Search Inside Yourself -- Chade-Meng Tan

Search Inside Yourself

Chade-Meng Tan

GENRE: Health & Wellness

PAGES: 288

COMPLETED: November 11, 2021

RATING:

Short Summary

Chade-Meng Tan takes readers through the Search Inside Yourself program he’s taught at Google since 2007. Tan discusses the art of mindfulness, why failure is nothing to fear, and how to harness your emotions.

Key Takeaways

Be Mindful — The key to meditation and mindfulness is focus. Concentrate on the process of what you’re doing and refocus your attention to the present moment whenever you catch yourself caught up in your thinking. Anchor yourself by following the breath and feeling the inner body.

Be Willing to Take an Honest Assessment — Accurate self-assessment is critical because it gives you the knowledge to know where you need to improve. It’s important to be mindful of where you can grow and improve.

Face Failure — What distinguishes successful people is their attitude towards failure. Running away from failure only prevents you from growing, and if you’re too afraid to fail, you’ll never fully maximize your potential. You have to be willing to put yourself out there and fall short. More importantly, you have to understand internally that failure ultimately brings you closer to success.

Favorite Quote

"If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate."

Book Notes

*Did not take chapter-by-chapter notes on this one. Running list below.

This book is based on the Search Inside Yourself program that Meng has taught at Google since 2007.
- It’s rooted in mindfulness, meditation, and emotional intelligence.
- Meng is a former engineer at Google who now works in the personal growth department at Google.
Search Inside Yourself works in three steps:

1. Attention Training
  - The idea is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time.
2. Self-Knowledge and self-mastery
  - Use your trained attention to create high-resolution perception into your own cognitive and emotive processes.
3. Creating useful mental habits
Emotional Intelligence — The ability to monitor one’s own thoughts, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking.

- There are 5 components, as described by Daniel Goleman:

1. Self-Awareness: Knowledge of one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions.
2. Self-Regulation: Management of one’s internal states, impulses, and resources.
3. Motivation: Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals.
4. Empathy: Awareness of others’ feelings, needs, concerns.
5. Social Skills: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others.
Neuroplasticity — What we think, do, and pay attention to changes the structure and function of our brains.
- We can intentionally change our brains with training.
- Hippocampus: Part of the brain associated with memory and spatial navigation.
- Ex. London cab drivers have larger hippocampus than most people because they are required to memorize every street in London before obtaining their taxi license.
Mindfulness — Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.
Amygdala — Part of the brain that scans for threats and controls anxiety/fight or flight.
- You can regulate this part of the brain via attention training.
Every emotion has correlate in the body. Emotion is psychological AND physiological.
- Things happen in the body that reflect each emotion.
Put simply, meditation is mental training. It’s exercise for the mind.
- Mediation is focusing on the breath. You can do this anywhere, anytime.
- When attention wanders away from the breath, bring it back.
- You are training your ability to concentrate and have attention.

- - Meta-Attention is when you observe your attention wandering.
- Just like physical exercise, your attention gets better and your mind becomes more clear and calm when you meditate regularly and overcome resistance (mind wandering).
Mediation Process
- Create Intention
  - Have a reason to mediate
- Follow the Breath
  - Focus on the process of breathing
- Attention
- Distraction
  - If you lose your focus and the mind wanders, bring it back to the breath
  - Every time you do this and recapture your attention, you are getting stronger and building your focus. It’s the equivalent of flexing your bicep during a bicep exercise.

Dealing with Distractions
1. Acknowledge it
2. Experience without judging or reacting
3. If you need to react, maintain mindfulness
4. Let it go
The key to mindful meditation: Breathe as if your life depended on it.
Meditate for at least 10 minutes. Focus on the breath. If the mind wanders, bring it back to the breath.
One 8-week study on mindful meditation in the corporate world discovered:

- Anxiety was reduced significantly.
- Increases activity in the brain in the area of positive emotions.
- The brain can process stimuli more efficiently and reduce “additional blink”, which is when the brain loses focus and “blinks” after making a discovery when analyzing information.
- Memory, perception, and learning are boosted.
  - When you lift, your muscles get bigger at rest. Similarly, when you meditate, you build calmness, clarity, and joy when you aren’t practicing.
“Mindfulness, I declare, is useful everywhere.” — Buddha
Mindfulness becomes life changing when you can take it beyond sitting and bring it into daily life.
- Remember, mindfulness is bringing a wandering mind back to attention.
Mindfulness to Activity
- Bring full, moment-to-moment attention to every task with a non-judgmental mind.
- When attention wanders, bring it back.
- What helps this is not taking things for granted. An example is eating food. Act as if this is the last meal you’ll ever have. Enjoy it using mindful practice.
- Another example is mindful walking. Pretend like you’re on a rock cliff where one stumble could result in you falling to your death. If you were in this situation, you would be focusing on every step along the cliff.
Other-Directed Mindfulness
- Focus your attention on another person. Listen carefully with your full attention.
- If the mind wanders, bring it back to focus.
Meditation and falling asleep have one common feature: They both rely on letting go.
- The better you are at letting go, the better you are at meditation and falling asleep.
- “Have expectations BEFORE meditation, but no expectations DURING meditation.”
There are two elements of attention:

1. Focused Attention
  - Intense focus on a chosen object.
  - Is trained during mindfulness meditation when you focus on the breath and bring attention back to it when the mind wanders.
2. Open Attention
  - Willing to meet any object that arrives at the mind or the senses.
  - Is trained during mindfulness meditation when you are non-judgmental of thoughts and feelings, and you let go.
Self-Awareness Competencies:
1. Emotional Awareness — Recognizing one’s emotions and their effects
2. Accurate Self-Assessment — Knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses
  - In a study of hundreds of managers at 12 big companies, Daniel Goleman found that this was a common trait among “star performers.”
  - Star performers typically underestimated their skills, whereas average people overestimated their skill set. This is an indication that star performers have high internal standards.
  - Accurate self-assessment is critical because it gives you the knowledge to know where you need to improve. Some people are delusional and lack this and think they don’t need to improve. This attitude fosters complacency.
3. Self Confidence — A strong sense of one’s self-worth and capabilities.
  - When you are truly self-confident, you are flexible with ego: you can pick up ego when necessary, but you can also put it down when necessary in order to learn something from somebody.
  - It’s OK to let your ego grow to whatever size is necessary that allows you to be unintimidated by whoever you are interacting with.
  - Quote (P. 85): “Self-confidence is the ability to be as big as Mount Fuji and as small as a grain of sand at the same time.”
  - There have been many studies that have shown the importance of self-confidence in outstanding performance. It’s essential to being a high performer.

You are not your emotions; emotions are what you feel, not who you are.
- View emotions as a psychological phenomenon that occurs in the body rather than seeing them as who you are.
  - Ex. “I experience anger in my body” RATHER THAN “I am angry.”
- Seeing your emotions in this way allows you to gain mastery over them because you know they are not who you are at a fundamental level.
- Metaphor: Thoughts and emotions are like clouds, while our core being is the sky. Clouds come and go.
We can’t stop thoughts or emotions from arising, but we can let them go, and a highly trained mind can do it right away.
Dealing with Distress

1. Know when you are not in pain

- When we actually have pain, we always dream about the day we won’t have pain and how nice that will be. But when we later actually do become free of pain, we take it for granted.
- Recognize when you are not in pain and appreciate that. Allows you to be more joyful.
- NEVER TAKE GOOD HEALTH FOR GRANTED!

1. Do not feel bad about feeling bad

- Feeling bad about feeling bad is an ego thing.

1. Do not feed the monsters

- Monsters/emotional distress might arise, but you keep them there by feeding them.
- Telling stories and replaying things in your mind constantly is how you feed the monsters. Direct your focus elsewhere.

1. Start every thought with kindness and humor

- In every situation, distressing or otherwise, it’s important to start each thought with kindness and compassion for oneself and others.

Elements of True Motivation:

1. Autonomy — The urge to direct our own lives.
2. Mastery — The desire to get better and improve yourself.
3. Purpose —The yearning to make a difference in the world that is greater than ourselves.

Quote (P. 141): “According to neuroscience — even before events happen — the brain has already made a prediction about what is most likely to happen, and sets in motion the perception, behaviors, emotions, physiologic responses, and interpersonal ways of relating that best fit with what is predicted. In a sense, we learn from the past what to predict for the future and then live the future we expect.” — Regina Pally

- This quote is on the importance of visualization and self-belief.
- Quote (P. 142): “You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.” — Michael Jordan
Failure
- Failure is a building block to success.
- Quote (P. 152): “Success is 99% failure.” — Soichiro Honda
- Quote (P. 152): “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” — Thomas Watson
- What distinguishes successful people is their attitude toward failure, and specifically, how they explain their own failures to themselves.
  - Successful people feel their setbacks are temporary, are isolated circumstances, and can eventually be overcome by effort and abilities.
  - Unsuccessful people react to setbacks with personal helplessness. They feel setbacks are long lasting, generalized across their lives, and are due to some inadequacies and therefore can’t be overcome.
Barbara Frederickson found that it takes three positive experiences to overcome a negative one — a 3:1 ratio.
- We focus on the negative experiences far too much. You could have much more success in your life than failure and it may not seem like it internally because we focus on our failures much more.
  - Just understanding this human tendency can change how you see yourself.
Research has shown that people who have high self-awareness (me) also have high empathy.
- The part of the brain that controls both is the insula.
- The insula regulates the ability to experience and recognize bodily sensations.
  - Ex. People with active insulae can become aware of their own heartbeat
- Empathy increases with perceived similarity. When we perceive someone to be similar to us, we empathize with them more.
When it doesn’t have enough information, the brain assumes things and makes things up to fill the gaps and complete the story.
- It also automatically believes these assumptions, and the assumptions are usually very negative.
- Daniel Kanehman discusses this in Thinking Fast and Slow.
  - System 1 just assumes things when not enough information is present.
Mantra to live by: Love them. Understand them. Forgive them. Grow with them.

Mack's Book Notes

Mack's Book Notes

Mack's Book Notes