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

by Chade-Meng Tan

contemplative practices

Meng’s sense of humor may be an acquired taste,

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.

discovered, or uncovered,

pathway for the development and application of emotional intelligence in the workplace and at home.

This research is showing that significant benefits of meditation can be observed after only eight weeks of training.

MBSR

Matthieu

more successful at achieving their goals. I believe

The groundbreaking book that popularized the topic is Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, written by Daniel Goleman, our friend and advisor. One of the most important messages in the book is that emotional competencies are not innate talents; they are learned abilities. In other words, emotional competencies are something you can deliberately acquire with practice.

One of the best things about the above practice is it can be used in any situation to heal relationships. I’ve found it extremely useful for dealing with conflicts. Whenever I have a fight with my wife or a co-worker, I go to another room to calm down and after a few minutes of calming down, I do this exercise in stealth. I visualize the other person in the next room. I remind myself that this person is just like me, wants to be free from suffering just like me, wants to be happy just like me, and so on. And then I wish that person wellness, happiness, freedom from suffering, and so on. After just a few minutes of doing this, I feel much better about myself, about the other person, and about the whole situation. A large part of my anger dissipates immediately.

When we communicate via e-mail, however, we lose that entire mechanism for communicating feelings. When brains can’t dance together, feelings don’t get to tether. But wait, it gets worse. 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.

Body language communicate the feeling.

I started meditating because I was miserable enough to try anything.