Dual Interviews with Empathy and Emotional Intelligence Experts Helen Riess and Richard Boyatzis at Trident Booksellers & Cafe

This event will feature two leaders in the emotional intelligence and empathy arenas for an exciting exchange of ideas and will show the intersection between The Empathy Effect and Helping Others Change.

About the Books

In The Empathy Effect, Dr. Riess champions the idea that empathy can dramatically change our lives for the better, and in 2012, The New York Times agreed, spotlighting Dr. Riess’s revolutionary empathy training research as the first study to demonstrate that empathy can be taught; this discovery was the answer to 20 years of major media headlines demanding more empathic care from medical professionals.Brilliant, relevant, and timely, The Empathy Effect provides the essential tools to improve every aspect of our lives—from our most intimate relationships to family, work, and community life—and, in turn, promote a more tolerant, inclusive, and peaceful world.

Helping People Change: In this powerful, practical book, Emotional Intelligence expert Richard Boyatzis and Weatherhead School of Management colleagues Melvin Smith and Ellen Van Oosten, present a message of hope. The way to help people to learn and change, they argue, cannot be focused primarily on problems that need to be addressed, but rather, must connect to a person’s positive vision of themselves, to an inspiring dream or goal they’ve long held. This is what great coaches do – they know that humans draw energy from such visions and dreams, which sustains our efforts to change, even through difficult times.

The authors use rich and moving real-life stories, as well as decades of original, published research on coaching and helping relationships, to show how coaching others around their dreams and vision – what they call “coaching with compassion” – opens people up to thinking creatively, to learning and growing in meaningful ways and increases the stickiness of change. In contrast, problem-centered approaches trigger physiological responses that make a person defensive and more closed to new ideas.

About the Authors

Dr. Helen Riess is a psychiatrist and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and directs the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is a core member of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. She has devoted her career to the art and science of healing relationships. Her research has been published in leading medical journals and has won many awards. Dr. Riess’s TEDx talk “The Power of Empathy,” has been viewed by nearly 500,000 viewers.  Her new book, The Empathy Effect  has been licensed in nine foreign countries. In 2012, Dr. Riess Founded Empathetics Inc., an organization that provides evidence-based empathy and communication skills training for healthcare,  education and business. Dr. Riess and her teams are dedicated to transforming systems into compassionate care systems.

Richard E. Boyatzis is Distinguished University Professor of Case Western Reserve University, Professor in the Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science, HR Horvitz Professor of Family Business, and Adjunct Professor in People/Organizations at ESADE. He has a BS in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT, a MS and Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University. Using his Intentional Change Theory (ICT), he studies sustained, desired change at all levels of human endeavor from individuals, teams, organizations, communities and countries, specifically has been researching helping and coaching since 1967. He was ranked #9 Most Influential International Thinker by HR Magazine in 2012 and 2014. He is the author of more than 200 articles on leadership, competencies, emotional intelligence, competency development, coaching, neuroscience and management education. His Coursera MOOCs, including Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence has about a million enrolled from 215 countries. His 9 books include: The Competent Manager; the international best-seller, Primal Leadership with Daniel Goleman and Annie McKee; and Resonant Leadership, with Annie McKee, and Helping People Change: Coaching with Compassion or Lifelong Learning and Growth with Melvin Smith and Ellen Van Oosten. He is Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science and the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology.