Through the wasteful consumption of natural resources and careless intervention in the earth’s ecosystems, humankind is endangering its own long-term future. In an essay for THE FOCUS, internationally renowned psychologist and bestseller author Daniel Goleman depicts the importance of a systemic focus on the bigger picture, not least for successful corporate leaders of the future. I remember the exact moment when Paul Polman entered the pantheon of leaders I admire greatly. We were on a panel together at the Davos World Economic Forum, and Paul, CEO of Unilever, was describing his company’s sustainability strategy. It wasn’t the company’s target to shrink the organization’s carbon footprint that hooked me – as laudable as those goals are, these are common ingredients of corporate sustainability strategies.
But Paul went on to announce that his company would strive to source raw materials in a new network of 500,000 smallholder farmers throughout the Third World. That was what got me. Around 85 percent of farms worldwide are classed as smallholders.
The World Bank names supporting smallholder farming as the single most effective way to stimulate economic development in rural areas. In emerging markets, agriculture supports – directly or indirectly – three out of four of those in the lowest income brackets.
Redrawing Unilever’s supply chain in this way would leave more money in local farming communities, while boosting their children’s health and education. In his thinking, the company’s CEO had gone way beyond the normal boundaries of creating value for his own organization. Paul Polman’s strategic vision exemplifies what I call an Outer focus, one of three kinds of focus every leader needs today: Outer, Other, and Inner. Emotional intelligence competencies Inner and Other focus can be seen in terms of emotional intelligence competencies. The first two of four emotional intelligence domains – self-awareness and self-management – signify a healthy Inner focus. They manifest among outstanding leaders in self-awareness strengths like a realistic self-confidence and an awareness of one’s own strengths and limitations.
Self-management reveals itself in emotional self-control (like staying calm and clear under high stress or recovering from it quickly), in adaptability, and in staying undistracted in pursuing goals. In addition, a well-honed self-awareness helps a leader attune to the subtle internal signals that are the brain’s way of letting the mind know what our life wisdom says about a decision we are pondering.
This mechanism seems to be the avenue by which we sense in the first instant where our guiding values point us. Integrity and a sense of ethics depend on this inner prodding: Only after we get this felt sense can we put our values into words. A robust Other focus, in the emotional intelligence model, shows up in leaders as an astute empathy, sensing how others think about the world – and so putting things in terms they understand – and resonating with how others feel in the moment. From this clear sense of others come relationship competencies like teamwork and collaboration, persuasion and influence, handling conflicts, and mentoring. These “people skills” matter for leadership effectiveness over and above purely cognitive abilities like crunching numbers.
Claudio Fernandez Araoz, Senior Adviser at Egon Zehnder International, analyzed cases where seemingly outstanding hires for C-level positions ended up being let go. His conclusion: they were hired for their business expertise and intelligence, but fired for lapses in emotional intelligence. Strengths of a third kind But in addition to Inner and Other focus, I believe leaders today need strengths in a third kind of focus: Outer. An Outer focus allows a leader to sense the workings of the larger systems that shape an organization’s fate – or a community’s or society’s. This goes beyond sensing coming changes in the winds of the economy, to include, for instance, social, cultural, and environmental forces at play.
When it comes to identifying emerging leaders, even while they are still in school, these three varieties of focus offer clues. Research finds that many of the abilities that mark outstanding leaders begin to emerge early in life, long before they enter the world of work. An astute inner awareness might reveal itself, for instance, in teenagers drawn to doing volunteer work for a cause larger than their own personal concerns, like the environment. Another manifestation might be in superior self-management in the form of a single-minded focus on goals; researchers call this mental capacity “cognitive control.” Many studies have found that cognitive control, when measured in children, predicts their financial success and health in adulthood more strongly than either their IQ or the wealth of their family of origin.
Skillful means A well-honed Other awareness takes the form of heightened empathy, the ability to sense how others think and feel. Tuning in to the inner world of other people creates a platform for concern about their problems and pains – in other words, compassion. That social awareness also manifests as the interpersonal adeptness seen in high-performing leaders (or teachers, for that matter) who can connect quickly person-to-person, listen deeply, and influence others for the better.
When empathy and social adeptness combine in the service of compassion, it becomes what Tibetans call ‘skillful means,’ effectiveness that does good. And a precocious Outer focus might emerge in children and teens who are fascinated by natural systems, trying on their own initiative (rather than as a school assignment) to understand the workings of nature. This can also show up as a fascination with the ‘STEM’ topics: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Youngsters who love learning how things work are expressing a natural openness to systems thinking. Yet when it comes to an Outer focus – which allows us to monitor the larger systems that shape our organizations, lives, society, and planet – we touch on a domain where the wisdom of one generation needs to be passed on to the next. This has become particularly true in transmitting critical knowledge for our species’ survival. That transmission has broken down in some crucial ways; while native cultures have always been keenly attuned to the workings of their local ecosystem in order to survive, in modern life we can stumble through, oblivious to the ways in which our local decisions can harm not just nearby, but also distant or invisible ecologies. The Anthropocene dilemma Perhaps the gravest systemic crisis of our day goes largely unnoticed: the Anthropocene dilemma.
We entered the Anthropocene age with the Industrial Revolution. Since then human systems for transportation, energy, construction, industry, and commerce have been steadily decaying the handful of global systems that support life on our planet. While carbon’s role in climate change has been the most visible of these systemic impacts, a huge array of others, from phosphorous-based fertilizer runoff creating dead spots in the world’s water, to the buildup in human tissues of toxins like endocrine-disrupters and carcinogens are largely unheralded. Corporate leaders who demand more transparency about such impacts in their own operations and throughout their supply chain, and who make decisions that lessen their footprints, display outstanding systems awareness. Their Outer focus lets them operate in ways that go beyond the logic of economics alone, and to bring a more complex calculus into play that balances financial return with public welfare.
The leadership world has paid much attention to cultivating and identifying the abilities that allow an executive to navigate an organization through formulating smart strategies, to execute strategic goals and to grapple with the problems of the day. But we need more leaders with a wider vision, ones who do not settle for conditions as they are, but rather see what they could become, and work to change them.
To target the greater good Our times demand leaders who are not just smart, but wise. Wise leaders formulate strategies that target the greater good, not just one organization’s aims. The more our communities, societies and the world at large choose such leaders, the better off we will be. And the more skilled we become at spotting the potential for such leadership in younger generations – and helping them cultivate those qualities – the more hopeful our future. I’m inspired by the words of Larry Brilliant, President of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, which seeks to prevent worldwide crises like pandemics and global warming. He says: “Civilizations should be judged not by how they treat people closest to power, but rather how they treat those furthest from power – whether in race, religion, gender, wealth, or class – as well as in time.” In my view, truly great leaders act from aspirations beyond the goals or boundaries of one organization or group, and rather seek to heal humanity as a whole. I think of Paul Polman, or Bill Gates in the philanthropic phase of his career, or Muhammad Yunus founding the Grameen Bank as exemplars.
These are leaders who grasp the pain of the powerless and of the planet itself, and who seek to repair that damage, whether in ameliorating the diseases that plague the poor, enhancing the viability of local communities, or fighting poverty itself. And the impacts of their strategies will matter far into the future. Wise leaders implicitly follow a dictum that I heard articulated by the Dalai Lama at an MIT conference on global systems. He suggested that when we are making a decision or consider a course of action, we should ask ourselves: Who benefits?
Is it just ourselves, or a group? Just one group, or everyone? And just for the present, or also for the future?
These leaders engage people’s passion, and foster organizations where work has deeper meaning. Jobs become ‘good work,’ a powerful combination where people’s best skills are engaged fully, their focus fully immersed, and their labor aligned with their values. Such workplaces are potent magnets for the next generation of remarkable leaders. Daniel Goleman born in 1946, graduated in clinical psychology, taught at Harvard, was senior editor at Psychology Today, and wrote for the New York Times on psychology and neurosciences. He made his name with his book Emotional Intelligence, which was published in 1995 and became an international bestseller. This was followed in 2006 by Social Intelligence, a work that focuses on human relationships and behavior in social contexts.
His latest publication is Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence.
Goleman in 2011 Born ( 1946-03-07) March 7, 1946 (age 71), U.S. Occupation Writer Alma mater Spouse Tara Bennett-Goleman Children 2 Website Daniel Goleman (born March 7, 1946) is an author and. For twelve years, he wrote for, reporting on the brain and behavioral sciences. His 1995 book was on for a year-and-a-half, a best-seller in many countries, and is in print worldwide in 40 languages.
Apart from his books on, Goleman has written books on topics including self-deception, creativity, transparency, meditation, social and emotional learning, ecoliteracy and the ecological crisis, and the Dalai Lama’s vision for the future. Contents. Biography He studied in using a pre-doctoral fellowship from Harvard and a post-doctoral grant from the. While in India, he spent time with spiritual teacher, who was also the guru to, and. He wrote his first book based on travel in India and.
Goleman then returned as a visiting lecturer to Harvard, where during the 1970s his course on the psychology of consciousness was popular. McClelland recommended him for a job at, where he was recruited by in 1984. Goleman co-founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning at 's Child Studies Center which then moved to the.
Currently he co-directs the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. He sits on the board of the Mind & Life Institute. Career Goleman authored the internationally best-selling book Emotional Intelligence (1995, Bantam Books), which spent more than one-and-a-half years on The New York Times Best Seller list. In 'Working with Emotional Intelligence' (1998, Bantam Books), Goleman developed the argument that non-cognitive skills can matter as much as IQ for workplace success, and made a similar argument for leadership effectiveness in Primal Leadership (2001, Harvard Business School Press).
Goleman's most recent best-seller is Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (Harper, 2013). In his first book, (1977) (republished in 1988 as The Meditative Mind), Goleman describes almost a dozen different systems. He wrote that 'the need for the meditator to retrain his, whether through or, is the single invariant ingredient in the recipe for of every meditation system'.
Awards Goleman has received many awards, including:. Career Achievement award for journalism from the. Fellow of the in recognition of his efforts to communicate the behavioral sciences to the public Publishing history Books. 1977:, Irvington Publishers. Later republished as The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience, Tarcher/Penguin. 1995: Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,.
2017: Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, Avery. See also. References.
Executive Summary Reprint: R1312B Attention is the basis of the most essential of leadership skills—emotional, organizational, and strategic intelligence. And never has it been under greater assault. If leaders are to direct the attention of their employees toward strategy and innovation, they must first learn to focus their own attention, in three broad ways: on themselves, on others, and on the wider world.
Every leader needs to cultivate this triad of awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance, because a failure to focus inward leaves one rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders one clueless, and a failure to focus outward may cause one to be blindsided. The good news is that practically every form of focus can be strengthened. The author of Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, and many other books on the power of cultivating awareness explains why focus is crucial to great leadership. Focused leaders can command the full range of their own attention: They are in touch with their inner feelings, they can control their impulses, they are aware of how others see them, and they can weed out distractions and also allow their minds to roam widely, free of preconceptions. The Problem A primary task of leadership is to direct attention. To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. The Argument People commonly think of “being focused” as filtering out distractions while concentrating on one thing.
But a wealth of recent neuroscience research shows that we focus attention in many ways, for different purposes, while drawing on different neural pathways. The Solution Every leader needs to cultivate a triad of awareness—an inward focus, a focus on others, and an outward focus.
Focusing inward and focusing on others helps leaders cultivate emotional intelligence. Focusing outward can improve their ability to devise strategy, innovate, and manage organizations. A primary task of leadership is to direct attention.To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. When we speak about being focused, we commonly mean thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions. But a wealth of recent research in neuroscience shows that we focus in many ways, for different purposes, drawing on different neural pathways—some of which work in concert, while others tend to stand in opposition.
Grouping these modes of attention into three broad buckets—focusing on yourself, focusing on others, and focusing on the wider world—sheds new light on the practice of many essential leadership skills. Focusing inward and focusing constructively on others helps leaders cultivate the primary elements of emotional intelligence. A fuller understanding of how they focus on the wider world can improve their ability to devise strategy, innovate, and manage organizations.
Every leader needs to cultivate this triad of awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance, because a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided. Focusing on Yourself Emotional intelligence begins with self-awareness—getting in touch with your inner voice. Leaders who heed their inner voices can draw on more resources to make better decisions and connect with their authentic selves.
But what does that entail? A look at how people focus inward can make this abstract concept more concrete. Hearing your inner voice is a matter of paying careful attention to internal physiological signals. These subtle cues are monitored by the insula, which is tucked behind the frontal lobes of the brain. Attention given to any part of the body amps up the insula’s sensitivity to that part. Tune in to your heartbeat, and the insula activates more neurons in that circuitry. How well people can sense their heartbeats has, in fact, become a standard way to measure their self-awareness.
Gut feelings are messages from the insula and the amygdala, which the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, of the University of Southern California, calls somatic markers. Those messages are sensations that something “feels” right or wrong.
Somatic markers simplify decision making by guiding our attention toward better options. They’re hardly foolproof (how often was that feeling that you left the stove on correct?), so the more comprehensively we read them, the better we use our intuition. (See “Are You Skimming This Sidebar?”) Are You Skimming This Sidebar? Do you have trouble remembering what someone has just told you in conversation? Did you drive to work this morning on autopilot?
Do you focus more on your smartphone than on the person you’re having lunch with? Attention is a mental muscle; like any other muscle, it can be strengthened through the right kind of exercise. The fundamental rep for building deliberate attention is simple: When your mind wanders, notice that it has wandered, bring it back to your desired point of focus, and keep it there as long as you can. That basic exercise is at the root of virtually every kind of meditation.
Meditation builds concentration and calmness and facilitates recovery from the agitation of stress. So does a video game called Tenacity, now in development by a design group and neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin. Slated for release in 2014, the game offers a leisurely journey through any of half a dozen scenes, from a barren desert to a fantasy staircase spiraling heavenward. At the beginner’s level you tap an iPad screen with one finger every time you exhale; the challenge is to tap two fingers with every fifth breath. As you move to higher levels, you’re presented with more distractions—a helicopter flies into view, a plane does a flip, a flock of birds suddenly scud.
Setelah sebelumnya saya memposting anime berjudul Kono subarashii sekai ni shukufuku wo sub indo, kali ini saya akan ngeshare kepada kalian anime bergendre Action, Comedy, Ecchi, Harem, Shounen yaitu Serial Experiments Lain 480p 720p Subtitle indonesia, Semoga akan bermanfaat buat kalian. Download anime serial experiments lain sub indo.
When players are attuned to the rhythm of their breathing, they experience the strengthening of selective attention as a feeling of calm focus, as in meditation. Stanford University is exploring that connection at its Calming Technology Lab, which is developing relaxing devices, such as a belt that detects your breathing rate. Should a chock-full in-box, for instance, trigger what has been called e-mail apnea, an iPhone app can guide you through exercises to calm your breathing and your mind. Consider, for example, the implications of an analysis of interviews conducted by a group of British researchers with 118 professional traders and 10 senior managers at four City of London investment banks. The most successful traders (whose annual income averaged £500,000) were neither the ones who relied entirely on analytics nor the ones who just went with their guts.
They focused on a full range of emotions, which they used to judge the value of their intuition. When they suffered losses, they acknowledged their anxiety, became more cautious, and took fewer risks. The least successful traders (whose income averaged only £100,000) tended to ignore their anxiety and keep going with their guts. Because they failed to heed a wider array of internal signals, they were misled. Zeroing in on sensory impressions of ourselves in the moment is one major element of self-awareness. But another is critical to leadership: combining our experiences across time into a coherent view of our authentic selves.
To be authentic is to be the same person to others as you are to yourself. In part that entails paying attention to what others think of you, particularly people whose opinions you esteem and who will be candid in their feedback. A variety of focus that is useful here is open awareness, in which we broadly notice what’s going on around us without getting caught up in or swept away by any particular thing. In this mode we don’t judge, censor, or tune out; we simply perceive. Leaders who are more accustomed to giving input than to receiving it may find this tricky.
Someone who has trouble sustaining open awareness typically gets snagged by irritating details, such as fellow travelers in the airport security line who take forever getting their carry-ons into the scanner. Someone who can keep her attention in open mode will notice the travelers but not worry about them, and will take in more of her surroundings. (See the sidebar “Expand Your Awareness.”) Expand Your Awareness. Just as a camera lens can be set narrowly on a single point or more widely to take in a panoramic view, you can focus tightly or expansively. One measure of open awareness presents people with a stream of letters and numbers, such as S, K, O, E, 4, R, T, 2, H, P. In scanning the stream, many people will notice the first number, 4, but after that their attention blinks.
Those firmly in open awareness mode will register the second number as well. Strengthening the ability to maintain open awareness requires leaders to do something that verges on the unnatural: cultivate at least sometimes a willingness to not be in control, not offer up their own views, not judge others. That’s less a matter of deliberate action than of attitude adjustment. One path to making that adjustment is through the classic power of positive thinking, because pessimism narrows our focus, whereas positive emotions widen our attention and our receptiveness to the new and unexpected. A simple way to shift into positive mode is to ask yourself, “If everything worked out perfectly in my life, what would I be doing in 10 years?” Why is that effective? Because when you’re in an upbeat mood, the University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson has found, your brain’s left prefrontal area lights up. That area harbors the circuitry that reminds us how great we’ll feel when we reach some long-sought goal.
“Talking about positive goals and dreams activates brain centers that open you up to new possibilities,” says Richard Boyatzis, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve. “But if you change the conversation to what you should do to fix yourself, it closes you down.You need the negative to survive, but the positive to thrive.”. Of course, being open to input doesn’t guarantee that someone will provide it. Sadly, life affords us few chances to learn how others really see us, and even fewer for executives as they rise through the ranks. That may be why one of the most popular and overenrolled courses at Harvard Business School is Bill George’s Authentic Leadership Development, in which George has created what he calls True North groups to heighten this aspect of self-awareness. These groups (which anyone can form) are based on the precept that self-knowledge begins with self-revelation.
Accordingly, they are open and intimate, “a safe place,” George explains, “where members can discuss personal issues they do not feel they can raise elsewhere—often not even with their closest family members.” What good does that do? “We don’t know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the story of our lives to those we trust,” George says.
It’s a structured way to match our view of our true selves with the views our most trusted colleagues have—an external check on our authenticity. “Cognitive control” is the scientific term for putting one’s attention where one wants it and keeping it there in the face of temptation to wander. This focus is one aspect of the brain’s executive function, which is located in the prefrontal cortex. A colloquial term for it is “willpower.” By the Same Author. The best managers rely on six leadership styles. Cognitive control enables executives to pursue a goal despite distractions and setbacks.
Singer Srinivas Tamil Songs| Minsara Kanavu| Ooo Lala la Song|. Ooh La La Ooh La La-Tu Hai Meri Fantasy dance video.PK ROY. O Lala Re| HD Song| Taarzan: The Wonder Car| Ayesha Takia| Vatsal Sheth. Beth Ditto - Oo La La (Audio). Ooh La La Bhojpuri Version - Dirty Picture Feat. Ooh la la tamil movie video songs free download. Grace Potter And The Nocturnals - Paris (Ooh La La). Thumb 'Ooh La La Tu Hai Meri Fantasy Full Song'| 'The Dirty Picture'| Vidya Balan. Goldfrapp - Ooh La La. Teena Marie Ooh la la la. Team Eastside Peezy - Ooh La La La (Feat. Most Wanted). Mr.Da-Nos - Ohlala (Official Video). Free Download Ooh La La (The Dirty Picture) Full HD.mp4. Ooh La La (The Dirty Picture) Full HD.mp4. Size of file. Ooh La La (The Dirty Picture).
The same neural circuitry that allows such a single-minded pursuit of goals also manages unruly emotions. Good cognitive control can be seen in people who stay calm in a crisis, tame their own agitation, and recover from a debacle or defeat. Decades’ worth of research demonstrates the singular importance of willpower to leadership success.
Particularly compelling is a longitudinal study tracking the fates of all 1,037 children born during a single year in the 1970s in the New Zealand city of Dunedin. For several years during childhood the children were given a battery of tests of willpower, including the psychologist Walter Mischel’s legendary “marshmallow test”—a choice between eating one marshmallow right away and getting two by waiting 15 minutes. In Mischel’s experiments, roughly a third of children grab the marshmallow on the spot, another third hold out for a while longer, and a third manage to make it through the entire quarter hour.
Executives who can effectively focus on others emerge as natural leaders regardless of organizational or social rank. Years later, when the children in the Dunedin study were in their 30s and all but 4% of them had been tracked down again, the researchers found that those who’d had the cognitive control to resist the marshmallow longest were significantly healthier, more successful financially, and more law-abiding than the ones who’d been unable to hold out at all. In fact, statistical analysis showed that a child’s level of self-control was a more powerful predictor of financial success than IQ, social class, or family circumstance. How we focus holds the key to exercising willpower, Mischel says.
Three subvarieties of cognitive control are at play when you pit self-restraint against self-gratification: the ability to voluntarily disengage your focus from an object of desire; the ability to resist distraction so that you don’t gravitate back to that object; and the ability to concentrate on the future goal and imagine how good you will feel when you achieve it. As adults the children of Dunedin may have been held hostage to their younger selves, but they need not have been, because the power to focus can be developed. (See the sidebar “Learning Self-Restraint.”) Learning Self-Restraint. Here’s a test of cognitive control. In what direction is the middle arrow in each row pointing? The test, called the Eriksen Flanker Task, gauges your susceptibility to distraction. When it’s taken under laboratory conditions, differences of a thousandth of a second can be detected in the speed with which subjects perceive which direction the middle arrows are pointing.
The stronger their cognitive control, the less susceptible they are to distraction. Interventions to strengthen cognitive control can be as unsophisticated as a game of Simon Says or Red Light—any exercise in which you are asked to stop on cue. Research suggests that the better a child gets at playing Musical Chairs, the stronger his or her prefrontal wiring for cognitive control will become.
Operating on a similarly simple principle is a social and emotional learning (SEL) method that’s used to strengthen cognitive control in schoolchildren across the United States. When confronted by an upsetting problem, the children are told to think of a traffic signal. The red light means stop, calm down, and think before you act.
The yellow light means slow down and think of several possible solutions. The green light means try out a plan and see how it works. Thinking in these terms allows the children to shift away from amygdala-driven impulses to prefrontal-driven deliberate behavior. It’s never too late for adults to strengthen these circuits as well. Daily sessions of mindfulness practice work in a way similar to Musical Chairs and SEL.
In these sessions you focus your attention on your breathing and practice tracking your thoughts and feelings without getting swept away by them. Whenever you notice that your mind has wandered, you simply return it to your breath. It sounds easy—but try it for 10 minutes, and you’ll find there’s a learning curve. Focusing on Others The word “attention” comes from the Latin attendere, meaning “to reach toward.” This is a perfect definition of focus on others, which is the foundation of empathy and of an ability to build social relationships—the second and third pillars of emotional intelligence. Executives who can effectively focus on others are easy to recognize.
They are the ones who find common ground, whose opinions carry the most weight, and with whom other people want to work. They emerge as natural leaders regardless of organizational or social rank. The empathy triad. We talk about empathy most commonly as a single attribute.
But a close look at where leaders are focusing when they exhibit it reveals three distinct kinds, each important for leadership effectiveness:. cognitive empathy—the ability to understand another person’s perspective;. emotional empathy—the ability to feel what someone else feels;.
empathic concern—the ability to sense what another person needs from you. Cognitive empathy enables leaders to explain themselves in meaningful ways—a skill essential to getting the best performance from their direct reports. Contrary to what you might expect, exercising cognitive empathy requires leaders to think about feelings rather than to feel them directly. An inquisitive nature feeds cognitive empathy. As one successful executive with this trait puts it, “I’ve always just wanted to learn everything, to understand anybody that I was around—why they thought what they did, why they did what they did, what worked for them, and what didn’t work.” But cognitive empathy is also an outgrowth of self-awareness. The executive circuits that allow us to think about our own thoughts and to monitor the feelings that flow from them let us apply the same reasoning to other people’s minds when we choose to direct our attention that way. Further Reading.
The origins of attention deficit trait, and how to control it in today’s busy organizations. Emotional empathy is important for effective mentoring, managing clients, and reading group dynamics. It springs from ancient parts of the brain beneath the cortex—the amygdala, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, and the orbitofrontal cortex—that allow us to feel fast without thinking deeply. They tune us in by arousing in our bodies the emotional states of others: I literally feel your pain. My brain patterns match up with yours when I listen to you tell a gripping story. As Tania Singer, the director of the social neuroscience department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in Leipzig, says, “You need to understand your own feelings to understand the feelings of others.” Accessing your capacity for emotional empathy depends on combining two kinds of attention: a deliberate focus on your own echoes of someone else’s feelings and an open awareness of that person’s face, voice, and other external signs of emotion.
Daniel Goleman Articles
(See the sidebar “When Empathy Needs to Be Learned.”) When Empathy Needs to Be Learned. Emotional empathy can be developed.
That’s the conclusion suggested by research conducted with physicians by Helen Riess, the director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. To help the physicians monitor themselves, she set up a program in which they learned to focus using deep, diaphragmatic breathing and to cultivate a certain detachment—to watch an interaction from the ceiling, as it were, rather than being lost in their own thoughts and feelings. “Suspending your own involvement to observe what’s going on gives you a mindful awareness of the interaction without being completely reactive,” says Riess. “You can see if your own physiology is charged up or balanced. You can notice what’s transpiring in the situation.” If a doctor realizes that she’s feeling irritated, for instance, that may be a signal that the patient is bothered too. Those who are utterly at a loss may be able to prime emotional empathy essentially by faking it until they make it, Riess adds.
If you act in a caring way—looking people in the eye and paying attention to their expressions, even when you don’t particularly want to—you may start to feel more engaged. Empathic concern, which is closely related to emotional empathy, enables you to sense not just how people feel but what they need from you. It’s what you want in your doctor, your spouse—and your boss. Empathic concern has its roots in the circuitry that compels parents’ attention to their children. Watch where people’s eyes go when someone brings an adorable baby into a room, and you’ll see this mammalian brain center leaping into action. One neural theory holds that the response is triggered in the amygdala by the brain’s radar for sensing danger and in the prefrontal cortex by the release of oxytocin, the chemical for caring.
This implies that empathic concern is a double-edged feeling. We intuitively experience the distress of another as our own. But in deciding whether we will meet that person’s needs, we deliberately weigh how much we value his or her well-being.
Getting this intuition-deliberation mix right has great implications. Those whose sympathetic feelings become too strong may themselves suffer. In the helping professions, this can lead to compassion fatigue; in executives, it can create distracting feelings of anxiety about people and circumstances that are beyond anyone’s control. But those who protect themselves by deadening their feelings may lose touch with empathy. Empathic concern requires us to manage our personal distress without numbing ourselves to the pain of others.
(See the sidebar “When Empathy Needs to Be Controlled.”) When Empathy Needs to Be Controlled. Getting a grip on our impulse to empathize with other people’s feelings can help us make better decisions when someone’s emotional flood threatens to overwhelm us. Ordinarily, when we see someone pricked with a pin, our brains emit a signal indicating that our own pain centers are echoing that distress.
But physicians learn in medical school to block even such automatic responses. Their attentional anesthetic seems to be deployed by the temporal-parietal junction and regions of the prefrontal cortex, a circuit that boosts concentration by tuning out emotions. That’s what is happening in your brain when you distance yourself from others in order to stay calm and help them. The same neural network kicks in when we see a problem in an emotionally overheated environment and need to focus on looking for a solution. If you’re talking with someone who is upset, this system helps you understand the person’s perspective intellectually by shifting from the heart-to-heart of emotional empathy to the head-to-heart of cognitive empathy.
What’s more, some lab research suggests that the appropriate application of empathic concern is critical to making moral judgments. Brain scans have revealed that when volunteers listened to tales of people subjected to physical pain, their own brain centers for experiencing such pain lit up instantly. But if the story was about psychological suffering, the higher brain centers involved in empathic concern and compassion took longer to activate.
Some time is needed to grasp the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. The more distracted we are, the less we can cultivate the subtler forms of empathy and compassion. Building relationships.
People who lack social sensitivity are easy to spot—at least for other people. They are the clueless among us. The CFO who is technically competent but bullies some people, freezes out others, and plays favorites—but when you point out what he has just done, shifts the blame, gets angry, or thinks that you’re the problem—is not trying to be a jerk; he’s utterly unaware of his shortcomings.
Social sensitivity appears to be related to cognitive empathy. Cognitively empathic executives do better at overseas assignments, for instance, presumably because they quickly pick up implicit norms and learn the unique mental models of a new culture. Attention to social context lets us act with skill no matter what the situation, instinctively follow the universal algorithm for etiquette, and behave in ways that put others at ease. (In another age this might have been called good manners.) Circuitry that converges on the anterior hippocampus reads social context and leads us intuitively to act differently with, say, our college buddies than with our families or our colleagues. In concert with the deliberative prefrontal cortex, it squelches the impulse to do something inappropriate. Accordingly, one brain test for sensitivity to context assesses the function of the hippocampus.
The University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson hypothesizes that people who are most alert to social situations exhibit stronger activity and more connections between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex than those who just can’t seem to get it right. By the Same Author. The truly effective ones have a high degree of emotional intelligence. The same circuits may be at play when we map social networks in a group—a skill that lets us navigate the relationships in those networks well. People who excel at organizational influence can not only sense the flow of personal connections but also name the people whose opinions hold most sway, and so focus on persuading those who will persuade others. Alarmingly, research suggests that as people rise through the ranks and gain power, their ability to perceive and maintain personal connections tends to suffer a sort of psychic attrition. In studying encounters between people of varying status, Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at Berkeley, has found that higher-ranking individuals consistently focus their gaze less on lower-ranking people and are more likely to interrupt or to monopolize the conversation.
In fact, mapping attention to power in an organization gives a clear indication of hierarchy: The longer it takes Person A to respond to Person B, the more relative power Person A has. Map response times across an entire organization, and you’ll get a remarkably accurate chart of social standing. The boss leaves e-mails unanswered for hours; those lower down respond within minutes. This is so predictable that an algorithm for it—called automated social hierarchy detection—has been developed at Columbia University. Intelligence agencies reportedly are applying the algorithm to suspected terrorist gangs to piece together chains of influence and identify central figures. But the real point is this: Where we see ourselves on the social ladder sets the default for how much attention we pay. This should be a warning to top executives, who need to respond to fast-moving competitive situations by tapping the full range of ideas and talents within an organization.
Without a deliberate shift in attention, their natural inclination may be to ignore smart ideas from the lower ranks. Focusing on the Wider World Leaders with a strong outward focus are not only good listeners but also good questioners. They are visionaries who can sense the far-flung consequences of local decisions and imagine how the choices they make today will play out in the future.
They are open to the surprising ways in which seemingly unrelated data can inform their central interests. Melinda Gates offered up a cogent example when she remarked on 60 Minutes that her husband was the kind of person who would read an entire book about fertilizer. Charlie Rose asked, Why fertilizer? The connection was obvious to Bill Gates, who is constantly looking for technological advances that can save lives on a massive scale.
“A few billion people would have to die if we hadn’t come up with fertilizer,” he replied. Focusing on strategy. Any business school course on strategy will give you the two main elements: exploitation of your current advantage and exploration for new ones. Brain scans that were performed on 63 seasoned business decision makers as they pursued or switched between exploitative and exploratory strategies revealed the specific circuits involved. Not surprisingly, exploitation requires concentration on the job at hand, whereas exploration demands open awareness to recognize new possibilities. But exploitation is accompanied by activity in the brain’s circuitry for anticipation and reward. In other words, it feels good to coast along in a familiar routine.
When we switch to exploration, we have to make a deliberate cognitive effort to disengage from that routine in order to roam widely and pursue fresh paths. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” wrote the economist Herbert Simon in 1971. What keeps us from making that effort? Sleep deprivation, drinking, stress, and mental overload all interfere with the executive circuitry used to make the cognitive switch. To sustain the outward focus that leads to innovation, we need some uninterrupted time in which to reflect and refresh our focus. The wellsprings of innovation.
In an era when almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from putting ideas together in novel ways and asking smart questions that open up untapped potential. Moments before we have a creative insight, the brain shows a third-of-a-second spike in gamma waves, indicating the synchrony of far-flung brain cells. The more neurons firing in sync, the bigger the spike. Its timing suggests that what’s happening is the formation of a new neural network—presumably creating a fresh association. This article also appears in. 24.95.
But it would be making too much of this to see gamma waves as a secret to creativity. A classic model of creativity suggests how the various modes of attention play key roles. First we prepare our minds by gathering a wide variety of pertinent information, and then we alternate between concentrating intently on the problem and letting our minds wander freely. Those activities translate roughly into vigilance, when while immersing ourselves in all kinds of input, we remain alert for anything relevant to the problem at hand; selective attention to the specific creative challenge; and open awareness, in which we allow our minds to associate freely and the solution to emerge spontaneously.
(That’s why so many fresh ideas come to people in the shower or out for a walk or a run.) The dubious gift of systems awareness. If people are given a quick view of a photo of lots of dots and asked to guess how many there are, the strong systems thinkers in the group tend to make the best estimates. This skill shows up in those who are good at designing software, assembly lines, matrix organizations, or interventions to save failing ecosystems—it’s a very powerful gift indeed. After all, we live within extremely complex systems. But, suggests the Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (a cousin of Sacha’s), in a small but significant number of people, a strong systems awareness is coupled with an empathy deficit—a blind spot for what other people are thinking and feeling and for reading social situations.
For that reason, although people with a superior systems understanding are organizational assets, they are not necessarily effective leaders. This article also appears in. 24.95.
An executive at one bank explained to me that it has created a separate career ladder for systems analysts so that they can progress in status and salary on the basis of their systems smarts alone. That way, the bank can consult them as needed while recruiting leaders from a different pool—one containing people with emotional intelligence. Putting It All Together For those who don’t want to end up similarly compartmentalized, the message is clear. A focused leader is not the person concentrating on the three most important priorities of the year, or the most brilliant systems thinker, or the one most in tune with the corporate culture. Focused leaders can command the full range of their own attention: They are in touch with their inner feelings, they can control their impulses, they are aware of how others see them, they understand what others need from them, they can weed out distractions and also allow their minds to roam widely, free of preconceptions. By the Same Author. Your mood can drive (or inhibit) your company’s bottom line.
This is challenging. But if great leadership were a paint-by-numbers exercise, great leaders would be more common. Practically every form of focus can be strengthened. What it takes is not talent so much as diligence—a willingness to exercise the attention circuits of the brain just as we exercise our analytic skills and other systems of the body. The link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time. Yet attention is the basis of the most essential of leadership skills—emotional, organizational, and strategic intelligence. And never has it been under greater assault.
The constant onslaught of incoming data leads to sloppy shortcuts—triaging our e-mail by reading only the subject lines, skipping many of our voice mails, skimming memos and reports. Not only do our habits of attention make us less effective, but the sheer volume of all those messages leaves us too little time to reflect on what they really mean. This was foreseen more than 40 years ago by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon. Information “consumes the attention of its recipients,” he wrote in 1971. “Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” My goal here is to place attention center stage so that you can direct it where you need it when you need it.
Learn to master your attention, and you will be in command of where you, and your organization, focus.
'A primary task of leadership is to direct attention, but to do so, executives must learn to focus their own attention.' In the Harvard Business Review article 'The Focused Leader,' author Daniel Goleman, a co-director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, explains that leaders need to reflect on themselves and analyze how they focus their own attention, before aptly directing the attention of others. He groups these 'modes' of self-reflection into three buckets. Focusing on Yourself: The two primary ways to do this is through self-awareness and self-control. Self-awareness has to do with not only listening to your inner voice and paying attention to your gut, but also taking a critical look at the actions you take based on what that inner voice is telling you. Once you master consciously and consistently reacting positively to these feelings, you can move to the next 'mode' — the one critical to being a good leader.
You have to, 'combine those experiences across time into a a coherent view of your authentic self.' In the article, Goleman explains in more detail the benefits of being a leader who is in touch with their authentic self. Self-control or 'willpower' is the second way leaders can reflect on their actions to understand how they pursue goals despite set-backs. This allows 'a single-minded pursuit of goals and also manages unruly emotions.'
Focusing on Others: Leaders who focus on others are easy to recognize, and most likely easy to work with. They have the 'empathy triad.' It includes 'cognitive empathy: the ability to understand another person's perspective; emotional empathy: the ability to feel what someone else feels and empathetic concern: the ability to sense what another person needs from you.' It also includes the ability to build relationships. Focusing on the Wider World: The executives who are not only good listeners, but are also good questioners can usually be considered visionaries who can sense 'far-flung consequences,' be they positive or negative.
These folks focus on strategy, and are constantly asking, 'what is your current advantage and how do you find new ones?' They are open to the creative challenge and 'wellsprings of innovation,' and open to wherever those ideas may reside with no qualms about hierarchy. To find out more about how effective executives direct their own — and their organizations' attention, download the full article below. The Enterprisers Project is an online publication and community focused on connecting CIOs and senior IT leaders with the 'who, what, and how' of IT-driven business innovation. The opinions expressed on this website are those of each author, not of the author's employer or of Red Hat. Aspires to publish all content under a but may not be able to do so in all cases.
You are responsible for ensuring that you have the necessary permission to reuse any work on this site. Red Hat and the Shadowman logo are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries.
Credit Ben Wiseman “Ineluctable modality of the visible.” So begin the musings of Stephen Dedalus as he walks along Sandymount Strand in the third chapter of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” “Signatures of all things I am here to read.” The chapter isn’t just a tour de force of prose writing. It’s an exquisitely sensitive depiction of a mind at play. Conscious of his own consciousness, Dedalus monitors his thoughts without reining them in. He’s at once focused and unfocused. Seemingly scattered ideas, sensations and memories coalesce into patterns, into art.
The Focused Leader By Daniel Goleman Pdf Writers
Brain researchers and Zen masters call this state of mind “open awareness,” the science writer Daniel Goleman reports in his new book, “Focus.” According to Goleman, the author of “Emotional Intelligence,” it’s a form of attentiveness characterized by “utter receptivity to whatever floats into the mind.” Experiments suggest it’s also the source of our most creative thoughts. Going beyond “orienting,” in which we deliberately gather information, and “selective attention,” in which we concentrate on solving a particular problem, open awareness frees the brain to make the “serendipitous associations” that lead to fresh insights. Artists and inventors alike seem unusually adept at such productive daydreaming. We tend to think of attention as a switch that’s on or off — we’re focused or we’re distracted. That’s a misperception.
Attention, as Goleman explains, comes in many varieties. Its extreme forms tend to be the most limiting. When we’re too attentive, we fall victim to tunnel vision. The mind narrows. When attention is absent, we lose control of our thoughts.
We turn into scatterbrains. Twinbee snes download. Open awareness lies in a particularly fertile area between the poles. It gives us entry into what Nathaniel Hawthorne, in one of his notebooks, described as “that pleasant mood of mind where gaiety and pensiveness intermingle.” All forms of attention, Goleman argues, arise from the interplay between two very different parts of the brain. The older, lower brain, working largely outside of consciousness, constantly monitors the signals coming in from the senses. Acting as a warning system, it alerts us to shifts in our surroundings, pains in our body, memories of worrying events. Such “bottom-up” attention, as neuroscientists call it, is impulsive, uncontrolled and often commanded by fear and other raw emotions.
The alerts that stream from the lower brain are so visceral that, when they pop into the conscious mind, they’re hard to resist. Advertisement Working to control all those primitive impulses is the neocortex, the brain’s more recently evolved outer layer.
Daniel Goleman Focus Summary
The source of voluntary, or “top-down,” attention, the neocortex’s executive-control circuitry is what enables us to screen out distractions and focus our mind on a single task or train of thought. Without it, we’d have the attention span of a chipmunk. “Top-down wiring,” Goleman writes, “adds talents like self-awareness and reflection, deliberation and planning to our mind’s repertoire.” As we go through the day, the direction and steadiness of our mental gaze are shaped by the “continual dance” between the top-down and bottom-up systems of attention.
Attention is not only a product of brain function. It’s also influenced by culture and, in particular, by the technologies we use to navigate and make sense of the world.
Goleman’s book arrives at a time of growing anxiety about what he terms “the impoverishment of attention.” Our smartphones and other networked gadgets allow us to jack into an unending supply of messages and alerts. Some of them are important, some of them are trivial, but all of them demand notice. The resulting “neural buzz” can easily overwhelm our ability to control our focus. We become prisoners of our bottom-up attention circuits. What appears to be most at risk is our ability to experience open awareness. Always a rare and elusive form of thinking, it seems to be getting rarer and more elusive.
Our modern search-engine culture celebrates information gathering and problem solving — ways of thinking associated with orienting and selective focus — but has little patience for the mind’s reveries. Letting one’s thoughts wander seems frivolous, a waste of practical brainpower.
Worse, our infatuation with social media is making it harder to hear the mind’s whispers. Solitude has fallen out of fashion. Even when we’re by ourselves, we’re rarely alone with our thoughts. In the end, we may come to see the flights and fancies of open awareness as not only dispensable but pathological. Goleman points out that the brain systems associated with creative mind-wandering tend to be “unusually active” in people with attention-deficit disorder. When they appear to be “zoning out,” they may actually be making novel connections between far-flung ideas.
If Stephen Dedalus or, for that matter, James Joyce were growing up today, he might well receive a diagnosis of A.D.H.D. And be put on a diet of Adderall to curb vagrant thoughts. His stream of consciousness would be dammed up into a stagnant pool. Trained as a psychologist, Goleman knows his way around a brain.
His earlier works on emotional intelligence popularized the notion that being smart involves more than acing the SAT. One reads “Focus” with the hope that it will perform a similar function for open awareness and other forms of attentiveness now under siege.
But the book suffers from an attention disorder of its own. Its brief chapters jump from topic to topic, the links between them growing ever more tenuous. We get discursive lessons on ethics and empathy, systems theory and skill building, even climate change and business strategy. “Focus” lacks focus.