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

I'm very happy to be here and thank you for that introduction tonight. I would like to draw your attention to her and let me start with a story. This is a classic experiment in social psychology that was done many years ago at Princeton Theological Seminary with theology students. Each student was told they were going to give a practice sermon, receive a topic to prepare, and then go on to another. building and gave the sermon to be evaluated, half of the students were given the parable. of the Good Samaritan as the topic, the man who stopped to help the needy stranger on the side of the road, the other half were given random Bible topics as each theology student headed to the other building to give his sermon, they came across a man who was bent over and moaning in pain the interesting question is did they stop to help the most interesting question is did it matter if they were reflecting on the parable of the good samaritan what do you think it didn't matter it didn't matter at all what mattered was how much pressure time people felt they were low and this is more or less the story of our lives.

There is a spectrum from noticing the other person to tuning into the other person, empathizing and understanding what they are going through and then if they are in need and there is something we can do compassionately and maybe help them, but if we never realize First of all, we will never go down that path and this is the problem with care today, I think the moment I knew we were under siege. I was in trouble a while ago, before I started writing the book. Focus. I was on my way to a meeting. I was driving. I live in the country, in New England.

I was late, but I wanted to let people know I was coming. I was driving, I was texting them on the way, that's pretty horrible because as I read not long after, it turns out that texting while driving is the same as drinking while driving, it's really bad, in fact, in my status is banned now, another thing I realized that when I was writing the book, I was like in a riff, really fluid, writing, so I had to look something up, so I go to Google Scholar. I love Google Scholar because it gives you access to academic databases, so I open my web browser and my web browser presents me with the news of the day and I'm a news junkie, so all of a sudden I start reading news and before I realize Mind you, I've had many, you know, fifteen.

It was twenty minutes before I realized that, oh, I was supposed to be looking for that and today we are all in the same boat and that the tools we use, our computer, our phone, etc., are also designed to interrupt us and seduce us. to draw our attention from this to that and usually underneath that is trying to sell us something, a pop-up ad or whatever, but the attention is besieged in a way that has never been true before when I went to editors and told them that I wanted to write about attention. An editor told me it's wonderful.

We would love to have that book, but could it be short? What happened to us in 2007? Time magazine, a major American publication, had a small article saying that there is a new word. In the English language the word is pizzle is a combination of perplexed and angry and refers to the moment when you are with someone who takes out their blackberry and starts talking to another person and ignoring you in 2007, that was unusual, but the The word pizzle has died with the blackberry because now that is the new social norm: you go out to dinner at a very romantic restaurant, you see a couple together and they are both looking at their phones instead of looking into each other's eyes.

Something happened to us in 1977. Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon wrote a very prescient book: he said that information consumes attention, therefore a large amount of information creates attention poverty. I believe that we have entered an era in which we are in danger of intentional impoverishment and the signs of this are more than evident. you know, a couple who look, they look at the phone instead of looking into each other's eyes the other day I saw a mother holding a little boy and the little boy is trying to get her attention and she's busy texting, he just doesn't It's available and you know.

Of course, the same story as dad. Last summer I was on a vacation island on Martha's Vineyard off the coast of New England and I was taking a taxi from the ferry to my house and I happened to share it with seven sorority sister college students who were going to take a weekend together and we got into a shared taxi, a big van and we got in the taxi and within a minute or two each of the sorority sisters were looking at an iPhone/ipad with a screen but they weren't talking to each other. and I think this is really long, the ingredients of the relationship are three: the first is total mutual attention, from that total attention comes a second ingredient, it is a non-verbal synchrony if you look at two people who are really in a relationship that it really connects if you made a video of it and watch it silently the two bodies seem like they are choreographed this is something that is managed by a category of brain cells called oscillators the oscillators govern how we respond to another person how we respond to physical objects the Oscillators are very important for the survival of the human species.

Consider this at the moment of a first kiss. They determine the speed at which two skulls come together and if they make a mistake it would be the end of the species. I am sure the third ingredient after complete attention. and non-verbal synchrony is that it feels good, it is a quite pleasant state of joy to connect with someone, well, these are the richest moments of our lives, the ones that really matter, however, recently there was an article in Harvard Business Review called human moment, he said: if you want to have a real connection with someone and if they walk into your office or remember this, step away from your screen, ignore your phone and on any other device, stop daydreaming or whatever is on your mind and you pay full attention to the person in front of you, it seems to me that they say that we have to have an article in Harvard Business Review to tell us something like that, but we have come to this because attention is an increasingly scarce commodity, but it is a very rare commodity.

Dear one, I believe that the time has come for us to take an active stance in our lives and fight this subtle attack. I know a couple, for example, who when they return home they have a pact to put their phones in a drawer that they won't look at. them for the night there is a new way to meet. I don't know if this has happened here in the UK, but in America for example, when people get together for dinner, everyone takes out their phone, puts it in the middle of the table and the first person to pick up their phone before for the bill to arrive you have to pay the bill now there is not just one type of tension attention there are several varieties the most obvious is selective attention when we

focus

on one thing and ignore others there are two main types of distractors two general classes one is distractors sensory, so if you're looking at me you're probably not noticing this whiteboard here, that's relatively easy, the difficult one is the second category, they are emotional distractors, our emotional distractors are extremely powerful, they are thoughts about that conversation that didn't go so well the fight I had with my partner this morning the relationship mainly refers to things that have bothered us so the more concentrated we are the better we will do at anything as a fairly obvious test, but for example concentration among athletes predicts how well they do will go in the next season, that is quite simple and the less our mind wanders or students care about the modern rule when reading a text, the better we understand the text, however, on average, while reading a book, our mind wanders between a twenty-forty percent of the time.

I think it depends on the book that particular study was done with Pride and Prejudice. If it had been done with, say, I Don't Know Fifty Shades of Gray or Blinks or whatever, it might have been different. but the point is that the more disturbed attention is, particularly for young people, the more difficult it is for them to understand the construction of cumulative mental models that amount to mastery, and in any subject there are basically three modes of attention. I want to get your attention. a and here's a schematic, so this is generally the relationship between

performance

, let's say this is

high

, this is low and this is the horizontal line, it's brain activity, particularly the levels of stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and the relationship is very revealing, it goes like this, it's an inverted U and the

high

est

performance

is when attention is absolutely one hundred percent, maybe one hundred and ten percent.

It's called flow. Flow is discovered for those of you who don't know by researchers who asked people from many different domains. of experience basketball players dancers neurosurgeons tell us about a time when you surpassed yourself you were absolutely at your best you even surprised yourself and no matter what the domain was, people described the same phenomena djegal state and one of the characteristics of the state is that attention is completely absorbed there was a neurosurgeon who told me that I had to do a surgery an operation that I really didn't know if I could do it was very difficult but I did it magnificently I surprised myself at the end of the surgery I looked around and I saw some debris in the corner of the operating room I said what happened they said while you were operating the ceiling you didn't notice it there and you didn't realize it is that kind of attention it is unbreakable it is also a state where your abilities are called upon to the maximum and whatever the demand , you can satisfy her, you are very flexible, very adaptable and very revealing, it is a state that makes you feel good, it is like a relationship, the relationship is a mutual flow, an interpersonal flow, that is when the

focus

is one hundred percent when you have a lot to do very little time very little support when you feel overwhelmed you are down here and your stress hormones are at an all-time high you are in a state that was recently called action in Science magazine in an article it was called the neurobiology of fatigue I don't know if you are familiar with fatigue I have been there many times it is constant stress and the problem here is that you can't stop thinking about what bothers you, what stresses you, what doesn't when you concentrate here, You're not focusing on the task at hand, you're focusing on what's bothering you and that's the power of emotions.

Emotions take over attention, they guide attention and if they are too strong, you will never get here. performance is low because people are low motivated lack of commitment this is a big problem of disengagement in the workplace people feel that in fact there was a survey this is really interesting it was done at Harvard It was given to 2,500 people an iPhone app and the app rings at random times during the day and answers two questions: what are you doing now and what are you thinking about now? And the discrepancy, of course, is great, since one measure of mental distraction turns out that 50 percent of the time, on average, our minds are wandering to a single activity. which had the highest focus, no wonder it was making love, but who completes that at a time like that?

I still haven't been able to understand that the lowest three were traveling sitting in front of a computer and working, that's how it is, so if you're not busy with what you're doing, your cortisol levels are too low, so I've been talking to concentrate as if it were the only valuable type of attention, but in reality, mind wanders, which is the enemy of focusing, the term they use in brain science. they are anti-correlated if your mind is wandering by definition you are not focusing and vice versa mind wandering is absolutely essential for creative perception the creative process demands that first of all you gather information concentrate on the problem you are really concentrating on and then You let it go to the annals of science, art and mathematics are full of people who came up with amazing solutions when they were just daydreaming in the shower, getting on a bus, walking their dog and that's because that during mental distraction we can make connections between remote controls. elements in a new way that has value, that is the definition of a creative act, of course, if you are going to execute if you are going to put the idea into practice, then you have to refocus, but mind wandering is extremely extremely valuable, There is another level at which attention operates, this has to do with leadership, but I maintain that leaders need three types of focus to be truly effective, the first is an internal focus, let me tell you about a case that actually comes from the annals of Neurology. a corporate lawyer who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumor which was discovered early and successfully operated on after surgery, although it was a very disconcerting image because he was absolutely as intelligent as he had been before a coefficientvery high intellectual he had no problems with stress or memory, but he could no longer do his job he could not do any work in fact he ended up without a job his wife left him he lost his house he lives in his brother's guest room and desperate he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio Damacio specializes in the circuits between the prefrontal area, which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn, and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our danger radar, triggers our strong emotions had severed the connection between the prefrontal area and the emotional centers and demacia at first was baffled.

He realized that this guy on every neurological test was perfectly fine, but something was wrong and then he got a clue and asked the lawyer when he should do it. We have our next appointment and he realized that the lawyer could give him the pros and cons of each hour for the next two weeks but he didn't know which is better and Damacio says that when we are making a decision any decision of when to have the next appointment should be left my work for another, what strategy should we follow in the future? Who should I marry this guy compared to everyone else?

I mean, those are decisions that require us to draw on all of our life experience and the circuits that compile that life experience. It's a very basic brain, it's very old in the brain and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words. It has a very rich connectivity from the Castro intestinal tract to the intestine, so we have a visceral sensation that feels good. feel good Damacio calls them somatic markers it is a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because it is valuable data: they did a study of California entrepreneurs and asked them how they make their decisions, these are people who built a business from zero to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and they pretty much said the same strategy.

I am a voracious gatherer of information. I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn't look right to me, I won't move forward. the treatment they are tuning into gut feelings I know someone I grew up with in a farming region of California, the Central Valley, and my high school had a rival high school in the next town over and I met him, someone who went to that other school high school was almost not a good student almost failed didn't graduate almost didn't graduate high school went to a two-year community college we call them found his way into film, which he loved and got into at a film school at film school his student project caught the attention of a director who asked him to be an assistant and it did so well that the director got him to direct his own film someone else's script did so well that he They let him direct a script that he had written and that movie did surprisingly well, so the studio that financed that movie said if you want to make another one we'll back you and yet he hated the way the studio edited the movie, I felt like I was creative. artist and they had massacred the art of him he said: "I'm going to make the film on my own.

I'm going to finance it myself." he kept going and ran out of money he had to go to 11 banks before he could get a loan he finished he managed to finish the movie you may have seen the movie it's called Star Wars so George Lucas made a decision based on his instinct I didn't feel good about it letting the studio destroy the next gnome he read. It was his integrity and this inner sense is ethical. He is an ethical writer. You know, it answers the question: What am I going to do based on my sense of values? and ethics, that's not a question that we answer first with words, we answer first and what feels good and what doesn't feel good, then we put it in words and every leader today needs a strong ethical rudder, so I would say an internal awareness, an internal focus. is essential, then there is another approach which is to be able to read people, to be able to tune into the person, there are three types of empathy and this is the empathy I am talking about.

The first is cognitive empathy means I understand how you think about the things that matter to you. mental models how you see the world what that means is that I can communicate with you in terms that you really understand you really resonate with leading managers who can talk to other people with good cognitive empathy are able to perform better than expected outside of people because they know how to mobilize them they know what matters so there is emotional empathy emotional empathy is an immediate felt sense of what is happening in the other person and this is absolutely essential if you only have cognitive empathy and do not have emotional empathy, you will miss the mark, The third type of empathy is also very important, it is an empathic concern, not only do I know how you think and how you feel, but if there is something, something you need and I can help you. with I am predisposed to helping leaders who have the greatest loyalty for whom people love to work have all three types of empathy.

There's an article in Harvard Business Review called Leadership Gone Wild. Leadership gone mad is about people who may have cognitive empathy but lack it. The other two are leaders who are very good at hitting the target, for example, but they don't care what happens to the people they lead, they don't feel anything for them and that's why they demoralize people. Our people are ready to leave if Abell The third type of approach is the external approach, this is very important, for example when formulating a strategy you need to understand the ecosystem within which your organization operates, you need to be able to feel what is going to work, what we will have to do in the future, etc. and for that you need a kind of overview of the systems, thinking that the sad story here is actually the Blackberry, there are two types of strategic thinking, basically two types, one is exploitation and the other is exploration, in exploitation you take a product or a brand. that has worked very, very well and you refine it you modify it you keep improving it because it keeps working for you that's what Blackberry did the danger is if you don't explore also exploration means that you see you look broadly and you see what's happening where things are going , you do R&D, you try to come up with the next new thing and they couldn't see, for example, Samsung, they couldn't see what the competition was doing, if you don't have an internal focus and another focus and an external focus the danger is not having direction, clueless or surprised attention is a mental muscle it's like going to the gym if you go to the gym and lift weights every time you do a repetition you strengthen the muscle you are working a tension can be strengthened in the same way, in fact, I think that I'll show you how, if you're interested, it only takes two minutes, all you have to do is sit, close your eyes, and pay attention to your breathing.

Don't try to control your breathing, just watch your breath to observe it, try to feel it going in and out, maybe your nostrils and notice each breath, full inhalation, full exhalation, start again with the next breath and start again. With the next breath be fully aware of the sensation and if you find your mind is elsewhere bring it back and gently reset Now you can open your eyes but has anyone noticed your mind wandering? Did someone bring her back? That's the repetition actually. Exercise is not keeping the mind focused, exercise is when it wanders and bringing it back, that is what strengthens the connectivity in the attention circuit.

This is a study that was done at Emory University and this is a basic muscle of the mind. What I find interesting is that if you don't exercise it, we usually rely on external things to get our attention, in fact our economy, in a sense, is based on getting attention. Habituation is what the brain does when it's like this. You see the same old thing day after day, except walking down the road. In the same way of working or whatever, you don't see it after a while, the brain economizes in the orientation of attention, on the other hand, it opens up, every time the brain finds something new, novel and surprising, it excites the brain and think about it every time. season there is a new fashion well, what is a new fashion?

It's actually a minor variation of a basic product. Every year there is a new car. Well, what is a new car? is just enough difference to stimulate the orienting response, so it is the basis of our economy, it is very A radical move to cultivate the ability to manage your own mind so that you can orient yourself at will, but that is exactly what is possible with tension training and become a big proponent of it. One of the reasons is the research of Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University. from Wisconsin has experience in the brain and emotions and discovered in his research that when we are agitated, upset, angry and anxious, there is a lot of activity in the right prefrontal area, just behind the floor, also in the amygdala of the brain.

Point for the fight flight freeze response when, on the other hand, we are in a really positive state. I feel very excited. What a wonderful day. There is a lot of activity on the left side and no activity on the right. Each of us has a proportion of tenants. at rest from right to left activity that predicts our mood range day to day, find that there is a bell curve for this as for IQ, most of us are in the middle, we have bad days, we have good days if you're too far to the right, you may be clinically depressed or clinically anxious, if you're too far to the left, you're very resilient, you bounce back from setbacks, so Davidson teamed up with a guy called Jon Kabat-zinn who has created mindfulness, as he calls it.

Very popular, for example, in the medical sector as a way of managing chronic illnesses and also in the leasing business states recently, many companies are incorporating it and it is more or less what we just did. Davidson and Kabat-zinn went to a 24/7, high-pressure environment biotech startup and taught people how to practice mindfulness, which is pretty much the breathing watching exercise, but they did it 30 minutes a day for eight weeks, what they found was that before that, people's brains were tilted to the right, they were quite upset and stressed after eight weeks, 30 minutes a day, they were leaning to the left and what's very interesting is that people spontaneously started saying "hey, you know, I'm starting to enjoy my job again." I loved this job, in other words, the positive mood was really making a difference.

There is a reason why companies incorporate it. I myself feel that it is not us adults who most need to pay attention in this way. I think it's the children. because childhood has changed, childhood has changed as a side effect of this attack of the digital world on our personal universe. He was talking to an eighth grade teacher who was complaining about how kids now text in the United States. He didn't know there were text messages here. has surpassed phone calls among teenagers as the preferred way to connect with their children, who send a hundred text messages a day to their friends and that's not unusual, she said, you know, for 20 years I've been teaching the same book to my 13 year old children.

It's Edith Hamilton's mythology and she said that in the last two, three and four years my students are starting to say that they have trouble reading this, it's a little difficult and she attributes it to the loss of comprehension ability because of this constant distraction I saw. a boy of about nine or ten years old riding a bike and texting while he was riding, can you believe that luckily he was in the country, on a country road? The reason I worry about children is that the brain is the last organ in the body. to mature anatomically it begins to grow from birth and doesn't actually finish until the mid 20's during that time the principle of neuroplasticity is extremely important neuroplasticity says that repeated experiences shape the brain use it or lose it as another way of saying it if a child has one experience, for example, of empathy and another experience of empathy, the circuit for empathy grows if a child has the experience of paying full attention and ignoring distractors, which is what we just did, the connectivity for that circuit grows and children need this in order for their brains to develop well when we see a child grow and go through different phases of childhood, what we are seeing are external signs of brain growth and I think it is up to us to help children to mold their brains the best way I did. in the classroom of seven year olds in Spanish Harlem in Manhattan Spanish Harlem is a very impoverished place the children live in housing projects and the projects arePretty terrible a kid came to class, the teacher told me and he was a little shocked, he just saw someone shot and the teacher said how many of you know someone who got shot, every hand went up it's that kind of childhood, it's a place very difficult and I happen to be there to see something called classmates breathing every day in this classroom, all the time. the children have a session where they go into their little cubbyholes and take their favorite stuffed animal and lay it down on a rug on the floor, turn the animal upside down and watch it rise with their breathing and fall with their breathing. exhale and count one two three with them one two three on the exhale and they are doing exactly what we just did exactly what they are strengthening the mental muscle capacity of attention there is something else there is a double here because the The same circuit also calms the stormy emotions.

The ability to manage emotions is inextricably linked to the ability to pay attention. And the teacher said, "You know, one day, because of a scheduling problem, we had to skip this and the class was chaotic. The class was chaotic, so do." a big difference for these children. I have long been an advocate for what is called social-emotional learning. Social-emotional learning takes the component of emotional intelligence. Self awareness. Manage your inner life. Empathy. Manage relationships. And it makes it part of the curriculum, not in a way that requires it. away from academics, but in a way that improves children's ability to manage themselves and their relationships and children's relationships, if your heaven needs to tell you this, but from puberty before puberty, relationships more Important in the life of a child are the family after puberty, forget about the family, it is another.

The children and the melodramas of childhood did not invite me to the party, whatever it is that captures me. Attention, those are emotional discomforts, the more you can handle those discomforts, the more attention span you have to listen to what the teacher says, one of the things what they do in these classes in these programs. I've seen this in New Haven in a very similar neighborhood. in Spanish Harlem there is a sign on the wall of each classroom it is a stop like a traffic light red light yellow light green light says when you are upset remember the traffic light red light to calm down and think before acting well stop, it says to have a choice calm down means that you can manage your inner turmoil thinking before acting is a very valuable lesson because it says that you cannot determine what emotions you are going to have our emotions arise spontaneously but once you have them you can stop and think about what you are going to do, in fact, a The definition of maturity is lengthening the gap between impulse and action.

Yellow light. Think about a variety of things you could do and what the consequences might be. Green light. Choose the best one and try it. It's a lesson in what's called cognitive control. Some of you may know the marshmallow test. It's another legendary study in psychology. Four-year-old children at Stanford University, taken into a room one by one, sat down as if at a small table. she put a big juicy marshmallow in front of them, the experimenter says this for you, you can eat the marshmallow now if you want, but if you don't eat it until I get back from running an errand, then you can eat it and then she leaves the room, This is a situation that tests the soul of any four year old, I assure you I have seen a video, some go up and sniff that it is too dangerous and then jump back and others go and sing and dance in the corner to stay. distracted, about a third of the children can't stand it, they just grab it and swallow it on the spot, and another third or so waits the endless 1012 minutes until the experimenter returns and gets the two marshmallows, the reward of the study has arrived. 14 years later, when they are tracked down when they are about to go to university and the two groups are compared, those who ate those who waited and it turns out that those who waited get along much better with their classmates. they can still delay gratification and pursuing their goals, which is exactly what it is a test of and this was a surprise on the American college entrance exam, the SAT, which at the time had 1600 total points, children The kids who took this is really interesting because they're all children of Stanford University parents, they're high-IQ, high-achieving families, so what's going on, but the difference It seems that if you are not able to control your impulses and your wandering mind is a kind of microcosm of that, then you will get angrier, you will feel more emotional, you will not be able to pay attention to what the teacher says, so you will not be able to learn. as good as before.

In a study conducted just a few years ago in New Zealand, all children in a New Zealand city who were born within a year participated in the study from ages four to eight. They were given rigorous tests of cognitive control with many different measures, including the marshmallow test, and then when they were 30 years old, they were re-tracked and it turned out that cognitive control, the ability to keep the mind here or bring it back when rambling, was a better predictor of mid-year financial success and health. 30 than the IQ or the social economic status of the family and is a completely independent factor;

In fact, the people who did the study argue that we should teach this skill to children to level the playing field, so that this becomes part of society. -Emotional learning, social-emotional learning, although it also means being smart in your relationships, so here is something that happened in New Haven between eleven-year-olds. They are going to play what we call soccer. I think you mistakenly call it football, that's right. So these kids were three kids who were going to play a little bit, the first kid is a little chubby, not very athletic and the two kids behind them are very good at soccer, very athletic and they are making sarcastic comments to the first one. boy and one of the other children. he says to the first boy with a big sneer, oh so you think you're going to play soccer and the chubby boy stops, takes a deep breath as if preparing for the confrontation I had, this could easily lead to a fight at school , turns around. and he says yes I'm going to try to play soccer I'm not very good at it I'm good at your art show me anything I can draw it very well but you are fantastic at soccer one day I would like to be as good as you are and before that the other boy just melts, walks over, puts his arm around him and says, oh, you're not that bad, let me show you a couple of things that weren't an accident and that's called a farce that Boyd learned on his own, it's a way of handling put-downs, which is a very big problem in early adolescence and is simply part of a larger curriculum that pays attention to what matters to children and attention needs to be part of that plan of studies. and it's not just about the schools you know the parents of the first coach and all this, when you pick up a baby who is crying and calm him down you are actually teaching him how to calm down when you point at a toddler you know when you did that. made your friend feel bad, that's a lesson in empathy, so you know, lessons in mindfulness and emotional intelligence start very, very early in life, but I think we have to get better at that, one of the reasons is that children are more exposed. and more to influences that are not so good I don't know if you know anyone, a young person who likes video games and spends hours that maybe they don't spend here in London but it is a big problem worldwide and the video data The games are quite varied, on the one hand, they really improve some aspects of care.

If you are a kid who likes fighting games, you know battle games and you have to constantly be on the lookout for the enemy that could appear and kill you. is very good for improving vigilance, you could be a very good air traffic controller for example, however it also means that if a child bumps into you in the hallway, your first thought is that he has a grudge against you, which creates a bias towards hostile attribution. So the video games we have now are quite varied, but a new generation is emerging that is using findings from cognitive science.

There is one called tenacity that all four of my grandchildren played from ages 7 to 13 at the time. In tenacity, you have an iPad every day. Every time you exhale, you tap the screen on the fifth exhale, you tap it twice, if you do that you get a visual reward. You know, flowers that bloom in the desert. As you do it more and more, it gets harder and harder, so basically what is it? to do is train attention, but in a way that keeps children's attention the same way all other video games do. There are other things we could use, you know the media in general and I say this is a reformed journalist, the media. it gives us a very toxic view of the world most of the news we get is about death threats from disasters, horrible things happening to people it's news to the amygdala, the amendment oh, it's a very primitive part of the brain that wants to know what the dangers are, however If we were to take on a given day all the acts of kindness done around the world, you know that a mother feeding her child is an act of kindness and we would put it on a scale and then we would take all the heinous acts and we would put them on the scale of losers, the acts of kindness would far outweigh the acts of meanness, but we don't have that sense that the world looks through the lens of the media, but we can use the media better.

An example I like is Sesame Street, if you've ever done it. If you have a toddler, I've had a toddler, you may have seen Sesame Street. Sesame Street. I found out when I visited Sesame Workshop that it's actually a very sophisticated operation. The day I went there, the writers were meeting with two cognitive scientists. meeting on cognitive control because Sesame Street segments turn out to be science-based lessons wrapped in entertainment one of the things that segments that aired this season is the Cookie Connoisseurs Club. I know if you're familiar with Cookie Monster Cookie Monster is one of the stars of Sesame Street and he loves to devour cookies, but Alan, who has a store on Sesame Street, decided to start a Cookie Connoisseurs Club much like a connoisseurs club. of wines, and in the Cookie Connoisseurs Club, you take a cookie and study it to see if they are imperfections, then you smell them for aroma and then take a bite to taste them.

Cookie Monster, of course, was dying to get into the club, so Alan gives him a cookie and he instantly swallows it. He can't help himself, so Alan tells him. He, you know, in this club we're going to try all kinds of cookies, so if you don't swallow them, I can get into the club and you'll be able to eat a lot of different kinds of cookies that do. for cookie, so that's a lesson, this is a show that two to four year olds love and two to four year olds learn a lot by modeling, so what's happening with cookie is that people that children are learning a lesson in cognitive control and I think the more the better, so let me finish by talking to you about the intelligent use of positive emotions to be able to manage our own internal world and that internal focus.

There is a remarkable man called Matthieu Ricard. He has written some books on happiness. It's yours. friend she has a PhD in cell biology from the Pasteur Institute her mentor there actually won a Nobel Prize for the research they are doing, but after graduating she made a surprising decision: she decided to leave science and go to the Himalayas to become a monk and meditator for the rest of his life I think his editors and publicists have called him the happiest man in the world because he has been studied by scientists and in this ratio from right to left is far to the left there is a scientist named Paul Ekman, who is the world expert in the facial expression of emotions.

Paul is the keenest observer of the face as a revealer of what you are feeling. He is a very dangerous man. One time I was walking down the street with Paul on the way to a meeting he was leading and Paul was telling me about a system for training people to become good at this thing that he had just developed and as he was telling it we arrived in the meeting room. and I thought this is really interesting, but I hope that wraps it up. "I have to think about what I'm going to do in the meeting at that moment," he tells me, "and if anyone had studied the system they would know that you're getting a little angry with me right now that's why the path is so dangerous." Paul was interested in emotional contagion and wanted to know what it would be. the effect of someone like Mathieu, who was very optimistic on someone who was the complete opposite, so Paul did a silent telephone survey among the professors at the University where he teaches, asking who is the membermost abrasive and confrontational member of our faculty, strangely enough, everyone agreed on who he was, which is why he calls Professor Would you participate in a scientific experiment? and the professor, delighted, said, "I'm happy to do it when the day comes." approached and by mistake started making demands that became more and more outrageous so they had to leave him and go with the second most difficult teacher and the experiment was that they were both having Mathieu and the teacher measure their physiology and Come on to have a debate, the debate is based on the premise that the teacher should see with Mathieu.

The professor had a permanent, secure, well-paid, highly influential position, but the premise of the debate was that he would leave it and become a monk? and go to the Hermitage for the rest of his life. At the beginning of this debate, physiology showed that he was very agitated thinking that Mathieu was totally calm, so when the discussion begins, Mathieu remains absolutely calm and the professor becomes more and more calm. by the end of the 15 minutes he's having such a good time that he doesn't want to stop the argument, so our emotions are contagious for better or worse, especially when we give each other our full attention.

I was once waiting for a bus on a 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 pretty invisible globe around us we feel a little irritated he says don't talk to me , no You don't touch me and my intact balloon and the bus stops. Go up with my balloon and the bus driver did something pretty amazing. He actually spoke to me and said: How are they folded? He surprised me but I sat down and took most of my bubble away.

Then I noticed that the bus drivers were chatting with everyone on the bus. You are looking for suits. You know there's a great deal right here at this department store. Did you hear about the Monnet exhibit on the left? It means wonderful and the Cineplex would come here. I know the movie and the theater got the best reviews, but the movie 2 filmed the other night. Great, you should go on and on like this and then people would get off the bus and he. He would tell them: I hope the rest of your day is really wonderful.

That man was an urban saint. He transformed everyone on the bus. He was sending waves of good feelings through a city that desperately needed him. We don't have to go to the Himalayas for decades, we can all do that in our lives if we pay attention. Thank you so much. I'm happy to answer any questions. They may have their microphones here and there. There may be some tools in the galleries, so raise your hand if you have any questions. The first question here mentioned the low cultures in America, where there are murders every day. Steven Pinker writes very well about some of these cultures and explains that people will be killed for a simple slight or a lack of respect or something, and it's ingrained in the culture, it's innate, what I can see is that there seems to be a insidious political correctness in the world. today where we are not allowed to say that a culture is a trash culture and in doing so we do not address the problems with these people, so every day they continue to have low expectations, the murders, the social Meliá that creates and continues. to create what you in America called broken window syndrome and I wondered what your opinion was on people's inability to address these issues honestly and openly and even on the fact that so much of our condition is inherited genetically, the brain no longer exists.

Unlike any other organ in the body, entire groups of people have a particular type of genetics. Well, I think there is a very young stage after that, it is not being addressed at all and we are losing because of that. Yeah, well, I know some. data that speaks directly to that. I think, first of all, we have to be very careful with stereotypes because in any neighborhood there are a variety of variations on who lives there; It may happen that there are very talented young people living in a neighborhood that is otherwise plagued with problems, so on the one hand we should allow for individual differences, but overall, it is a global problem what to do with children who They grow up in extreme poverty, because, on the one hand, the brain is very fragile, so if you are not well nourished in childhood the brain does not grow as well and all over the world children who grew up in poverty can have brains malnourished, which makes them susceptible to all kinds of behavioral problems, especially when it comes to prefrontal development, since I mentioned that the prefrontal area is the one that manages emotions, so if you can't manage your anger, for example, many People who end up on the murderer's row who have killed someone have damage to the prefrontal areas, so we need to confront this as you clearly suggest and see what the problems are. and what the possible interventions could be because I would never rule out an entire group of children.

Instead I would say these are developing brains, let's help them develop as best they can and in fact I mentioned that the New Zealand study suggested that we have active interventions particularly in early childhood there is a famous study done in the it's called the study Perry PE rry preschool where children from a neighborhood like this had not written children from a neighborhood like this in a very enriched program and did much better in life than other children from the In the same neighborhood and it is very important to understand the question of IQ and class, in cultures around the world where there is a privileged caste or class and a disadvantaged caste or class, there has always been a large gap in IQ scores between the privileged and the disadvantaged, and it is considered that It is genetic, however, there is something called the Flynn effect.

Flynn is a researcher at the University of Otago in New Zealand and he has shown with vast data sets that every three four five years, when IQ tests are reviewed, they have to ask the hardest questions, they have to ask the hardest questions. difficult because children become smarter in each generation than previous generations; In other words, it's not fixed. The other thing he discovered is that when children from a caste group, which is our disadvantaged class, migrate to a country where there is no bias about that caste class. Their kids do just as well as other kids, so it's not genetic, it's largely situational, so you're absolutely right, we have to look directly at those situations and see what we can do to help.

Where is the microphone? Next question Hello, thank you for your talk. I enjoyed it a lot. My question relates to the marshmallow situation and you said that if you give a child a yes before everyone has one and if one eats one later they will have two and you said when they arrived. At 30, you know the high performers were the ones who waited, right? How much of that is related to addiction? Do you mean want both marshmallows right away? You could get addicted to marshmallows. I don't think so, but it's that youth, yes, exactly, the inability to control.

The urge makes one susceptible to addiction to alcoholism. Gambling addiction, shopping addict, etc., because you want the hit and you don't hold back and you see that there are other ways to do it. Yes, by the way, don't try that at home with your child. the marshmallow test I know someone who tried it with her four year old daughter and she looked out to see what it was doing she put the marshmallow and left the room she took the marshmallow she took out half of the marshmallow and ate it and then put it back, it's probably the executive director of a company.

Now I died. I have good news, good news and bad news, if the brain matures anatomically in the mid-20s, but that does not mean it is too late to change habits, however, habits are instantiated in the brain. Childhood is very strong, so if you end up, say, addicted or overly anxious or whatever, it is still possible to change, but you need to make the extra effort and the reason is that you have to practice the new and better healthy behavior over and over again. time because you've practiced the wrong way 10,000 times you know you've done it over and over again on the circuit it's very strong but here cross your arms this is what feels like a habit now cross them to the other side with the other arm above that's what it feels like to change a habit it's a little strange at first, a little strange, but if you make the effort and keep putting in the effort at every opportunity that occurs naturally, what happens is that the neural connectivity for the new path becomes It gets stronger and stronger until at some point you pass a developmental benchmark, a neural benchmark at which you adopt the new habit, you perform the new habit effortlessly, without thinking about it, it becomes automatic. and what that means is that the connectivity for the new habit has now become stronger than the old one: it's the brain. now the brain's default choice, but it takes work, it takes more work.

My question is about the three approaches you mentioned, the internal and the other, and the answer I won. I'm wondering if they exist in isolation or if they exist in a hierarchy and, if so, is there a method to progress through them. I think each of them can be improved. I don't think there is a hierarchy because, for example, in research on leaders we discovered that some leaders can be very good at two or one of them and bad at any of them. the others are right, in other words, all combinations are possible. You can be very emotionally intelligent.

Manage yourself well. Manage other people well, but be absolutely blind to the systems and broader context in which your organization operates. Or you can be very good at managing yourself and very bad at reading people, actually there are many in the workplace, there is a whole class of people who are outstanding individual contributors, often very good at systems and work very hard, programmers of computers, for example, that have no empathy. I was talking to someone here in Europe, who was in the company, and he said we have a guy who is absolutely brilliant at systems and we can't get him in front of a client because when we do, he starts talking non-stop and never stops to get to know them. to the client to find out what is on their mind to understand the problem from their point of view, so here is someone who is very good at internal management and managing themselves and their systems, but not people.

Do you mean that attention is handled differently within different or valued differently, absolutely sure, oh yeah? I mean culture, that culture makes a huge difference, particularly, for example, in valuing attention training. Most of the attention training methods that we use now come from Eastern cultures because because of Eastern cultures like Bhutan, for example, many people in Bhutan and meditators can be to some extent. almost all of them, all the citizens, it is part of the culture, it is part of the background, so the methodologies that they have were quite sophisticated, they have been developed over millennia and people like Richard Davidson, who I mentioned, who do research in this area , they are using expert advisors from those cultures to help you understand what the potential is that we have to train attention because in the West we are quite atrophied in our view of how to train attention, so I think that when it comes to a mental faculty, the Culture makes a huge difference, the same is true for emotions, every culture values ​​and expresses emotions differently, everyone universally has the same wiring for emotions, our emotions are contagious, yes, therefore should we spend more or less time with our angry colleagues? the American bus driver or the French monk, should we save the world or ourselves?

Hahahaha, well the French monk is really good at saving everyone, that's his mission, but other than that, I think it's important to understand the dynamics of sending and receiving emotions. There are several factors that determine in any interaction who sins and who receives. There are studies done, for example, when two strangers come into a laboratory, fill out a questionnaire about their mood or how you feel at the moment and then sit opposite each other in silence for two minutes then fill out the same genres it turns out that The person on that diet who is more emotionally expressive transmits his emotional state to the other person in two minutes of silence, so expressiveness is very important.

On the other hand, power matters in any human group. It is natural to pay more attention to it and give it more importance. but the most powerful person in that group says it and does it. Emotions tend to spread from the person who has power outward. What this means, for example, these are experiments done with Keynes, if the leader of a team is in a very bad mood, the people in the team notice that mood and performance decreases, if the leader of the team team is in a very good mood, a positive mood, people giveAccount for that and performance increases, and this is true for business decisions, for creativity, for physical coordination, like setting up a tent, so the second factor is the power relationship, the third factor has to do with Mathieu Picard and it's how stable are you if you're going to go and be with your angry colleague, are you stable enough in a positive State that, like him, you can bring him or the bus driver, you can bring him to that state.

Will you end up angry? Those are at least three factors that could determine the answer. Fascinated by social-emotional learning advocacy, yes, and I would. It seems that there are many Western parents today who have taken the same approach when prescribing Ritalin to many of their children. Can you take a minute and talk a little bit about? You have described an organic approach to improving concentration and I look forward to reading it. More on that, but what is the impact of over-prescribing Ritalin? What are the long term effects? So, Ritalin, which of course is given to children who have so-called ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, you already know, 50 years ago.

I used to say, well, he's just a little kid, he'll get over it, but now it's become a diagnostic category and there are some kids who have genuine problems paying attention, digital media doesn't help them like it does today, They would help a lot. because of these cognitive control lessons that are very new and just being studied, so there are people like Davidson who are studying the ways that we can use attention training, think about it, why has this culture had as an option default to buy a medicine and give it? our children for something that is a skill deficit is a skill deficit stress is a skill I think the reason is that there are pharmaceutical companies that are making a lot of money selling us these drugs and convincing us that this is the best alternative my personal opinion when in reality what we haven't done is basic research on the attention mechanisms involved in ADHD and what type of training would help children improve at it and I think that within the next five years we will see a series of very direct interventions that They are not pharmaceuticals in those conditions.

I just wanted to ask your opinion: to what extent do you think our emotional reactions are learned or innate? Well, I believe that our emotions are innate and our particular emotional reactions are largely learned. I recommend my wife's book here it's called Mind Whispering her name is Tara Bennett gomen she's a psychotherapist because she talks about the way emotional patterns of reactivity are learned in childhood and how you could use mindfulness cognitive therapy a series of interventions to change habits that are counterproductive the name of the book is a whisper and her name is Tara Bennett

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I found it very useful, in fact, I find it even more useful, in fact, there is data on that, if you are a pessimist, can you learn to be an optimist? research done by a guy named Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, who developed a field called positive psychology. He developed the field because psychology for 80 years only studied pathology, so there was a problem that we hadn't noticed: there was a positive spectrum of emotion and experience, but anyway Seligman took children who were prone to depression and it turned out that They tended to be pessimistic and to see if they had something that didn't work out or a setback in life they would say it's my fault and I'll do it.

It will always be like this and it taught them to think differently. Well, it was a circumstance that circumstances can change and I can do something to change them. It's a more optimistic perspective and he found that actually after about a year his thought patterns had changed, but that's what I said as with any behavior of this type we have to keep at it and keep at it every opportunity that presents itself. naturally and recover when we returnFor him, you know the old pattern, so yes, optimism can be learned. In fact, I know the gentleman who invented cognitive therapy.

Cognitive therapy looks at our distorted thinking patterns and helps us see more realistically and is very effective for depression. His name is Aaron Beck. 93 now he had a terrible accident that put him in a wheelchair and after that I talked to him and he was very optimistic, he is supposed to be one of the most optimistic people I know, then he lost sight in one eye and I was talking to me , he said Well, you know my right eye works perfectly fine, I can still run and then he went blind in his right eye and I told him, you know, I can still listen to recorded books, in other words, he had the ability to see what was right. instead of what was right. wrong, that's what you're talking about yeah, hello.

I just had a question about the performance graph you have there. Yes, you mentioned two extremes, you have motivated performance and then you have burnout and yes, what can you do if? You're one of those types of people, what can I do? How can you improve it? Well, we can do it with this type of person and with this type of person. Yeah, well, let me ask you in this hypothetical question: Are we this kind of person? We are driving? this type of person or a friend of this who we are are we the person a friend of this type of person today speaking I have a friend here who every day so what the person who is not very excited who is not committed needs is to get involved to get more motivated more passionate more committed and there is something now there is literature about something called good work good work combines three things combines what we are really good at in our excellence with what we are really passionate about what engages us and what we value with our Ethics , if you align those three things, you will naturally ascend from here to there;

In fact, you will get into flow much more easily, so a question we can ask our friend is what would be a good job for you and what could you do to make it a greater proportion of the time in your day or your week or your month? or over the course of the next five years of your career? So that's kind of an individual strategy for that if you're here if you re frazzle in frazzle what you need is calm, which is very related to cognitive control, but there are many ways to calm down, however, if you can't, there are two strategies if you say frazzle because you have a boss who asks you to.

If you do too much in too little time and provide too little support, you can get your boss's CV and send it to a headhunter, but that's not an immediate solution, so you might be able to manage your own world better if you find something that works for you. you. It relaxes you physiologically. It can be meditation. It can be yoga. It can be deep muscle. It can be working out in the gym. Everyone is different. Do it every day and do it before going to work or whatever it is that is exhausting you because what happens is that over Program your body's set point for stress changes and you will be able to handle it better or be in a more relaxed state under the circumstances.

Two general strategies. Yes, I have two quick questions. The first one might be a silly question, so sorry if I've missed this, but do you consider focus to be an extension of emotional intelligence or cognitive or are both correct? So what I think is that attention was built into emotional intelligence because the brain has emotion circuits for empathy and for getting attention, I never thought about that, I didn't realize I had to write a whole new book about this. and tonight, okay, the second question is I have a two-year-old son, oh, when he's four, I fully intend to do it.

Make the marshmallow just wander between now and then. Are there things you could do for him that will help him be more likely to wait? you're probably already doing them just being a good parent is great, yes, but pay attention Know your child's feeling needs, that's very important. I wasn't at all surprised to hear this from my friend a while ago that he works at a psychiatric hospital for residents and the difference between the emotions of the sexes is absolutely huge if a woman comes looking for him. one session the psychotherapist will say how are you doing how are you and I will come exactly how are you feeling when a man comes in very little is said then the psychotherapist will say on the next sofa there is a collection of stuffed animals choose why not hahahahaha then the sir will go look for the Panda aha and the psychotherapist will say well how is mr. panda today and then the difference in emotions between the sexes will come.

However, we like to think that we are basically all the same. I think we are enormously different, so I thank you. Well, I just wanted to give an answer to the gentleman who is two years old, I have three children and I'm sure that if all three of them came from the exact same background they would probably react very differently to the marshmallow test, so we get back to my question: is it learned or innate? And I often think that some people just have a natural emotional intelligence. Yes, I didn't answer the question, the answer is that it is learned and innate, since each of us is born with a particular range of set points in the brain, chemicals. who manage emotions, that is our temperament and like you. knowing if you have more than one child children differ from day one, on the other hand, epigenetics tells us that it is not the genes you have, but the genes that are activated and deactivated that will make the lasting difference and the behavior of a child is very malleable, so if a child is very impulsive that child can learn cognitive control if a child is too restricted that child could learn to relax there is data on children, for example, who are what is called behaviorally inhibited this is Jerome Kagan's work at Harvard he finds that approximately 15% of children are eager for new stimuli, new playground, new friends, new food and when they are very young these are the children who at school age are identified as shy and it had been thought that this was just genetic but they realized.

Didn't he follow a group of these children? Some of them at school age were not shy and he looked at parenting, my goodness, and he noticed that he discovered that the difference was this if your parents identify you as shy and I protect you those are the children who do not change if the parents tell them They tell a child well, you may feel a little shy about it, but go ahead and try it anyway that child learns. At first I'll be a little scared, but if I keep going, I'm going to have a good time and those are the kids that don't end up being shy, so it's a malleable mix of both, yeah, and I think we've reached the end of our time , Daniel, I think you've got our attention. brilliantly peace, will you join me in thanking him for a truly fascinating pick-me-up?