Managing Behaviour & Emotion | Daniel Goleman

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 fellow named Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, who developed a field called positive psychology. He developed the field because psychology, for 80 years, only studied pathology. There was a problem. We hadn't noticed that there was a positive spectrum of emotion and experience. But at any rate, Seligman took kids who were prone to depression. It 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. 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 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 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. Yes? Hi. I just had a question about the performance graph that you have there. You mentioned two extremes. You have the unmotivated low performance end. And then you have the frazzled end. What can you do if you're one of those types of people? What can we do? How can you improve your performance? What we can do with this type of person and with this type of person. Yeah. Well, let me ask you in this hypothetical question, are we this type of person? Are we managing this type of person? Or a friend of this? Who are we? Are we the person? A friend of this type of person. We're a friend of this type. Like an undermotivated. I have a friend who. Let's say the undermotivated, disengaged person. So what the person needs who is under aroused, who's disengaged, is 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 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 frazzled, and frazzled, what you need is calm, which is very related to cognitive control. But there are many ways to calm down. However, if you can't, well, there are two strategies. If you're, say, frazzled because you have a boss that asks you to do too much in too little time and give too little support, you might get your boss's CV and send it out to a headhunter. 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. It 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 is 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. Yes? 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? Right. So what I think is that attention was embedded within emotional intelligence. Because the brain's 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. The second question is, I've got a two-year-old son. When he's four, I fully intend to do the marshmallow experiment. I'm just wondering, between now and then, are there things that I could be doing for him that will help him be more likely to wait? You're probably doing them already. Just being a good enough parent is terrific, yeah. But pay attention to your child's feelings, needs. That's very important. 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 will come exactly how it's going, how they feel. When a man comes in, very little is said. 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 emotions between the sexes, however we like to think we are basically all the same, I think we are hugely different. So do I. Thank you. 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 of 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. Oh, yes. I didn't answer your question. The answer 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 stimuli, 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 that some of them, by school age, weren't shy. And he looked at the parenting they got. And 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.