‘Search Inside Yourself’ Program Intro

Speaker 1:

Good morning everybody. Thank you all for being here.

We like to tell ourselves, "I will be so successful if I have more self-awareness. I will be so successful if I can remain calm and confident in a crisis. I will be so successful if I can understand people better and help people like me."

All these qualities come under the umbrella of emotional intelligence. And the good news is these qualities are skills and because they are skills, like all other skills, these qualities are trainable. Better still, given our experience, these qualities are trainable to a meaningful degree in seven weeks which is the duration of Search Inside Yourself program.

Search Inside Yourself, what you are here for today, is a course about training such skills. It was created in-house in Google in conjunction with Stanford University, where we all are right now, and the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and our friend, Daniel Goleman, who talk about a little bit later.

The objective for today's class, we hope that by the time you all walk out this lecture theatre today you will have a basic understanding of emotional intelligence, what it is, and so on and very importantly, you also walk out of today with practical skills that you can already use today which can begin to change your life. But first, a little bit about myself. So, for those who do not know me my name is Ming and for those who know me my name is still Ming.

It turns out my name is invariant to whether or not you know me. Back in high school you study mathematics and you study invariants and you wonder when you ever apply this in real life. Well, this Is it. My name is invariant. So welcome back to the math class.

I am the Jolly Good Fellow of Google. And I think I had the coolest job title in corporate America, "Jolly Good Fellow". And the way I got this job title started as a joke. When we had our engineering career ladder, the highest-ranking engineer in Google is called a Google Fellow and we should say to Vice President. And the joke I told is; why be a Google Fellow when you can be a Jolly Good Fellow? And everybody laughed and then my philosophy is if everybody laughs that's the right thing to do. So, I had it printed on my business card just for fun and it stuck. And I had that job title ever since. So, that is me, the Jolly Good Fellow of Google.

The textbook for the Search Inside Yourself course is conveniently called, Search Inside Yourself, so it's easy for you to remember. For those of you watching this at home, I would encourage all of you to read the book because there are very important details in the book that we simply do not have time to cover in this course.

Speaker 2:

So, how do we define emotional intelligence? Fortunately, there's research from Salovey and Mayer from 1990 who were the originators of this field who defined emotion intelligence in the following way; They said that it's the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions. The ability to discriminate or discern among those and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.

Daniel Goleman wrote a very influential book called, Emotional Intelligence, in which he summarized lots of research and he summarized it in a way that came up with five interrelated domains of emotional intelligence, sometimes called Five Emotional Intelligence Competencies. These are self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. Five interrelated domains of emotional intelligence training and skills.

Howard Gardner, a very important researcher from Harvard University, wrote a book that was very influential as well called, Frames of Mind, in which he made a very clear point that IQ or intellectual intelligence is not the only domain but in fact that there are multiple forms of intelligence that are important to develop.

Specifically, in this class, the five emotional intelligences map onto two different aspects: intrapersonal skills and interpersonal skills. And in fact, self-awareness, which is defined or characterized as knowing one's internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions loads on intrapersonal. Second domain, self-regulation, the ability to manage internal states, impulses and emotions, also is an intrapersonal skill. And motivation, understanding the tendencies that facilitate reaching one's goals. These three emotional intelligences are actually loading on interpersonal skills.

Interpersonally, as we extend it into the social domain, there are two other emotional intelligences: empathy, here understood as the awareness of others emotions and concerns and also finally social skills, the being adept or skillful at working with others. These two load on interpersonal emotion intelligence skills. And in this course, we will gradually unpack and provide context for practicing all of these.

Speaker 1:

This leads us to a question we call the, "So what?" question. I mean, emotional intelligence is nice but what does it do for me, like "So What?" Emotional intelligence has at least three benefits for you and your organization. The first, not surprisingly, is that it creates the conditions for outstanding work performance. This is actually not that surprising especially in roles or in jobs that require interaction with, let's say, clients. So, it's sales. For example, if it's sales people, definitely you need emotional intelligence. Definitely they sell more if they have better EI. Right?

Well there's a surprise. It turns out it doesn't just work for people from sales. Surprisingly, surprising at least to me, this is also true for engineers. Even for engineers, emotion intelligence create a condition for outstanding performance.

So, if you look at this list, for example, the top six distinguishing factors that distinguish the best engineers from the average engineers are these in this order. So, the first one is a strong achievement drive and high achievement standards. The second is the ability to influence. The third is conceptual thinking followed by analytical ability followed by initiative, you take your own challenges and self-confidence.

You notice something about these six qualities. You notice that there are four emotional competencies in this list of six and two cognitive competencies. Which means that and it gets better, the two top competencies are both emotional competencies. So, that emotional competencies are twice as important leading to outstanding work performance even for engineers. That was my first surprise.

The second thing that emotional intelligence does for you is that it creates the conditions for outstanding leadership which is again not surprising. I mean, imagine the best manager you ever had. Imagine somebody with high emotional intelligence, right?

So, here's another surprise. The surprise is this is true even in the Navy. Which was surprising to me because when I think of Navy commanders, I think of the best Navy commanders are people who shout orders: Make it so, number one. Engage. Go, go, go! That's what I think of when I think of top naval commanders.

But there was a study done and published in 1988 on what distinguished the best naval commanders from the average naval commanders. And this is what they found, and I'm going to quote here, "They found the best naval commanders to be positive, outgoing, more emotionally expressive, dramatic, warmer, more sociable, more appreciative, and trustful." In other words, the best naval commanders are nice guys, people you want to be with. And funnily enough, the title of this study was, "Nice Guys Finish First".

That third and perhaps I think to me the most important benefit of emotional intelligence is that it leads to the conditions for happiness. And just a secret between you and me and the million other people watching this video, this was the real reason we started SIY, Search Inside Yourself. The other two factors I told you about, they're all true, but I use those to sell this to management, but this is the real reason, I want to create the conditions for happiness for my co-workers and for the world.

The first step in creating emotional intelligence is to begin the assumption that emotional intelligence is trainable. When you come to a course like this that advertises itself as an emotional intelligence course, you might think of this as a behavioral course, right? You might expect to be told, "share a candy," don't bite your co-workers," "be nice to everybody". So, you might expect to be told what to do.

We decided on an entire different approach. We decided instead of doing it a behavioral way, we do it in a way that creates skills. And the theory behind this is, if we can develop the correct skills, the behavioral issues go away. For example, if we can create the skills to manage anger, then behavior issues concerning anger just go away. So, therefore we say let's focus on training skills emotional competences.

And here you see on the board right now these fare examples of skills that we can develop in the space of seven weeks that you're staying with us. So, examples are; the ability to respond to emotional triggers, how to be triggered and not fly off the handle, the ability to conduct difficult conversations, and also how to be confident in times of stress, for example, speaking in front of a large audience with an accent, for example. I'm just saying.

Why can we do this or what enables us to do this? This is based on a fairly new branch of science called Neuroplasticity. The idea is this. The idea is what we think, what we do, and most importantly, what we pay attention to, change the brain.

So, for example, you have been shown...So, the example is London cabbies, people who drive cabs in London. It's very hard to get a license to drive a cab in London. In order to qualify for a license, you have to be able to navigate all the streets of central London in your head. Like, given point A and point B, you must be able to in your head say, let's go this way and that way and so on. And it turns out that it takes about most people two to four years of hard study to qualify for the license.

And the question then is, given the training are the brains of London cabbies different from the brains of normal people. It turns out they're different. It turns out that the part of the brain associated with directions called the hippocampus, of the hippocampi. The hippocampus for London cabbies are bigger and more active than normal people and the longer they've been driving a cab the more powerful, the bigger and more active the hippocampus is. So, just as an example that what we pay attention to changes of brain. Even for adults. And this is true even for emotional skills. And this is a mechanism we'll be relying for, for training emotional intelligence.

The next question is this. The next question is; So, now we know we're going to train emotional intelligence, what do we begin the training with? Cognitively, we begin training with attention. And you might wonder, what has attention got to do with emotional intelligence? The answer is this. The answer is that a strong, stable, and perceptive attention that offers you a calm and clear mind is a basis of emotional intelligence.

In other words, we're trying to train attention in a way that you can create a quality of mind that is calm and clear on-demand. Imagine like everything happening around, everything happening around you people shouting at you and you can create a mind that is calm and clear on-demand. And if you can do that, then it creates a foundation for emotional intelligence and that skill is highly trainable.

Which leads us to another question; how do you train that most powerful skill? Very simple. We train it with a technique called mindfulness. And mindfulness is defined here by Jon Kabat-Zinn, our friend, as paying attention. And not just paying attention. Pay attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, very important, non-judgmentally. This is mindfulness.

The good thing about mindfulness is that all of us already know how to do this because it's something that all of us already experience from time to time. That's the good news. The better news, and with me there's no bad news, the better news is that this is something you can sustain and deepen and create on-demand with training this quality of mind. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to train mindfulness and this will be the basis. Mindfulness will help us create the mind is calm and clear on-demand and this will be the basis of emotional intelligence training.

Speaker 2:

So, there's an increasing literature on scientific investigations of the effects of mindfulness that help us to provide empirical data of both the short term and long-term effects of mindfulness practice. One such study as shown here has to do with training attention using mindfulness and its effect on brain functions and in particular focusing on the amygdala. The amygdala is a very ancient and important brain region that is one of the most interconnected brain regions. And it's very important in terms of detecting emotional salience, generating emotion, and it's triggering other parts of the brain to come online to help regulate.

In this particular study, as you can see the amygdala shown in blue, in this study there were negative or aversive acoustic stimuli or sounds of people screaming and this is something that would immediately trigger the amygdala to react and to generate very rapidly an emotional response, emotional reactivity. And the idea here is that, in a group of long-term meditators and as you can see in the X-axis, people with tens of thousands of hours of meditation training, their training literally down regulated the amygdala response that would be normally very rapid and very powerfully reactive to negative sounds.

And one of the things that we know about the amygdala is that when the amygdala is triggered it can literally hijack or overtake other psychological processes that are instantiated in different neural circuits. For example, when the amygdala is triggered it can literally override our ability to regulate our attention, to make clear informed decisions, or even to regulate our emotions. Hence the ability to train or modulate amygdala response could be very important for health.

In this particular study, we see that a small group of very well-trained meditation masters and as you can see in the having tens of thousands of hours of training are literally able to down regulate their amygdala via their training in response to a cue, a very aversive negative sound, a person screaming, that would normally induce a very powerful negative emotion response.

One thing that's very important to understand here is that even though the X-axis talks about tens of thousands of hours, if we really think about how many hours does it take to become a master violinist, a master computer programmer, to get a Ph.D. to become a physician, that also, if you counted, would include thousands and thousands of hours of training. Another very important point here is that there are huge effects of individual differences. People vary very much in their readiness for the meditation to impact their psychology, their skills.

Another very important point is that research has shown that even as little as 100 minutes of meditation training has measurable effects. And that's very promising because it suggests that, again going back to an earlier theme of plasticity, our brains are plastic. The amygdala can be trained, and other brain systems can help to regulate the amygdala response and that this is amenable to meditation training.

There are many different forms of emotion regulation. One form shown here is what's called affect labeling. This refers to generating an emotion word that describes an emotional state. This is one form of emotion regulation. Work coming from Matt Lieberman at UCLA has shown, as shown in this graph here, there's a region of the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that is more active when we are volitionally engaged in labeling with words our current emotional state. And also, that that brain activity via the medial prefrontal cortex down regulates amygdala response hence the intensity of our emotional response or emotion generation.

Another study following up on this, again looking at individual differences in trait mindfulness, so how much mindfulness different people have as innate as their quality, showing again that this right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex as well as the medial prefrontal cortex vary as a function of how much mindfulness skills people self-report, showing an individual difference brain relationship. Again, more evidence of how mindfulness might literally be related to different brain's prefrontal cortical circuits that help to modulate emotional experience.

And then, very importantly, cartoons. One of the questions that we always ask, and we can ask ourselves is how much of my waking hours am I in the present moment? And what this cartoon suggests is that we spend much time in what I call past tripping or future tripping. And if we could have a little monitor on top of our heads that measured how much are we in the present, you could really wonder how much am I in the present? Not that there's anything wrong with considering of the past or preparing for the future, but the ability to intentionally bring the mind back to the present moment i.e. Sati, Smiti mindfulness is a very powerful and important skill and you can think of very practical applications like when you really want to pay attention to a friend who's saying something important or you're driving a car or you're listening to your daughter's day, a description of her day at school. The ability to stay in the present as opposed to being pulled into the past and future.

How do we begin to train mindfulness? There are many ways but one way that we have found in the Search Inside Yourself program is literally paying attention to the body, the embodied sense of mindfulness. And as you can see in this slide, you can begin to read people's emotional states by their bodily posture. And in fact, what we've come to understand is that there's important brain regions like the insular cortex that maps our whole sense of body or sensory experience and hence paying attention to the body is a way of understanding what emotional state I'm in because all emotional states have physiological correlates.

Why is it so important? Paying attention to sensations in the body is a way of understanding our moment to moment emotional state because different emotions have bodily correlates. So, the ability to develop a fine resolution laser beam like attention to our moment to moment changes in physiology actually is a way to develop emotional intelligence and understanding what am I actually feeling from moment to moment. So, this is one basis for training attention to emotions via sensations in the body.

One of our friends, Laura Delizonna, actually has a definition, provided this quote or definition that "emotion is a basic physiological state characterized by identifiable autonomic or bodily changes". Simply put, sensations are constantly occurring throughout the body and pinging back to parts of the brain that are always online, sensing, detecting, and again, that this is information that we have access to that we can use from moment to moment to understand our own emotional state and also the emotional state of others.

How do we begin to do this? Through developing what's called high resolution awareness of emotions as they arise. And as you can see in this slide, it raises the question, how refined can I make my attention and what are the ramifications or the benefits that arise from laser beam like attention, high resolution attention, that can notice emotions and their physiological correlates as an emotion arises, fully develops or manifests, changes over time, and even dissolves? What would be the benefits from developing that high-resolution awareness of our own physiological sensations and reactions that are related to our emotions?

Speaker 1:

Why are we bringing mindfulness to the body? The reason is to create a higher resolution perception into the process of emotion. What does that mean? Let me illustrate with an example. The example is this, can you detect anger the moment it is a rising? That's important because if you can detect more anger that moment, that is the moment you have control. Can I turn it on? I mean, do I want to turn it off or do I want to let it continue. You have choice and the choice comes from that moment and the choice comes from having the ability to perceive that moment.

Part of this training is to be able to develop the ability to perceive the process of emotion both at high spatial resolution and high temporary resolution. This goes back to why we want to bring mindfulness to the body because only by bringing mindfulness of the body can you create the conditions for high resolution perception.

What does that mean? So, coming back into the example of detecting anger. If your mindfulness is in the mind, if you bring attention to the mind, it's very hard to detect anger the moment it's arising. However, if you detect in the body, you find that the of emotion in the body are a lot more vivid. For example, in the case of anger for example, you might find your forehead tightening. You might find you're breathing differently. You might find your chest tightening and so on. You might feel your own of anger. And imagine that you're in a situation and you find, "Oh my God, my chest is tightening, my breath is changing. I am beginning to become angry right now." You have that kind of perception or the high resolution of perception and the only way to do that is by bringing attention to the body. Which is why this is so important.

However, this is not the only benefit. There is another benefit to bringing attention or mindfulness to the body. And this has to do with intuition. A lot of intuition comes from the body. And it sounds a lot like hocus pocus but let me tell you what it means, and you'll find it is all grounded in science.

There is a very interesting study done in the University of Iowa. And the study was this. It's a very simple game. The game is a blue deck and a red deck, and you choose one that comes from one deck and open to one card at a time. So, the interesting thing that the players do not know in the beginning is that the red deck is minefield. So, if you play the red deck, eventually you lose money. So, you had to play the blue deck to win money in the long term. And after 80 rounds of doing this most people figured it out. They figured out that the red deck loses you money and they figured out how.

Just something interesting, before that happens, so, at a 50th turn, before they figure it out cognitively, they had a hunch. They say, "Eh, there's something wrong with the red deck but I don't know what it is." The hunch begins way before the cognition. But here's something even more interesting. We saw as part of a study they measured the sweat glands of the participants to detect stress. And it turns out that even way before the 40th hand, on the 10th turn, the player already detected it. The player's sweat glands started reacting when they're playing the red deck and their behaviors started changing.

So, it means that way before you had a hunch that something's wrong, your body knows, your body knows. There's is something wrong here or this. So, imagine if you had access to the body's wisdom. You have access to intuition. Why is that the case?

It turns out there are neurological reasons. One part of the brain most correlated or most related to intuition is a very primitive part of the brain called the basal ganglia. It's very primitive and the basal ganglia what it does is sort of create decision rules in life. It detects what's happening in life all the time. And you sort of create rules, like this is good, this is bad, this is dangerous, this is not. This eats me. I eat this. This is what the basal ganglia does.

And the basal ganglia is so primitive that it has direct connections to the gut but no direct connections to the vertical centers of the brain. Which is why you have gut feelings, literally gut feelings, and you cannot explain your gut feelings. And that is neurological. So therefore, once you create a strong mindfulness in your body you don't just have emotional intelligence. You don't just have high resolution perception into emotional process, you also have better intuition. This is amazing. The best deal on TV.

So, in summary, these are the 3 SIY principles. The first principle is that emotional skills are trainable. And this course Search Inside Yourself is about training those skills. The second is that we start the training with attention, specifically with mindfulness. And the third principle is that emotions are not just in the brain they're also in the body. It's as much a physiological as a psychological process and therefore we bring mindfulness to the body. And these are the principles of Search Inside Yourself.

So, here are some applications and benefits of my mindfulness practice. One application is that with this is mind you can just learn to pause and notice thoughts and emotions throughout the day. Just pausing and noticing, "what am I feeling right now. What I'm thinking right now." Sort of as a state of rest and also a state of reflection. So, that's one possible application.

Another one is just bringing mindfulness into daily activity. For example, we're having sushi. Such a lovely experience. So that's bringing mindfulness through the experience. Or even just taking a walk. Very small things, simple things. Everything you do can inject mindfulness. One of the benefits of this practice is that with enough mindfulness you become very good at recovering from distraction.

So, try that. Try that in a situation where you're in a meeting, you have to focus on the boss and your attention keeps thinking away, use mindfulness. Use your boss as the object of mindfulness and then you might find that your concentration improves, and you might find you get a promotion. And if you do you, owe me lunch.

And finally, use mindfulness as a tool for emotional stabilization. For example, if you feel the need to send a very angry e-mail, try this. Try instead of sending the angry e-mail now, try going into mindfulness on your breath for just three breaths. That is all. Take three mindful breaths and then if you still want to, feel free to press send. And you might find that sometimes you will decide to not press send and then might save your career.

So, these are some of the applications and benefits.

SIY 102 Day of Mindfulness .mp4

Speaker 1:

What is meditation? Let's begin with a scientific definition. Scientific definition: meditation refers to a family of mental training practices that are designed to familiarize the practitioner with specific types of mental processes. The key words here mental training practices. It turns out meditation is no magic. It is just practice. You may ask, so this is a scientific definition? But meditation has been around for thousands of years. Do traditional peoples feel the same way? It turns out the answer is yes.

For example, the Tibetan word for meditation is "gom". And "gom" means "to familiarize". Which basically exactly matches the scientific definition of meditation. The Pali tradition which is at least 2500 years old, they refer to meditation as "Bhavana". And "Bhavana" literally means cultivation as in cultivating the soil. So, they see meditation as cultivating qualities the same way you cultivate wheat and rice. So, even for them, even for those people in the Pali tradition from 2600 years ago, they don't see meditation as magic. To them, it's just work, cultivation, practice.

Which leads us to our first question. If we're doing training, what are we training? Specifically, we're training two qualities, which you see on the screen right now. The first quality is attention, and everybody knows what attention is. And as usual, William James has the best definition and you see on the screen right now.

The second quality that you train is meta-attention which is attention of attention. What does that even mean? What is attention of attention? So, a very simple way to describe this is this. Meta-attention is the ability to know when the attention has wandered away. So, you focus, you put attention on one thing, it wanders away, something knows, something clicks us, "oh, I've lost it," and that something, that quality is meta-attention. And those two, attention and meta-attention are both trainable qualities. And we're training them in this class.

My friends, I'm going to share a secret with you, a very powerful insight which is that meta-attention is the secret of concentration. What does that mean? Let me give you an illustration. Riding a bicycle. As you're riding a bicycle, how do you keep the bicycle balanced as you're tipping left and right? The way you keep your bicycle balanced is with micro-recoveries. So, for example, you find yourself tipping a little bit to the right, you just recover to the left. You find yourself tipping a bit to the left, you recover bit to the right. And if you recover quickly and often enough you get the effect off continuous balance, right?

Similarly, a similar mechanism is at work in concentration. If every time your attention wanders away, you recover your attention quickly and often enough, you get the effect of continuous attention. And that my friends is concentration. So, meta- attention is the secret of concentration and the good news is once you're done with SIY your concentration will improve just because of this and that alone is worth your money.

So, the next question. You train in attention you train in meta-attention, you're good at both. And then what? What does it do for you? Here's what it does for you. Imagine the mind like a snow globe as you see on the screen. Imagine that a snow globe is constantly agitated. What does it look like? It looks white all the time, right? However, imagine you stop agitating the snow globe. Just stop. What happens? The snow in the snow globe starts to settle. And then after a while you get a quality of the snow globe that is calm and clear at the same time, right?

It's the same as the mind. The mind is constantly agitated. However, with the power of your attention and your meta-attention you can settle the mind. And once the mind settles, it's like the settling of the snow globe. The mind becomes calm and clear at the same time. That is the power of attention. But wait it gets better. When the mind is calm and clear, there is a third quality of mind that's not captured by this analogy. And the third quality is happiness, joy.

Which makes no sense. If you think about it. Why should a calm and clear mind automatically be happy? For myself, even after I was able to bring about this mind on-demand, it didn't make sense to me. I couldn't figure it out. So, I asked one of the Western's most top experts in this topic on the topic of relaxed concentration and his name is Alan Wallace and he says, "it's all very simple. It's because happiness is the default state of mind." So, when the mind is calm and clear at the same time all they are doing is returning the mind to default. And the default is happiness.

And if you fully understood what I just said, my friends, this is a life changing insight. Imagine if you understand that and you can access the mind that happiness is a default state, it means that happiness is just being. That happiness is not something you pursue. Happiness is something you allow. It's not something you try to catch. It's something that is always there, in your life, in your mind, at all times and all you have to do is to allow it. And the simple way of allowing it is just to calm the mind. And that my friends, for me at least, was a life changing insight. This literally changed my life.

So, the idea of the mind as a snow globe. That is actually a 2600-year-old analogy. So, the old analogy, the classical analogy is the mind as a pot of water with lots of sediments and you've stopped agitating the pot and the sediments settle.

There is an alternative analogy which is more fitting that modern people are more used to. And that's the idea of meditation as exercise. So, what are the similarities? The first similarity is that in both meditation and exercise you can see both of them as acquiring new abilities. So, for example, if you go to a gym, right. You're acquiring strength. If you go running on a treadmill, you're acquiring endurance. Similarly, in meditation, if you want to, you can think of it as acquiring mental abilities, right? With meditation I can learn to have clearer mind. I can learn to have calmer mind. I can learn to increase my concentration and so on. So that's the first similarity.

The second similarity is that in both cases, so for exercise for example. And first is very hard. Well, in fact the first week is very easy. The first week, "this exercise thing is great. I want to start it." After the first week it gets very hard. However, if you persist on, after eight or nine weeks you'll discover something. You discover your life changing. You discover that you have more energy, you discover you are stronger, you discover you're healthier, you don't get sick so often, you feel great about yourself. And you even look better in the mirror. And in other words, a quality of life change substantially and once that happens you cannot not workout anymore. Even if you do not want to. It's so compelling, you have to do this.

And it's the same with meditation. The first week is easy. The second week it gets kind of hard, but if you persist on, after seven or eight weeks your quality of life will change so much. You feel better, you get happier a lot more, you get calmer, people love you more and so on. You cannot not do this anymore. The change in the quality of life is so compelling and after that point you are driven by the quality of life. That's the second similarity.

The third similarity, which is I think very important so pay attention to this. The third similarity is the growth in both cases. Growth arises from meeting resistance. What does that mean? If you're doing weights, for example, every time you are resisting the dumbbells, gravity, you are growing your muscles just a little bit, right? And so that's how you grow.

In the case of meditation, it's the same. Every time your mind wanders away and then bring it back. Every time you bring it back it's like strengthening the muscles of meta-attention. And if you understand that insight it leads to a very important insight which is there is no way to do this wrong, right?

When you're doing dumbbells for example, you never say, "Oh, I'm succeeding. I'm failing. I'm succeeding, I'm failing," because that sounds absurd. However, when you're doing meditation you do that. Your mind wanders away you say "Oh, I'm failing. I suck at this." It turns out you're not failing. It turns out this thing that your mind wanders away and you bring it back, this is the training. Every time you do that you are strengthening your muscles, the mental muscles, muscles of attention. Therefore, there is no way to do this wrong. This is important to know.

Speaker 2:

So, what's the empirical evidence and what does science have to say to support all of these practices and ideas that we've been presenting today? There was a pioneering study done about a decade ago by Jon Kabat-Zinn and Richard Davidson and this was an interesting study because it's the first study that was done in a biotech company. It was a randomized control study where they randomly assigned workers, biotech workers, into two groups. One group was a control group and the other group received mindfulness-based stress reduction for the standard format for eight weeks.

And they did several different investigations of different dependent variables but what's shown here is a very fascinating result which is that after the course was finished and after the control group was finished or actually during, they provided the influenza virus and they looked at what was the immune body, the immune response to this influenza virus. And as you can see here in the gray bar there was a much larger increase in the immune response to the influenza virus in the group that received the mindfulness meditation training compared to the control group. So, that was a fascinating demonstration of the mind body connection. That some kind of training that reduced stress and changed mental processes was able to translate into an enhanced immune response to a very common thing, the common cold, the influenza virus. That was one finding.

Another very fascinating part of this study was that they also measured using EEG left and right prefrontal cortical activity. And they found the people who had greater left hemispheric or left prefrontal cortical neural activity showed a much greater immune response to the influenza virus, demonstrating a neural substrate or a neural mechanism that might help to explain the connection between the immune response and the meditation practice. So, this was a fascinating contribution that has led to many other kinds of studies that are ongoing today.

Another piece of evidence from a very different kind of task, a computer task, that looked at one specific aspect of attention. It's called the attentional blink. And simply put, as you see here on the slide, this is a task where you'll see a series of letters, letters, letters, letters, and then suddenly you see a number. The brain picks up that number and attentional resources are allocated to processing that number. And it takes a while for the brain to reset, so to speak, before it can consciously process or process another stimulus, another number. If the duration is quite short on the order of a couple of hundred milliseconds between the first number and the second number there is a blink. Meaning that the brain is not able to attend to the second stimulus. This is a very standard attentional task, computer task, that's done.

Heleen A. Slagter and Richard Davidson, again just a few years ago, thought let's see if a mindfulness meditation or meditation training might actually influence the ability to reset and allow attention to be allocated to the second stimulus more quickly thereby eliminating this blink. And that's exactly what they found. They actually found that after meditation training, people were more able to actually perceive the second stimulus suggesting that there was a change in the temporal dynamics of the brain systems that control at least one aspect of attention. Fascinating demonstration that mindfulness meditation or that meditation practice can actually influence the temporal neural dynamics.

Another study is actually several studies other known benefits and there are many others, Antoine Lutz, also from Richard Davidson's lab, has demonstrated that with meditation training there are changes in what's called the gamma brain waves which are very fast oscillating waves on the order of 40 hertz on the cortex and that this has been linked to an enhancement in memory and in learning. Another piece of evidence that suggests that even specific psychological processes can be influenced, and it might be through changes in gamma wave intensity.

Another very interesting study, also a very practical application, was the use of mindfulness in helping as an adjunct to help people who were suffering from skin disease specifically psoriasis. So, the standard intervention is ultraviolet light. And so, again it was a randomized controlled trial where one group received treatment as usual, ultraviolet light therapy, the second group received the ultraviolet light therapy plus a mindfulness meditation training. And they found that the group that received the meditation training healed faster. Again, demonstrating a mind body immune response connection.

And then lastly, another study that has been very influential is a study by Sarah Lazar indicating changes in the rate of cortical thickness decay. So, the normative pattern is as we age, the cortex or the grey matter cells begin to dwindle as shown on the slide. As we get older, our brain becomes smaller and we have less and less grey matter in different parts of the brain. What she did is a cross-sectional study demonstrating that people who had long-term meditation practice had a much slower rate of decay of grey matter cells which was fascinating.

And it demonstration...Again mind bodies, possible mechanisms might include that these are people who because of their meditation training had less stress or less stress reactivity and therefore had less oxidative stress or less damage to their grey matter cells. This remains to be demonstrated in prospective studies but again just several pieces of evidence that of some of the effects of meditation training.

Now, when we engage in a focused type of meditation practice on a given object, what are we actually doing from moment to moment to moment? So, what you see here projected on the slide is a process model of mindfulness meditation. Now, the first step is that we bring some level of intentionality. This might be that I simply want to reduce my stress, I would like to increase my wellbeing, or I'm interested in doing these practices because I'm curious to use this as a tool for self-exploration. There are many different levels of intentionality.

So, we pick an object. It could be anything. In this case we might choose the breath. It's always present, always available. We follow the breath and if we are fortunate, we begin to feel some changes in the level of concentration, perhaps enhanced sense of calm, flow, etc. But inevitably, we will have moments of distraction and the distraction is very very important in terms of the process of learning from mindfulness meditation.

We might become distracted because we begin to ruminate or spin on positive thoughts or negative thoughts or self-deprecation or negative self-beliefs, etc. We might worry, we might fantasize. And the key thing then is to re-gain our attention, to re-orient our attention, release from the distraction and re-engage with the object of meditation, in this case the breath. Now, at that moment, this is another very important juncture. The attitude that we bring to that moment. We might at that moment become very self-critical, "Oh my goodness I can't focus. I can't concentrate. I'm never going to be good at this. Why am I even bothering to do meditation?" and I might give up.

Another way to approach that same experience is very different. It would be really about tenderness towards the self. A sense of kindness or even curiosity about what are these things that are pulling my attention away? How can I simply note them, acknowledge, release, and return without engaging in any extra elaboration, evaluation, negative judgment? This I would suggest is the basis for kindness, perhaps even empathy. Understanding how other people are so caught up in these more negative self-critical processes. And then you bring your attention back to the breath and you start again. So, this is a process model that might be occurring on the order of seconds or perhaps even minutes. So, further considerations about the notion of no-self and how this plays out in different domains.

So, in the realm of clinical psychology or clinical psychotherapy, the notion of self and no self is very important when working with a client. So, one practical thing is that one of the biggest sources of suffering in psychotherapy and working with clients is a distorted view of the self.

And we have plenty of evidence of a very clear set pattern of views of self and beliefs about the self that are the source of tremendous amount of suffering. Now of course these are evaluations, judgments, interpretations. So, one practical view or understanding of how to apply no self in this particular context, clinical practice, is helping the client understand that the way they view the self might be distorted, not valid or even inaccurate or even un-beneficial. And by slowly getting to a point where they view the self is a constructed narrative, ever-changing, storyline, a basis for making sense of one's experiences, this begins to free up the sticky mind that holds onto self as if it were solid, real, independent. And this creates the opportunity for freedom in ever larger doses. So, that's one practical place where we can apply these notions of self and no self.

From a neuroscientific perspective, there's been an explosion of research, empirical research, on brain systems that are the basis for different modes of self-processing. So, there are midline structures that are very important that serve as the basis in which is instantiated, self-referential, conceptual, linguistic based views of the self. So, these are self-concepts and the brain actually shows this in a very clear clear pattern.

What's interesting is that there are other modes of self-processing that are not conceptual, linguistic, that are more sensory, visceral, that are based on anterior insula where there's a sensory experience and somatosensory cortex where there's a sense, felt sense of the self of the body. So, this week you could think of as a felt embodied self and there's likely other modes of self-processing that are occurring in the brain for which we don't really have labels yet. And it's likely, this Is more theoretical, that we are probably shifting across multiple modes of self all the time even on the order of milliseconds. And that part of the practice is to recognize which mode one is in, if one can, to slow down the process and see that these are all different modes of self but there is no actual inherent concretes self-embedded anywhere in the brain. So, that's a really powerful contribution from neuroscience to this practice and understanding of the mechanisms of distorted healthy or healthy sense of self.

One more area that's very important to consider is, so how does this contribute to wellbeing or optimizing performance in the workplace? Well, most of you, if you stay in a company, as you advance in your career, you're going to become managers, executives, VPs. At some point, you'll have many other people reporting to you. One consideration is that the ability to modulate the grasping of this conceptual self or releasing this conceptual self too some degree, allows us to actually have more space to consider the other. You can think about this as cognitive perspective taking which is very much dependent on areas of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex other areas and even empathy. The degree to which the grasping at one's own self releases or relinquishes even a little bit, literally creates the ability to take the perspective of others, to consider what others feel or what it's like to be in their shoes.

And so, neuroscience also, in this case, is providing the neural basis, the neural substrates, for all of these specific practices, perspective taking, considering others. And this becomes super important because when we know that as you climb in the corporate ladder the ability to have these emotional intelligence skills, empathy, emotional awareness, emotion regulation, are directly related to being a stellar, optimized person in the workplace, a leader.

Speaker 1:

Meditation posture. What should your posture be like when you meditate? So, on the screen right now you are looking at something called the traditional seven-point posture. And the seven-point posture are: back straight like an arrow, legs crossed in lotus position and so on. You notice that we labeled the slide, "Blah blah". And the reason we do that is that I'm going to ask you to ignore everything you see on the screen right now because there are only two important things to remember when it comes to meditation posture which is to be alert and relaxed at the same time.

Any posture that allows you to be alert and relaxed at the same time is the correct posture for meditation. So straight away you find boundaries of what not to do. For example, you don't want to hunch because it's not good for alertness and you don't want to stiffen your back because it's not good for relaxation. It's something in between. Find out what it is for yourself. Doesn't matter what it is as long as you are alert and relaxed.

The seven-point posture you see on the screen, this is the traditional posture which over thousands of years people found to be optimal for maintaining alert and relaxed for a very long time. Having said that, we discovered that in teaching this that this posture doesn't necessarily work for modern people at the beginning because we have different posture habits. For example, we don't sit on the floor, we tend to sit on the sofa and because of that, this posture is initially difficult for most beginners. Therefore, we suggest that you just find any posture you like which allows you to be alert and relaxed and just know that there is a posture which other people found to be optimal which you may or may not want to experiment with as your practice matures.

If you like, there is a very nice way to remember this posture which is suggested by Sogyal Rinpoche and he's says to sit like a majestic mountain. So, the idea is you pretend you are a majestic mountain, your favorite mountain. Pretend you're Mount Fuji. "I am Mount Fuji. People look up to me," right? And if you sit in that posture, in a dignified majestic posture, very likely this posture is also the one that allows you to be alert and relaxed at the same time. So, if you like this, give you a try. I may or may not work but it's kind of fun to try. It's kind of fun to be your favorite mountain.

The eyes. What do you do with the eyes? Do you open or close your eyes in meditation? And the answer is yes and no and both and neither. Which is a funny answer but let me tell you what that means. So, what is important actually is to understand the pros and cons, upsides and downsides of opening or closing eyes. And if you think about it, they're very obvious. If you close your eyes, you do not get distracted however you fall asleep. If you keep your eyes open, you don't fall asleep, but you get distracted. Therefore, what are the solutions?

It turns out there are two compromises on two different dimensions. There is a spatial compromise and there's a temporal compromise. The temporal compromise is to keep your eyes closed until you feel sleepy and then you open your eyes until you feel distracted and then you close your eyes again. So, open and close, if you want.

The spatial compromise is to keep your eyes half open like a slit, just gazing down at nothing particular and having your eyes open enough for light to come in so you don't fall asleep but closed enough to not get distracted. And this is a tradition posture for the eye which is why if you go to like a Buddhist temple, for example a Buddhist temple, you will see the statue of Buddha, the Buddha has slit eyes is for that reason because that is found over thousands of years to be the optimal way to keep your eyes during meditation. And once again it's kind of hard for beginners so just experiment with what works for you knowing the pros and cons of each approach.

What if you experience distraction? What if there's a thought or sound that distracts you? Three things, very easy. The first is to acknowledge, knowledge I am being distracted by the sound. That's all, just acknowledging. The second is to experience the distractor without judging, as "Ah, there's a sound." Experience it, that's all. And the third thing, let it go. Let it go. And if it doesn't want to be let go, it's okay. Let it be for as long as it wants to be. And then let it go. That is all.

What if you have a discomfort? What if you've got itching? Very similar things. So, the first is acknowledge, I am being distracted by an itch. The second. Okay, let me suggest this. We suggest not to react for three breaths, five breaths, whatever number of breaths that you define for yourself. Do not react automatically. Why? Because in real life, the space between stimulus and reaction, between that is choice. So, therefore the idea is to learn to train your brain not to react automatically to stimulus. And once you are able to do that then the choice, there's a space available for choice becomes bigger for you over time. And this thing is a very good and simple practice.

Where there is a distractor don't automatically react for a few breaths. And then if you really have to react, if you really have to scratch, what do you do? Remember this. Remember that in this meditation it's about mindfulness. It is not about stillness. Therefore, as long as you maintain mindfulness, everything you do is fair game.

So, therefore, if you have to move, I suggest you maintain mindfulness over three factors, three qualities. The first is mindfulness of intention. The intention that I want to scratch. I'm going to scratch. The second if mindfulness of the movement and the third is mindfulness of the sensation. OK? Three things: mindfulness of intention, movement, and sensation. And as long as you maintain mindfulness, even in movement, even in scratching. it's all fair game.

Finally, if you do not remember a single thing I've told you in the past 15 minutes, just remember one thing, Jon Kabat-Zinn says of meditation, "Meditation is breathing as if your life depends on it." That is all. If you remember breathing as if your life depends on it, you will understand meditation and you can forget everything I just told you in the past 15 minutes.

My friends, I want to explore the topic of self. And before I begin, I want to remind all of us that this topic is an advanced topic. And because it's an advanced topic, I want to say that everything I say to you is a suggestion or a provocative way of saying it is, everything I say to you is BS until you with your own practice either falsify it or verify it for yourself and if you verify it then it's not BS. Otherwise it's just BS.

I begin this topic by making a statement. And a statement is that our boundary of self, our representation of self in the brain are not as straightforward as we think it is. In fact, they're fairly fluid. Let me give you some examples. For example, if I asked Philip, "Imagine that you're sitting there," certain parts of his brain will activate. If instead I say, "Philip, imagine your body is sitting there," a different part of the brain gets activated. So, at least for that quality, how the brain sees me and how the brain sees my body is represented differently in different parts of the brain.

Another data point is this. It comes from studies from phantom limb syndrome. So, these are people who have, for whatever reason, lost a limb. Mostly in war like Vietnam, Vietnam vets and so on or in car accidents. They lost a limb and they have phantom limbs. So, even though their limb, the hand is amputated they still feel that there's a hand. They still feel that the hand is in pain or is itching. And it gets weirder. So, when a person with phantom limb feels that the hand is in pain or the arm is in pain, obviously the arm is no longer there so the person cannot massage himself, however if a person massages the arm of somebody else, he actually feels better. Which is very weird if you think about it.

How does it work? The theory behind it is this. The theory is that there are parts of our brain called mirror neurons and if we experience pain same neurons light up. If we see other people experiencing pain or we perceive they are experiencing pain, same neurons light up.

However, why is it that for you, you know you can discern whether I'm feeling pain or another person's feeling pain. The way it works is that your body sends a signal to you and say, “No, I'm fine. I'm fine. It's not me. This pain is somebody else." So, therefore when your arm is amputated there is no arm to send a signal to, to suppress that part of the brain. There's no signal that says, "it's not me." And therefore, it's the same with massages and therefore if person with amputated limb massages somebody else's limb he feels better. So, at least the boundary of self is not straightforward, and it gets even weirder.

Once again, a phantom limb patient, for example, his phantom limb is in pain. So, his arm was amputated, and he had this feeling that his arm, his hand is tightly clenched and it's in spasm and is very very painful. And unfortunately, since the arm is already amputated, he could not just open this. How do you treat this, right? Drugs and everything didn't work for this guy. And it turns out there's a three-dollar solution, which is fascinating.

So, the researcher in this case, went to I think Wal-Mart or something, and bought a three dollar mirror and he put a mirror in front of the patient in this position where he can see his right arm through the mirror as if he's looking at his left arm, his left hand and consciously, this person's not on drugs, he's not hypnotized, consciously he knows that I am just opening my right hand and my left hand is reflecting it. Even though he knows that consciously, he was able to trick his body. He was able to open up his right hand and it was like, "Ah! I feel my left hand has relieved. Is opened up now." This is fascinating.

The idea that this is self, and this is where self begins and this is where self ends not necessarily static, not necessarily straight forward. And therefore, I'm going to suggest this. When it comes to self, I suggest or we suggest, that self is a mental construct. That self is a construct that the brain, sorry the mind, continuously creates in reaction to stimulus of thoughts.

Whenever there's a stimulus or a thought, the brain reacts by creating a sense of self to experience the sensation of the thought. Therefore, in theory at least, there is a state of mind that is so calm that the mind does not feel the need to create self, to construct self. And in that mind, self doesn't arise. And there's no self.

Why are we raising this topic? It seems theoretical. It seems kind of fun, but it doesn't sound very useful does it? Well, the reason we are raising this topic is because a lot of our suffering in life comes from the idea of self. And therefore, if we are able to see the fluidity of self, if you're able to see where self is constructed in the mind, then it creates a possibility of some liberation or some relief from suffering.

Let me tell you what that means, for example. Every one of us, most of us I say, in our adult life come to this conclusion that my body is not me. And when you come to this conclusion you find a certain level of freedom from suffering. And then some of us made a very important discovery. We discover that our thoughts are my thoughts are not me. My thoughts are merely thoughts, they are not me. And once you find the fluidity of self, once you find that thoughts are not me, you become free from thoughts. Then there's a level of freedom that you they never discovered before. Specifically, freedom from suffering arising from thoughts.

And I want to suggest there are a couple more levels of freedom. One more level is the idea that my sensation and my perceptions are not me. And I think once you reach that level there is another level of liberty from suffering.

To be an all rounded athlete. It's good to have two qualities. It's good to have strength and endurance at the same time. Therefore, an optimal athlete spends time both training in cardio exercises and strength exercises. And one way to do this is something we call circuit training. At least back in the Army.

So, the idea is this. I just run it on a track. So, you get cardio training and then we all drop and do pushups and do resistance of strength training. And we run around the track again and then we all do chin-ups, resistance training. So, we alternate between cardio and strength.

Something very similar happens when you do meditation. A well-rounded mental athlete or meditator needs to be strong in two complementary qualities of mind. And one quality is open awareness which can be seen as mindfulness and the other one is focus awareness which can be seen as concentration. So, a good mental athlete, a good meditator can do both on-demand. He can be very good at the open mind and is very good at focusing whenever he wants to.

These two are complementary qualities which can be trained separately. And a good way to do this is to do something like circuit training. So, some amount of time on focus concentration followed by some amount of time on open awareness and so on. Before we begin, let me give you some qualities, I'll describe some qualities of each mind.

Open awareness. Open Awareness is like an open door. Specifically, it's like being a very good host, a welcoming, very friendly host in the house and whoever comes, he allows them in, he welcomes them. And then whoever wants to stay he allows them to stay for as long as they want and for whoever wants to leave, he allows them to leave. He lets them go.

In contrast, focus awareness is like God at the palace gates. There's certain people allowed in, he allows them in. There's certain people not allowed in. He will courteously but firmly say, "No, I cannot let you in." So, there's a difference.

So, in real life or in your practice in open awareness or mindfulness there is no such thing as a distractor. Any thought that arises, any sensation that arise is the object of meditation It'll just bring to mind or attention to the object. And when that object leaves the mind, we let it go. In contrast, in focus awareness there is such thing as a distractor. So, for example, if a chosen object of meditation is the breath, anything that's not a breath, thought arises, a sound, anything that is not the breath is a distractor. And the mind should just very gently, courteously but firmly tell the distractor, "I'm sorry. You are not my object and I'm returning to my object." This is the difference.

There are a couple of other analogies. Open awareness is like grass swaying gently in the wind. It's very flexible. Whatever arise, whatever wind comes, it just moves to it. Focus awareness, in contrast, is like a mountain. It's always there, stable, strong, unwavering. Whatever the wind comes is untouched by the wind.

If there’s one word that can encapsulate this class the word is clarity. Specifically, two qualities of clarity as you can see on the screen right now. Self-awareness is about creating clarity into the self on these two dimensions. The first is vividness. The second is resolution. That's two dimensions of resolution. So, one dimension is spatial, and one dimension is temporal.

Spatial resolution means the ability to perceive the process of emotion in a subtle way. To see subtle changes in an emotion. The temporal resolution means to be able to perceive the experience or emotion in real time, as it's happening. So, that's one aspect of resolution. The other aspect of clarity or self-awareness is vividness, which means the ability to perceive the process of emotion in high clarity, in high vividness.

So, as you can see on the screen right now, the picture on the left compared to the picture on the right. The picture on the right has both higher resolution and vividness. So, the high resolution means you can now see the individual words and high vividness means that it used to be dark, now brighter and because of that, you can perceive more information, perceiving information about self. That is essentially what self-awareness is about.

So, what is the definition of self-awareness? And this is a definition that comes from Daniel Goleman which I really like. "Knowing one's internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions. And I really like this definition because it goes beyond what we normally understand to be self-awareness. When we normally say self-awareness, we're just thinking becoming aware of what I'm feeling right now but it's more than that. What Daniel Goleman's definition suggests is that it goes even up to the level of meaning, up to the level of who am I? What are my resources? What do I prefer? What makes me happiest? And so on.

So, the whole spectrum from what I'm feeling right now to who am I as a person. This entire spectrum is covered in this definition of self-awareness as it should be. The three emotional competencies relating to self-awareness are these three you will see on a screen right now. The first is emotional awareness. The second is self-assessment and the third is self-confidence.

The question that comes to mind is, what is so good about self-awareness? What is about you? It turns out that each one of the three competencies of self-awareness is, by itself, extremely valuable for work. We all know what self-competencies, but what is the difference between emotional awareness and self-assessment? The difference is they operate on different levels.

Emotional awareness operates at a level of physiology. It is at the level of, this is what I'm feeling right now. This is my emotional experience right now as experience in my body. In contrast, self-assessment operates at a level of meaning. That is at a level of, this is who I am. This is who I want to be. And this is what I like, this is what I don't like. These are my strengths and my resources. So, these two levels are complementary, but you see the difference between them.

So, the question that arises is, what is so good about self-awareness? It turns out that each of the three competencies of self-awareness is beneficial in its own way. Let me give you some examples. First, emotional awareness. There has been a study in American Express, specifically in American Express Financial Advisors where they teach financial advisors emotional awareness skills. And it has been shown that just that alone, just teaching the financial advisers emotional awareness, that increased their sales adviser.

It turns out it's because when the financial advisers become more self-aware, they become better at working with the customers. They become more aware of what the customers want and how the customers affect them, which make them better at serving the customers. And presumably, it also increases the quality of their financial advice. Which by the way, I taught my financial advisor mindfulness meditation and he thought I was just being nice. Now you know why. So, that's emotional awareness.

Self-assessment is even more important. Self-assessment has been shown to be of defining characteristic in individual success. It is shown that every highly successful person is strong in self-assessment. It is like a baseline competency. If you are not strong in self-assessment, you are not likely to be highly successful. Why is that so? It turns out the reason is very simple. It turns out that one of us is perfect and because we are not perfect, if you're strong in self-assessment then we know where we are strong at, where we're weak at and we know who to work with to cover for our individual deficiencies. And that's how we can form teams that can help us become very successful. And that is why self-assessment is such a powerful and important quality for success.

And self-confidence as you know is one of the most, one of the defining distinguishing factors between those who are very successful and those who are average. And self-confidence, as we all know, it has been shown to be a distinguishing character that distinguishes the best performers from the average performance. There's something about self-confidence and I'll tell you why it is.

Self-confidence, you feel confident in yourself, you project a certain amount of charisma. You project the charisma that inspires people to want to work with you. And that is why self-confidence is one of the predictors of success.

There is something else very interesting about the three competencies of self-awareness which is there is a linear relationship between the three. What does that mean? If you look at the development of the three competencies of self-awareness, you find that if you develop emotional awareness you can become strong in self-assessment and when you become strong in self-assessment, you'll become strong in self-confidence. This is a linear relationship.

So, let me explain to you how that works. So, start thinking of emotional awareness. If a strong and emotional awareness, after a while, what happens if you develop a clarity into your own emotions, into your own emotional process? What that enables is, eventually, when you become clear about your own emotional process, you become able to perceive your emotions and yourself objectively from a third person perspective. So, I can see myself as a monk seeing me, for example.

And then once you're able to do that, once you're able to perceive yourself objectively, you create the ability to perceive, and not just perceive, to also accept both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. And that creates the conditions for a strong self-assessment because self-assessment is essentially depending on objectivity. And that level objectivity would give you a very powerful self-assessment.

And once you do that, once you have a strong self-assessment, what happens? After a while, you become honest about your own strengths and weaknesses. You become clear about your own values. And very importantly, if you do that for a while, you reach a state where there are no skeletons in your closet that you don't already know about and that which you're not comfortable being with. Therefore, you reach a state where you become comfortable in your own skin. And that is to create the conditions for self-confidence. Being comfortable in your own skin.

And does something better, by the way. Once you create the conditions for self-confidence, with enough practice, it gets better. You get to a state where you go beyond ego. You get to a state, the way I would describe it, is that you're so flexible with your ego that you are able to become as big as Mount Fuji and as small as a grain of sand at the same time, you can be both. It sounds kind of funny.

So, let me give you an example. I was teaching this for a while and I was forced to practice and what happened was, I was speaking at the World Peace Festival and I was on the plenary panel. There's only one problem, oh there are a couple of problems. The big problem is that everybody on the panel was ten times cooker than me. There was a government minister. There was a major philanthropist. That was my friend, Deepak Chopra, and then sitting beside me was a Nobel Peace laureate. And then there's me. Some guy from Google. Everybody's cooler than me.

And so, I was in the situation where I decided that I have to practice this because Mount Fuji small as a grain of sand thing. Because I realized that if I want to serve my audience, all those people looking at me, my ego has to be irrelevant. This cannot be about me. I'm sitting here solely to serve the audience. At the same time my ego has to be big enough. I have to feel that I deserve to sit here right next to a Nobel Peace laureate at a peace conference. My ego has to big enough that I'm equal to that person on stage.

So, simultaneously my ego has to be very big and very small. And I realize that was very useful and I managed to not do too badly I think in the peace conference. Given that, given how useful self-awareness is the next question is this, how do you develop it? How do you develop self-awareness? If you look at a definition of self-awareness you get a hint.

So, on the screen you see right now the definition of self-awareness by Daniel Goldman or one of his other definitions which is very useful. He defined self-awareness as a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even in the midst of turbulent emotions. So, this is how Dan defined it. But superimposed on that, if you look at the definition of mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn. And this is how Jon Kabat-Zinn defined mindfulness. He says, "Mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally.".

And if you see these two definitions side by side on a screen right now, you might notice one thing. You might notice that these two statements are referring to exactly the same thing. And this offered us an epiphany. We realize that, wait, we are practitioners of mindfulness. We know how to develop mindfulness and if mindfulness is the same as self-awareness then we know how to develop self-awareness. And then we follow this line of inquiry, myself and my team, which led us to create Search Inside Yourself what you are taking right now. So, was this, inside this line of inquiry that led us to Search Inside Yourself. So, which also means that developing self-awareness is as simple as developing mindfulness.

So, this is one way to look at mindfulness. So, this is a relationship on the screen you can see, the relationship between mindfulness and the mind. The mind is like a flag fluttering in the turbulent wind. Mindfulness is like a pole holding on. Grounding, literally grounding the mind, keeping it stable in the situation of turbulence. So, when you think mindfulness, this is one way to think about it. It's something to ground the mind.

As we deepen our self-awareness and mindfulness, we arrive at a very important insight. And this is one of those insights that could change your life. It is this insight that we are not our emotions. What does that mean? So, let me make it more tangible for you. We begin with no saying, "I am angry." As your mindfulness becomes stronger, you will notice a very subtle shift in the way you think about this. This shift is very subtle but is very important. It could be life changing. And it is this shift that goes from existential to physiological.

What does that mean? So, when we say, for example, "I am angry. I am sad. I am," the way we use our language we are stating that emotion as if that emotion is us. It's me. "I am. This emotion is me." However, what if you reframe that. What if you frame it to, "This emotion is not me. This emotion is merely an experience." So, moving from existential to experiential, right? Instead of, "I am angry," we go to, "I am experiencing anger.”

But it gets better. There's another step which is equally powerful. Which is going from experiential to physiological. Going from, "I am angry," to, "I experience anger," to, "I am experiencing the sensations of anger in my body." This is important. Why is it important? Because, once you get out of the frame that, "This is me," it goes into, "This is what I'm experiencing in my body," and it becomes something you can do about it. You can create the possibility of mastery over emotions. If my emotions is me, there's not much I can do because it's me. However, if it's something that I experience in my body, then I can treat it as if I'm treating pain, right?

So, let's say I'm playing tennis and I have this pain over here. This pain I know is not me. It's just I'm experiencing a sensation in my body. And because it is just a sensation there are things I can do. I can take Tylenol. I can rub cream. I can ignore it if I want to. I can experience it mindfully. I can eat ice cream. I distract myself from this. And so, there is so many things I can do because it's not me. I have mastery over the experience and it's the same with emotions. Once you get out of frame of, "This is me," to, "This is what I experience," then there are things you can do. Then you create the first possibility of mastery, of mastery over your own experience.

So, we talked about high resolution perception into our emotional process and we talked about vividness of perceiving emotion. Now, define about how do we do that? First, mindfulness. Mindfulness alone will help you do that. But that's the good news. There's better news. So, with me there's no bad news, there's only good and better news. The good news is mindfulness is sufficient, the better new is, you can do more than that.

The recognition is that emotion is a physiological process or at the very least, we say every emotion has a physiological core with it. Therefore, if you can apply your mindfulness to your body then you can create even more resolution and vividness into your emotional process. How do you do that? It turns out, it's very easy. So, again that's good news and better news. The good news is it's as simple as bringing attention to the body all the time. The more attention you bring to the body the more you become aware of the bodily functions, of the body experience, the more you become aware of emotions. It's as simple as that. So, that's the good news.

The better news is that in addition to that, there is a systematic way of doing that, of doing this practice, which done, often enough, it creates the ability for improve emotional awareness and self-awareness in general. How do you do that? It's very simple. It's so simple it's embarrassing. It is as simple as systematically bringing attention to different parts of the body. So, for example, what we're going to do right after this, bring attention to the head and then to the face. And so on. All the way down to the rest of the body. As simple as that.

The next question you might ask, why is that effective? Or, how does it work? Well, as Phillip has talked about just now, the way this works or the way it's known to work, is this is insula workout. The parts of the brain that Phillip talked about called am insula right over here. The insula is correlated with a couple of functions of mental and physical function. One function is that people with very active insula they are known to have very strong awareness of their body especially visceral awareness.

So, for example, people with active insula can hear their own heartbeat very accurately. So, that's one. The other thing, it turns out, that people with strong insula also have very strong self-awareness specifically emotional awareness, which by now, should not be surprising to you.

And that an interesting study effect, which we'll talk about in a couple of classes from now, which is that people with strong insula are also known to be high in empathy. And we'll talk about this in a few weeks. How do you train the insula? It turns out again it's very simple. Mindfulness of the body. Systematically bringing attention to different parts of the body. It's like every time you bring attention to the body, it's like training the masses of this awareness of connecting the brain to the body. In other words, every time you bring awareness to the body, it's like strengthening the insula a tiny bit more. And if you do that a lot, your insula muscles will be big and strong and then you will have very strong emotional awareness.

Speaker 1:

So, let's begin this class with a story. This is a short story of a man riding a horse and as he was riding the horse, he passed by some guy standing on a street, on a side of the street, and a guy standing there asked the rider, "So rider, where are you going?" And the rider said, "I don't know. Why you asking me? You should be asking the horse." The horse is like our emotion and we allow our emotion to bring us wherever it wants to take us. We have no control, or we tell ourselves we have not control. We live our life that way.

So, in this class, self-regulation, we are trying to change the situation. We want to gain mastery, like the rider gaining mastery over the horse so he can go wherever he wants to go rather than where the horse wants to go. In this class, we learn to gain mastery over our emotional life so that we can bring it where we want it to be rather than allowing it to take us where it wants.

If we can summarize this class in four words, the four words are: from compulsion to choice, and my friends, this is the basis of freedom, specifically freedom from a tyranny of being in control by your emotions. It's important to note that when we say from compulsion to choice, when we say we have mastery over our emotional lives, it doesn't mean that we never have certain emotions. In fact, there are times when we choose to have "negative emotions".

And let me give you an example. I mean, you would think somebody like practicing meditation like me would never get angry, and so on, right? I was in this situation where I was at a rent-a-car shop and as I was at the counter, I realized that the person behind the counter was trying to rip me off. And so, being a practitioner of mindfulness practitioner and so on, I started noticing anger arising in me. And again, being a practitioner, I was at the stage where I had the choice to turn it off. If I wanted to, it's as simple as this. I can be not angry at a moment. However, I decided that since this person was trying to rip me off, the appropriate response from me is to become angry.

And so, I made a deliberate choice. I made a choice to not turn off the anger and then I feel the full force of the anger arising in me and I felt my face turning red and I find myself shouting at him and banging on the table. And that was by choice. So, that's an important story. It illustrates the idea that it's not about not experiencing certain things. It's about choosing. Always having the ability to choose the right response for the situation.

This idea of going from compulsion to choice, it turns out it's not particularly new. If in fact it even turns out that it's not particularly Asian. A very famous person from the West who came out with the same conclusion, his name is Marcus Aurelius. He live, I think, in about the fifth century C.E. Anybody knows his day job? His day job is or was emperor. Marcus Aurelius was Emperor of Rome and on the side when he's not working, he was a philosopher.

And Marcus Aurelius, he arrived at a very important insight in his life and he this is what he wrote. He says, "If you are distressed by anything external," and we think also internal but if you are distressed by anything external, "the pain is not due to the thing itself but your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." And Malcolm Aurelius, the Emperor of Rome figured out from compulsion to choice, which I found fascinating. I also found fascinating that this collection of his thoughts is in his book titled, Meditations, which is kind of a coincidence for our class.

Self-regulation. What is self-regulation? The definition is what you see on the screen right now and as usual it's provided by Daniel Goleman. Self-regulation, Goleman defined, is the process of managing one's internal states, impulses, and resources. And once again, I felt that Dan Goleman defined this very skillfully because in his definition of self-regulation, it goes beyond control. In fact, it even goes beyond just choosing what reaction to have. He also goes into being able to utilize the full range of internal resources. And that is, in a way, the best of self-regulation which we will come to in a couple of minutes.

But first, it's important also to note that self-regulation is not just about self-control. I mean, when we think of self-regulation that's the first thing that comes to mind, controlling ourselves. Turns out, that's not the only thing. It turns out that there is a full range of other emotional competencies. All of them very useful that has to do with self-regulation. And this is the list you see on the screen right now. The list is: self-control, trustworthiness, conscientiousness, adaptability, and innovation. What is the one thing in common with all these competencies? And I want to suggest that the one underlying trend, the one thing common is choice.

For example, adaptability. I mean, who among us doesn't want to be adaptable? We all like to be in a situation where something change, environment changes, and we are there. That doesn't affect us. Who among us doesn't want to be like conscientious, like always doing the "right thing" rather than the "easy thing"? We all want to do that but it's so hard for us because we keep feeling that we are overwhelmed by our emotions. Therefore, once you create the mind of choice, being able to choose your own emotional responses, then you create the ability to have all these emotional competencies at the same time. And that is why choice is so important.

There is an important and fascinating topic concerning the relationship between thoughts and emotions. And it begins with a very interesting question. And here's the question; When an emotion or a thought is about to arise, is it possible to suppress it? Is it possible to prevent that thought or emotion from arising? This is an interesting question. It's so interesting that the person who asked this question was Paul Ekman, who is one of the most prominent scientists or psychologists of our generation. And the person he asked that question was to the Dalai Lama.

So, he asked this question to the Dalai Lama and Paul's opinion is that once an emotion or thought is about to arise, there's no way to stop it. So, he was curious what the Dalai Lama thought. And it turns out the Dalai Lama had the same opinion, that once thoughts or emotions about to arise this is it, there's nothing you can do to stop it.

However, the Dalai Lama added something very important. He says, "Even though you cannot stop a thought or emotion from a rising, a trained mind can let it go immediately. The moment the thought or emotion arises, the mind lets it go." And that is the power. That's a power we have. We do not have the power to stop a thought or emotion, but we have the power to let it go. And that power to let go is the source of choice. And the Buddha had a very beautiful analogy for this state of mind. He says, "It's like writing on water. The moment it is written, it disappears." And so, the enlightened mind, a trained mind is like writing on water. The moment an emotion or thought arises, it disappears. And that comes with training. It's a beautiful analogy.

That insight leads to another really important insight which is, the underlying relationship between a negative emotion and a negative thought. So, let me suggest here's what the process looks like. For example, let's say Philip says something that created anger in me, that I feel angry about. Let's just say. So, what happens usually, if I wasn't conscious, I would... The process would look like this. The process will be, he says it, I feel triggered, and once I'm triggered, I feel a process of emotion, anger and everything else. And then something happens, really important. That what comes with, what arises alongside with the emotion is, in this case, aversion, which is that I don't want to feel this way.

And because of the aversion, the aversion leads to a thought which is," I don't want to feel this way; therefore, he must be a horrible person. It must be his fault." So, this whole process from starting from stimulus, response, aversion, to thought, this chain of process, if you're unconscious about it, you would think that, "No, it's his fault. It's him." You're always blaming them. And then you bring mindfulness to this process, you will notice that each stage of this process is a distinct, qualitatively distinct experience. And most importantly, you will notice that the negative sensation of the emotion is distinct from the aversion.

I told you this was a suggestion. We can verify or falsify your practice matures. I suggest that once you recognize this, there is a possibility that you can let go of the aversion and then the moment you let go of aversion, you might find that a negative thought doesn't arise or if it arises it's very weak. And then you'll say, "Ah!" You can experience this whole entire process without thinking that person is a bad person.

So, why is that important? That is important because once you understand this whole process, you create the power, the ability, to recover. You understand that stimulus perception response aversion and so on. If you understand this whole process and you are able to let go of your aversion, you'll find your ability to experience negativity in life vastly increases because you find the ability to recover from these experiences.

And there's a person in our class from a couple of months ago who had this epiphany. He discovered that, with knowing the understanding this process and having gone through the training that we went through today, he discovered that when he's triggered, the first thing he discovered is there is a time boundary, with the practices that we went through today, he can limit the amount of time that he felt bad. And for him, it was about 30 minutes. And from his point of view, 30 minutes later, he recovers, he's back. My mind's thinking again.

He discovered a second thing. He discovered that the more he does these practices, the more he does his mindfulness practice, his breathing practice, body scan and so on and the Sibernoff Rul practice, the more he does all this, the shorter the time table it becomes so he can recover quicker and quicker.

And what does that give him? That gave him confidence. I gave him confidence that whatever situation in life that can trigger him, he can handle this. He can recover from this. So, this is a relationship between self-regulation and confidence. Once you've created the ability for self-regulation, you also create confidence in yourself.

Speaker 2:

So, in this slide we're going to look at a neural model of emotion regulation. Emotion regulation being one core component of self-regulation. And here, as you can see in the context of a stimulus, that might be interpreted as a threat cue, real or imagined, external or internal. The human brain has been sculpted through evolution to be exquisitely sensitive to cues that might indicate threat or danger.

So, we know that as you can see here in the red bubble, the red circle, emotion, there are limbic and paralimbic brain regions that work together to pick up cues and to respond to them within milliseconds well before there's conscious thought. This is very important because that allows us to survive. But on the other hand, we know that within seconds a person's emotional state can shift into anger, fear, anxiety, intense arousal, and this is a bottom up process in the sense that these are immediate, very powerful emotional shifts that send a bottom up signal to other parts of the brain where other forms of regulation are instantiated.

As you can see here in the blue bubble, that's called regulation. And Here these are different capacities that are come online as needed to modulate different aspects of emotion. Perhaps it's intensity, it's duration. Perhaps, introducing a secondary compensatory motion perhaps helping to reduce the arousal and so forth or even the expression of emotions. This involves both cognitive perspective taking or what's called reframing or cognitive reappraisal, changing the meaning of the situation in a way that helps to reduce the toxicity of a certain situation, condition or emotion.

There are other forms of emotion regulation that involve attention regulation. Shifting attention. Shifting where attention is deployed. And this sends a top down regulatory signal that helps to modulate ongoing emotions. This system in humans also involves the way that we think about ourselves i.e. self-talk, internal language, linguistic processing, and also the view of self, meaning if we have an accurate or distorted view of self, a view of self that's beneficial or that's harmful.

All of these systems and many more are interacting with each other from moment to moment in our brains to actually create and modulate our ongoing emotional experience. When this system is working well, meaning that we can experience emotions and modify them, regulate, shape them, we'll have the most powerful form of self-confidence to be able to experience emotions without the aversion, without fear, without fear of amygdala hijack or without the fear of being compelled to behavior as opposed to sitting in choiceful experience.

When the system is not working well i.e. specifically, hyperactive emotional reactivity or inefficient top down regulation, this is when we really begin to spill into catastrophizing, fear of emotions, fear that we're not going to be able to control or handle what we're experiencing from moment to moment and this becomes the basis for anxiety, depression, suicidality,etc. But when the system is working well, this is really a sign of maturity of health, of freedom.

When looking at emotional regulation, it's equally important to understand what emotion regulation and self-regulation is not. It is not avoiding in the sense that avoiding what actually is or avoiding experiencing emotions or certain thoughts or certain experiences. Avoiding, unfortunately, is a very powerful form of emotion regulation which of course can have short term benefits but long term it actually preamps the ability to develop emotion regulation skills and become more finely tuned to self-regulation.

So, avoidance can be breaking eye contact, not showing up at parties, not attending certain functions or avoiding even engaging in things that might be somewhat fearful or challenging. Self-regulation is also not denying what is. So, this has to do with being in alignment with values and what actually is as opposed to trying to deny things in our environment external and internal.

Self-regulation also is not about suppressing. Even though suppressing, showing your feelings or even feeling certain emotions, at some points might be functional in certain contexts. So, for example, your 2-year-old just bangs her finger and looks up at you and you might want to suppress your own emotional facial expressions at that moment for the benefit of the other, but in general when we talk about suppressing emotion, suppressing showing your emotions, long term it's been linked to more medical problems, more psychological problems.

So, when we think about self-regulation, it's important to discern what it is, what its components, are how it functions in us and also what it's not. And of course, there are many other ways to handle triggers and specifically different types of strategies, motion regulation strategies that we can use to work with our emotions effectively.

So, if you think about a situation. So, for example, you might be at work and you are walking down the hallway and you say hello to a friend and the friend doesn't respond back. Or perhaps she doesn't even make eye contact. That could be a trigger which in a matter of milliseconds can get the amygdala firing emotional reactivity, amygdala and interior insula, personal salience, what's going on, did I do something wrong? The mind starts spinning.

So, what are the range of possible choice points where I can implement a strategy to help deal with the ongoing emotion in that situation? Well, one thing would be attentional control, specifically attentional deployment. Could I distract myself from that moment? Could I possibly focus on non-emotional aspects of that situation? That would be a way to regulate my attention right in the moment to help reduce my emotional reactivity. So, practically I could count to ten. That's one form of distraction. Very effective, short term. I could take deep breaths and focus my attention on the sensation of the breaths. I could focus on my own physiology and notice the sensations that are rising without judgment.

So, those are all are under the category of attention regulation or attention deployment. Moving further along time if those are not effective there's a whole other range of cognitive strategies that could be very useful in the moment. So, for example, we speak about cognitive reframing or reinterpreting the meaning of the situation.

For example, maybe she's upset about something or she just got a phone call or an email with very bad news and this has nothing to do with me. Suddenly, just reframing the meaning of the situation immediately reduces my reactivity. It's not about me. She's having a very complex or difficult emotion right now. And you could actually see the positives in the situation. Maybe just saying hello to her is sufficient and maybe help her in this moment. I can also make connections with my own pattern of reactivity, "Oh, in the past, I've noticed how I've been hyper-reactive to things that had nothing to do with me.".

Moving along and temporally, there are other forms of emotion regulation which could actually be very helpful, and this could be discussed as metacognitive cognitive strategies. This is seeing the patterns of my own and my emotions and seeing how they arise and my patterns of reactivity where I could actually bring another attitude. For example, willingness to experience the emotions. A certain level of acceptance of emotion arising positive or negative and trusting confidence that, even if it arises, it will dissolve, it will habituate, it will come back down to baseline.

That has to do with a very powerful sense of acceptance, willingness, deep knowing about the nature of the impermanence of emotions and thoughts that go along with it. You could also bring, very practically, a sense of humor or curiosity, "Oh, look at this pattern that's arising. Why is this happening now?" "Wow, look at this. Isn't this, this is my dear old friend, fear, insecurity, vulnerability, hurt.".

There also could be another strategy of meshing. Seeing myself as porous just in the moment and allowing whatever's occurring just to move right through me. That also is a kind of metacognitive emotion regulation strategy. The key thing here is to actually test out in one's own research lab, mind and body, all these different ways of working with our emotions, because you never know in a specific context when and how effective a given method will work.

So, the idea is if I can become familiar with many different methods, I'll have more flexibility at any given moment to apply it and to see which one is optimally effective both for myself in modifying my emotions, understanding the emotions, but also for the benefit of other people around me.

And it behooves us to learn how to test all these different methods of emotion regulation, all these different strategies, because we never know when a given strategy will be most effective or most helpful in a given context. And this is important because it gives us the confidence, the choice, the freedom, to be able to experience emotions fully, have confidence that we can work with them, and be optimally effective for ourselves but also for all of the other people that we're interacting with.

The class today is on motivation. So, for this class to work, we need to hire the expertise of a motivation expert, somebody who knows how to motivate you, to get you to do your best work, to do the most amazing work. Happily, we know who that person is. And that person is you. You turn out to be the world's best expert in knowing what best motivates you. And so, for the rest of this class, all we are doing is helping you discover it for yourself. In fact, I would suggest that this is true in general for Search Inside Yourself that you are the world's top expert at everything that we talked about in this class, but it's especially true for these classes especially true for motivation. You are best at knowing what motivates you.

So, with that, let's talk about what we're going to do today. Today we've going to cover the three easy steps to motivation. And the three easy steps are: alignment, envisioning and resilience. And here's the idea.

Alignment is about aligning you up with your deepest values. The idea is that if what you're doing is aligned with what you most value in life, then you're more likely to do outstanding work. So, that's alignment. Envisioning is once you are aligned, once you know where you are, envisioning helps you envision where you want to be. What is your ideal future? The idea is that once you can imagine your ideal future, it's much easier to get there. So, that's step 2. Step 3, resilience. So, once you find your deepest values and you can see ideal future, resilience helps you to get there. It gives you the optimism and the power to arrive at your ideal future.

So, this my friends, is a complete package for living your dreams, I hope. I hope it's a good dream. I'm going to begin the alignment module by telling you a story of my friend. His name is Tony Hsieh. A fellow Chinese guy. Good looking Chinese guy like me. The funny story I told is that once I had to speak on the same conference as Tony and I spoke right after him, so I had to introduce myself as the other good-looking Chinese guy.

So, Tony. Tony is an inspiration to me. When he was, I think, 24 years old, Tony before he sold his company to Microsoft for, if I remember correctly, $265 million and change, or something.

But Tony did not stop there. And that's not what is most inspiring about me. After he made a lot of money, Tony went on to fulfill his dream. Which was at that time, when he was young, he always wanted to live near a Taco Bell and a movie theater. So, he bought a house next to a Taco Bell and a movie theater and his dream was fulfilled. But beyond that, beyond that he went on to become the CEO of a company called Zappos, which some of you have heard of.

Interesting thing by Zappos is that when Tony took over Zappos as CEO, the company was basically not doing it, not selling anything. The sales was basically zero. Tony brought this company from zero to a billion dollars in sales. Which is amazing. But that is not even the most inspiring part of Tony's story. The most inspiring part is how he skillfully made use of happiness as a corporate strategy. And not as a corporate strategy, as a very successful corporate strategy.

So, what did he do? Tony figured out something very important. He figured out the idea which he calls delivering happiness. And the idea is this. He figured out if he delivers happiness to his employees, his employees will be happy and then they in turn would deliver happiness to the customers and customers will be happy. And if the customers are happy, they just spend more money on Zappos and Zappos will have lots of money. That's the theory.

In practice, it ended up working really well. In practice, because Tony has done so much for his employees and his employee serve his customers so well, there are at least two or three very important effects beside the billion dollars in sales. One effect is that the company ended up not spending money on marketing because the customer service is so good that people talk about Zappos to friends and so therefore, they don't have to spend money on marketing, and it saved a lot of money.

The other thing that's interesting is that the customer service was so outstanding that there was at least one year when Zappos was rated more highly for customer service than Four Seasons Hotel. Four Seasons. I mean, imagine? Four Seasons Hotel, Dot-com company in Nevada and the Dot-com company won? That is how amazing it is. And Tony, to his credit, he figured out something really important about happiness. He figured out the three levels of happiness as shown on this slide. The three are: pleasure, passion, and purpose. The interesting thing about the three levels of happiness is the difference in the sustainability.

So, pleasure for example, is highly unsustainable. If you experience pleasure, it's really nice but it doesn't sustain itself right. After a while, you start habituating to the pleasure and you need more better and newer and better higher highs to get to the next level, to maintain your happiness.

Passion. Passion is a lot more sustainable than pleasure. Passion it means doing something that gives you pleasure. That the work itself is intrinsically pleasurable for you., So that's passion.

Purpose is even more sustainable. Purpose is a highly sustainable source of happiness. Doing something that is meaningful to you. That creates a lot of happiness. So, comparing the three. Pleasure is the least sustainable. Passion is more sustainable. And purpose is highly sustainable as a source of happiness.

Recognizing this, you will find something interesting about ourselves, right? Usually, we spend a lot of time and effort thinking about and pursuing pleasure. We spend some time on passion and then every now and then we think about purpose which, if you think about it, it's sub-optima because if you think about the sustainability of each level, you should be doing precisely the reverse. You should be spending most of your time and effort on purpose. And then a couple of times a week engage in passion and get you doing something that you find intrinsically rewarding. And then every now and then you get pleasure, you get you get an injection of a nice bonus, you get a treat from the boss and so on. So, this should be the most sustainable way and that is what you figured out.

He figured out it's true for individual and also for a company. And that is why he decided that the most sustainable source of happiness for his company and its employees is purpose, creating meaningful work, serving customers, doing something that people find meaningful. And that turns out to be a very successful formula for happiness for him and his company and his employees.

Which leads us to a complimentary idea of intrinsic motivators. And the question behind his ideas is this; how do you best motivate people to do outstanding work? Our standard answer is pay them. Pay them more. The more you pay them the higher, the better work they produce. The research suggests that that approach doesn't always work. And this is what intrinsic motivators is about.

So, let me tell you what they are. According to Dan Pink these are the three intrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery is the desire to become better and better at something that matters to us. Purpose is a yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves. It turns out that these three motivators are far more motivating than just money alone.

So, money is something we call a hygiene factor when it comes to motivation. What does hygiene factor mean? So, that that term comes from public restrooms. So, if you go to public restrooms, it's dirty. You notice. And if it goes from dirty to clean, you notice the difference. However, if it goes from clean to very clean, it makes no difference to you. And it turns out to be the same with salary. If you're underpaid, it hurts you. If you go from being underpaid to well-paid, you notice the difference. However, if you go from well-paid to very well paid, you don't notice that much of a difference. It doesn't motivate you as much. What really motivates you, are the intrinsic motivators, you see on the screen right now.

And there are a couple of fascinating experiments to illustrate this point. So, one experiment that illustrates this point is the Kenda problem which came from the 1940s. And it's a very simple idea. So, here's the problem. The participant comes into a room and he sees three items on the table. He sees a candlestick, a box of matches, and a box of thumbtacks or pushpins, what do you call them, thumbtacks.

So, he's told that he needs to find a way to stick the candle onto the wall. How do you do that? So, the solution, as you can see, is on the slide right now. The interesting thing is the insight required to solve this problem is realizing that the box is part of the solution. And it's not obvious at first, right? When you walk into a room and you see the setup, you would first thing you think of is the box is there to hold the tacks. So, the "aha" moment, the insight is, "Ah, the box is part of solution." Then you solve it. So, there's a little bit of creativity involved in that experiment.

So, so here's the experiment. You get two groups of people randomly assigned. First group we call them the control group. For the control group you tell those kids, or those participants that we are trying to establish a distribution of how long it takes to solve the problem. So, you take as long as you need. I mean, try to solve it quickly but it doesn't matter. Whatever time you take we will pay you the same amount of money. So, that's the control group.

For the other group, we call the experimental group, you tell them this thing is competitive. So, the faster you take to solve this problem, the more money we'll pay you. And what's real, interesting counter intuitively it turns out that the experimental group did worse than the control group. They took longer to solve the problem. So, the monetary incentive did not just not work. It made it worse. If you pay people more for performance, they do worse, which is shocking.

But the story gets better. It gets even more interesting. So, you do another set of experiment. This time when the participants come into the room, you empty the box of thumbtacks beforehand so that when the participants come in, they see a box, thumbtacks, candle and matchsticks. So, the moment they walk in, immediately it's clear that the box is part of the solution. So, therefore in their situation, no creativity is required. And in that situation, the experimental group, the group that gets paid more incentivize for performance, that group does better than the control group.

And what does that tell you? It tells you that the pay for performance only works in situations that do not require creativity. If creativity is required, then paying more can actually hurt performance which is fascinating. And in those situations, the only real motivators are the intrinsic motivators.

So, having said all we just said; recognizing the usefulness of alignment in motivation. The question is, how do you create alignment? And the answer it turns out to be is as simple as you think it is. Alignment comes from self-awareness. Specifically, it comes from self-assessment. If you know, for example, what your weaknesses are, what your strengths are, what your resources are, what you like to do, what makes you happy, things like that, if you have clarity on those things, what happens? What happens is when opportunities arise for you to do what you like to do you are there to capture those opportunities.

If you didn't have that clarity, opportunities are just going to come and go and you just going to see them right in front of your eyes. However, if you have the clarity, the self-assessment, "No. This is what I wanted to do next. this is what I want to do for the rest of my life." or "This is what really makes me happy." And then the opportunity comes in front of you, you captivate it. And that is why people who have a lot of self-awareness, people who are clear of what they want, they seem to get what you want.

Well, it turns out we all have opportunities but those people, they are there to capture the opportunity. So therefore, to be lucky is actually very simple. To be lucky is to just have the clarity to know what you're looking for so that when it arises you are there to catch it.

Question then. How do we create the type of self-awareness that create alignment? And again, by now, you should know the answer. The answer is mindfulness. If you have been practicing the mindfulness that we've been doing in this class for the past few weeks then eventually, you would create the kind of self-knowledge and self-assessment needed for alignment. So, simple as that. You don't have to do anything extra. That's the good news. And as usual with me, there's better news. The better news is that there's something you can do to accelerate that process even.

How do you do that? And again, it's very simple, it's very obvious. The way to do that is verbalize, which means talk about it. So, it's very simple. The idea is to always talk about or at least, not always, but find opportunities to talk about what motivates you. What are your core values? What matters to you? Why is that helpful? Very simple. Because those things like what makes me happy, they are very abstract. When you talk about them, you are forced to verbalize them. And once you verbalize them, they become more tangible. Most importantly, they become more tangible to yourself and that is how talking about your values create the conditions for the type of self-awareness that leads to alignment.

I want to tell you two stories. I usually tell you one story, now I tell you two because it's two-for-the-price-of-one day. So, the first story is a story of my friend Roz Savage. You see Roz rowing a boat. Why do I show a picture of Roz rowing a boat. Because Roz Savage became one of the first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean solo, by herself. One woman, one boat, across the Atlantic Ocean. As if that's not amazing enough, Roz Savage them became the first woman in the world to row solo across the Pacific Ocean. And she did it in three stages. I think the first stage was from San Francisco to, if I remember correctly, Hawaii and then from Hawaii to Papua New Guinea and I think Papua New Guinea to Australia or something like that.

And in each leg, she was the first woman ever to row solo across the leg and combined all three legs, she's the first woman ever to row across the Pacific Ocean. And the last I heard, she was rowing across the Indian Ocean. And I told Roz, "Oh man, you're going to run out of oceans very soon." So, that's the story of Roz, which is a continuing story. And you might wonder what got Roz motivated enough to row across oceans.

So, her story was this. Roz, she was from London and she was a professional. And if I remember correctly, she was a management consultant in London. She had a comfortable middle class or upper middle-class life. She had a house, she had cars, she had a husband, everything was doing great. One day she did an exercise. She wrote her own eulogy. She wrote about what people say about her after she dies. Interesting thing is she wrote two versions of a eulogy.

The first version is her eulogy assuming her life goes on her current trajectory. A second version was a eulogy assuming that she lived the life she wanted to live. And while she was writing the two eulogies, she discovered something very important. She discovered that when she was writing the first eulogy, like her life at the current trajectory, she discovered that her energy was completely drained away. She was so drained she could not finish that article.

The second eulogy she discovered her energy was so high. While writing, she didn't want to stop writing it. And that was a very powerful discovery for her, which led her to decide to live the life that she wanted to live. And what did she want to do? She wanted to row across oceans. And that's how she started her life as ocean explorer.

And when I tell this story, one question that many people have is they assume that for Roz to be able to do this, she must be rich. They say, "I'm not rich. I can't do that." Well, I can assure you Roz is not rich. You can see this picture of Roz in her boat. This boat and everything inside the boat was her entire net worth on the day this picture was taken. Her entire net worth, this is it. That's all she had. So, she spent her entire fortune pursuing this dream, buying the boat and buying everything in the boat.

So, this is the first story the second story is somebody closer to home, closer to where I live. It's a story of this person, my friend again, his name is Marc Allen. So, here's a story of Mark. Mark, he was 30 years old on his 30th birthday. He woke up and he was in shock. So, the story that he told was, he was just fired as a busboy and a dishwasher. He was broke. His rent was $65 a month, he's trying to get $65 bucks to pay his rent.

And he looked at his life and one thing he told himself he said, "I'm 30 years old. I'm a grown man now. I'm not a kid anymore. So, what do I do in my future.?" So, he did an exercise, a journey exercise. So, journey exercise was this. He wrote about what his life will be like in five years if everything turned out well or if everything meets or exceeds his highest expectation.

So, he wrote about his life. In that journey exercise he wrote that he is going to be a successful publisher. He's going to publish books. He's going to publish music and he's going to do that with a stress-free relaxed life. He's not going to be overworked. And if you think back from that point of view it's kind of funny in the absurd kind of way. Here's a guy who was broke, had no money, who could not keep a job and he's going to be a successful publisher in five years.

So, what happened? Well if you fast forward a little bit, Marc Allen is today, known as a very successful publisher. He is the founder and publisher of New World Library who, among others, published Eckart Tolle and the early books off Deepak Chopra and marks himself financially very successful. And he still lives a relaxed life. He wakes up on most days at 11a.m. and goes to work before 1:00p.m.

And here my friends is the power of envisioning. It's the power of writing down your ideal future on paper. Because you wrote it down, becomes more tangible to you. And then by doing that, it creates the condition for your actual success. So, for myself, I five years ago when I'd did this...oh actually it was more than five now. I think seven years ago, when I did this exercise for the first time, my dream was to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime. That was my dream. And of course, it continues to be my dream today.

And so, as I wrote about and as I talked about it to my friends, I realized this process. I realized that when I wrote about it, it was impossible. I mean, World Peace. Come on. Impossible.

However, the more I talked about it, you went from impossible to implausible. And then you went from implausible to possible. And you went from possible to, most importantly, actionable. There are things that I can actually do to move this forward. And that's what led to my life today. That's what led me to creating Search Inside Yourself and writing my book and doing whatever else I'm doing to create the conditions for world peace today.

So, that's the first thing. Talking about it makes it tangible and it makes it actionable. In addition to that, there's a very important second reason. You want to talk about this a lot. Especially if your dream is something that involves the greater good, which is that the more you talk about it the more you inspire other people. And then when you inspire other people, they want to help you. So, for example, I mean if your dream is about driving a nice car, nobody cares.

However, if you dream about something that is serving other people, for example, you do not ever want to see a hungry person in San Francisco again. That's a dream, right? Or, maybe not the whole city, maybe your own local community. You want every kid to be taken care of, right? Or every stray animal to be taken care of, something like that. Something that is beneficial to something larger than yourself. If you say that out loud, I guarantee you the most likely response from other people is, "How do I help you?" Because people want to be inspired by goodness.

So, every time you create intention for goodness you inspire people. And they want to participate. And that is how I got to have so many allies. The more I talk about creating the conditions for World Peace, the more people will say, "Oh, I want to help you," or "I know this person you can talk to who can help you." And so, my circle or my friends and allies got bigger and bigger. And it started including luminaries. It started including people like Daniel Goleman and Jon Kabat-Zinn and it eventually it started including people like the Dalai Lama and Jimmy Carter. And it's because of this is because I put out my intention to serve good for the world.

And my friends, I want to encourage you to do the same thing. Create intention that serves the greater good for yourself and for the world, envision to future and then talk about this a lot to other people and inspire them.

So, how do you create resilience. You do it in three steps. The first step is inner calm. The second step is emotional resilience or developing emotional resonance and the third step is developing cognitive resilience. And you might notice that this mirrors the structure of Search Inside Yourself in general. The first step is training the attentional training. The second step is affective training and the third step is cognitive training. Almost as usual.

So, the first, inner calm, is very straightforward and by now all of you should be familiar with this, which is the idea that the first, the basic foundation of resilience, is the ability to bring the mind to a place that is calm and clear at the same time, which comes from mindfulness, which we have been learning for the past few weeks. Once you create the ability, once your mindfulness is so strong that, no matter what happens, no matter how you're feeling, no matter how things are crashing and burning, you can create a mind that is calm and clear at the same time. Then you have the foundation of resilience.

So, let's step one. And by now you all already have, you're already there, you already know how to do this. As usual, there's better news. Step two: emotional resilience. This is the recognition that success and failure, they are both emotional experiences and like every other emotion experience they are also physiological experiences. Therefore, to deal with the experience of success or failure, we need to get to the level of emotions which means we need to get to a level of physiology. And we will do an exercise which explores the physiology, the physiological aspects of success and failure. And in doing that exercise will help you gain familiarity, awareness, and thereby gain resilience to the experience.

And the third is cognitive resilience which basically means creating the conditions for optimism. And we talk about that in the next few minutes. But first, an interesting recognition that the beginning of resilience is failure. Specifically recognizing that failure is common, and failure is the beginning of success. How common?

So, here's a story I'm going to share. Actually, it's not my story. You can see from this slide, it's a story of an athlete who, by his own account, is a failure and the difference is this person is brave enough to talk about how much he is failing life. And since he's so brave, I'll just quote him. So, this is what he said. Oh, by the way, he's a basketball player. And he says, "I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games, 26 times I've entrusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed." And his name is Michael Jordan.

And for those of you who do not know Michael Jordan, well shame on you. He's only the greatest basketball player of all time. Anyway, for those of you who do not know. Well, if failure is not bad enough for you well there's worse news. So, there's a change. I know this. Bad news and worse news. The worst news is that you don't just fail. You have to feel stupid. And here's a quote from this guy called Nathan Myhrvold and he says, "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 wow new shit. You have to be confused, upset, think you're stupid. If you are not willing to do that, you cannot go outside the box.".

The interesting thing about this quote is who it came from, Nathan Myhrvold. Who is Nathan Myhrvold? Anybody knows who he is? Well, people from the tech sector would know because Nathan...Let me tell you a bit of his life story. He finished his Ph.D. at the age of 23. Really really smart. He didn't just finish his Ph.D. at 23. He also became the CTO, the chief technology officer of Microsoft. He was also a founder of Microsoft Research, so amazing engineer. And as if that's not enough, he is also a world winning wildlife photographer. And if that's not enough, he is also a certified master chef. He is so smart that Bill Gates, his best friend, says, "I don't know anybody smarter than Nathan.".

And even for Nathan Myhrvold, even for him, innovation involves feeling stupid, being confused, and so on. And once I recognized that, I realized that my life is not so bad. That even though I feel stupid all the time, if even Nathan Myhrvold has to feel stupid to do amazing things, I can give myself a license for being stupid.

Speaker 1:

So, empathy is all well and good, but that leads us again to the question, how do you do this? How do you train empathy? And once again, turns out, not that hard. So, the way to train empathy. There are two factors. There are two components. The first is seeing human similarity. Looking at a human being and seeing this person is just like me. That creates the condition for empathy.

There's a fascinating study that illustrates this. And this study came from Italy. And so, to tell you about the study, I need to tell you a little bit about the context. The context is this. So, if I put electrodes on your face, and let's say I introduced a very small current, there will be a certain level of currant that will allow you to feel the sensation on your face. And then I tone it down very slightly which means that you deliver enough currant that is just below a conscious sensory experience. Which means that you cannot perceive it. It's right at a threshold of your perception.

So, here's the interesting thing. You cannot experience it however, if at the same time that this currency introduced on your face, you see a video of your own face being touched. Then you can feel it because seeing a video of your face being touch somehow increases a sensitivity of sensing touch. So, that's interesting, but it gets more interesting.

So, the question is this. Instead of seeing your own face, what if you see somebody else's face being touched? Does it have the same effect? It turns out, yes. If you see the face of somebody else being touched, it also lowers the threshold at which you can experience that sensation.

Now it gets really interesting. Now the question is this. If you see the face of somebody being touched, the face of somebody from your own race, your own skin color versus somebody else from another race, does it make a difference? It turns out it makes a difference. It turns out that according to the study, they had white guys and black guys looking at either faces of white guys or black guys being touched and if somebody from your own race, it affects your sensitivity more than from somebody else's race.

Now gets even more interesting. What if this is somebody from your own race however, it is somebody either from your own political party or from the other party. Would that make a difference? And it turns out it does make a difference. So, the mere perception of this guy shares my political beliefs, or this guy doesn't share my political beliefs. Just that mere perception affects your level of empathy at the neurological level, at the level of sensation, which is fascinating.

So, therefore, it suggests that if we create a habit of seeing people as just like me, that by itself will already increase empathy. So, that's number one. And the second one is very obvious. It's loving kindness. It is like, if you are kind to people, if you feel a kindness towards that other person, you feel more empathetic for that person. Very straightforward.

So, the next question. How do you do that? How do you increase human similarity and empathy? And again, it turns out it's very simple. The way to do that is encapsulated by a quote which is retroactively very obvious at the same time it's one of those life changing insights and this is the quote; "Whatever one frequently thinks and ponders upon that will become the inclination of his mind."

In other words, what you think often, you become. This suggests the methodology in which we can trade compassion. It is to create mental habits. Specifically, the two mental habits. The first mental habit is the habit of human similarity, which is to look at any human being and your thought is, this person is just like me, human being just like me. And the second thing is loving kindness, which is again, a mental habit of looking at any human being and your thought is, I want this person to be happy, I want this person to be happy, I want this person to be happy.

Imagine having that mental habit. Imagine like going to any meeting room, looking at any human being and saying, I want all these people to be happy. Changes everything. It changes how you interact with them and it changes how they interact with you because your wish for them to be happy is reflected in your body language unconsciously. The way you approach, the way you thought, your facial expression, your posture, and then it's unconsciously picked up by the other person. And they are feeling is they like you and they don't really know why they like you and it's because you've been wishing them happiness. It's really as simple as that and extremely powerful.

So, how do you train that? There are informal ways and formal ways. The informal way is very simple. Remember what we just said which is that if you think about something often enough, it becomes the inclination of your mind? So, the informal way is just randomly looking at human beings and thinking, this person is human being just like me and I want him to be happy. And if you do that a lot it becomes a mental habit and you become a person of kindness and empathy. And everybody loves you and you think just because of the good looks, like me huh? So, that's it. As simple as that. So, that is the informal way.

So, that's the good news. The better news is that there's an even more effective way of doing that which is an informal practice. So, here's a very interesting story about a recent study. So, here's the study. They get a bunch of 5th graders and first they give them a test, a math test and the math test is designed such that they're guaranteed to do this very well. So, they all get high scores.

So, the kids were randomly assigned into three groups. Two experimental groups and one control group. So, the first experimental group were given something called person praise. They were told, "You did the test really well. You must be really smart." The second group. They were given something called process praise. They were told, "You did really well. You must have worked really hard." And the third group were given no praise at all. They were just told, "You did really well.".

So, the interesting question is what happened after that? After that, they were given another test and this test was hard, designed to be challenging. So, what happened? It turns out that the kids given the person praise, that you must be really smart, did worse than the other two groups. The kids that were given process praise, that they were told you worked really hard, they did better than the other two groups. And the control group, the group that were not given any praise, they there were in the middle. Which is fascinating because it suggests that if you praise people unskillfully you can actually lower their performance, and if you praise people skillfully basically you can increase the performance.

Why is that so? Why is it that person praise leads to lower performance and process praise leads to higher performance? And the reason is this. The reason is mindset. There's this thing called a fixed mindset and the growth mindset. A fixed mindset is when you assume that your success and factors leading to the success are fixed, that I'm smart, I'm given these resources, and so on, I'm born with this, I think I need to change it. So, people with a fixed mindset, they assume that their success is due to the fact that they are fixed, like what they're born with, what they're given and therefore when they experience failure, the way they explain to themselves is, I feel there's nothing I can do about this.

People with growth mindset, they assume that their success is due to effort, that they can grow, that they can become better. And therefore, when they fail, they explain their failure as temporary and something that can be overcome with effort. And a person praise will reinforce the fixed mindset and a process praise reinforces the growth mindset. And it turns out in this study, just one praise is enough to reinforce either a fixed or a growth mindset enough to reflect in test scores. So, my friends, the moral of the story is praise people skillfully.

Speaker 2:

So, the topic of today's class is empathy. And empathy, as you know, is now the fourth of the five emotional competencies that were outlined by Daniel Goleman. Empathy here is being used in a very specific way. It has multiple components. The first important point to consider is that empathy refers to the ability to experience and understand what others are feeling, thinking, and while maintaining a very clear discernment about what is your own and what are other people's feelings and perspectives.

The second part is extremely important because without the discernment that what I'm sensing and feeling is really another person's emotional state of other person's perspective, can we can often slip into what's called emotional contagion. And this is something that leads to exhaustion fatigue. Picking up emotions from others and experiencing them as if they were your own.

So, to counter that latter part of this emotional contagion, having a clear understanding about an ability to discern what is it like to be in another person's shoes. What would they be feeling right now? How do they see this situation? And being able to create a model that includes another person's feelings, emotions, thinking, perhaps even their inclinations, interpretations, allows us to be informed to then make very clear decisions about how to act or not to act in different situations.

So, one of the things that we've already been working on in this whole course, in fact the first emotional competency, is self-awareness. And if you remember, self-awareness has to do with a whole set of practices and skills to enhance the ability to sense what's actually happening from moment to moment. One of the brain regions involved in this is the anterior insula, deeply embedded here. It's involved in many different capacities including the ability to focus attention, to feel emotions, and most importantly probably to actually have a sensory experience, a somatic map so to speak, of what all the different sensations that are occurring in the body.

And why that's so important is that, as we've been practicing, the information that's flowing into the insula and somatic sensory cortex actually gives us access to what we're feeling and sensing from moment to moment. And it also, interestingly, is related to the ability to sense and feel others, other people's physical pain, emotional pain. And In fact, there's some studies that suggest that people with greater empathy have higher activation in the anterior insula region that's important for literally feeling, attending, and experiencing somatic sensations in the body.

So, we'll see that prior practices of developing attentional skills, self-awareness, exercising the insula, the insula workout that we talked about through body scan and other practices. These are building blocks for some of the capacities that lead to empathy.

In terms of the neurology of empathy or the neuroscience of empathy. In the past multiple years there's been a huge explosion of interest in what's called mirror neurons. Mirror neurons refer to neural architecture and specifically to perceptual processing regions of the brain, motor areas that then lead to behavioral output. This was first noticed at the University of Parma by researchers who had electrodes embedded inside, underneath the skull, but right on the surface of the cortex of the brain in monkeys. And what they were doing was trying to map neural activity when monkeys were reaching out for food.

The electrodes were still inside the brain when experimenters were moving towards another part of the room, the experimental lab, and were grabbing food and they heard, and they noticed the same set of neurons firing. They repeated this multiple times and then they inferred that there are sets of neurons and neural architecture and neural networks in the brain that allow us to perceive actions in others and to induce motor patterns that are very similar to the motor patterns that are activated when we reach out and do things.

So, this was initially across species but also within species. So, we know that when children will often mimic each other, or little infants will mimic their parents. And this is again, evidence for this innate neural architecture that becomes the social glue that allows us to perceive others, facial expressions, actions, behaviors, perceive them, create a model that shifts to anterior in the brain to motor areas that allow us to actually kick into motor patterns that mimic those facial expressions or mimic those behaviors. And this is one neural conduit for understanding self and other, social interactions, and leading to understanding empathy and how it functions in part of the brain.

One key idea here is physiological entrainment. So, there are interesting studies that have been done where you take couples. So, John Gottman and Bob Levinson from, I've done studies where you videotape couples interacting with each other while they're hooked up to a whole set of physiological sensors that measure skin conductance, heart rate, blood pressure, etc. and then they have them view their own video clips when they're having a difficult conversation and they do moment to moment ratings of how they were feeling subjectively that aligns with the physiological measures.

Then you bring in a third person, not a member of this couple, to watch this video. And it turns out that physiological entrainment is the following. The degree to which the person who's watching the couple, watching the body movements, the facial expression, the degree to which the rater, the viewer, actually creates the same kind of physiological response as the person that they're watching in the video. That is part of physiological entrainment.

And in addition to that, subjectively, when people, the raters rate themselves on empathy, the higher the level of empathy that the rater rates about his or herself, the greater the physiological arousal that mimics, that mirrors, that's entrained with the person in the video that they're watching. So, here we see a combination of subjective ratings of empathy, physiological parameters that are in one's own body that's mimicking the others, and that this again, is beginning to explain some of the underlying peripheral nervous system and perhaps even central nervous system factors that are leading to this ability to experience other people's emotions, to put yourself in other people's shoes.

So, when we are here in this class, our explicit goal is to introduce the idea of empathy as a practice. Again, to emphasize that this is a muscle or let's it's a capacity that we already have to some degree and the goal of the course is to refine it, to become more aware and understanding of the processes and to actually refine our capacity to use empathy. And as we'll see, as we advance in any company, the ability to understand other people, their feelings, their perspectives, their inclinations, is incredibly important in becoming an effective leader.

So, in this class today, we have three specific steps or topic areas. The first is understanding others. How do we actually do this? And we'll be practicing this. Second one is developing others. Out of a sincere interest in seeing the other people flourish, how do we skillfully set up our scaffold other people's experiences so they can flourish and evolve? And then the third part, stepping back and looking more broadly, is what political awareness. How do we understand the network of social relationships that are occurring in a workplace or on a team that then allow us to be more effective, more skillful, more understanding?

So, the first part is understanding others. And as you can see here on this slide, Daniel Goleman, who's contributed greatly to this whole course, provides the following explanation. Empathy represents the foundation skill for all of the social competencies. And the idea here is again that, empathy as a skill that we can enhance, that we can develop, that we can refine is literally the foundation for being effective socially interpersonally.

So, understanding others has at least two different specific psychological capacities that have to be developed. The first part is really cognitive perspective taking and from neuroscience we do know that different distributed brain systems that allow us literally to take the perspective of another. The ability to understand other people's motivations, their intentions, their desires or wishes, even their beliefs and that from this cognitive processing, which relies very much on dorsomedial, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, we can begin to infer or reason what is the mental state right this moment of another person. And obviously this will give us great information and a window into understanding why other people do what they do and how we could positively influence, support, or modify other people's behaviors.

A whole other part is empathy. And again, referring back to the ability to pick up emotions, intentions, building a model of another person's emotional state and how that's changing from moment to moment, that we have other sets of neural architecture that allow us to sense and feel other people's emotions. And again, that all this, this also relies on this whole mirror neurons system, perceptual, leading to motor, leading to behavior.

Wonderful work by Tania Singer, a superstar neuroscientist and her team in Leipzig in Germany. They've begun to map out the neural regions or the neural networks in which these two different capacities: cognitive perspective taking and empathy or empathic concern or empathic resonance might be another term are instantiated. What's interesting about this is that we can see to what degree are these different brain systems coming online when people are experiencing other people's pain, physical or emotional? And, through training, how much can we actually develop the muscle, the signal, the coordinated activity across these different brain regions in which cognitive perspective taking and empathy are instantiated?

Some of the foundational empathy practices rely on the following; the first part is seeing similarities. And this really refers to understanding how self and others are really far more similar than different in terms of the needs, the wishes, the intentions. At a first glance, this is probably a lot easier to do with people who you care for, who you love, who you respect, but gradually we extend this out to strangers, to people we don't know, perhaps people from other countries or even people who join your workplace who you may not initially be very close with. The idea is to enhance the capacity to see similarity.

The second part of this is then offering kindness to others. And that offering that kindness as a way of skillfully influencing, connecting, reinforcing that social glue that's already instantiated in the mutual brains that are pinging and communicating with each other, but this is that motivational state of wanting to actually connect with others through kindness.

The other very strong principle here, and kind also comes from neuroscience; use it or lose it. This is a very strong principle of how neurons that fire together connect together. On a higher order, you can think about this as creating mental habits, even behavioral habits. On the mental level it's whatever one frequently thinks about, ponders. That will become the inclination of the mind. The idea that we build up more momentum towards a certain way of thinking or orienting in the world based on what we practice from moment to moment or day to day. And this is both on a mental level and also on a psychological level.

The second important point that we were going to cover today is called developing others. And again, this has to do with the understanding that that by understanding others, by seeing the similarity within wish or develop the motivation or the wish to want to help others flourish their own capacities. So, wonderful work by David Rock and his book, Your Brain at Work, has led to a model that he's proposed which is just a simple way to try to understand some things that get in the way of this process or that might be modified so that you can have a more healthy process.

The first idea is that there are threats and rewards. In the same way that food is often a reward or that things that cause fear are threatening. We know that human beings or human animals have evolved exquisite brain systems to be able to detect these signals within milliseconds, but then you step up into the social realm. We understand that there are social threats or triggers, things that trigger one's self or others, and there also are things that are innately rewarding and the more that we have insight into what might serve as a trigger of threat or that might serve as a symbol of reward, this is a very powerful way to influence the workplace, relationships, whole families, etc.

So, the SCARF model suggests that there are at least five domains that we would sometimes move away from because we perceive them as threatening or if they can be modified and understood and skillfully, we might actually move toward those things. The first is status. A very simple idea that we live in a relational world and that relative power, especially in the workplace, can become a source of threat, it can become a source of concern or jealousy and that there are different ways to work with this. So, on an individual level, one way is to actually play the game of playing yourself, which refers to, what is my status in a specific domain and a specific skill. So, one concrete example, academic writing or writing.

So, if I view myself in the past at a time when I was not so skillful, I at the present have a much higher status than my version of myself from the past. So, you can understand it and see this relational stance that I can have even towards myself. Likewise, in the workplace, you can see that people have different capacities or have different tenure in a company. And of course, there will be different power structures and different relationships across job positions and so forth.

Second part, probably more intuitive, is certainty or the lack thereof. The idea that when things are uncertain, job description is not clear, the role that the person is playing in a company is not clear, this uncertainty is something that can be seen as a source of threat. So, if it's possible to modify that and to make the parameters more certain, clear, transparent, then people can operate with greater certainty and less uncertainty. And we also know that uncertainty can lead to learned helplessness and that uncertainty in and of itself is a stressor that can literally damage neurons in the hippocampus in the brain and can be seen as a chronic stressor that actually erodes people's ability to use their skills or mastery.

And that leads to the next topic: autonomy. As a leader, it's very important to try to enhance people's autonomy, giving them these contexts, the tools, the resources to develop mastery, to become skillful in what they do so that they can move towards projects, challenging tasks. The extent to which we do not give autonomy or support to others then they might actually see new tasks as not just a challenge but actually as a stressor or even a threat to their view of themself. So, this is very important in how to skillfully set up the situation for people to develop mastery, skill, and to feel autonomous in their work life.

The next is relatedness. Extremely important. This goes back to this notion of the social glue and leads most directly back to empathy. The extent to which people feel isolated means that they do not experience the resources, or they do not call on the resources of their social network. This can be very damaging, especially in the workplace, when certain tasks require being very much interconnected with others, relying on other people who have other resources and working together as a team. We know that one of the single most important factors that supports the perception of quality of life is how much we are interconnected in our social network. And if you think about it there's the home life, there's work life, and we spend so much time at work, and that social interconnectedness and relatedness with others, especially when engaged in challenging tasks, can be super important in how much a person feels that they will stay to the job, give it their all, etc.

So, relatedness in the workplace is extremely important because the degree to which a person feels that they can rely on others when engaged in a job that's very challenging, call on other people as resources to actually get something done is extremely important. The inverse of that is if a person feels isolated, then they will have a much more difficult time at functioning in the workplace.

The fifth factor is fairness. And this is a very interesting domain. Fairness here has to do with what is just and what is perceived as being fair in a social or interpersonal way. Some experiments that have been done in an economic scientific studies suggest that if you give two people, Person A, you give her 100 dollars and she has the right to distribute the money as she wishes. Person B is the receiver. So, when Person B is given the opportunity to accept $1 and Person A keeps $99. Person B, from an economic perspective, of course you take $1 and you're $1 wealthier than you were before. That is normally the rule that would be engaged. However, when something is perceived or evaluated as being unfair, that will trump basic economic valuation. So, that person will say, "That's not accurate and that's not fair for me to be given only $1 when another person receives $99. So, in fact I will simply not accept the gift.

And this is a very interesting behavior and lot of studies have been done to say where does that shift? But the idea here is that if you're in a team or you're in a workplace and others are doing the same or less work, but you are being compensated less so, that the perception of the lack of fairness it can become toxic and destroy the quality of people working with others at the workplace. So, this is a model, the SCARF model, that helps people, especially if you're a leader, manager, etc. or in a position where you can actually sculpt the workplace based on these five factors, you can have a huge amount of influence and either set up parameters that make people more threatened or less inclined to participate or the inverse, actually reward people and help people feel more interconnected.

So, the third important point that we were going to go over today is about political awareness. And again, this has to do with broadening the scope of empathy, not just to one individual or a specific relationship, but to a whole set of relationships in the workplace. And as you can see on this slide here, you can see these kittens. I think there's a spy among us. How do we figure out who's that?

But here, a political awareness again, are specific skills that we have to a certain degree that we can refine and really bring, with a good motivation, to the workplace. So, as you see here, accurately reading the key power relationships among different people or even different systems in a organization. Another very important point here is how do you detect crucial social networks? And this could really be important in terms of how you help sculpt a company, how you motivate groups of people, how you understand how different networks of people work together, and this might be across different divisions.

Another key point here is understanding the forces that actually shape the view and the actions of the members of a company. So, beginning not only with those that are obvious and, on the surface, or that might be explicit but those that are even implied, perhaps never clearly verbalize but they are very active forces that shape what people choose to do, how much they commit to actually coming to work and how they feel at ease or not at ease contributing and collaborating with others. These are key political awareness skills.

And then another factor is accurately reading the organizational and external realities. So, even though an organization might have a very clear mission or motivation, there are external realities, be it a recession or other factors that are outside of the specific company or organization that influence what can and cannot happen. And all of these together constitute political awareness skills.

So how do you begin to develop this in the workplace? Well one, you can intentionally try to cultivate and maintain rich personal networks. And this might be not only within your team but across teams or even across divisions or across domains within a company. Another factor is to read the underlying currents of your own organization, how decisions are made, what influences the key decision makers and how those currents are changing over time. So, this is not just a one moment but it's continually refreshing our understanding of the company.

And then, very importantly, distinguishing between the following; What's my own interest to take to make sure that I develop in skills and develop professionally? What's the interest of the team or teams that I'm working with? What do they need or what do we need as the we, not just me? And then thirdly the organization. Even organizations evolve and mature and develop over time. What does the organization need to actually continue to grow and be healthy?

Another key point here is utilizing self-awareness. Remember that the insula workout, the body scan, the continuous flow of information from your own body that allows us to be informed from moment to moment what's actually happening in myself and others, empathy. To understand your own role. Practice empathic listening frequently. And this is so inexpensive to do and can have such a powerful impact whether it's with one person actively listening as opposed to interrupting, hearing the voices more clearly of the people on a team and then even on organizational level.

Speaker 1:

Today's class is about being loved. But not just being loved, being loved in a way that allows you to be very successful at the same time, getting stuff done. So, we have this dichotomy or this false dichotomy. We like to think that if we're at work especially if we are managers, we think that we have to make a choice between being loved and being effective. You would think that you can't have both. If you are loved, you don't get stuff done, if you get stuff done, people hate you. I want to suggest that you can have your karma and eat it too. That it is possible to be loved and effective at the same time and this is the essence of today's class.

So, let me quote an interesting study and this was a study that is a quote from a book, Encouraging the Heart. In this study, researchers get a bunch of managers from a company, they measured their effectiveness and managing and try to find out what distinguished the best managers from the worst managers. So, they mention a couple of factors and they tried to figure out the top, the what distinguished the top 25 percent top quarter managers from the bottom quarter.

Here's the really interesting finding, interesting because it's sort of counter intuitive, which is that of all the factors that were studied in this study, it turns out that only one, only one differentiated the top performers from the bottom performers and the one factor is affection. Affection both expressed in one thing. So, it turns out that the best managers are those who like people, who can love people and want people to love them back. Somehow, loving people wanting people to love you back is the condition for outstanding leadership. Which is, at first a bit strange, but it turns out there's a very simple reason behind it. And a very simple reason is, the more we like somebody, all other things equal, the more we like somebody, the harder we are willing to work for them and a better quality of our work. It is that simple.

So, managers who are loved, they have people who work harder and produce better work which is what makes them more effective managers. Simple as that. And this study is not just a single study. Remember from a couple of classes ago we talk about naval officers where a study showed that the most effective commanders in the Navy are people who are liked. So, you see a trend. The best managers tend to be those who are liked.

So, for this class, we deal with three main sub-topics. The first topic is leading with compassion. The second is communicating with insight and a third is influencing with goodness.

So, first let's talk about compassion. What is compassion? Embarrassingly, when we started this work, we realize there is no scientific consensus for the definition of compassion. However, we did we did find a definition that we like a lot. And this is a definition from Stanford University specifically from a Tibetan scholar called, Thupten Jinpa. And this is his definition of compassion. He defined compassion as a mental state endowed with a sense of concern for the suffering of others and, very importantly, aspiration to see the suffering relieved. Specifically, and even more importantly, Jinpa specified three components of compassion. And the three components of compassion are this.

First study said affective component which is, "I feel for you." Second is a cognitive component of compassion which is, "I understand you." And the third component is the motivational component which is, "I want to help you." So, these are the three components of compassion.

So, why are we are talking about compassion in this class, in a class about emotion intelligence and leadership? It's very simple. There is a very close relationship between compassion and leadership. And the first hint is this. The first hint comes from a quote from a book by Bill George. The book is called True North, and Bill George was a CEO of Medtronics and for his time he was one of the most respected CEOs in America. And this is what he says. And in this book, by the way, is not just his own personal experience, it is the experience of 200 or so authentic leaders that he interviewed.

And this is what he said, and this is actually the consensus of all these leaders which is this. The transformation from "I" to "we" is the most important process leaders go through. So, this is the connection between compassion and leadership, specifically authentic leadership, is the transformation from "I" to "we". That is the most important step taken by a leader. And so, if you are skilled in compassion, you're already there, you already know how to do this. So, you are already ahead of the game when it comes to becoming a leader.

But wait there's more. More good stuff. There is a very nice book titled, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni. And this is a book about how a team dysfunctions and how it can be highly functional. There turns out to be a specific relationship between the five ways a team dysfunctions and it can be represented in this pyramid over here.

So, when a team is dysfunctional, it begins with absence of trust. Specifically, what Lencioni calls vulnerability-based trust. It is when team members do not trust other team members enough to show their vulnerabilities and because of that, they never ask for help. They never say things are going wrong and so they wouldn't say, "I know my project is getting late. I need resources." They would never say that because they cannot show their vulnerability. They have to put out a brave face and because of that, there is no productive conflict. There is no productive discussion and then it cascades all the way up to inattention to results.

The lack of trust lies at the base of a team's dysfunction. A team dysfunctions when there's no trust and then when there's trust within the team members, there begins a process that turns it into a highly functioning team.

Trust. Specifically, vulnerability-based trust. And this vulnerability-based trust is basically what compassion is about. If the leader is compassionate, if the leader has a strong in all three factors of compassion, "I understand you. I feel for you. I want to help you," then it creates the conditions for this trust in the team. So, there is a second way that compassion leads to effective leadership.

But wait there's even more. There's something else which is even more important, which is the idea of Level 5 Leadership. And this comes from a very good book called, Good To Great. This book, Good To Great, starts with a fascinating premise, at least fascinating to me, a data loving engineer, and the idea was that in this in this book or in this study, they looked at all public companies, I think from 1965 onwards all the way until, if I remember correctly 1995, so for my extended period of time, and they look at every company that's been listed publicly and they look specifically for companies that go from good to great.

So, in other words these are companies that started off as good company, so not bad companies. They are performing at roughly the industry's average. So, they're making money they are like retaining dividends and so on, but something happened to these companies. For a prolonged period of time, and it was defined in 11 years or more to weed out the flukes, for a prolonged period of time, these companies greatly outperformed the rest of the industry.

So, in other words they went from good to great. And this book is about sifting through all the data to figure out what turned these companies from good to great. So, that is fascinating. What I found even more fascinating was what came out of a study. And what came out, the first thing that came out, is that good to great companies have a very specific kind of leaders and these leaders are called Level 5 leaders.

So again, in the book Jim Collins defined five levels of leadership. And level four are effective leaders. So, these are people who are good CEOs. The CEOs who run companies that make money, retain dividends and so on, and they survive and so on. However, Level 5 leaders go beyond that. Level 5 leaders go beyond being good CEOs and they turn companies from good to great.

And here's the question. What other factors do they possess? What is the differentiating thing between Level 5, Level 4 leaders? It turns out there are two differentiating factors and the two seems paradoxical. Comparing a Level 5 leader to a Level 4 leader has great ambition, at the same time he's personally humble. There is a paradoxical mix of ambition and humility. Because for a Level 5 leader his or her ambition is to want serving or creating greater good and because it is focused on greater good, he or she doesn't feel the need to inflate his own ego.

And that creates Level 5 leadership. So, that leads us to a question. Are Level 5 leaders trainable and if so, how do you train them? We don't actually know the full answer, but we do know that there is a relationship between compassion and Level 5 leaders. It's just a relationship. Remember the three factors of compassion, the three components, they are the affective component, "I feel for you," the cognitive component, "I understand you," and most importantly, the motivation component, "I want to help you.".

What if you superimposed the three components of compassion on the two factors of Level 5 leaders? And remember the two factors of Leve 5 leadership: humility and great ambition for greater good. And if you superimpose them, you find a relationship. You find that the first two components of compassion create the condition for personal humility and the last component of compassion, the motivational component create the conditions for great ambition for greater good.

And therefore, we can confidently say that compassion is a necessary component of Level 5 leadership and therefore compassion training is the necessary training for Level 5 leaders.

So, compassion is nice and good but that leads us to a question. How do you train it? And it turns out it's very simple. Remember from last the last class we talk about creating mental habits. So, we use that for training of kindness, loving kindness. And we can use the same technique for training compassion. It's all about creating the mental habits that are conducive for compassion.

So, now let's begin our practice. So, let's sit in the position that allows you to be alert and relaxed at the same time, whatever that means to you.

So, sitting in the position, let's begin by resting the mind. If you want to, you can imagine the mind resting very gently on the breath. And if you want to, you can think of your mind or think of your breath as a mattress and the mind resting very gently on it. And let's stay in this state of rest for about a minute.

Now, let's connect with the goodness within ourselves. Our love, our compassion, our altruism and our inner joy. If you wish, you may visualize your goodness as a white, a faint white light radiating out of your body.

When you breathe in, breathe in all your goodness and breathe it in to your heart. And then use your heart to multiply all the goodness you just breathed in by a fact of 10.

And then when you breathe out, give all the goodness to the world.

So, now let's shift gears a little bit and connect with the goodness of everybody in the room or if you are alone in your room, imagine yourself connecting with the goodness of everybody around you in your building or in your office or in your apartment building. So once again, when you breath in, breathe in the goodness of everybody around you. And if you like, you may imagine their goodness radiating from their body as faint white light, if you want.

And then breathing all their goodness into your heart and multiplying it by 10. And as you breathe out, breathe out all the multiplied goodness to the whole world And again, if you like to, imagine that as breathe in white light radiating from you, touching everybody in the world.

I'm going to pause for two minutes.

Finally, lets connect with the goodness of everybody in the world. And once again, if you would like to, you may visualize everybody in the world radiating their goodness as faint white light. And as you breathe in, breathe in everybody's goodness, the goodness of everybody in the world, into your heart. Multiply that by 10.

And as you breathe out, breathe out all the goodness. And if you want to again, as brilliant white light radiating towards everybody in the world, touching every human being.

So, I hope all of you like that exercise. And for those of you who are brave, there is an exercise or practice even better than this and even more effective, but it's more difficult. So, let me tell you what it is and if you want to, you can practice it on your own.

So, here's the practice. Remember that in the previous practice, we breathe in goodness of other people ourselves and other people, we transform it into more goodness and breathe that out. So, the change is this. The change is instead of breathing in goodness, we breathe in suffering. If you want to, you can visualize your suffering as black disgusting gooey stuff coming out from you. Breathe that in, transform that into goodness, and then breathing that out. And then after a while of doing that, you breathe in the suffering of people around you as black disgusting gooey stuff into your body, into your heart, turning that into goodness, breathe out and then do it for everybody in the world, right?

There's a name for this practice. It's called, "tonglen" which is a Tibetan word which literally means giving and taking. So, the idea is taking suffering and giving goodness. And this practice is extremely powerful. The Dalai Lama, for example, is supposed to be doing this every day. This is one of his main practices. It turns him into the man he is.

This practice gives you at least three mental habits, which is even more powerful than the mental habits that we talked about earlier. And the first is to become fearless towards pain. Because the idea is, if you're willing to breathe in suffering that creates a fearlessness in the mind towards suffering. Very powerful.

The second is again you become confident in the transformative power of self. You become able to transform, in your mind at least, you can transform suffering into goodness.

And the third is, like the previous exercise, giving the gift of goodness to everybody. And my own experience of this practice is that the very first time I did it, it changed me. The very first time I did this I found my level of self-confidence jumped a big notch and over time I realized that that jump in self-confidence was permanent. Which is very surprising, right? You do an exercise. You sit for a few minutes. You have a significant and permanent change in self-confidence.

How does that come about? So, in my case, I realized what happened was once I was able to breathe in my own suffering and breathing in suffering other people, I realize that what has been holding me back is fear of suffering. And I find it the moment I'm willing to even breathe it in. I built a barrier. I built a barrier, my confidence increased. As simple as that.

Speaker 2:

So, the next part of social skills is communicating with insight. And we're going to focus on one core piece here which is the topic of having difficult conversations. And difficult conversations is such a huge topic and such an important one. One way to look at our work time is that it's one conversation after another. And the topic here is, how can we build more trust? How can we build more trust in our workplaces as a leader or as a co-worker? And one of the key ways to do this is to have conversations that we find we are avoiding, conversations that are difficult which usually means we're expressing something that's hard for us to express or often expressing something about ourselves and our own feelings.

So, we've been talking a lot about two of the three pieces of a difficult conversation which is the content and the feeling part. New to this is what we would call the identity, which is really kind of a core sense of who you are. So, within any difficult conversation, the most skillful way to approach it is to recognize that there are three primary parts of any conversation. There's the content, there's the feelings, and there is the identity.

There are many different identities but three core identities, which I want to mention, are the questions; Am I competent? Am I a good person? Am I worthy of love? Or as Ming would add to this, Am I good looking? But we don't worry about that particular identity. It's really these three; competency, am I a good person, am I worthy of love.

So, how do we go about having a difficult conversation skillfully and in a way that will build more trust. This is the essential reason why we're going to have this difficult conversation is because we want to build more trust in our relationships. So, the first part of having a difficult conversation is to recognize that this conversation is going to have these three pieces. It's going to have content, feelings, and identity. Next, is to check in with yourself. Why am I having this conversation? Why do I want to have this conversation? Is this something that would be useful to raise? Is this a conversation that is likely to build more trust?

And the next, is starting from what we call starting from the third story, which is the story of, how would this look, how would this conversation look if you were to step outside of yourself and look at what's happening between you and these other people or this other person and this conversation that you want to have. And you might explore this story from these couple different points of view. How might it look? How would the content look? How would the feelings look? How would the identity look from this other person's point of view as well as how does it look from your own?

And also, as you're about to enter this conversation, you want to start it from a sense of problem solving. This is great. I love this cartoon from Ming's book. How about now? Is now a good time to do the difficult conversation exercise while you're there on the desert island? Yes, this would be an excellent time to have the difficult conversation.

And also, a lot of this topic is about influencing with goodness. The reason we're having the difficult conversation is this is a powerful way to influence another person but to influence in a way that has a positive result. And this is kind of bringing back something that we talked about in the last class is David Rock's SCARF model. And again, it's just a reminder in terms of this question of influence that these five categories are kind of core ways that we are being influenced and influencing others: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.

So, emotions are contagious. This is a really core piece of understanding social skills and working with teams and also building trust. And this is just a scientific, physiological fact of life that how we are, our own moods, our own emotional life, is always being influenced and influencing the emotional lives of others.

There's a really interesting study that was done. This was a study done at Yale in which there is a group of people who were making a decision about whether to give someone a raise or not. And what they didn't know was that one of the people in the group was a plant, was an actor.

And the way this study worked is that this particular actor came in and experimented with different moods and each time his mood had a tremendous effect over the mood as well as the outcome of the group. So, when this person when this plant, when this actor came in as someone who was kind of upbeat and was in a good mood, this group was able to make a really good and effective decision.

When the same group met and this person came in and was kind of grumpy and was in a bad mood, the group was much less functional and, in the end, they were not able to make a very good decision. So, emotions are amazingly contagious.

So, how do we influence change? What are the ways that we can actually skillfully influence the change of others and the teams that we're working with? I just want to mention four key practices briefly. One is recognizing that we are always influencing others. I think we've talked about this a little bit in a previous class. I think of this as one of the key rules of influence that everything we do and everything we don't do, everything we say and everything we don't say has influence over others. And this is kind of a very primal way of expressing and living with self-awareness in the work world.

The other way, another good practice of influencing others is to see how we can strengthen self-confidence. What can we do? What can we do as part of our own self-confidence to help empower others? One way I like to think of this is, how can we help create spaces that people can move into that gives them a sense of feeling good about themselves, of getting to know themselves better, and ultimately feeling a sense of more awareness and more confidence.

The third is looking at how we can help people succeed knowing that everyone around us wants to be successful, we all want to be successful, how can we help others succeed.

And then the fourth is this practice of being aware of how can we serve the greater good. And part of it is recognizing that in almost any situation, we all have our own self-interest. We often have the interest of our team and there's the greater good of what's really good for the company. And just to be able to recognize and let go when appropriate of what our self-interest is and to move towards working for the greater interest, the greater interest, the greater good.

So, we're coming now to the end of Search Inside Yourself. This is the last class. So, just to recap. Key points. The first and most important point is that compassionate leadership can bring out the best in all of us. This is the most important takeaway.

The second is what we did, this meditation on multiplying goodness. This is something you can do on your own and you can do throughout the day.

The third piece is about difficult conversations and how to have difficult conversations.

And last, the skills around influence. The influence of self-awareness, understanding others, and serving the greater good.

And last, I want to show this is Ming's book, Search Inside Yourself, which would be the key book of this class. Two other books that I want to recommend. Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence. And Daniel Goleman's, Emotional Intelligence.

Your Brain at Work by David Rock is another book we recommend.

And the homework here is very simple. Live long and prosper. Thank you very much.