Daniel Goleman and Social Intelligence

The Finan­cial Times has a fun inter­view today as part of their “Lunch with the FT” series.

Daniel Gole­man is the author of best­seller Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence and is now pro­mot­ing his recent book Social Intel­li­gence.

An quote from the interview:

- The jour­nal­ist asks, “So how do the rest of us get better?”.

- The answer, he says, is very sim­ple: by listening.

Lis­ten­ing poor­ly is the com­mon cold of social intel­li­gence. And it’s being made worse by tech­nol­o­gy. To have a human moment, you need to be ful­ly present. You have to be away from your lap­top, you put down your Black­Ber­ry, you end your day­dream and you pay full atten­tion to the per­son you’re with. It may sound rudi­men­ta­ry, but think about how often we just keep mul­ti­task­ing and half pay atten­tion. You can over­come that by becom­ing mind­ful of what is happening.

Keep read­ing the FT arti­cle Poet­ry in emo­tion.

And Social Intel­li­gence and Mir­ror Neurons