4400 East West Hwy/Ste 1104, Bethesda, Md 20814 301-986-5688 * [email protected] * www.mentorcoach.com Subscribe to Coaching Toward Happiness here. For the latest on coaching and positive psychology, follow us on Facebook. The Daniel Goleman Interview Transcript (For the audio recording, submit your email here. For listener comments about this interview, see the bottom of this PDF. For multiple resources, videos, and links to Dan’s work, see the bottom of his Interview Webpage.) Ben: Hi everyone. This is Ben Dean of MentorCoach and this afternoon we’re talking with Daniel Goleman. This is one in a series of monthly interviews with thought leaders in positive psychology and coaching. You’ve all read Dan’s bio so I’ll just say that he holds a PhD in Psychology from Harvard where his doctoral research was on meditation as an intervention in stress arousal. He always thought he would be a college professor like his parents before him but after a stint at Psychology Today, he was recruited in 1984 by the New York Times to cover psychology and related science news. © 2015. MentorCoach LLC. Goleman Interview. All rights reserved. 1 He reported on the brain and behavioral sciences at the New York Times for 12 years. His 1995 book Emotional Intelligence was an outgrowth of his journalistic research on emotions in the brain. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half with more than five million copies in print worldwide. He’s written many other books over the years but most interesting for us today is his latest one, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. So Dan, welcome to the call! Dan: Thanks Ben. Ben: To orient everyone, can I ask where you’re located and what can you see as you look around where you’re sitting? Dan: I’m in my office, which is in a small village in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. It’s lightly snowing. I see snow-laden branches as I look out my window and I see immense clutter as I look around my office and about a thousand things to finish doing. Ben: Would it be fair to say you must be fairly good at focusing yourself given all the books you’ve written over the years and all the work you’ve done? Dan: That’s why things pile up in my office. I see all of those things to do as distractions. I focus on my writing for the most part. Ben: Plus you’ve been probably meditating since the ‘70s, correct? Dan: Since the ‘60s. Ben: Since the ‘60s. So, if that in fact is one of the best ways to train your attention, you’ve had a lot of practice. After all your previous books what got you interested in the science of attention and how is focus the hidden ingredient for eXcellence in our personal and professional lives? © 2015. MentorCoach LLC. Goleman Interview. All rights reserved. 2 Dan: As a science journalist, which is the profession I’ve been practicing since having been trained as a psychologist, I follow trends in sciences, particularly the neurosciences. In the last year or two, there’s been just an explosion of findings about attention and the brain, which is quite parallel to what happened before I wrote Emotional Intelligence. There had been a new surge of findings on emotions in the brain. That was when things prompted me for that book, and the same for this book. At the same time, I feel it’s particularly timely because everyone is finding their attention under siege by digital distractions, and this is a problem. I just spoke at a school yesterday a high school for kids, and teachers are telling me, they’ve banned phones in the classroom because kids are texting each other during class. That’s a very common practice now. Last week I was at an office, an architectural and construction firm in Manhattan, where the CEO wanted me to teach everybody everything I knew about attention, and how they could focus both as a group and individually. In fact he wanted them to do a basic, I don’t call it meditation, actually, it’s really attention building exercises and so I taught them two or three ways to beef up your attentional muscle if you will. I find that the book Focus is particularly timely because of that seduction of attention that we all face. Ben: You write that there are three types of focus. Is that your unique formulation and could you eXplain to everyone what the three types of foci are? Dan: This is a new framework. It’s also the cover article in the Harvard Business Review this month (Goleman, (Dec. 2013). The Focused Leader. Harvard Business Review). They extracted it from the book. Basically the first two kinds of focus are emotional intelligence. There is self-focus, focusing on your inner world, on your emotions, and on monitoring how your attention is at this moment, if you need to do anything about that, or using that same ability to manage your distressing emotions or mobilize your positive ones for motivation, or to recover from stress. Those are all self-awareness, self-management abilities. That’s the first focus. The second focus is on other people. This would be in the emotional intelligence model, social awareness, particularly empathy, also handling relationships well. © 2015. MentorCoach LLC. Goleman Interview. All rights reserved. 3 The third kind of focus is something that had shown up in my data for a long time and I realize now how important it was. This is focus on the wider systems that we operate in, whether they’re family systems, organizational dynamics, or for a company the economic and technological, and cultural forces, and so on that are shaping your competitive arena, and what you need to do strategically. Even beyond that, the interaction between human systems and global systems, and the problem of the degrading of the global systems that support because of our daily activities and what’s built into them the unfortunate side effects. I see all of those as important. That last one had shown up in data on outstanding leaders. When I did the book, Working with Emotional Intelligence, which followed Emotional Intelligence, I looked at competence models from a couple of hundred organizations and I saw that in terms of discriminating competencies, the ones that distinguish stars from average - not threshold competencies, the ones everyone needs - but distinguishing ones. The higher you went in the organization the more emotional intelligence abilities mattered, and competence models for say, C-level people, often would have 80, 90 or 100% of the competencies that mattered in that organization for outstanding leadership, based on emotional intelligence within that domain. There was one set that kept showing up over and over that had nothing to do with what we were calling emotional intelligence. It was pattern recognition or systems thinking, and I realized that’s that third focus. The ability to understand how a decision today matters tomorrow or how it’s going to ramify through a complex system, and move things here or there, or simply being able to detect patterns that other people don’t see that matter enormously. So, those are three. Ben: I have a friend, whose father was a famous diplomat, author and cabinet officer in the ‘60s. I once asked him what had been the secret of his father’s great productivity. He said, “He had this astonishing ability to concentrate. You could have put his desk in Grand Central Station and he would have had no trouble focusing”. Where does this type of task focus fit into the typology you’re describing? © 2015. MentorCoach LLC. Goleman Interview. All rights reserved. 4 Grand Central Station, New York City Dan: This is the type that most often is the hidden ingredient in excellence, which is the subtitle of the book. This is a hundred percent absorption or immersive concentration in a task. Whether it’s writing a book or a memo for the State Department, or getting a project done, or consulting with a client, you have to pay sustained attention in order to understand deeply, in order to gather all the information you need, and in order to express yourself effectively. Those abilities you find over and over again predicting a person’s ability to marshal whatever cognitive or technical skills, whatever your talents may be, if you don’t have that ability you can’t display them at full force. Ben: So where does that kind of deep task focusing fit into your three types of focus? Dan: That has to do with the inner focus because managing attention is a byproduct of good self-awareness. Sometimes these days it’s called mindfulness. There’s a new vogue in teaching people mindfulness. What mindfulness really does is help people develop a tool kit that lets them step back from being caught up and carried away by trains of association and streams of thought, and to monitor the mind and see “well where am I? Am I concentrating? Oh, I’m surfing the web, what happened”, because we get swept away without realizing, and mindfulness lets us step back or step up to the balcony of the mind to see what’s going on, and make any changes we need to. There’s interesting data now coming out of Emory, which is in the book, that the essential move in strengthening this concentrative, immersive, absorptive ability, is to put your mind where you need it to be, and then the mind will wander.