The Financial Times has a fun interview today as part of their “Lunch with the FT” series.

Daniel Goleman is the author of bestseller Emotional Intelligence and is now promoting his recent book Social Intelligence.

An quote from the interview:

- The journalist asks, “So how do the rest of us get better?”.

- The answer, he says, is very simple: by listening.

Listening poorly is the common cold of social intelligence. And it’s being made worse by technology. To have a human moment, you need to be fully present. You have to be away from your laptop, you put down your BlackBerry, you end your daydream and you pay full attention to the person you’re with. It may sound rudimentary, but think about how often we just keep multitasking and half pay attention. You can overcome that by becoming mindful of what is happening.

Keep reading the FT article Poetry in emotion.

And Social Intelligence and Mirror Neurons