Once upon a time, there was a world-renowned expert in emotional intelligence who was also a very talented writer. He was encouraged by his friend to write a book on mindfulness and emotional intelligence. He felt inspired to do so but could never find the time. So the friend wrote the book instead. I am that friend, and this is the book.
Thank you, Danny, for trusting me to write this book.
Contents
Dedication
Foreword by Daniel Goleman
Foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Introduction: Searching Inside Yourself
Chapter One: Even an Engineer Can Thrive on Emotional Intelligence
Chapter Two: Breathing as if Your Life Depends on It
Chapter Three: Mindfulness Without Butt on Cushion
Chapter Four: All-Natural, Organic Self-Confidence
Chapter Five: Riding Your Emotions like a Horse
Chapter Six: Making Profits, Rowing Across Oceans, and Changing the World
Chapter Seven: Empathy and the Monkey Business of Brain Tangos
Chapter Eight: Being Effective and Loved at the Same Time
Chapter Nine: Three Easy Steps to World Peace
Epilogue: Save the World in Your Free Time
Acknowledgments
Notes
Recommended Reading and Resources
Index
Praise for Search Inside Yourself
Copyright
My first impression of Google was shaped by Chade-Meng Tan, widely known as Meng. Meng is the company’s unofficial greeter, its irrepressible jolly good fellow (“which nobody can deny,” as his business card puts it).
As I’ve gotten to know him, I have realized that Meng is someone special. One tip-off came as I went by his office and saw the bulletin board on the wall near his door: row after row of Meng in snapshots with the world’s bold-face names. Meng with Al Gore. Meng with the Dalai Lama. And with Muhammad Ali and with Gwyneth Paltrow. Later I learned, via a front-page article in the New York Times, that Meng was famous as “that Google guy,” the singular engineer with high enough social intelligence to make any visitor feel right at home—and pose for a photo with him.
But that’s not what makes Meng so special. Rather, it is Meng’s magical combination of brilliant systems analysis with a heart of gold.
First, the analysis.
I had come to give a talk on emotional intelligence as part of the Authors@Google lecture series. I felt a bit like yet another of the endless perks employees there famously enjoy, somewhere between a massage and all the soda you can drink.
In this bastion of the intellect—after all, you need top SAT scores just to be considered for a job at Google—I anticipated that lecture with some trepidation about anyone in this hardheaded information engineering company being much interested in hearing about soft skills. So I was amazed on arriving at the room where I was to speak, the largest venue in that part of the Googleplex, to find the place overflowing, with throngs spilling into the hall. There was clearly high interest.
At Google I was talking to perhaps the highest-IQ audience I’d ever addressed. But among all those big brains who heard me that day, it was Meng who had the smarts to reverse engineer emotional intelligence. Meng picked it apart and put it back together again with a brilliant insight: he saw that knowing yourself lies at the core of emotional intelligence, and that the best mental app for this can be found in the mind-training method called mindfulness.
That insight underlies the program Meng has developed. When he unveiled the course at Google University, it was called (fittingly for a company all about web search) Search Inside Yourself. As you’ll read here, many who have taken the course at Google have found it to be a transformative experience.
Meng was also savvy in choosing his collaborators, like Zen teacher Norman Fischer, and my longtime friend and colleague Mirabai Bush, founding director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. And Meng has drawn on the expertise of another old friend, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who pioneered the use of mindfulness in medical settings throughout the world. Meng knows quality. He didn’t stop there. Meng and this team also cherry-picked the best from well-tested methods for creating a life with self-awareness and well-being, kindness, and happiness.
Now for that heart of gold.
When Meng saw that this inner search had such benefits, his instinct was to share it with anyone who might want to give it a try—not just those lucky enough to have access to a Google course. In fact, the very first time I met Meng, he was passionate in telling me that his life goal was to bring world peace through spreading inner peace and compassion. (Meng’s enthusiasm for this goal, I noticed a bit uneasily, seemed to inspire him to a level of vociferousness.)
His vision, detailed in this highly enjoyable account, entails beta testing a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence curriculum at Google and then offering it to anyone who might benefit—as he puts it, “give it away as one of Google’s gifts to the world.”
As I’ve gotten to know Meng better, I have come to realize that he is not your average engineer; he’s a closet Bodhisattva. And with this book, I’d drop the “closet” part.
—Daniel Goleman
When I first met Meng, I thought to myself: “Who is this guy, who calls himself the jolly good fellow of Google?” (It is on his business card, along with the rubric “which nobody can deny.”)
Meng had invited me to give a tech talk on the subject of mindfulness at Google. Within a few seconds of my arrival, he was talking to me about mindfulness and world peace, while making one joke after another. His sense of humor was a bit bewildering. Meng proceeded to take me on a tour. The first stop was his photo board in the lobby of the main building of the Googleplex . . . photos of himself together with pretty much every famous and powerful person in the world. “Who is this guy who welcomes all these heads of state, Nobel laureates, and celebrities to Google? And can I take him seriously? Can I believe everything he is telling me?”
He was telling me a lot, including that his ultimate aim was to create the conditions for world peace in his lifetime and that he felt the way to do that was to make the benefits of meditation accessible to humanity. And that Google could play a special role, being Google.
You can imagine what was going on in my head: “Google, the quintessence of universal accessibility (except in countries that try to block