6 Ideas You Should Know From: Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) by Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, and Jon Kabat-Zinn

The 6 Big Ideas:

  • Need to Train Attention

  • Take 2 Minutes to Stop and Do Nothing

  • Stop grasping and aversion

  • Need to feel stupid to do innovative stuff

  • 3 Assumptions to Make Clear Before a Meeting

  • Cultivate Emphatic Listening

My Highlights From the Book:

Need to Train Attention:

How do we begin training emotional intelligence? We begin by training attention. This may seem a little counterintuitive at first. I mean, what does attention have to do with emotional skills? The answer is that a strong, stable, and perceptive attention that affords you calmness and clarity is the foundation upon which emotional intelligence is built.

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.” What a mind of calmness and clarity does is to increase that space for us.

Take 2 Minutes to Stop and Do Nothing:

In my classes, after explaining some of the theory and brain science behind mindfulness, I offer two ways to experience a taste of mindfulness: the Easy Way and the Easier Way.

The creatively named Easy Way is to simply bring gentle and consistent attention to your breath for two minutes. That’s it. Start by becoming aware that you are breathing, and then pay attention to the process of breathing. Every time your attention wanders away, just bring it back very gently.

The Easier Way is, as its name may subtly suggest, even easier. All you have to do is sit without agenda for two minutes. Life really cannot get much simpler than that. The idea here is to shift from “doing” to “being,” whatever that means to you, for just two minutes. Just be.

process of breathing. The second thing to do is to remember an important insight we discussed earlier in this chapter—that this process of bringing a wandering attention back is like flexing your biceps during your gym workout. This is not failure; it is the process of growth and developing powerful mental “muscles.”

Let go of grasping and aversion:

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.

Need to feel stupid to do innovative stuff:

If you dislike failure, the story gets worse. If you want to do something new and innovative, you often need to feel stupid as well. This point was made by Nathan Myhrvold (talking about his friend Bill Gates but also making a general point about going outside the box): Lewis and Clark were lost most of the time. If your idea of exploration is to always know where you are and to be inside your zone of competence, you don’t do wild new shit. You have to be confused, upset, think you’re stupid. If you’re not willing to do that, you can’t go outside the box.

3 Assumptions to Make Clear Before a Meeting:

Whenever I chair a meeting, I like to begin with a practice I call the Three Assumptions: I invite everybody in the meeting room to make the following assumptions about everybody else:

1. Assume that everybody in this room is here to serve the greater good, until proven otherwise.          

2. Given the above assumption, we therefore assume that none of us has any hidden agenda, until proven otherwise.

3. Given the above assumption, we therefore assume that we are all reasonable even when we disagree, until proven otherwise.

Cultivate Emphatic Listening

Specifically, there are four things we can do to strengthen our ability for empathic listening.          

1. Mindfulness: With mindfulness, we become more perceptive and receptive.          

2. Kindness: When we are kind, we can listen better to feelings.

3. Curiosity: Practice wondering what someone might be feeling when you hear their stories.          

4. Practice: Just do a lot of empathic listening. The more you do it, the better you become, especially when you practice it in conjunction with mindfulness, kindness, and curiosity.