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

by Chade-Meng Tan

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

“keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality,”

There may be a neurological explanation for why intuition is experienced in the body. Matthew Lieberman’s review of research showed “evidence suggesting that the basal ganglia are the neuroanatomical bases of both implicit learning and intuition.” The story behind basal ganglia is, once again, best told by our friend Daniel

To make it even easier, you’re free to switch between the Easy Way and the Easier Way anytime during these two minutes. Any time you feel like you want to bring awareness to breathing, just switch to Easy. Any time you decide you’d rather just sit without agenda, just switch to Easier. No questions asked.

With enough practice, you may even become able to bring your mind to that state on demand and stay in it for a prolonged period of time. When the mind becomes highly relaxed and alert at the same time, three wonderful qualities of mind naturally emerge: calmness, clarity, and happiness.

However, the Dalai Lama added an important point: 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.

The Buddha has a very beautiful metaphor for this state of mind. He calls it “like writing on water.”1 Whenever an unwholesome thought or emotion arises in an enlightened mind, it is like writing on water; the moment it is written,

piece of [insert context-appropriate noun].” It is important to recognize that distress is a naturally arising phenomenon—we all experience it from time to time. Even Thich Nhat Hanh, the very symbol of enlightened peace in the world, once got so angry at someone he almost wanted to stand up and slug him. Also recognize that feeling bad about feeling bad is an act of ego. It’s a reflection of our ego’s image about itself, and the net result is the creation of new distress for no good reason at all. The antidote is to let the ego go, with good humor whenever possible. And remember,

needs to feed on your angry stories. With no stories to eat, Anger Monster gets hungry and sometimes goes away. By not feeding Anger Monster, you save mental energy and Anger Monster may leave you alone to play elsewhere. Anger Monster knows people are giving away plenty of anger food elsewhere. Not feeding monsters

Every Thought with Kindness and Humor

Here is a practice called the Siberian North Railroad for dealing with triggers. This is a useful practice not only for triggers but also for other situations in which we need to deal with negative or distressing emotions. The practice has five steps: 1. Stop 2. Breathe 3. Notice 4. Reflect 5. Respond

Bevan, one of our class participants, came up with the mnemonic that became the name of the practice. She took the first letter of each step, SBNRR, and created the phrase SiBerian North RailRoad. I like the mental imagery behind the mnemonic. It’s like you need to cool down from all that heat of an emotional trigger, and where better to cool down than one of the coldest and most remote places in the world? The first and most important step is to stop. Whenever you feel triggered, just stop. Pausing

SIBERIAN NORTH RAILROAD

dollars in annual sales. But his entrepreneurial success is not what inspires me. What really inspires me is his wise, skillful, and courageous use of happiness in a corporate setting. Tony figured out that the secret to Zappos’ success is “Delivering Happiness”, which is also the title of his book. He created a corporate culture that is conducive to employee happiness; happy employees then provide customers the best customer service in the industry, and happy customers spend more money at Zappos. In other words, happiness is not just something nice to have; it is also the centerpiece of Zappos’ business strategy and the foundation of its business success. That is really inspiring.

Daniel Pink proposes

Here’s the interesting thing: you have two randomly assigned groups. For individuals in one group, the incentivized group, you tell them the faster they can solve this problem, the more money they’ll get paid. For individuals in the other group, the control group, you tell them they will get paid the same amount of money regardless of how long they take. Here’s the really interesting find: the incentivized group did worse! That’s right, boys and girls, external incentives not only did not work but were counterproductive.

difficult decisions with empathy is found in Goleman’s Working with Emotional Intelligence: Consider how employees were treated when plants closed at two companies. At GE, workers had two years’ notice that the plant would be closed, and the company made an intense outplacement effort to help them find other jobs. The other company announced the closing with just one week’s notice, and made no effort to help workers locate other employment. The results? Almost a year later, the majority of the former GE workers said it had been a good place to work, and 93 percent lauded the transition services offered them. At the other company, only 3 percent said it

to work. GE preserved a large pool of goodwill, while the other firm left a legacy of bitterness. When we lay people off, we are subjecting them to one of the most painful experiences in their lives. Yet it is possible to do even that with empathy, and even under those painful circumstances, trust and goodwill can be created. Some people call it “being tough without

Practice giving people the benefit of the doubt: Most people do what they do because it feels like the right thing at the time, based on what they want to accomplish and the information they have. Their reasons make sense to them, even if their actions do not make sense to us.

many positive experiences does it take to balance out a comparable negative experience? It depends on who you ask. In Chapter 6, we mentioned the 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.”4 Famed psychologist John Gottman, however, found a different ratio in a different context. He found that for a marriage to succeed, there must be at least five times as many positive interactions in the relationship as negative ones, a 5:1 ratio that Gottman dubbed the “magic ratio,”5 more commonly known as the “Gottman ratio.” This ratio is such a powerful predictor that Gottman reputedly can accurately predict if a marriage will end in divorce within ten years just by scoring the positive and negative interactions in a fifteen-minute conversation between the couple. He jokes that this is why he does

many people in the position of person B will reject the deal out of being offended by unfairness. In contrast, a chimpanzee playing a similar game (using raisins as the object of value rather than U.S. dollars) will rarely reject that deal.8 To a chimp, forgoing raisins is just silly. The moral of the story is to never underestimate a person’s sense of fairness; it is overwhelming enough that he often may sacrifice his own self-interest for its sake. (The other moral of the story is to never count on a chimpanzee giving you a fair deal. Nor an elephant,

Conducting difficult conversations is a skill, an extremely useful one, indeed. According to the authors of Difficult Conversations, who make up part of the Harvard Negotiation Project, there are five steps to conducting a difficult conversation. Here is my brief of those steps: 1. Prepare by walking through the “three conversations.” 2. Decide whether