About Daniel Goleman

Daniel Goleman is a well-known psychologist with a global reputation. He often gives talks to professionals, business groups, and students on college campuses. As a science writer, Goleman spent many years covering brain science and human behavior for The New York Times. His 1995 book Emotional Intelligence stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for 18 months. It has sold over 5 million copies and has been translated into 40 languages. The book became a bestseller in many parts of the world. Beyond emotional intelligence, Goleman has written about topics like self-deception, creativity, openness, meditation, emotional learning, eco-literacy, and the environment.

Harvard Business Review described emotional intelligence as a groundbreaking idea that challenged the belief that IQ alone measures ability. They included his article What Makes a Leader in their list of ten essential reads. TIME Magazine listed Emotional Intelligence as one of the top 25 most important business books. The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Accenture Institute for Strategic Change also named Goleman one of the top business thinkers.

Goleman helped start the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which was first based at the Yale Child Studies Center and is now at the University of Illinois at Chicago. CASEL aims to bring proven emotional learning programs to schools around the world.

He also co-leads the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University. This group connects researchers and professionals to explore how emotional intelligence leads to workplace success.

Goleman is a board member of the Mind & Life Institute, which supports conversations and research between scientists and meditation experts. He has brought together the Dalai Lama and scientists for deep discussions that led to the books Healthy Emotions and Destructive Emotions. He is now editing a new book from their latest meeting, which focused on ecology, interconnection, and ethics.

His recent book Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence brings together key parts of his earlier writing and includes his popular Harvard Business Review articles, such as What Makes a Leader? and Leadership That Gets Results. This book clearly shows his ideas on leadership.

Another of Goleman’s newer works, The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights, looks at recent brain research. It covers how the brain relates to creativity, peak performance, leadership connections, and how people can grow their emotional intelligence.

In his 2009 book Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything, Goleman explains how new technology could make the hidden effects of our purchases visible. He says this kind of “radical transparency” could help shoppers choose products that are better for health, the environment, and society. This shift in buying habits could lead to better product standards over time.

Goleman’s work in science journalism has earned him several awards. These include the Washburn Award for science writing, a Lifetime Career Award from the American Psychological Association, and being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his efforts to share science with the public.

In His Own Words

I was born on March 7, 1946, in Stockton, California, right at the start of the post-WWII baby boom. I was likely conceived around the time of Victory in Europe Day, which marked the end of the war in Europe on June 6, 1945. My parents were both college teachers. My father taught humanities – including Latin and world literature – at what later became San Joaquin Delta Community College. The college library is named after him. My mother worked as a social worker and also taught sociology at what is now the University of the Pacific.

Possibly because I was student body president in high school, I received a leadership scholarship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to attend Amherst College, though I’d never been to New England. I later transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, during my junior year through Amherst’s Independent Scholar program, which was new at the time. I spent part of my senior year there, too, before returning to Amherst to graduate. While majoring in anthropology at Berkeley, I had the chance to learn from several incredible professors, including a graduate seminar with Erving Goffman, who taught about social rituals. Back at Amherst, I completed my honors thesis on mental health from historical, anthropological, and social viewpoints. I graduated magna cum laude – something that seemed unlikely given how poorly I did in my first year.

Thanks to a scholarship from the Ford Foundation, I went on to Harvard to study clinical psychology through the Department of Social Relations, which combined psychology, sociology, and anthropology. I liked the idea of studying the mind from different fields. My main mentor was David C. McClelland, best known for his work on achievement motivation. Around that time, he was also developing ways to identify what sets high performers apart from others – an idea I would revisit later in my career.

With support from McClelland and a Harvard traveling fellowship, I studied in India, focusing on ancient psychological systems and meditation practices found in Asian religions. I had already started meditating back in my junior year at Berkeley and was fascinated to see how ideas about the mind had been practiced and developed for thousands of years – ideas I had never encountered in any psychology class. When I returned to Harvard, my doctoral research looked at how meditation affects stress.

I later received a postdoctoral grant from the Social Science Research Council to continue this work in Asia, spending time in India and Sri Lanka. From this research, I wrote my first book, The Meditative Mind, which explored my studies on meditation.

Back at Harvard, I became a visiting lecturer and taught a course on the psychology of consciousness. It was a hot topic in the 1970s, and the class grew so large that it had to be moved to one of the biggest lecture halls on campus.

On McClelland’s recommendation, I got a job at Psychology Today, which was a major magazine back then. The editor, T. George Harris, hired me. I hadn’t planned to go into journalism – I always assumed I’d be a college professor like my parents – but I found I really enjoyed writing. Working at the magazine gave me a crash course in journalism, which ended up shaping the rest of my career.

In 1984, I joined The New York Times to report on psychology and related areas. I worked there for twelve years. I learned a lot from my editors and fellow writers on the science desk, and the job gave me great exposure and access. Still, I often wanted to write about ideas that didn’t always fit what the paper considered newsworthy. This was especially true when it came to new research on emotions and the brain. I had covered bits of it over time but felt the topic deserved a full book. That’s how Emotional Intelligence came to be. To my surprise, the book became a huge hit. I got so many invitations to speak that I eventually had to leave the Times to focus on the work inspired by the book.

One big idea from the book was that schools should include emotional learning in their lessons. While writing Emotional Intelligence, I teamed up with Eileen Growald and Tim Shriver to help make that happen. In 1993, we co-founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), led by Roger Weissberg. It began at Yale’s Child Studies Center and later moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago. CASEL played a key role in starting the social-emotional learning (SEL) movement. Now, SEL programs are used in thousands of schools worldwide. Research shows that SEL not only helps children develop social and emotional skills but also reduces problems like violence, drug use, and teen pregnancy. It also boosts behavior and attitudes toward learning. Most importantly, academic performance improves by 12 to 15 percent on average.

To my surprise, business leaders also became very interested in emotional intelligence. That led me to write Working With Emotional Intelligence, published in 1998. I returned to the kind of research McClelland had started, which was now widely used in big companies. I reviewed studies across many organizations – from PepsiCo to the U.S. government – looking at what skills set top performers apart. This research became the basis for my Harvard Business Review article What Makes a Leader?, which became their most-requested reprint at the time. It showed how interested business professionals were in the concept.

As I continued studying job performance, I realized that the quality of data used in workplace decisions was often weak. Around then, I co-founded the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, which I co-lead with Cary Cherniss from Rutgers’ graduate psychology program. Like CASEL, the Consortium promotes research, this time on how emotional intelligence impacts work performance.

I found the link between emotional intelligence and leadership especially powerful. Along with Richard Boyatzis – a fellow Harvard grad student now teaching at Case Western – and his former student Annie McKee, who runs the Teleos Institute, we wrote Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence.

Although my meditation practice has been on and off since my time in Asia as a grad student, I stayed connected with that world. Through my friends Adam Angle and Francisco Varela – founders of the Mind and Life Institute – I helped organize a discussion with the Dalai Lama in 1990 about health and emotions. That became the book Healthy Emotions. Ten years later, I organized a second dialogue about what makes certain emotions harmful. I told that story in my book Destructive Emotions.

I’m still writing today from the home in the Massachusetts hills that I share with my wife, Tara. My two sons from a previous marriage live nearby, along with my grandchildren.

While bios tend to focus on a person’s public life, I’ve found that over time, my private life has become even more important. These days, I enjoy not having to rush around so much. What brings me happiness now isn’t how well a book sells but being part of meaningful projects and spending time with people I love.

Tara and I often go on meditation retreats or travel to places that enrich our lives. The simple things – a walk by the ocean, playing with my grandchildren, or a heartfelt chat with a friend – mean more to me now than awards or achievements.

As I wrote in Social Intelligence, we get energy from being around others, especially those we love. These close bonds are a powerful source of renewal. The brain-to-brain connection between a grandparent and child, a couple, or good friends has real value. The takeaway is clear: take care of your relationships.

My Father, Irving Goleman

The recent rededication of the Irving Goleman Library at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California, inspired me to write this in memory of my father.

Irving Goleman, my father, was born in 1898 in Kansas City, Missouri, to immigrant parents. He was 48 when I was born, and I was just 15 when he passed away in 1961. When I was invited to speak at the reopening of the newly renovated Irving Goleman Library at San Joaquin Delta College, I saw it as a chance to go through his papers and reconnect with who he was. One of my earliest memories of him is waking up at 4 a.m. and seeing him already up – reading, writing lectures, and grading student work. I’d ask for a glass of water and fall back asleep. He was deeply committed to teaching, and his former students say he was a powerful and engaging speaker.

His main course was “World Literature: Autobiography of Civilization,” which covered writings from ancient to modern times from all parts of the world. He didn’t just stick to well-known literary classics – he also included myths, oral stories, fairy tales, and folk songs. While going through his old metal file cabinet, I discovered something unique about this class: personalized assignments for each student written on 3x5 index cards.

The first assignment he gave was an autobiography titled “Who Am I?” Based on the student's responses, he would then create a reading list tailored to their life experiences and challenges. For example, a student named Emilie was given the topic “A Study of Conflicts in the Soul of Womanhood” and assigned readings like Shakespeare’s Othello and Antony and Cleopatra, Racine’s Phaedra, Ibsen’s Heda Gabler, and O’Neill’s Strange Interlude.

Another student explored “Business Ethics and Literature as Social Critique,” reading books like Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. One student named Blondell was given the topic “Six Plays and Three Playwrights in Search of Blondell.”

I’ve met some of his former students during 50th reunions at the University of the Pacific, where he also taught, and many said he was the only class they still remembered. Jazz legend Dave Brubeck and his wife Iola were among his students. Years later, Dave wrote an oratorio titled Light in the Wilderness, which he dedicated to my father, along with two other musical mentors.

Irving’s deep reading was a natural match for his field, philology – a blend of literature, history, and language studies. He studied ancient languages like Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. While attending UC Berkeley, he became friends with Peter Boodberg, a brilliant Russian immigrant who would go on to master over 30 Asian languages, write a Chinese-English dictionary, and establish Berkeley’s Asian Studies department. They remained close friends for life.

In the 1930s, during his time as a graduate student at Yale, Irving became the first Hillel adviser at a time when elite schools openly discriminated against and used quotas. He cared deeply about fairness and never accepted stereotypes. One of his favorite sayings, in Latin, was that being human means nothing human is foreign to us. Long after his death, we learned that during the 1940s, when Japanese Americans were being sent to internment camps, he gave a talk to one group the night before they were taken away, letting them know there were Americans who stood with them and knew they weren’t the enemy.

In 1935, Irving was hired from Yale to teach at what began as the lower division of the College of the Pacific and later became Stockton Junior College. He believed in a mission: to offer quality education to people who couldn’t afford expensive private schools. He saw the growing community college system as a way to give more people access to learning.

He took this mission seriously. In one comment he wrote on a student’s paper, he urged her to help fight the cynical materialism of the time. He encouraged her to still believe in peace, love, and deep understanding. He said those who care about humanity should stay grounded by learning all they can about the full range of human nature – both the good and the bad – but also hold on to the belief that values like spirit, compassion, and hope are more important than cold logic, playing it safe, or focusing only on personal gain.

My Mother, Fay Goleman

My mother lived through nearly a century of major social changes and in her own quiet way, helped shape some of them. She was born in Chicago in 1910 to immigrant parents. Her father came from an area of Russia that is now Belarus. After arriving in the U.S., he worked in the textile industry, first as a labor organizer and later as a factory manager. Her mother, Emma Levinson Weinberg, was orphaned young and raised by cousins. Before leaving Russia, Emma – taught to read by her father – risked her life by gathering groups of peasants in secret to read materials that encouraged rebellion against the Czar, which was punishable by death. She later escaped to America.

Fay, my mother, grew up surrounded by political discussion and intellectual curiosity. Her Chicago neighborhood was filled with Russian immigrant thinkers. One of her early inspirations was Jane Addams, co-founder of Hull House, a pioneering social center that helped poor immigrant families and became the model for a movement of settlement houses.

Fay earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago and went on to complete a Master’s in Social Work at Smith College. In 1932, she married my father, Irving, who was a struggling grad student at Yale at the time. While he worked toward his degree in philology, Fay worked as the social secretary to the wife of Yale’s president, James Rowland Angell.

During those years, Fay also joined the birth control movement started by Margaret Sanger, which later became Planned Parenthood. Much like her own mother’s secret meetings back in Russia, Fay helped lead illegal, private classes for women on family planning.

In 1935, my parents drove to California in a Model A Ford with another couple. The trip took several weeks back then. Both joined the faculty at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. Fay spent the next 40 years teaching in the Sociology and Education departments and started the clinical services program there.

I remember as a kid in the 1950s I was the only one among my friends whose mom worked full-time, not just my dad. That was rare in those days, especially compared to now, when most families have two working parents. Having lived through the women’s suffrage movement and the right to vote being won in 1919, Fay became a lifelong advocate for women's equality. Throughout her life, she often broke new ground. She started by being the first female editor of her high school yearbook. In 1972, she became the first Chair of the Affirmative Action Committee at UOP and was honored with the University’s Susan B. Anthony Award in 1989.

When I was in Sunday School, held in an old building next to our synagogue, Fay noticed it was unsafe. She wrote a strongly worded letter to the board and hand-delivered it to all 18 members. Her letter kicked off a campaign that led to a brand-new temple and Sunday School building. That letter is still displayed in the lobby today.

Fay was always involved in local causes. I have so many childhood memories of her heading to meetings and events. As a board member of the Stockton Community Council, she helped start programs like the Visiting Nurse Association, a center for seniors, a facility for people with disabilities, services for those with developmental challenges, and the construction of the Stockton Public Library. At different times, she was president of the San Joaquin County Community Council and served on the boards of the County Public Welfare Association, the PTA Foundation, and our synagogue. She also traveled to Sacramento for state committees on mental health and youth services. When a riot broke out in a girls’ prison, she served on the committee that investigated the incident and pushed for changes. My mom took her community work seriously – she was always in motion.

Every Sunday, she spoke on the phone with her brother, Alvin Weinberg, a physicist who led Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 25 years. Alvin was one of the early voices supporting alternative energy. He eventually lost his job after a corporate takeover because he kept warning that private companies running nuclear power plants might cut corners on safety and that the industry needed a better way to manage nuclear waste. Fay and Alvin kept up their weekly phone calls for over 50 years until he passed away in 2006 at age 91.

Fay died just a few months before her 100th birthday in the same room where my father had passed from cancer nearly 50 years earlier. When my sisters and I packed up their house, we went through their papers and sorted their big, diverse book collection. As we shared stories from our childhood, I felt a deep appreciation for our parents. They raised us in a home filled with love, a strong sense of justice, a drive to help others, and a passion for learning.