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

by Chade-Meng Tan

ORGANIZATIONAL AWARENESS EXERCISE

Think of big conflict you were a part of. Write out your reasonable account of the event, explaining the situation. Then do the same for someone you were in conflict with

There are many reasons why this can happen. One common reason is that people implicitly value different priorities.

Yes.

MULTIPLYING GOODNESS MEDITATION

This one felt hokier than the others so far. Breathe in and imagine you're breathing in your goodness, it goes to your heart and multiplies 10x. Now breathe out that goodness. Then visualize others giving off goodness, perhaps as a white aura around them, maybe in varying brightnesses. The value here though is seeing goodness in everyone. Make that your first instinct rather than aversion, skepticism, derision, fear, cynicism.

TONGLEN MEDITATION

Similar to above but take in pain and suffering and breathe out goodness. Like The Green Mile?

These five domains form a model which David calls the SCARF model, which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.6

Seeking these is tantamount to survival responses. Every human strives to improve these. Use that to be aware of self and to help motivate others

When the brain receives insufficient data about others’ feelings, it just makes stuff up. The brain makes assumptions about the emotional context of the message and then fabricates the missing information accordingly. It does not just fabricate information, however. It also automatically believes those fabrications to be true. Worse still, those fabrications usually have a strong negative bias—we usually assume people to have more negative intentions than they actually do.

Why not to email difficult conversations.

When we engage in mindful e-mailing, that recollecting quality of mindfulness is the main one we rely on. The first thing we recollect is that there is a human being on the other end, a human being just like me. The second thing we recollect is this insight that people who receive e-mails unconsciously fabricate missing information about the emotional context of the sender, so we apply the appropriate care and caution.

Email clients should show photo of other person/people while composing new email message to encourage you to think of them as people while doing so.

Let us close this chapter with a mantra that I created for myself. It summarizes many of my social skills practices. The mantra is: Love them. Understand them. Forgive them. Grow with them.