optimal state and you know, a sense of purpose are kind of maybe the yin and the yang of each other. I mean, I see both of them, you know, being feeding, feeding to and supporting the other.

CHRIS I'm glad you brought that up, actually. Research on well being, for example, Carol Reef at the University of Wisconsin, shows that a sense of purpose is part of the formula for feeling well. I know the research now doesn't look just at how long you live, but how long you live healthily. It's called health. And you know, the health span is increased when you have something like a sense of purpose in your life. It brings meaning to whatever you doing and somehow it helps health too. We don't know how, but it's one of those magical ingredients.

Yeah, well, and as my I have a 95 year old uncle who just recently stopped farming, still lives on the farm, lives independently, as sharp as attack. He and I have conversations every month about what's going on in the world and he is generally more and better well informed than I am and he could probably do twice as many push ups as I could too. And I think part of that too is just his being in nature like we talked about earlier, and self care kinds of aspects, but also having a sense of purpose with what it is to still be sort of the caretaker of the farm as it is today, to be a father and grandfather of his girls and his granddaughters and those kinds of things, however it is is we define as purpose and as having those kinds of drives and strengths I think are really part of what you and I would call and others as an optimal life. I want to be conscious and respectful of your time. I know you've got a hard stop and we've kind of covered a variety of different kinds of areas. But are there other things that you would like to share before we wrap up vis a vis emotional intelligence, living in an optimal kind of performance way, or anything like that?

DANIEL well, yes, when we were talking about organizations, there's a key point that I hadn't been able to mention before. That's this, that an organization that wants to be emotionally intelligent would also bring this into performance reviews. The too many people are driven or drive others, the leaders to get results. You know, we're worried about the quarter and what we're, you know, how we're going to do in our stock price. But if you stress people out to get those results, you also burn them out. However, however, if you inspire them, if you talk about a shared sense of meaning or purpose, that moves that person too. As a driver of performance, you get the same results, but in a better way. And so in a performance review, it's not just did you get your results, but how did you get those results? Did you do it in a way that's going to, you know, hollow out human capital? People are going to best people will leave if they can. You can. Or did you do it in a way that people feel they love their job? And how well people do their job depends to a great extent on how well they love it. And there the relationship with their direct boss makes a big difference. So I think anyone has a sphere of influence. We all do. The people in our lives, the people that are perhaps at work, our family, and what do we bring to that sphere? Is it a sense of purpose? Is like your uncle. Is it being in control or managing ourselves well? And are we empathic? Are we tuning into people? That's emotional intelligence.

I love that. How do we. How do the people that get off our bus, Daniel, feel after they gone for a ride?

Well put.

Yeah. So. Well, you. You are one of the busiest people in the world that I. That I know. What's. What's next? What's on the horizon? What's cooking?

Oh, I'm going to do a change of pace book. I'm doing something. Oh, I should mention this. My wife and I are doing a series of workshops based on her work, particularly Emotional Alchemy, her book which integrates mindfulness and cognitive therapy. I think you'd like it, Chris. I don't know if you've seen it, but we're doing workshops. Two thirds based on her work, one third on mine.

Wow.

Those are coming up this fall.

Great. Well, we'll be sure to put that in the show notes. And speaking of that, that teases up nicely for. What are some ways for people to learn more about your work, your wife's work, to connect, to get a hold of. Of your books. Where can we route people?

Well, the books are available everywhere, but I want to alert people to the Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence course. The Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence course, which is online and it will help you become much more familiar with emotional intelligence and to master the elements of it and the competencies that make people outstanding performers. It's a Daniel, Daniel, one word. Daniel Goleman, Emotional intelligence that should be in Show Notes.

Okay.

As well as the URL for the course my wife and I are about to give and I think that's about it.

Okay, good. Well, for people that might be driving or running or exercising, whether listening to this, just check out our show notes. We'll have all those links and they can go directly to that. So Daniel, you and I behind the scenes went through a lot to be able to make this happen and I am so happy we did. Thank you so much for taking the time. I have so enjoyed it and I just personally want to say again, you have served as an inspiration and a role model for me in my career as a psychologist and I am deeply indebted to the work that you have done and the work that you're doing. You bring so much to the world and my heartfelt thanks.

Chris. I want to go right back to you and say thank you. I also saw how resilient you are. We had a lot of stress and getting a good connection here and I want to thank you for your good work.

Well, thank you and I look forward to keeping in touch with all this. This episode was also brought to you by Young Automotive, a partner and sponsor of our 2024 Racing to Help Others project. They're a second generation auto service provider based in Sturgeon Bay and serving customers throughout Door County, Wisconsin. They are recognized as a trusted, community minded, locally owned business. In fact, their motto is is changing lives by fixing Cars. Their ASE Certified technicians are experts in servicing domestic, European and Asian vehicles along with hybrids. They are MAP accredited and an ASA member. Cal's expertise in preparing the C8 for the racing season has made all the difference both in the car's on the track performance and my peace of mind as the driver. Owner Fred Young and Service manager Nick Krueger's backgrounds, experience and automotive knowledge are without compare. Their commitment to helping others is a testament to their ethics and the shop's ethos. Fred's leadership in developing a positive, diverse and supportive workplace culture serves as a model for other entrepreneurs to aspire to. And on a personal note, I want to share my heartfelt thanks and deep appreciation for all they do and to our collaboration in helping others wherever we can. Visit their website@youngautomotive.net and be sure to check out the stories on their YouTube channel at Young Automotive, Inc. Sturgeon Bay. You won't be disappointed. Thanks. Living a Life in Full is a production of Stout Media, a subsidiary of Gordian Knot, LLC. Assistant Producer Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien Executive Producer and Host, Dr. Chris Stout. To learn more, stop by our website A lifeinfull for show notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile. Thanks. And until next time.