Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) - By Chade-Meng Tan
Date read: 2018-11-18How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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Great book from a Google engineer on how to apply mindful meditation to the workplace and build strong emotional intelligence.
Contents:
My Notes
Definition of emotional intelligence: The ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.
In the context of the work environment, emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness.
The aim of developing emotional intelligence is to help you optimize yourself and function at an even higher level than what you are already capable of.
Strong, stable, and perceptive attention that affords you calmness and clarity is the foundation upon which emotional intelligence is built.
Mindfulness trains two important faculties, attention and meta-attention.
Meta-attention is the ability to know that your attention has wandered away.
Meta-attention is also the secret to concentration.
When your meta-attention becomes strong, you will be able to recover a wandering attention quickly and often, and if you recover attention quickly and often enough, you create the effect of continuous attention, which is concentration.
When the mind becomes highly relaxed and alert at the same time, three wonderful qualities of mind naturally emerge: calmness, clarity, and happiness.
When the mind is calm and clear at the same time, happiness spontaneously arises. The mind becomes spontaneously and naturally joyful!
Happiness is the default state of mind.
Happiness is not something that you pursue; it is something you allow. Happiness is just being.
Bring full moment-to-moment attention to every task or to another person with a nonjudgmental mind, and every time attention wanders away, just gently bring it back.
Looping = loops back by saying what she thought she heard Allen say. After that, Allen gives feedback on what he thought was missing or misrepresented in Becky’s characterization of his original monologue. And they go back and forth until Allen (the original speaker) feels satisfied that he is correctly understood by Becky (the original listener).
Dipping = respond to these internal distractions is to notice and acknowledge them. Know that they are there, try not to judge them, and let them go if they are willing to go. If feelings or other internal distracters decide to stay around, let them be and just be aware of how they may affect your listening.
Have expectations before meditation, but have no expectation during meditation.
A really good way to practice mindfulness is using joy as an object of meditation.
Open attention is a quality of attention willing to meet any object that arrives at the mind or the senses.
Deepening self-awareness is about developing clarity within oneself.
The moment you can see a raging river, it means you are already rising above it. Similarly, the moment you can see an emotion, you are no longer fully engulfed in it.
Two important modes I operate in: my failure mode and my recovery mode. If I can understand a system so thoroughly I know exactly how it fails, I will also know when it will not fail. I can then have strong confidence in the system, despite knowing it is not perfect, because I know what to adjust for in each situation. Know exactly how the system recovers after failure, I can be confident even when it fails because I know the conditions in which the system can come back quickly enough that the failure becomes inconsequential.
Strong emotional awareness leads to more accurate self-assessment, which in turn leads to higher self-confidence.
When inner peace, compassion, and aspiration are all strong, compassionate action comes naturally and organically, and hence, it is sustainable.
“With all this socially engaged work, first you must learn what the Buddha learned, to still the mind. Then you don’t take action; action takes you.”
A large part of our happiness depends on our luck in the genetic draw. But in the same way that physical qualities such as strength and agility are highly trainable, mental qualities such as joy and calmness are also highly trainable.
you are trying to let your thoughts flow onto paper so you can see what comes up.
You give yourself a certain amount of time, say, three minutes, and you are given (or you give yourself) a prompt, which for our purposes is an open-ended sentence such as “What I am feeling now is . . .” For those three minutes, write down whatever comes to mind. You may write about the prompt, or you may write about anything else that comes to mind. And do not stop writing until your time is up.
We are not our emotions.
Emotions go from being existential (“I am”) to experiential (“I feel”).
Thoughts and emotions are like clouds—some beautiful, some dark—while our core being is like the sky. Clouds are not the sky; they are phenomena in the sky that come and go. Similarly, thoughts and emotions are not who we are; they are simply phenomena in mind and body that come and go.
while we cannot stop an unwholesome thought or emotion from arising, we have the power to let it go, and the highly trained mind can let it go the moment it arises.
Four very helpful general principles for dealing with any distressing emotions are:
Here is a practice called the Siberian North Railroad for dealing with triggers:
Three practices for motivation:
Lewis and Clark were lost most of the time. If your idea of exploration is to always know where you are and to be inside your zone of competence, you don’t do wild new shit. You have to be confused, upset, think you’re stupid. If you’re not willing to do that, you can’t go outside the box.
When experiencing success, take conscious note of it and accept credit for it.
When experiencing failure, focus on realistic evidence suggesting that this setback may be temporary. If you have thoughts of inadequacy, recall past successes of which you took conscious note and for which you accepted credit.
Increase objectivity by balancing out your natural, strong negative bias.
If you are strong in self-awareness, you are also very likely to be strong in empathy.
Tough decisions still need to be made, but if people trust you, feel that your heart is in the right place, and understand that you are doing this for the greater good, you are more likely to win their cooperation.
Kindness is a sustainable source of happiness.
Just Like Me = in which we remind ourselves how similar other people are to us, thereby creating the mental habit of perceiving similarity.
Loving Kindness Meditation = where we create good wishes for others, thereby creating the mental habit of kindness.
Trust has to begin with sincerity, kindness, and openness, so it is optimally productive to start every relationship that way, both in work and in life.
Begin your feedback with “What I hear you feel is...” This requires the listener to listen for feelings and then to give feedback about feelings.
It’s better to praise people for working hard than for being smart.
You may do this as either a writing exercise or a speaking exercise. If you do this as a speaking exercise, you may speak to a friend.
Instructions: