Search Inside Yourself

Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062121424
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

With Search Inside Yourself, Chade-Meng Tan, one of Google's earliest engineers and personal growth pioneer, offers a proven method for enhancing mindfulness and emotional intelligence in life and work.

Meng's job is to teach Google's best and brightest how to apply mindfulness techniques in the office and beyond; now, readers everywhere can get insider access to one of the most sought after classes in the country, a course in health, happiness and creativity that is improving the livelihood and productivity of those responsible for one of the most successful businesses in the world.

With forewords by Daniel Goleman, author of the international bestseller Emotional Intelligence, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, renowned mindfulness expert and author of Coming To Our Senses, Meng's Search Inside Yourself is an invaluable guide to achieving your own best potential.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Being Effective and Loved at the Same Time

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

Being Loved Is Good for Your Career

Two renowned leadership scholars, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, offer the following research conclusion:

. . . 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

To those of us in the corporate world used to the idea that the most effective way to get things done is to act like a jerk, this study offers a refreshing and inspiring possibility of a better approach. You do not necessarily have to get things done at the expense of being liked; it is possible to have both. You can have your cake and promotion too. In fact, being liked may be the most effective way to get things done in the long term. This possibility is also reflected in the study of U.S. Navy commanders we quoted in Chapter 1, which showed that the most effective naval commanders are also the ones with higher emotional intelligence and who are most liked.

“You know, Lord Vader, you’d be much more effective if you were more likable.”

In this chapter, we will explore some emotional skills that will help you be liked and also be successful at what you do. Some people buy books that teach them to be liked, others buy books that teach them to be successful. This book teaches you both. You are so lucky.

Using Kindness to Grow Friendship from an Ugly Situation

Even in difficult situations, it is sometimes possible to make important things happen while still creating happy friendships. It requires a kind heart, an open mind, and the right social skills.

Many years ago, I had a friend and co-worker named Joe (names have been changed, again to protect me). Joe was never on my team, but his work involved building systems used internally in the company, so in that sense, I was Joe’s customer and a very satisfied one. A new manager, Sam, joined the company and took over Joe’s team, and within a few weeks, Sam called Joe into his office and told him his performance had been very unsatisfactory and dismissal procedures would soon be initiated against him.

Joe was devastated. I was very unhappy too. As a customer of the team, I considered Joe one of its best performers, so I was angry that Joe would even be evaluated poorly, let alone dismissed on performance grounds. I was determined to help him.

I was an influential person in that company, so if I had confronted Joe’s new manager, Sam, the potential for things to become really ugly was obvious, even to an engineer like me.

Fortunately, I already had years of meditation and compassion practice, so I had the right tools to deal skillfully with this situation. I calmed my mind with mindfulness and used the Just Like Me meditation (see Chapter 7) to put myself into Sam’s shoes. I quickly realized that there must be something important I did not know about the situation and which I needed to understand before I judged. I was missing important data. My mind quickly shifted from anger to an eagerness to understand and engage with kindness and curiosity.

I wrote Sam an e-mail introducing myself, sincerely welcoming him to the company, and then explained my concerns about Joe and my eagerness to help him. Part of the e-mail read:

I understand that we are all reasonable people, so that decision must not have been made lightly. However, I hope to be able to understand the reasons behind that decision, so that I can figure out how to better help Joe.

Will you be comfortable if I schedule some time with you so that I can listen to and learn from you about this case? I don’t want to put you in an uncomfortable position, so please feel free to say no.

Happily, Sam, though understandably a bit uncomfortable, engaged me with reciprocal kindness and sincerity. We sat together, exchanged personal stories, and then talked about Joe. We both learned a lot in that conversation. From Sam, I learned that Joe had created issues for his team, such as taking on too much from his customers in an undisciplined manner that caused him to neglect some important team goals. On the other end, Sam learned from me how much Joe’s customers valued him for all those extra miles he had gone for them. Sam and I both acquired important missing data.

Soon after that, Sam and Joe talked again, established a better understanding of each other, and figured out how they can work effectively together. Dismissal proceedings against Joe were dropped. Sam and I established a great friendship that is still strong to this day.

What could have been an ugly drama instead became the starting point of a long friendship. This is the usefulness of emotional skills used in a social setting.

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.” Like most Zen sayings, this one is both absurd and true. All the emotional skills you learn in this book are useless if they cannot be applied in the real world, including a setting as seductive and dangerous as the emperor’s court. Conversely, the real world is the best place to sharpen your emotional skills. The real world is both your dojo and your zendo, from which you will get your mojo. Yo?

In this chapter, we will learn three essential social skills: leading with compassion, influencing with goodness, and communicating with insight.

Leading with Compassion

Compassion is known in every faith tradition and numerous philosophies as a great virtue. It is not just a great virtue, however. Compassion is also the cause for the highest level of happiness ever measured, and it’s a necessary condition for the most effective form of leadership known. Amazing stuff.

Compassion Is the Happiest State

Earlier in this book, we talked (and joked) about my friend Matthieu Ricard, the “happiest man in the world.” When Matthieu’s brain was scanned and measured with fMRI, his measure of happiness was extremely high. He was actually not the only person to register that extreme level of happiness—a number of Tibetan Buddhist meditation masters (people we consider the “Olympians” of the meditation world) were measured in the same lab, and more than one registered extreme levels of happiness. Matthieu was the first subject whose identity was unintentionally leaked to the public, which earned him that nickname. Another subject whose identity recently became known is Mingyur Rinpoche. Mingyur is similarly nicknamed in the Chinese-language press as the “happiest person in the world.”

These folks are, by far, the happiest people ever measured by science. Which leads us to a question: what were they thinking when they were being measured? Something naughty, perhaps? There is something about monks and their monk-y business, you know. Actually, they were meditating on compassion. This must be mind-blowing to many people because many of us consider compassion to be an unpleasant mental state, but here is scientific data showing precisely the reverse—that compassion is a state of extreme happiness.

I asked Matthieu about it. His own first-person experience confirms the data. In his experience, compassion is the happiest state ever. Being the engineer I am, I asked him the most obvious follow-up question, what is the second happiest state ever? He said, “Open awareness,” a state in which the mind is extremely open, calm, and clear. I don’t know about you, but as a practicing meditator, I found that insight stunning. As meditators, we train the mind toward profound calmness and clarity. As our practice deepens, we become increasingly happy, and since this deepening happiness does not require sensual or mental stimulation, some of us fall into the danger of withdrawing from real life (as usual, the Zen folks have the funniest description; they call them “Zen bums”). It turns out that even when you perfect that practice, the most you can achieve is the second happiest state.

The happiest state can only be achieved with compassion, which requires engagement in real life with real people. Hence, our meditation practices cannot be perfected outside of real life; there has to be a combination of seclusion from the world (to deepen the calmness) and engagement with the world (to deepen the compassion). If you are a deep meditator, remember to open your door and go out once in a while.

When I first read about these studies done on Matthieu (which was before we knew each other in person), it became one of the pivotal moments of my life. My dream is to create the conditions for world peace, and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace an...