The Art of Managing Emotions
Daniel Goleman, Ph.D. | 8:46
Transcript
If you ask people honestly about how they feel about their job, a very large proportion are disengaged, it's just a job, I just do enough to keep it that's that statement is a rough index of a person having too little cortisol, there in the wrong brain state at work. As you get such people more motivated, more interested, more engaged, they rise up this art toward the optimal zone. However, if you give them too much pressure, too little support, too little time, too little staff, too much to do. They start to feel overwhelmed, and they keep going to the right and performance suffers. So the art of leadership is to help people get and stay in the optimal state for performance.
That is how you get your best return on investment from a salary. And from a neurological point of view, this means helping people get and stay in the best internal state, the best state of their brain. This optimal state is called flow flow was discovered by researchers who asked one simple question of a huge variety of people.
The question was, tell me about a time when you outdid yourself, even you were surprised to how well you did. And they asked ballerinas and basketball players and chess champions and surgeons, business people, all kinds of people. And what they discovered was that it didn't matter what domain of skill they were involved in. Everyone who was outstanding at that moment was in the identical internal state. And that state is characterized by several things. One is unperturbed bubble attention, their focus is 200%