Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 72: Daniel Goleman, Diving into 'Emotional Intelligence' (Bonus Episode!)

Episode Date: April 14, 2017

"The human central nervous system and brain is designed the same around the world... and there probably is a lot of spontaneous rediscovery in different areas of different ways you can play with the mind," Dan Goleman, renowned psychologist and author of the best-selling book, "Emotional Intelligence," says in our interview. Goleman has helped spread the concept of "emotional intelligence," or "EQ," and its four parts -- self-awareness, self-management, social awareness (empathy) and relationship management (social skills) -- across the globe and explains why it matters a great deal in leadership. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from. And where's Tom from my space? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Got a bonus episode for you this week. It's my friend Danny Goldman. You may know him as Daniel Goldman. He wrote a huge book, a couple decades ago, a huge book called Emotional Intelligence, which was really paradigm shifting a book about not being yanked around by your emotions. It was informed in part by his many years as a science journalist, but also in part by his decades as a meditator. And I became friends with him several years ago he's he's uh... part of

this group that sometimes is referred to as the jubos uh... bunch of uh... folks mostly from the new york city area who uh... and many of them sort of ivy leaguers who all ended up for a variety of reasons getting into meditation in the sixties and seventies uh... some of them over in uh... india others of them over in India, others of them, back here at home. Many of these folks have been on this podcast before Mark Epstein, Sharon Salisberg, and the like. And Danny is part of that group, it has been four years.

And also has been just super influential for me as a writer and also as a friend, just as by way of an example. Not long after 10% happier came out, he called me a couple months after and said, hey, good for you, glad the book's doing well, but now you're getting people excited about meditation, what are you gonna actually do to help them meditate?

Which was a really, I didn't have an answer at the moment, but it led ultimately to me getting involved in starting the 10% happier app and this podcast I didn't have an answer at the moment, but it led ultimately to me getting involved in starting the 10% happier app and this podcast and a lot of the projects that I'm now and this upcoming book that I'm working on, the road trip we'd done across the country. Anyway, a long way of saying Danny's been a huge and I think very positive influence on me and I think you'll be fascinated to hear his backstory and some of the stuff he's working on.

So here we go. Danny Goldman. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Thank you very much for doing this. I'm happy to do it, too. Let me ask you the question. I always ask, which is how did you get into this whole meditation racket? It was one of those happy accidents.

You know, I didn't really plan on it. You never really plan on the best things that happened in your lives. I was spending my first winter in graduate school, writing a paper about suicide. And graduate school. And I was pretty depressed myself. Yeah, yeah.

This is at Harvard. This is at Harvard. In the clinical psychology first year. And all of a sudden there's a knock on my apartment dorm. And this beautiful woman is at Harvard. This is at Harvard. In the classical psychology first year. And all of a sudden, there's a knock on my apartment door and this beautiful woman is standing there. And I was very happy to see her, but I had no idea who she was. And she said, she had been in a monastery in Kathmandu and gotten the message that her sister was getting married.

And she should come back to the States. So in Delhi, she stayed in a rooming house where a friend of mine was staying, who had been writing me as he went around the world and wasn't sure any of the letters were getting to me. So he gave her a letter to hand delivered to me because it turned out she lived outside Boston. So here she is. So this is a way before you mail. This is a way before you have. I think the people who invented email weren't even born.

So the other option was smoke signal. This was ancient days. And she said, you know, I got to the States and I found out my sister backed out of the wedding. So I only have two things to do. One is to deliver this letter to you. And the other is I'm supposed to go see this guy who's up in New Hampshire. I couldn't even remember what the name was. She told me, I said, well, why don't I

drive you there? Considering the alternative, which was a suicide paper. So happily, she said, yes, that made me more than 10% happier right on the spot. And we get up there and it's a big big estate and there's this guy in a room and one of the outbuildings who is sitting on the floor with his eyes closed and the walls are papered with these goddy posters. It turns out to be Hindu deities. I'd never seen anything like it. And he'd come in and he doesn't say a thing. He doesn't even look at us. He doesn't open his eyes. And this woman sits down and does the same thing.

I'd never been in a situation like this. I didn't know what the heck was going on. So I waited and waited. And then finally he opened his eyes and he started talking. And it turned out that he was Richard Albert. And I knew Richard Albert because he and Timothy Liri had both been fired from the very department I was enrolled in at Harvard. And of course, they were notorious as the tune-in turn-on drop-out duo who were making psychedelics

very popular around the country. They were fired. The approximate cause for the firing was giving Silasibon to in a study or something like that? Yes, the supposed cause was that they had given psychedelics to undergraduates without approval of the university. The actual cause had to do with they're not giving psychedelics to an undergraduate who really wanted them.

Really? Yes. That's another story. So anyway, we start talking and it turns out that Albert has now become Rondas. He had just come back from India. That was his Hindu name, Rondas. He was given that name by an old yogi named Niem Crowley Bob. And the reason he was sitting there with his eyes closed was he was doing something called meditation, which I'd vaguely heard about, but I'd never seen in the wild. And there he was. And then we ended up talking about people we knew in common because I was in the same department.

He'd been from. And as a member of the Graduate Student Colloquium Committee on the spot, I invited him to come back to Harvard and give a talk, which he did a couple months later. And maybe sooner than that, come think of it, because it was only the second talk he'd given after coming back from India, and he was very fired up. He started at 7 a.m. and I think finished it too. I had to bribe the janitor to keep the room going. Seven AMersam PM. He started seven PM and finished it to AM.

So this was the talk he gave? Yeah, and people were just magnetized because this guy was full of energy. Yeah. Really, unsaying these amazing things about alternate states, altered states of consciousness, or you know how meditation can change you and transform you if you do it for years and years, like this yogi named Koli Baba that he's with. And I was pretty impressed, and so I ended up going to a summer camp that he ran in that same estate, which was his father's. His father had been president of what was in the new Haven Railroad. And we learned yoga and we learned meditation and I ended up going to India and spending time with his teacher named Crowley Baba. But that's how I got into meditation. I tried by the way

TM in college. Transnental meditation. Yes. Which is the guy, Maharishi Mahashyogi who started that became quite popular in those days because he was Briefly the guru to the Beatles and that made him very famous. Yeah, and so I tried that and that was nice except You're supposed to do it 20 minutes twice a day and I was an undergrad as chronically sleep deprived so Every second meditation would be a nap for me, which was pleasant, but it wasn't really when I was expecting something more for meditation. And so I kind of let that drop. But this is, I really picked it up again with Rondas and going to India. And in India, I met people who were, you'd have to say, pretty hardcore meditators, like that was what

their life was about. And I also experienced them as some of the most upbeat, wonderful people in energizing that I'd ever run into. And then when I came back to Harvard to tell people this, that you know, there's something in your, something that you may not know about in your psychology, they were totally negative. Really? Totally negative. Give me a sense of how negative they were.

So I told my clinical psychology instructor that I was going to do a dissertation on meditation and stress reactivity, a physiological study. And he said, we start talking about it and then we got on the idea of a mantra sound, Sanskrit sound that you repeat silently in your mind. And he said, how is that any different than my obsessive patient who can't stop saying, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh. I mean, he was confused, you know, he thought it was Tourette's. He thought it was Tourette's, but they didn't have that diagnosis then. So he, but anyway, he was just saying they were totally dismissive. In other words, in those days, the clinical psychology lens was very reductive.

Psychedelics were called an originally psychotomometics, meaning they mimic psychosis. And all of anything having to do with the change in consciousness or managing your mind back then was seen as somehow transgressive and probably dangerous. So given that you were reared in this environment, what about your background or personality allowed you to take all this stuff seriously? Because I've seen the old film of Ram Das and that was a weird scene. Weird scene, how was it weird?

Well everybody's dancing around, they're like full on. Oh we had a good time. Yeah, yeah, it looked fun, but it was pretty weird. I mean, I'm not saying that in a negative way, but it's... Yeah, you probably saw films of Sufi dancing. I've seen teaching yoga on the yard. I wore, there's a whole documentary about him called Fierce Grace. In that documentary teaching yoga on the yard. I wore this whole documentary about him called fierce grace. In that documentary there's old footage. I highly recommend the documentary to

everybody. And there's old footage of him teaching yoga on the lawn at his daddy's estate and all that stuff. And so I'm just wondering given that you were in a pretty straight-laced environment at Harvard getting your graduate degree in psychology, why was this, why was this okay for you? I had a kind of weird childhood. So I was born in the Central Valley of California, which is like the Midwest of California. But my father's best friend, who we saw often, was a professor of Asian languages, I percoli. And he was a guy who was quite interesting.

He, in 1917, if you could imagine, was a cadet in a military school in Vladvostok, Russia. His father was the head of the Russian army in that part of the country. The revolution breaks out, and he's got a flee for his life. And he ends up traveling through Asia. And it turns out he's a savant. He picks up languages.

He ended up speaking 30 languages or more. He founded the Asian language department at Berkeley. He had my father met in a Sanskrit class. My father was a linguist. And they became very close friends. They were, you know, room together at Berkeley and stuff. So I knew him and he kind of brought a different sense of the world in with him, like he was somehow very Asian. And also my father made a point of bringing me to experiences like meeting a Zen teacher in when I was in high school. And this was in the early 60s, actually

maybe late 50s. And you know, it was just out of the ordinary. And for my, for my sister gave me a book called Zen Mine Beginners Mine. Oh, yeah. And Shun Rio. Shun Rio. Yeah, Suzuki. And also that other really good one, I can see the cover.

It's a yellow cover. And it was one of the earliest books on Zen. It was stories of Zen Enlightenment episodes. So, you know, these were kind of background osmotic formative experiences. But it gave me a sense that there was more to understanding the mind that I was learning at Harvard in clinical psychology and that the East Asia really had some wisdom about this that was worth exploring.

And I think that that plus the fact that I learned by accident that the Ford Fellowship that sent me to Harvard had in it a year of travel and study abroad. And I had a wonderful professor there, David McClellan, who actually had hired and fired Lyrian Albert. He was chairman of the department at that point. Who kind of fronted for me and he said, okay, this guy's gonna go to India and he's going to do some research and he made it all okay and so I had a free trip to India and I had a reason to go. And so you ended up spending a year there? Two years all together.

Wow. Yeah. I had a postdoc also brought me back to India. So how many different forms of meditation were you studying? Well, you know, I was open to everything. So I actually was trying to figure it out. My first book, which is now called Meditative Mind. Can I just give it a brief plug? Because I find this book fascinating. And I know you wrote it.

You've expressed to me some sheepishness about the fact it was written at the early part of your career, etc. But it is a great and brief synthesis of the various paths to enlightenment in contemplative traditions. And for anybody who's interested in comparing these paths and just learning what they are and seeing the commonalities which are striking, especially given that these come out of cultures that are disconnected in space and time, is a fascinating read.

Thank you, Dan, for that. And I'm revising it and bringing it out fresh and updated in December. Oh, really? Yeah, cool. Because I feel that the book I'm just finished, which is called Alter Traits. Science reveals how meditation transforms mind, body, and brain is going to revive interest in that other book. So I better update it because it's very embarrassing. It's not embarrassing.

Yeah, well I wrote it because I was trying to figure out what is the difference between what Sufis do and Hindoogis do and Zen and how does it all map on each other. And luckily I had a lot of time in India. There's not much to do in those days. It was before, as you point out, before the digital age, I spent a monsoon season in a village that had one bus come through once a day. It was in the foothills of the Himalayas, very remote. Whatever was available in the store was what ripened that week or what they brought in on the truck that came in every week. It was very remote. And I was able to plow through a very fat book,

which I summarized in Meditatimine, the Visudimuga. It's an ancient text. It's a fifth century text for meditators. The worst thing about it was it was written before printing. It's a text which is meant to be memorized. And so there's a huge amount of boring repetition. It's a very fat book, but I had nothing else to do. So I read it by Kerosene Lamb.

The house I was in, there was a cow downstairs. It was ridiculous. Aromdass and other people were there because Joseph's teacher, Manindra. The house I was in, there was a cow downstairs. It was, and it was fearless. Ramdhast and other people were there because Joseph's teacher, Manindra. Oh, well you should say who Joseph is. Oh Joseph Goldstein, who by the way has done a wonderful meditation app. Joseph Goldstein, I met first in Bulgaria, India, and December, November of 1970, he'd been there four or five years studying with a teacher there, Manindra, how to do the postmeditation, which is mindfulness.

Good, passinat. Yeah, yeah. And so his teacher, Anna Grika Manindra, whom I also studied with for a while, not five years, like Joseph, maybe three months. Anyway, he had said to a group of us who would gather in Bogai, which he'd buy then, included Romdos in his second trip back, to India, that he would meet us in this little tiny village in the Himalayas, Kosani. So we all went up to this little tiny village, and he wrote a letter saying, oh, I'm so

sorry. There's illness in my family, I can't come. So we had each other, we had the books we brought. And that's how I started what became the meditative mind. But one of the books I brought was this very fat meditators manual, the basute muga, which comes from the fifth century. And it describes the entire path from getting your mind to stay with your breath and mindfulness up through all the states and places you go on the way to what they call nibbana, which has kind of been enlightenment in that language. Yeah, the other way to pronounce that would be nirvana.

That's the Sanskrit form, and it is more widely known in English, you should say. Anyway, so here I am doing all of these weird things. No wonder my department thought I was out there. So I tell that whole story in this new book, Altered Trades, which will come out in September. You can get it now, I think, probably in Amazon. But I go into more detail on how that all happened, because what it did was lead me and my good friend Richard

Davidson who's a neuroscientist at University of Wisconsin now. He was a fellow graduate student to get really serious about this meditation stuff. Richie, as we call him, was the one guy back at Harvard who was open to all this. Richie, by the way, is a previous guest on this podcast. Oh, a once in future guest, because I'm sure he'll come back on, but just so listen, you can go here from Richie if you want to scroll through the podcast feed. So you guys have written this book together,

which will come out in September. We wrote that book together. So do you, and this may be a question that I may want to ask you in more depth when you come back on to talk more fully about that book, the upcoming book, Alter Trades, which I have not yet read. But is enlightenment real? Is Nirvana a thing?

Well, actually, it's not a thing, but is it an actual phenomena? So the reason we call the book Alter Trades is that what the research shows verifies the claims made say in this fifth century book, the Basoudi Manga, that is to say there is an ongoing transformation of being which I'll be happy to tell you about in detail when the book comes out. Okay, but in other words the short answer is yes. Yes. So let me ask another question that is related to this, but I don't think we'll walk on the

subject matters. We'll want to cover when the book comes out. Maybe it does. So you can feel free to swat it away. But what I find so interesting about the meditative mind, the book, that your first book, is just seeing how these, as I said before, these cultures that aren't connected by chronology or geography seem to have arrived at many of the same conclusions or experiences about transcending the ego or the voice in the head, et cetera, et cetera. How would you describe the commonality among those experiences? Well, first of all, I questioned your assumption that they had no contact. There's a book that just came out. I saw it reviewed in briefly in the New Yorker about the ancient world and how much contact there was. There was trade from China to the Mediterranean.

But I don't know that the shamans and the jungles of Brazil had much contact with. Well, so there are two ways I look at that. One is that the human central nervous system and brain is designed the same around the world. Yes. And you can do certain things with it and can't do other things with it. Yes.

And there are probably, there's a lot of spontaneous rediscovery in different areas of different ways you can play with a mind, or game the mind, or hack the mind, or transform the mind. I think that's one answer. The other answer is, you know, there were Buddhist monks in Alexandria, Egypt. Egypt. The desert fathers, who were the first Christian monks in the second century, were in that same area. And oddly enough, the methods they used, like having beads, fingering beads, and doing a mantra with each bead, is identical to what Tibetans or yogis are doing, or Hindu yogis are doing today. And I don't think it's an accident. I think the, you know, my own feeling is there was a lot of contact and transmission of

what were state-of-the-art technologies in those days. That's amazing. Okay, so just getting back on your chronology, you spend a bunch of time in India, you meet all these other young Westerners who are into this stuff too who then go on to become a group that is sometimes referred to as the Jew Boos. You Richie Davidson, Joseph Goldstein, a younger guy, Mark Epstein, Sharon Salzberg. The list goes on. Did you, but you unlike many of these other people did not become a meditation teacher. So how did you incorporate it into your career?

Because you went on to write for the other time. Yeah, so I incorporated it into my life. I don't know that I incorporated it into my career. Like you, I'm a meditator who does news. I'm a science journalist by training. That's my craft. And that's what I did at the New York Times for 12 years until I wrote Emotion Intelligence

and I could quit my day job. So the reporting of science in a way that makes it accessible to the general reader who has no training is like my one trick. I'm a one trick pony. That's what I do. That's what my books are. It's a I do. That's why books are. It's a pretty good trick. It's a useful one. And when I first left Harvard to go into journalism, people were scandalized in academia. They thought, what a waste of good education.

After a while they started coming saying, you know, could you write about my research? But it took a while for them to understand that actually you got more attention there than you did in academics, in academia. So for me meditation has mostly been something that helps me with my day and with my life and doesn't necessarily inform what I write about or how I write about it, informs how I feel as I write about it, I would say. And then I think that when I wrote emotional intelligence, there was some deep structure that may have resonated with, as you point out, some of the similarities among spiritual traditions around the world, because the human brain is one

in the same. So there are four parts of motion intelligence, self-awareness, self-management, empathy, knowing how other people feel, and handling relationships. So that is a pretty universal. When a motion intelligence came out, I was just really astonished at how it resonated with cultures around the world. It's in 41 languages now. How many millions of copies is it sold?

I don't know. At least five, but I have. I stopped counting out. Wow. It's a very popular book, and I think it is because it's a science book. It's a book that tells you why you do those weird things that you do that you wish you hadn't done. Right, I have to do that. Yeah, I still do that. Yeah, I do too. Because meditation is not a cure-all. Meditation is not a cure-all, which is something I wanted to bring up, because I'm as someone who's looked deeply into the science and meditation,

I feel that mindfulness, for example, is overhyped, particularly in the business world. And having said that, I should also say that my assistant adores your app that you did with Joseph. Oh, right. You were starting talking about it. Yes, yes, yes, yes, thank you, thank you. He was just telling me today, be sure to tell Dan how much I like it. So, you know, I think that that's wonderful that more people are meditating.

What makes me nervous is how the meditation research is being misrepresented, particularly when you get into the business world, and start selling the service of teaching people mindfulness to companies because what you're doing is monetizing mindfulness in a way it was never meant to be. I think mindfulness should be spread every way it can because it's helpful to people and research makes that abundantly clear. But it's not helpful in every way. For example, there's a lot of action now around mindful leadership.

And emotional intelligence got me very involved in the research on leadership and what makes people highly effective leaders or high performing and whatever they do. Mindfulness helps, definitely, but it's not the whole deal. And it's being talked about or sold as though all you need is mindfulness. When in fact, I think mindfulness gives you a foundation, helps you stay more calm, more focused. If you do what's called meta or loving kindness meditation, it helps with empathy and paying attention to other people. But it doesn't do the things that make you an outstanding leader. It's not going to make you able to, for example,

articulate a shared vision that moves people and gives people a sense of a real purpose and meaning to what they do. That's a different skill. And the skills of leadership that are very well documented are not the same as what mindfulness does. So, here's... I've been...

You've got a few sheets in front of you. I just want to reduce some of the particular competencies that research on leadership shows make a difference. Before you do that, I'll just back up for one second. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast, even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newer series is all about drag icon RuPaul

Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers. Opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Can you just you you walk through the four parts of emotional

intelligence, but can you just give us the brief backstory on how you came to the subject? What the, what if you could condense the thesis of the book for us just for those of us who are familiar with it? Okay, so I went to very competitive schools after actually I went to a public high school in California. It was not competitive at all. But then I went to college and at the time was the hardest to get into in the country. I was just very lucky to get in. They thought, oh, we'll diversify. In the 60s, that meant a kid from a farm town in California who did not go to a prep school. That was me. Yeah. And then I went to Harvard and so on. So I noticed that people there, even though they were in the top point, 0.01 percent of SAT scores, whatever, didn't necessarily succeed in life and in the career.

And that people that I had known, for example, in my high school, who were so, so students actually ended up being CEOs. So what's going on here? And then I realized that it's how they handled themselves and particularly how they manage relationships that made them highly successful in their careers. And I'm a child of academics, both my parents were professors and the big heresy of emotional intelligence is, hey, you know what, when you're in school, everybody talks about your scores, your IQ,

your grades, your GPA, but once you get into your career, nobody cares. It's how well you do at your job. It's how well you function on a team. It's how well you perform as an individual and as a leader. That's a different you perform as an individual and as a leader. That's a different skill set. Nobody tells you this in school.

So that was the personal insight. And then when I started looking at the data on the brain, which I did as a science journalist at the times, I saw that, well, you know, the system that manages ourselves and our relationships is completely different, although very enmeshed with. The system that makes us go to taking tests, they are not the same, and that because the circuitry differs so much, we have to respect that there is a different way of being smart. Then in 1990, when I still the times, a guy who was now the President of Yale, Peter Salave, who was then an assistant professor or something, wrote an article in an obscure journal called

Emotion of Intelligence. And I saw that phrase that, wow, that is terrific. Because first of all, it sounds like an oxymoron. You don't think of intelligence and emotions, at least in those days, in the same breath. But I realized it's really saying you can be intelligent about emotion. And then I used that framework to organize a book which was really about what the brain research tells us, what the competencies of being intelligent about emotions and relationships are. And then I was really arguing in the book for bringing this into elementary education,

high school education, K through 12, which by the way in the 20 years since then has become a very robust movement. Social and emotional learning. Exactly. Well, how does one train in emotional intelligence? How do I boost my EQ? Well, mindfulness is good start because so what is emotional intelligence? First, you said there are four parts, self-awareness.

Well, that's what mindfulness does. It brings you into a focus on yourself in a very intimate way and you start to notice the thoughts and the feelings that would just go by or take you over without you being aware of that. So it cultivates self-awareness. That's one of the powers of mindfulness. Another, the next step in emotional intelligence is managing yourself, self-regulation. And if you are not mindful, you can't do it. Right, if you don't see your inner torrent,

you're going to be owned by it. Exactly. But then there are other parts of emotional intelligence. These are competencies based on self-management. They make people outstanding as high performers or as leaders. That mindfulness doesn't help you much with. One is striving toward goals, even when you have setbacks. Might help, but not much.

That's really a different skill set, mentally. Having a positive outlook, interpreting things as opportunities rather than defeats, that's a way of thinking. It's not mindfulness per se. Or just being adaptable, and having being able to get out of a fixed routine when it's not working and try something new. That's a skill that makes someone emotionally intelligent and a good leader,

but not necessarily developed by mindfulness. So these are cognitive rather than contemplative skills? Well, I wouldn't say they're purely cognitive, they're both emotional and cognitive. They're not that sensitive. So, let me just push you on that. Sure. Because I found in my own experience that meditation has helped me separate signal from noise, so that when I have setbacks and I have them all the time, I'm a little less likely to go down the rabbit hole of useless rumination and able to see more clearly the road ahead and the opportunities ahead. And similarly, so that is the resilient piece. And then there was another piece you

were talking about that somehow. Uh, goal, achieving goal. Yeah, achieving goals. The same thing that I, there are all these things I want. And just having the injection of common perspective that mindfulness gives you helps me see what really matters. So, let me push back on that. Okay, great. Do you need mindfulness to know to think about what really matters?

No, exactly. So, let's not conflate the two. No, I don't conflate them. I just think that they're additive and supportive. I think so too. I think mindfulness helps pretty much across the board. It's necessary. I don't think it's sufficient.

That's all I'm saying. So for example, with positive outlook, there's one of the very powerful ways that if discovered of treating depression, serious depression, is mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Which can we just say that your wife has done some work in that area? She wrote the first book, putting the other mindfulness in cognitive therapy, which is called emotional alchemy. Yeah.

Just to this day, a wonderful book. But how can I say that's my wife? Of course I have to say that. It's widely embraced as a wonderful book. Let me just say it. Thank you very much. Tarot. Tarot, yes.

It's an important support. Tarot, Ben, at Goldman, yes. Yes, sir. Yes. Yes. Tarabinic Goulmanus. Yes, yes. So, the interesting thing is that phrase mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. What it means is mindfulness is the base. It helps you see your thoughts and feelings, and then cognitive therapy tells you you don't have to believe those thoughts. And that's a very powerful intervention, but that's a cognitive intervention, which is

separate from mindfulness per se. Put them together and you have something that's very potent, but they separate. So there's your cognitive outlook and positive outlook is purely cognitive. Mindfulness may help you get there, but it may not necessarily help you get there. There could be someone who's very mindful and very depressed. And just mindful of, oh, here's that, I'm lousy feeling again. Right. And noticing and noticing it. However, cognitive therapy tells them, hey, whenever that comes up, think about, you don't think about, look at what you're telling yourself.

I'm no good. It will never change. Challenge those thoughts. Well, that's a cognitive act. It's not mindfulness per se. So mindfulness helps. Yeah, I'm going to bring you back to your sheets. Yeah, there you go. Okay, so then another place, another ability of outstanding leaders is empathy and loving kindness actually, which is often paired with mindfulness, does help you with that. And that is a kind of meditation where you systematically envision other beings and send them good vibes. And there's a lot of science that suggests that that actually has not only health benefits but behavioral.

Exactly. But then there's another one which is called organizational awareness, which is being able to read the map of your organization, know who's influential, know who to go to make a decision, know how to persuade them so that in that next meeting they're going to speak up for you. You don't learn that in mind from this per se. You learn it in that social intelligence basically, something else. I see that. So you're, again else. I see that.

So, you're, again, what I interrupted you when you were looking at the sheets in front of you, your concern was, we were concerned if I recall, was that somehow mindfulness is being injected into the corporate world and sold as a panacea, but in fact, it leaves things out. Yeah. So, I'm managing conflict. That's another ability of outstanding leaders. Mindfulness may not help you there

Very much because it's so interpersonal that it can help you stay calm But it isn't necessarily going to help you with getting to win win and those of us who have any visibility into Meditation communities around this country and around the world will know there's plenty of conflict In those organizations. Yes, exactly. Or teamwork, that's another thing. You learn that, playing soccer is a kid, not doing mindfulness on a cushion, particularly. All I'm saying is there's a skill set. And if you're interested in that skill set, I recommend going to more than sound.net,

where I put all of this into books and videos and so on. Well tell us more about what's there at more than time because that's that you and your son have really built this up as a place where people can go for resources to learn about emotional intelligence. Exactly. What else is there? There's a couple of things that people might be interested in. One is a little book called The Brain Intermotional Intelligence, which goes into the brain level of what's happening as you manage yourself for your handle relationships skillfully.

There's a book called What Makes A Leader, which has all of my articles from the Harvard Business Review. I've been writing there for quite a while. And the article calls, what makes a leader, which I wrote in 98, is still one of their, I think is the second most requested reprint to this day. I have to say, between you and me and people listening, they have all rights to that. They paid me 100 bucks for that. I think I end out in chair at the business school by now. I don't know. But anyway, I put together all of the articles from the business review in this,

what makes leader it's at more than sound. And also we're going into primers on each of these competencies. We have one on self-awareness, self-regulation, positive outlook. We're doing one a month if anyone is interested in, you know, well, what is this? What is it matter? How can I do it? Great. Yeah. So that's what's there, more than sound to have that. Any other concerns as mindfulness you've watched, you've had a front receipt as mindfulness has gone mainstream over the last couple of decades led, in part by another member of this cabal, the aforementioned Jubu's John Capitzen, a very close friend of yours,

and somebody who I admire greatly and have some personal connections with as well, how do you feel about what's happened as a result of this snowball that you helped set in motion back in India in the 60s? Well, I'm thrilled that it's happening, and I think that my quibbles are just at the edges of the movement. I think it's one, you know, it was a dream. There were two things that I dreamed of happening in America when I was in India. One was that people would meditate and that this would not be a weird thing, but just matter of fact.

We do it in business, we do it in school, we do it. I do it every day, not a big deal. The other was that you could get chai somewhere. Both of these things have happened. Both things have come to be. I'm just thrilled with that. Chai isn't more easily accessible than meditation, I think. Maybe. Maybe. Every Starbucks in the country has a chai. Well, soon they'll have a meditation room. Well, you know what? Perhaps who knows? So you don't think you have some, some, you talk a little bit about, you know,

mindfulness for profit and having some worries about that. I'm in the business of mindfulness for profit at the app. Is that, is that something I should take a hard look at? I don't think so. I make a distinction rich and and I, in our book, talk about people who are very serious about meditation, who do it very deeply. If you go to Insight Meditation Society, for example,

or Joseph Teachers, he's a founding teacher with Sharon Salzburg, you can do a 10-day retreat or a three-month retreat. And that's all just at cost. You can do a 10-day retreat or a three-month retreat. And that's all just at cost. And if you want to give something to the teachers, it's called Don, it's a donations. It's cognates same word.

It's not mandatory. So they're doing it in the way it's traditionally done. So that's not monetized, but it's made available. That's the way I think deep practice should be. You're doing something else with your app, and other people are doing, which is spreading it very widely. And I think that to spread it widely, you need to use whatever means the culture and technology

in society gives you. And so there's digitization is inevitable, but it makes it much more widely available. And I think you have to pay for that. You know, you have to... Well, it costs money to make it available. Exactly. On our end, we have to invest in it, et cetera, et cetera.

And, you know, I write books about, I've written books about meditation, but they're books, people have to pay for the book. Yes, yes. I want to give readers a sense of your bibliography before we close, but before we do that. Can you just give me a sense of what your daily practice is like now? Well, I started years hence.

Yeah. So I started with TM, that kind of faded away. Then in India, I picked up mindfulness and what's called insight of apostasy meditation. And then I segued from that to a Tibetan form of apostasy, which is called Zogchen. And now that's the practice I do. So what do you do in your mind when you're doing Zogchen? Well, that's a very private thing. Oh, really? Yeah.

Okay, so people talk about apostasy in a readily, but Zogchen is a little bit more... Zogchen is what's called a nondual practice, which means that it's not at the level of thoughts, it rather's. And like Vapasana, thoughts are treated as a risings that pass away in the mind, that you don't have to get sucked in by. And it's like Vapasana, you create a kind of a platform and awareness where you can, that allows you a steadiness that lets other things come and go. And how much do you do a day of this?

Not enough. It depends on the day. I like to do a lot. I wish I were doing retreat, but I don't seem to be able to schedule it much. Well, I've known you for several years. During that time, you've seen you take and your wife as well, take some pretty long retreats. Last year or so, it's not so much so. I see, because you're working on all these books.

Many reasons, whatever the reasons, I think, that it also says I don't prioritize retreat enough. Well, Joseph's on my case about that as well. Is that right? Yeah. As we speak. Right. Well Joseph is a very high bar. He's a guy who does his own retreats every year for I know a couple months. Three months. He's coming out of a three months. Easy. Yeah. So the books that I've read by you that I can easily talk about are meditative mind as we've discussed also emotional intelligence and an excellent book you wrote in the recent years called Focus which really talks about

what the title suggests how we stay focused. What are some other books that interested listeners might check out? Well, there's a book called Social Intelligence which explains how the brain operates in relationships. There's a book called Ecological Intelligence, which is about the environment and why we are so bad about our impacts on the environment, and what could be done about that. There's the book just about to be published in September,

which is Altered Trades, which is altered traits, which pulls together all of the meditation research that's been done so far. With Rijit Abhitson. And I actually left out one book that I have read that the title of which is evading me, but it's about the Dalai Lama. A force for good, which I wrote for the Dalai Lama's 80th birthday, which is his vision of how people can use mindfulness and other methods to manage themselves better so they're calm and clear, adopt an ethic of compassion, caring, and concern, and then act.

He's really a social activist. I was pretty surprised to see that. But it's his program for what he would love to see people do with their lives, has around meaning, purpose, and making a difference. And then I've done a lot of work on education, as you suggest, I did a book that more than sound has with Peter Sangay, who is an expert on systems learning and systems thinking, saying that in addition to social emotional learning,

which we should talk about someday, Dan. Let me in the podcast. You can do it now. Social emotional learning takes emotional intelligence. There's four components, so awareness management, empathy, social skill. And embeds it in the curriculum for kids K through 12 in a way that it doesn't take that much time,

but it helps them learn, you know, the, well, let me put you differently, there's a line of development that every child goes through, which is emotional, and it has to do with how the brain develops, and another line, which is social, which also has to do with how the brain develops and how they manifest in relationships or how the kid handles himself or herself. And right now we leave that learning to chance. And I think we do so, you know, in a way that puts us at risk. So I have a two-year-old, what do I do about this? Because I take it seriously. Right, relax, you're doing fine. I don't know, you should see him.

First of all, he's poopin' in his pants, I'm not sure that's a good thing. Yeah, so pay no attention to those norms. Every child is different. But I take very seriously the idea of my highest goal for him is to be a good guy. Right, and I don't know why. See, you are the year child's coach. Every parent is a child's coach and mentor.

And in every little interaction, you're teaching something about how to be a human being. So you're doing it naturally. It's called good enough parenting. So if you create what's called a secure base for your child where he knows that you care about him, that you tune into him, you notice what's going on in him, that you'll protect him, that he can trust you, that creates a core of security that your child will bring into every relationship through life. So just by being a good enough parent, you're already helping your child become emotionally intelligent. But what I saw is that, you know,

there are a lot of kids in this country that grow up in very dysfunctional situations, and they don't have that sense of security, or they don't learn how to manage their anger, because they have parents who blow up, who beat them, whatever it may be. And it was for that reason, I thought this should be in schools so that every child has an opportunity to learn how to know what you're feeling, how to manage your disruptive feelings,

how to tune into other kids' feelings, how to get along, how to collaborate, how to cooperate. They're basics for life. And this is really interesting. If you reverse engineer those competencies that we found make outstanding leaders, it goes back to learning these things in childhood. And in fact, when they've done studies with outstanding leaders about how did you learn to be so good at leading a team, they go back to like oh in middle school this happened to me. I had this experience. So it starts in childhood and you know a healthy family will help a child get the right foundation.

But it doesn't hurt to be sure every child gets the right lessons at the right point developmentally through life. It's a social justice issue. There's no question about it. Yes Well, I say this as somebody who's completely biased because you're my friend But just talking to you about the scope of your work I hope you're able to appreciate it times the amount of impact you've had not only in the corporate cultures Also in education and young lives and also just by dint of that curiosity that sent you over to India and got you mobbed up with these other folks who got interested in meditation way before it was cool and that has allowed for

somebody like me who would never have otherwise approached this stuff if I didn't see smart scientifically minded people who are into it and modeling it as a as a behavior that I want to emulate. So you've had just a major impact, I just want to make that point before we close. Well, down, that's very kind of you. It's sincerely said. And thank you for coming on, and I just want to let everybody know you'll be back and then not too distant future to talk about this new book which is coming out in September.

Absolutely, I promise. Love it. Thank you, my friend. Okay, there's another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you liked it, please make sure to subscribe, rate us, Thank you my friend. and really do pretty much all the work. Lauren, Efron, Josh Cohen, Sarah Amos, Andrew Calp, Steve Jones, and the head of ABC News Digital Dance Silver. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music.

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