Interview with Google’s Chade Meng Tan

Mindfulness in the Workplace Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 10/24/2011 - 13:00

Meng and I Ted Ning LOHASI recently had the opportunity to present at Naropa University in Boulder with Google’s Chade Meng Tan who has a job that I wish I had. He gave me his business card and his job title is Google’ Jolly Good Fellow (which nobody can deny). Really! He is one of the earliest engineers hired by Google and his job description is "Enlighten minds, open hearts, create world peace". I had a chance to speak with him about his role and his goals. The guy is a real gem - funny, unassuming and very approachable. How did you come up with your job description? One of the unique work policies at Google is the ‘20 percent time’. This means that throughout your work time at Google they allow employees to work 20 percent on anything that they want. One day I went on a walk and decided that I want to work on world peace through compassion. That is great. Many people have dedicated their lives to this cause. How does yours differ? My approach is a little different since I am an engineer and hardwired in logic and practicality. I want compassion to be a part of modern day living in the U.S. I believe that in order for this to take root it needs to have proven positive results. Wouldn’t we all? Do you have an example of this? In 1927 Harvard created the fatigue lab and wanted to study exercise to prove exercise is healthy. At the time this was thought of as nonscientific and no one would support the funding of the research. The only support they got was from the Army. The study had some amazing results and found that a fit person is a fit person is physiologically different from an unfit person. Today health is universal and everyone knows the following: 1. Everyone knows health is good. 2. All know how to get fit and information is available and accessible. 3. People can do it at work. 4. It is completely integrated into society. My goal is to apply the same principles to meditation. That would be great! There are plenty of people who are stressed at work don’t you agree? Yes indeed. At Google people wear stress as a badge of honor to show how strong they are and how much they can endure. I want to change the concept of stress reduction to a model of success. I want to create this to be customer focused and the by product will be world peace. Meng at Naropa So world peace is a bi product and not the focus? Yes mindfulness leads to emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence, if properly trained, leads to inner peace, inner joy and compassion. All 3 are needed. Inner peace alone will not do it. You must have all 3 at a global scale. How do we implement this? At Google we have the motto launch early and launch often. Some other engineers and I sat in the room trying to figure this out. We created the ‘Search Inside Yourself’ initiative and a building authentic relationship course and empathy course. This helped create the Google University. Impressive! What does the ‘search inside yourself initiative’ teach? The search inside yourself initiative focuses on attention. A calm and clear mind creates the foundation. How this is done is through mindfulness. Moment to moment non judging attention. A study was done on the brain. The amygdala is part of the brain that contains our emotions. If you perceive a threat your amygdala takes over. People with mindfulness training can downgrade the amygdala take over. When meditating we are calm and joyful. This joy is non energetic, is highly sustainable and subtle therefore takes a quite mind. This inner joy can be called on demand. Happiness is not what we pursue but what we allow. And what do we do with our attention? We create what I call ‘high resolution perception’. This causes subtle changes in process of emotional perception. We can experience the detection of emotion and create the option of choice. This leads to emotional mastery and develops confidence. Body emotional awareness increases empathy. Empathy reflects others emotions in and on my body and therefore I can view the emotional process. Emotions are physiological processes, and recognizing that allow us to change from ‘I am angry’ to ‘I am experiencing anger in my body’. The emotion is not a part of being. Kindness and goodness are mental habits. Compassion fosters habit of helping others. These are trainable. If you want to be happy change your interactions with others. What you think you will become. How do you bring this to the corporate world? We must bring science and statistics to it. We need to own the knowledge and be customer oriented and meet people where they are in order to have it be applied to daily life easily. How can it be communicated in business to those who don’t believe in the theory or think it is too strange? There are 3 things that need to be implemented to be affective. The first thing is the correct language. Language is extremely important. We cannot go beyond the current level of expertise of people or it will be over their heads. At Google ‘deeper awareness’ training has been reworded to ‘high resolution perception’ training. This is much more acceptable to employees and human resources department. Remember human resources is coming from a place of caution and risk prevention for the company. Therefore you need to have empathy for their point of view in order for them to support a companywide initiative. Secondly, we need to use the minimum affective dose. If we overdose we will push people away. We teach people a simple 2 minute meditation exercise. This is about the same amount of attention time that my 12 year old daughter has for this so I think it is a short enough time for people to practice. Thirdly, is to get an appropriate instructor. You need someone with a deep practice who owns the science and provides credibility and speaks the language of the audience. Saving the world will fail as a goal. But if you work on mindfulness and compassion it will be a byproduct of the end results. http://www.lohas.com/content/mindfulness-workplace

Gregory Podlucky Before and After

Ex-Pa. soft-drink CEO gets 20 years in prison Senior U.S. District Judge Alan Bloch sentenced Gregory Podlucky, of Ligonier, to 20 years in prison on Thursday after determining he defrauded investors, vendors and, mostly, lenders out of $684 million. I found it really interesting to compare Gregory's physical form from the beginning of his troubles to yesterday when he was sentenced.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/mostread/s_466853.html

When you don't give up..You cannot fail

An Olympic Athlete who does not give up even though injured----Not sure if many of us would endure the pain to carry on like he did? When you don't give up..You cannot fail.

Determination

If you feel like giving up ---just watch what happen to someone who never does and tell me if you still feel like giving up.