Peter James Quotes

Novice leaders often respond dramatically to provocations.

I believe the greatest asset a head of state can have is the ability to get a good night’s sleep.

I actually met a cop who worked with street gangs. I wanted to understand what drives someone who deals with very hardened criminals on a daily basis. How do you turn that off when you go home at night?

I'm fine around other people's feelings. It doesn't make me nervous or anxious.

I have always been able to handle situations well once they've happened to me.

We need better police training.

As a comic and as a nurse, it's important to look calm on the surface when you're absolutely crapping yourself inside. So, if someone is waving a machete at you, which has happened to me when I was a nurse, it's important to make that person feel that you're in control.

I think for leadership positions, emotional intelligence is more important than cognitive intelligence. People with emotional intelligence usually have a lot of cognitive intelligence, but that's not always true the other way around.

I've had to deal with all different types of situations - positive and negative and extremes of both.

There is a time in the life of every predicament where it is ripe for resolution. Emotions provide the cue to act when a problem is big enough to see, yet still small enough to solve. By understanding your emotions, you can move adeptly through your current challenges and prevent future ones.

People tend to become more emotionally intelligent as they age and mature.

In most job interviews, people say they are looking for people skills and emotional intelligence. That's reasonable, but the question is, how do you define what that looks like?

Being a 911 operator means balancing seemingly contradictory skills. On one hand, operators have to be fanatically precise and well-organized. On the other, they must be able to establish rapport with panicky callers.

What police do is not really about force. Police preserve peace and order principally by educating, leading, persuading people to cooperate in a peaceful community. Any veteran officer will tell you that the essential police skill is talking to people. That is especially true for dealing with young people, who ... no one else really talks to at all.

One important lesson I learned over and over is that, when you walk into any troubled organization, there is a delicate balance between expressing human empathy and yet not passively sweeping hard truths under the rug.

You really have to act on the force, too. You're involved in a hundred things a day, and you have to react in a hundred different ways, depending on what's going on. And you learn that as you go through your career, how you handle certain situations, interrogations, how you carry yourself. There's a kind of acting to it.

As a manager, I have to keep calm.

Law enforcement agents need to be vetted more thoroughly and psychologically and emotionally to see who they are, if they're really built for fairness in all communities.

Voters should absolutely know that a future president has the instincts to react to real-life and unrehearsed situations.

I've always been sensitive and over-emotional.

My father's a police officer, and he's told me numerous times about his training and how they've gone through what they call verbal judo, which is essentially them trying to de-escalate the situation.

I've had many managers, and learned a lot from them, the good ones always stayed even-keeled, never rode the waves.

The hardest thing in leadership is managing your own psychology, and yet it's also the least talked about.

I want to show I can control my emotion and aggression and stay calm.

To be a police officer in New York requires so much more than just we, as a citizen, need to walk around. Your job is to put yourself in this place where a horrible event has happened and try to figure it out. That's what you do, day in and day out. You have to have a certain distance to it. You can't let yourself go too far into it.