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 [1] an "Enlightenment engineer" -- has seen emotional intelligence exercises transform an employee’s work and life. As Google’s resident “Jolly Good Fellow[2] ,” 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[3] , 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)"[4] . 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[5] 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 five ways that you can cultivate emotional intelligence -- and revolutionize your work, relationships and happiness.


Meditate.


meditation office


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[6] that mindfulness contributes to emotional well-being, in addition to improving memory and attention[7] . A 2013 University of Utah study[8] 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[9] also found that mindfulness meditation could improve an individual's control over brain processing of pain and emotions.


Cultivate compassion.


compassion


Meditation is also the primary vehicle for cultivating compassion: A recent Harvard University study [10] 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[11] . The researchers theorized that empathy may be something one can cultivated by "exercising" the brain through loving-kindness meditation.


Tan explains that mindfulness training helps to boost self-compassion first and foremost, which then expands to compassion for others. "[After the program], people say, 'I see myself with kindness.'"


But the benefits of cultivating compassion go beyond greater kindness towards oneself and others: In addition to improving happiness, compassion can also boost a business's creative output and bottom line, according to Tan -- a sentiment that LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, a leading proponent of compassionate management[12] , would agree with.


"The one thing [that all companies should be doing] is promoting the awareness that compassion can and will be good for success and profits," says Tan.


Practice mindful observance of the mind and body.


deep breathing


Mindful awareness of what's going on in the mind and body -- thoughts, feelings, emotions, physical sensations and disease -- is an important step in cultivating inner joy, says Tan.


"If you start from mindfulness, the first thing you get is inner peace," Tan explains. "Then you add on other practices like observing wellness in the body, you also get inner joy. Take that inner joy and add on other practices, and you will get kindness and compassion."


Make mindfulness a habit.


habit change


You may not think of inner peace as something that you can develop through creating good habits, but Tan explains that happiness is a habit that you can create through a daily mindfulness practice.


"To create sustainable compassion, you have to be strong in inner joy,” says Tan. “Inner joy comes from inner peace -- otherwise it's not sustainable. And inner peace is highly trainable."


The way that inner peace is trained is through regular meditation -- which isn't strictly limited to sitting quietly in lotus position. A meditation habit can be a quiet daily walk around your block, a yoga practice, or any of these non-om forms of meditation[13] . The important thing is that you create a habit by doing it regularly and turn mindfulness into a part of your daily life.


"Habits are highly trainable," explains Tan. "And habits become character."


chade meng tan



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  • Be curious.


    Being curious is the best way to become more insightful, says Klein, and a lack of insight often comes from being in a passive and disinterested state of mind. "Curiosity is another engine of insight," says Klein. "People who get insights see something that's a little bit off, and instead of ignoring it, they're curious about it. Curiosity keeps our mind engaged to work out the implications."




  • Let your mind wander.


    A <a href="http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2012/04/the-benefits-of-daydreaming/" target="_blank">2012 psychological study</a> found that daydreaming -- passive though it may seem -- actually involves a very active brain state, which is why the wandering mind can sometimes stumble upon brilliant insights and sudden connections. The researchers credit this phenomenon to the fact that daydreaming correlates with our ability to recall information in the face of distractions. Recent <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201102/why-daydreamers-are-more-creative" target="_blank">neuroscience research</a> has also found that daydreaming involves the same brain processes involved in imagination and creativity. "I worry about people who spend all their empty time when they're not in conversations listening to music or podcasts or things like that, and not leaving any space to just daydream," says Klein.




  • Pay attention to coincidences.


    "Be more alert to anomalies," Klein says, "rather than quickly explaining them away and staying in your comfort zone." We tend to ignore coincidences or not think much of them, because they're often meaningless, says Klein. But looking for coincidences is a powerful way to make surprising connections. "There's a belief that correlation doesn't imply causality, which is true. People see all sorts of correlations in coincides that turn out to be spurious, so they get a bad reputation," Klein says. "But in my work I find that a lot of insights are fed by people spotting coincidences and making assumptions, and instead of just saying 'It must be true,' doing to follow-up work to find out if it's true."




  • Look closely at contradictions.


    Insights can occur when we encounter ideas that don't make sense to us. Questioning contradictions is another path to epiphanies. Whereas curiosity makes us wonder, contradiction causes us to doubt -- and it can be another powerful way to gain insights. "Our tendency when we hit a contradiction that involves things we believe we understand well is to say, 'Well, that must an anomaly.' We have a marvelous set of techniques for explaining away inconvenient facts," says Klein. "The contradiction only leads to an insight when people take it seriously enough to explore it a bit."




  • Act on your insights.


    Daydreaming isn’t the only state of mind that can lead to insights. "I've found a number of examples where people were under tremendous pressure and came up with marvelous insights," says Klein. "We should embrace urgency." This urgency forces people to look at things they'd otherwise ignore (what Klein refers to as "creative desperation"), and when they gain an insight, encourages them to act on it right away. This is frequently how chess grand masters try an unusual move that ends up being successful and winning the game for them. "The problem with too many organizations is that they don't feel any pressure to act on the insights they've had," says Klein. "They act like they have all the time in the world and then they end up going out of business."