Daniel Goleman on Focus: The Secret to High Performance and Fulfilment

Daniel Goleman

00:35:50 — After puberty, forget family, it’s other kids. And the melodramas of childhood, they didn’t invite me to the party. Whatever it may be, capture attention. Those are emotional upsets. The more you can manage those upsets, the more attentional capacity you have to hear what the teacher is saying. One of the things they do in these classes, in these programs, I’ve seen this in New Haven in a neighborhood very similar to Spanish Harlem.

00:36:23 — There’s a poster on the wall of every classroom. It’s a stoplight, a traffic light. Red light, yellow light, green light. It says, when you’re upset, remember the stop light. Red light, stop, calm down, and think before you act. Well, stop says you have a choice.

00:36:43 — Calm down means you can manage your inner turmoil. Think before you act is a very valuable lesson, because it says you can’t determine what emotions you’re going to have. Our emotions come unbidden. But once you have them, you can stop and think what you’re going to do. In fact, one definition of maturity is lengthening the gap between impulse and action.

00:37:09 — Yellow light, think of a range of things you could do and what the consequences might be. Green light, pick the best one and try it out. This is a lesson in what’s called cognitive control. Some of you may know about the marshmallow test. It’s a rather legendary study in psychology. Four-year-olds at Stanford University are brought into a room one by one, sat down at a small table, big juicy marshmallow put in front of them.

00:37:35 — The experimenter says to this four-year-old, you can have the marshmallow now if you want. But if you don’t eat it till I come back from running an errand, you can have two then. Then she leaves the room. This is a predicament that tries the soul of any four-year-old, I assure you. I’ve seen video on it. Some of them will go up and sniff it as though it were dangerous and then jump back and others go off and sing and dance themselves in a corner to stay distracted.

00:38:01 — About a third of the kids can’t stand it. They just grab it and gobble it down on the spot. And another third or so wait the endless 10−12 minutes until the experimenter comes back and they get the two marshmallows. The payoff from the study came 14 years later when they’re tracked down as they’re about to go to university, and the two groups are compared, the ones who gobbled, the ones who waited. It turns out the ones who waited get along much better with their peers, they’re still able to delay gratification in pursuit of their goals, which is exactly what that’s a test of.

00:38:35 — This was a surprise on the American University Entrance Exam, the SAT, which at that time had 1,600 total points. The kids who waited had a 210 point advantage over the kids who grabbed. This is really interesting because these are all children of parents at Stanford University.

00:38:56 — These are high IQ, high achieving families. So what’s going on? The difference seems to be that if you’re not able to manage your impulse, and mind wandering is kind of a microcosm of that, then you’re going to be more upset, you’re going to be more emotional, you’re not going to be able to pay attention to what the teacher is saying, so you can’t learn as well.

00:39:21 — There was a study done just a few years ago in New Zealand. Every child in a city in New Zealand who was born over the course of a year became part of the study. From ages 4 to 8, they were rigorously tested on cognitive control, many different measures, including the marshmallow-type test. And then when they’re in their 30s, they’re tracked down again.

00:39:46 — And it turned out that cognitive control, the ability to keep your mind here or bring it back when it wanders, was a better predictor of financial success and health in the mid-30s than either IQ or the socioeconomic status of the family you grew up in. It’s a completely independent factor. In fact, the people who did the study argue that we should be teaching this ability to children in order to level the playing field.

00:40:17 — So this is becoming part of social emotional learning. Social emotional learning, though, also means being smart about your relationships. So here’s something that happened in New Haven among 11-year-old boys. They’re going to play what we call soccer. I think you erroneously call it football here, is that right?

00:40:41 — So, these kids were, three boys going to play soccer. The first kid is kind of pudgy, not very athletic. And the two kids behind him, very good at soccer, very athletic. And they’re making sarcastic remarks to this first kid. And one of the other kids says to this first kid, the big sneer. So you think you’re gonna play soccer. And the pudgy kid stops, takes a deep breath as though to brace himself for the confrontation ahead.

00:41:10 — This could easily lead to a fight in this school. Turns around and says, yeah, I’m going to try to play soccer. I’m not very good at it. What I’m good at is art. Show me anything I can draw really well. But you, you’re fantastic at soccer. Someday I’d like to be as good as you are. And at that, the other kid just melts, comes up, puts his arm around and says, Oh, you’re not so bad. Let me show you a thing or two. That was no accident. That is called a put-up.

00:41:38 — That boy learned it in his SEL. It’s a way to handle put-downs, which is a very big problem in the teenage, early teen years. And it’s just part of a wider curriculum which pays attention to what matters to kids, and attention needs to be part of that curriculum. And it’s not just schools. You know, parents are the first coach in all of this.

00:42:03 — When you pick up a baby who’s crying and soothe her, you’re actually teaching her how to soothe herself. When you point out to a toddler, you know, when you did that, it made your friend feel bad. That’s a lesson in empathy. So the lessons in attention, in emotional intelligence, start very, very early in life. But I think we’ve got to get better at it.

00:42:30 — One reason is that kids are being exposed more and more to influences that aren’t so great. I don’t know if you know any youngster who likes video games and spends hours at them. Maybe it doesn’t happen here in London, but it’s a big problem worldwide. The data on video games is rather mixed. For one thing, they actually do enhance some aspects of attention.

00:42:58 — If you’re a kid who likes to play fighting games, you know, battle games, and you have to be constantly on the lookout for the enemy who might pop up and kill you, it’s very good for enhancing vigilance. You could be a very good air traffic controller, for example. However, it also means that if a kid happens to bump you in the hallway, your first thought is that he has a grudge against you. You get a bias toward hostile attribution.

00:43:26 — So, the video games that we have now are rather mixed but there’s a new generation coming along which is using findings from cognitive science. There’s one called Tenacity that I had my four grandchildren play, ages 7 to 13 at the time. In Tenacity, you have an iPad. Every time you breathe out, you tap the screen. On the fifth out-breath, you tap it twice.

00:43:53 — If you do that, you get a visual reward, you know, flowers blooming in the desert. As you do it more and more, it gets harder and harder. So basically, what it’s doing is training attention, but in a way that keeps the attention of kids the same way that all the other video games do. There are other things that we could be using. You know, the media generally, and I say this as a reformed journalist, The media gives us a very toxic view of the world.

00:44:24 — Most of the news we get is about disaster, threats, horrible things happening to people. It’s news for the amygdala. The amygdala is a very primitive part of the brain that wants to know what are the dangers. However, if we were to take, on any given day, all of the acts of kindness performed around the globe, you know a mom feeding her kid is an act of kindness and we would put it on one scale and then we’re to take all the atrocious acts and put them on another scale the acts of kindness would far outweigh those of meanness but we don’t get that sense of the world looking through a media lens but we can use the media better.

00:45:13 — One example I like is Sesame Street. If you have ever, if you have a toddler, had a toddler, you may have watched Sesame Street. Sesame Street, I found when I visited. Sesame Workshop, is actually a very sophisticated operation. The day I went there, the script writers were meeting with two cognitive scientists. They’re actually meeting about cognitive control because Sesame Street segments turn out to be lessons based in science wrapped in entertainment.

00:45:45 — One of the segments that aired this season is the Cookie Connoisseur Club. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Cookie Monster. Cookie Monster is one of the stars of Sesame Street and he loves to gobble cookies. But Alan, who runs a store on Sesame Street, decided to start a Cookie Connoisseur Club, very much like a wine connoisseur club.

00:46:10 — In the cookie connoisseur club, you take a cookie and you study it to see if there are imperfections. Then you sniff it for aroma. And then you take a nibble to taste it. Cookie Monster, of course, was dying to get into the club. So Alan gives him a cookie, and he instantly gobbles it down. He can’t restrain himself. So Alan tells him, you know, in this club, we’re going to try all kinds of cookies.

00:46:38 — So, if you don’t gobble it down, I can let you into the club and you’re going to be able to eat many, many different kinds of cookies. That does it for cookie. So that’s a lesson. This is a show that is loved by two to four year olds. And two to four year olds learn largely by modeling. So what’s happening with cookie is that the kids are learning a lesson in cognitive control.

00:47:03 — And I think the more of that, the better. So let me finish by telling you about a smart use of positive emotion, of being able to manage our own internal world, of that inner focus. There is a remarkable man named Mathieu Ricard. He’s written some books on happiness. He’s French. He has a doctorate in cell biology from Pasteur Institute.

00:47:34 — His mentor there actually won a Nobel Prize for the research they’re doing. But after graduate school, he made a startling decision. He decided he’d give up science and go to the Himalayas, become a monk and meditate for the rest of his life. He’s been called, I think, by his publisher’s publicist, the happiest man in the world, because he’s been studied by scientists and on this right-to-left ratio, he’s very far to the left.

00:48:03 — There’s a scientist named Paul Ekman who’s the world’s expert on the facial expression of emotion. Paul is the keenest observer of the face as a revealer of what you’re feeling. He’s a very dangerous man. I once was walking down the street with Paul on the way to a meeting that I was conducting and Paul was telling me about a system for training people to get good at this that he had just developed.

00:48:28 — And as he was telling it, we’re getting to the meeting hall and I thought, this is really interesting, but I hope he wraps it up. I’ve got to think about what I’m going to do in the meeting. At that moment, he says to me, and if someone had studied the system, they’d know you’re getting a little angry with me right now. This is why Paul is so dangerous. Paul was interested in emotional contagion. He wanted to know what would the effect be of someone like Matthew, who was very, very upbeat, on someone who was quite the opposite.

00:48:58 — So Paul did a quiet phone survey of faculty at the university where he teaches, asking who is the most abrasive, difficult, confrontational member of our faculty. Oddly enough, everyone agreed who that was. So he calls Professor X, he says, in the interest of science, would you take part in a scientific experiment? And the professor is delighted. He said, sure, I’d be happy to.

00:49:25 — As the day drew nearer and nearer, he started making demands which became increasingly outrageous. And so they had to dump him and go with the second most difficult professor. And the experiment was they’re both, they’re having Matthew and the professor have their physiology measured and they’re gonna have a debate. The debate is on the premise that the professor should do what Matthew did.

00:49:49 — The professor had a very influential, secure, well-paid, tenured position, but the premise of the debate was that he would give it up and become a monk and go to a hermitage for the rest of his life. At the beginning of this debate, the physiology showed he was really agitated at the thought of that. Matthew was totally calm. So as the discussion starts, Matthew stays absolutely calm and the professor gets calmer and calmer and calmer. By the end of 15 minutes, he’s having such a good time, he doesn’t want to stop the discussion.

00:50:22 — So our emotions are contagious, for better or for worse, particularly when we pay full attention to each other. I once was waiting for a bus on a very hot, humid day in New York City in August. It’s the kind of day, I don’t know about London, but in New York we have a rather invisible balloon around us.

00:50:45 — We’re feeling a little prickly. It says, don’t talk to me, don’t touch me. I had my balloon intact and the bus pulls up. Get on with my balloon and the bus driver did something quite surprising, he actually spoke to me. He said, how’s your day been? I was shocked, but I sat down, taking most of my bubble with me. Then I realized this bus driver is carrying on a conversation with everyone on the bus. You’re looking for suits, are you? You know, there’s a great sale over here on the right in this department store.

00:51:14 — And did you hear about the Manet exhibit on the left at the museum? Wonderful. And the Cineplex we’re coming to here. I know of the movie in Cinema 4 got the best reviews, but the one in Cinema 2, I saw it the other night, fantastic, you should, on and on like that. And then people would get off the bus and he’d say to them, I hope the rest of your day is really wonderful. That man was an urban saint.

00:51:37 — He transformed everyone on the bus. He was sending ripples of good feeling through a city that sorely needed it. And I think the bottom line is, you know, you don’t have to go to the Himalayas for decades. We all can do that in our lives if we pay attention. Thank you very much.

00:52:07 — So I’m happy to answer any questions you might have. There are mics here and there’s standing mics, I’m told, in the galleries. So just raise your hand if you have a question. First question over here.