Optimal
How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
In his groundbreaking #1 bestseller Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman revolutionized how we think about intelligence. Now, he reveals practical methods for using these inner resources to more readily enter an optimal state of high performance and satisfaction while avoiding burnout.
There are moments when we achieve peak performance: An athlete plays a perfect game; a business has a quarter with once-in-a-lifetime profits. But these moments are often elusive, and for every amazing day, we may have a hundred ordinary and even unsatisfying days. Fulfillment doesn’t come from isolated peak experiences, but rather from many consistent good days. So how do we sustain performance, while avoiding burnout and maintaining balance?
In Optimal, Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss reveal how emotional intelligence can help us have a great day, any day. They explain how to set a realistic, attainable goal of feeling satisfied that you’ve had a productive day — to consistently work at your ‘optimal’ level. Based on research of how hundreds of people build the inner architecture of having a good day, they sketch what an optimal state feels like, and show how emotional intelligence holds the key to our best performance.
Optimal is the culmination of decades of scientific discoveries bearing on emotional intelligence. Enhanced emotional intelligence pays off in improved engagement, productivity, and more satisfying days. In this book, you’ll find the keys to competence in emotional intelligence, and practical methods for applying this skill set more readily. It will equip you to become a highly effective leader and enable you to build an organizational culture that empowers workers to sustain high performance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Science journalist Goleman (Altered Traits) teams up with Cherniss (Beyond Burnout), a psychology professor emeritus at Rutgers University, to deliver a mostly successful treatise on the benefits of emotional intelligence (EI) in the workplace. They suggest EI is characterized by self-understanding, the ability to "keep disturbing emotions from disrupting" one's activity, and empathy, which helps individuals support coworkers and be good team players. Research illustrates the advantages of EI, as when the authors describe a study that found the most productive teams at an unnamed "large manufacturing plant" were distinguished by the "sense of psychological safety" members established through regular check-ins about each other's needs. Such studies make a persuasive case for EI's importance in the office, but, as Goleman and Cherniss concede, there are "far too few actual experiments on how to design" EI training. The EI programs that do exist, they note, explain the tenets of EI and offer such exercises as asking participants to "track moments you become emotionally hijacked," reflect on what caused the reaction, and think about "what would be a more effective response." Though the advice isn't always actionable, this is a thought-provoking take on what it takes to succeed in business.
