Bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman & Cary Cherniss reveal practical methods for applying the principles of EI to more readily enter an optimal state of high performance and satisfaction, offering a roadmap to being at your best, every day.

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 fleeting, and for every amazing day, we may have a hundred ordinary and even unsatisfying ones. Fulfillment doesn’t come from isolated peak experiences, or elusive ‘flow’ states, 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.

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.

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.

Each year thousands of people enter one of the helping professions. The work they do affects how we live, how we feel, even who we become. Yet an increasingly critical public believes that many of these professionals lack idealism and commitment. This work explores the source of this problem. Based on an in-depth, longitudinal study, it follows a group of social workers, teachers, psychologists, nurses and lawyers over a period of 12 years, beginning with their first year of practice. These professionals describe in their own words what happened to them when their idealism collided with the realities of their work. The process of burnout is described as well as the factors that allow professionals to recover from it. The text charts the changes that occurred in the professionals' attitudes and values, and the resulting positive and negative effects. It also suggests practical policy changes to enhance professional caring in the human services.

For many decades, the conventional wisdom was that emotion has no place in the work world, and the ideal leader is one who approaches problems rationally and unemotionally. However, the reality is that emotion is inevitable when a group of people come together for an extended period of time to work on challenging tasks, and if used effectively, a leader's moods and emotions can be a plus rather than a minus. This book describes how 25 outstanding leaders used emotional intelligence to deal with critical challenges and opportunities. Featuring commentary from the leaders themselves describing how they handled each situation, it helps managers better understand not just what emotional intelligence is, or how to measure it, or how it is linked to bottom-line results: it also shows how real leaders used their emotional intelligence to deal with real situations. The book distills the leaders' experiences into nine strategies that can help any leader or potential leader to be more effective. Each chapter concludes with activities that help readers to apply immediately each of those strategies.

This book is about a group of people who became human service professionals. They were poverty lawyers, public health nurses, high school teachers, social workers, and psychologists. They wanted to serve others, and they began their careers with enthusiasm and commitment, caring and compassion. I originally studied these professionals during their first year of practice. Using in-depth interviews, i learned about the stresses they experienced as their idealism collided with the realities of public schools, legal aid clinics, and mental health centers. I witnessed how, in response to these stresses, they lost much of their idealism and commitment. The study became an examination of early career burnout.

A significant number of public schools are implementing a whole-school approach to school change. School change leaders face a number of questions: - What implementation strategies make whole-school reform work? - What factors work for or against sustainability? - How can committed educators and change agents "scale up" models that are successfully engaging students and promoting their learning and development? Author Cary Cherniss provides answers to these questions by examining the implementation of one particular whole-school reform model: MicroSociety (R), a program founded in 1967 and recognized by the US Department of Education as a whole-school reform model. Profiling in depth the implementation successes and challenges of six MicroSociety schools, the author offers analytical tools and strategies for school leaders attempting to implement and sustain school change. School Change and the MicroSociety (R) Program is a research-based and strategy-driven resource for any school leader interested in cultivating and sustaining successful school change.

A significant number of public schools are implementing a whole-school approach to school change. School change leaders face a number of questions: - What implementation strategies make whole-school reform work? - What factors work for or against sustainability? - How can committed educators and change agents "scale up" models that are successfully engaging students and promoting their learning and development? Author Cary Cherniss provides answers to these questions by examining the implementation of one particular whole-school reform model: MicroSociety (R), a program founded in 1967 and recognized by the US Department of Education as a whole-school reform model. Profiling in depth the implementation successes and challenges of six MicroSociety schools, the author offers analytical tools and strategies for school leaders attempting to implement and sustain school change. School Change and the MicroSociety (R) Program is a research-based and strategy-driven resource for any school leader interested in cultivating and sustaining successful school change.