Search Inside Yourself Quotes

“There is a simple technique for self-regulation called “affect labeling,” which simply means labeling feelings with words. When you label an emotion you are experiencing (for example, “I feel anger”), it somehow helps you manage that emotion.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“The key is to let go of two things: grasping and aversion. Grasping is when the mind desperately holds on to something and refuses to let it go. Aversion is when the mind desperately keeps something away and refuses to let it come. These two qualities are flip sides of each other. Grasping and aversion together account for a huge percentage of the suffering we experience, perhaps 90 percent, maybe even 100 percent.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“happiness is not something that you pursue; it is something you allow.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“The more we are able to create space between stimulus and reaction, the more control we will have over our emotional lives.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“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”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“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.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“Thich Nhat Hanh has a very nice way of putting it: wilting flowers do not cause suffering; it is the unrealistic desire that flowers not wilt that causes suffering.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“People who are optimistic react to setbacks from a presumption of personal power. They feel that setbacks are temporary, are isolated to particular circumstances, and can eventually be overcome by effort and abilities. In contrast, people who are pessimistic react to setbacks from a presumption of personal helplessness. They feel that setbacks are long lasting, generalized across their lives, and are due to their own inadequacies, and therefore cannot be overcome.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“She wrote two versions of her obituary. The first version reflected how things would turn out given her then-current life trajectory. The second version reflected the life she aspired to live.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“He describes three types of happiness: pleasure, passion, and higher purpose.1            1.    Pleasure: This type of happiness is about always chasing the next high. It is the rock-star type of happiness because it is very hard to maintain unless you are living the lifestyle of a rock star.            2.    Passion: Also known as “flow,” where peak performance meets peak engagement, and time flies by.            3.    Higher Purpose: This is about being part of something bigger than yourself that has meaning to you.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“A beautiful way to practice mindfulness, which is almost guaranteed to improve your social life, is to apply mindfulness toward others for the benefit of others. The idea is very simple—give your full moment-to-moment attention to another person with a nonjudgmental mind, and every time your attention wanders away, just gently bring it back. It is just like the meditation we have been practicing, except the object of meditation is the other person. You”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“To quote Viktor Frankl, “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.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“Or as Michael Jordan says, “You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters to what lies within us. —Ralph Waldo Emerson”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“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. Mindfulness practice gives calmness and clarity which increases the space for us.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“In every conversation, there are actually three conversations going on. They are the content conversation (“What happened?”), the feelings conversation (“What emotions are involved?”), and the identity conversation (“What does this say about me?”).”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“What we think, do, and pay attention to changes the structure and functions of our brains!”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.2”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“In the context of the work environment, emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“One small shift in the way we each conduct ourselves, and the crystal lattice structure of the world is already different. In this way, we are the world, and when we take responsibility for our small but not insignificant part of it, the whole is already different—the flowering we manifest emotionally and in every other way of some importance, potentially enormous.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“Self-confidence isn't egotism. When you are truly self-confident, you are flexible with regard to ego; you can pick up ego when necessary, but you can also put it down when necessary in order to learn something completely new through listening. And if you find that you cant put ego down, at least you know that this is so. You can admit it to yourself. It takes profound self confidence to be humble enough to recognize your own limitations without self blame”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“The keyword is practice. Mindfulness is like exercise—it is not sufficient to just understand the topic; you can only benefit from it with practice.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“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 think of dipping as self-directed mindfulness during listening.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“There is an old Chinese Zen saying: "The small [meditation] retreat is in the wilderness, the medium retreat is in the city, and the great retreat is in the emperor's court.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“Compassion is a mental state endowed with a sense of concern for the suffering of others and aspiration to see that suffering relieved.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“realized during the practice that a lot of what was holding me back originated from my fear of pain and suffering, and once I found myself capable of breathing in the pain and suffering of myself and others, and comfortable radiating kindness, love, and compassion, a lot of the fetters holding me back dissolved away.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“the listener doing the looping will begin her feedback with “What I hear you feel is . . .” This requires the listener to listen for feelings and then to give feedback about feelings.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“There is an ability called “response flexibility,” which is a fancy name for the ability to pause before you act. You experience a strong emotional stimulus, but instead of reacting immediately as you normally would (for example, giving the other driver the bird), you pause for a split second, and that pause gives you choice in how you want to react in that emotional situation”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness