Focus – The Secret to High Performance and Fulfilment: Daniel Goleman (Transcript)

Oscillators are very important for the survival of the human species. Consider this: at the moment of a first kiss; they determine the velocity at which two skulls come together. And if they get it wrong, it would be the end of the species, I’m sure.

The third ingredient; after the full attention and the non-verbal synchrony is that it feels good. It’s a rather pleasant, joyous state to connect with someone that well. These are the moments in our lives that are the richest, that really matter. 

However, recently there was an article in the Harvard Business Review called the human moment. It said, if you want to have real connection with someone, and if they come into your office, remember this: turn away from your screen, ignore your phone and every other device, stop your daydream or whatever’s on your mind and pay full attention to the person in front of you.

I find it sad that we have to have an article in Harvard business review to tell us something like that, but it has come to this because, attention is a rarer and rarer commodity, but it’s a very precious commodity.

I think the time has come for us to take an active stand in our lives and fight back against this subtle onslaught. I know a couple, for example, who, when they come home, have a pact that they’ll put their phones in a drawer. They won’t look at them for the evening.

There’s a, a new way of getting together. I don’t know if this has happened here in the UK, but in the States, for example, when people get together for dinner, everybody takes their phone out, puts it in the middle of the table. And the first person that reaches for their phone before the bill comes has to pay the bill. 

Now there’s not just one kind of attention. There’s several varieties. The most obvious is selective attention, when we focus on one thing and ignore others. There are two main kinds of distractors. Two general classes: One is sensory distractors. So if you’re looking at me, you’re probably not noticing this whiteboard here, right? That’s relatively easy.

The tough one is the second category. It’s emotional distractors. Our emotional distractors are extremely powerful. They are thoughts about that conversations that didn’t go so well. The tiff I had with my partner this morning… mostly relationship concerns, things that have upset us.

So the more focused we are, the better we do at anything. Isn’t it rather obvious. But for example, a test of concentration among athletes predicts how well they’ll do the next season. That’s rather straightforward. And the less our mind wanders or students mind-wander reading a text, the better we comprehend the text. 

However, it turns out on average while we’re reading a book, our mind wanders about 20% to 40% of the time. I think it depends on the book. That particular study was done with Pride and Prejudice. If it had been done, say with, 50 Shades of Gray or Blink or whatever, it might’ve been different.

But the point is that the more disrupted attention is particularly for young people, the harder it is for them to grasp, to build the cumulative mental models, that amount to mastery in any subject.

There are basically three modes of attention. I want to call your attention to it: Here’s a schematic. So this is generally the relationship between performance. Say, this is high. This is low. And this is… the horizontal line is brain activity, particularly levels of stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline. And the relationship is very telling. It goes like this. It’s an upside down U. And the highest performance is when attention is absolutely a 100%, maybe 110%. It’s been called flow.

Flow is discovered for those of you who don’t know about it by researchers who asked people in many different domains of expertise, basketball players, ballerinas, neurosurgeons, tell us about a time you outdid yourself. You were absolutely at your best, even you were surprised. And no matter what the domain was, people were describing the same phenomenological state. And one of the characteristics of the state is that attention is utterly absorbed.

There was a neurosurgeon who said “I had to do a surgery and operation that I didn’t really know if I could. It was so difficult, but I did it superbly. I was really surprised myself. At the end of the surgery, I looked around and I saw some rubble in the corner of operating theatre.”

 I said, “What happened?”

They said, “While you were operating the roof caved in over there and you didn’t notice.”

It’s that kind of attention. It’s unbreakable. It’s also a state where your skills are called upon at the utmost and whatever the demand is, you can meet it. You’re very flexible, very adaptable and very tellingly, it’s a state that feels good. Yeah, it’s like rapport. Rapport is mutual flow… interpersonal flow.

So that’s when focus is at hundred percent. When you have too much to do, too little time, too little support… when you feel overwhelmed, you’re down here. And the stress hormones are at their highest, you’re in a state which was called recently in the scientific journal.  Actually the journal Science and article was called the neurobiology of frazzle.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with frazzle. I’ve been there many times. It’s constant stress. And here, the problem is you can’t stop thinking about what’s upsetting you, what’s stressing you? You’re not focusing here. You’re not focusing on the task at hand. You’re focusing on what’s upsetting you. And that’s the power of emotions.

Emotions take over attention. They guide attention. And if they’re too strong, then you’ll never get up here. Over here, performance is low because people are under motivated, disengaged. This is a huge problem – Disengagement in the workplace. People feel, in fact, there was a survey. This is really interesting. It was done at Harvard. 2,500 people are given an iPhone app and the app brings them at random times during the day. And they answer two questions. What are you doing now? And what are you thinking about now?

And the discrepancy of course is a measure of mind-wandering. Turns out 50% of the time on average, our minds are wandering. The one activity that had the highest focus, no surprise, was making love, but who fills out that app at a time like that? I still haven’t been able to figure that out.

The lowest three were commuting, sitting at a computer and work. That’s this. So if you’re not engaged in what you’re doing, your cortisol levels are too low.

I’ve been talking about focusing as though it were the only valuable kind of attention, but actually mind wandering, which is the enemy of focusing, the term they use in brain sciences, they are anti-correlated. If your mind is wandering by definition, you’re not focusing and vice versa.

Mind wandering is absolutely essential for creative insight. The creative process demands that. First of all, you gather information. You focus on the problem. You really concentrate. And then you let go.

The annals of science and mathematics are full of people who came up with incredible solutions when they’re just daydreaming… in the shower, getting on a bus, walking your dog. And that’s because during mind wandering, we’re able to make connections between remote elements in a new way that has value. That’s the definition of creative act.

Of course, if you’re going to execute, if you’re going to put the idea to use, then you have to go back into focus. But mind wandering is extremely valuable.

There’s another level at which attention operates. This has to do with leadership. I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus to be really effective:

The first is an inner focus. Let me tell you about a case. That’s actually from the annals of neurology. There was a corporate lawyer who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumor. It was discovered early, operated on successfully.

After the surgery though, it was very puzzling picture because he was absolutely as smart as he had been before. Very high IQ, no problem with attention or memory, but he couldn’t do his job anymore. He couldn’t do any job. He, in fact, he ended up out of work. His wife left him. He lost his home. He’s living in his brother’s spare bedroom. And in despair, he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio.

Damasio specializes in the circuitry between the prefrontal area, which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our radar for danger. It triggers our strong emotions. 

They had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and the emotional centers. And Damasio at first was puzzled. He realized that this fellow on every neurological tests was perfectly fine. But something was wrong.

And then he got a clue. He asked the lawyer, “When should we have our next appointment?” And he realized the lawyer could give him the rational pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks. But he didn’t know which is best.

And Damasio says when we’re making a decision, any decision when to have the next appointment, should I leave my job for another one? What strategy should we follow going into the future? Who should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows? I mean, those are decisions that require, we draw on our entire life experience.

And the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain. It’s very ancient in the brain and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words.  It has very rich connectivity to the gastrointestinal tract, to the gut. So we get a gut feeling – feels right, doesn’t feel right. Damasio calls them somatic markers. It’s a language of the body. And the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data, too.

They did a study of California entrepreneurs and asked them, “How do you make your decisions?” These are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. And they more or less said the same strategy. I’m a voracious gatherer of information. I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go ahead with the deal. They’re tuning into the gut feelings.

I know someone, I grew up in a farm region of California, the central Valley and my high school had a rival high school in the next town. And I met someone who went to that other high school. He was not a good student. He almost failed it. Didn’t graduate, came close to not graduating high school.

He went to a two-year college, a community college, as we call them. Found his way into film, which he loved and got into a film school. In film school his student project caught the eye of a director who asked him to become an assistant. And he did so well at that, that the director arranged for him to direct his own film, someone else’s script. He did so well at that. They let him direct a script that he had written, and that film did surprisingly well.

So the studio that financed that film said, “If you want to do another one, we will back you.” And he however, hated the way the studio edited the film. He felt he was a creative artist and they had butchered his art, but he said, “I’m going to do the film on my own. I’m going to finance it myself.”

Everyone in the film business that he knew said, “This is a huge mistake. You shouldn’t do this.” But he went ahead and he ran out of money. It had to go to 11 banks before he could get a loan. He managed to finish the film. You may have seen the film it’s called Star Wars. 

George Lucas made a decision on the basis of his gut. It didn’t feel right to let the studio mangle his next film. It was his integrity. And this inner sense is an ethical rudder. It answers the question- what I’m about to do in keeping with my sense of meaning, values, purpose, and ethics. That’s not a question that we answer first in words, we answer first in what feels right and doesn’t feel right. Then we put it into words. And every leader today needs a strong ethical rudder. So I’d say an inner awareness; inner focus is essential.

Then there’s other focus, which is being able to read people, being able to tune into a person. There are three kinds of empathy. And this is empathy I’m talking about.

The first is cognitive. Cognitive empathy means I understand how you think about things, your mental models, how you see the world. What that means is I’m able to communicate with you in terms, you really understand, you really resonate with. 

Managers, leaders who are able to talk to other people with good cognitive empathy are able to get better than expected performance out of people, because they know how to mobilize them. They know what matters.

Then there’s emotional empathy. Emotional empathy is an immediate felt sense of what’s going on in the other person. And this is absolutely essential too. If you only have cognitive empathy and you don’t have emotional empathy, you’ll miss the mark.

The third kind of empathy is very important too. It’s empathic concern. Not only do I know how you think and how you feel, but if there’s something you need and I can help you with I’m predisposed to help.

The leaders who have the most loyalty, who people love working for have all three kinds of empathy. 

There’s an article in the Harvard business review called Leadership Run Amock. Leadership run amock is about people who may have cognitive empathy, but lack the other two. These are leaders who are very good at hitting the target for example, but don’t care about what happens to the people that they manage. They have no feeling for them. And so they demoralize people or people are ready to leave if they’re able.

The third kind of focus is outer focus. This is very important, for example, in formulating, you need to understand the ecosystem within which your organization operates. You need to be able to sense what’s going to work, what we’ll need to do in the future and so on. And for that, you need to kind of systems view, big picture thinking. The sad story here is actually the Blackberry.

There are two kinds of strategic thinking. One is exploitation. The other is exploration. In exploitation, you take a product or a brand that’s worked very, very well and you fine tune it. You tweak it. You keep making it better because it keeps working for you. That’s what Blackberry did.

The danger is if you don’t also explore. Exploration means you look widely, you see what’s happening, where things are going. You do R&D. You try to come up with the next new thing. And they failed to see, for example, Samsung. They failed to see what the competition was doing.

If you don’t have an inner focus and other focus and an outer focus, the danger is being rudderless, clueless, or blindsided.

Attention is a mental muscle. It’s like going to the gym. If you go to the gym and you lift weights, every time you do a repetition, you strengthen the muscle that you’re working. Attention can be strengthened in the same way.

In fact, I think I’ll show you how, if you’re interested in.  Just take two minutes, all you have to do is sit straight up, close your eyes and bring your attention to your breath. Don’t try to control your breath. Just watch your breath. Observe it. Try to sense it coming in and out. Maybe your nostrils and watch every breath, the full in breath, the full outbreath.

Start over again with the next breath.  And just start again with the next breath. Be fully aware of the sensation. And if you find that your mind is somewhere else, bring it back again and gently restart 

Now you can open your eyes. Did anybody notice their mind wandering? Did anybody bring it back? That’s the rep. Actually the exercise is not keeping your mind focused. The exercise is when it wanders, bringing it back. That’s what strengthens the connectivity in the attentional circuitry. This is a study that was done at Emory University. And this is a basic muscle of mind.

What’s interesting to me is that we don’t exercise it, typically. We depend on externals to grab our attention. In fact, our economy, in a sense, is built on the grabbing of attention.

Habituation is what the brain does when it sees the same old thing day after day after day, walking the same way to work or whatever it is. You don’t see it after a while. The brain economizes on attention.

Orienting on the other hand is opening up. It’s whenever the brain encounters something new, novel, and surprising, it excites the brain.

Think about it every season there’s a new fashion. Well, what is a new fashion? It’s actually a minor variation on a basic product. Every year, there’s a new car. Well, what’s a new car? It’s just enough difference to excite the orienting response.

So it’s the basis of our economy. It’s a very radical move to cultivate the ability to manage your own mind so that you can orient at will. But that’s exactly what’s possible with attention training and I’ve become a big advocate of it.

One of the reasons is the research Richard Davidson, who’s a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has expertise in the brain and emotion. And he’s found in his research that when we’re agitated, when we’re upset and angry and anxious, there’s a lot of activity in the right prefrontal area, just behind the forehead. Also in the amygdala, the brain’s trigger point for the fight-flight-freeze response. 

When we’re on the other hand in a really positive state, I feel great… enthusiastic… what a wonderful day. There’s a lot of activity on the left side and no activity on the right. Each of us has a ratio at rest of right-to-left activity that predicts our mood range day to day.

He finds there’s a bell curve for this. Like for IQ. Most of us are in the middle. We have bad days. We have good days. If you’re very far to the right, you may be clinically depressed or clinically anxious. If you’re very far to the left, you’re very resilient. You bounce right back from setbacks. 

Davidson paired up with a fella named Jon Kabat Zinn, who has made mindfulness as he calls it a very popular, for example, in the medical sector as a way to manage chronic conditions. And also in the States, at least in business, recently, a lot of businesses are bringing it in and it’s more or less what we just did. 

Davidson and Kabat Zinn went to a biotech start-up, a 24 seven, high pressure environment. And they taught people how to do mindfulness, which is more or less the exercise of watching the breath. But they did it 30 minutes a day for eight weeks.

What he found was that before that people’s brains were tilted to the right, they’re pretty hassled and stressed. After eight weeks, 30 minutes a day, there were tilting back toward the left. And what’s very interesting is people spontaneously started saying, “Hey, you know, I’m starting to enjoy my work again. I remember what I love about this job” In other words, the positive mood was really making a difference. 

There’s one reason that businesses are bringing it in. I myself feel that it’s not we adults who are most in need of paying attention to attention in this way. I think it’s children. Because childhood has changed. Childhood has changed as a side effect of this onslaught of the digital world into our personal universe.

I was talking to an eighth grade teacher who was complaining about how kids now are texting in the States. I don’t know about here. Texting has overcome phone calls among teenagers as a preferred way to connect. Their kids will send a hundred texts a day to their friends.

And that’s not unusual. She said, “For 20 years I’ve been teaching the same book to my 13 year olds. It’s Edith Hamilton’s mythology.” And she said, “In the last two, three, four years, my students are starting to say, they’re having trouble reading this. It’s a little too hard.” And she attributes it to a loss of ability to comprehend because of this constant distraction.

I saw a kid, maybe nine or 10 years old, riding a bicycle and texting while he was riding. Can you believe that? Luckily, it was on a country lane. 

The reason I’m worried about children is that the brain is the last organ of the body to become anatomically mature. It starts growing from birth, and it actually doesn’t finish until the mid-twenties. During that time, the principle of neuroplasticity is extremely important. Neuroplasticity says that repeated experiences shape the brain. Use it or lose it is another way of saying it.

If a child has an experience for example of empathy and another experience of empathy, the circuitry for empathy grows. If a child has experienced a paying full attention at ignoring distractors, which is what we just did, the connectivity for that circuitry grows, and children need this in order for their brains to develop well.

When we see a child grow and go through different phases of childhood, what we’re seeing are the external signs of brain growth. And I think it’s incumbent on us to help children shape their brains in the best way.

I was in a classroom of seven year olds in Spanish Harlem in Manhattan.  Spanish Harlem is a very impoverished place. The children they’re living in housing projects and the projects are pretty dire. One child came to class. The teacher told me and was a little shaken. He’d just seen somebody shot. And the teacher said, “How many of you know someone who’s been shot?”

Every hand went up. It’s that kind of childhood. It’s a very tough place. And I happened to be there, to watch something called breathing buddies. Every day, this classroom, all the kids have a session where they go to their little cubbies and they get a favorite stuffed animal. And they lie down on a rug on the floor. They put the animal on their belly and they watch it go up with the in breath and down when they breathe out. And they count one, two, three on in breath, one, two, three on out breath. 

And they’re doing exactly what we just did. They’re strengthening the capacity, the mental muscle of attention. There’s something else. There’s a twofer here because the same circuitry also calms stormy emotions. The ability to manage emotions is inextricably linked with the ability to pay attention. And the teacher said, “One day, because of a scheduling problem, we had to skip this. And the class was chaotic.” So it makes a huge difference for these kids.

I’ve long been an advocate of what’s called social-emotional-learning.  Social-emotional-learning takes the emotional intelligence components: self-awareness, managing your inner life, empathy, handling relationships and makes it part of the curriculum. Not in a way that takes away from academics, but in a way that enhances children’s ability to handle themselves and their relationships. And children’s relationships, if you’re a parent, I don’t need to tell you this, but from puberty on… before puberty, the most important relationships in a child’s life are family. 

After puberty, forget family, it’s other kids and the melodramas of childhood. They didn’t invite me to the party, whatever it may be, capture attention. Those are emotional upsets. The more you can manage those upsets, the more attention, more capacity you have to hear what the teacher is saying.

One of the things they do in these classes; in these programs, I’ve seen this in New Haven, in a neighborhood, very similar to Spanish Harlem. There’s a poster on the wall of every classroom. It’s a stop like a traffic light, red light, yellow light, green light. It says when you’re upset, remember the stop light. Red light- stop, calm down and think before you act. 

Well, stop says you have a choice; calm down means you can manage your inner turmoil. Think before you act is a very valuable lesson, because it says you can’t determine what emotions you’re going to have. Our emotions come unbidden. But once you have them, you can stop and think what you’re going to do. In fact, one definition of maturity is lengthening the gap between impulse and action.

Yellow light: Think of a range of things you could do and what the consequences might be.

Green light: Pick the best one and try it out.

This is a lesson in what’s called cognitive control. Some of you may know about the marshmallow test. It’s around the legendary study in psychology. Four year olds at Stanford University are brought into a room one by one, sat down as a small table. Big juicy marshmallow put in front of them. Experimenter says to this four-year-old, “You can have the marshmallow now, if you want, but if you don’t eat it till I come back from running an errand, you can have two then.” 

Then she leaves the room. This is a predicament that tries the soul of any four-year-old. I assure you I’ve seen video on it. Some of them will go up and sniff it is over and then jumps back… and others go off and sing and dance themselves in a corner to stay distracted.

About a third of the kids can’t stand that. They just grab it and gobble it down on the spot. And another third or so wait the endless 10-12 minutes until the experimenter comes back and they get the two marshmallows.

The payoff from the study came 14 years later when they’re tracked down, as they’re about to go to university. And the two groups are compared the ones who gobbled and the ones who waited. And it turns out the ones who waited get along much better with their peers. They’re still able to delay gratification in pursuit of their goals, which is exactly what that’s a test of.

And this was a surprise, on the American university entrance exam – The SAT, which at that time had 1600 total points; the kids who waited had a 210 point advantage over the kids who grabbed. This is really interesting because these are all children of parents at Stanford University. These are high IQ, high achieving families. So what’s going on?

The difference seems to be that if you’re not able to manage your impulse and mind wandering, it’s kind of a microcosm of that, then you’re going to be more upset. You’re going to be more emotional. You’re not going to be able to pay attention to what the teacher is saying. So you can’t learn as well.

There was a study done just a few years ago, in New Zealand. Every child in a city in New Zealand who was born over a course of a year became part of the study. From ages four to eight, they were rigorously tested on cognitive control, many different measures, including the Marshmallow Type Test.

And then when they’re in their thirties, they’re tracked down again. It turned out the cognitive control, the ability to keep your mind here or bring it back when it wanders was a better predictor of financial success and health in the mid-thirties than either IQ or the social economic status of the family grew up in. It’s a completely independent factor.

In fact, the people who did the study argue that we should be teaching this ability to children in order to level the playing field. 

So this is becoming part of social-emotional-learning. Social-emotional-learning, though also means being smart about your relationships. So, here’s something that happened in New Haven among eleven- year-old boys:

They’re going to play what we call soccer. I think you erroneously call it football here, is that right? So these kids were three boys going to play. So the first kid is kind of pudgy, not very athletic and the two kids behind them, very good at soccer, very athletic. And they’re making sarcastic remarks to this first kid.

And one of the other kids says to this first kid, “The big sneer, Oh, so you think you’re going to play soccer.” And the pudgy kid stops, takes a deep breath as though to brace himself for the confrontation ahead. This could easily lead to a fight in the school, turns around and says, “Yeah, I’m going to try to play soccer. I’m not very good at it. What I’m good at is art. Show me anything, I can draw really well. But you you’re fantastic at soccer. Someday I’d like to be as good as you are.”

And at that, the other kid just melts comes up, puts his arm around and says, “Oh, you’re not so bad. Let me show you a thing or two.” That was no accident. That is called a put-up. That boy learned it in his SEL. It’s a way to handle put-downs, which is a very big problem in the teenage… early teen years.

It’s just part of a wider curriculum, which pays attention to what matters to kids and attention needs to be part of that curriculum. And it’s not just schools. You know, parents are the first coach in all of this. When you pick up a baby who’s crying and sooth her, you’re actually teaching her how to soothe herself. When you point out to a toddler, “You know when you did that, it made your friend feel bad. “ That’s a lesson in empathy.

So, these lessons in attention and emotional intelligence start very, very early in life. But I think we’ve got to get better at it. One reason is the kids are being exposed more and more to influences that aren’t so great. I don’t know if you know anyone, any youngster who likes video games and spends hours at them. Maybe it doesn’t happen here in London, but it’s a big problem worldwide.

And the data on video games is rather mixed. For one thing, they actually do enhance some aspects of attention. If you’re a kid who likes to play fighting games, you know, battle games, and you have to be constantly on the lookout for the enemy who might pop up and kill you. It’s very good for enhancing vigilance. You could be a very good air traffic controller, for example. 

However, it also means that if a kid happens to bump you in the hallway, your first thought is that he has a grudge against you. You get a bias toward hostile attribution. So the video games that we have now are rather mixed.

But there’s a new generation coming along, which is using findings from cognitive science. There’s one called tenacity that I had my four grandchildren play ages 7 to 13 at the time. In tenacity, you have an iPad. Every time you breathe out, you tap the screen. On the fifth out-breath you tap it twice. If you do that, you get visual reward – flowers, blooming in the desert. As you do it more and more, it gets harder and harder. So basically what it’s doing is training attention, but in a way that keeps the attention of kids the same way that all the other video games do. 

There are other things that we could be using. The media generally, and I say this as a reformed journalist, the media gives us a very toxic view of the world. Most of the news we get is about disaster threats, horrible things happening to people… it’s news for the amygdala. The amygdala is a very primitive part of the brain that wants to know what are the dangers.

However, if we were to take on any given day, all of the acts of kindness performed around the globe, you know, a mom feeding her kid is an act of kindness… and if we were to put on one scale and then we were take all the atrocious acts and put them on the loose scale, the acts of kindness would far outweigh those of meanness. But we don’t get that sense of the world looking through a media lens.

But we can use the media better. One example I like is Sesame Street. If you have had a toddler, you may have watched Sesame Street. Sesame street, I found when I visited Sesame workshop… is actually a very sophisticated operation.

The day I went there, the script writers were meeting with two cognitive scientists. They’re actually meeting about cognitive control because Sesame street segments turn out to be lessons based in science, wrapped in entertainment.

One of the things that, segments that aired this season is the cookie connoisseur club. I know if you’re familiar with cookie monster… cookie monster is one of the stars of Sesame Street and he loves to gobble cookies. But Alan who runs a store on Sesame Street decided to start a cookie connoisseur club, very much like a wine connoisseur club. And the cookie connoisseur club, you take a cookie and you study it to see if they are imperfections, then you sniff it for aroma and then you take a nibble to taste it. 

Cookie monster of course, was dying to get into the club. So Alan gives him a cookie and he instantly gobbles it down. He can’t restrain himself. So Alan tells him, “You know, in this club, we’re going to try all kinds of cookies. So if you don’t gobble it down, I can let you into the club. And you’re going to be able to eat many, many different kinds of cookies.”

That does it for cookie. So that’s a lesson. This is a show that is loved by two to four year olds. And two to four year olds learn largely by modelling. So what’s happening with cookie is that people that the kids are learning a lesson in cognitive control. And I think the more of that, the better.

So let me finish with by telling you about a smart use of positive emotion, of being able to manage our own internal world of that inner focus. 

There is a remarkable man named Matthieu Ricard. He’s written some books on happiness.  His friend, she has a doctorate in cell biology from Pasteur Institute. His mentor there actually won a Nobel Prize for the research they’re doing. But after graduate school, he made a startling decision. He decided he’d give up science and go to the Himalayas, become a monk and meditate for the rest of his life.

He’s been called; I think by his publisher’s publicist, the happiest man in the world, because he’s been studied by scientists and on this right to left ratio, he’s very far to the left.

There’s a scientist named Paul Ekman who’s the world’s expert on the facial expression of emotion. Paul is the keenest observer of the face as a revealer of what you’re feeling. He is a very dangerous man.

I once was walking down the street with Paul on the way to a meeting that I was conducting. And Paul was telling me about a system for training people to get good at this that he had just developed. And as he was telling it, we’re getting to the meeting hall. And I thought this is really interesting, but I hope he wraps it up. I’ve got to think about what I’m going to do in the meeting at that moment. He says to me, “And if someone had studied the system, they know you’re getting a little angry with me right now.”

This is why Paul is so dangerous. Paul was interested in emotional contagion. He wanted to know what would the effect be of someone like Matthieu, who was very, very upbeat on someone who was quite the opposite.

So Paul did a quiet phone survey of faculty at the university where he teaches asking, “Who is the most abrasive, difficult confrontational member of our faculty.” 

Oddly enough, everyone agreed who that was. So he calls Professor X. He says, in the interest of science, would you take part in a scientific experiment? And the professor was delighted said, “Sure, I’d be happy to.”

As the day drew near and near, he started making demands, which became increasingly outrageous. And so they had to dump him and go with the second most difficult professor. And the experiment was, they both; they’re having their Matthieu and the professor have their physiology measured, and they’re going to have a debate.

The debate is on the premise that the professor should do what Matthieu did. The professor had a very influential, secure well-paid tenured position, but the premise of the debate was that he would give it up and become a monk and go to an Hermitage for the rest of his life.

At the beginning of this debate, that physiology showed he was really agitated at the thought of that. Matthieu was totally calmed. So as the discussion starts, Matthieu stays absolutely calmed. And the professor gets calmer and calmer and calmer. By the end of 15 minutes, he’s having such a good time he doesn’t want to stop the discussion.

So our emotions are contagious for better, or for worse, particularly when we pay full attention to each other. I once was waiting for a bus on a very hot humid day in New York City in August. It’s a kind of day; I don’t know about London, but New York, we have a rather invisible balloon around us. We’re feeling a little prickly. It says, don’t talk to me, don’t touch me. And I had my balloon intact and the bus pulls up, get on with my balloon. And the bus driver did something quite surprising. He actually spoke to me. He said, “How has your day been?” 

I was shocked, but I sat down taking most of my bubble with me. And then I realized this bus driver is carrying on a conversation with everyone on the bus. “You’re looking for suits? You know, there’s a great sale over here on the right and this department store.” “And did you hear about the Monet exhibit on the left at the music?  Wonderful.”  “And the Cineplex on, we’re coming to here. I know the movie and cinema four got the best reviews, but the one in cinema two saw it the other night. Fantastic.”

He said on and on like that. And then people get off the bus and he’d say to him, I hope the rest of your day is really wonderful. That man was an Urban Saint. He transformed everyone on the bus. He was sending ripples of good feeling through a city that sorely needed it.

And I think the bottom line is, you know, you don’t have to go to the Himalayas for decades. We all can do that in our lives if we pay attention. Thank you very much. 

Question-and-answer session

Daniel Goleman: I’m happy to answer any questions you might have. There are mics here and there’s standing Mics I’m told in the galleries. So just raise your hand. If you have a question. First question over here. 

Question: You mentioned the low cultures in America, where there are murders every day. Steven Pinker writes very well about some of these cultures and explains that people will be killed over a simple slight disrespect or something. And it’s ingrained in the culture. It’s innate.

The thing that I can see, there seems to be an insidious political correctness in the world today where we’re not allowed to say that a culture is a rubbish culture. And in doing that, we don’t address the problems with these people. So every day they continue to have the low expectations, the murders, and the social melia that creates and continues to create what you in America called the broken window syndrome.

And I wondered what your view was on the inability for people to address these problems honestly and openly. And even going on to the fact that a lot of our condition is genetically inherited. The brain is no different to any other organ in the body. That whole groups of people get a particular kind of genetic. It’s not being addressed at all. And we’re losing out over that. 

Daniel Goleman: Yes, well, I know of some data which speaks directly to that. I think first of all, we have to be very careful about stereotypes. Because in any given neighborhood, there’s a range of variation who happens to live there. There may happen to be some very talented young people who live in a neighborhood, which is otherwise rife with problems.

So, for one thing, we should allow for individual differences, but generally, it’s a worldwide problem what to do with children who grow up in dire poverty. Because for one thing, the brain is very fragile. So if you’re not well-nourished in childhood, the brain doesn’t grow as well.

And worldwide, children who grew up in poverty can have undernourished brains which makes them susceptible to all kinds of behavioral problems, particularly when it comes to prefrontal development. As I mentioned, at the prefrontal areas, the one that manages emotions. 

So if you can’t handle your rage, for instance, many people who end up in murderer’s row, who’ve killed someone, have a damage to the prefrontal area it’s been found. So we need to face this as you suggest starkly and see what the problems are and what the possible interventions might be, because I would never write off an entire group of children. I would say, instead, these are developing brains, let’s help them develop as well as they could.

And in fact, I mentioned that the New Zealand study suggested that we have active interventions, particularly in early childhood. There’s a famous study done it’s called the Perry preschool study, where children from a neighborhood like this had a very enriched program. And they did much, much better in life than other kids from the same neighborhood. 

The question of IQ and class is very important to understand. In cultures worldwide, where there’s a privileged cast or class and an underprivileged cast or class, there was always a wide gap in IQ scores between the privileged and the underprivileged, and it’s taken to be genetic.

However, there’s something called the Flynn effect. Flynn is a researcher at the University of Otago in New Zealand. And he’s shown with vast datasets that every three, four, five years when IQ tests are revised, they have to make questions harder. They have to make questions harder because kids become smarter every generation than previous generations. In other words, it’s not fixed.

The other thing he’s found is that when children… when a group from a class which is underprivileged migrates to a country where the bias about that that caste or class doesn’t exist, their children do as well as other children. So it’s not genetic, it’s largely situational.

So you’re absolutely right. We have to look squarely at those situations and see what we can do to help.

Where’s the mic. Next question. 

Question: Hello there. Thank you for your talk very much. Enjoyed it. My question relates back to the situation of the marshmallows. And you said, if you give one child one, four year old to have one-one, and if one eats one later, then he’ll have two. And you said when they got to their thirties; the high achievers were the ones who waited. How much of that is linked to addiction? 

Daniel Goleman: You mean wanting the two marshmallows right away? You could get addicted to marshmallows, I think. 

Yeah, exactly. The inability to control impulse makes one susceptible to alcoholism, addiction, shopaholism, gambling addiction and so on. Because you want the hit and you don’t restrain yourself and see that there are other ways to go.

By the way, don’t try that at home with your child, the marshmallow test. I know someone who tried it with his four year old daughter and he peeked to see what she did. He put the marshmallow and he left the room. She took the marshmallow, she took out the middle of the marshmallow and ate it and then put it back. She’s probably CEO of a company now, I don’t know.

I have good news and bad news. The brain becomes anatomically mature in the mid-twenties, but doesn’t mean it’s too late to change habit. However, habits instantiated in the brain in childhood are very strong.

So if you end up say addicted or overly anxious or whatever it may be, it’s still possible to change, but you need to make an added effort. And the reason is that you have to practice the new, healthy, better behavior over and over, because you’ve practiced the bad way 10,000 times. You’ve done it over and over. And this circuitry is so strong.

But here cross your arms. This is what a habit feels like. Now cross them the other way with the other arm on top. That’s what it feels like to change your habits. A little weird at first, a little strange, but if you make the effort and keep making the effort, every naturally occurring opportunity, what happens is the neural connectivity for the new pathway gets stronger and stronger until at some point you pass a developmental landmark, a neural landmark, where you perform the new habit effortlessly without thinking about it… becomes automatic. 

And what that means is that the connectivity for the new habit has now become stronger than the old one. And now it’s the brain’s default choice, but it takes work. It takes more work. 

Question: My question is about the three focuses that you mentioned: the inner, the other and the outer. I’m wondering whether they exist in isolation or whether they exist in a hierarchy. And if so, is there a method of moving through them? 

Daniel Goleman: Well, I think they each can be improved. I don’t think there’s a hierarchy because for example, in research on leaders, we found that some leaders can be very good at any two or one of them, and bad at any of the others.

In other words, every combination is possible. You can be really emotionally intelligent, manage yourself well, manage other people well, but be absolutely blind to systems. And to the larger context in which your organization is operating. Or you can be very good at managing yourself and very bad at reading people.

There are actually a lot of… in the workplace there is a whole class of people who are outstanding individual contributors, often very good at systems and worked very hard, computer programmers for example, who have zero empathy.

I was talking to someone here in Europe, who was with the company and he said, “We have a guy who is absolutely brilliant at systems, and we can’t put them in front of a client because when we do, he just starts talking nonstop. He never stops to meet the client to find out what’s on their mind to understand the problem from their point of view.”

So here’s someone who’s very good at inner and managing himself and its systems, but not people.

Question: Is attention handled differently or valued differently?

Absolutely, culture makes an enormous difference, particularly, for example, in valuing attention training. Most of the attention training methods we use now come from Eastern cultures, because Eastern cultures like Bhutan, for example, many people in Bhutan are meditators. Maybe to some extent, almost all of them, all of the citizens, it’s part of the background. 

And so the methodologies they have are quite sophisticated. They’ve been developed over millennia. And people like Richard Davidson, who I mentioned, who do research in this area, are using expert advisors from those cultures to help him understand, what the potential is for us to train attention. Because in the West, we’re rather stunted in our view of how to train attention.

So I think when it comes to a mental faculty, culture makes an enormous difference. The same thing is true by the way of emotions. Every culture values and expresses emotions differently. Everyone universally has the same wiring for emotion. 

Question: Our emotions are contagious. Therefore, should we spend more or less time with our angry colleagues? Should we be the American bus driver or the French monk? Should we save the world or save ourselves? 

Daniel Goleman: Well, the French monk is actually good at saving everyone, that’s his mission. But apart from that, I think that, it’s important to understand the dynamic of sending and receiving emotions.

So there’s several factors that determine in any given interaction who sends in, and who receives. There are studies done, for example, where two strangers come into a lab, they fill out a mood questionnaire, ‘How do you feel right now?’

Then they sit facing each other in silence for two minutes. Then they fill out the same questionnaire. It turns out the person who’s most emotionally expressive, transmits his or her emotional state to the other person in two silent minutes. So expressivity is very important.

On the other hand, power matters. In any human group it’s natural to pay most attention to and put most importance on what the most powerful person in that group says and does. 

So emotions tend to spread from the person who has power outward; what this means, for example, and these are experiments done on teams. If the leader of a team is in a very bad mood, people on the team catch the mood and performance goes down. If the leader of the team is in a very good mood; a positive mood, people catch that and performance goes up. This is true for business decisions, for creativity, for physical coordination, like putting up a tent. So that’s a second factor, is the power of relationship.

The third factor has to do with Matthieu Ricard. And that is how stable are you. If you are going to go and be with your angry colleague, are you stable enough in a positive state that like him you can bring, or the bus driver, you can bring him into that state. Are you going to end up angry yourself? So those are at least three factors that might determine the answer. 

Question: Fascinated by the advocacy of social-emotional-learning. And it would appear that there are many Western parents today who have gone down to the same focus in prescribing Ritalin for many of their kids. Can you take a minute and talk a little bit about, you’ve described an organic approach to improving focus, and I look forward to reading more about those, but what are the impacts of the over prescription of Ritalin? What are the effects, long-term effects? 

Daniel Goleman: Right. So Ritalin, which of course is, is given to children who have so-called ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. 50 years ago, they used to say, well, he’s just a little boy. He’ll outgrow it.

But now it’s become a diagnostic category. And there are some kids who have genuine problems paying attention. They’re not being helped by digital media as they are today. They would be very helped by these lessons in cognitive control, which are very new and are just now being studied.

So there are people like Davidson are studying the ways in which we can use attentional training. Think about it, why has this culture had as its default buying a drug and giving it to our children for something which is a skill deficit. It’s a skill deficit, attention is a skill. I think the reason is there are drug companies who are making a lot of money selling us those drugs and convincing us that this is the better alternative. This is my personal opinion.

When in fact what we have not done is basic research on the attentional mechanisms involved in ADHD, and what kind of training would help children get better at it. And I think within the next five years, we’re going to see a set of very direct interventions that are non-pharmaceutical in those conditions. 

Question: I just wanted to ask your opinion as to what extent do you think our emotional reactions are learned or innate? 

Daniel Goleman: Well, our emotions are innate, I think, and our particular emotional reactions are largely learned. I have to recommend my wife’s book here. It’s called mind whispering. Her name’s Tara Bennett-Goleman. She’s a psychotherapist. Because she talks about the way in which emotional patterns of reactivity are learned in childhood and how you can use a mindfulness cognitive therapy, a number of interventions to change the habits that are self-defeating.

The name of the book is Mind Whispering and her name is Tara Bennett-Goleman. I found it very useful. Actually find her even more useful. 

Actually, there’s data on that: If you’re a pessimist, can you learn to be an optimist? And there’s research done by a fella named Martin Seligman at University of Pennsylvania, who developed a field called positive psychology. He developed the field because psychology for 80 years only studied pathology. So there was a problem. We had noticed that there was a positive spectrum of emotion and experience.

Seligman took kids who were prone to depression, turned out that they tended to be pessimists and to see if they had something that didn’t work out or a setback in life. They’d say “it’s because of me and I’ll always be like that.”

And he taught them to think differently. While it was the circumstance, circumstances can change and I can do something to change them. It’s a more optimistic outlook. And he found that, actually after about a year, their thinking patterns had changed. 

But it’s what I said as with any such behavior, we have to keep at it, and keep at it at every naturally occurring opportunity and catch ourselves when we go back to the old pattern. So yes, optimism can be learned.

I actually know the gentleman who invented cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy looks at our thinking; distorted thinking patterns and helps us see more realistically. And it’s very effective for depression. His name is Aaron Beck. He’s 93 now. He had a terrible accident that put him in a wheelchair and I happened to speak to him after that. And he was very upbeat. He’s supposed to one of the most optimistic people I know.

Then he lost sight in one eye and I was talking to him. He said, “Well, you know, my right eye works perfectly fine. I can still read.” And then he went blind in his right eye. And he said, “You know, I can still listen to books on tape.” In other words, he had the capacity to see what was right instead of what’s wrong, which is what you’re talking about.

Question: Hi, I just had a question about the performance graph that you have there. You mentioned two extremes, you have the unmotivated low performance, and, and then you have the frazzle. What can you do if you’re one of those types of people, how can you improve your performance?

Daniel Goleman: What can you do with this type of person and with this type of person? Well, let me ask you in this hypothetical question, are we this type of person, or are we managing this type of person or friend of this? Who are we, are we the person? 

Questioner: I have a friend…

Daniel Goleman: What the person needs who is under aroused, who’s disengaged his involvement, to get more motivated, more passionate, more engaged. And there’s a literature now on something called good work. Good work combines three things. It combines what we’re really good at. Our excellence, with what we’re really passionate about, what engages us and what we value with our ethics.

If you align those three things, you’re naturally going to go up from here to there. In fact, you’ll, you’ll get into flow much more easily. So one question to ask our friend is what would be good work for you? And what could you do to make it a larger proportion of the time in your day or your week or your month or over the course of the next five years of your career? So that’s a kind of individual strategy for that.

If you’re here, if you’re in frazzle, what you need is calm, which is very related to cognitive control, but there are many ways to calm down. Well, there are two strategies. If you’re say frazzled, because you have a boss that asks you to too much in too little time and give too little support, you might get your boss’s CV and send it out to a head-hunter, but that’s not an immediate solution.

So instead you might manage your own world better by finding something that works for you, that gets you physiologically, relaxed. It might be meditation. It might be yoga, might be deep muscle. It might be working out at the gym. Everyone is different.

Do it every day and do it before you go to work or whatever’s frazzling you. Because what happens is that over time, your body’s set point for stress changes and you’ll be able to manage better or to be in a more relaxed state in the circumstance. Two general strategies.

Question: I’ve got two quick questions. The first one might be a silly question. So I apologize if I’ve missed this, but do you see focus as an extension of emotional intelligence? Or is it cognitive or is it both?

Daniel Goleman: So what I think is that attention was embedded within emotional intelligence because the brain circuits for emotions, for empathy and for attention intermingle. I just never thought about it. I didn’t realize I had to write a whole new book about it until I did it. 

Question: The second question is I’ve got a two year old son; when he’s four, I fully intend to do the marshmallow test. I’m just wondering between now and then, are there things that I could be doing for him that will help him more be more likely to wait?

Daniel Goleman: You’re probably doing them already. Just being a good enough parent is terrific. But pay attention to your child’s feelings, needs. That’s very important.

Question: I wasn’t entirely surprised to hear this from a friend, a little while ago, who works in the psychiatric resident hospital. And the difference between the emotions of the sexes is absolutely enormous. If a woman comes in for a session, the psychotherapist will say, “How’s it going? How are you?” And we’ll come exactly how it’s going, how they feel.

When a man comes in very little as sad. So the psychotherapist will say, “On the sofa over there, are a collection of soft toys, pick one up.” So the man will go and pick up the Panda. And the psychotherapist will say, “Well, how is Mr. Panda today?” And then it will come.

So the difference of the emotions between the sexes is however, we like to think we are basically all the same. I think we are hugely different. 

Daniel Goleman: So do I, thank you.

Question: Well, I just wanted to make a response to the gentleman with the two year old, because I have three children and I’m sure that all three coming out of exactly the same environment, probably would react very differently to the marshmallow test. So that goes back to my question, is it learned or innate? And I think often that some people just have a natural emotional intelligence.

Daniel Goleman: Yes. I didn’t answer your question. The answers is it’s both learned and innate. In that each of us is born with a particular range of set points in the brain chemicals that manage emotion. That’s our temperament. And as you know, if you have more than one child, kids differ from day one.

On the other hand, epigenetics tells us that it’s not the genes you have. It’s which genes turn on and off that will make the lasting difference. And the behavior in a child is very malleable. So if a child is very impulsive, that child can learn cognitive control. If a child is too constricted, that child could learn to loosen up.

There’s data on children, for example, who are, what are called behaviorally inhibited. This is work of Jerome Kagan at Harvard. He finds that about 15% of children are anxious about new stimulant, new playground, new friend, new food, when they’re very young. These are the kids who at school age are identified as shy. And it had been thought that this was just genetic.

But what he realized when he followed a group of these kids was it some of them by school-age, weren’t shy. And he looked at the parenting they got, and he noted. He found that the difference was this: if your parents identify you as she’s shy and protect you, those are the children who don’t change.

If parents say to a child, well, you may feel a little timid about it, but go ahead and try it anyway, that child learns I’ll feel a little scared at first, but if I go ahead, I’m going to have a good time. And those are the children who don’t end up shy. So it’s a malleable mix of both. And I think we’ve reached the end of our time.

Resources for Further Reading:

Daniel Goleman: Why Aren’t We All Good Samaritans? (Transcript)

How to Get Your Brain to Focus: Chris Bailey (Full Transcript)

The Art of Focus – a Crucial Ability: Christina Bengtsson (Transcript)

Tony Robbins: How To Train Your Brain To Stay Focused (Transcript)

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