Daniel Goleman on Emotional Intelligence, Self-Awareness, and Investing

Daniel Goleman

Oh, William, it's my pleasure. I always enjoy talking to you. Thank you.

Daniel Goleman

David was my mentor in graduate school. He was, at the time, probably one of the most famous living psychologists — known for his work on motivation. But what affected me, and set a direction for me, was his later work on the competencies you find in star performers that you don't find in average performers. This was a new idea at the time.

He wrote a very influential article in the main psychology journal saying: look, if you're going to hire someone, don't look at their grade point average, don't look at their personality profile. Look at someone in your own organisation who exemplifies outstanding performance in that role, and compare them with people in the role who have only average or mediocre performance. Assess what competencies or abilities the stars have that you don't see in the average — then hire people who look like the stars.

This became the theoretical, or philosophical, basis for what's now called competency modelling. He was one of the pioneers of the competency movement — most every major corporation in the world now has a competency model for its leaders. Sadly, too many of those models are built by asking leaders what they think matters, instead of looking at empirical data on what matters, so they may not be as sound. But I think McClelland's work, and the work of others who became pioneers in the movement, was so convincing that companies everywhere now have these models.

I was able to look at more than a hundred of them when I wrote the follow-up book to Emotional Intelligence, Working with Emotional Intelligence, and it was very clear that if you separate the competencies into ones based on purely cognitive ability — your IQ, technical skills — and ones based on emotional intelligence — self-awareness, self-management, empathy, social skill — top leadership is eighty to ninety per cent based on emotional intelligence. That is to say, the competencies that distinguish the star leaders from the average are based on emotional intelligence.

The reason for this is interesting, and it may make sense to your listeners if you think about what it takes to get in the game — to be a successful investor, for example. You have to have a very high IQ. But you know what? So does everybody else. That means the threshold for entry into the field is a high IQ, so what's going to distinguish you isn't your IQ — it's going to be how you handle yourself, how you tune into other people. It's your self-awareness and your self-management that sets you apart from the other high-IQ investors you're competing with, in some sense. So when I wrote Emotional Intelligence, David McClelland was very influential.

Along the way in graduate school, I ran into — by sheer accident — a guy called Ram Dass, who was better known at Harvard as Richard Alpert. He was the first professor ever fired from Harvard University — fired because, along with Timothy Leary, he'd become famous for advocating the use of psychedelics. When I ran into him, he had just come back from spending time in India, and he was now going under the name Ram Dass — he wasn't Richard Alpert any more. He'd gone through a huge transformation. He was basically a yogi, and he'd come from a wealthy family.

Daniel Goleman

His father's country estate. And Ram Dass was living in one little room — which probably, at one time, was the maid's room, I don't know. He was all dressed in white, with a long white beard. I didn't know who he was when I met him, but then when we started talking it turned out he'd actually been very close to David McClelland — McClelland was the one who'd hired him, back when McClelland was chair of the department, and McClelland was also the one who fired him, because he was chair of the department when it happened.

I invited Ram Dass back to Harvard — for the first time since he'd been fired — and he gave a talk that was actually quite electrifying. But it wasn't about psychology, really; it was about the inner game of awakening, if you will. He went on for hours — I think from seven till two or something like that — and people were really entranced. But just to give you an idea of the difference between his view and that of the department I was in — remember, I was in clinical psychology — I was having lunch the next day with a professor who leaned over to me and said, very conspiratorially: "Tell me — do you think he's psychotic?" And I looked at this guy and thought: who's psychotic here, really? Because what Ram Dass said made a lot of sense to me. So, anyway, those two were very influential.

Daniel Goleman

Well, Ram Dass had come from that world — he was a very popular professor, already a charismatic lecturer, and he continued to use that charisma as Ram Dass in his lectures. I actually went to see his teacher, whose name was Neem Karoli Baba, who was unlike anyone I'd ever met before. He was absolutely centred, loving, present — and didn't seem to be motivated by the usual motivations, the kind of need for power David McClelland studied.

He actually told Ram Dass, "Don't talk about me when you go back to the States." Ram Dass talked about him all the time anyway, but he wasn't interested in that — unlike a lot of the Indian gurus who came to America, he wasn't interested in power, wasn't interested in money, wasn't interested in any of the things someone in that position could take advantage of. He was just totally present, in a way I had never seen in my Harvard professors.

Daniel Goleman

I came with two other friends, and we did what you do in India, which is called having darshan — which we would call hanging out. It means something like "go and see" — just be with, because he radiated this state. And when you were with him you felt — as a friend of mine, Larry Brilliant, who's now a leading epidemiologist and was head of the Google Foundation as well, put it — Larry had also come to see Neem Karoli Baba, and he put it really well: what was surprising wasn't that he loved us, but that when we were with him, we loved everybody too. It was a kind of emotional contagion.

Daniel Goleman

Yeah — Steve Jobs was a close friend of Larry's, and I think it was Larry who persuaded Steve to go to India to see Neem Karoli Baba, though I'm not sure he ever actually saw him. But I know his bedside reading included a book called The Miracle of Love, which is about Neem Karoli Baba.

Daniel Goleman

Yes — that book, Be Here Now, was inspired by his stay with Neem Karoli Baba, and that book in turn became a bestseller of the day, and I think was very inspiring. Ram Dass went on a lecture circuit after that, and tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of people went to hear him. What he talked about was inner transformation.

Daniel Goleman

It is right, but the details are a little more interesting. I had a fellowship, actually, from the Ford Foundation, that included a year of travel and study abroad — which I didn't know about, but then took advantage of. McClelland fronted for me, saying, oh yes, he has serious research to do in India — and that allowed me to hang out with Neem Karoli Baba, with lamas and Sufis and yogis, people I was very interested in, to see how meditative practices and spiritual disciplines transform the mind and the heart.

When I came back to Harvard I wanted to communicate this to other psychologists, but other psychologists weren't very interested at the time. What I ended up doing was showing that meditation was a useful intervention for stress, which by now, decades later, has been well established — but then it was a radical idea.

Daniel Goleman

By today's standards they're all somewhat dubious — two of them were anecdotal reports, and one was a non-peer-reviewed publication. Our standards are higher these days; when I look at my dissertation, given the measurements we had decades ago, I don't think it would be published today. Now you'd use brain imaging, much more sophisticated methodology — we didn't have that back then. But I'd say the hunch I had, that meditation really can help you be more calm and more focused, has been tremendously well validated.

I finished a book, published a couple of years ago, with a friend, Richard Davidson, who was also a graduate student with McClelland at Harvard — Richie, as we call him, has gone on to become a world-famous neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. He and I wrote a book looking at the now thousands of peer-reviewed articles on meditation, which shows very clearly there's a dose-response relationship — the more you do it, the stronger the benefits. It's a brilliant book — we'll hopefully talk much more about meditation later, but that book is called Altered Traits.

Daniel Goleman

Well, yes. At the time when I came back we didn't have the understanding in neuroscience of neuroplasticity that came much later — neuroplasticity says, basically, the more you exercise brain circuits, the stronger the connectivity between them becomes. That's now very well established; then, no one even entertained the idea — brain science was just beginning to emerge. And not only that, there was a lot of scepticism about the East.

When I wrote the book — as you point out, I couldn't really find a job that suited me in academia after getting my PhD — I went into science journalism, and ended up at the New York Times, writing on the brain and science. It was then that I wrote the book Emotional Intelligence, and I was really thinking of people in the business world, the education world. The message wasn't "in Asia they completely transform their brains and minds" — it was more pragmatic, because Western culture is very pragmatic: what use is this, can I focus better, can I stay calm even in a turbulent situation? Think of an investor — your investment fails and all of a sudden you're overwhelmed by fear or anxiety. How do you handle that? Emotional intelligence speaks to that. And how do you stay focused amidst all the distractions we have today? Emotional intelligence speaks to that too. So I made a point of being pragmatic, even though the way I think about it is deeply informed by what I'd been exploring in Asia.

Daniel Goleman

Oh, yeah — the culture has changed enormously. Mindfulness is everyday news now. You mentioned I was in Sri Lanka — that was on a postdoc. I went to study with a monk named Nyanaponika Thera, who wrote about the mind and how to work with it, how to transform it, based on fifth-century texts written as manuals for meditators. Nyanaponika, who was actually German by birth but had been a monk since the 1920s, was a scholar of Pali, and had access to all this. What I realised, William, is that there's a psychotechnology, well known in Asia, well established, that's been functioning for thousands of years — and we knew nothing about it in Western psychology until very recently.

When I started looking into it, it was unknown, and I faced a lot of actual, open hostility about it — which probably encouraged me to be a little subrosa at the beginning, because things hadn't changed yet. It may be that I, and a host of other people, had a hand in changing that. In India I met someone named Joseph Goldstein, who became one of the first major teachers of what's called insight meditation, and a whole generation after him. Another name in that world — I met Sharon Salzberg in Delhi, and I told her, hey, there's this meditation course, so she went to Bodh Gaya and learned what she now teaches. So I guess I get some karmic credit for all the good sharing she's done — she's an amazing teacher. But what I'm saying is that when we all started, this was very new in the West, and of course that small group can't take credit for the whole transformation, but we were part of it. Now it's much easier to talk about these things.

Daniel Goleman

What happened was, when I wrote the book Emotional Intelligence, I went beyond what I'd been able to write in the Times — I included some articles I rewrote for the book, but most of it was based on a decade of research on emotions in the brain, of which, by the way, my friend Richard Davidson was a leader — that movement in neuroscience was very helpful to me. I've always paid attention to the scientific and neuroscientific underpinning of the things I bring to the business world, because I think it's important that it be rooted in something real, not just the fad of the day. So my training as a science journalist has been very useful in the writing I've done since.

Daniel Goleman

Sure. There are four parts to emotional intelligence. The first is self-awareness, which leads to being able to manage yourself well — and those are the two abilities I think are absolutely crucial in dealing with the chaos of the day. Self-awareness means you know what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, how it's impacting you, how it's driving your thoughts, your emotions, your impulse to act. Once you know that, maturity is widening the gap between impulse and action. If you're going to be a good investor, you don't do what your emotions tell you — sell! — you say, well, I'm going to ride it out, the market will rise again, for example. And to do that you need a component of self-management called emotional balance.

Emotional balance means: yes, you feel the emotion — you can't dictate what you're going to feel, how strongly, or when. Emotions just come to us, unbidden. But once you feel that, you have a choice point, and that's how you react. Emotional balance means you can feel the emotion, be with it, and not have to act on it — in fact, you can recover from it more quickly. The operational definition of resilience is how quickly you recover from being upset, and once you recover you can think about it more clearly. There's an intimate relationship between the executive — the part of our brain that thinks about what to do and makes good decisions — and the emotional centres, which can overwhelm and hijack it. Being able to recover from that hijacked state, I think, is absolutely crucial to anybody, particularly to an investor.

Daniel Goleman

I think it goes back, in one sense, to some research I did while at Harvard, on how people experience anxiety and fear. Some people are very mental, very cognitive — their thoughts start going in this direction or that, usually worried or fearful thoughts. Others feel it in their body — somatic anxiety, their stomach feels weird, or they feel trembling in their knees, whatever. One of the things you can do is learn to pick up the early cues in yourself — oh, I'm getting anxious now. The earlier you notice, the better you'll be at recovery. It's not that it's too late if you never noticed, because then you can think about it and prepare for next time — or you notice mid-arc: oh my God, I'm anxious, I'm sweating, my heart is pounding.

But it's interesting — the moment you can name to yourself what's going on, you shift your neural functioning. When the emotions are dominant — fear, anxiety, whatever — they activate circuits that capture the prefrontal area, the part of the brain that thinks clearly and lucidly. But if, as you go through the anxiety attack, you can name it — I'm anxious, I'm fearful, I'm angry — you deactivate the emotional centres and activate the verbal cortex, in the prefrontal area. It shifts the energy in the brain and starts to let you release the feeling — that's part of the recovery. It turns out, also, that if you're a meditator you'll recover more quickly in general — so the combination is pretty powerful.

Daniel Goleman

There's a very famous neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio, who studied decision-making in the brain and the body. He calls exactly what you're talking about somatic markers. He says the part of the brain that captures life experience — when I did that, it worked; when I said that, it didn't — is very deep, in a primitive area of the brain, lower than the part that thinks in words, and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words. But it has very strong connections to the body, to the gut, so it sends out signals: this feels good, this doesn't feel good. What he says is that if you're going to make a sound decision, it'll be even better if you can include that gut sense — it's not just what the spreadsheet tells you, not just what the numbers say, it's some deeper understanding of the context.

For example, outstanding entrepreneurs were studied at USC, and they found that in how they made business decisions, they all said: well, I gather as much information as I can find — they're voracious gatherers of information, they went way beyond what other people might think was relevant — but they always checked it against their gut feeling. Maybe I can't trust these guys. In other words, maybe you know something you don't know you know, that you need to pay attention to — that's what those somatic markers are telling you. We know more than we can say.

Daniel Goleman

What he's saying, if I could put it differently, is that when you're upset — and he listed six or seven different ways to be upset — don't do anything hastily. Widen the gap between impulse and action. That's exactly what he's saying: think about it before you act.

In fact, the school programmes that implement emotional intelligence — they're called social-emotional learning — many of them use a poster of a stoplight: red light, yellow light, green light. When you're upset, think of the stoplight. Red light: stop, calm down, and think before you act. Yellow light: think of a range of different things you could do, and what the consequence would be of each. Green light: pick the best one and try it out. That's good advice for anyone, not just kids in school — investors, or anyone — because we're all dealing with the same central nervous system, the same susceptibility to overwhelming emotions, and yet we have to function with those emotions. He spelled it out very well, I thought.

Daniel Goleman

The amygdala hijack refers to the situation where your brain's radar for threat — which at the time neuroscience had centred on the amygdala — realises there's a danger, whatever it may be. The brain was designed to help us survive, and it helped us survive in prehistory, which was when the brain took shape, and the threat in those days was actual — life-or-death threats, something in the bushes that could either eat us or that we had to chase and eat. So we developed a very quick, sudden response — that's the decision rule for this part of the brain, this circuit — and it can take over the rational part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, where we learn, where we comprehend, where we plan, where we make good decisions. It captures it — that's the hijack. And the signs of a hijack: you have a very sudden emotional reaction, typically negative — anger, fear — and when the dust settles, you really regret what you did. You didn't widen the gap; there was no gap at all.

Daniel Goleman

Now brain science has moved forward — we realise it's not just the amygdala, that the amygdala is part of what's called the salience network, which means "what's relevant to me right now." The salience network is the part of the brain that, instant by instant, simplifies life for us, by putting aside the huge amount of sensory information we get constantly and picking out just the part it thinks is relevant to the task at hand. For an investor, that means: what are the forces, what's the relevant information for this investment? But the salience network is doing this for us all the time, in every life situation, and the amygdala is part of that network.

If it thinks there's a threat — and the threat today might be "I'm feeling disrespected," "I'm getting blamed," "someone else is taking credit" — in other words, symbolic realities, not biological ones — it turns out the amygdala, and that salience network, actually make a lot of mistakes. We get hijacked over things that, if we thought about them, maybe we wouldn't be so upset about. But it would rather be safe than sorry, essentially — so we end up getting hijacked all too often. And I'd say the hijacked state is the worst state to invest from. I can't think of anything worse.

Daniel Goleman

You can think about it this way, William. A couple of things: first, the brain is designed to register negativity more strongly than positivity, because that helped us survive — you want to remember the thing that's dangerous, the thing that's a threat, the thing you should never do again. So the brain is designed to imprint that memory more strongly than pleasant things. That's why people — all people, not just investors — overreact to bad news. That's why newspapers are full of bad news — it's captivating, it's what we want to read about, it's what the brain wants to know, because it wants to learn the lesson: oh, that happened to someone else, I don't want it to happen to me.

There are three ways people differ in how they react to threat or bad news. One is how often they're triggered — some people are triggered a lot, some people very little. The second is how deeply they're triggered — how intensely they feel the negative emotion; some people feel it really deeply, some very lightly. And the third is how quickly they recover — resilience, whether you snap back.

Daniel Goleman

Yeah, and it's nuanced — because when I talked to Bill Miller about this recently, on this podcast, he said, look, I'm actually pretty emotional — when I listen to music I can cry — and yet when it comes to financial decisions, there's this supreme rationality.

Daniel Goleman

In psychology we call that reappraisal — cognitive reappraisal. It's rethinking the situation, and it turns out one of the best ways to handle stress, or a stressful reality, is to think it through and reframe what's going on — exactly as he did. Take the upset and think about it in a way that helps you handle it better — that's the reframe, that's the cognitive reappraisal. And that, by the way, can be a learned talent — all of these mental skills are learned and learnable. Emotional intelligence, unlike IQ, is learned and learnable, so you can get better at any of these abilities. And we haven't even got to empathy in relationships yet, which may or may not matter that much for investors.

Daniel Goleman

Yeah. But I just want to emphasise that those two are learned and learnable, and in fact I'm now writing a book about why learning this will benefit an entire organisational culture — having leaders who say, yes, this matters, offering people chances for development, putting it in a performance review. It's not just your numbers — it's how you got those numbers. Because if you got them in the worst ways, we're going to lose talent — people hate you if they work for you, people cut corners, people lose their ethical sense if they're pressured too much just to get the numbers for the quarter. Leading in the wrong way can hollow out human capital. People don't want to work for bosses they hate.

Daniel Goleman

Well, William, it's actually advanced quite a lot since then. I was, for twenty-five years, co-director of a consortium for research on emotional intelligence in organisations, and now the other director, Cary Cherniss, a professor at Rutgers, and I are harvesting more than two decades of research in the business realm, which shows that organisations with more emotionally intelligent leaders, and more emotionally intelligent teams — because you can have this at the team level too — have higher levels of engagement, higher productivity, higher performance, less turnover, whatever the metric is. It's very, very positive.

What we want to do now is bring this to companies — I have a group called the Goleman Consulting Group, I hope you'll put it in the show notes, which helps companies create a more emotionally intelligent culture. One of the ways is by having groups learn how to become more emotionally intelligent together — it's great to coach at the top of the house, but there's everybody else, all the managers and so on, who don't get that. So we found there's another methodology you can use to get this more deeply into an organisation. That's where my interests are going now with emotional intelligence.

Daniel Goleman

Let me start by talking about the business autobiography of Andy Grove, who used to be CEO of Intel, back when Intel was the company in tech — Intel Inside, on every laptop in the day. Grove said: we could have died a few times. One was when we were blindsided by competitors; another was when we shipped a chip that had a flaw. He said: how we survived depended on the emotional reactions of the top team. If we had denied what was going on, if we'd been paralysed with fear, if we had panicked, we would not be here today as a company. I think that's a very strong argument for what you're asking — how people can learn to handle the ups and downs, the stresses, the challenges, the shocks and surprises of business every day. And this is true for family too — with your kids, in the workplace, as an investor. What's extraordinary is how many applications this has, even for raising kids — it's absolutely critical to teach them these skills.

John Kabat-Zinn, another friend of mine from Harvard days, calls it "the full catastrophe" of life — he wrote a book called Full Catastrophe Living, wonderful title. Let me share the same method, if you don't mind, with your listeners — it's a kind of generic attention training that helps with becoming calm and focused, even despite what's going on. It's very simple: if you're comfortable, you can close your eyes and bring your attention to your breath — the in-breath and the out-breath, the full in-breath, the full out-breath, the sensation of breathing, maybe at your nostrils, or the rise and fall of your belly — and then start with the next breath, do it again, a full in-breath, a full out-breath, just keep your focus there, on your breath. And when your mind wanders, and you notice it's wandered, just bring it back to the next breath. That's all there is to it — you just stay with the breath, bringing your mind back when it floats away, and then you can open your eyes.

That's the simple core instruction. But if you do it five minutes, ten minutes, in the morning, it resets your brain for the day. The longer you do it, the better the benefits, and the benefits are very well established now — it makes people calmer, better able to handle stress, more focused, better able to ignore distractions, better learners, better able to so-called multitask without losing concentration on what really matters. It has numerous benefits, but it's like developing any skill — the more you practise, the better the benefit.

Daniel Goleman

I'd recommend fifteen to thirty minutes a day of that breath exercise. As you point out, it may be hard to do at the beginning — you may be very distracted — which is why it's beneficial to be able to listen to someone guiding you through it. So if you can get an app, if you're just starting out, all the better.

Daniel Goleman

I suspect, and there's data that suggests this, that every time you notice your mind has wandered and you bring it back, you're strengthening the neural circuitry for staying focused. Think about it — you're reading a very important article, whatever it may be, and all of a sudden you get a ping, a text, an email, and you look at your phone, and the next thing you know you're on Twitter, and you've lost your concentration, which was up here — and when you go back, it's down here, and it takes you a while to get it up again — unless you did that simple exercise, because what you're doing is training your brain to pay full attention, to concentrate, and to let distractions go. The moment of mindfulness is the moment you notice your mind has wandered and you bring it back — it's that simple. But it's like a rep in a gym: every time you lift the weight, you're making the muscle that much stronger. Same thing with your brain.

Daniel Goleman

There's a saying in cognitive science: what information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a paucity of attention. Today, some estimates are that we get about five times more information in a given day than we did ten or twenty years ago — it's been increasing exponentially. The distractions, as you point out, are worse than ever.

I heard a talk by a fellow who was one of the designers of the first iPhone — he said, we made it as seductive as we could. He said, today I have kids, and I really regret it. This is the problem we all face — we're seduced constantly, and what we're seduced for is attention. Our eyeballs are what advertisers want, what apps want, and the longer we stay on it, the better for them — but that means we're being pulled away from what matters to us most, in that moment, that day. So I think we all face the need to strengthen the muscle of attention, I think today more than ever, because it's just basic self-defence — how am I going to stay focused on what matters to me, in the midst of this ongoing welter, this cloud of distraction?

Daniel Goleman

Well, William, I'm a little privileged, in that I lead a life where I don't have to be on alert all the time — I don't have to be at the beck and call of a phone. I'm like an industrial-strength meditator — I don't schedule anything before lunch, for example; I like to meditate and write in the morning, and I don't feel there's anything that important coming in on a phone. I'd rather be present for the person in front of me than looking at the phone.

In fact, in 2009 there was an article in Time magazine — which was then the major magazine, I think they'd just laid me off a few months earlier —

Daniel Goleman

Anyway — the article said there's a new word in the English language: "pizzled", a combination of puzzled and pissed off, and it's how you feel when someone you're with takes out their phone and looks at the phone instead of you. That was 2009 — the norms have changed enormously, people do it now all the time without thinking about it, although now I've seen there's a new word, "phubbing" — snubbing with a phone — which speaks to the same tension, between being present to the person you're with, or on Zoom with, and all the incoming, whatever it may be. I feel it's good to limit your attention to the incoming to certain periods, rather than letting it intrude whenever it happens to come.

Daniel Goleman

I think this has to do with the empathy aspect of emotional intelligence — remember, that's the third part. There are three kinds of empathy: one is cognitive — understanding how the person thinks; the second is emotional — understanding how they feel, sensing how the person feels; and third is concern — caring about the person. I like to try to be present to the person I'm with, because that connotes caring — paying full attention to the person in front of you. Sometimes it's called executive presence in the business world, and I think it's very important. And your daughter has to be particularly charming — thank you, so it's very easy to be fully present to her; I'm not sure I am to everybody else.

Daniel Goleman

Well, it's hard to separate individual differences — did Matt, or I, have this tendency earlier on? I don't know. But it's clear now, from the data, that calmness and focus — whether on the project at hand, the numbers, or the other person — gets enhanced through meditative practice. No question about that.

Daniel Goleman

There's very interesting research coming out of Germany — they have, like, the MIT of Germany — where they had people practise an exercise I call the circle of caring, sometimes called loving-kindness practice, where you might end your meditation on the breath with this, daily: you think of someone in your life who's been kind to you, that you're grateful for, and appreciate them — you wish them to be safe and happy and healthy, and their life to be fulfilled. You wish it toward yourself, you wish it toward the people you naturally love, your loved ones — you do this silently — and then you extend it to people you know, your acquaintances, people you work with, perhaps, and then to everyone, everywhere. You spend a good deal of time doing this — Sharon Salzberg teaches this practice — and the institute in Germany found that this seemed to strengthen the neural architecture for caring and concern. Which seems pretty simple and clear to me, because it's just like with the breath meditation that helps you be calm and focused — it turns out the same neural circuitry does both those things, and then there's different circuitry for caring, concern, compassion toward other people, and that gets exercised by the circle of caring.

I have a close friend — I'll slightly conceal this person's identity — a psychiatrist who specialises in adolescents, and in war veterans with PTSD, a very extraordinary guy. I remember him telling me that he'd drive to his VA hospital every day doing loving-kindness meditation on the drive, and he had a particularly difficult colleague — when this colleague would say stupid stuff that drove him absolutely nuts, he would just sit there in a meeting, silently going through these meditations — may you be happy, may you be safe, may you live with ease — and I could see the difference in him over the years. He was always a lovely guy, but he became more and more loving and joyful. I think it does work — there's a lot of research on it now, showing people do become kinder, more generous, more altruistic, more outgoing and caring toward other people. So I'm not surprised.

Daniel Goleman

Richie Davidson flew these yogis over, from Nepal and India and Europe, one by one. One of them was this yogi, Mingyur Rinpoche, who at the time had done sixty-two thousand lifetime hours of meditation — if you do a traditional Tibetan three-year, three-month, three-day retreat, you get credit for about ten thousand hours, so this guy had done huge amounts. When they asked him to do a compassion meditation, the circuitry in the brain for that increased, in an instant, by seven to eight hundred per cent — never been seen before in neuroscience, such a voluntary jump in the activation of a brain circuit, and this was a circuit for compassion. I thought it was pretty astounding.

Daniel Goleman

Here's the thing — I kind of have a foot in both worlds, the world of Asian spirituality and methodology, and the world of science and psychology. At first there was a huge gap between those worlds, but as science has investigated these practices, it's finding — oh, you know what, this works. It seems to me there's an ancient psychotechnology that's been well preserved in Asia, in many Asian cultures, and it's only now becoming known in the West — I think that's very important.

It's interesting, because Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger, this ninety-eight-year-old polymathic genius who studies all these different fields, will say: I observe what works and doesn't work, and why. And this is one of those things where you observe it in the laboratory, you observe it in people's behaviour, and — oh, it works.

Daniel Goleman

Well, that's the culture shift I've seen over the last several decades — that people like Ray Dalio were doing it as a matter of fact, not a big deal — you know, I go to the gym, and I meditate, it's self-care.

Daniel Goleman

I didn't know that.

Daniel Goleman

You know, I don't go out for beers with the Dalai Lama — it's not like we're buddies — but I've seen him over the years in a number of situations, and one thing I really admire about him is his openness to everybody. It doesn't matter who it is, he's absolutely present for that person — a beggar, a prime minister, no difference. He really exemplifies loving kindness, presence — the Tibetan word for the Dalai Lama isn't "Dalai Lama", it's Kundun, which means "presence".

I remember once I was at a reception in Hollywood — A-list stars lined up to meet the Dalai Lama — and I was standing with a monk who travels with him, and he said, watch this: at about eight or ten feet away from the Dalai Lama, everybody's going to break into a big smile, because he has this aura around him that's contagious, and you pick up that calmness. I really admire that. And I admire the fact that he's remained, throughout his life — which has been very turbulent, by the way, talk about ups and downs, he lost his country, his people have been tortured by the Chinese, many upsetting things come to him all the time — that calm, loving presence, through it all. I really admire that.

Daniel Goleman

I think he sees things in multiple dimensions, and one of them that's really impressed me is that he's a systems thinker. He understands that poverty, for example, is built into our economic system; he understands that global warming, the pollution of the environment, is an everyday by-product of the way we live now, the way we produce things, the way we consume — and he sees that the solutions need to be systemic as well as individual. He also sees that each one of us has a sphere of influence — for some people it's very wide, you may be an executive, you may run a company, that's a big sphere; or you may have friends and family you can influence, that's a smaller sphere. He says: it doesn't matter, do something, whatever you can, whatever you're called to do that will improve our situation — and don't do it just for the benefit now, the benefit may come after you're long gone, but do it anyway.

Daniel Goleman

That's pretty good, for you. He said: when you're making a decision, ask yourself three questions — who benefits, is it just me or a group; is it just my group or everyone; and is it only for the present, or for the future too? I found that very profound. He said that at a meeting at MIT.

Daniel Goleman

Well, William, I think there is a spiritual dimension to emotional intelligence, but there's a spectrum — there's the absolutely pragmatic benefit of it, and then there's another end of that spectrum, which is spiritual. Self-awareness, for example, is absolutely crucial to handling yourself, to leading yourself — but it also happens to be one of the core principles of every spiritual tradition: know thyself, mastery over your inner world. Same thing — huge practical implications, but there's a spiritual dimension too. Every spiritual tradition talks about this kind of need for self-discipline, if you will, or following a set of ethics and morals. Empathy is the root of altruism and compassion.

Daniel Goleman

You know, William, it's hard to tell whether it has to do with my meditation practice, or ageing, or something else — but yeah, I was attacked, I thought, very unfairly, though I did get four pages in The New Yorker, so you can see it different ways. I sat with the feelings — I didn't do anything, but I felt them — and they dissipated after a while, and then I went on to the next thing. That's how I handled that particular sling and arrow.

I can't say there was a particular method, although I've just been writing about something one of my Tibetan teachers calls handshake practice — this is Mingyur Rinpoche's brother, Tsoknyi Rinpoche — where, when you have something that's very upsetting, or you get angry, whatever, you sit with the feeling, you don't deny it, you feel it fully and accept it, and it turns out that has the power to actually dissipate the impact of that feeling. So I was using that method, if you will — I have a book coming out with him in the fall, called Why We Meditate, which describes that practice in detail.

Daniel Goleman

Absolutely amazing.

Daniel Goleman

I think our accomplishments, the kudos we get over life, the money we earn — as we're dying, will matter not at all. The times we've enjoyed with people we love, or just being, are what will matter, ultimately.

Daniel Goleman

Yes. I'm doing a memoir, by the way — a spiritual memoir. I'd be happy if people, in future, got more interested in inner life, in inner practice, meditation, whatever — because of what I left behind. That's a great ambition.

Daniel Goleman

Well, thank you for that perception — don't know if it's true, but it's always a pleasure to talk to you, William.