BOOK SUMMARY 126 Search Inside Yourself
·
Summary written by: Matt Tod
"The Mind of calmness and clarity you
experience while sitting in mindfulness meditation is very nice, but it only
becomes life changing when you can bring up that mind on demand, in day-to-day
life."
- Search Inside Yourself, page 52
Search
Inside Yourself is a fantastic book written by one of
Google’s first engineers, Chang-Meng Tan (“Meng” by his friends). When you
first pick up the book, it may seem as though it’s another book on meditation
and how to achieve personal happiness.
It is.
But it’s also so much more.
This
book melds the traditional Eastern approach to mindfulness and meditation with
the more modern and scientific aspects of Emotional Intelligence in Western
society. The interesting point that’s made very quickly is that mindfulness and
emotional intelligence are, essentially, the same thing.
Meng
helps us better understand the role that mindfulness, meditation and emotional
intelligence can plan in our own personal happiness, but also in our work
success and the success of our companies.
The Golden Egg
The Process of Mindfulness
"There
is nothing mysterious about meditation. It’s really just mental
training."- Search Inside Yourself, page 29
Before
getting in the practice of mindfulness, it’s important to understand what it is
and how works. According to Meng, mindfulness trains two important faculties in
our minds: Attention and Meta-Attention.
Attention is something that’s pretty well understood.
Basically, it’s taking possession of the mind in a clear and vivid way.
Meta-Attention, on the other hand, gets a bit more complex. It’s
attention of attention. Really what that means is that it’s the ability to pay
attention to your attention when it’s wandered off.
It’s
also the secret to concentration.
When
our meta-attention becomes strong, you can bring back wandering attention
quickly and often. By doing that, you create the effect of continuous
attention.
The
more you’re able to bring back a wandering mind, the stronger your mind gets.
It’s like a muscle. The more you work it out, the stronger it becomes.
If
fact, Meng goes on to talk about the similarities between exercise and
meditation, helping the reader understand that one important similarity between
exercise and meditation is that, in both cases, growth comes from overcoming
resistance.
A
second similarity between the two is they can both significantly change the
quality of your life.
So
where do you start?
You
start with intention. Just like exercise, mediation starts by
creating an intention – a reason for wanting to be more mindful.
Each
time that you create an intention, what you’re doing is forming or reinforcing
a mental habit. Over time, that habit will eventually guide your behavior.
Gem #1
Mindfulness and the Role of Leadership
"You
can influence people most effectively when you help people achieve what they
want in a way that also helps you and simultaneously serves greater
good."- Search Inside Yourself, page 215
It’s
been found that there is only one factor that significantly differentiates the
top managers from the bottom ones: high scores on affection.
Being
liked may be the most effective way to get things done in the long term.
It
seems like common sense, but with everything else being equal, people will work
harder and more effectively for you if they like you. And we like people in
direct proportion to how they make us feel.
The
book explores some of the emotional skills that will help us to be liked and
also successful at what we do:
1.
Leading with Compassion
Compassion is a state of extreme happiness. And the happiest state, according to research on the brain, can only be achieved with compassion. It’s not enough to meditate by yourself every morning, you need to practice mindfulness and compassion in real life with real people.
Compassion is a state of extreme happiness. And the happiest state, according to research on the brain, can only be achieved with compassion. It’s not enough to meditate by yourself every morning, you need to practice mindfulness and compassion in real life with real people.
Meng
makes a solid case that compassionate leadership is the most effective
kind of leadership. It’s about having a sense of concern for the
suffering of others and wanting that suffering to be relieved.
Specifically,
there are three components:
·
A cognitive component: “I understand you”
·
An affective component: “I feel for you”
·
A motivational component: “I want to help
you”
To
become a highly effective leader, you need to go through an important
transformation. You need to move from “I” to “We”.
The
practice of compassion is about going from self to others.
2.
Training compassion by Multiplying Goodness
We can train compassion in a way similar to how we train productivity or time management skills: by creating mental habits.
We can train compassion in a way similar to how we train productivity or time management skills: by creating mental habits.
The
approach is the same: The more you think about something, the stronger the
neural pathways in our brain become and the easier it is to have that thought.
3. The
Ability to Have Difficult Conversations
Based on work done on this topic, Meng shares that there are 5 steps to conducting difficult conversations:
Based on work done on this topic, Meng shares that there are 5 steps to conducting difficult conversations:
·
Prepare by walking through the “three
conversations”
·
Decide whether to raise the issue
·
Start from the objective “third story”
·
Explore their story and yours
·
Problem solve
If you
find yourself in a situation where you need to have a challenging conversation,
try shifting into a mode that supports learning and problem solving.
Gem #2
Mindful Emailing
"The
biggest problem with email is that the emotional context is often
miscommunicated, sometimes with disastrous results."- Search Inside
Yourself, page 224
Modern
communication, in so many ways, has improved our lives and the way we work with
each other. But, like many things, too much of a good thing can soon become
bad. More and more we’re coming up against challenges and difficult situations
caused by an overuse of email. But can we really truly get back to face-to-face
communication the way it was?
Probably
not.
When
it comes to relying on email communication, Meng puts it well when he says,
“The good news is that we can, and the bad news is that we do.”
The
biggest problem that we face with email is that the emotional context is
often miscommunicated, sometimes having the opposite impact that we were
intending it to have. By using email as our primary form of communication, we
don’t give our brains the data about others’ feelings. As a result, we start to
make things up. We get offended or frightened by emails that lack tone, emotion
and sometimes context. We often write emails with a clear intent but
end up having a negative impact.
Why do
we do this? Meng tells us it’s because email seldom contains sufficient
information for the brain to recognize the emotional context of
the sender. As a result, the brain creates the information it’s missing, often
with a negative bias. Our brains don’t know the difference between what’s real
and what we think is real. If we believe the email to be
aggressive or demeaning, it quickly becomes so.
This
understanding is key to effective email communication.
Just
by being aware of this, we can be more effective in our email communication.
When
engaging in mindful emailing, it’s important to think about two things:
1. That there is a human being on the other end; a human
being just like you.
2. That people who receive emails unconsciously make up
missing information about the emotional context of the person sending, so we
take care and caution before responding.
Search
Inside Yourself takes the practice of mindfulness and
helps to bring it into the mainstream. Filled with easy to do (and easy to
teach) practices for the concepts mentioned in the book, you’ll love the
connection that mindfulness has to our daily lives.
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