Transcript: Dr. Daniel Goleman: “I wrote a book called focus and it rethinks emotional intelligence in terms of something that I’ve always been interested in but didn’t realize was implicit in emotional intelligence – that’s attention. There are three kinds of focus, three kinds of attention, that every leader needs to have mastery. The first is attention to yourself, internal attention, and this of course is essential for the self-management competencies. The second is attention to other people, empathy, tuning in, this is critical for the relationship competencies. The third kind is a larger focus, it’s a focus on the system’s we operate in, the world around us.

I’d like to talk in some detail about that third, but let me talk about attention itself because attention these days is under siege in a way it never ever has been before I think in human history, and the reason is technology. Our computers and email, our mobile phone and all of the apps and all of the new ways of getting information is very useful for anybody, any leader, but it has a downside. The downside is that these same sources of information are sources of distraction.

Someone very wise – a cognitive scientist – said some years ago that information consumes attention and a wealth of information means a poverty of attention. What this means for a leader is that you have to be very smart about what you pay attention to and what you ignore because the capacity for attention in the human brain is very limited – it’s more or less seven plus or minus two digits, for example, a phone number. It means that there’s this bottleneck in attention and if it’s taken up by distraction we have no attention, or little attention left for what matters.

I remember an executive saying whenever my mind wanders in a business meeting I wonder what opportunity I just missed. So, attention is an executives key weapon. It’s the leaders main tool for getting done what you need to do. There are three ways to use it. First is you focus your own attention on yourself. The second is you direct the attention of others toward what you find is important. The third is to put that all in the context of your larger mission, goals and strategy, and that means the third kind of attention which is the system that we operate in.”