I take parenting incredibly seriously. I want to be there for my kids and help them navigate the world and develop skills emotional intelligence to enjoy life and I'm lucky to be able to do that and have two healthy normal boys.

I think that animals aren't less intelligent than humans they're just of a different intelligence. We have five million smell-sensitive cells in our nose they have two hundred and fifty million - they can smell emotion. They can smell different types of emotion they just have another type of intelligence.

Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents teachers and with each other carry emotional messages.

When I went on to write my next book Working With Emotional Intelligence I wanted to make a business case that the best performers were those people strong in these skills.

But once you are in that field emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.

Emotion is often what we rely upon to carry us across the unfathomable voids in our intelligence.

The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.

Your intellect may be confused but your emotions will never lie to you.

I've studied a technique called the Sanford Miesner technique that teaches you how to focus. It's mainly about daydreaming. And the technique's really about imaginary circumstances. Using your imagination to sort of daydream about stuff. It makes you emotional in a scene.

I'm an emotional sort of person in general and I have a vivid imagination so I feel the whole spectrum of emotion strongly when I write.