Sonia and Simon
The #1 Skill Nobody Taught You | Daniel Goleman on Emotional Intelligence
14 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is emotional intelligence and why is it important?
Emotional intelligence is all about how to handle people. They are two very different ways of being smart, and they're based in different parts of the brain. If you're smart cognitively, like AI, AI is genius, but that doesn't mean you're going to be good with people. And I think people who are emotionally intelligent have a different kind of intelligence.
They have the ability to integrate with their cognitive smarts their emotional situation. And they can do it in a way where they can read other people too.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman spent decades studying the science of human behavior and discovered that emotional intelligence is what sets great leaders apart.
There are four parts to emotional intelligence. One is self-awareness, tuning into your own thoughts, your own feelings. Do I really want to do that? Do I trust my own thoughts? And then there's using that information to manage yourself, to handle your upsets, your anger, your anxiety. The The third part is empathy and there are three kinds of empathy.
What do you think leaders are getting wrong about their emotional impact around people?
I think right now there's a bandwagon for AI and I think too many leaders are putting too much faith in it. Leaders may be forgetting that it's really all about people. If everyone had an AI system, they still need to be inspired. They need to be guided. They need your influence. To forget that the human element still matters, I think is a huge mistake.
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Now let's get into today's episode. Daniel, let's start off talking about kids and screen time. On average, school aged children are spending between four to five hours per day on screens, which is wild. And that is roughly 2.5 months a year on screens. What is that doing to their ability to develop emotional intelligence?
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Chapter 2: How does screen time affect children's emotional development?
How do they view that?
Well, I think people who don't tune in to the other people they're with – who are only in their own mind, probably are projecting what they think the other person is doing. They're making it up, essentially, and reacting to that made-up other, which is very different than actually pausing, tuning into the other person and sensing what they're feeling.
David, let's talk about your four domains of emotional intelligence. Can you talk through those, the foundations, essentially?
Well, emotional intelligence, there are four parts to emotional intelligence. One is self-awareness. This is what Simon and I were just talking about. Tuning into your own thoughts, your own feelings, how they're driving what you do. And then being able to decide, do I really want to do that? You know, do I trust my own thoughts?
In cognitive therapy, they say, you know, you don't have to believe all your thoughts because they may be distorted. We have blind spots. We have biases. And then there is using that information to manage yourself. That's the second part. to handle your upsets, your anger, your anxiety, your distancing from people, whatever it may be.
The third part of emotional intelligence is empathy, and there are three kinds of empathy. Cognitive empathy, which is what AI is brilliant at. Emotional empathy, which is reading the feelings of the person you're with. I don't think AI is very good at that. It can mimic it, but it doesn't really do it. And then there's a third kind, which is caring about the other person.
You want your spouse, you want your best friend, you want your family to have that third kind of empathy, to care about you. Because if they only have cognitive empathy, if they only have emotional empathy, they can be very manipulative. And this is good in marketing and good in politics. It's not very good in close relationships.
The fourth part of emotional intelligence is putting it all together to have effective relationships. And in my most recent work, I've looked at the competencies of people in the workplace that make them outstanding performers that are based on these different abilities, things like influence or power.
in a leader or being able to inspire people or being able to manage your own upset well to what we call self-regulate in a technical jargon. All of these are specific abilities that people can learn, by the way, that help you do better in the emotional intelligence domain. And that, by the way, in the workplace makes you more productive.
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Chapter 3: How can we improve our self-awareness?
Focus is really about attention. And if you think about social media, TikTok, Instagram, and so on, they're designed to capture your attention and to keep it. And I see something very sinister in that, or rather not very admirable, which is that what's happened is attention has become a commodity. Your attention is monetized. Everybody's attention is monetized.
And I feel that the ability to stay in control of your own attention and not necessarily be sucked in by social media is extremely important. So I feel that attention training is an essential human skill now.
And it means that you're able to fight the beast, the beast being all of those things that are pulling you into social media or wherever for kind of mindless entertainment, but which captures your eyeball so they can count the number of people watching and then sell ads on that basis.
Well, Sonia and I both come from traditional media. We're out of that now and we're in this space with this community where we're building conversations that are much more positive and forward thinking. But we know that those traditional media platforms and even the social media platforms are built around negativity. Why is it that our brains are drawn towards negativity?
Well, there is a theory about that. It comes from evolutionary psychology, and it is that the brain is an organ that evolved to help us survive. So it wants to notice, react to, and remember things that might be a threat. That's the way the brain is designed. So we're more likely to remember, for example, the argument we had with that person than the good time we had with that person.
That's the way the brain is designed. And in evolution, it meant that the brain was helpful for survival. And the whole basic theory of evolutionary psychology is that whatever helps us survive is sticky. And so the brain is designed around exactly what you're saying.
Daniel, when it comes to maintaining your attention, I know mine has changed dramatically over the years. Everything is so instantaneous now. Like when you're chatting to an AI chatbot, the response is instant. So in real life, when you don't get that instant response, sometimes I find myself frustrated. How can you pull yourself back into that and re-regulate yourself, I guess?
Is there an exercise?
As with any skill, like I want to be a good basketball player. I want to be good at golf. You have to practice. So the more you practice, the easier it becomes to pull your attention away. And practice might be... You know, spending five minutes, ten minutes, a half hour every day paying full attention to your breath and when your mind wanders off, pulling it back.
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Chapter 4: What are the four domains of emotional intelligence?
And so you know where people are at. You know where your people are at if you're the leader. And you can speak to that. I think it's a gift. And it's being really good at that kind of empathy I was talking about.
Dan, have you ever seen emotional intelligence used to manipulate situations? Can it be used to manipulate people?
Sure. That's what I was saying about empathy. The first two kinds of empathy can be used to manipulate. I once gave a talk at a huge marketing convention And I said there are three kinds of empathy. The first is cognitive, knowing how people think. The second is emotional, knowing how they feel. And by the way, that's what marketing is about.
Mm-hmm.
putting those two together to manipulate people. And there was this big nervous laugh throughout the room because they knew I was, you know, that's spot on, but they didn't want to name it. The third part is not seen in marketing, and that is caring about people. Although there's interesting data I saw a study years ago about the best salespeople.
And what they found was that they saw themselves as consultants And they took the client's point of view and they said they might pass up a sale in order to save the relationship. They might say, well, you know, our product isn't the best one for you. But that builds immense trust and means that the relationship will continue, which is why they were so good at sales.
But that means that they cared about the client, about the customer.
Dan, that is so interesting. We both come from traditional media, like I mentioned, and we came from the advertising world. And there is a real big shift that is going on right now where you've got radio stations where you are and you would have heard the ads on the radio and you would have seen a billboard on the side of the road. And there's a shift now where audiences are much smarter, right?
They're not necessarily allowing themselves to be manipulated by advertising anymore or standard advertising. So if they hear an ad on the radio, do they really believe it? Or when they see a billboard, they're questioning it more now than what they were in the past. So I think there's this real interesting shift of trust towards advertising or trust towards marketing.
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Chapter 5: What role does empathy play in leadership?
They help them feel better just seeing the faces.
What has being a grandfather taught you?
I think the lessons of being a grandfather are really about love, loving and being loved. just for being around, for being who you are, and not what you do necessarily, but showing up in family life, in someone's life. I've made a habit of bringing a grandchild with me when I go to some foreign country, Sao Paulo, more recently Panama, Milan, wherever it happens to be.
And it's very meaningful for them. And it's a great time, opportunity for me just to hang out. And I realize the benefits of hanging out with people you love.
Does that have anything to do with staying in flow or that, what we were talking about earlier, like when you do spend time with... The optimal state? Yeah, the optimal state.
I think it is. Yeah. I think being in love is definitely an optimal state.
Yeah. Dan, thank you so much for sharing. We really appreciate it.
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
If someone has made it this far into the episode, they've loved every single thing of what you've had to say today, Dan. Is there something that you want to say to that person that's watching this episode right now?
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