Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

As every author knows, books never really end – you just stop writing them at some point.  This is especially true for books like mine, which take a science journalist’s approach to major new fields of discovery. The research and its applications that I wrote about in <em>Emotional Intelligence</em>, <em>Social Intelligence</em> and my other books has continued. My own thinking evolves along with the new findings.

That has been a frustration for me: I’ve wanted a way to share with my readers some of my own continuing interests in these areas of science, with their rich implications for our lives. This website lets me do that, to some extent.

Another frustration has been the limits a book places on my ability to probe a field indepth.  So often I have had to boil a stack of articles and books into a few paragraphs or pages in my books, when I would have loved to keep going.

So I’m trying an experiment: the audio series <em>Wired to Connect: Dialogues on Social Intelligence</em>, which lets me explore in more detail the work and thinking of people whose specialty or area of expertise expands on my books. It’s a kind of book extender.

When you were young, which of these did you feel more often:

• No matter what I do, my parents love me.
• I can’t seem to please my parents, no matter what I do.
• My parents don’t really notice me.

The answers to such questions reveal more than about our childhood: they also tend to predict how we act in our closest relationships as adults.

Our childhood shapes our brain in many ways – and so determines our most basic ways of reacting to others — for better and for worse. If we felt well-loved in childhood, we tend to be secure in our relationships – but if not, then we’re more prone to chronic problems. When it comes to the engrained self-defeating habits that we bring to our adult relationships from childhood, understanding why we have these habits in the first place is a first step toward becoming free of their grip.