and I'm not the Dalai Lama. I was third choice of Meng's to actually introduce him today.

[laughter] But I'm incredibly honored to be here as a friend of Meng. I'm just a huge

fan of him and his work. In preparation for being here today, I decided to google "Meng"

and "search inside yourself". The first thing that came up was "Mengstupiditis", which I

didn't know that you had this website, Meng. But he has a website called Mengstupiditis.

There's actually a little point in that website where he says -- there's a picture of him

-- and it just says, "I'm just a random generic guy." There's a picture of him and Barack

Obama. So I don't -- [laughter] I actually think, although it doesn't say it on his website,

I think the symptom of Mengstupiditis is excessive need for getting your photo taken with famous

people. I don't know about you, but I think that's one of Meng's more endearing qualities.

I think he should have named the book "How To Be A Jolly Good Fellow." But what I love

about Meng more than anything is his combination of humility and humor. In looking at that

website, the Mengstupiditis website, there was a wonderful little poem that he wrote

last month called "The Not Difficult Path". I'm going to read it to you very quickly,

it's very short, and then we'll have him up here. Meng says, "With calm mind, I see my

true nature. With jolliness, I open Dharma doors. With open heart, I welcome my Buddha.

And with non-doing, I enlighten the world." Meng, come please, enlighten us. Thank you.

[applause]

>>Chade-Meng Tan: Thank you. Thank you. I like to stand behind the podium so you can

see less of me. It's always an improvement when you see less of me.

[laughs] So welcome. [inaudible]. Thank you, Chip. Chip is a wonderful, beautiful human

being. It's always nice to be introduced by you. Thank you.

I want to start by telling you a famous Zen parable. It's a parable of the guy on the

horse. So some guy was riding on a horse, and he was passing by some guy walking on

the street, or standing on the street. The guy standing on the street asks the guy on

the horse, "So, rider, where are you going?" And the guy on the horse says, "I don't know,

why are you asking me? You should be asking the horse. How do I know?" So this is a parable

about our emotional lives. The horse signifies our emotion, or emotional life. Usually, we

allow a horse to take us where the horse wants to take us. We don't think we have any control.

But in fact, I want to tell you today that we do have control. To this, the book in general

and to this talk is about mastery. But first, I think even beyond allowing the

horse to take you where he wants, I think most of the time we analyze this. We're like,

"The horse is dragging us." And especially if we're experiencing emotions like fear,

nervousness. For example, you're speaking in front of a crowd of a hundred people, and

you're going on YouTube. For example, that could be nerve wracking, right? I don't know,

I'm just creating the example. Or anger, and things like that. Then you feel like, "I have

no control. I have lost control." You feel like you're being dragged along. Search Inside

Yourself is the idea that you can improve on that.

The first level of improvement is going from that to this.

[laughter] Looking cool.

[more laughter] And smoking a Marlboro. But no, I'm just kidding.

But looking cool. So you're on the horse, and you don't just look cool. You get to at

least have influence on where you want the horse to go. To a certain degree, you get

to control the horse. The horse still has his own mind, in the same way our emotional

processes have a quote-on-quote "own mind". But you get to control it, guide it where

it wants to go. However, it gets even better. You can go from this skillfulness into this

mastery, like you stand on a horse and so on. I wish the Geshes were here. I think they

would appreciate this. So this is emotional mastery. The question then is, "What does

emotional mastery look like in the context of work?" I think that emotional mastery manifests

itself in the type of statement we make about ourselves in relation to our emotional skills

and success. Oh, the Geshes are here. Okay, I'll just continue

talking. [laughs] [pause]

For example, the example of those statements. We tell ourselves, "If I have strong self-awareness,

I'll be so successful. If I can remain calm and confident in crisis, I'll be so successful.

If I can create optimism and resilience, I'll be so successful. And if I can understand

people better, then I can instinctively like people, and it can help people like me. I'll

be so successful." So all these qualities that I've talked about: confidence, awareness,

optimism, and so on, they come under the umbrella of emotional intelligence, which is defined

as this: the ability to monitor one's or the others' feeling to discriminate among them.

And, most importantly, to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions. This

is emotional intelligence. The good news. The good news is that these

qualities are skills. And like all other skills, these skills are trainable. Emotional skills

are trainable. Emotional intelligence is trainable. That's the good news. However, there's better

news. The other thing with me, there's no bad news. There's good news and better news.

This is why people like me, I mean, in addition to my good looks. [laughter] The better news

is that we've found running Search Inside Yourself that those skills are trainable to

a meaningful degree in as little as seven weeks. Seven weeks you can train to a large

degree of those skills. This is what Search Inside Yourself is about. Search Inside Yourself

is an EI, or emotional intelligence, curriculum for adults. A cartoon to show what that looks

like. [pause]

The question then is, "How do you --" hello, welcome. [pause] It looks like I'm being nice

and waiting for guests to sit, but I'm just taking a break, drinking my water. People

think, "Meng is so nice" but no. [laughter] Just kidding, just kidding.

How do you learn emotional intelligence? It turns out that you cannot learn emotional--

it's just by reading the book. You can learn about EI, but you cannot learn EI. In the

same way, there's an analogy. The analogy is the gym. Exercise, working out. You can

learn about getting fit, but the only way to get fit is to do it, is exercising. So

therefore, to acquire emotional skills requires training, just like to acquire muscles requires

training. The question then is, "What are we training?" We are training the brain. We

can do that because of something called neuroplasticity, which is the discovery that what you do, what

you think, and what you pay attention to changes the structure and functions of our brains,

even for adults. Even for engineers. [laughter] The most important part is attention. What

you pay attention to changes the structure of the brain. That is how we can acquire emotional

and mental skills, by training our brain with our attention, which I'll talk about soon.

Which leads us to another question -- oh, by the way, and this is a very important insight.

The insight that even adults and even engineers can train their brains. Which leads us again

to the next question, which is, "How do you train emotional intelligence?" It turns out;

all you need is three easy steps. Step 1 is attention training, Step 2 is self-knowledge

and self-mastery, and Step 3 is to create mental habits. Now I will talk about this

in some detail. By the way, the cartoons you see on the slides

are the cartoons in the book. So the book has cartoons. I know, I was writing -- I told

myself, "If I'm writing a serious book about emotional intelligence and mindfulness, it

has to have cartoons. Whoever heard of a serious book without cartoons?" This is why I did

that. Anyway. [laughs] The first step is this, is

training attention, which is counterintuitive. We talk about attention. You come to a class

that calls itself an emotional intelligence class. What has attention got to do with emotional

intelligence? It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. So here is where it makes sense:

the attention we're talking about is to basically create a quality of mind which is this, which

allows you to be calm and clear, at the same time, on demand. The idea is to develop your

mind, develop your attention to such a degree that whatever situation you're in, whether

you're just hanging out, speaking in front of the public, or under stress, customers

shouting at you, deadlines, bosses are looking at you, and you can drop into the state where

you mind is calm and clear, and at the same time, on demand. And that, my friends, that

is the foundation of emotional intelligence. Again, the good news is this is highly trainable.

Again, this leads to a question. Yeah, it's highly trainable, but how do you do this,

how do you train this quality of mind? The answer is very simple. It's embarrassingly

simple. It is a true technique called mindfulness.

[inaudible]You're going to laugh at me because it's so embarrassingly simple is this: mindfulness,

[pause] [laughter] mindfulness is paying attention, but not just

paying attention. Paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.

Thus said, that is mindfulness. It's so embarrassingly simple that we can even do it in a couple

of seconds. So I'm going to invite everybody to do a ten second exercise. It's very, very

simple. All you have to do is to bring a gentle attention to your breath, the process of breathing,

whatever it means to you, and then if attention wanders away, just bring it back very gently.

Thus said, we're just going to do ten seconds, which is one breath. Easy to do, right? Even

an engineer can do that. But because I'm an engineer, I'm going to time ten seconds.

[laughs] [laughter]

Okay. So, ten seconds, attention to the breath, beginning now. Very gentle attention to the

process of breathing. If attention wanders away, just bring it back. That is all. And

that was ten seconds. Easy. So easy anybody can do it. So that's the embarrassing part.

The hard part is doing this-- being able to deepen the mind of mindfulness, like calm

and clear. Deepen it and bring your on demand, and stay in it for as long as you want. So

that's the hard part. The easy part is, you know what it is, you can bring it about in

ten seconds in a semi-controlled environment, where there's nobody fighting each other or

something. It's easy. You might ask the question, which is a valid question, except it's what

I call a WTF question, which is: "It sounds so embarrassingly easy, what good can it possibly

do?" You bring attention to it -- what good can it possibly do for you? It turns out it

does wonders. Here's the analogy, the physical exercise analogy: what you just did is the

equivalent of me telling you, giving you a dumbbell and saying, "Do this once." It sounds

stupid, right? You take a heavy object, you lift it, you put it down. What can that possibly

do for me? It turns out that if you can do this enough, you develop strength. Once you

develop strength, you realize that you can do things that you can never imagine before

you were strong. A simple thing like this, a simple practice, done repeatedly, over,

so practice, over a long stretch of time, changes you. That is the power of mindfulness.

So what does it do? How does it change you? A couple of things.

[pause] The first change you realize if you practice

a lot of mindfulness, like I said, very simple techniques, giving attention to breath. The

first effect you find the perception changes. Specifically, the quality of perception changes.

You see things in more clarity, especially, specifically, the process of emotion, the

process of thought. You can see in clarity. But I talk about it a bit more detailed.

The second thing it does-- so it sharpens the mind, increases the quality of attention,

and it calms the mind. This practice, done often enough, once again mastery of it, in

the middle of stress, you can just bring attention to the breath and your mind is calm. That

easily. If people think, "Wow, nothing can bother you." It's not true. Things bother

you, but you calm yourself on demand. So what's the proof? There's a study done--

this is one of the earliest fMRI studies done on highly achieved, highly enlightened monks,

like the monks we have in the audience today. People with between 10 and 50,000 hours of

meditation training. This involves the part of the brain called the amygdala, which is

a very special part of the brain. The amygdala, it has to do with emotion. It's especially

active when you perceive a threat. It doesn't have to be real. You just have to perceive

it. Examples of perception of threat. One example is if you see a saber-tooth tiger

running at you. Now that's perception of threat. Another perception of threat is when the boss

comes to you and says, "Meng, we need to talk." [laughter] [pants]

Oh, crap! You know? That's perception of threat. The amygdala likes that. An interesting thing

about the amygdala is that it has a very privileged position in the brain, which is that when

it activates, when it perceives a threat, it takes over. The way it takes over is that

it shuts down the executive part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, over here. You almost,

not literally, yeah, you almost literally stop thinking. You just react. Then, gradually,

this "Oh my God, I don't believe I just said that to the boss! I just told the boss to

go do whatever." [laughter] And then we tell ourselves, "I wasn't thinking." Well, it turns

out neurologically, you were not thinking, like for real, literally.

That mechanism has been around for millions of years. It's there for a good reason: it

helps us survive. If you see a saber-tooth tiger running at you, you don't want to think,

"Oh, is that dangerous? Should I google this?" [laughter]

Wait a minute, Google hasn't been invented. This sounds like a problem. You don't want

to go to this. It's just a "Oh, crap. Run!" So that's how the mechanism works. Unfortunately,

it has slight negative consequences that we have today. Because if the amygdala triggers

all the time, it's not very healthy. It causes problems. Especially if you're shouting at

the boss. Career-limiting. [laughter]

However, the question then is, "Is it possible to down regulate something as primitive as

the amygdala?" Well, of course not. It sounds stupid. It turns out the answer is yes. Accomplished