Compassion begins with attention.
Western business people often don’t get the importance of establishing human relationships.
While there I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind.
CEOs are hired for their intellect and business expertise – and fired for a lack of emotional intelligence.
Threats to our standing in the eyes of others are remarkably potent biologically, almost as powerful as those to our very survival.
Fear, in evolution, has a special prominence: perhaps more than any other emotion it is crucial for survival.
Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages.
When I went on to write my next book, Working With Emotional Intelligence, I wanted to make a business case that the best performers were those people strong in these skills.
Well, any effort to maximize your potential and ability is a good thing.
When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences – the first person – with what the measurements show – the third person.
Making choices that improve things for all of us on the planet is an act of compassion, a simple act we can do any time we go shopping.
However, I began meditating at about that time and have continued on and off over the years.
I don’t think focus is in itself ever a bad thing. But focus of the wrong kind, or managed poorly, can be.
Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.
My hope was that organizations would start including this range of skills in their training programs – in other words, offer an adult education in social and emotional intelligence.
Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.
Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.
If you are doing mindfulness meditation, you are doing it with your ability to attend to the moment.
If you do a practice and train your attention to hover in the present, then you will build the internal capacity to do that as needed – at will and voluntarily.
Buying phosphate-free soap allows you to say, ‘My detergent doesn’t have the harsh chemicals others do.’ The question is, how are you washing with it? The very worst thing for the Earth about detergent is that we heat water to use it.