In My Own words…..
I was born in Stockton, California, on March 7, 1946. The leading tip of the tidal wave of postwar baby boomers (I must have been conceived just about the time of V-E day, the end of World War II in Europe, June 6, 1945). My parents were college professors; my father taught in the humanities, including Latin and a course on world literature at what became San Joaquin Delta Community College-the library there is named after him; my mother was a social worker who taught in the sociology department of what is now the University of the Pacific.
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gave me a scholarship for leadership at Amherst College in distant New England, which was a place I had never seen before. Because, in part, of culture shock and, too, taking advantage of the newly created Amherst Independent Scholar program transferred to the University of California at Berkeley for my junior year and part of my senior year, graduating from Amherst. At Berkeley, where I was an anthropology major, I was fortunate to have several remarkable professors, including a graduate seminar with the brilliant sociologist Erving Goffman on rituals of social interaction. When I returned to Amherst, I wrote my honors paper on mental health from historical, anthropological, and social perspectives, graduating magna cum laude—a miracle given my disastrous academic performance there during my freshman year.
The Ford Foundation was kind enough to grant me a scholarship to Harvard, where I entered the program in clinical psychology in what was then the Department of Social Relations. It was an interdisciplinary department including anthropology and sociology together with psychology, and I was attracted to the idea of studying the human mind from an interdisciplinary perspective. My main mentor there was David C. McClelland, best known for his theory of the drive to achieve. Just at this time McClelland was developing and championing methods for assessing the competencies that distinguished star performers from average—a body of research I was to return to later in my career.
With the help of McClelland and a Harvard predoctoral traveling fellowship, I spent some time studying in India, where my interest lay in the ancient systems of psychology and the accompanying meditation practices of Asian religions. I had been a meditator since my junior year in Berkeley and was intrigued by finding theories of the mind and its development that were still in active use after two thousand years or more which had never been mentioned in any psychology course I had taken. When I returned to Harvard, my doctoral research was on meditation as an intervention in stress arousal.
I then received a postdoctoral grant from the Social Science Research Council to return to Asia and continue my studies of these ancient psychologies, spending time both in India and Sri Lanka. I wrote what became my first book, now called The Meditative Mind, summarizing my research on meditation.
I went back to Harvard as a visiting lecturer teaching a course on the psychology of consciousness—a subject that was just then getting everybody’s interest, in the 1970s. The class became so large that it was moved from a small room to one of the biggest lecture halls on campus.
After some months at Harvard on the recommendation of McClelland, I was offered a job at Psychology Today, then a major magazine, by T. George Harris, the editor. This was a jog in my career path not anticipated; I had assumed I would be a college professor like my parents. But writing appealed to me, and at the magazine, I went through a tutorial in journalism that was to set the course for the rest of my career.
I was recruited by the New York Times to cover psychology and related fields, so in 1984 I began a twelve-year sojourn. Much was learned about science journalism from my editors and colleagues, a talented crew on the science desk, and the Times offered remarkable access and visibility. However, I found that my desire to write about impactful ideas pushed me into avenues that sometimes didn’t match the agenda of the news for the Times. It was most so regarding the goldmine of research findings on emotions and the brain, covered by me piecemeal through the years for the times. I thought the topic deserved to be a book, and thus Emotional Intelligence came to be. To my surprise, the book became a bestseller. I received so many requests to lecture that I had less and less time for writing in the Times. I finally left the paper to devote my efforts to the message of the book.
Included on this list was the belief that schools should teach emotional literacy along with a traditional curriculum. As I wrote Emotional Intelligence, I spoke with a group including Eileen Growald and Tim Shriver about this. In 1993 we cofounded the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning with Roger Weissberg, who was at the time working at Yale Child Studies Center, then moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago. This collaboration catalyzed the SEL movement so that life skill programs are now commonplace in thousands of schools all over the world. Equally important, rigorous studies are now yielding evidence that SEL not only enhances children’s social-emotional skills but also decreases risks such as violence, substance abuse, and undesired teen pregnancies while making youngsters better-behaved and more positive in their attitudes toward learning. Even more impressively, they improve their academic achievement test scores by an average of 12 to 15%.
I was surprised when there was a lot of interest in emotional intelligence within the business community. This took me to write Working With Emotional Intelligence, published in 1998 and returned me to the research tradition spawned by David McClelland, which had, by then, become quite common in most large organizations. This allowed me to survey studies of the competencies that distinguished outstanding performers done independently in a large range of organizations PepsiCo to the U.S. Federal Government. It provoked my writing an article in the Harvard Business Review called “What Makes a Leader?
” That paper became the most-requested reprint that the Review had ever experienced up to that time, a measure of the interest the readers had in the concept. My immersion in research on work performance led me to realize that all too often the quality of data on which business people based decisions left much to be desired. About this time, I co-founded the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, which I direct with Cary Cherniss of the Graduate Program in Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers.
The Consortium has a parallel mission to the SEL collaborative: it catalyzes research on the contribution that emotional intelligence abilities make to workplace effectiveness.
What particularly interests me is the role of emotional intelligence in leadership. Collaborating with Richard Boyatzis, who was at one time a fellow graduate student with McClelland himself and now teaches in the business school at Case Western, and his former student Annie McKee, whom he co-founded in collaboration with to lead the Teleos Institute consulting firm, I wrote Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence. Since my long sojourn in Asia as a grad student, I have been an on-and-off meditator. It was through my friends Adam Angle and Francisco Varela, who had founded the Mind and Life Institute to foster dialogues between the Dalai Lama and scientists, that in 1990 I organized a round on the topic of health and emotions, which became the edited book Healthy Emotions.
Ten years later, I sponsored another such dialogue, this time focused on what constitutes a destructive emotion. This I documented in Destructive Emotions.
I continue writing from our home in New York where my wife, Tara Bennett-Goleman, and I live. Our two sons from previous marriages reside within an easy driving distance from here, as do our grandchildren.
While a bio like this focuses on one’s public life, over the years my private life has become increasingly important to me, especially as the years permit me to spend less time running around and more time just being. What satisfies me has little to do with how well one or another book does—though the good works I participate in continue to matter much. My wife and I also do workshops together. We try to use as much of our free time in meditation retreats or traveling together to enjoy the places that nurture the same part of our lives. A walk on the beach, playing with my grandchildren, or simply having good conversations with friends can have greater appeal to me than professional honors or ambition.
