A: If there’s any topic that arouses the amygdala – the brain’s center for hope and fear – it’s money.  The connection between emotions and thinking about financial decisions is the focus of the relatively new field of neuroeconomics. These brain scans typically show how irrational we really are while making what we think are rational decisions – especially about money.

In Working With Emotional Intelligence I wrote about research done at a branch of American Express that helped people invest their retirement savings.  In work led by Doug Lennick, financial advisors were given some training in basic EI skills like self-awareness and empathy. These advisors were then better able to raise difficult questions with clients, and so help them make more sound decisions about how best to invest. They could sense their own anxiety, and the uneasiness of their clients, and bring it up rather than try to ignore it.

A: There’s a good reason your best ideas come to you in the shower or while walking your dog: the mind makes more associations while in a relaxed state. Creativity comes from finding fresh connections, and when you relax your brain goes into an alpha wave state that activates your right hemisphere. The right hemisphere makes more and wider connections to the rest of the brain than does the left, which is active when we are task-focused.

When you are practicing mindfulness, your stance toward the contents of your stream of awareness is neutral: your worst fear and your best creative insight are supposed to be treated the same – you just note them and let them go.  As Jon Kabat-Zinn (an old friend) has shown, this change in our relationship to our thoughts has huge benefits for many people who suffer from chronic disease or intractable pain. And a stream of new clinical benefits from mindfulness-based stress reduction, which Jon developed, continues to be discovered.

One area that strict mindfulness may inhibit, though, is creative insights. You may get into a relaxed brain state while practicing mindfulness, and have Aha! moments, but if you are rigorous in following the instructions, you are supposed to just let these go.  When I first tried mindfulness while in my 20s with a teacher in India, I told him I was frustrated that I’d get a great idea, but have to just let it go. He advised me to keep a notepad nearby and make a quick note if I had a fantastic insight, then just continue with mindfulness and follow the idea up afterward.

There are, of course, many ways to get into a relaxed state. Jon Kabat-Zinn and I collaborated on some research years ago on which relaxation methods worked best for which people – not everyone, for instance, relaxes best with yoga or with meditation. That’s why I made “Relax” which gives instructions in six different relaxation methods, so folks can try out several and then stick with the one that appeals most to them.

A: Leadership is Influencing people to take action.  In the workplace, leadership is the art of getting work done through other people.  Leadership can be widely distributed within an organization – most everyone leads at some time or other, if not all the time.  And it’s highly situational: anyone might step forward to lead, given the right circumstances.

A: This sounds like a wonderful way to help kids develop both their analytic skills and some key emotional intelligence abilities, like self-management.  In helping kids manage their feelings about winning and losing, you might consider using some cognitive reframing — that is, redefining the situation in a better way for them.  So you might talk about how many games you played at their age, and how even when you lost you learned valuable lessons that helped you win later. Or you might help them see every game as a chance to master specific moves or sequences of moves, and that the overall outcome is not that important at this point.  In other words, tell stories that help them care less about winning and losing these particular games, and make the process of learning more important.

A: Yes, the stages are well-defined, and have been known to developmental psychologists for many years.  So an EI ability like empathy begins with early roots in infancy, grows among toddlers, and develops further as a child brain matures throughout childhood and the teen years. This is the basis of social-emotional learning, which uses school-based programs to ensure that every child gets the EI lessons they need at the right time and in the right way to foster their emotional and social development. See the outstanding work of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning particularly the developmental standards they put together for the State of Illinois.

A. I wouldn’t put it exactly that way. You need to be more specific about what you mean by “positive” and “negative”. For example, in my books I’ve reviewed much research on workplace climate that shows a more positive emotional atmosphere fosters better performance, and so does positive mood on teams. And then there’s the crucial emotional impact of an emotionally intelligent leader in creating that positive emotional climate.   Much of this research is reviewed in the new collection of my writings, Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence.

A: A virtual office makes great sense in your case, and can be quite workable.  The key will be balancing some in-person time, when you gather everyone together for some days together to plan, generate objectives, divide functions clearly, and so on.  But during that face time there’s another crucial goal: having down time to get to know each other.  That will make the virtual part work better. The expert on this is Clay Shirky. I had a conversation with him about the pitfalls and how to avoid them, available as a downloadable audio conversation.

It depends. There is much to be said for a spirit of cooperation, and getting along – top-performing teams, for example, thrive on harmony. On the other hand, when this means turning a blind eye to major ethical wrongs, then avoiding action is unethical.  We need people willing to speak the truth, even to power.

A: Getting followers’ reports on a leader is one of the best ways to guage her performance. Even if objective metrics like hitting quarterly numbers look good, how a leader hits the target matters enormously in the long run: a tyrannical boss may reach short-term objectives, but the attrition of talent and drop in morale will hurt longer term. There are, for example “kiss-up-kick-down” types who are charming to their own boss but hell to work for.  The best tool for getter followers to rate a boss is a confidential 360-degree questionnaire, one they can fill our anonymously, and with the data from everyone aggregated so no one can be identified. With that kind of honesty, you can get a more accurate picture of how a boss operates in human terms.

A: The answer is in your question: fear itself, in all its forms, is the enemy of great performance – not just in design, but in any domain. The fundamental reason: when the brain’s circuitry for fear, worry, and anxiety takes over, it paralyzes the executive functions of the brain, the parts we use for thinking, creating, and execution of our plans.  So the key lies in managing fear. For this, the EE self-management competencies are the answer, particularly emotional self-control.