Author
Daniel Goleman
The psychologist and science journalist who put emotional intelligence into the language and the amygdala hijack into the office.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Daniel Goleman trained as a psychologist at Harvard and spent twelve years writing about the brain and behavioural sciences for the New York Times before the book that made his name.
Emotional Intelligence, published in 1995, assembled the research of the early 1990s into the case that a set of emotional abilities, distinct from IQ, shapes how lives go and can be learned. It became a global bestseller, was translated into some forty languages, and put both its title and the amygdala hijack into everyday use.
He followed it with Working with Emotional Intelligence in 1998, Social Intelligence in 2006 and Focus in 2013, and has spent the decades since on leadership development and on contemplative practice, including collaborations with the Dalai Lama.
The signature
Goleman writes as a translator of research for a general reader: a study, a mechanism, a scene from a marriage or an office where it plays out. His signature is the five-ability sequence beginning with self-awareness and the insistence that emotional skills are learned rather than given.