2012, Chade-Meng Tan
Made at Google. This book is full of “lists” of concepts going together. Also, many exercise, that is worthless writing down here. This summary is relatively rough. It is more to know what is in the book or a kind of index to stuff in which you might be interested in.
The book is easy to read, enough illustration, examples, not too much endless stories, so the good trade-off for beginners.
3 steps:
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters to what lies within us., Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions. 1
These are learned abilities, not innate. There are five categories of EI:
Compare to IQ, it is considered as a form of intelligence as you would understand how to behave, why, how to adapt…
What distinguish average from star performers:
Among them, there are only to IQ related skills (Analytics and conceptual thinking)
Communication and trust. Create a positive work environment, where you feel like in your family. Someone who lead is someone who is appreciated for many reason:
These traits are observed among the best military leaders, where we would imagine barking leaders
The way EI is taught in this book focus about learning how to feel people (and ourselves), and not to fake our behavior to look nicer in the apparencies. When understanding people, behavior automatically changes. EI is trainable, as IQ. Neuroplasticity plus motivation are the keys.
Stable, strong and perceptive attention that enable clamness and clarity are keys to emotional intelligence. If you cannot pay attention to yourself and others, you won’t go far.
This is also called mindfulness.
After mind, there is body. For two reasons:
The better we are aware, the better we can manage them.
The exercise is to pay a consistent attention to the breath. Keep thinking to it, pay attention to the rhythm, the muscles, the temperature of incoming and outgoing air.
This is the difference between doing and being. Look at anything in life, are you doing your job or being someone improving stuff ? Are you doing the cooking or being preparing healthy food to be stronger tommorow ? There is a difference in the intention, where when you do, you are passive, following a command. When you are, you are part of the process, you know why you are doing it, and you are fully implied with. This is the easier way
By non-doing, all doing becomes possible. —Lao Zi
Meditation is just mental training. Mindfulness develop attention and meta-attention (attention of attention, self monitoring).
When both are developed, mind becomes focused and stable while relaxed. There is no stress while paying attention to signals. When calm and clear, the happiness emerges spontaneously, as if it was the default state of the mind.
Without the sweating.
There is an interesting picture in the book, describing the process when breathing.
The first step is intention. Keeping in mind that you want to do it. Even if you have no time for it, at some point this intention would be printed in your mind, and you will start one day.
After, practice the breathing method. There are other possibility, watching people moving, but breathing is the simplest as you can do it alone anywhere. There is no special position: sitting, standing, eyes opened or closed, doesn’t really matter, as long as you are relaxed and focussed on the exercise. If you need to scratch your face, focus on the movement: think first to the intention of itching, focus on raising you arm, moving the finger, the sensation in the face.
There are some study about the impact of meditation over global health:
Mindfulness, I declare, is useful everywhere. —Buddha
Mindfulness because very useful when you are able to bring that mind on demand.
Normally, it is easy to incorporate mindfulness in other areas of the life. The way to quickly improve is to in some of your daily life, to take a few minutes to think to what you are doing:
You can also synchronize breathing with walking movements.
You can also do that towards people, when listening paying full attention on what they are saying, and not on your thougths. Listen without interruption, acknoledge that you are listenning. Being listen is very appreciated.
Three pilars:
We cannot take benefits of these methods just by learning theoreticaly how to do them. We need to practice.
It is often easy to do the exercises for one week. After, we are less commited to do it. You may like the idea of meditation, but not the practice of meditation.
Some ideas:
Do not push too hard. Have expectations before meditation, but not during meditation.
Focused attention is a strong focus toward an object / person, and undisturbable.
Open attention is an attention towards new object… TODO
Mindfulness develop the two at the same time.
You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it. —Albert Einstein
self-awareness: knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions2
Emotional competences:
On 360 degree self assessments, average performers tends to overestimate their strengths will star performers rarely do.3
Self-confidence is not ego. It is about honesty and humility.
Self-awareness … is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even in the midst of turbulent emotions.
Scan:
Take the time to analyze each part.
Self discovery by writing to yourself.
You are not trying to communicate with someone, but to let your thoughts onto papers, so you can remember what was your state of mind. It helps you to think better about them. Take three minutes to write down “how am I feeling right now ?” “My wishes”, “What hurts me”, “Other are”, …. Focus on writing, do not stop until you have written all you wanted to write.
According to studies, writing things down helps to feel better on the long term. 4
Write about:
Write about:
Take also the time to read what you wrote before.
Emotions are not me
Emotion is a feeling, not what you are. Existential vs experiential.
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. —Leonardo da Vinci
From compulsion to choice.
Self-regulation is far more than self control:
Everyone wishes to have these competences. But we don’t master all.
This is not denying. If you have a cancer and one month left to live, sure it is not easy, but denying it won’t help.
Suffering and pain are different. 90% of suffering is link to:
These two concept are neither sensation nor perception.
How to experience pain VS suffering ? Mindfulness helps to separated both.
Second facet is to experience pleasure without aftertaste, as pleasure does not last forever.
Wehn shifting to fear and anxiety, the best remedy is to address the problems.
We must control ourselves not to burst into a dragon for a small displeasant remark. Contoling the triggers.
Retrospective training:
First instinct with unpleasant emotions is aversion Taming it allows to tame the others like rumination. This improve self confidence.
There are three types of happiness: 5
Three practices for motivation:
A complementary vision
We often don’t wake up the morning saying “my purpose in life is xxx so lets start our day”. However, knowing them may help to make the good choices consciousously.
Two questions to answer:
It is easier to achieve a goal where we can visualize the outcome and the steps.
Try the writting exercise thinking about the future. If you accomplish everything you would like to do, you overperform your expectation, what would be your life in x years ? If you succeed:
Next is to talk about your ideal future, for two reasons:
Ability to pass through obstacles.
Three training levels:
Success is 99 percent failures
Problem is that we pay more attention to negative feelings, so life is hard !
Optimism and Pessimism have an impact on success. Pessimist people would say “I am just realistic”. Maybe. But optimist people get a better success rate in hiring, because they naturally feel and reflect more confidence.
We need to unlearn pessimism. We have to pay more attention on successes and less on failures. We have to learn from failure, to check what was wrong. But we must not judge our capabilities to success later.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood. —Stephen R. Covey
Compassion = suffering together.
People with high empathy are better at recognizing feelings.
People often confuse empathy with agreeing and psychologizing. Empathy is about understanding why the person is feeling like that.
So when agreeing, the listener fully agree, and psychologizing fully disagree. Empathy is just receiving the feeling of the other with kindness. This is not judgment, just understanding the other person’s state.
The book takes the example of closing companies. Suppose the company will shut down the plant in two years.
In the first case, people would say that it was a great place to work, while in the second case not. Because in the first case, the company understood that loosing a job is a big life issue, and helping people to find a new one is beneficial.
“I feel what you feel if you are similar to me”. Visual remapping of touch.
Five ways a team becomes disfunctional:
People love to be understood, deeply. Political awareness: been aware of emotion inside an organisation and power relationships.
People can be in conflict while being 100% correct and 100% reasonable if they don’t have the same targets and values.
You can make more friends in two months by becoming really interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Which is just another way of saying that the way to make a friend is to be one. Dale Carnegie
Warm managers do better than those that act like a jerk 6
Three essential skills:
Necessary for obtaining the most effective form of leadership.
Compassion: sense of concern for the suffering of others and aspiration to see that suffering relieved.
In three components:
Related book: “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and others don’t”. Great leaders have two conflictual qualities: ambition and humility
Understand the social brain. Minimize danger while maximize reward. Reward effect is much smaller than threat effects. So you must more rewards than threats to be balanced.
SCARF model: Primary rewards / threats
How to influence people ?
Difficult conversation are hard to have, but important. We often try to avoid them.
We often judge ourselves by the intention, and the others by their impact.
Behind content and emotions in every difficult conversation, there are issues of identity.
Identity issues are hidden, but usually dominate.
To prepare a difficult conversation, the best way to train is to talk with other. You will know what they think (third party), they will give you arguments, information you don’t know and that will help you to understand your “adversary”. Otherwise, you can write down to think clearly.
To reach peace, teach peace, —Pope John Paul II
Happiness is contagious. Happy people tends to impact positively the others around.
The author of the book present his own personal goal: to develop the practice of meditation, and make it more scientific.
This book is a kind of tutorial to meditation, knowing better ourselves. In the book, there are many parts skipped in this summary, full of practical exercises.
It correctly documented, the set of resources is not very large, but that’s enough to open up all topics that have been aborded.
Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, “Emotional Intelligence,” Imagination, Cognition, and Personality 9, no. 3 (1990): 185–211 ↩
Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence ↩
Cherniss and Goleman, The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace. ↩
“Know Thyself,” Very Short List (March 2, 2009), http://siybook.com/a/knowthyself. ↩
Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Business Plus, 2010). ↩
James Kouzes and Barry Posner, Encouraging the Heart: A Leader’s Guide to Rewarding and Recognizing Others (Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 2003). ↩
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