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

Soon after that, Sam and Joe talked again, established a better understanding of each other, and figured out how they can work effectively together. Dismissal proceedings against Joe were dropped. Sam and I established a great friendship that is still strong to this day.

What could have been an ugly drama instead became the starting point of a long friendship. This is the usefulness of emotional skills used in a social setting.

There is an old Chinese Zen saying: “The small [meditation] retreat is in the wilderness, the medium retreat is in the city, and the great retreat is in the emperor’s court.” Like most Zen sayings, this one is both absurd and true. All the emotional skills you learn in this book are useless if they cannot be applied in the real world, including a setting as seductive and dangerous as the emperor’s court. Conversely, the real world is the best place to sharpen your emotional skills. The real world is both your dojo and your zendo, from which you will get your mojo. Yo?

In this chapter, we will learn three essential social skills: leading with compassion, influencing with goodness, and communicating with insight.

Leading with Compassion

Compassion is known in every faith tradition and numerous philosophies as a great virtue. It is not just a great virtue, however. Compassion is also the cause for the highest level of happiness ever measured, and it’s a necessary condition for the most effective form of leadership known. Amazing stuff.

Compassion Is the Happiest State

Earlier in this book, we talked (and joked) about my friend Matthieu Ricard, the “happiest man in the world.” When Matthieu’s brain was scanned and measured with fMRI, his measure of happiness was extremely high. He was actually not the only person to register that extreme level of happiness—a number of Tibetan Buddhist meditation masters (people we consider the “Olympians” of the meditation world) were measured in the same lab, and more than one registered extreme levels of happiness. Matthieu was the first subject whose identity was unintentionally leaked to the public, which earned him that nickname. Another subject whose identity recently became known is Mingyur Rinpoche. Mingyur is similarly nicknamed in the Chinese-language press as the “happiest person in the world.”

These folks are, by far, the happiest people ever measured by science. Which leads us to a question: what were they thinking when they were being measured? Something naughty, perhaps? There is something about monks and their monk-y business, you know. Actually, they were meditating on compassion. This must be mind-blowing to many people because many of us consider compassion to be an unpleasant mental state, but here is scientific data showing precisely the reverse—that compassion is a state of extreme happiness.

I asked Matthieu about it. His own first-person experience confirms the data. In his experience, compassion is the happiest state ever . Being the engineer I am, I asked him the most obvious follow-up question, what is the second happiest state ever? He said, “Open awareness,” a state in which the mind is extremely open, calm, and clear. I don’t know about you, but as a practicing meditator, I found that insight stunning. As meditators, we train the mind toward profound calmness and clarity. As our practice deepens, we become increasingly happy, and since this deepening happiness does not require sensual or mental stimulation, some of us fall into the danger of withdrawing from real life (as usual, the Zen folks have the funniest description; they call them “Zen bums”). It turns out that even when you perfect that practice, the most you can achieve is the second happiest state.

The happiest state can only be achieved with compassion, which requires engagement in real life with real people. Hence, our meditation practices cannot be perfected outside of real life; there has to be a combination of seclusion from the world (to deepen the calmness) and engagement with the world (to deepen the compassion). If you are a deep meditator, remember to open your door and go out once in a while.

When I first read about these studies done on Matthieu (which was before we knew each other in person), it became one of the pivotal moments of my life. My dream is to create the conditions for world peace, and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace and compassion on a global scale. Learning about Matthieu gave me a new angle for looking at my work. The insight that compassion can be fun changes the entire game. If compassion is a chore, nobody will do it, except maybe the Dalai Lama. But if compassion is fun, everybody is going to do it. Therefore, to create the conditions for global compassion, all we have to do is reframe compassion as something that is fun. Wow. Who knew saving the world would require fun?

Happily, compassion is not just fun. It has very real business benefits as well, especially in the context of business leadership.

Compassionate Leadership Is the Most Effective Leadership

The best definition of compassion I know comes from the eminent Tibetan scholar Thupten Jinpa. Jinpa is also the longtime English translator for the Dalai Lama. He has a charmingly mellow and gentle voice, so the Dalai Lama mischievously makes gentle fun of it every now and then (“See, I have deep booming voice, but this guy, his voice so soft,” the Dalai Lama would say, and they would all laugh out loud).

Jinpa defines compassion as follows:

Compassion is a mental state endowed with a sense of concern for the suffering of others and aspiration to see that suffering relieved .

Specifically, he defines compassion as having three components:

1. A cognitive component: “I understand you”

2. An affective component: “I feel for you”

3. A motivational component: “I want to help you”

The most compelling benefit of compassion in the context of work is that compassion creates highly effective leaders. To become a highly effective leader, you need to go through an important transformation. Bill George, the widely respected former CEO of Medtronic puts it most succinctly, calling it going from “I” to “We.”

This shift is the transformation from “I” to “We.” It is the most important process leaders go through in becoming authentic. How else can they unleash the power of their organizations unless they motivate people to reach their full potential? If our supporters are merely following our lead, then their efforts are limited to our vision and our directions.... Only when leaders stop focusing on their personal ego needs are they able to develop other leaders . 2

The practice of compassion is about going from self to others. In a way, compassion is about going from “I” to “We.” So if switching from “I” to “We” is the most important process of becoming an authentic leader, those who practice compassion will already know how and will have a head start.

But wait, there’s more. I found the work of Jim Collins, documented in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t, 3to be even more illuminating. I tell all my friends that if they only read one business book in their entire lives, the one to read is Good to Great . The premise of the book is itself fascinating: Collins and his team tried to discover what makes companies go from good to great by sifting through a massive amount of data. They started with the set of every company that has appeared on Fortune 500 from 1965 to 1995, and they identified companies that started out merely as “good” companies that then became “great” companies (defined as outperforming the general market by a factor of three or more) for an extended period of time (defined as fifteen years or more, to weed out the one-hit wonders and those that were merely lucky). They ended up with a set of eleven “good to great” companies and compared them to a set of “comparison companies” to determine what made the merely good companies become great.