2/24/2025-EI savant: Dan Goleman

If you know your product inside and out, understand your industry, and communicate value to your prospects as an empathic, caring human being, then you’re on your way to great things.

Interacting with customers always gets your blood flowing faster. But when cortisol starts gushing, it can be hard to control your knee-jerk reactions. The same goes for pushing for what you need inside your org.

Optimal performance occurs when you’re calm and measured. You’ll win any interaction when you rationally process information and manage your reactions.

Sure, go ahead and dial up your enthusiasm and excite your customers, but apply your EI to stay in control and present your best you.

Most sellers fancy themselves as emotionally intelligent (and they are…YOU are), but EI work never ends.

Daniel Goleman, the father of emotional intelligence theory, published Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day last year. The title sounds like it would fit nicely in the Selling section of a bookstore, right?

Today, buy the book!

Consistent EI work will help you strengthen a core superpower.

Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist, author, and science journalist.

He wrote for The New York Times for twelve years, reporting on the brain and behavioral sciences. More importantly, Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence (1995) was on the NY Times best-seller list for eighteen months. (To boot, it’s in print in 40 languages!)

Goleman’s main thesis is that non-cognitive skills can matter as much as IQ for workplace success. ("Amen" from all the fantastic C-student sales-studs out there!)

Don’t interpret his theory as an invitation to revert back to "relationship guy" (or gal). Today’s market requires immense technical and product acumen, AND sales skill dexterity. EI is the glue that holds all requisite skills together and pushes you toward success.

If you understand your industry, know your product inside and out, and communicate value to your prospects as an empathic, caring human being, then you’re on your way to great things.

But don’t expect just to study Goleman or read his new book Optimal and have the light switch move to ON….you gotta work on it.

This basic rule is a good start: THINK before acting, reacting, and responding.

…welcome back from ordering Optimal – you’re gonna be excited to dig in on great content by Dan the EI Man.

As you await the book’s arrival, watch this YT short and appreciate the three stages of EI that might help you recenter your approach with that stupid client or numbskull office mate…

(…wait! That thinking is precisely what needs to be curtailed.)