This is the 10% Happier Podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hey everybody.

How much better and smoother would your life be if you were not so owned by your emotions?

If you could sit in a frustrating meeting without popping off unnecessarily,

if you could communicate clearly with your romantic partner without being overtaken by frustration,

if you could be afraid of taking risks or getting on airplanes or giving speeches, but do it

anyway. One name for this skill is emotional intelligence.

That phrase was popularized by my friend Daniel Goldman more than 25 years ago.

Danny, which is what his friends call him, is a Harvard-trained psychologist who, along with other contemplative luminaries such as Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and John Cabot-Zinn, and many others, went to Asia back in the

1960s and discovered meditation and then made it a huge part of their lives and careers.

Danny reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for the New York Times for many years, and then in

1995, he released a book called Emotional Intelligence, which became a New

York Times bestseller with more than 5 million copies in print around the world in 40 languages.

It was also listed as one of Time magazine's 25 most influential business management books.

And in this conversation, we talked about the four components of emotional intelligence

and how to develop them.

Impulse control and how it relates to childhood development.

A phenomenon called amygdala hijack.

How emotional intelligence helps us to have more powerful relationships and be attuned

to other human beings, empathy and

relationship management in the age of Zoom. And we talked about something that fascinates me,

...