The Growing Demand for Soft Skills Featuring Daniel Goleman

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Hi everyone, I'm Jaci Clement. Joining me today is psychologist and author Daniel Goleman. Dan, thank you so much for being with us.

Jaci, it's a pleasure to be here.

Oh, I thank you. I suppose we can just consider this episode as a chance to dive inside people's minds and talk about how they work and what we're kind of doing right and what we're doing wrong with modern society today, if you will. You know, so much of our time is spent online and dealing with virtual worlds and things that aren't even reality, but we're Just immersed in it, and we think it's real. What is that doing to us mentally?

I think we've unconsciously adjusted to a somewhat dysfunctional way of connecting. One of the dysfunctions is built into our hardware. If you're trying to have rapport with someone face-to-face, you do it by looking in their eyes. However, the placement of the camera and the picture of the person And Zoom doesn't allow that. Either you look to camera and the person feels you're looking in their eyes, or you look at their face where you pick up a ton of information about their feelings from their facial expression, in addition, of course, to tone of voice. So I think we've adapted to that. It's an unknown as to how we will readapt to face-to-face. Now that more and more of us are hanging out with people.

Okay. The way the pandemic has really influenced our lifestyles really, really fast-forwarded us into both technology, living online, and has also, you know, really pushed artificial intelligence towards us faster and faster. I'm wondering, you know, Are we stunting our actual emotions the more we rely on technology?

I wouldn't put it that way, Jaci. I'd say that if we rely on our technology for emotions, for our emotions channel, we're making a big mistake. AI doesn't have emotions. AI is genius cognitively. It can sweep the web in a second. and find out, you know, anything about everything, but it doesn't know how it feels about it. And how we feel is a human domain. And I think even if AI someday builds in, like, recognition of feelings from facial expression, it will never be the same as a human brain. You know, our social brain, is the fore part of the brain, has many, many circuits that are designed in human evolution to tune into the brain of the person in front of us unconsciously, instantly. And it tells us how that person feels and what they're intending and so on without our having to think about it. And I doubt that AI will ever have that capacity. So AI may be a great time saver. I was talking to a friend of mine who's Why ain't going to write a column? And he said he asked AI to do it and it came up with a pretty good one. On the other hand, there are a lot of mistakes AI makes because it doesn't understand nuance, doesn't understand emotion, and it might get better and better, but I think there's still room for people.

Okay. All right. And I know some of the ways technology has impacted the media landscape, which is something I talk about a lot. You know, news stories are shorter. More information comes at us faster. We've kind of lost focus, you know, and it's hard for us to focus. So now I understand you, you did just come out with a new book on meditation. Now, is that sort of the antidote to one of our problems that we see happening today with the lack of focus?

Well, uh, sure, that's a huge area that you're bringing up.

Okay.

I mean, one of the things that is happening, as you point out, is that news items are shorter. They appeal to a shortened attention span. However, the brain really wants more nuance. It wants novels. It wants us to understand a story. That's the way the brain is designed. So I saw one estimate that we get about 5 times more information than was true, say, 20 years ago before the advent of online reality, streaming, and so on. And what information consumes is attention. And the more information, the more challenged our attention is. Attention is a narrow bandwidth.

Yeah.

So to focus, we need to maybe be more intentional. And it turns out that the biggest distraction, if you're trying to focus— and meditation is at base retraining attention, helping us get more focused and stay more focused— the biggest distractor is our upsets. It's not, you know, the people talking at the next table and the coffee. It's our thoughts. What upset you this morning and is still upsetting you? That is the biggest distractor. And so meditation training, which invariably starts with letting go of that distraction, that internal distraction, returning to a point of focus, can be really easy. I'll share with you the basic mindfulness meditation. You know, you sit in a relaxed position, maybe close your eyes if that's what you want to do.

Mm-hmm.

And you bring your awareness To your breath, to the full breath, a full in-breath, full out-breath. And then the next breath, a full in-breath, out-breath. And at some point, your thoughts are going to take over. And when you realize that you have lost track of your breath and you wandered off in some thought, that's a moment of mindfulness. You say, okay, to yourself, I'm going back to my breath. And you drop that train of thought.

Okay.

Go back to your breath and start again with the next breath. That, in essence, is the basic instruction in pretty much every kind of meditation. Because from the get-go, in whatever meditation practice you're doing, mindfulness being the most popular one these days, you need to learn how to let go of that inner distraction, that compelling thought, that emotionally laden thing, that thing she said to me that I can't let go of. You need to learn to let go of and go back to your breath, at least for the time. The more you do it, the easier it gets.

Mm-hmm.

And if you really do it for a while, like every day, 5, 10, 15 minutes, whatever, you reach a point where you start to see changes in how you react to emotional upsets. One of them being that you don't get triggered so often. You know, that person who triggers you doesn't do it as much. When you do get triggered, you're not as upset as you usually used to get, and you recover more quickly, which means you're more resilient. The time it takes to go from the peak of an upset back to calm is the time it takes you to be resilient. That's the operational definition in a science lab of resilience. And the more you The more you meditate, I would say the more hours you put in over months or years, the more this tends to happen.

Okay. Now, is there actually a reverse method, such as something I should keep in mind when something triggers me? How do I bring that awareness? Like, oh, I have to talk to Dan today. He always says something that drives me crazy. How do I stop myself from getting crazy?

Well, you already took the first step, which is to remind yourself that you get crazy when you're with Dan.

Okay. Nothing personal, by the way.

Yeah, right. Or Dan hypothetical, whoever that might be. We don't want to name that actual person. So I think the second step might be doing something that you personally find disarms that upset. And it might be reminding yourself that Dan doesn't have the final word in your life. Lots of other opinions of you, that you don't get triggered when you talk to Jane or Howard. In other words, you put it in some perspective cognitively. That's another step. So the mindfulness of the meditation is ancillary. It's an add-on to that.

I see. All right. I should mention the name of the book that we're currently talking about is called Why We Meditate: The Science and Practice of Clarity and Compassion. Now, a lot of your work focuses on using neuroscience. And I know you talk often that we have 2 minds. We have a rational and an emotional.

We do.

And how it equates to leadership and our ability to lead.

Can you explain how you came up with Well, you know, when I wrote the book Emotional Intelligence, I loved the phrase, which I didn't invent, by the way. It was an article in an obscure journal by a guy named Peter Salovey, what was called emotional intelligence. Peter now is the president of Yale University. He's done very well over his time. And I think it's because he, in part, he's emotionally intelligent. It means being intelligent about your emotions. It doesn't mean disregarding your ordinary intelligence, your IQ. It means in addition to that, having a skill set that lets you be more self-aware. What am I feeling now? How is it driving my perceptions, my thoughts, my performance? Using that information to manage your emotions better, as we talked about before, to stay focused, to stay positive. To keep working toward your goals, whatever those may be, despite your emotional state. And then to empathize with other people, to tune into their emotions. And this is a key leadership quality. It's the new CEO, relatively new CEO at Microsoft, Satya Nadella, has told people working there, we need empathy. We need empathy to understand our customers. We need empathy with each other. We need to know how each other is feeling so that We can speak to that as well as to what they're thinking. So I would say emotional intelligence is doing both. And then finally, it's putting all that together— self-awareness, self-management, empathy— putting it together to have effective relationships, effective interactions with people.

I see. So tell me, how did you kind of forge this path for yourself? You were a science journalist at the New York Times.

Correct.

And is that sort of what kind of sent you down this path of delving into the mind and how it works?

Partly, but partly not. I would say the day-to-day emotional climate in the newsroom was not optimal. I'd say there was too much free-floating anxiety, just between you and me and your listeners at that time. However, it was because I was a science journalist. I have a PhD in psychology, so they wanted me to cover psychology and brain sciences and so on. So I would read these obscure journals, which is why I came across that article by Peter about emotional intelligence. And that gave me a label for a book I had been wanting to write already, which was about a decade of findings on the neuroscience of emotions in the brain, what happens in the brain. And so That was the book that I wrote that became rather surprisingly popular and set me on that course. In the meantime, I had a parallel interest for a long, long time since I was an undergraduate actually in meditation, which I had started back as an undergrad because my first motivation was it calmed my anxiety and made me less uptight, made me better able to focus, gave me more clarity. in what I was doing as a student, and I've continued it to this point.

So when you were 5 years old, what did you think you'd be when you grew up?

Oh my God, fireman? I have no idea. That was a long time ago.

Well, now, now there is one of the quotes of yours that I like, which I think applies to just basically everything we've talked about, is out-of-control emotions make smart people stupid.

Yeah.

I don't know if you remember saying that.

Well, you know, it basically— that's a derivative of an understanding in brain science that our emotional brain, when we think there's a threat, that's what gets us upset, can take over and paralyze the thinking brain. That's why smart people can do dumb things when they're upset. That's why anybody can do dumb things if that part of the brain is running them, because that part of the brain was designed to help us survive in early human evolution when, you know, the rustle in the bushes was the danger we were reacting to. We didn't know what it was, and we had to be— better be safe than sorry. And our ancestors were the ones who were safe, who did something instantly to preserve themselves, to live longer. And that's how our brain is designed now. Except here's a problem, Jaci. We're dealing with complex social reality, and we have the same primitive brain response to that reality, which is another reason I'm all in favor of that focus, mastering focus, which attention retraining does for you.

I see. Okay. Now, way back in '95, when you wrote the bestseller on emotional intelligence, Did you have any idea how important a role that would become in today's society?

I had no idea how popular the book would be, nor its impact. I had one slim chapter on managing management, and it turned out there was a huge interest in the business world, in the corporate world, in that. And I started speaking about it, and I went back to my roots in Harvard in graduate school. And my mentor then had developed a method called competence assessment, where you can— where any organization can look at its top performers and then look at people in the same position or just medium or less and see what competencies or abilities distinguish the top performers. And he argued you should hire people for those if you could. You can train people for those. And so my second book, the follow-up to Emotional Intelligence, was about the competencies that reside within the domain of emotional intelligence, which turned out to be key for leadership. I did an article for Harvard Business Review back then talking about what makes a leader, about these abilities. And that became phenomenally successful for them. So, you know, that kicked off a whole series of books and readers and so on by the Harvard Business School Press on emotional intelligence and leadership. But at the same time, that whole idea was catching hold in the business world. So I, after a while, I left the Times and just started Going around giving lectures and talking about emotional intelligence leadership.

Can you name some leaders that you think do emotional intelligence well?

One leader who I just wrote about in my new book, which will come out in January next year, '24, was the CEO of Pfizer. Who set a goal, challenged his people to do something that was then impossible, to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 in 8 or 9 months and to make several billion doses of that vaccine in that same time period. And at that time, the capacity for making doses of vaccine was 2 or 3 million, not 2 or 3 billion. And nobody had developed a vaccine ever that quickly. So they had to rethink how to do it. They came up with an mRNA strategy, which worked. And that CEO, I think, was remarkably emotionally intelligent in the way he inspired his people to rise to that challenge. I think I mentioned Satya Nadella at Microsoft. He was— he's someone who emphasizes empathy and the role of empathy in leadership. So I would say there's 2 right there.

It's interesting because these qualities, they are sort of nuanced. They aren't things that you can really quantify, right? More, more of the soft skill set. than what would typically be considered a hard skill set?

Well, it's not easily quantified. You can do it. The best way to do it is by asking people to rate someone who know that person well and to do it anonymously so they can speak freely. I have something called the Emotional and Social Competence Inventory. It's what's called a 360-degree measurement. That means people around you. are assessing you. The reason 360 is so important is if you have blind spots about this, and many people, particularly people who are not really good at it and think they're good at it, will be really wrong in assessing themselves. So people around them can see that. So you get a 360. I think that's the best method to quantify soft skills. And interestingly, soft skills are increasingly in demand. as what companies are looking for in their top leaders. Hard skills are less and less so. I think that means it's not that hard skills don't matter, it's just that everybody's supposed to have them.

Oh, I see. Okay. And do you find generational differences in dealing with these issues?

Uh-huh. It's hard to say because we don't know if a difference you find now is stage of life You know, people in their 20s tend to be more idealistic than people in their 60s, maybe. I think, though, that climate change is putting this at the top of younger people's agenda, life agenda, sense of purpose and meaning and what matters. Environmental science is becoming one of the most popular majors for undergraduates these days. I think for that reason. So I— and I don't think that younger people are any less skilled than older people were in this skill set, but it, you know, remains to be seen. We don't know.

Okay. All right. And a lot of your work also, you marry up the idea of East and West. Can you explain a little bit of that?

Well, you know, the West, what we think of as modern civilization, is extremely good at mastering the material world. It's genius. It's not very good at mastering the inner world, the world of spirit, the world of soul, the world of meditation, if you will. And Eastern cultures have been better at preserving some ancient wisdom. about that. So I think that we're better off if we put the two together, which is what I've tried to do in my work. Yeah.

And how was that received in the beginning?

Terribly. When I was a graduate student at Harvard, I came back from 15 months in India. I said, hey, I think something's going on there that we should know about. And, you know, maybe I'll do a doctoral dissertation on meditation. What do you think? They thought it was a terrible idea. They thought it was career-ending because in those days, you know, the outlook was kind of very traditional, psychoanalytic. Meditation was completely off the map. And, you know, I was lucky I found a mentor who thought, oh, that's not such a bad idea. David McClellan, I mentioned before, and a guy at Harvard Medical School, Herbert Benson, who was looking at meditation as a way to lower blood pressure. And I think because there was someone from the medical school who said it was okay, my department let me go ahead and do it. But I did a very, you know, scientific look at it. It was physiological study of stress reactivity and meditation. Okay.

You probably wouldn't have gotten away with it otherwise, right?

I'm sure I wouldn't have. No question.

But now, so where do you see this going? What do you think are the next steps here?

Well, it's hard to say. I was told by an old wise yogi in India, you can plan for 100 years, but you don't know what'll happen the next moment, which is of course true. So if I say what's going to happen, it's total speculation. I don't know what's going to happen. What I'd like to see happen is that kids, for example, learn these attention strengthening methods. I mean, focus is what helps you learn. And the mission of schools is to help kids learn. So why don't we teach them the basic skill of learning? That's something I'd love to see. I also am a very strong believer in environmental science and in learning how all of us are unwilling colluders with the destruction of the planet, in that every material thing we own and use and buy and every service has a footprint. The footprint is the negatives of the impact of that on the planet. It's not just carbon. There's 8 global systems that support life on the planet, and the things we buy and use degrade all of them to some degree. There's a system called life cycle assessment, which can tell you what that negative number is for anything. Right now, it's only used by companies to find ways to— cut costs. I think it should be information that we get along with the price of something at the point of deciding whether to buy it, because that way we could choose a competing product that had a better footprint. But we don't have that information yet. That's another thing I'd like to see happen.

Your work seems to be resonating louder than ever in the current situation—

Interesting. —that we're in.

I'm wondering, are you finding differences perhaps from country to country where your work is being portrayed?

No, I never know. I have no idea.

You never know.

Maybe.

Okay.

Yeah, I think India, from what I hear, is putting a lot of emphasis on this now, but that's just hearsay. I don't know.

So I think one of the other issues I wanted to talk to you about is Just negative patterns of thought. We touched on it a little bit earlier. Sure. About how do you get yourself out of that groove once you're in it? Because to me, it kind of seems like a spiral. Once it starts, you go down a rabbit hole.

So I have to recommend a book my wife wrote, Tara Bennett-Goleman, Emotional Alchemy, because it's about those emotional patterns, self-defeating habits of thought that plague us all the time. And the first step— she was one of the pioneers in putting mindfulness together with regular psychotherapy. The first step is being mindful, noticing, oh my God, I'm thinking that thought again.

Yeah.

And it's only then that you have any leverage at all to do something about it. And what you might do then depends on what your toolkit It might be reminding yourself that this is just a thought and that there are counter-thoughts and bringing those to mind. That's a standard cognitive therapy approach. Sometimes people will write down the counter-thoughts because they're hard to remember when you're caught in that thought. So you can have a little card that says, oh yeah, you know, oh, I am worthwhile. Many people love me. When you're having that— Unlovability thought. And that's another step you can take. You can realize this is just a thought. And if you're good at mindfulness, you can let it go and bring your mind to something positive or neutral. You can practice what's called the gratitude journal, where at the end of the day, you write down 3 things that you're grateful for in your life, or 3 people. Which builds up a more positive mindset, which counters the tendency to have those negative thoughts. So those are some things you can do. I mean, many— you can see a psychotherapist. Good luck. I hope you get a good one.

All right. And as you talk, I can't help but wonder, with 2 experts living in the same house, do you ever argue?

Less and less as time goes on. Thank you.

Do you ever win the argument? I probably should ask.

Well, it depends on what you mean by winning.

Oh, okay. Fair enough. Fair enough.

Because one of the problems with arguments is that each person thinks they're right.

Yes.

It's a very seductive mindset. You need to agree with me. Maybe the best resolution is something we can both accept.

Interesting. Very adult. That is very adult advice. So I do have a question. One of the audience members, we always allow feedback whenever we announce we have a guest on, wanted to know if there's a difference between emotional intelligence and social intelligence, or is that the same thing?

I fold social intelligence into emotional intelligence. Some people say emotional intelligence is just self-awareness and self-regulation or self-mastery, but I see it as being also empathy, and relationship skills, which is what's usually meant by social intelligence. So I fold social into emotional.

Okay. And what about left brain and right brain? Is that really a thing in your mind?

No, no. Left brain and right brain is rather outmoded brain science. That's from decades ago. Turns out, for example, that negative emotions are more left brain than right brain. It depends what part of the brain— front, middle, back— or it can get even more differentiated you're talking about. So actually, the story is more complex than left brain and right brain. I think they're metaphors. They're useful metaphors, but they're not good brain science.

Okay. All right. One last question, as we're already at time, which is— it's kind of a classic Fast Chat question. It may be the hardest question that we ask.

Yes.

Um, what's the best thing about being Daniel Goleman?

Oh, yeah, I don't have a day job. I just write stuff I like to write, which gives me pleasure. Thank you very much, Jaci. It's been a real pleasure being with you.

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