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June 19 - July 14, 2022
a taste of your own deep interior resources for acting in your own best interest by realizing that your interest is best served by recognizing and nurturing the interests of others at the same time.
And because mindfulness is not about getting someplace else—but rather about being fully where you already are and realizing the power of your full presence and awareness right now, in this moment—Meng’s
that emotional intelligence is one of the best predictors of success at work and fulfillment in life, and it is trainable for everyone.
Emotional skillfulness frees us from emotional compulsion. We create problems when we are compelled by emotions to act one way or another, but if we become so skillful with our emotions that we are no longer compelled, we can act in rational ways that are best for ourselves and everybody else. And we will play nice, share candy, and not bite our co-workers.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” What a mind of calmness and clarity does is to increase that space for us.
Mindfulness is defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present
moment, and non-judgmentally.”
“keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality,”
There is scientific evidence showing that improving our ability to regulate our attention can significantly impact how we respond to emotions.
We can usually experience emotions more vividly in the body than in the mind. Therefore, when we are trying to perceive an emotion, we usually get more bang for the buck if we bring our attention to the body rather than the mind.
More importantly, bringing the attention to the body enables a high-resolution perception of emotions.
Our approach to cultivating emotional intelligence begins with mindfulness. We use mindfulness to train a quality of attention that is strong both in clarity and stability. We then direct this power-charged attention to the physiological aspects of emotion so we can perceive emotion with high vividness and resolution.
By non-doing, all doing becomes possible.
—Lao Zi
Mindfulness trains two important faculties, attention and meta-attention.
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.
practice of relaxed concentration (a practice known as shamatha).
simple: happiness is the default state of mind. So when the mind becomes calm and clear, it returns to its default, and that default is happiness. That is it. There is no magic; we are simply returning the mind to its natural state.
It implies that happiness is not something that you pursue; it is something you allow. Happiness is just being.
One important similarity between exercise and meditation is that, in both cases, growth comes from overcoming resistance.
The more we are able to create space between stimulus and reaction, the more control we will have over our emotional lives.
The Art of Self-Motivation The
most venerable, clearly understood, enlightened, and reliable constant in the world is not only that we want to be happy, but that we want only to be so. Our very nature requires it of
Flow occurs when the task at hand matches the skill level of the practitioner, such that it is difficult enough to provide a challenge but not so difficult that it overwhelms the practitioner. If the task is too easy relative to skill level, the practitioner will be bored or apathetic.
“delivering happiness,” infuses autonomy, mastery, and purpose to
According to neuroscience, even before events happen the brain has already made a prediction about what is most likely to happen, and sets in motion the perception, behaviors, emotions, physiologic responses and interpersonal ways of relating that best fit with what is predicted. In a sense, we learn from the past what to predict for the future and then live the future we expect.6
We naturally pay much more attention to negative than positive occurrences in our lives.
Barbara Fredrickson, a noted pioneer in positive psychology, found that it takes three positive experiences to overcome a negative one, a 3:1 ratio.10 In general, each negative feeling is three times as powerful as a positive one. If you put that in perspective for a moment,
Whatever one frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of his mind.8
Just Like Me Now, read the script below slowly to yourself, pausing at the end of each sentence for reflection: 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,
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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)
In other words, kindness is a sustainable source of happiness—a simple yet profound insight that can change lives.
The five dysfunctions, in order of causality are:
“vulnerability-based trust.” That is when team members trust the intentions of each other enough that they are willing to expose their own vulnerabilities because they are confident their exposed vulnerabilities will not be used against them. Hence, they are willing to admit issues and deficiencies and ask for help.
Whenever I chair a meeting, I like to begin with a practice I call the Three Assumptions: I invite everybody in the meeting room
to make the following assumptions about everybody else: Assume that everybody in this room is here to serve the greater good, until proven otherwise. Given the above assumption, we therefore assume that none of us has any hidden agenda, until proven otherwise. Given the above assumption, we therefore assume that we are all reasonable even when we disagree, until proven otherwise.
when a person is given person praise, it reinforces a “fixed mind-set,” or the belief that our success is due to fixed traits that are a given. People in this mind-set worry about their traits. They also worry about how adequate or inadequate they might be. When they fail, they attribute it to personal inadequacy. They are afraid to take risks when failure may show them to be inadequate. In contrast, when a person is given process praise, it reinforces a “growth mind-set,” or the belief that our qualities can be developed through dedication and effort, and therefore that success comes from
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in “plain vanilla” empathy—you understand the feelings, needs, and concerns of individual people. In political awareness, you understand the feelings, needs, and concerns of individual people and how those feelings, needs, and concerns interact with those of others and how that all weaves into the emotional fabric of the organization as a whole.
Leadership and Social Skills You can make more friends in two months by becoming really interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Which is just another
way of saying that the way to make a friend is to be one. —Dale Carnegie
… researchers looked at a number of factors that could account for a manager’s success. [They] found one, and only one, factor significantly differentiated the top quartile of managers from the bottom quartile … the single factor was high scores on affection—both expressed and wanted … the
highest performing managers show more warmth and fondness toward others than do the bottom 25 percent. They get closer to people, and they are significantly more open in sharing thoughts and feelings than their low-performing counterparts. … All things being equal, we will work harder and more effectively for people we like. And we like them in direct proportion to how they make us feel.1
Compassion is a mental state endowed with a sense of concern for the suffering of others and aspiration to see that suffering relieved.
groundbreaking work of psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, which suggests the ratio to be 3:1. She discovered that “experiencing positive emotions in a 3-to-1 ratio with negative
ones leads people to a tipping point beyond which they naturally become more resilient to adversity and effortlessly achieve what they once could only imagine.”
The second key insight is that beyond the content and emotions in every difficult conversation, there are, more importantly, issues of identity. Very often the identity issues are the most hidden and left unsaid, but they are usually the most dominant.
You don’t take action, action takes you.
