Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

From Self-Regulation to Self-Confidence

Whenever we experience unpleasant emotions, our first instinct is aversion. We do not want these unpleasant feelings; we want them to go away. As a result of this aversion, we shift our thoughts externally toward the other person or environment instead of toward ourselves. For example, when we feel hurt, our thoughts are dominated by how awful the other person is, all because we want to avoid experiencing unpleasant emotions. This process is usually unconscious to most of us.

If, however, through mindfulness and other practices, we bring conscious awareness to this process, then we can see that our externally directed negative thoughts arise mostly from our aversion. Given that insight, if we also develop the capacity to experience our own unpleasant feelings, we may tame aversion, which in turn may tame ruminations and obsessive thoughts. Once we create within ourselves the ability to tame such thoughts, we increase self-confidence.

Earlier in the self-awareness chapter, we talked about how self-confidence can arise from deep understanding of our failure mode and recovery mode. In my engineer’s mind, I think of skillfulness in self-regulation as an upgrade to my recovery mechanism. By knowing exactly how a system recovers after failure, I can be confident in it even when it fails because I know the conditions in which the system can come back quickly enough that failure is inconsequential. If, in addition to that, I can upgrade the recovery mechanisms such that it can recover much faster and more cleanly (that is, causing fewer problems), then I can have even more confidence in it and can subject it to even more interesting and challenging environments. We can think of the practices in this chapter as upgrading our recovery mode.

That is how the practices in this chapter can increase our self-confidence.

Jason, a Search Inside Yourself participant, learned to use the insights of self-regulation to improve his own self-confidence. He considered himself a person who gets triggered extremely easily and, consequently, often found himself in socially difficult situations. During Search Inside Yourself, he learned that being triggered can be a “time-limited” experience once he learned to bring attention to his breathing and to stop feeding his monsters. He discovered that all he had to do was calmly experience the unpleasantness by “riding things out” and “letting my body reset” for fifteen to thirty minutes, and then his “view would open up again” and his mind would be clear enough to think properly once more. He also discovered he could gradually shrink the time it takes to “reset” with mindfulness training. Consequently, he gained confidence in himself.

One unintended happy consequence of this was, in his own words, “If I didn’t learn all this, I would have quit my job and regretted it.” Jason was a skillful engineer, so he was not the only beneficiary of that decision; Google also benefitted by getting to keep him.

Making Friends with Emotions

Ultimately, self-regulation is about making friends with our emotions. All the practices and techniques mentioned in this chapter—the Siberian North Railroad, not feeding monsters, seeing positives in triggers, and so on—point toward befriending our emotions.

Mingyur Rinpoche provides a powerful personal example of befriending emotions. He suffered from full-blown panic disorder until the age of thirteen. When he was thirteen and in the middle of a meditation retreat, Mingyur decided to look deep into his panic. He realized there are two ways to make his panic bigger and stronger: treating it like a boss and obeying its every order, or treating it like an enemy and wishing it to go away. Mingyur decided he would, instead, learn to make friends with panic, neither taking orders from it nor wishing it to go away, but just allowing it to come and go at will and treating it with kindness. In just three days, his panic went away, permanently. “Panic became my best friend, but it was gone in three days, so now I miss my friend,” he half-joked to me. Here he describes the insight he gained from this exercise:

For three days I stayed in my room meditating.... Gradually I began to recognize how feeble and transitory the thoughts and emotions that had troubled me for years actually were, and how fixating on small problems had turned them into big ones. Just by sitting quietly and observing how rapidly, and in many ways illogically, my thoughts and emotions came and went, I began to recognize in a direct way that they weren’t nearly as solid or real as they appeared to be. And once I began to let go of my belief in the story they seemed to tell, I began to see the “author” beyond them — the infinitely vast, infinitely open awareness that is the nature of mind itself . 6

The great Persian Sufi poet Rumi beautifully describes the mind of befriending emotions in his famous poem, “Guest House”:

This being human is a guest house

Every morning a new arrival .

A joy, a depression, a meanness ,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor .

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows ,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture ,

still, treat each guest honorably .

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight .

The dark thought, the shame, the malice ,

meet them at the door laughing ,

and invite them in .

Be grateful for whoever comes ,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond .

Inspired by Rumi and Mingyur, and also because I am an engineer pretending to be a poet, I would like to end this chapter with a poem I wrote titled “My Monsters”:

My monsters come in different shapes and sizes .

Over the years, I have learned to deal with them .

I do that by letting go .

First, I let go of my wish to suppress them .

When they arrive, I acknowledge them .

I let them be .

Next, I let go of my instinct to vilify them .

I seek to understand them .

I see them for who they are .

They are merely creations of my body and mind .

I humor them a little .

I joke with them .

I joke about them .

I let them play .

Then, I let go of my desire to feed them .

They may play here all they want .

But they get no food from me .

They are free to stay here hungry, if they want .

I continue to let them be .

Then they get really hungry .

And sometimes they leave .

Finally, I let go of my desire to hold on to them .

They are free to leave as they wish .

I let them go .

I am free .

For now .

I do not overcome them .

They do not overcome me .

And we live together .

In harmony .

“I know they’re now good friends with you and all, but must they hang out here so often?”

CHAPTER SIX