Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace)

by Chade-Meng Tan

Search Inside Yourself works in three steps: 1. Attention training 2. Self-knowledge and self-mastery 3. Creating useful mental habits

Attention Training Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities. Therefore, any curriculum for training emotional intelligence has to begin with attention training. The idea is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time.

Self-Knowledge and Self-Mastery Use your trained attention to create high-resolution perception into your own cognitive and emotive processes. With that, you become able to observe your thought stream and the process of emotion with high clarity, and to do so objectively from a third-person perspective.

Creating Useful Mental Habits Imagine whenever you meet anybody, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, I wish for this person to be happy. Having such habits changes everything at work, because this sincere goodwill is picked up unconsciously by others, and you create the type of trust that leads to highly productive collaborations. Such habits can be volitionally trained.

Goleman adds a very useful structure to emotional intelligence by classifying it into five domains. They are: 1. Self-awareness: Knowledge of one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions 2. Self-regulation: Management of one’s internal states, impulses, and resources 3. Motivation: Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals 4. Empathy: Awareness of others’ feelings, needs, and concerns 5. Social skills: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others

According to a study, the top six competencies that distinguish star performers from average performers in the tech sector are (in this order): 1. Strong achievement drive and high achievement standards 2. Ability to influence 3. Conceptual thinking 4. Analytical ability 5. Initiative in taking on challenges 6. Self-confidence5

As usual, I let my experience with a child inform how I teach adults. This daily two-minute experience is the basis of how I introduce the practice of mindfulness in introductory classes for adults.

Mindfulness step 1: 2 minutes per day, just be. Focus on breathing if you like but have no other agenda.

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.

Also develop meta-attention, ability to detect when attention has wandered from intended focus. Better concentration. The most important part is detecting attention wander and bringing back to focus (rather than preventing the distraction)

Let us begin by sitting comfortably. Sit in a position that enables you to be both relaxed and alert at the same time, whatever that means to you. Or, if you prefer, you may sit like a majestic mountain, whatever that means to you. Let us now take three slow, deep breaths to inject both energy and relaxation into our practice. Now, let us breathe naturally and bring a very gentle attention to your breath. You can either bring attention to the nostrils, the abdomen, or the entire body of breath, whatever that means to you. Become aware of in breath, out breath, and space in between. (Short pause) If you like, you can think of this exercise as resting the mind on the breath. You can visualize the breath to be a resting place, or a cushion, or a mattress, and let the mind rest on it, very gently. Just be. (Long pause) If at any time you feel distracted by a sensation, thought, or sound, just acknowledge it, experience it, and very gently let it go. Bring your attention very gently back to the breathing. (Long pause) If you like, let us end this meditation by inviting joyful inner peace to arise. Breathing in, I am calm. Breathing out, I smile. This present moment, Wonderful. (Short pause)

There you have it. Mindfulness is the skill that gives you the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again, and as William James said, it is “the education par excellence,” the best thing you can learn. I hope that makes you feel better about spending money on this book.

Now that he mentions it, why is Meng selling a book if he wants these skills in everyone's hands across the world?

so if you can train yourself to keep your attention on something as neutral as your breath, then you can keep your attention on anything else. Your breath is like New York City for your attention—if your attention can make it here, it can make it anywhere. Hence, if you become very good at settling attention on breathing, you may find yourself able to pay much better attention in class or at meetings.

you can accelerate this generalization process by purposefully bringing mindfulness to activity. The simplest way to do it is to bring full moment-to-moment attention to every task with a nonjudgmental mind, and every time attention wanders away, just gently bring it back. It is just like sitting meditation, except the object of meditation is the task at hand rather than the breath.

Walking meditation is really as simple as it sounds. When walking, bring full moment-to-moment attention to every movement and sensation in the body, and every time attention wanders away, just gently bring it back.

You do not have to walk slowly when doing walking meditation; it can be done at any speed. This means you can do walking meditation every time you walk.

Why not running?

If there are people in your life you care about, be sure to give them a few minutes of your full attention every day. They will bloom like flowers.

Practice mindful listening. Keep attention on them and what they're saying. If you drift, mindfully bring yourself back. Don't talk but can give reassuring nods etc. This can be artificial so Meng recommends deliberately practicing this where speaker knows what you're doing and doesn't ask you questions, get annoyed you're not participating etc

The main reason we do not listen to others is that we get distracted by our own feelings and internal chatter, often in reaction to what the other person said. The best way to 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.

You can practice mindful conversation either formally or informally. The formal practice involves creating an artificial environment for each person to practice the three techniques of listening, looping, and dipping. The informal practice is simply to use those techniques in everyday conversation.

Ive been practicing this and it feels to intentionally be an attentive listener. It does feel like giving them a gift. Not that my attention in particular is something special in the world, but that it's special when anyone is completely focused on what another is saying. It does create joy.

So how do you sustain your practice up to the point it becomes so compelling that it is self-sustaining? We have three suggestions:

1. Have a buddy (hold one another accountable, but also discuss how mindfulness is going, how today's conversation went) 2. Do less than you can (don't push it, keep it from becoming a burden) 3. Start with one mindful breath a day (for the rest of your life)

a really good way to practice mindfulness is using joy as an object of meditation, especially the type of joy with a gentle quality that doesn’t overwhelm the senses. For example, taking a nice walk, holding hands with a loved one, enjoying a good meal, carrying a sleeping baby, or sitting with your child while she is reading a good book

Having said that, it is important to note that Joyful Mindfulness is best practiced as a complement to, not a replacement for, formal sitting practice. Formal practice requires you to bring mindfulness to neutral experiences like your breath, and because attention naturally gravitates away from neutral experiences, that mindfulness gain is a lot more generalizable.

In the same way, our circuit training starts with a focused attention exercise for three minutes, and then we go to an open attention exercise for three minutes, and so on. We usually do this for twelve minutes, plus two minutes each of resting the mind on the breath at the beginning and at the end.

Attention circuit training. Interesting that it includes "open attention" periods where you let attention drift to whatever pops to mind. It sounds like the opposite of meditation. But also reminds me in a way of this performance/experiential art I heard about on Note to Self podcast where you put on noise canceling headphones for an hour or two in a big room with tons of other people. A cognitive cleanse or some such.

For those of you who like to do things systemically, there is a formal practice called body scan. It is one of the core practices in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s highly successful Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course. The practice itself is very simple: we just systematically bring moment-to-moment non-judging attention to different parts of our bodies, starting from the top of our head and moving down to the tips of our toes

I've been doing this during mindfulness meditation while reading this book. I think I got this from my high school psychology teacher, Mr Weinstein (another really jolly good fellow). Sometimes have to mindfully reorient my attention from thinking of him, his class while meditating. What would it mean, however, to intentionally meditate on a memory of past meditation? And how many stack frames deep can that recursion go? ;)

Scan Body

Scan from portion of body to portion of body (e.g. Head, face, back, chest/trunk), then focus on a positive memory and the physiological sensations it induced, then focus on breathing.

Face Now move your attention to your face. Your forehead, eyes, cheeks, nose, lips, mouth, and inside of your mouth (gums, tongue) for 1 minute. Neck and Shoulders Move your attention to your neck, the inside of your throat, and your shoulders for 1 minute.

Just before picking this book back up, was doing this when I needed to swallow and it was a curious and cool feeling to focus attention on the tongue, throat, esophagus while swallowing. For a second it felt like the same level of sensory input/attention that vision usually commands. And I felt parts of my throat that I don't remember feeling before. Hm. Wonder what a mindful sneeze is like.

Journaling

Open-ended non-stop writing initiated by general prompt like "right now I am feeling..." a brain core dump. Do this three minutes straight (or more)

A study by Stefanie Spera, Eric Buhrfeind, and James Pennebaker had a group of laid-off professionals write to themselves about their feelings for five consecutive days for twenty minutes each day.10 These people found new jobs at a much higher rate than the people in the non-writing control group. After eight months, 68.4 percent of them found jobs, versus 27.3 percent from the control group.

Here are some suggested prompts: • What I am feeling now is . . . • I am aware that . . . • What motivates me is . . . • I am inspired by . . . • Today, I aspire to . . . • What hurts me is . . . • I wish . . . • Others are . . . • I made a happy mistake . . . • Love is . . .

JOURNALING FOR SELF-ASSESSMENT

* Prime for 2 minutes with thoughts about challenging situation in which you did not respond well * journal about things that annoy you or weaknesses you have * prime for 2 minutes on challenging situation where you did respond well and you felt you did great * journal about things that give you pleasure or your strengths * read what you wrote

With even more mindfulness practice, there may be another subtle but important shift—you may begin to see emotions simply as physiological phenomena. Emotions become what we experience in the body, so we go from “I am angry” to “I experience anger in my body.”

If my emotions are who I am, then there is very little I can do about it. However, if emotions are simply what I experience in my body, then feeling angry becomes a lot like feeling pain in my shoulders after an extreme workout; both are just physiological experiences over which I have influence.

The first important opportunity is the possibility of experiencing pain without suffering. The theory is that aversion, not the pain itself, is the actual cause of suffering; the pain is just a sensation that creates that aversion.

Remember reading that meditators can withstand pain much better than others. Experienced meditators can focus on something other than the pain to withstand it. Expert meditators fully experience the pain but don't associate any aversion/discomfort with it. They just observe it as they would music playing in the background. Kind of a wild concept but seems really cool. Wonder if it works for enduring pain in athletic/endurance competition. But when I've experience pain climbing hills, it really does feel more that my legs are weakening/generating less power rather than I allow myself to slow to avoid pain. It's not at all the same sprinting on the track (right up until 750m into a kilo ;) )

Four very helpful general principles for dealing with any distressing emotions are: 1. Know when you are not in pain. 2. Do not feel bad about feeling bad. 3. Do not feed the monsters. 4. Start every thought with kindness and humor.

You may also find your mind constantly feeding the anger by retelling one or more stories to yourself over and over. If you then stop telling the stories, you may find the anger dissipating for the lack of fuel. Anger Monster needs to feed on your angry stories.

SIBERIAN NORTH RAILROAD

Handling triggers that bring emotions high (too) easily: * Stop (the "sacred pause", which itself almost invariably improves response and outcome) * Take a Breath * Notice your physiological response. Experience the emotion as something physical affecting your body, not your identity. * Reflect on why this triggers you. Also recognize that whatever the other person has done was done because they believe that in some way, this will make them happier * Respond in light of your reflection

The next time you are triggered, remember to take the SBNRR. “Good news, comrades! To help you deal with negative or distressing emotions, the Politburo has come up with a handy mnemonic . . .”

😀 fun visual here too (this is a caption for a cartoon)

This insight also suggests the best way to find motivation at work is to find our own higher purpose. If we know what we value most and what is most meaningful to us, then we know what we can work on that serves our higher purpose.

Some of us are lucky and we have the flexibility to ensure that our work directly serves our higher purpose (versus, say, earns enough of a living to support it or keep one's family sheltered, fed, educated and have affordable access to healthcare). I'd wager that is a small majority of humanity. What should the rest of the world do?

Alignment: Aligning our work with our values and higher purpose

Uber employees take note.

If everything in my life, starting from today, meets or exceeds my most optimistic expectations, what will my life be in five years? The more detailed the imagery in your mind, the better this exercise will work. Hence, consider these questions before writing. In this future: • Who are you and what are you doing? • How do you feel? • What do people say about you?

Writing exercise to define ideal future so you can start pursuing it

MEDITATION ON RESILIENCE

Think of a personal failure. What was physical sensation? Then do the same for a success

In a business setting, if we have to make a decision that hurts somebody’s interest, it is easy to tell ourselves not to bring empathy to the situation, because if we do, we will just make it hard for ourselves to make our tough, but necessary, decision. I found this to be suboptimal. If we make tough decisions without empathy, we can more easily achieve what we want in the short term, but we also create resentment and mistrust, which hurt our own interests in the long term. If instead we treat the affected people with kindness and empathy, we create trust and understanding. With that, we may become more able to skillfully negotiate and manage their concerns.

Use don't eschew empathy in tough business decisions. Better in the long run.

The method itself is simple; invite a thought to arise in your mind often enough, and it will become a mental habit. For example, if every time you see another person, you wish for that person to be happy, then eventually, it will become your mental habit and whenever you meet another person, your instinctive first thought is to wish for that person to be happy. After a while, you develop an instinct for kindness. You become a kind person. Your kindness shows in your face, posture, and attitude every time you meet somebody.

I like this and was the one thing I still remember from his Fresh Air interview. This is stuff that can change the world. Easily.

This person has a body and a mind, just like me. This person has feelings, emotions, and thoughts, just like me. This person has, at some point in his or her life, been sad, disappointed, angry, hurt, or confused, just like me. This person has, in his or her life, experienced physical and emotional pain and suffering, just like me. This person wishes to be free from pain and suffering, just like me. This person wishes to be healthy and loved, and to have fulfilling relationships, just like me. This person wishes to be happy, just like me.

Think about someone you care about then read/think these words about them.

Now, let’s allow some wishes to arise. I wish for this person to have the strength, the resources, and the emotional and social support to navigate the difficulties in life. I wish for this person to be free from pain and suffering. I wish for this person to be happy. Because this person is a fellow human being, just like me. (Pause) Now, I wish for everybody I know to be happy. (Long pause)

Whenever we’ve asked participants how they felt during the exercise, the most common response has been “happy.” They discovered that being on the transmitting end of kindness is a calming and happy experience, often at least as good as being on the receiving end.

This is so true. Later he also says he uses this immediately after conflict (during cooling down period) before facing that person again

In other words, kindness is a sustainable source of happiness—a simple yet profound insight that can change lives.

Get in pairs and take turns being the speaker and the listener. As usual, the speaker begins with a monologue. If you are the listener, after the speaker’s monologue, you loop about what you heard the speaker was feeling. In other words, instead of starting your looping with, “What I hear you say is . . .” start with, “What I hear you feel is . . .” Suggested topics for monologue: • A difficult work situation or a conflict you are having with a boss, co-worker, or person who reports to you • A time when you could feel someone else’s pain, or when you wanted to but were unable to • Any other topic with emotional “juice”

Try listening and the mb tell speaker how she /feels/ about topic/event, not just what she is saying happened.

1. Maintain rich personal networks within your organization, especially with allies, mentors, and groups who will support and challenge you. To do this, care about people, help people, and nurture relationships. Pay attention to one-on-one relationships, as well as relationships with key groups—your team, other management teams, customers, stakeholders, etc.

This list of techniques to build organizational awareness

2. Practice reading the underlying currents of your organization. Understand how decisions are made. Are decisions made by authority or consensus? Who are most influential in making them?

3. Distinguish between your own self-interest, the interest of your team, and the organization’s interest—everyone has all three of these interests. It is very important to understand which is which.

4. Utilize your self-awareness to better understand your role in the web of personalities and interactions. Make frequent use of empathic listening to understand how people feel about situations and about each other.