mindfulness - 101

Search Inside Yourself
Mindfulness - Based Emotional Intelligence

Module 101 - Introduction To Emotional Intelligence

Good morning everybody. Thank you all for being here.

We like to tell ourselves:

I will be successful, if I have more self-awareness.
I will be so successful, if I can remain calm and confident in a crisis.
I will be successful, if I can understand people better and help people like me.

All these qualities come under the umbrella of emotion intelligence.
And the good news is these qualities are skills. And because they are skills like all other skills, these qualities are trainable. Better still given our experience. These qualities are trainable to a meaningful degree in seven weeks which is the duration of Search Inside Yourself program.

Search Inside Yourself what we are here today is a course about training such skills.
It was create in house in Google in conjunction with Stanford University Where we are right now. And the Center for contemplative mind in society and our friend Daniel Goleman who we will talk about a little bit later.

The objective for today's class. We hoped by the time you all walked out this last lecture theatre today you will have basic understanding of emotion intelligence what it is and so on. And very importantly you also walked out today with practical skills that you can already use today. Which can begin to change your life.

But first, a little bit about myself. For those who do not know me, my name is Ming. For those who know me, my is still Ming. It turns out my name is invariant to whether or not you know me. Back in high school, you studied mathematics and you studied invariants you wondered when you ever apply these in real life. This is it. My name is invariant. So welcome back to your math class.

I am the jolly good fellow of Google and I think I have the coolest job title in corporate America. And the way I got this job title start as a joke. When we have our engineering career ladder, the highest ranking engineer in Google is called a Google Fellow. And we should say you couldn't do a Vice President. And the joke at all is why be a Google Fellow when can be a Jolly Good Fellow. And everybody laughed and because my philosophy is if everybody laughed that's a right thing to do. So I had it printed on my business card just for fun and it stuck and I had a job title ever since. So that is me a Jolly Good Fellow of Google.

The textbook for Search Inside Yourself course is conveniently called Search Inside Yourself. So it's easy for you to remember. For those of you watch it at home, I will encouraged all of you to read the book. Because there are very important details in the book, we simply do not have time to cover in these course.

So how do we defined emotional intelligence. Fortunately, there's research from salivate and Mayer from 1990 who were the originator of this field.Who defined the emotional intelligence in the following way. It's said that it the ability to monitor one's own and other's feeling and emotions. The ability to discriminate and discern among those, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions. Daniel Goleman wrote a very influential book called Emotional Intelligence which summarized a lot of research. And he summarized in a way that came up with five inter related domains of emotional intelligence sometimes called five emotional intelligence competencies. These are:

Self-Awareness
Self-Regulation
Motivation
Empathy
Social Skills

Five inter related domains of emotional training and skills.

Howard Gardner very important researcher for Harvard University wrote a book that were very influential as well called Frames of Mind in which he made a very clear point that IQ or intellectual intelligence is not the only domain. In fact that there are multiply forms of intelligence that are important to develop. Specifically in this class the five emotional intelligence map onto two different aspects intra-personal skills and inter-personal skills.

And in fact Self-Awareness which is defined or characterized as knowing one's internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions loads on interpersonal. Second domain Self-Regulation the ability to manage internal states, impulses, and emotions also is a intra-personal skill.
And Motivation, understanding tendencies that facilitate reaching one's goals. These three emotional intelligences are actually loading on intra-personal skills.

Inter-personally as we extend it into the social domain. There are two other emotional intelligences. Empathy here understood as the awareness of other's emotions and concerns. And also finally social skills the being adept or skillful at working with others. These two load on inter-personal emotional intelligence skills.

And in this course we will gradually unpack and provide a context for practicing all of these.
This leads us to a question we call the so what question. I mean emotional intelligence is so nice, but what dose it do for me? So what? Emotional intelligence has a least three benefits. For you and your organization. The first not surprisingly is that it creates the condition for outstanding group performance. This is actually not that surprisingly, especially in rows and jobs that require your interaction with flexing clients. So we sales, for example, if you are salespeople, definitely you need emotional intelligence, definitely sale more, you need better EI, right? It turns out it doesn't just work for people from sales. Surprisingly, surprising at least to me. This is also true for engineers. Even for engineers, EI create a condition for outstanding performance. So if you look at this alike for example. The top six distinguish factors that distinguish the best engineers from the average engineers. The order:

1. Strong achievement drive and high achievement standards
2. Ability to influence
3. Conceptual thinking
4. Analytical ability
5. Initiative in taking on challenges
6. Self-confidence

You notice something about these six qualities, you notice that there are four emotional competencies in the list of six and two are cognitive competencies. Which means that, and it gets better, the two top competencies are both emotional competencies. So the emotional competencies are twice as important leading to outstanding performance even for engineers. There are surprise.

The second thing EI does for you is that it create the condition for outstanding leading ship which is again not surprising. I mean imaging the best manager you ever had, imaging somebody with high intelligence. Right?

So here is another surprise. Surprise is this is true even in the navy which was surprising to me. Because when I think of navy commanders, I think the best navy commanders are people who shout orders, number one engaged Go!Go!Go! That's what I think of when I think of top navy commanders. But there was also a study done and published in 1988. On what distinguish the best navy commanders from average navy commanders and this is what they found. And I'm good quote here, they found best navy commanders to be positive, outgoing, more emotional expressive, dramatic, warmer, more sociable, more appreciative and trustful. In other words, the best commanders are nice guys, people you want to be with. And finally enough, the title of the study was nice guys finish first.

The third, perhaps to me the most important benefit of EI is that it leads to the conditions for happiness and just that's a secret between you and me and the million other people watching this video. This was the real reason we started SIY. The other two factors I told about, they all true. I use those to sell to management. But this is the real reason, I want to create a condition for happiness for my coworkers and for the world.

The first step in training EI is begin with the assumption that EI this trainable. When you come to a course like this. As advertisement itself as EI course. You might think of this as a behavior course. You might expect to be told you know share the candy. Don't buy your co-workers. Be nice to everybody. You might expect to told what to do. We decided on an entire different approach. We decided instead of doing the behavioral way, we do it in a way it creates skills. The theory behind this is if we can develop the correct skills. The behavior issues go away. For example, if we can create the skill to manage anger, then behavior issues concerning anger just go away. Therefor we say that let's focus on training skills emotional competencies. And here you see on the board right now.

These are the examples of skills that we can develop in the space of seven weeks that you staying with us. So examples are the ability to respond to emotional triggers. How to be trigger and not fly out of the handle. The ability to conduct difficult conversations. And how to be confidence in times of stress, for example, speaking in front of large audience if they accept. Why can we do this or what enable us to do this? This is based on a fairly now branch of science called neuro-plasticity.

The idea is what we think, what we do, and most importantly what we pay attention to change the brain. For example, the London cabbies people who drive cabs in London. It turn out it is very hard to get a license to be a cabby in London. In order to qualify for a license, you have to be able to navigate all the streets of centre London in your head. The given point A and point B, you must be able to in your head says let's go this way and that way and so on. And it turns out it takes most of people at least two to four year of hard study to qualify for the license. The questions is, given the training, are the brains of London cabbies are different from the brains of other normal people? It turns out they are different. It turns out the part of brain that associate with directions called hippocampus(海马体). The hippocampus are bigger and more active than normal people, and the longer they have been driven a cab the more powerful(the bigger) and the more active the hippocampus is. So this is the example that we pay attention to change our brains even for adults, and this is true even for emotional skills. And this is mechanism we will be relying for training EI.

So the next question is so now we know we then train EI, what do we begin the training with? Counter-intuitively we begin with training attention. And you might wonder, what has attention go to do with EI ? The answer is that a strong, stable and perceptive attention that offers you a calm and clear mind is the bases of EI. In other words, we are trying to train attention in a way that you can create a quality of mind as calm and clear on demand.

Imaging everything happening around you, people shouting at you, and you can create a mind as calm and clear on demand. If you can do that, then you create a foundation of EI, and that skill is highly trainable. With this relate to another question, how do you train that most powerful skill? Very simple, we training it with a technique called mindfulness. Mindfulness is defined by Kabat-Zinn in 1994 as:

"Paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally."

The good thing about mindfulness is that all of us already know how to do this, because it is something all of us already experienced from time to time. The better news and with me there's no bad news. The better new is that this is something you can sustain and deepen and create on demand with training. This quality of mind, this is we are going to do, we are going to train mindfulness.

And this will be the basis. Mindfulness will help us create the mind of calm and clear on demand which is the basis of EI training.

There is an increasing literature on scientific investigations of the effects of mindfulness.
And it help us create empirical data of the both of short-term and long-term mindfulness practice. One such study as shown here has to do with training attention using mindfulness and its effects on brain functions and in particular focusing on Amygdala(杏仁体). The Amygdala is a very ancient and important brain region that is one of the most interconnected brain regions. It's very important in terms of detecting emotional salience. It triggers other parts of brain to come online to help regular. As this particular study, as you can see, the Amygdala shown in blue -- in this study, there is a very negative and aversive acoustic stimuli or sounds of people screaming and this is something will trigger people immediately trigger the Amygdala to react and to generate very rapidly the emotional response -- emotional reactivity. And the idea here is that in the group of long-term meditators, as you can see the x-axis people with tens of thousands of meditation training, their training literally down-regulated the Amygdala response. They will normally be very rapid and very powerful reactive to negative sounds. One of these things we know about Amygdala is that when the Amygdala is triggered, it will literally hijack or overtake other psychological processes which are instantiated in different neural circuits. For example, when the Amygdala is triggered, the Amygdala can literally overwrite our ability to regulate our attention to make clear and form decision or even to regulate our emotions. Hence the ability to train or modulate the Amygdala response could be very important for health. In this particular study we see a small group of very well trained meditation masters as you can see have tens of thousands of training are literally able to down-regulate their Amygdala via the training in response to a queue of very aversive (negative) sound (a person screaming) that would normally induce a very powerful negative emotional response. One thing that very important to understand here that even though the x-axis talks about tens of thousands of hours, if you really think about how many hour dose it take to become a master of violinist, a master computer programmer, to get a phD, to become a physician. That also if counted would it include thousands and thousands of hours of training.

Another very important point here is that there are huge facts of individual difference. People vary very much in their readiness for the meditation to impact their psychology -- their skills.

Another very important point here is that research shown that even as litter as 100 minutes of meditation training has measurable effects. And that's very promising, because it suggests that, again going back to earlier theme of plasticity, our brains are plastic, the Amygdala can be train, and other brain's system can help to regular Amygdala response. This is amenable to meditation training.

There are many different forms of emotion regulation, one form shown here is called affect labeling. This refers to generating a motion word that describes an emotional state. This is one form of emotional regulations. We're coming from Matt Lieberman at UCLA has shown a graph here, there is a region of right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that is more active when we are volitionally engaged in labeling with words our current emotional state. And also that brain activity via the medial prefrontal cortex down-regulates Amygdala response, hence the intensity of our emotional response (motion generation).

Another study funding upon this, again look at individual differences are in trait mindfulness. How much mindfulness difference people have as an innate quality showing again that this ventral lateral prefrontal cortex as well as medial prefrontal cortex vary as function of how much mindfulness skills people self-report. Showing an individual difference brain relationship. Again more evidence of how mindfulness literally related to different brain prefrontal cortex circuits that help modulate emotional experience. And then very importantly cartoons. One of question we always ask, we can ask ourselves is how much of my wearing hours, am I in the present moment. What this cartoon suggests that web spend much time what I call past tripping or future tripping. And one if we have a monitor on top of our heads that measure how much are we in the present. Not that there's any thing wrong with considering in the past or preparing for the future. The ability to intentionally bring the mind back to the present moment. Ie. Sati smoothie mindfulness is a very powerful important skill. You can think a very practical applications like when you really want to pay attention to friend who is saying something important or you are driving a car or listening to your daughter's description of her day at school. The ability to stay a present as opposing to be pulled into the past and future. How do we begin to train mindfulness. There are many ways, but one way we have found in the Search Inside Yourself program is literally pay attention to your body, the embodied sense of mindfulness. As you can see in this slide, you can begin to read people's emotional states by their bodily posture. And in fact we have come to understand is that there is an important brain's region like the insular cortex that map's our whole sense of body or sensory experience. And hence paying attention to the body is a way to understand what emotional state I am in. Because all emotional states have physiological correlates. Why this is so important, paying attention to sensations of the body is a way of understanding our moment to moment emotional state. Because different emotions have bodily correlates. So the ability to develop a fine resolution laser beam like attention to our moment to moment changes in physiology actually a way to develop emotional intelligence and understanding what am I feeling from moment to moment. So this is one basis for training attention to emotions via sensation in the body. When our friend Laura Dellazona actually has definition provided as this quote definition that:

"Emotion is a basic physiological state characterized by identifiable autonomic or bodily changes"

Simple put sensations are constantly occurring through out the body and pinging back to parts of the brain that always online sensing, detecting. And again this is information we have access to. We can use from moment to moment to understand our own emotional state and also the emotional state of others.

How do we begin to do this? Through developing what's called high resolution awareness of emotion as they raise. As you can see in the slide. It raises the question how refined can I make attention. And what are the ramification of the benefits that arise from laser beam attention (high resolution attention) that can notice emotions and their physiological correlates as emotion arises fully develops a manifests, changes over time and even dissolves.
What would be the benefits from developing that high resolution awareness of our physiological sensations or reactions that related to our emotions?

Why are we bring mindfulness to the body? The reason is to create a high resolution perception into the process of the emotion. What does I mean? Let me illustrate with example, the example is can you detect the anger the moment it is arising? That's important, because if you can detect more anger at the moment that is the moment you control. Do I turn it off or do I let it continue. You have choice which come from the moment, and the choice come from having the ability to perceive that moment. Part of this training is to be able to develop the ability to perceive the process of emotion both of high spatial resolution and high temporal resolution. This goes back the why we bring the mindfulness to the body. Because only to bring back mindfulness to the body can you create high resolution perception. What does that mean? Coming back into that example of detecting anger. If your mindfulness is in the mind, if you are paying attention to your mind. It will be very hard to detect anger the moment it is arising. However if you detect it in the body, you find that the correlations in the body are a lot more vivid. For example, in the case of anger, you might find your forehead is tightening, your are breathing differently, your chest is tightening and so on. You might find your correlates of anger, and imaging in a situation. Imaging in such a situation, I'm beginning to
Become angry right now. You have that higher perception or higher resolution. And only way to do that is by bring attention to the body which is why this is so important. However, this is not the only benefit. There is another benefit to bring attention or mindfulness to the body. And this has to do with intuition that a lot of intuition comes from the body. And it sounds a lot like hocus-pocus(deception;trickery). Let me tell you what I means, you will found it's all ground in science, There is a very interesting study done in the University of Iowa, and the study is a very simple game. That is you have a blue deck and red deck, you choose one card and open one card at a time. So the interesting is the player do not know in the beginning is the red deck is a mind-field, so if you play the red deck, eventually you lose money. So you had to play the blue deck to win the money in the long-term. After 80 round of doing this, most people figure it out, they figure it out the red deck loses your money and they figure out how. Here is something interesting before that happens. So at the 50th turn, before they figure out cognitively they had a hunch. "There is something wrong with the red deck, but I do know why is this." The hunch way before the cognition. But here is something even more interesting, which was as a part of the study they measure the sweat gland of the participants to detect stress. And it turns out even way before the 40th deck （40th turn). At the 10th turn the player already detect it. The player's sweat gland started to reacting when they playing the red deck and behavior started changing. So it means way before you had a hunch, something is wrong, you body knows. So imaging if you have access to the body's wisdom, you have access to intuition. Why is that the case? It turn out there are neurological reasons. One part of brain most related intuition is a very primitive part of the brain, called the basal ganglia(基底神经节). What it does is to create decision rules in life, it detects what happening in life all the time, and it is sort of create the rules like this is good or this is bad, this is danger, this is not, this is me, I eat this. This is what the basal ganglia does. And the basal ganglia is so primitive that it had direct connections to the gut, but have no direct connections with worker centers of the brain. Which is way you had gut-felix(肠腓肠肌运动) literally gut feelings and you can not explain your gut-felix. And that is neurological. So therefore once you create strong mindfulness in your body, you don't just have emotional intelligence, you don't just have high resolution perception into emotional process, you also have better intuition. This is amazing. So in summary, these are the three Search Inside Yourself principles:

1. Emotional skills are trainable.
2. Start with training attention.
3. Emotions are in both the brain and the body. It is as much as physiological as a psychological process and therefore we bring our mindfulness to the body.

There are some applications and benefits of mindfulness practice. With this mind you can just learn to pause and notice force and emotions through out the day. Just pausing and noticing why am I feeling right now, why am I thinking right now. Sort of as state of rest and also as a state of reflection. So that one possible application, another one is just bring mindfulness as daily activity. For example, when I am having sushi, such a lovely experience, so that's beginning mindfulness to that experience. Or just taking a walk very small simple things. Every thing you do, you can inject mindfulness. One of benefits of this experience is that with mindfulness, you become very good at recovering from distraction. So try that, in a situation way any meeting, you have to focus on the boss, anything takes your attentions away, use mindfulness, use your boss as object of mindfulness, and you might find your concentration improves and you might find you get promotion. And if you do, you own me lunch. Finally, use mindfulness as a tool for emotional stabilization. For example, if you feel the need to send a very angry email, try going into mindfulness on your breath for just three breath, that's all. The three breath and then if you still want to feel free to press send. And you might find that sometimes you might decide not to send that might save your career. So these are some of applications and benefits.