Google's 'Jolly Good Fellow' On The Power Of Emotional Intelligence
Posted: 09/29/2013 8:48 am EDT | Updated: 09/30/2013 4:04 pm EDT
When
Google engineer-turned-mindfulness expert Chade-Meng Tan gives a talk
in front of a group of Silicon Valley developers and executives, he
often starts with a simple exercise.
“Imagine two human beings. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything, just wish for those two human beings to be happy. That’s all.”
During
one recent talk, he gave the group a homework assignment: Perform the
exercise the next day at work, spending 10 seconds each hour randomly
choosing two people and silently wishing for them to be happy. The
following morning, Tan received an email from an employee who attended
the workshop that read, “I hate my job. I hate coming to work every day.
But yesterday I tried your suggestion and it was my happiest day in
seven years.”
It’s not the first time that Tan -- who
Wired recently dubbed an
"Enlightenment engineer" -- has seen emotional intelligence exercises
transform an employee’s work and life. As Google’s resident “
Jolly Good Fellow,”
Tan developed Search Inside Yourself (SIY) program, a mindfulness-based
emotional intelligence training program. Tan's philosophy is that
cultivating emotional intelligence through mindfulness training and
meditation can help an individual reach a state of inner peace, the
essential foundation of happiness, success and compassion.
More than 1,000 Google employees have gone through the SIY curriculum,
according to Wired, the principles of which are outlined in Tan's New York Times bestseller,
“Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path To Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace)".
The program focuses on building up the five emotional intelligence
domains of self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and
social skills, primarily through meditation and mindfulness training,
which aims to improve one's focus and attention on the present moment.
The
benefits of emotional intelligence
in the workplace are well-documented, from career success to improved
relationships to better leadership -- and Tan says getting Silicon
Valley interested in a meditation program to train employees in
emotional intelligence wasn't difficult.
"Everybody
already knows, emotional intelligence is good for my career, it's good
for my team, it's good for my profits," Tan tells the Huffington Post.
"It comes pre-marketed, so all I had to do is create a curriculum for
emotional intelligence that helps people succeed, with goodness and
world-peace as the unavoidable side-effects."
Here are four ways that you can cultivate emotional intelligence -- and revolutionize your work, relationships and happiness.
Meditate.
Tan
outlines three major steps to developing emotional intelligence:
Training attention ("the ability to bring the mind to a state that's
calm and clear, and to do it on demand," he explains), self-awareness,
and social intelligence. The first step is building an individual's
powers of attention through meditation.
Tan is convinced that much
like improving physical fitness, improving "mental fitness" through
meditation and mindfulness practices can improve nearly every aspect of
your life, from work to family life to physical health.
"There are
some things in life where if you improve one thing, everything else in
life is improved... If you improve physical fitness, it improves your
home life, success, wellness, everything," says Tan. "The same is true
for meditation, because meditation is in fact mental and emotional
fitness. If you are fit mentally and emotionally, every aspect of your
life improves."
Research
has confimed that mindfulness contributes to emotional well-being, in addition to improving
memory and attention. A 2013
University of Utah study
found that individuals with mindful personality traits (such as
self-awareness and attentiveness) exhibited more stable emotional
patterns and reported feeling more in control of their moods and
actions.
Brown University research also found that mindfulness meditation could improve an individual's control over brain processing of pain and emotions.
Cultivate compassion.
Meditation is also the primary vehicle for cultivating compassion: A recent
Harvard University study found
that individuals who underwent eight weeks of meditation training were
significantly more likely to help others in need than those who hadn't
gone through the meditation training.
Neuroscientists have even
seen that meditating on compassion can create an empathetic state in the
brain. When Tibetan Buddhist monks were asked to meditate on
"unconditional loving-kindness and compassion" in a 2006 study, the
researchers measured brain activity in the left prefrontal cortex, which
is associated with positive emotions, that was 30 times stronger than
the activity among a control group of college students who didn't
meditate,
Wired reported.
The researchers theorized that empathy may be something one can
cultivated by "exercising" the brain through loving-kindness meditation.
Read More Here
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Ommmm! How Silicon Valley values meditation
Published: Friday, 20 Sep 2013 | 2:54 PM ET
Google is going Zen.
Silicon
Valley is well known for its lucrative employee perks, but now
companies are offering meditation and mindfulness courses to employees
and there's a long waiting list to attend. Google's "Search Inside
Yourself" course has been taken by more than 1,000 employees and
currently has more than 400 on the waiting list. It's designed to teach
people to manage their emotions, which could ultimately make them more
productive and creative thinkers.
The program was created by
Chade-Meng Tan,
who was employee #107 at Google. His official job title is "Jolly Good
Fellow," which is a drastic change since his days at Google starting out
as a software engineer.
He's also come out with a book, "Search
Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness
(And World Peace)" which has been ranked a New York Times Best Seller.
"Meng"
came to the New York Stock Exchange where he joined CNBC's Tyler
Mathisen and Kenny Polcari, director of NYSE floor operations at O'Neil
Securities, to give some tips on quick ways to de-stress.
Read More and Watch Video Here
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