NY Times Best-Selling Author Daniel Goleman Shares the #1 Skill You Need to Succeed & Lead

Audio Transcription

On today’s show, we are interviewing the living legend, New York Times best selling author and nationally renowned psychologist Daniel Goleman. Daniel Goleman has sold over 5 million copies of his book, emotional intelligence, which has now been printed in over 40 languages. The Harvard Business Review called emotional intelligence, which discounts Iq as the sole measure of one’s abilities as revolutionary, a paradigm shattering idea and shows Daniel Goleman’s article, what makes a leader as one of the 10 most read articles from its pages and emotional intelligence was named at what are the 25 most influential business management books by Time magazine, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Accenture Institute for Strategic Change has listed Goldman among the most influential business thinkers Coleman’s work as a science journalist, has been recognized with countless awards including the Washburn Award for Science Journalism, a lifetime career award from the American Psychological Association, and he was made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of science in recognition of his communicating science to the general public. What is the gentleman? I’m a huge fan, and without any further ado, I introduce you to the man. The Myth, the legend, Mr Daniel Goleman,

Oh, yes, yes, yes. And Dr. Z, on today’s show we have a world renowned special guest. We have the internationally recognized psychologist, The New York Times bestselling author of emotional intelligence, a man who I quote on this show, so, so often, his book called emotional intelligence, was named by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential business management books. Mr Daniel Goleman. How are you, sir? Well, it’s a pleasure to be here, clay. Thank you, Daniel. I want to. I want to deep dive into this emotional intelligence into this book that I read so many years ago that blew my mind. Could you introduce the listeners out there who are not familiar with the concept of emotional intelligence? What, what this means, what this concept is all about? Sure. We all know about emotional intelligence because it’s

people skills. It’s how you manage yourself, how you handle your relationships. It’s that simple. However you never heard about it. When you’re in school, they teach something very different, right? And how does teach, how does school teach about emotional intelligence differently than how you teach about it?

Well, first of all, most schools don’t teach emotional intelligence. They teach academic subjects. Uh, you learn emotional intelligence in life and you learn it Kinda idiosyncratically. I divide it down into these four domains. So for awareness, self management, that’s how you’re handling yourself than empathy and relationship skills. It’s how you handle your relationships under each of those four parts. I have 12 competencies that companies themselves that determined to identify their high performers and each of them is based in a different aspect of emotional intelligence.

Daniel Goleman, there’s a lot of. This is going to sound like a backhanded compliment for you. There are a lot of optometrist in Tulsa that one could argue on, no more about the human eye than, or about the same. Oh, you are probably the best selling optometrist in Oklahoma or one of the top selling optometrists in, in Oklahoma. And Daniel, you wrote in your book emotional intelligence that essentially no matter how intelligent you are, if you can’t emotionally connect with your employees, if you can emotionally connect to their people, they’re just not going to stay engaged. Can you share with most business owners out there where by default most people are getting it wrong as it comes to emotional intelligence?

Well, the basic mistake that’s made is you put your goal before the connection, when in fact it shouldn’t be the other way around. Doesn’t matter if you have a. You know what your business is. First of all, you want to connect with the people you’re working with who worked for you, and then you want to connect with your clients and your customers and you first. It’s not just about, okay, here’s your glasses. It’s about how you doing today. You know, empathizing with them. What’s going on? How can I help you? People want to hear that. How can I help you? And they want to feel like you actually care how you can help them. You know, there’s research that shows that the very best salespeople don’t just try to make a sale, they try to nurture the relationship because that’s repeat business and I think that’s all about the putting the relationship first and then everything else follows.

There was a specific line in emotional intelligence that really did blow my mind. And so I’m going to read a specific portion of the book, so I’m going to read it to you and I’d like for you to kind of break it down a line by line for us. You wrote here, if your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self awareness, if you’re not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships that no matter how smart you are, you’re not to get very far. I read that during a time of my life where I was very good at the particular skill. Um, Mr Daniel of of deejaying, I was a disc jockey. I started what became the largest wedding entertainment company and in America, but I was all alone. It was just me and my awesome Dj Janus. My great skill and I couldn’t ever build a team of people because I struggled to manage my distressing emotions, so when I read that line I realized, Oh man, I am struggling in this area. Can you coach our listeners and and kind of break down what the average district distressing emotions that are experienced by most people are. Well,

basically let me back up. What you’re saying is what got you here won’t get you there. The things that you may be good at, like, oh, I’m the greatest Dj, the wedding Dj. I can’t keep people together as a team, but that says that such a common problem and it does speak to handling your emotional abilities, managing your distressing emotions particularly and then empathizing. So let me break it down. First of all, knowing what you’re feeling and how it’s impacting your performance. That takes self awareness. You want to kind of monitor yourself. One, know what’s going on. Is it good? Is it bad? The second thing is if you’re having, if you’re having a distressing emotion, you’re like really angry or really anxious. Those are the most common distressing ones. What can you do about it? Can you handle it? Can you recover from it?

Resilience is defined as how quickly you recover from the peak of that upsetting emotion to being able to be calm and clear, and that’s where you do things best from. So that’s the second part. And then there’s empathy. Empathy is critical to teams, to sales, to dealing with people. Uh, it’s, it’s knowing what the other person is feeling and then that determines what you do. So if you don’t know what they’re feeling, a, if you’re really tuned out, you’re going to be off. And if you’re off, people really don’t want to have much to do with you. They certainly won’t want to be on your team and they may not come back as repeat business. So empathy I think is really key, but you can’t empathize if you don’t handle your distressing emotions because the nature of being upset is that it fixates your attention on what’s upsetting you at. You’re not empathizing with the other person. You’re trying to fix yourself

a Z. I want to share a story out there with, uh, with Daniel and Daniel. If you can kind of coach me through it, if I did it right, we actually had a person, a member of our team who used to work for us over four years ago, and then nefariously while still being employed by us. They started a company to compete directly with us, Aka violating their noncompete agreement and uh, trying to steal customers from us to build up their own business will since that person left our company, they have failed to pay their taxes and have failed to have their wages garnished for the last four years. They owe a ton of child support. So apparently when talking to a member of the government or the irs or the attorney or whoever is after them chasing their wages, garnished wages that they have not reported over the past four years, they claimed that they were still employed by us as of today.

The actually claimed they still work for us even though that they don’t. And it’s so easy to prove it don’t work for us because there’s a myriad of reasons that it’s easy to prove. They don’t work for us. They just simply have not worked for us at all for nearly. Well, it’s getting closer to five years. It’s obviously provable whether somebody is employed or not, but the point is I have to fill out all this paperwork. I had to get notarized today. I had to go up to the city flex towers to sign stuff and it just, it, it, it made me mad for about 60 seconds, but it used to make me mad for about six weeks. Daniel, how long should these kinds of things, because I took time out of my schedule to drop what I’m doing to go notarize something to prove something that I knew was true and it’s just a hassle. I had a paid attorney $500 to thank him for the, but I got a tour of the facility. That was nice. That’s nice. So how long should someone stay mad if they get upset about the shit? Take 60 seconds.

Well first of all, I want to appreciate your learning curve going from six weeks to 60 seconds. That’s really great. Can you go from 60 seconds to Tucson?

It’s taken me so long and the whole way I was going, I was going into the city of flex tower. I’m in the car, go in baby steps, baby steps.

What about mom all over again? The world championship. This would flip it around and they’d say, you know, this is so amusing that I have to do this at all. It’s ridiculous. And they would laugh at it. So you know, that’s like the ultimate goal for handling, upsetting emotions is not being upset at all. That’s very hard one. I think if you’re doing 60 seconds, that is pretty darn good.

I honestly did not stay mad immediately. I was like, that’s crazy. I think Marshall, you weren’t aware of the situation. I’m good. Are you kidding me? What? No one that I’m like, baby steps going to go see my attorney.

I want to tell you, I want to point out two things you just said you did. First of all, you step back. It went from the basement to the balcony. As we say, the basement is. You’re caught up in the emotion and Oh my God, you’re so upset, and the balcony, you’re kind of seeing it and then not only do you see it, but you see that you can change it. That’s fantastic and those anybody can do that, but it takes work to keep practicing.

Now, here’s what I used to do though. I used to get mad z for six weeks and then I had no empathy during those six weeks because I was just mad at everything and then I put off this negative scowl and that’s when I first met Dr [inaudible]. My wife worked for you or really good scope. I was scowling. I’d been mad for 18 consecutive years for empathy. For the listeners out there who are our hard charging Alpha entrepreneurs, most of our listeners are business owners or want to be. How should we show empathy more effectively? Where are most people getting it wrong? Walk us through empathy.

There are three kinds of empathy. First is cognitive empathy. You know how that person sees things, how they think about it, how they perceive the language, the terms they use. That means you can be a very effective communicator with them because you can put things in terms of, I’ll understand. The second kind is emotional empathy. You need this to, this is knowing what that person is feeling, not getting consumed by, you know, they’re really upset. You get upset, but rather knowing that, uh, you know, you’re being on the cracked up at your job, they or they’re really mad about something, but you know that. And then the third thing, a third kind of empathy is called empathic concern that you actually care making the person. This is really important. Making the, you know, your employee or your customer, your client feel that you care about them. That’s where people really feel empathized with. And I think in terms of a business, that’s where you want to be. That’s what you want to project to people that, oh, I get you. I know, I know. It’s upsetting you. I know what you like about this. You know I’m talking language. You understand and you know what? I’m going to help you out.

Z, you have worked with so many doctors. People in your peer group are very, very successful and doctors, lawyers, professionals, people who’ve done well in life. It’s, it’s easy to come across as condescending or to talk down to people. I see it a lot with a lot of attorneys I’ve worked with over the years. They don’t mean to. They just kind of talk down to people how have used the learn to be more empathetic for your patients when you started out as a young doctor because you’re a master at that. You always, you sincerely do care, but how have you. How did you learn that? Did you, did you have to read Daniel’s book here 47 times or what did you have to do

exactly? Forty eight. Oh, nice. Are, you know, I think the main thing is communication and listening. I’m really being attentive and then connecting just like you said, it’s all about the connection with the patient and I think listening and then answering their questions accurately and, and, and not in a. I try to talk like I’m talking to someone, you know, like a third grader trying to explain it simply. Yeah. Like I picture clay and the chair and I speak very slowly with good pronunciation and small words running a lot of pictures. No, no, not, I don’t treat them like that, but I think the main thing for me is in the connection and the eat q part is, and I think some. And you, Daniel, I’d like to get your take on this as people not listening, you know, people not paying attention.

Oh my God. Poor listening is a continent cooler business today. I think first of all, people are more distracted than ever. They have more incoming texts calls and this is a nats and uh, it’s very hard to pay full attention to the person in front of you, which is where empathy begins. Then you, you know, you don’t have it, it kills it right from the start. So you want to give the person full attention and then take in and then you’ll spontaneously know what to do.

Now, not paying attention to the part, to the person in front of you is something that I see a lot because of the smartphone, which, uh, I think we could more accurately named the dumb phone. Um, can you talk to me, Danielle, about how a smartphone that’s being used to communicate with someone who’s not in front of you can really kill communication. You know, when, when couples are out to dinner and they’re having a separate conversation, people are in meetings. Each of them are on their smartphone, kind of weaseling away text messages during the meeting. How can that can just kill the report?

Well, it’s, it’s so funny that in Silicon Valley they phones in meetings, you have to leave them outside the door because they know that they, you may as well not be there if you’re texting or checking your phone under the table because you’re not paying full attention. Full attention is a priceless commodity these days. I was out to dinner with. My wife had one of these nice fancy restaurants, white tablecloths, candles and the couple next to us. They’re not looking at each other’s eyes, which is taking advantage of the opportunity they’re looking at their phone. There was a article 10 years ago when there was a major magazine called Time magazine said there’s a new word in the English language. It’s puzzle. It’s combination of puzzled and pissed off and it’s how you feel when the person next to you takes out their phone and start talking to someone else.

Only 10 years ago, this was violating a norm. Social rule like you know, you pay attention to the person you’re with. Now. Things have shifted. People talk on their phone all the time, so poor listing has become a epidemic and not only that, I think we need to be mindful. We need to notice that this is happening and change what we’re doing. Pay Full attention. It sounds simple, not as simple as it used to be. How much communication do you feel like his body language, and I’ve read so many things about that. Eighty percent, 20 percent and so listening is one thing, but also watching how they’re saying it in the end, really lifting how they’re saying it in their body language, what they’re saying and what what do you give more detail more to what they’re saying or their bike lanes that they’re saying. I wouldn’t give it a fixed percentage, but I say this, the lack of your ability to see the body language of the other person which you don’t have online when you’re texting or emailing a is a big loss.

The reason that we have what’s called flaming where people get really upset and they’ll type something and send it and then they’ll regret it later. That’s an emotional hijack that and the reason we have is in face to face interactions, your. Your brain registers instantaneously like hundreds of thousands of cues and you register what’s going on with the other person and you fine tune what you do. According with online, you don’t have it. You’re not only don’t have the physical cues, you don’t have the tone of voice. If it’s just text and tone of voice carries a lot of emotional information. So you really navigating blind, but what it does in the brain is allow the emotional centers to take over because they don’t get any would’ve called inhibitory signal saying, I’m telling you, don’t say that, don’t do that. And so you do say that you do do that and then you regret it.

His own. The phrase that pays puzzle. Again, it’s a combination of, you said puzzled and pissed off. Is that correct? That’s correct. Okay. And I just want to make sure that we all know when he’s talking about. We’ve all been to the mall recently is the. I was at target and I watched the young man walk right into the door, you know, because there’s doors automatically open. Oh yeah. He just walked straight into a non door and I watched that facebook because he was texting or whatever he was doing. I can’t stand it. I watched people drive like that. I watched people do drive their meetings like that drive their company like that. I watch people and you just said there are companies, Daniel and silicone valley that band smart phones from their meetings.

You just triggered a guy. Actually, one of the people who developed the first iphone, you said we were all 20 somethings. We’re single, we’re staying up all night. We didn’t care. We try to make it as seductive as possible. He said, now I have two kids and I really regret it.

I think about that. Yeah. Famous last words. Sure. Well, I was going to say I know a lot of people that come from the silicone valley area that have talked about that a lot of people who’ve made these devices like the facebook apps and the to help develop these things. We had a guy named Nir I all on the show ill near ill who wrote a book called hooked and he talked about a lot of these young people that have helped develop these apps. They’ve actually turned the push notifications off of their own phones. The old they’ve developed,

they won’t let the kids show phones chiller like teenagers. Right? Because it wrecks your brain. Totally it. Well, what it does is the region I worry about it actually is because emotionally intelligence. The brain is designed to learn it in life by paying attention to other people and the more screen time kids have to pay attention to the people around.

I, I, I, I am very worried about it as well and I’m glad that you used the word worry. I won’t. I want to ask you this though. You have written that in a very real sense. We have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels. Could you break down what you, what you mean by that?

Well, the part of the mind that thinks is the executive center. Technically it’s a prefrontal cortex of the brain in the forehead and this is the part of the that takes in information, understands it deeply, responds agilely. Uh, it comprehends, it learns. Then there’s the emotional center deep in the brain, which actually is more powerful. It was of the brain was designed as a survival tool and our emotions, our brains way of making us pay attention. This is important and driving us to do something in the emotional centers can take over the rational centers. Those are two different minds and they run us in two different ways. There’s a practice book by a guy named Danny Kahneman thinking fast and slow, and he documents just up and down the difference. For one thing, the emotional centers are much faster but much more sloppy than the rational centers. The rational centers in brain time are slower and so our first impulse is the emotional impulse, but if you stop and think about it for a minute, then you let the other brain, the more rational brain, the part of the brain that takes him more information, make the decision. You’re going to be smarter.

What if there’s somebody out there listening right now who’s doing some self awareness and see some soul searching and they’re saying, I really am terrible with my emotional intelligence. People think that I hate them, dislike them, that I’m always, that I’m hothead, that I’m always. I always come across as angry. Whenever I say something, people don’t seem to get it. I, I, I’m now 30. I’m 25, however old I am, I’m 45. I recognize that through circumstance. A lot of people, I see second generation business owners where their parents helped put them in charge of something or they inherited something and all of a sudden they’re in charge. Maybe they were good at a skill and they got promoted because they’re good at a skill and all of a sudden they realize I might be the worst communicators on the planet. I might have the least high level of emotional intelligence ever. What? What can someone do? What are the steps that someone needs to take if they are self aware and they know they need to get better in this area?

Well, for one thing you know most everyone can stand and get a little better in some areas of emotional intelligence. I have five basic steps. The first is asking yourself, do I really care? Is going to take a little work, a little effort over some time, and if you don’t really care, you can stop right there. Stop right there, but if you go on a. another thing that helps a lot is to get us through assessment. As I said, emotional intelligence is not one thing like an Iq score. There’s 12 different competencies, you know, they range from self awareness and managing your emotions and having a positive outlook to empathy, to being able to be influential and persuade people or good team member, I mean each of those is a different skill set and by the way, they’ve been identified by dozens and hundreds of companies as what set their star performers aside.

So we have an assessment is called the emotional social competence inventory. Sit three 60 where you pick people who you trust, whose opinions you value, and ask them to rate you anonymously. This is very important because you won’t know what they said so they can be totally frank. You get the date, you asked maybe eight or 10 people. You get the data as an average. That gives you a map. I have a profile and not so good at empathy. I can be a better listener. I could manage my emotions better. Whatever it is. That’s where you want to work. Then get some support. I’ve started a emotional intelligence coaching network because I. I don’t really think that a lot of the stuff out there that’s called emotional intelligence is, is where I’d like to be a. we’re training coaches to look at the whole profile of someone’s emotional intelligence and then hone in on where that person could develop and it’s different for everybody.

You might need to, you know, help handling your emotions and we might need help tuning into someone else’s emotions or being a team member or running a team, whatever it might be. So they identify that and by the way, if your listeners want to be coached, they can go to a key step media slash coach and say, Hey, I want to be coached. We’ve got coaches waiting to coach. And then the other thing you have to do and the coach will help you is identify a particular behavior that you could practice. Like when someone comes into my office or comes up to me, I’m going to stop what I’m doing. Put it aside, stop my ruminations, pay full attention to the person in front of you in front of me. Now, that may sound easy, but you know what? If you practice being a poor listener, thousands of times, that’s the brain’s default.

That’s what you do automatically, so you, you have to stop yourself allies, this is the moment I got to pay full attention, do it, and the coach will help you. Coach will support you in that, and then you have to practice it every naturally occurring opportunity, by the way, not just at the office, not just at the business, could be with your teenagers, can be with your spouse and the brain doesn’t make a distinction between home and work, but the more you practice, the stronger the circuits for the new behavior become, and then finally it becomes automatic. That means there’s a neuro landmark. You’re can do that the right way. From now on,

Dana, I want to, I want to mine into some details on here for some specific scenarios that would happen to me all the time and Dr [inaudible] can relate to this as well. You Bet. A dean at the peak of the company, Dj connection, before I sold it, we were doing about 80 wedding receptions per weekend, so about 4,000 events, right? And every wedding was somebody, you know, big day and a Marshall, you know this because you were one of the Djs back in the day, this is years ago. Um, some guys would go out to the wedding and not care about doing a good job. They would say, give you lip service. Like, I’m going to do a good job. We get the surveys back and Daniel, if we did a 80 weddings, we’d probably get one or two keyboard warrior complaints about, you know, they would say I was not happy with the service.

So about four percent, five percent of people were not happy and right. Ninety five percent of the customers were happy. That was kind of the best I ever got it to me. And I would get so frustrated Daniel, with these people, I’m like, how could you possibly go to someone’s wedding and not care enough to show, to show up on time and to do a good job? I would be mad on Monday, you know, because the wedding’s on Saturday. I’d read the surveys on a Sunday. I would come to work on Monday. That’d be mad. But you wrote emotions are contagious, clay. We’ve all known it experientially. You know, after you have a really fun coffee with a friend, you feel good when you have a rude Dj boss in an office meeting. Clay people walk away feeling bad. And so I’m like, wow, he wrote that specifically for me. I really did though, feel I, I would just project that onto my team and I didn’t stop doing that until I was probably 25, 26. I’m 38 now. Could you coach a younger me, the person that would read those complaints from a bride or she’s detailing how upset she was and how rude Dj was and how to not project that on the team when you’ve sincerely are frustrated.

Yeah. But first of all, to make the distinction between the person and frustrated you and you need to deal with that. And maybe, uh, you know, you get one more chance or two more chat, whatever it is. Yeah. But you need to be strong with that person and then stop right there. Because when you go in with your team, who, by the way, weren’t that person right? Right, right. They did. Well then you want to switch. You want to manage your emotions, your emotional state, because emotions are powerfully contagious from, from the leader outward, right? I mean the date on that is an unbelievable leader of a team isn’t a positive mood. People on the team catch that mood. Emotions are contagious and by the way their performance goes up. If the leader is in a down mood, clay, people catch that route. Performance goes down, so you know you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot. If you go in with your team meeting and greeting that other, you know, unpleasant feeling that you had with that person, that blew it. You want to leave that behind. You want to be able to manage your own emotions, go in and actually energize people, be the upbeat, enthusiastic bus that people love, that that also energizes the team and yes, a coach could help you do that because it’s something you can practice.

Dr Z, you are so good at being the Dr Zellner industries hype man. Well, you know, I made that note with the bank, with the optometry clinic, with the auto auction, with a to z medical, with the, uh, durable medical company with all the things you’re involved in. No, seriously, there’s multiple companies. There’s probably a fire at one of those brands. There’s never a day where everything is going well, right? I mean, there’s always a fire at one of them for that day. You own a lot of real estate. There’s probably never a day where there’s not a problem with something. Correct. So how did, how have you learned to do, to implement what Daniel teaches? How have you. It’s a decision. It’s a choice you make every morning. You wake up, we all have a reason to be upset. We all have a reason to be in a bad mood. I’ve made a list right now.

We just face it. We all do. And just choosing joy over everything else and understanding that all those things are fixable and they will get fixed. And you just got to make you use. Got to be purposeful and fixing them. That’s you. Don’t ignore them. Stick your head in the sand and go, well, that toilet will stop running. I’m sure eventually you know, or that that leak will stop eventually or that person who’s stealing money from me. I’m sure they’ll get enough and then they’ll.

So Daniel, UNC are both very good at this. You have a notable quotable, Daniel, where you wrote, you said scheduling downtime as part of your routine is hard, but worth it personally, even professionally. This has been and continues to be. The hardest thing for me to implement because it ever have downtime. Daniel, I’ll go to the beach with my wife and I’ll stand there looking into the ocean in waiting to come back home.

We have downtime. It’s very interesting because it’s not just being at the beach. Where is your mind clear back in the office, right? Right. Yeah, so actually downtime has to do with what’s happening mentally and emotionally and be able to have some time in your day and your week when you recover from all of the stuff that’s stressing you out because as you point out, life is full of stress and the body is designed to have an emergency episode. We call it stress today. It’s a biological reality in the body and stress hormones are flooding through and so on, and then it’s designed to have a recovery, and today modern life. We just don’t give ourselves that recovery time, but I say recovery means needs to be not just will you went to the beach because that could be as stressful depending on what you’re thinking about. Freaked me out.

So. So the better thing I think is to have something you can do yoga or go for, take your dog for a walk and be present in that moment or mindfulness. Mindfulness, getting very popular in the business world today. It’s a way of bringing your attention to something neutral, like your breath, and then when your mind goes to that thing that’s upsetting you and you notice it, you bring it back to the breath and what that does is strengthen the muscle of letting go of what’s upsetting you and going back to something neutral or is Dr Jason Joy. Why not? Why not be happy, but something that is different than that thing that you find so stressful and doing it. Remember I talked about practice. Practice actually changes the brain, so the more you can practice that. For example, some people I’ve been working with, the different groups of business people lately who are showing them how to do this simple breath focus, which takes your mind off to stuff that’s upsetting you and the more you do it, if you do it everyday in, a lot of them do, do it. Find five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it may be, more you do it. The stronger that mental muscle gets.

That’s a fantastic word, Daniel. I’ll tell you what, so many people talk to me about getting something in their mind and not being able to get away from it. You know, having that thing just tortured their mind and they can’t sleep or they wake up in the middle of the night and they can’t go back to sleep and they just stress over it or they just think about it and they can’t. They can’t get away from it. So that is a wonderful, beautiful story or technique on how to start that process of getting the brain towards stronger and stronger and stronger to get away from those thoughts. Get away from that. It’s a super move. It is a super move and it’s amazing how many people out there suffer from that.

Okay, well,

it’s not the events, it’s how you. Yeah, that’s the difference. You want to give yourself a way of letting go. Dropping it. Yeah. Just being in a better space

right now. I want to, uh, educate the listeners about one move, Daniel, that you’ve written about that I stole from you and I want to just get that out there. I want to apologize. Thank you. Apologize to whatever it is. What is it? Yeah. Well, I had read where you’ve said every morning you go off to a small studio behind your house and you try to ignore all email and phone calls until lunchtime. Then I launched into the sometimes frantic buisiness have a tightly scheduled day. That was the routine you had, so I kind of reversed it where a Z. I go to work every day and basically around 1:00 most days I come back here and I do the show prep and I record the podcast and I do my editing and I keep my phone off and it is. It’s. It’s really, it’s really, it’s, it’s helped me to stay energized and focused. How long did it take you, Daniel, to develop this routine that works for you? Well,

I came upon it when I’ve had to deliver on time and also for many years I worked at the New York Times and so I was doing articles on deadline and it means you have to have the capacity to tune out everything else. You can’t let your phone for every little texture stuff you’d have to give yourself. It’s called cocoon time. Sometimes it’s a protected time and place where you can be productive and you ignore phone calls. You look at email, you block out the outside world. I think it’s essential these days to get things done because if you’re frantic all the time, if you’re in meetings, if you’re talking to people, you never do those things that are most important for you. So I learned early on, I found that I could take a morning. I worked at home and who knew I was up in the studio or up the hill behind my house, no phone, no email, and by the way, it was the most productive time. Then I go and do everything else.

You know, I heard, I heard you talk about this and I saw you. I saw the notable quotable that you had where you wrote, we need to recreate boundaries. When you carry a digital gadget that creates a virtual link to the office, you need to create a virtual boundary that did not exist before. Um, could you, for somebody out there who’s going, you don’t understand, I need to keep my phone on all the time. You don’t understand, I need to, but you don’t get it in my scenario. I need to go into their kids’ events. They’re going to cheerleading events, soccer events. They’re going to camps, they’re going to things and they just never are fears, never mentally and physically present at the same time because they’re never turned their phone off. What advice would you have for somebody who is struggling to recreate, struggling to create boundaries?

You know, first of all, it helps to realize boundary between work and life. This is like the old days and ancient times, predigital, but those two things were separate. They’re two separate domains. If you want to be there for your kids, you can’t also be there for your office. So what, what we need to do now is become conscious of something that used to happen automatically and to set the boundaries. Like, okay, I’m going to be at my kid’s softball game or soccer game the next hour and a have a message. I’ll get back to it in two hours and people will have to live with that,

but what if I upset somebody? Danial someone’s saying, what? What if I upset somebody?

It’s your question. What’s more important? Loving your kid and letting your kid know that you’re there for him or her or having someone be upset, upset is simply their first reaction to a new reality they have to learn. And the new reality is that, hey, you’re taking some time to yourself. You’re setting some boundaries. Get used to it. I’ll get back to you. I’m not, I’m not, you know, for going my responsibility. I’m going to be the same person I was. I’m just going to be it on my timetable, not yours.

Daniel. I would love to get your reaction to a naval ravikant to quote on Vol Robuchon the famous silicone valley investor behind twitter, facebook, and other very successful companies. Uh, he said, I don’t think modern science has good answers here. I think the modern world is actually really bad. The modern world is full of distractions. Things like twitter and facebook are not making you happy, that are making you unhappy. You are essentially playing a game that’s created by the creators of those systems and yes, it can be a useful tool once in a blue moon, but you’re engaging in dispute, resentment, comparison, jealousy, anger about things that frankly just don’t matter. Now this is a guy who invested in stack overflow. He’s invested in twitter, he’s invested in Uber. He invested in these things, and now he’s sort of looking back at it going, oh, could you. Could you please explain other dangers of being constantly connected to social media?

Yeah, there we go. So they’re great money machine and operate by activating pleasure centers in the brain and people actually get addicted to them and so that’s, that’s like why he would invest. On the other hand, you might have some remorse because the data shows that the more time people spend on digital devices, the less happy they become, particularly if they’re just roaming. If they’re just searching for something or just reading feeds that come into them rather than like listening to your podcast, something that they choose. So and so, the unhappiness that people create online has an antidote, is getting offline and doing something you enjoy.

Go. Come on now. Okay, here we go. Paul Graham, I’m sure you’re familiar with Paul. He is one of the. He’s the Co founder of y combinator, but he’s the mastermind behind a airbnb, dropbox and reddit. He sent out a tweet that blew people’s minds that said simply I never carry an iphone, and he went onto explain through further interviews that he hear that. Here’s a guy who invented the first shopping cart ever purchased by Yahoo called via web. You could buy via web. He developed the first, so he developed online shopping. Then he developed online home rentals with airbnb. They developed dropbox online file sharing, but he never engages with us with an iphone. Can you explain how that’s possible? Someone has to say, how is that possible? How could a guy who’s developing these things that everyone on an iphone uses not engage on them because it just seems like a counterintuitive idea. Somebody out there is on the verge of getting it. Daniel preached the good news.

He sounds like a very smart because he understands that on the one hand, while he can make money for these things and why not, he also doesn’t have to be a slave to them. He doesn’t have to be someone like so many of us. We’re constantly checking our phones for techs for email, for calls and so on, and he’s setting a boundary which says, you know, I’ll communicate with you when I want and I’ll get your communication when I want. In other words, he’s taking control and itself is something that gives people a sense of deep satisfaction and security. So, uh, you know, I applaud the guy,

I’ve seen you say this to somebody and I would like for you to educate the listeners of how you had to do this. I’ve seen you in a meeting where somebody said, hey, I sent you a text and you didn’t respond. And I, and I’ve seen CSI are explained in a very direct kind. I think it was a kind way, but you know, you. Did you explain to somebody who was in. They said, hey, I sent you a text and you never responded. And you said to this week, can you kind of summarize the kind of thing you would say to somebody when they said, I sent you a text and you did not respond? Could you kind of summarize how you clarify that idea?

Well, I, you know, the thing about it is, is that I don’t always have my phone. I’m not always when people ding or whatever, I’m not a slave to my phone trying to be a slave to my phone number to non texting back is communicating by, oh by the way, number three, sometimes I don’t want to get into a texting conversation with someone at that point. So I’m going to choose when I want to talk with them. So it’s like, you know, hey, I wasn’t urgent for me. I didn’t see an urgency in it. I’m not going to text you back unless it’s something urgent. And by me not texting you that let you know that. So, you know, but something I think we need to deep dive or talk about, I’ll bring it up. If not, it’s kind of a dead issue to me. So

Danny, I want you want to get your take on flow state versus the frazzled state

perhaps when you’re constantly upset, you never recover opposite. It’s when you perform at your best and in fact people are mildly relax. The brain is less active in flow than it is when it’s stressed and the reason is that you’re doing so well and you’re doing it so easily, it just flows through you. So when you ask people, tell us, tell me about a time when you did yourself. Even you are surprised by your performance. You’re describing not only what exactly did, but also what their interstate ones and the interstate is always the same. It’s what we call and by the way, slow is pleasurable.

You don’t see psychology. If you’re looking at the definition, a psychologists such as yourself and other leading experts have described flow state as essentially being a mental state of operation in which a person performing activities fully immersed in feeling and a feeling of energized, focused or involvement. They’re just totally lost. They lose. They lose the ability to almost keep track of time and space and that’s how I feel when I’m working on the podcast or writing a book or working on a workflow for one of our companies. So my wife will come downstairs to check on me and I’m so immersed and enjoying the reading of a good book that, uh, I just lost track of time. You know, I just, I just lose track of time.

We, we get into flow and doesn’t have to like be a big thing. You get into what are called microflows. Anytime you pay full attention and immerse yourself in what’s going on and lose track of everything else, that’s actually good because you’re being fully engaged in that thing. It could be being with another person, could be a book. It could be a movie, could be anything, could be a hobby, but it’s intrinsically pleasurable. As we in psychology, say you feel really good and it goes with this whole focus.

Marshall, you played basketball in college as well as professionally and you would get in a flow state where you would hit many three pointers in a row to quote unquote, to be technical. You’re on fire. Oh, nice. Right. You’re on fire and so you’re hitting a lot of three pointers. Things are going well for you all. Six foot eight of the six foot eight of great is all dedicated towards a common purpose of hitting the three. You don’t even. You did the heckler. You don’t notice him. The the fans. You don’t notice them. You’re in that flow state, right? As a business coach, I believe you’re in that flow state. Most of the time you coach business owners that sometimes are never in a flow state because they’re in a constant state of frazzle. What questions would you have for Mr Daniel Goleman on behalf of your clients that you know are just struggling to focus to get stuff done because they’re always in a perpetually reactive state.

Daniel, one of the things is you talk about the frazzle. I’ve seen that with so many different business owners, they are caught up and the daily rigors of answering the phones, even if it’s a sales call, but sometimes the sales calls or interrupting them from getting things done and one of the things that we coach them to do is to spend every morning creating a to do list because we found of all of the top entrepreneurs, everybody, every business owner, every successful a top business owner is creating a list of what needs to be done throughout the day and so there’s a something that we teach our business owners. It’s that the pen is for remembering and the mind is for thinking. Can you explain why it’s important to keep a clear mind for critical thinking throughout the day rather than just having to store it all up in your mind at all.

I like the fact that you’re having people make lists way of prioritizing that tells you when the moment is this high priority or low priority, do I have to do this or can I put it off? Give it to someone else. And that’s really important in terms of keeping the work you do right size instead of overwhelming and it’s overwhelmed with which people travel. So basically I think that being able to focus on what really matters now and put the other aside as a way of keeping your stress from just overwhelming you,

Daniel, you are a guy who’s had a lot of success in your, in your field. And I’d like to tap into your, your habits in your daily routines. So how do you, how do you spend the first four hours of your day? Typically right now? I mean currently at this very moment. What is the board of the Ford was one of the first four hours of a typical day look like for you right now.

Oh, okay. So I get up. So I like to do mindfulness practice mindfulness as long as I can have breakfast with my wife, right? I’m a that that’s my thing. I write. So I write when I’m most clear and when things come most easily, I try not to take calls or do texts or so until lunch. That’s the first four hours.

What would you say you practice mindfulness? Can you walk the listeners through? What do you mean

by the most basic way to begin is find a place where you won’t be disturbed. Uh, you know, don’t put your phone aside, close the door, no kids, no pets, whatever, just where you’re alone. That alone, by the way, is to help you handle things. Then look at your mind. Where’s your mind? First of all though, fuel your body. What are your sensations? That’s the way becoming fully present yourself. Then bringing your attention to your breathing and as thoughts come up and they will always do and you’ve noticed that you’re thinking, bringing it back to your breath. That’s the whole exercise. You want to be aware of the full inbreath where the full outbreath, the mind’s gonna Wander. You notice wanting to bring it back. You hear a sound, your mind wanders, bring it back and start with the next breath. And you do that for as long as you can. I’ve got so I really like it. I really enjoy it. A truce. You may be shocked at how crazy your mind is with different thoughts, but that’s, that’s actually normal. You’re just noticing it for the first time. Uh, so you have to stay with it. That’s what’s called mindfulness.

How long do you do this mindfulness routine? Is it, is it an hour or is it minute selling? Are we.

Well, it depends what have, you know, if I say I’ve got a meeting early in the morning, I might get up a little earlier to 10 minutes, half hour. I, if I have a day, I actually do full days of this if I have the option, uh, but you know that that’s not as often as I’d like, but I find that it keeps me pretty calm with pretty focused the rest of the day. I could

tell listeners I on a perfect day and I could, I would spend my entire day just doing that kind of thing. I really enjoy solitude, working on things. I enjoy that. And I also like being in the company of people who I share their values and their mindset. I, I enjoy that. And one of the things that had me most excited to have you on the show is you’re, you’re like this wealth of knowledge. You have all these books, all these great things you’ve taught over the years. But if you were given one billboard that was the biggest billboard in the history of the world, this billboard is massive. And it was like a. It showed up. Everyone’s facebook, it showed up on Youtube. Everybody would see this message. Is there a certain message that you would convey? And there’s no limit to the number of characters you can put on a bus or a certain message right now that you would most passionately want to communicate to our hundreds of thousands of listeners,

pay attention. We paid attention to what do you, what would you say were, were paying attention?

Pay Attention. Pay attention to the needs of people around you. Pay attention to your own internal state, paying attention to the person in front of you. Pay Attention,

Daniel. If, if somebody is out there and they’re wanting to look into, uh, uh, Daniel Goleman book, you know, the therapist and say, no. What I love, I loved her and I want to learn more that you’ve written so much. There’s so many resources you put out there. Is there a specific book that you would recommend for all of our listeners to to pick up?

Well, it goes into the each of those abilities of emotional intelligence I told you about. It’s called building blocks of emotional intelligence and it’s available online from a key step media and I think that if you want to really understand emotional intelligence, that’s the place to start.

Now, Marshall andZ , we have time for one more question and so you go first there. Final question for Daniel Goleman, the leading psychologist, arguably on the planet earth, at least that I know about this guy as living legend. We’ve been. We’ve been chasing you around for a long time. I’m so honored to have you on the show today. A Z. What is your final

question for finally caught him? Finally caught him. Daniel, if you could go back in time, say 20 years, get into the Delorean, put back in time and sit down with yourself 20 years ago, self self, what advice would you give to yourself

know over the last 20 years, things have turned out pretty frequently, but I actually would tell myself to spend more time with my kids.

Wow, okay. Good word. That’s a good word. How old are your children now?

Well, now they have kids themselves, so spend time with your grandkids.

There you go. Perfect. Thank you.

All right. Now by Marshall, you. You’re a big Daniel Goleman fan. You read his work. You quoted often. What question do you have for the man? The Myth, the legend, Mr Daniel Goldman. One of the things that’s big for us up here is ongoing education in the and the growth mindset, Daniel, and so I was hoping that you might be able to speak to the connection between the growth mindset and having emotional intelligence and how that plays a role in business.

Gross mindset is very important. Whack. Of course it’s promoting the concept. I talked about it for years and years under the rubric of Positive Outlook, seeing the possibilities and people, the possibilities and events and basically what it means is not missing things, not being a naysayer, but being open to what can happen. Being open to how people can develop. They can get, not just dismissing them as they are or you yourself. You can grow your business, you can grow life, you can expand. In other words, the world is full of potential if we pursue it.

That’s good that this whole thing is good. I mean the only way we can really put a cherry on top of of this, of this kind of interviews and we’d like to end every show with a boom boom, which are technically speaking, stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. Mr Goldman, that’s what we believe all of our listeners need to have to have success and so Marsha, can we kind of role play the boom real quick here? Okay, let’s roll three, two, one, and boom. Okay. Dan, are you ready? Are you ready to, to bring the boom. Oh, let’s see. Okay, here we go. Z, are you ready to bring the boat? One hundred percent. Here we go.

There’s different ways of being smart. One is how smart you are in terms of school, but the other emotional intelligence, how you handled yourself, how you handled your relationship’s good news. It’s learned and learned them.

If you are like most humans that I know when you see two gas stations and one sells gas for a little bit less and they’re next to each other, you might go for the one that sells gas for less money. It it, it makes sense. You know, every little bit can help, you know, I don’t really agree with that. I like to spend as much money as I possibly can on fossil fuels. It just something I’m into your eyes, but here’s what’s weird though. Sometimes we save a few pennies here and there and ignore opportunities to save huge money. I’m talking about life changing money. If you switch today as an example to medicare for your healthcare, it could be a massive savings for you and your family. The typical savings for a family is about $500 a month. I repeat $500 a month. Ah, so okay.

I have a quick question. So when you said you could save like $500 a month, I mean, are you talking about actually being able to save $500 a month? Yes, that’s why I said the number. You could actually save $500 a month. Just think about that for a second. What would you do with all that extra money? Thrivers you can be buying a flat screen every single month. That’s 12 flat screens a year. $6,000 per year or 12 flat screens per year. Well, I have been trying to save up for 12 flat screens and this seems to be the most reasonable prudent way to do it. And yes, people love it. They love it because it works. It’s believers who share each other’s health care costs and now with over 400,000 people, a k, eight members of medishare, again with over 400,000 members, there’s proof it works and it’s growing like crazy.

It will be like having a seven foot tall third grader in your family. It’s like growing like a weed. It is taking off, find out how much you could save and why Medicare is so popular. Go to medicare.com, forward slash clay. That’s Medicare. M, e, D, I share.com, forward slash clay, or call them eight, four, four. Two, five. Share for more info. That’s eight. Four, four, two, five. Share hogs. Excuse me. I would like. I’d like to see if you could repeat the number one more time, but in the form of a rap song because I find that I can typically remember numbers better if it’s a form of a rhyme. When something rhymes. I remember. Help me remember the number. Here we go. It’s the Medicare rap. Isn’t mindshare. Wrap this. Submit a sheer for food and shit. That’s eight. Four, four, two, five and shit. Everybody now eight, four, four, two, five and shit. Come on. Come for four to five and share. If you want to say 500 bucks a month, here’s something, a little hunch for everyone. For everyone. Eight, four, four to five. Share the number of care. Say money everywhere.

Share, share. Thank you. I now officially remember the number eight, four, four to five share.