The Science of Optimal Performance—at Work and Beyond | Daniel Goleman

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If you have any degree of ambition, one of the things you probably think about is how to perform at your best, or somewhere close, every day. How to keep your energy up. How to get into flow. How to stay focused and productive. How to play well with others.

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Daniel Goleman— his friends call him Danny—-has been thinking and writing about optimal performance for decades. He’s perhaps best known for his book, Emotional Intelligence. He’s a Harvard trained psychologist who also wrote in the New York Times for a while. And in his youth, he spent many years studying meditation in Asia, alongside many of today’s most intellectual meditation teachers like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg.

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He’s got a new book called Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day, co-written with Cary Cherniss.

In this episode we talk about:

How to train your mind for optimal states
How to reduce burnout
How to develop and deploy empathy in a work setting
How to give feedback
A productivity hack that involves only doing the easy stuff
The 4 parts of emotional intelligence—and how to get better at each
And the future of EI in a world of AI

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This episode kicks off the latest installment of our occasional series, Sanely Ambitious. Over the next two weeks, we will be posting episodes on: how to focus in the midst of a pandemic of distraction, how to fail well, and when to quit. It’s a great lineup.

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Daniel Goleman’s online Emotional Intelligence Program

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The Science of Emotional Intelligence | Daniel Goleman

#523. A Masterclass in Handling Yourself When Things Suck | Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Daniel Goleman

#436. Brené Brown Says You're Doing Feelings Wrong

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