Daniel Goleman

In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding.

For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when emotions hold sway.

My hope was that organizations would start including this range of skills in their training programs - in other words, offer an adult education in social and emotional intelligence.

There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.

The basic premise that children must learn about emotions is that all feelings are okay to have; however, only some reactions are okay.

But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.

Brain studies of mental workouts in which you sustain a single, chosen focus show that the more you detach from what's distracting you and refocus on what you should be paying attention to, the stronger this brain circuitry becomes.

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings. This is part of teaching emotional literacy - a set of skills we can all develop, including the ability to read, understand, and respond appropriately to one's own emotions and the emotions of others.

If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.

Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.

Threats to our standing in the eyes of others are remarkably potent biologically, almost as powerful as those to our very survival.

Emotional self-control-- delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness- underlies accomplishment of every sort

Even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige,_x000D_ or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on_x000D_ academic abilities, ignoring the emotional intelligence that also_x000D_ matters immensely for our personal destiny.

Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.

Evolutionary theory holds that our ability to sense when we should be suspicious has been every bit as essential for human survival as our capacity for trust and cooperation.

Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood.

Our emotional mind will harness the rational mind to its purposes, for our feelings and reactions-- rationalizations-- justifying them in terms of the present moment, without realizing the influence of our emotional memory.