Altered Traits

Daniel Goleman: Well actually, mindfulness is a subcategory of meditation. There are many types of meditation, each of which involves some retraining of attentional habits. That's kind of the essence of what any meditation does, and some do it through visualizations or just repeating a sound, a mantra or a phrase over and over.

Mindfulness as meditation means that you create a focus, a capacity to pay attention to one thing, and then use that as a platform for a stance that allows you to watch thoughts and feelings come and go without getting swept up in them.

Rachel Salaman: Can you tell us about your own experiences of meditation and mindfulness, which date back to long before the current popularity of these things?

Daniel Goleman: Long before, in fact. When I was a graduate student in clinical psychology at Harvard I got a pre-doctorate traveling fellowship to India and I ended up staying two years. And I was quite interested in meditation, though my professors at the time thought it was a complete waste. I had begun to meditate as an undergraduate and when I went to India nobody in the West had ever really heard the term "mindfulness" – there was maybe one book with that word in its title, if you can imagine, back then.

Rachel Salaman: It's amazing to think about that now, isn't it?

Daniel Goleman: And I was able to study with one of the world's experts on mindfulness, actually a fellow from Germany who in the 20s went to Sri Lanka and became a Buddhist monk, but he was a scholar and he had translated books about mindfulness and written about it. Later, I was also fortunate enough to go to one of the first mindfulness courses for Westerners, and some of the people who were in that course with me have become the leading teachers in the West of mindfulness or insight meditation, which is the tradition from which it comes.

So I've been involved with mindfulness for a long time and also am very interested in research on it. When I went back to Harvard I told my professors, "You know, this is very important, this is a way to train the mind that we know nothing about in the West and I'd like to study it." My dissertation was on meditation as an intervention, and stress – essentially a way to handle stress better.

Since then I've been tracking the meditation research. My co-author on the book "Altered Traits" (which, by the way, is called "The Science of Meditation" in the UK and Commonwealth countries, and has other titles depending on the language it's been translated into) was at Harvard, and he did his dissertation on a variety of mindfulness and how attention training can change, back then EEG patterns is what he was looking at.

At the time we could only cite three technical articles in the peer-reviewed literature that had anything to do with meditation. Now, when we looked at the whole territory of research we found there are more than 6,000, and for the book we took just the top 60, the ones that are in the very best journals, that have the tightest methodology and so on, and on the basis of that we wrote the book, "Altered Traits."

Rachel Salaman: And why did you decide to write it now in particular?

Daniel Goleman: Well, two things: one, there is certainly a critical mass of good solid findings that tell a story of what's happening scientifically when you meditate (and the longer you meditate). And the other is this upsurge in interest – you know, mindfulness has become a fad, it's in business, it's in schools, it's in people's lives. And we thought that, you know, it's being hyped to some extent, and we wanted to focus on what was really solid.

Rachel Salaman: So what are some of the myths about meditation and mindfulness that you'd like to see dispelled?

Daniel Goleman: Well, you know, I don't make it my business to track every bit of hyperbole about meditation, but in general I think there's a lot of over-promising, particularly of what happens right at the start. Most people, for example in a business context, who learn mindfulness are really beginners and things do happen at the beginning but not everything that's promised.

What we do know from the research is that your attention becomes stronger, you're able to focus even in the midst of multitasking, which is a very useful skill these days for sure. You can remember better, you can learn better.

Students who do mindfulness actually score better on exams. There's also a real benefit for how you handle stress. You become less reactive, triggered less often, and if you do have an emotional hijack, you recover more quickly. These are results that show up pretty much from the start, but the more you practice (say, you have a daily session of mindfulness), the stronger the benefits become.

Rachel Salaman: And how long would that session need to be, do you think, if you had a daily session?

Daniel Goleman: We see results that are measurable right at the beginning in as little as 10 minutes a day. Many people will start with 10 and then increase it slowly, maybe go to 20 or 30, whatever their schedule allows and their interest motivates them to do, but there's a very strong relationship between the number of hours you've practiced over the course of your life and the benefits that accrue.

Rachel Salaman: Now, if we can talk just a moment about the title of your book, which is "Altered Traits," a play on words with "altered states," if I'm not mistaken?

Daniel Goleman: Absolutely, yes.

Rachel Salaman: So could you explain what you mean by that phrase? What traits and how are they altered?

Daniel Goleman: The things I've been telling you about, the better attention or the being less reactive to stress, are signs of altered traits, and what I mean by an altered state is what you experience during the meditation or mindfulness practice session. So you may feel blissful, or you may feel great equanimity, or you might be bored.

But our point is, it doesn't really matter what you feel during the session. The real payoff is how this filters through into the rest of your day. Does it make you better able to focus, does it make you more resistant to stress, does it make you kinder – there are a whole other range of benefits that show up if you do meditations that are tailored to have that benefit. So it's who you become, the traits that characterize you, that we feel, are really the lasting payoff from any mindfulness practice.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, and I think that's hinted at in a quote from your book, which is that, "The most compelling impact of meditation is not better health or sharper business performance, but rather a further reach toward our better nature." So what benefit does that "further reach toward our better nature" bring to our lives and work? Is it just that we generally get on better with people, or is it something more than that?

Daniel Goleman: I think it's more profound. One sign is that you do get on better with people, but the quality of your life is enhanced in several ways. I mentioned equanimity – this is being able to roll with the ups and downs of life, whatever they may be, or being present to the people in your life.

Or, caring about them in a way that expresses itself as helping them out when they are in need (otherwise called compassion) or being able to get what you need to do done, and help other people get what they need to do done.

This of course is very important in the workplace. It's the nature, it's the essence of teamwork, of a coordinated organization. These are lasting changes in people that we feel are signs of a better nature, and of course the ultimate formulae for this are in the great spiritual traditions where cultivating this better side of human nature is a goal – it's a universal goal across every major tradition.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you talk about two paths of meditation, one deep and one wide, which are embodied in different levels, one to five. Could you tell us a little bit more about those two paths?

Daniel Goleman: Well, the way mindfulness is coming into business and actually going into schools. I should mention here I wrote a book called "The Triple Focus" – it's about education. I wrote it with Peter Senge, who is at MIT, and we are forecasting or proposing what we feel the next steps in education should be.

What we propose is that every child get help in paying attention. Paying attention is the root of learning, and if you can't pay attention, you can't learn. And meditation or mindfulness are proven ways to enhance this capacity.

Well, if that goes into every school, that's very wide. On the other hand, if you want to go deep, the deepest practice is by professionals, these are people who devote their lives to this kind of practice, they are monks and nuns and yogis and are very rare in the West.

The Eastern cultures, of course, have been designed to cultivate and value that use of a life, so that you find those practices much more common in Asian cultures, such as India, China before the Communists, Tibet certainly.

Asian cultures have really valued and cultivated and made opportunities for people to be full-time meditators. They go the deepest, and in "Altered Traits" we're able to show the results with very deep practice among 21 Tibetan yogis who were flown over from Europe, from Nepal and India, to Brain Lab at the University of Wisconsin, one by one, and their brains measured, and we find that there you see the most dramatic changes related to meditation.

Rachel Salaman: So you've touched a little bit on some of the research that's coming out about the relationship between science and meditation, but how seriously has the scientific community taken that research over the years?

Daniel Goleman: I would say that there's been an escalating interest. We noticed a dramatic surge within the last five years. Part of this is due to the efforts of a group that Davidson and I were on the board of until recently. It's called the Mind & Life Institute (the Dalai Lama was one of the founders) and it's dedicated to promoting dialog between science and contemplative traditions.

One of the things it does is a summer research institute for graduate students and post-docs in neuroscience and related fields to encourage them to use the best methods to study contemplative practice, and I think that because of that there have been more and more publications in what we call "A level" journals – Science, Nature and so on.

And because of these journals publishing studies about meditation, it makes it OK to study. When I proposed studying meditation at Harvard, my professors were mostly against it. They thought this is crazy, it's a waste of time – that was many decades ago. Now it makes a lot of sense, because the data clearly shows there are changes in the brain, there are surprising changes actually in the genome, at least functionally there are changes at very basic levels of mind, brain and body, and this of course means there might be some very practical applications that come out of this research.

Rachel Salaman: Some people talk about a downside to mindfulness, don't they? They say, for example, it can lead to over-analysis or keep us stuck in the present so we lose sight of our goals. Are there any risks or downsides to it?

Daniel Goleman: Well I'd say those two are rather distortions, those are people who aren't doing it properly, frankly, and I suppose that could happen to people. This, by the way, speaks to the need for a really seasoned teacher. One of the problems I see in how mindfulness has been brought into corporations is that many of the people, too many of the people I should say, who are teaching mindfulness aren't that seasoned themselves.

So, they may not be able to guide people who are brand new to the practice and they may go astray in the ways you've just named. So I think that if you have good instruction, you're very likely to have very positive experiences. There are a very few cases, statistically, of people who have very upsetting experiences during meditation, particularly on deep retreat, full-time retreat, not during daily practice so much at all actually, but these are people who go into it more deeply and what we don't know of course is what the baseline is.

There are people who go to college in freshman year and have very upsetting experiences, or who go into boot camp for the military, so we do know there is a portion of the population who are vulnerable to being triggered by various stressful experiences, whatever they may find stressful.

What we don't know is, is meditation particularly dangerous for a small subset of people, and what are their characteristics? When I say meditation I mean very deep, a week or a month or three months of practice, not the kind of thing people are doing in the business setting where they are doing a few minutes a day.

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Rachel Salaman: So what is the best way to bring meditation or mindfulness practice into the workplace?

Daniel Goleman: Well, I think first of all it should never be forced on people, it should only be offered to employees. Secondly, I think there should be a good solid science base to how it's explained, what the rationale is, what the business case might be for it. Another is that the culture of the workplace should be one that supports people who do choose to try mindfulness.

I was in a… I won't name the company, but I was at a company a little while ago where everyone was in rows and rows staring at their video screens, glued to their computers, and there were two meditation rooms there and someone told me, "Well yes, there are those meditation rooms but if you are seen using them too much you might be fired."

That does not instill the urge to practice mindfulness, so I think another criterion is that the instructor be someone who knows what they're doing, and who can answer questions well. I'd say that there's a wonderful app being prepared at the University of Wisconsin by Davidson's group, it's called The Healthy Minds Institute, which has a three-month course in mindfulness which is very science based and well-instructed, and there are several others.

There is also a whole cadre of mindfulness instructors being prepared to do that, but I would caution anyone who is thinking of bringing mindfulness into their company to be sure that it's brought in in the right way.

Rachel Salaman: So, if someone listening is convinced and wants to do that, what would be the best way for them to present the business case for mindfulness practice to senior management?

Daniel Goleman: If you look at our book and you look at the benefits that accrue right at the beginning, it is very clear, you can easily translate that into a business case because people who can stay focused despite all the distractions in the workplace, people who have better cognitive abilities, people who can handle the stress that's inevitable in any workplace, are going to perform better. I think that's the business case, pure and simple.

Rachel Salaman: When you were putting together this book, what were the most striking research studies that you wrote about?

Daniel Goleman: Well some were, frankly, a complete surprise. One was that seasoned practitioners, people who have been doing this daily for a couple of years, several years, and who go on a retreat once a year, maybe for a week, when they do one day of sitting practice, the genes in their DNA that create inflammation throughout the body, they go quiet; they down-regulate, technically.

This was a complete shock because nobody in genomic science thought that any mental maneuver could possibly have an effect on how genes operate, so that was a stunning finding.

The other surprise was how many benefits show up right at the beginning with mindfulness. We didn't expect that, we didn't expect that just 10 minutes a day right at the beginning would help you focus better.

For example, if you multitask, and by multitask I mean this: you're doing that one thing that's important today and then all of a sudden you think I'd better answer my email. And then you go online and you start looking at Facebook. And you get some texts and you make some phone calls, then you go back to that one thing.

So your concentration, which was very high, is now very low and it takes you quite a while to ramp up again, unless you've done 10 minutes of mindfulness. Then it turns out your concentration stays high when you go back to it. Now that's a huge benefit given the reality of the workplace today, and that shows up right in beginners.

Also, as I mentioned, the ability to be less reactive to stressors, to hassles, to the kinds of things that happen daily, many times a day, actually, to all of us, helps you stay more focused and get your work done. The reason is when we get emotionally hijacked by a stressor, our mind and attention goes to the thing that's upsetting us and we lose track of what it is that we're trying to get done, and this means that you can go back to work mentally quicker, and that's very important. That was a surprise, too.

Rachel Salaman: And who do you see getting the most benefit from your book?

Daniel Goleman: Oh well we designed it actually as, well it's basically 60 reasons to meditate, because every study shows a benefit. So for people who are considering trying mindfulness it presents an array of findings I think are very compelling.

For people who are already doing mindfulness, it suggests a number of scientific reasons to keep going, maybe to do more of it, and so I would say it is really for anyone who has mindfulness or any kind of meditation on their map.

Rachel Salaman: Just broadening out a little bit now, Dan, how does your work on meditation and mindfulness relate to your work on emotional intelligence?

Daniel Goleman: Well it's very interwoven, it turns out. When I wrote the book "Focus," I noted that intrinsic to emotional intelligence is the ability to attend, that awareness is fundamental. In fact there are four parts in my mode: there's self-awareness, there's self-management, there's social awareness or empathy, and then there's relationship management or social skill.

It turns out that the mindfulness practice or meditation generally, they are essentially practices of self-awareness, so that's the first part of emotional intelligence. They definitely strengthen that, and it turns out that the payoff is not only in being able to monitor what's going on inside you and handle it better, but also in self-management, in applying that, which is the second part of emotional intelligence, so that you are better able to manage your upsets and to stay focused on your goals and marshal a positive attitude. And then there's presence to other people.

All of these are payoffs for mindfulness practice, that's the third part of emotional intelligence. Those three parts are what we combine in our relationship skills, so I would say that it's a booster across every part of emotional intelligence.

Rachel Salaman: Obviously, your 1995 book was groundbreaking and massively popular, but what was your personal response to the success of that book and how the term "emotional intelligence" has entered the mainstream?

Daniel Goleman: Well I didn't expect it to be so successful. In fact, I'd already put out another proposal for my next book because I didn't think this book would do much of anything in particular. I was astonished, and I remember having the thought before it came out that if one day I heard two strangers using the phrase "emotional intelligence" and they both knew what it meant, it had become a meme, and I would have succeeded in the goal. So it's been a success far beyond my expectations.

Rachel Salaman: And looking back at your complete body of your work over the last 20 years, what stands out for you as the most relevant and useful for managers today?

Daniel Goleman: I don't know if there's a single lesson because there are so many different parts to emotional intelligence within those four domains – self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship management.

There are a nest of 12 specific competencies that make people outstanding performers, particularly in leadership, and you can have a profile of strengths and limits across those 12 but I think the most common deficit has to do with listening these days.

I think that people are so distracted, so preoccupied, that listening, or simply being present to the other person – which is a basic skill of management, of teamwork, of leadership – is diminishing, and I feel that that's one place that emotional intelligence, particularly coaching, can help enormously.

Rachel Salaman: And I suppose mindfulness practice would help with that too?

Daniel Goleman: Well mindfulness is training in being attentive in the moment, and if there's another person in front of you, hopefully you are attentive to that person.

Rachel Salaman: So, it's all connected. Before you go, Dan, do you have any final words of advice for managers who are struggling to cope with the stresses and overload of today's business environment?

Daniel Goleman: I can think of two things: one is look at your priorities in the day. Do you make time for yourself, do you make time to reflect, do you have a time when you don't need to be answering the phone, answering texts, doing anything other than thinking about what's going on in your life or being with yourself? That, by the way, is one of the benefits of a regular mindfulness practice: it gives you that time.

The second thing is when you are with another person, when you're interacting, when you're on the phone or in person, ask yourself, how present am I?

Rachel Salaman: And that should bring you back to the present?

Daniel Goleman: The question itself can bring you back to the present and it also can lead you to reflecting on what you can do to be more present, more often.

Rachel Salaman: Daniel Goleman, thanks so much for joining us today.

Daniel Goleman: Quite a pleasure, Rachel, thank you.

The name of Dan's book again is "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body." His website can be found here.

You can hear reviews of his books "Focus" and "Emotional Intelligence" in separate Mind Tools Book Insight podcasts. There are some useful articles on mindfulness and meditation on Mind Tools as well, so do please take a look.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye!