Optimal

More than twenty-five years on from the huge bestseller Emotional Intelligence, this book reframes the concept's importance for a new era, explaining how to create high-performing individuals, teams, and organisations.

Emotional intelligence is now embedded in our public discourse—an idea so pervasive and important in our work, culture, politics, and society that leaders such as Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams have placed it at the heart of what they do.

Daniel Goleman's bestselling book Emotional Intelligence was the first to coin this idea and bring it to a mass audience. Now, more than a quarter of a century after it was first published, he and Rutgers professor of psychology Cary Cherniss take a fresh look at how emotional intelligence has evolved over the past few decades, reframing its importance in this definitive book.

Beginning with a dissection of what makes for individual success, Goleman and Cherniss then set out how high performance can be cultivated at every level, scaling up the concept to top team performance and outstanding organisations. Building on attributes such as self-awareness, a sense of meaning and emotional balance, high concentration, and 'flow' states, they demonstrate that it is in our optimal moments that our mental clarity shines.