Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence: From an Ashram to the Boardroom

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Daniel Goleman was born in 1946 in Stockton, California, to two college professors, sociologist Faye and humanities professor Irving, and his uncle was nuclear physicist Alvin M. Weinberg. He graduated magna cum laude from Amherst, studied at UC Berkeley and earned a clinical psychology PhD at Harvard, then used fellowship grants to study in India and Sri Lanka, spending time with Neem Karoli Baba. His first book, in 1977, argued that all forms of meditation share one ingredient: the retraining of attention. He taught a popular psychology of consciousness course at Stanford, joined Psychology Today on the recommendation of his Harvard mentor David McClelland, and in 1984 moved to the New York Times, where his 12 years of science reporting earned two Pulitzer nominations.

In 1995 he published Emotional Intelligence, which spent a year and a half on the New York Times bestseller list, appeared in 40 languages and was later named by Time as one of the 25 most influential business management books. It argued that self-awareness, emotional self-management, empathy and social skill matter alongside IQ. He co-founded CASEL in 1993 to bring social and emotional learning to schools and the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations in 1996. His 2013 book Focus introduced inner, other and outer focus.

• Goleman popularized the amygdala hijack, describing the brain's alarm system overriding the prefrontal cortex.
• The book cited the Stanford marshmallow test, where children who waited later had higher SAT scores and lower body mass indexes.
• The episode presents neuroplasticity as the reason emotional intelligence, unlike IQ, can be trained in adults.
• He followed the original book with Working with Emotional Intelligence and Primal Leadership.
• With the Dalai Lama he co-authored Destructive Emotions (2003) and A Force for Good (2015), and he wrote Altered Traits in 2017.