Optimal by Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss

I finished this book in April 2025. I recommend this book 3/10.

Why you should read this book:

This book dives into emotional intelligence and balance is necessary to achieve optimal state.. However, parts are reputation, or follow up on Daniel Goleman's original Emotional Intelligence book. The book provides research on business and personal experiences from the authors.

Get your copy here.

🚀 The book in three sentences

1. Follow-up on the original Emotional Intelligence book.

2. Emotional Intelligence changes for different generations.

3. As a leader, you have to find your balance, but also look out for each of your team members' states.

   
   

📝 My notes and thoughts

• P17. Here's a list of the subjective elements of being in an optimal state—having a really good day:

  • More creative, seeing obstacles as challenges

  • More productive, turning out high-quality work

  • Feeling good, in an upbeat mood

  • Mentally sharp, making small wins toward a larger goal

  • A positive outlook, committed to your efforts

  • Giving and getting support in relationships

• P39. "I let them know that if they pay attention, the zone will happen as a by-product," Mumford told them. "When they are in the moment and absorbed in the activity, they play at their best." While the flow researchers saw utter absorption in the activity at hand as an outcome of flow, we consider the ability to tune in fully to what's at hand as a doorway into the optimal state. Concentration demands that our distractions be at bay; the more concentrated we are, the fever distraction thoughts and feelings we have—and during our best efforts we are indistractable.

• P57. That ability to regulate our attention, our emotions, and our impulses allows us, for instance, to keep focused on our long-term objectives despite the distractions of the day, week, or year. Grit requires cognitive control—to and extent. While having a goal in mind matters greatly, a mental goalpost in itself may not be sufficient. Adventurer Colin O'Brady completed the Three Poles challenge (reaching the North and South Poles and climbing Mount Everest) and now trains athletes "to relate to their goals wisely." He adds, "As soon as they notice they've been caught up in over-rehearsing, strategizing, or focusing on a future outcome, they can bring themselves back into the moment." This presence to the moment, he says, allows their years of training to take over and gets their mind out of the way. One other sign of achievement competence: taking "smart risks." They are "smart" because the person taking the risk knows he or she has a particular strength—say, having practiced a skill—that is not so apparent to other people. This gives the risk-taker confidence about what they are about to do; entrepreneurs often experience this. But people who just see the risk-taking but not the expertise behind it may think it's not so smart.

• P68. We associate stress with negative emotions like anxiety. But every emotion has its uses, as we noted before, Salovey and Mayer's group often cites research showing that being sad, for instance, enhances accuracy in detail work. In those situations where the relevant information comes from a narrow range—like proofreading a text, or doing the math for our taxes—then negative emotions that put us in a more serious frame of mind are better. Positive emotions tend to let us take in a wider array of information and enhance cognitive efficiency; negative emotions lead to narrowing. That may be why we do better at solving our day-to-day problems and challenges when we are in a better mood. "If information comes from diverse sources," University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson tells us, "the positive emotions enhance" how we do cognitively. That complexity is the usual case in the challenges in our lives. Feeling good—having positive emotions—has an unexpected benefit. Rather than making us complacent (the "fat and happy" theory of life), it turns out that feeling good makes people more likely to take action on big issues, like climate warming.

• P71. There are many routes to finding our emotional balance in the face of stress. Here are some:

  • Find meaning. Having a sense of purpose helps buffer stress because we are able to reappraise negative life events in light of that deeper sense of purpose.

  • Focus on task at hand even in the face of toxic levels of stress. A daily practice of meditation—whether "mindfulness" or some other variety—can help here. If we get upset, a mounting body of research shows, these mental exercises tend to make us less reactive to stress and more resilient—able to recover more quickly.

  • Manage the tug-of-war between work and family. Anyone with a family knows those needs can conflict with work demands. There has always been certain tension between work and the rest of our lives.

  • Change what you can. "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference," implores theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer. That insight applies in spades to how we can handle what stresses us. Sometimes we can better cope by handling our own reactions to a worrisome deadline by getting an extension or enlisting help.

• P73. When it comes to lessening stress itself, there is a specific tool: emotional balance:

  • Deep Breathing. Our breathing can reflect the state of our autonomic arousal: quick and shallow when we are in the fight-or-flight zone, and deep and slow when we are in the body's recovery mode.

  • Gratitude. One way to shift negative thinking to more positive track can be intentionally bring to mind people or aspects of your situation you are grateful for.

• P81. At Harvard Medical School. Residents are urged to make eye contact with their patients, recognize the patient's feelings by reading their facial expressions, and listen attentively and without judgment. Even better: name what the patient feels, and respond in a way that shows understanding, in a soothing tone. That is good advice for any parent or leader. Empathy represents a quality we all want in our loved ones—our spouses, our friends, our family—and in anyone we regularly spend time with. Take the world of work.

• P88. Our colleague Richard Boyatzis makes this recommendation to enhance your organizational awareness: "Reflect in your next meeting on who in the room has the most power and next most and so on until you notice the person with the least. Who is listening to others? To whom are they listening? Who are the leaders? Who are the helpers or coaches?"

• P92. Scientists find that helping someone else activates the feel-good dopamine circuits in the brain of the person who helps. That may be the neural explanation for a bit of wisdom from the Danish philosopher Soren Kirkegaard: "The door to happiness always opens outward."

• P92. For instance, an executive who lacks this outlook might well dismissively rationalize the stress employees are under and ignore their suffering. On the other hand, one who has compassion would do something to ease that stress—perhaps give practical support, change their circumstances, or help them develop more resilience. Some key points to remember about empathy:

  • There are three kinds, each based on different brain circuitry.

  • Cognitive empathy lets us understand how a person thinks, the language they use, and their perspective. This lets us message them in ways they will be comprehended.

  • Emotional empathy means we sense how the person feels. Having this kind of empathy means we can make our messages to that person land with impact.

  • Empathic concern means we also care about that person. Showing this kind of empathy enhances the person's trust and respect for us, and strengthens our relationship.

  • Organizational awareness takes empathy to a larger area, applying social intelligence to read the networks of friendship and influence behind the formalities, whether in a family or a business.

  • Seeing a given group as "other"—creating a divide—inhibits empathy. When empathy withers, so does the relationship.

• P98. Unfortunately, many leaders are not aware of how they are giving feedback—or even if they are giving it at all. In one study, supervisors were observed interacting with their staff during the day, including how often they gave feedback to their staff. There was feedback in only about 2 percent of their interactions. But when the supervisors were asked how often they thought they had given feedback, they said on average about 10 percent of the time—and they all felt that they should be giving feedback even more. Needless to say, the supervisors were dumbfounded when they learned how little feedback they were actually giving.

• P103. The path to being able to inspire—whether a few or multitudes—starts in the same place. First, you need to feel inspired yourself. Visionaries give voice to a mission they wholeheartedly believe in. This gives conviction to their words, so they naturally express that mission from the heart to the heart—that is, in a bull's-eye way that hits home with their audience. This, of course, draws on both self-awareness and empathy, tuning in to other people. When someone feels deeply moved and can articulate that feeling in ways that resonate with listeners, they create a positive emotional field.

• P129. At first, researchers thought that employee burnout was due to personality styles like perfectionism. Now it's clear that your relationship with your boss matters more. When leaders managed their own emotions and provided empathic support to others—like Jessica Andrews's boss pushing back with the sheriff—employees can withstand high levels of stress without burning out. as one executive told us, "Part of my job is to protect my people from the craziness higher up in the organization."

• P132. Business schools do little or nothing to prepare MBAs for handling this emotional burden. Organizations, on the other hand, can intervene by creating a safe space for leaders where they can freely express their emotions—where it's "okay to be not okay." One experiment found that meeting regularly with leadership peers to air personal and professional troubles in a confidential setting not only relieved this emotional pressure but also increased the participant's emotional intelligence. In general, helping leaders make gains in their emotional intelligence gives them a skill set to better deal with the challenge of emotional labor. Emotional intelligence matters the most among leaders whose positions require they handle well their own emotions and those of the people they work with.

• P139. For emotional self-management, a study of high-performing leaders found, was adapting an "inquiring mindset." You can sharpen your ability for this via a simple mental exercise. Bring to mind a real dilemma, from work or your personal life, that's emotionally charged for you. Without editing what you write, just jot down a stream of consciousness that comes to mind about what you think might be going on. Consider what might be making the other person (or people) involved act that way. Then ask yourself, "Could I somehow be triggering them? If so, what might I be doing?" And then, "What else might be going on?" The goal here is not to "solve" the problem, but simply to widen your perspective on it—to broaden your emotional awareness and understanding of the situation by considering different vantage points.

• P140. "Active listening" can help in these difficult moments. You can practice this skill with a learning partner, someone you know well, and with whom you feel comfortable. Ask them to tell you about something at work or home that made them happy, sad, anxious, or angry. As they tell you about it, focus on what they are telling you. To help you better understand, you can use the prompts like:

  • What's that like for you—tell me more.

  • What was going on for you when that happened?

  • What did you feel or think about that?

  • What might someone else not know about this situation?

  • What's your perspective on that?

  • What else can you tell me?

• P155. The CEO thought they could do better when it came to DEI, and so his vice president of diversity and inclusion invited a trusted external colleague to help develop a DEI program based on emotional intelligence. The program started with a half day just for their seven senior vice presidents, focusing on an exercise that would show that each of them had been excluded at some point in their lives. The exercise began by asking a series of questions, such as "Have you experienced someone making assumptions about you because of the way you look or talk or something else?" One of the participants, a man from Texas, told the group that "the minute people heard my accent, they deducted twenty IQ points." After seeing how all of them had experienced exclusion and bias and could remember how it felt, they were trained in a methodology developed by Consortium member Stephen Kelner, deliberately designed to enhance their empathy on issues of inclusion and exclusion, exploring each other's stories with neutral questions like "What were you feeling? What were you thinking?"