search inside yourself book review

Search Inside Yourself

• Self-awareness: your understanding of yourself
• Self-regulation: your ability to control yourself, especially your impulses and emotions
• Motivation: your ability to self-start and propel yourself towards your goals
• Empathy: your sensitivity to others’ feelings and needs
• Social skills: your ability to identify with and influence others

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Mar 27, 2021

Book review - search inside yourself by chade-meng tan.

 Yet another example of how the Universe brings in the right information at the right time. Once I started trusting this powerful principle, I'm just amazed at the sheer number of coincidences and serendipitous events.

"Our attention is the most valuable gift we can give to others. When we give our full attention to somebody, for that moment, the only thing in the world we care about is that person, nothing else matters because nothing else is strong within our field of consciousness"

"Grasping is when the mind desperately holds onto something and refuses to let it go. Aversion is when the mind desperately keeps something away and refuses to let it come"

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Book "Search Inside Yourself" - review and summary

Aug 27, 2019

I finished reading “Search Inside Yourself” by Chade-Meng Tan recently. This was an amazing book. I enjoyed it and learned a lot. I can call it life-changing. Here is my review and summary.

The book is very well written and organized. Overall it touches many tricky topics (like emotional intelligence, empathy, mindfulness). Since the author is an engineer from Google, they manage to explain everything very well (perhaps even a bit from technical perspective). For each topic the book always considers practical aspects and there is always a link to the real life applications (team building, leadership). This also felt like a deep dive into topics from “The science of wellbeing” course, which I did before and here is my summary . The intersection is large, but the book goes much deeper and also gives more actionable advice on what to do.

Score: 5/5 (amazing life-changing book, everyone should read it after taking “The science of wellbeing” course)

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is one of the best predictors of success at work and fulfillment in life.

Salovey-Mayer definition of EI - ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.

Goleman’s domains of EI:

• self-awareness
• self-regulation
• social skills

EI helps to perform better at work, makes people better leaders, creates conditions for our own sustainable happiness.

To train EI, we train attention.

Frankl: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lives our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”

Basal ganglia ( wiki ) stores our wisdom, but it has no connectivity to verbal cortex. Thus, instead of words, it tells us what it knows in feelings (a gut feeling).

Easy way to experience mindfulness - bring your attention to your breathing gently for 2 minutes. Every time your attention wanders, just bring it back to breathing.

Easier way - just seat without an agenda for 2 min. You can switch between easy and easier ways at any time.

The exercise can be rephrased as “breathing as if you life depends on it” (Kabat-Zinn).

“Expensive food meditation” - eating food as if it is very expensive and rare.

Scientific definition of meditation (by Brefczynski-Lewis) - a family of mental training practices that are designed to familiarize the practitioner with specific types of mental processes.

Mindfulness meditation trains EI via attention (taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form) and meta-attention (ability to know that your attention wandered away). Meta-attention is the secret for concentration.

Happiness is the default state of the mind.

Meditation is exercise for the mind to gain more mental abilities. In both meditation and exercise growth comes from overcoming resistance. Every time we bring a wandering attention back, we are giving our muscles of attention an opportunity for growth.

“Grandmother mind”: you are perfect and grandmother loves you as you are.

The posture should help to be alert and relaxed.

Four step plan for distractions:

• Acknowledge
• Experience without judging or reacting
• If you need to react, continue maintaining mindfulness

If you have to react during a meditation (e.g. scratch your leg) - try to take 5 breadths before reacting - to create space between stimulus and reaction. This gives more control in life.

Meditation is about inquiry like science. Attention is a tool for developing insights into the mind.

Meditation has been studied by Davidson and Kabat-Zinn.

Benefits of meditation

After eight weeks of meditation subjects were measurably happier (measured in brains) and showed an increase in developing immunity.

3 months of training reduce attention blink (Slagter, Lutz, Davidson) - i.e. the shortest time between two acts of selective attention ( wiki ).

Lutz has showed that meditation has effect at rest.

Kabat-Zinn - mindfulness accelerates psoriasis healing.

Lazar - meditation leads to thicker cortex in attention and sensory processing areas.

Meditation helps to pay attention better, e.g. in a class. It is important to integrate mindfulness in your everyday life. We take stuff for granted (no pain, three meals, being able to walk). With mindfulness these become a source of joy, because we no longer take them for granted. Experiences get better too, because our full attention is there. In mindfulness, neutral experiences tend to become pleasant, pleasant experiences tend to become even more pleasant (there is no downside).

One can accelerate mindfulness generalization by bringing it to activity. Every time attention wanders, gently bring it back to the task. I.e. like sitting meditation, but the object is the task at hand rather than the breath.

Walking meditation

The best formal practice is walking meditation. When walking - bring full moment-to-moment attention to every moment and sensation in the body and every time it wanders away, just gently bring it back.

Walking meditation:

• stand still
• experience pressure on the feet
• take a step forward
• plant your feet mindfully
• take a moment to experience
• do it with the other foot

You can repeat silently “lifting, lifting, lifting”, “moving, moving, moving”, “standing, standing, standing”. After some step you can turn “turning, turning, turning”. You can synchronize with breathing:

• lifting foot - breathe in
• moving out and planting - breathe out.

You don’t have to walk slowly, thus, you can do it every time you walk. I do this on my way to restroom and this helps me to be creative.

Other practice - directed mindfulness - like before but object of meditation is another person.

Formal mindful listening

Take 2 people. One has 3 minute monologue (silence is allowed), second can only acknowledge. Then switch. Possible topics:

• feeling right now
• something that happened today
• anything else

Informal practice - when listening in everyday life, give your full attention. If your mind wanders, gently bring it back to other person talking. Don’t lead the conversation, just acknowledge and don’t over acknowledge.

Our attention is the most valuable gift we can give to others. Give people you care about a few minutes of your attention every day. They will bloom like flowers.

Mindful conversation:

• Mindful listening
• Looping - say what you heard, other person can give more feedback
• Dipping - self directed mindfulness during listening - acknowledging internal chatter and feelings.

To practise:

• 4 minute monologue
• 6 minute looping & dipping.

One can practise this informally - “left me repeat how I understand this. Let me know if I am correct.”

Mindfulness is like an exercising. It is not sufficient to just understand the topic. You can only benefit from it with practice.

To sustain:

• Find a buddy
• Do less than you can (so that it does not become a chore)
• One mindful breath a day

Focused attention - focus on a chosen object. Open attention - willing to meet any object that arrives to the mind or the senses.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness - “knowing one’s internal states, preference, resources and intuitions” (Goleman’s definition).

It engages neo-cortex (the thinking brain) in the processing of emotion. The moment you can see an emotion, you are no longer fully engulfed in it.

Competencies of self awareness:

• emotional - recognizing your emotions and the effects
• accurate - knowing your strengths and limits
• self confidence - a strong sense of one’s self worth and capabilities.

Self awareness is mindfulness.

Formal practice - body scan - bring moment-to-moment non-judging attention to different parts of your body. This helps to fall asleep.

Journaling - self-discovery by writing to yourself. You are trying to let your thoughts flow onto paper, so you can see what comes up.

For 3 minutes, write “What I am feeling now is”. Try not to think, just write. It doesn’t matter how closely you follow the prompt, just let all your thoughts flow onto the paper. If you run out, just write “I have nothing to write”. Remember - you write this to yourself, you won’t have to show this to anyone.

Spera et all: people writing about their feelings (20 min / day for 5 days) found a job much sooner. Very Short List (VSL): Science -> students writing about experiences for 15 min a day were healthier, had higher grader, better mood and wellbeing.

Four minutes is enough.

• What I am feeling now is
• I am aware that
• What motivates me is
• I am inspired by
• Today I aspire to
• What hurts me is
• I made a happy mistake

Formal journaling:

• (Priming) 2 minutes thinking about one or more instances in which you responded positively to a challenging situation and the outcome was satisfying. If considering more than one instance - think about connections or patterns.
• 30 seconds pause
• Things that give me pleasure are …
• My strengths are …
• Priming as above, but for responding negatively.
• Things that annoy me are …
• My weaknesses …
• Read what you wrote.

Handling emotions

We are not our emotions.

They are what you feel, not who you are. Emotions go from “I am” to “I feel” with mindfulness practice. With more practice you begin to see them as psychological phenomena. We are like sky and thoughts and emotions are clouds. They come and go. This allows one to have mastery over their emotions and move them from compulsion to choice.

Emotions are like a horse. They can drive us without us knowing where. We can tame and guide this horse. We need to understand it first (self awareness).

Self regulation:

• Self control - keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check
• Trustworthiness - maintaining standards of honesty and integrity
• Consciousness - taking responsibility for personal performance
• Adaptability - flexibility in handling change
• Innovation - being comfortable with novel ideas, approaches and info.

Commonality for all of them - choice. We need to move from compulsion to choice to enable all of these.

Self regulation is not about avoiding emotions and not about denying or repressing true feelings. They are valuable info. It is not about never having certain emotions. It is about becoming skillful with them. It is impossible to stop a thought or emotion from arising. But we have the power to let it go. The trained mind can do it in the moment it arises.

Letting go.

Pain and suffering are different. The key is to let go of grasping (mind holds onto something) and aversion (mind keeps something away). They account for huge percentage of suffering we experience. They are separate from sensation and perception, but arise so close together that we don’t see the difference.

Once you can distinguish them, you have an opportunity to experience pain without suffering. The theory is that aversion (not pain) causes the suffering. Another benefit is experiencing pleasure without aftertaste of unsatisfactoriness. Our clinging to experiences causes suffering.

Dealing with distress

• Know when you are not in pain. Be aware when you are not in pain. This makes us happier. When we are in pain we say “with no pain I will be so much happier”, but then we forget. The pain is not constant. Appreciating low levels of pain (even temporary, especially emotional) helps to start the recovery.
• Do not feel bad about feeling bad. “Meta distress” - distress about experiencing distress. This is an act of our ego (reflection of its image of itself). The solution is to let go of ego.
• Do not feed the monsters. Anger needs repeating of angry stories. If you don’t repeat them - anger may go away.
• Start every thought with kindness and humor.

Neural model of emotion regulation: mindfulness increases bandwidth between emotion and regulation parts of the brain, so that the can communicate more clearly.

To deal with triggers - identify when you are triggered (e.g. fight-or-flight response). Triggers are based on insecurities.

Practice to handle triggers (or negative distressing emotions) “Siberian North Railroad”:

Do not react for one moment aka “Sacred pause”. This enables all other steps.

When reflecting:

• everybody wants to be happy
• this person thinks that acting this way will make them happy in some way

Imagine the kindest most positive response.

You can practise reflection and response step retroactively - after the triggering event is over. This can be generalized:

• Attention deployment (count to 10 or take deep breath or think of something else)
• see positives
• kindness and compassion
• meshing (let emotion go through your body)
• humor and curiosity One needs step (2), because otherwise the situation will be there and will re-trigger the person.

Better self regulation = better recovery mechanism after failure -> more self confidence.

Ultimately, self regulation is about making friends with our emotions.

E.g. you can see panic as a boss and obey it or like an enemy and wish it to go away. Instead you could be friends and just allow it to come and go at will and treat it with kindness.

You already know your deepest values and motivations, you just need help in discovering them.

Tony Hsieh describes 3 components of happiness:

• Pleasure (chasing the next thing)
• Passion aka flow
• Higher purpose

The sustainability of each decreases. We often chase (1) thinking that it is sustainable, i.e. we spend the most effort on (1), a little on (2) and almost no on (3). Tony suggests to do the reverse.

Thus, the best way to motivate yourself is to find your own higher purpose. Then you get good at it, thus, enjoy more flow. Then gain recognition and get bonuses and mentions, i.e. (1).

Three practices for motivation:

Alignment: aligning our work with our value and higher purpose.

Create a situation in which your work is fun for you, but you get paid. Intrinsic motivators:

• Autonomy - the urge to direct our lives
• Mastery - the desire to get better and better at something that matters
• Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves.

Traditional monetary incentives work well for routine, rule-based work. For creative work then can even be counter productive.

Another way to clarify your values and higher purpose is to tell them to other people. Act of verbalizing them forces us to make them clearer and more tangible to ourselves. Another way is to journal: * my core values are … * I stand for …

Envisioning: seeing the desired future for ourselves.

It is much easier to achieve something if you can visualize yourself already achieving it. In a sense we learn from the past what to predict for the future and then live the future we expect. In other words - you have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.

Exercise: Discover my ideal future: if everything in my life, starting from today, meets or exceeds my most optimistic expectations, what will my life be in five years?

The more detailed the imagery in your mind, the better this works.

Consider in this future:

• Who are you and what are you doing?
• How do you feel?
• What do people say about you?

Spend 1 minute in silent contemplation before writing.

Variations:

• more time (hours)
• final date (10 years)
• pretend you live there and write your daily diary
• own obituary or two (current and desired)

Talk about your ideal future with others:

• The more you talk, the more real it becomes to you.
• The more likely it is to find people to help you (especially when it is something altruistic).

Resilience: the ability to overcome obstacles in our path.

Overcome obstacles. Levels:

• Inner calm. Deep inner calm always allows you to stay resilient. Mindfulness trains this.

Emotional. Success and failure are emotional experiences. When we become capable of containing emotions and able to let go of grasping and aversion, we can become emotionally resilient to success and failure.

Meditation on resilience

• Calm mind - attention to body parts.
• 4 min - failure
• 4 min - success
• Returning to calm.

Cognitive. “Success is 99 percent failure”. “Failure is the mother of success”. If you want to do something new and innovative, you often need to feel stupid as well. “You have to be confused, upset, think you are stupid. If you are not willing to do that, you can’t go outside the box”. The failure is a common experience. What distinguishes successful people is their attitude to failure and specifically how they explain their own failure to themselves. Optimist reacts to setbacks as temporary and can be overcome by effort and abilities. To learn optimism, become realistic & objective (normally we pay more attention to negative).

Fredrickson has found that it takes 3 positive experiences to overcome one negative. You life ratio can be 2 positive to 1 negative and you will feel unhappy.

• We need to be aware of out strong negative experiential bias. We pay too much attention to failures and too little to successes.
• Mindfulness leads to objectivity toward our own experiences. Bring attention to tendency to downplay success and to disproportionally strong effect of failure.
• Transformation. Take conscious note of success and accept credit for it. This creates mental habit of paying attention to success. When experiencing failure focus on realistic evidence suggesting that this setback may be temporary. If you find any evidence suggesting reasons for realistic hope, bring attention to it.

Mirror neurons - cells that fire when one performs an activity or when another person is performing an activity. When you see your loved one in pain, you share a similar affective experiences (neural foundation for compassion). Empathy works by having you physiologically mimic the other person. Empathy relies on self awareness. “Psychologizing” - dismissing the problem - not understanding it. Empathy does not mean psychologizing or agreeing. It increases with kindness and perceived similarity. To be more empathetic, we need to instinctively respond to everyone with kindness and an automatic perception of other being just like me -> we need to create mental habits.

We become what we think. Inviting a thought to arise in your mind is often enough and it will become a mental habit. E.g. wishing another person to be happy -> you get instinctive thought.

Informal practice - generate this thought every time you meet people.

Just like me & loving kindness meditation

• 2 min breath.
• Bring mind to somebody you care about.

This person has a body and a mind, just like me. This person has feelings, emotions, and thoughts, just like me. This person has, at some point in his or her life, been sad, disappointed, angry, hurt, or confused, just like me. This person has, in his or her life, experienced physical and emotional pain and suffering, just like me. This person wishes to be free from pain and suffering, just like me. This person wishes to be healthy and loved, and to have fulfilling relationships, just like me. This person wishes to be happy, just like me.

I wish for this person to have the strength, the resources, and the emotional and social support to navigate the difficulties in life. I wish for this person to be free from pain and suffering. I wish for this person to be happy. Because this person is a fellow human being, just like me. (Pause) Now, I wish for everybody I know to be happy. (Long pause)

• 1 min resting It can be used to heal relationships and deal with conflicts (dissipate anger).

Traditional Metta Bhavana (source for the loving kindness approach above):

• May I be well / happy / free from suffering
• Someone you like
• May he or she be well / happy / free from suffering
• Someone neutral
• Someone negative
• May they be well / happy / free from suffering

Empathy helps to build trust. Five dysfunctions of a team:

• Absence of trust
• Fear of conflict (no debates)
• Lack of commitment
• Avoidance of accountability
• Inattention to results

Absence of trust is the root cause of all dysfunctions. Specifically “vulnerability-based trust” - willing to expose our own vulnerabilities because we are confident that they won’t be used against us. Once you learn to establish this type of trust, you can become effective team-leader, mentor, coach. Trust has to begin with sincerity, kindness and openness. Assume that other person is good and deserves to be treated as such until proven otherwise. Assume that others make the right choice, even if we don’t understand or would have done differently ourselves.

Trust begets trust. If you assume someone is trustworthy, it is easier to build trust with them.

Three assumptions (before a meeting)

• Assume that everybody in this room is here to serve the greater good until proven otherwise.
• Given the above assumption, none of us has any hidden agenda until proven otherwise.
• We are all reasonable even when disagree until proven otherwise.

Empathic listening - like listening practice above, but for feelings. Same exercise as in mindful conversation but “What I hear you feel is”.

The authors never explain what a given skill is before doing any of the exercises in their courses. These skills come preinstalled into humans, we just need to improve it.

To improve empathetic listening, we need mindfulness, kindness, curiosity and practice.

You can practice informally. Do mindfulness meditation, then “Just like me / Loving kindness”. Start by thinking “I want this person to be happy”. Give as much feedback (or go into feelings) as possible. Give them airtime. Consider going meta in the end - “Was this conversation helpful to you?”.

Never praise falsely - it will be sniffed out and you will lose credibility. However, you still need to praise skillfully. Bad praise can undermine. Being praised for being smart is bad (“a person praise”) -> fixed mindset (success due to a fixed trait). In this framework a fail would mean personal inadequacy. “Process praise” (“You must have worked hard”) -> “growth mindset” -> creates love of learning and resilience.

Structure feedback around effort and growth rather than by labeling the person, i.e. for working hard rather than being smart.

Political awareness

Political awareness - reading organization’s emotional currents and power relationships. Generalization of empathy from an interpersonal level to an organization level.

• Rich personal network. To do this - care about people, help people and nurture relationships.
• Practice reading currents. How decisions are made, by authority or consensus. Who are the most influential in making them?
• Distinguish your own self interest, your team’s and organization’s.

Exercise (writing or speaking)

• Think of conflict or disagreement (real, with meaning for you).
• Describe the situation as if you are 100% correct and reasonable.
• Same for other person.

The purpose - see perspectives of different players. Both parties can be correct and reasonable in a conflict -> different priorities, missing info. Once you see that both parties are correct and reasonable, you will be able to understand differing perspectives objectively.

Kindness is the most important mental habit for empathy. I.e. during an interaction “this person is a human being just like me. I want him or her to be happy” should effortlessly arise.

To be liked helps in career. Leading with compassion. Compassion is the happiest state ever. The second happiest is “open awareness”. Compassion is a mental state endowed with a sense of concern for the suffering of others and aspiration to see that suffering relieved. Components:

• “I understand you”
• “I feel for you”
• “I want to help you”

Compassion creates highly effective leaders.

Compassion is about switching from “I” to “we”.

Based on “Good to Great” by Collins, company needs L5 leader to become great (from good), i.e. highly capable, great ambition (for greater good, thus, no need to inflate ego), personal humility. As a result they are highly effective and inspiring.

Compassion can be used to train L5 (necessary, but may be insufficient). We can train compassion by mental habits. Exercise:

• 2 min resting on breath.
• Visualize your goodness as white light radiating out of your body. Breathe in all your goodness in your heart. Multiply 10x in your heart. Breathe out and send goodness out to the whole world (e.g. like brilliant white light).
• 2 min pause
• Same as above, but for people you know.
• 2 min pause.
• Same for everyone in the world.
• 1 min resting on breath.

This develops

• Seeing goodness in others and self.
• Giving goodness to all.
• Confidence that you can multiply goodness.

Tonglen meditation - same as above, but breathe in suffering and pain and transform into goodness. You can start with multiplying goodness and after some time give Tonglen a try.

Influencing

We already influence others. They key is to expand this and use for good. Social brain - “minimize danger (with high weight), maximize reward (with low weight”. We respond more strongly to negative events than to positive (Fredrickson -> 3 negative : 1 positive ratio makes people more resilient and helps to achieve goals, Gottman -> 5:1 for marriage to succeed).

SCARF model - five primary domains (survival issues)

• Status - relative importance. When learning something that matters to you, you gain status (reward against your former self).
• Certainty - uncertainty takes brain resources.
• Autonomy - perception of exerting control over environment.
• Relatedness - whether another person is “friend” or “foe”.
• Fairness - people are the only animals to sacrifice their self interest due to unfairness (99 and 1 dollar example - I am given an offer where I can take 1 dollar and if I do so another person will get 99 dollars. Even though having 1 dollar is better than 0, the person is inclined not to take it due to unfairness).

Difficult conversations

Difficult conversations - the ones hard to have.

• What happened
• What emotions are involved
• What does this say about me (am I competent, good person, worthy of love)

Sort out objectively what happened, understand yours and others emotions, identify what is at stake for you. Decide whether to raise the issue. What do you want to accomplish? Solve a problem? Help? Or make someone feel bad? Sometimes the right thing is not to raise the issue. Start from objective “Third Story” (third party view). Explore their story and yours. Problem solve - invent solutions to meet concerns and interests.

Impact is not intention. We judge ourselves by intentions and others by impact (infer intentions). If someone said something and hurt us, this doesn’t mean that they wanted this.

There are issues of identity in every difficult conversation. E.g. “Am I competent?”.

Preparing for a difficult conversation - may be in writing or speaking (e.g. to a friend):

• Think of a difficult conversation (you had, will or should have had).
• Describe the three conversation from your point of view
• Then from the other person’s perspective.

In e-mails - emotional context can be miscommunicated.

Brain gets no emotional data and makes it up. It believes the result to be true. Usually the result has strong negative bias.

Practice for mindful email:

• Reflect humans on receiving end. Just like you. You may do “Just like me” meditation.
• Write email.
• Reflect that the receiver will assume negative emotions if none. Reread email from their perspective and assuming no context.
• Breath before sending. You may change your mind and don’t send.

Mantra - love them, understand them, forgive them, grow with them. Repeat silently when in difficult situation.

Inner happiness is contagious. Social interactions become more positive -> create more inner happiness. Positive feedback loop.

Search Inside Yourself

The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace)

Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn | 4.35 | 6,682 ratings and reviews

Ranked #21 in Meditation , Ranked #26 in Mindfulness — see more rankings .

Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Search Inside Yourself from the world's leading experts.

Eric Schmidt CEO/Google Recommends this book

Tony Hsieh CEO/Zappos.com Recommends this book

Chip Conley [Chip Conley recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show".] (Source)

Henry Medine This book is written by an early core member/lead engineer from Google. Chade does a fantastic job proving the reader reasons why soft skills like emotional intelligence, acceptance, and empathy matter in a work environment. The book is great for any business person who wants to establish a strong company culture that promotes longevity, employee empowerment and self confidence. Chade reveals how soft skills that typically get lost in the sea of performance metrics of work culture really do matter. This book provided me with confidence to lead with my emotional skills and I carry many of the... (Source)

Rankings by Category

Search Inside Yourself is ranked in the following categories:

• #28 in Emotional Intelligence
• #48 in Happiness
• #54 in Personal Branding
• #93 in Self-Awareness
• #98 in Wellness

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Search Inside Yourself Summary

1-Sentence-Summary: Search Inside Yourself adapts the ancient ethos of “knowing thyself” to the realities of a modern, fast-paced workplace by introducing mindfulness exercises to enhance emotional intelligence.

Favorite quote from the author:

Audio Summary

Listen to the audio of this summary with a free reading.fm account*:

These days, meditation becomes a go-to technique for all facets of personal growth. Search Inside Yourself : The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) explains how practicing mindfulness can have an enormously positive influence on your work performance and job satisfaction.

The “search” in the title, paired up with the design of the book’s cover, immediately makes you think of Google. That’s the right direction of thought: Chade-Meng Tan , the author, used to be one of the earliest Google engineers. As he explored the topic of personal growth, he ended up teaching company’s employees how to apply mindfulness to increase their well-being in the office and beyond.

Today, Search Inside Yourself is also the name of an independent leadership institute that organizes mindfulness-based trainings all around the world. 

But you don’t need to sign up for the training to explore the program. Tan decided to lay out all the basics of it in his book. Endorsed by Jon Kabat-Zinn and Daniel Goleman, who both wrote forewords to Search Inside Yourself , it stands as a credible guide on how to find success by learning to look within.

Here are 3 lessons I’ve learned about mindfulness and emotional intelligence:

• Emotional intelligence matters a great deal at work.
• Meditation is a practical way to improve emotional intelligence.
• Happiness in the workplace comes primarily from three things.

Now let’s begin the most important work there is: the one of searching inside yourself!

If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.

Lesson 1: The impact of emotional intelligence on work is tremendous.

Emotional and professional lives may seem to have little in common. But when we really understand what emotional intelligence is, the impact it has on our work becomes quite obvious.

Emotional intelligence can be defined as awareness of your own, as well as other people’s feelings – and the ability to use that awareness to guide your behaviors and thoughts. Howard Gardner, who first proposed the theory of multiple intelligences , would describe it as the fusion of the interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence.

According to Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence , it consists of five important elements:

• Self-awareness (knowledge of your internal state)
• Self-regulation (your capacity to control your mental states and behaviors)
• Motivation (being able to use emotions as fuel towards your goals)
• Empathy (the awareness of other people’s feelings)
• Social skills (your capacity to impact others)

Now that we’ve broken it down, it will be easier to understand that the most important skills at work are usually related to emotional intelligence. 

Self-awareness and self-regulation are the basics – they allow you to identify your internal state at any given moment and respond accordingly. This encompasses a wide range of issues – from knowing when to take a break, to getting your work relationships straight.

Skillfully cultivating motivation fuels productivity, while empathy and social competences help you collaborate within a team and empower you to be a better leader .

All of that sounds great. But what is the practical way to develop these aspects of emotional intelligence?

Lesson 2: Meditation improves self-awareness and how you manage your attention.

Tan sees the development of emotional intelligence as a three-step process. First, you need to master the intentional directing of your attention. This allows you to notice more thoughts and feelings and enriches self-knowledge. Finally, if you gain enough insight into your own mind, you are able to establish mental habits that benefit you – and your work – in the long run.

Mindfulness meditation can help with this because it tackles the very first step of the process: becoming the master of your attention . You can train attention like a muscle, so that, over time, it starts serving you in a much more effective way.

This also enhances self-awareness , which is the first of the Goleman’s components of emotional intelligence. The reason why self-awareness is so important is that it activates the neocortex – the new part of the brain, responsible for making rational decisions. Our behavior is then less driven by unconscious impulses and more by conscious choices.

Tan explains the practical implications of increased self-awareness by sharing a personal story of delivering a speech during the World Peace Festival in Berlin. Right before his presentation, he felt extremely nervous – so he became intentionally aware of his feelings. He reminded himself of his strengths and accomplishments that brought him to the stage in the first place. He also recognized his shortcomings, which he was able to simply let go of by reconnecting with his breath.

This shows that once we become aware of our internal state, we are no longer driven by it. Instead, we can be in charge of how we respond.

Lesson 3: There are three main sources of work-related happiness.

For many decades, employers used to think that the best ways to motivate employees were external rewards – such as pay rises or company benefits. But with a consistent observation of the modern workplace backed up by insights from motivational psychology, we can now confidently state that this is not the case.

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, has built his company around happiness . He believes that all job-related happiness comes from three main sources:

• Pleasure , which  comes from external acknowledgments of your work, such as a special mention from your boss or bonus pay. It is founded on the same mechanism as our instinctive chase for instant gratification and it is, therefore, short-lived.
• Passion or the satisfaction that comes from being fully immersed in your work – what you may call a state of flow . Compared to pleasure, passion is a much more sustainable way to enjoy your work.
• Sense of purpose comes last and is the most reliable factor for job-related happiness . Much like Dave Logan, the author of Tribal Leadership , Hsieh believes that this is the most powerful drive at work. Believing that what you do contributes to creating something bigger than yourself, often makes your job feel like an adventure.

All this goes to show that, good money and benefits or not, true happiness always comes from inside – even at work.

Search Inside Yourself Review

Search Inside Yourself is a practical guide on how to manage yourself at work – as well as how to create a better working culture of tomorrow. It is an important voice that encourages the much-needed shift in how we approach success and personal achievement. This book will help you redirect your focus from the external events and to the inner landscape of your mind.

Who would I recommend the Search Inside Yourself summary to?

The 30-year old online influencer who wants to saturate their work with meaning on a regular basis, the 52-year old executive director who needs to increase their department’s output without exploiting the employees, and any leader who’d rather care for their people than manage them.

Last Updated on August 18, 2022

Marta Brzosko

In 2019, Marta wrote 30 summaries for us as a freelance contributor. She is a facilitator, writer, and community wizard. Originally from Poland, where she attained a Master's Degree in Asian Studies, she now lives in Edinburgh, where she runs her own event agency called Contour. In her spare time, Marta loves running, camping, meditation, and dancing. You can read her summaries or reach her on LinkedIn.

*Four Minute Books participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising commissions by linking to Amazon. We also participate in other affiliate programs, such as Blinkist, MindValley, Audible, Audiobooks, Reading.FM, and others. Our referral links allow us to earn commissions (at no extra cost to you) and keep the site running. Thank you for your support.

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• Search Inside Yourself, by Chade-Meng Tan

Available from: Amazon.co.uk , UK Kindle store , Amazon.com , US Kindle Store , IndieBound .

The cover of Search Inside Yourself is a clever riff on Google’s famous multicolored logo, and this is appropriate given that the author is a long-term Google employee and that the material is based on a course developed for Google’s staff.

Meng, as he is called, is a long-term meditator. Quite how long I’m not sure, but he refers to meditating before he joined Google (which was in 1999). Google’s workers are allowed to spend 20% of their time on personal projects, and so Meng and some of his colleagues spent that time developing a personal-development course which had meditation and mindfulness at its core.The course was jokingly called Search Inside Yourself, and the name stuck. This book is the result. SIY (the course) has been taught at Google since 2007, and has been taken by hundreds of people.

• “Fearless at Work” by Michael Carroll
• Mindfulness at work can reduce retaliation after unfair treatment
• How corporates co-opted the art of mindfulness to make us bear the unbearable
• Google seeks out wisdom of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh

Search Inside Yourself is in some ways an odd book, no doubt because it’s written by an eccentric person. Meng seems irrepressibly jokey. (His Google business card describes his job title as “Jolly Good Fellow.”) The book is peppered with goofy cartoons and constant quips. At times these provoked chuckles, but mostly I found it all a little wearying. Quite literally I found my energy to be drained by Meng’s jokes, which I think is to do with the jokes taking my attention away from Meng’s more serious points, and thus requiring me to have to re-engage. I’ve had a similar sense of weariness overcome me at times when talking with people who can’t stop joking.

Which is not to say that the book is not valuable — in many ways it is, and I’ll come to that shortly. But at one point I almost put the book down for good. One of Meng’s traits is constant name-dropping and a lack of modesty that some might find refreshing but which to me is distasteful. Here is the point at while I nearly abandoned my reading:

[E]ven though I am very shy, I find myself able to project a quiet but unmistakable self-confidence, whether I am meeting world leaders like Barack Obama, speaking to a large audience, or dealing with a traffic police officer. I watched the video of myself speaking at the United Nations, and I was amazed how confident I appeared.

In the very next paragraph Meng mentions “interacting” with Natalie Portman and Bill Clinton. It was several days after reading that particular passage before I could persuade myself to pick up SIY again.

What kind of book is this? It’s a guide to achieving success and happiness, according to the subtitle. Inside we learn that we do this by developing greater emotional intelligence. It’s therefore not just a meditation book. Meditation here is just one tool to develop emotional intelligence. As the book went on I became increasingly enthusiastic and interested in Meng’s approach. The later material is more connected with empathy, lovingkindness, and compassion, which is for me inherently more interesting than the earlier material on mindfulness.

Who is the book aimed at? At times it seems that the target market consists of managers and CEOs, and often it’s reminiscent of Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — and in fact Covey’s book had a big influence on me. But some may find the recurring references to the corporate world a little off-putting if that’s not part of their experience.

I present what I didn’t like first, because my experience of reading the book was of being tripped up on the way to reading about an interesting program of personal development. And there is a lot of useful material in the book, and Meng has a number of strengths as a guide.

One strength Meng has is that he is an engineer and likes to know what works and what’s the science behind what works. And so there’s a lot of scientific backing for the meditative methods he outlines. For a meditation geek like me this was a delight. He’s also keen on taking systems to pieces and putting the back together again. So he breaks down the skills of mindfulness, empathy, compassionate communication, motivation, etc., and presents them very clearly.

I found myself looking forward to the gray boxes that contained the actual exercises. These were very stimulating and sometimes suggested exercises that I’d never thought of, such as the “meditation circuit training” on page 73. There’s an exercise on dealing with memories of “success” and “failure” (pp. 149–151) that’s similar to exercises I’ve taught in dealing with painful memories generally, but never with regard to that particular topic. His lovingkindness meditation (pp. 169–170) is very brief, and very familiar, but laid out in a very clear and concise way.

(As an aside, talking of familiarity, Meng uses a diagram on page 36 of his book that’s almost identical to one I devised for my own teaching twenty years ago, and use on this site . He referenced this to researcher Philippe Goldin, who used the diagram in a lecture he gave at Google, and I’m intrigued to know whether Goldin read my book, saw this site, or maybe happened to come up with the same schema independently.)

Another of Meng’s strengths is that he is not shackled to a particular ideology. The very common, almost standard, mindfulness-based stress reduction model, for example, that tends to downplay lovingkindness and compassion meditation (although it integrates those qualities into the meditation it teaches). Meng is prepared to take whatever works and to go with it. And so his approach is refreshingly varied and creative, including mindfulness, compassion, tonglen, communication exercises, etc.

One of the other things I admire about Meng is that he is a big thinker. In discussing motivation and “higher purpose” he says,

If you find yourself inspired by your ideal future, I highly recommend talking about it a lot to other people. There are two important benefits. First, the more you talk about it, the more real it becomes to you … The second important benefit is the more you talk to people about your ideal future, the more likely you can find people to help you.

This is something practical I’ll certainly take away from Meng’s book, and for that teaching alone I felt deep gratitude for having spent time with his writings. I realized how much I keep my vision to myself, as I work on from day to day trying to bring the benefits of meditation to more people. How sad! And how limiting! I’ll be spending more time reflecting on this.

The conclusion to SIY is in fact an outline of how Meng plans to make meditation accessible to the world. He wants to get to the point where everybody knows as a matter of course that meditation is good for them (just as they know that exercise is good for them), where everyone who wants to meditate can find a way to learn it, where companies value meditation and encourage their employees to do it, and where, in short, meditation is taken for granted. Or as Meng says, people will get to the point where they think, “Of course you should meditate, duh.”

SIY (both the course and the book) is part of Meng’s strategy for achieving these goals. He wants to make the SIY course “open source,” and to “give it away as one of Google’s gifts to the world,” although it’s not clear what he means by this. The book itself is not free. Even the Google Books preview limits how many pages can be read, which is rather ironic. And given that the book is under traditional copyright, it’s not strictly legal for people to copy and possibly even teach verbatim the exercises in it without permission. I wonder if Meng could have published the book under a Creative Commons license rather than traditional copyright, making the material freely available on a non-commercial basis, so encouraging others to spread the word?

Still, I wish Meng well. He’s a crazy dreamer, but when has anyone but a crazy dreamer ever pulled off anything big?

5 Comments . Leave new

My reaction to Search Inside Yourself was decidedly more positive than Bodhipaksa’s. Perhaps this reflects my relative inexperience with mindfulness and meditation. Still, after studying and reading on the subject over the past year, I found a number of instances in which SIY conveyed nuggets of wisdom that were genuinely new to me. At the risk of seeming to engage in Asian stereotyping, Meng reminds me of Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid in his ability to convey important information so that the student barely realizes its significance until it’s already been assimilated.

Also, Bodhipaksa’s observations about the book’s distribution and copyright strike me as not being on point or relevant. Meng is a Google employee; this book is not Google’s, it is his. Whether or not Google could afford to distribute it for free, then, is not germane. And the copyrighting is the publisher’s domain, not the author’s.

Relatively speaking, these are quibbles. Bodhipaksa overall assessment of the book is positive and I agree with his main points. I’d take it a step further, though: If someone who was entirely unfamiliar with the concepts of mindfulness and meditation came to me wanting a place to start, Search Inside Yourself is likely where I’d point them.

Hi, George.

I hope I made it clear that there’s much of value in the book, and it’s the style of writing that I didn’t enjoy. There’s certainly a lot to appreciate.

I don’t think the comment on Meng’s description of the program being “Open Source” is at all irrelevant. The term open source has a specific meaning, which Meng as a programmer must be aware of. That meaning is that the creator is making his or her work freely available for other people to copy, redistribute and (most importantly) improve upon. But there’s nothing in the book that indicates that it’s legal to do this with the content. In fact the copyright declaration says “All rights reserved” so it would technically be illegal to use Meng’s program without written permission. This could have been addressed by using Creative Commons licensing, or Meng could have avoided using that phrase in an unclear or even meaningless way.

You’re correct of course that it’s Meng and not Google who is the book’s owner, but Meng could, if he wished, make the electronic version available free of charge. Some authors (the science fiction authors Cory Doctorow and Patrick Kelly spring to mind). And he could have given Google permission to use the whole of the book in Google Books. I’ll edit that part of the review, however, to correct my inaccuracy.

I’m a software engineer working in a corporate environment who’s recently become interested in meditation and mindfulness, so I was quite excited when I saw this book: a book on meditation and mindfulness aimed at engineers! I ordered it as soon as it became available in the UK and am now just over halfway through it.

It probably takes a lot to convince such cynical people as engineers that sitting quietly on a cushion for twenty minutes a day thinking about lovingkindness is time well spent, but I think Meng succeeds. My wife recently reminded me that some years ago I dismissed meditation as a lot of nonsense. I don’t remember the comment, but I in the past I would have seen it as some cranky new-age practice.

The book doesn’t say much that is new, but it is reassuring to see much of what I’ve learnt from books and a local Buddhist group repeated in an engineering context. Perhaps it won’t find its way onto the book shelves of may Buddhist centres, but I think it has a place next to my software engineering books.

I’m a meditation teacher and a monk, living in Silicon Valley. I’ve met Meng Tan and spoken at Google and other companies about how to develop love, creativity and wisdom through meditation. (Hope that’s not too much name dropping, Bodhipaksa. I just want to create some context.) I appreciate the work of Meng and others. If it were not for their pioneering work, paving the way and making meditation much more acceptable in this very science based tech community, I do not think I would have been invited by these companies to present a more traditional, spiritual version of meditation. I do feel that in the process of secularizing meditation and making it more palatable to a skeptical audience, something is lost, as though it were meditation with the love taken out. However, now that they have been exposed to a simple form of meditation, the Googlers I met displayed a keen interest in going beyond mindfulness and learning more about the deeper, spiritually transformation side of the meditation tradition.

The Search Inside Yourself program is nothing more than a Corporate Pep Rally to allow employs to give more of what they don’t have, i.e: More time to the company, more energy to the company, more blood, sweat and tears to the company. They don’t care what will do that for them. Meditation can be exploited just as easily as mid eastern Oil.

‘Search Inside Yourself’ Brings Mindfulness Practices to Business – Book Review and Summary

by Brandon Laws | Feb 18, 2015 | Book Review | 0 comments

At Xenium, we are constantly looking for ways to grow as people, and so we often push ourselves to learn new things and step out of our comfort zones. In living up to the Xenium Promise to develop personally and professionally, the Xenium Book Club will often choose books that are a little outside the genre of traditional business books. In the books we read, we often find new ideas that inspire an interesting discussion that provides insights we often try to apply to our personal and professional lives. Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace) was the latest book to accomplish just that: an enriching read and an engaging discussion with those that participated. I first ran across this book after Suzi Alligood passed along an article featuring the “Search Inside Yourself” course. The article summarized how a little company called Google has an engineer (go figure!) who developed a course called “Search Inside Yourself” for Google employees. According to the article , the seven-week course quickly fills up with participants each time it is offered and maintains a large waiting list of Google employees due to its popularity. The way the article described why the course was so popular led the Xenium Book Club to pick up the book based on the course material.

What is Search Inside Yourself ?

The author, Chade-Meng Tan, created a book that he hopes will be revolutionary in changing the way we think about mindfulness and how it relates to business. Business professionals, especially HR professionals, understand emotional intelligence, how it plays such a key role in dealing with others in our life, and how aware we are of our emotions. Meng dives even deeper. He suggests that mindfulness-based exercises can help develop emotional intelligence and lead to a happier life both personally and professionally. I have read several emotional intelligence books and I do not recall ever reading about meditation and relaxation techniques as a way to enhance emotional intelligence. In other words, this book is a trailblazer from that standpoint.

“Emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness.” – Chade-Meng Tan

What’s in the Book?

At 242 pages, this book covers a lot of topics—from the science of happiness to meditation practices to how we can relate these practices and skills to the business world itself. The story at the beginning, and again later in the book, about the ‘happiest man in the world’ was a really interesting way to set up the entire premise of the book. The reader comes to find that the ‘happiest man,’ measured by scientists, is a Tibetan Buddhist monk. This led scientists and other academics to understand the way in which Western and Tibetan cultures teach and practice mediation; and ultimately it gave Meng a reason to develop the course and write the book in the first place. A few key areas I found particularly useful were the meditation exercises, such as Mindfulness Meditation, Mindful Listening and the Body Scan, and the section on developing empathy.

How this Book Applies to the Business World

“When the mind is calm and clear at the same time, happiness spontaneously arises.” – Chade-Meng Tan

  Resources:

• “ How Mindfulness May Give You the Competitive Edge ” – Xenium HR
• “ K., Google, Take a Deep Breath ” – New York Times
• Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) – Amazon.com
• “How Mindfulness Can Jumpstart Our Exercise Routines”  – NY Times

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SEARCH INSIDE YOURSELF- TPB Paperback – International Edition, January 1, 2012

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher HarperCollins
• Publication date January 1, 2012
• Dimensions 6.14 x 0.72 x 9.21 inches
• ISBN-10 0007467974
• ISBN-13 978-0007467976
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins (January 1, 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0007467974
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0007467976
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.14 x 0.72 x 9.21 inches

About the author

Chade-meng tan.

Chade-Meng Tan (Meng) is an award-winning engineer, international bestselling author, and philanthropist. At Google, where he held the title of Jolly Good Fellow, he led the creation of the groundbreaking mindfulness course called Search Inside Yourself.

Meng is Co-chair of One Billion Acts of Peace, which has been nominated by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and seven other Nobel laureates for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is Co-founder of Buddhism .net, and served as Executive Producer of the movie, "Walk With Me", about Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. He is also Founding Patron of Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), and adviser to a number of technology start-ups.

Meng delivered a TED talk on compassion at the United Nations, spoke about the development of kindness at the White House, and led mindfulness practice at the Vatican. He was featured on the front page of the New York Times. He has met four United States Presidents. The Dalai Lama gives him hugs. His personal motto is, "Life is too important to be taken seriously".

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Customers say

Customers find the content concise, practical, and engaging. They also describe the humor as fun and written with love. Readers also appreciate the straightforward style and lack of dogma.

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Customers find the book's content to be a wonderful combination of all 3 concepts. They are impressed with the simple clinical studies that validate the concepts. Readers also say the book is relevant, accessible, and down to earth. They appreciate the sincere passion expressed and the succinct but engaging fashion. They say it shows how to follow a time-tested, elegant but simple process to mindfulness.

"...The one practice that I found simple and practical and useful and which is now a habit with me is:..." Read more

"...It also contains a great deal of science backing up all of his claims, not to mention the book contains personal testimonials from other Google..." Read more

"... Part anecdotal , part scientific, part humorous, Chade-Meng Tan did his absolute best to make mediation appealing to a broad audience...." Read more

"...This book taught many of the meditations that are found in the book Meditation for Dummies...." Read more

Customers find the humor in the book fun, hilarious, and worth the read. They also say the book is written in a light, playful spirit. Readers also mention that the cartoons add to the light-heartedness.

"This guy is absolutely hilarious !..." Read more

"...Overall, it's a worthwhile read , but it's likely much easier to get certified through one of their "SIY" conference seminars...." Read more

"...It was written with love and you feel this love while reading." Read more

"...The book is written in a light, playful spirit , and walks you through not only what mindfulness meditation is, but how to practice it, why it is..." Read more

Customers find the book straightforward, simple, and clear. They also appreciate the author's thoroughness, effort, and attention to tone. Readers also mention that the material covered is easy to apply and completely lacking in dogma.

"...It's simple and elegant and backed by research into our brains ability to radiate waves of consciousness...." Read more

"...The book is an easy read and left me with several take-aways, even though I've been meditating for years...." Read more

"...The book is written in a light , playful spirit, and walks you through not only what mindfulness meditation is, but how to practice it, why it is..." Read more

"... Authorial thoroughness , effort and attention to tone, separate from the issues mentioned previously, are lacking...." Read more

Customers find the writing style simple, elegant, and backed by research into the brain. They also say the context and pictures give the book a fun vibe.

"The book title is fancy and appealing . The writer and all contributors top notch...." Read more

"...Loved the context in the book and the pictures gave the book a fun vibe also :)" Read more

"...and mindfulness books/self help guides and this one is pretty down to earth and easy to read, with a little engineer humor mixed in." Read more

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