thats-a-wrap

Search Inside Yourself

So!

I got to attend a Search Inside Yourself course at work last week.

What is it?

  • A 2-day program to develop emotional well-being, resilience and connection with others
  • It’s an interactive workshop that combines mindfulness and neuroscience to develop emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, self-management, motivation, empathy, and leadership.  Calm & focus your mind.

My learnings:

Attention training can grow and improve similar to working out your muscles

  • Practice re-orienting your mind
  • Our minds are wild with rich territory if we learn to see it

Attention: directing the mind to an object

Meta-attention: Attention of attention, the ability to know your attention has wandered

  • Keep the intention
  • Distractions happen, no need to fight them
  • May notice new feelings and thoughts in the attempt to find silence
  • Focusing on breath causes our minds to run around like a new puppy and it’s ok
  • Try to be present

Emotions are physically felt and stored in the body

Approach with curiosity and kindness

Emotional charge exists with most thoughts

Emotional skills are trainable

Mindfulness develops self-awareness that enables other emotional intelligence domains

Self-awareness: pay attention to the body. From existential to experimental

Self-management: from compulsion to choice

Can use meditation to solve problems like memorization

Neural plasticity: what we focus on changes the physical makeup of our brains

We think → we do

Next time you feel an emotion, try to locate where you physically feel it in your body.

Our bodies show signs of thoughts before we voice it:

Use journaling to discover your honest thoughts and feelings that may have been covered in daily routine of being busy. By slowing down, you can uncover thoughts and emotions.

Practice mindful conversation

  • “I hear that you’re saying…”
  • Often times we want to interject with a relatable story, but try to hold off so you’ll hear more from the speaker
  • Giving more space for listening improves connection

Mindful Walking

  • What is it? Walking while noticing the physical parts of your body
  • By slowing down your walk, you physically calm your brain

Self-Management

  • What resources can we find in ourselves to help us?
  • Compulsion —> Choice
  • “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
  • Mindfulness creates space around our emotions.

How to respond to triggers?

  • Amygdala region in our brain sends signals of threats (physical, social, imaginative) and down regulates prefrontal cortex causing us to have less focus around our morals
  • We’re wired to physically regulate even before we mentally notice
  • Respond to triggers using the pneumonic device, SomeBody Needs R&R
    • Stop
    • Breathe
    • Notice
    • Reflect
    • Respond
  • Emotion Management strategies

Make physical transitions to encourage mental transitions

Open the hand of the mind which is so often clenched around thoughts/ideas

Just 1 minute of meditation can calm our minds

Consider starting meetings with a “mindful minute” – moment of silence

Throughout the day, make little moments to check in for emotional clarity

We all have some influence around others

Motivation

  • Process of discovery
  • 3 areas:
    • 1. Alignment: understanding values
      • Pleasant life – doesn’t promote happiness
      • Life of engagement
      • Meaningful life – strongest correlation to happy life
    • 2. Envisioning: seeing our desired future
    • 3. Resilience: ability to bounce back from obstacles

“In a sense, we learn from the past what to predict for the future and then live the future we expect.”

Shoot for the moon to at least get half way

Write your goals in present or as if you’ve achieved them to spark the seed and give it mental attention

  • It’s easy to be afraid
  • Don’t give up on your goals

Resilience: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortunate/change

  • 3 steps:
    • 1. Inner calm
    • 2. Emotional resistance
    • 3. Cognitive resilience: the minds is a great servant but a terrible master

Explanatory Style:

Cultivating optimism:

  1. Become aware of negative biases
  2. Use mindfulness
  3. Transformation

Empathy

  • Don’t use “at least” when trying to be empathetic
  • Rarely a response makes it better but rather a connection
    • “I don’t know what to say”
  • Ability to experience and understand what others feel while maintaining a clear discernment about your own
  • It is not psychologizing or agreeing with people
  • Self-awareness helps one become empathetic
  • Sometimes “I can imagine” isn’t correct and instead ask more questions and say “I can only imagine”
  • Studies show large neural response occurs in our brains when we see negative things happen to those who are similar to us
  • Empathy is affected by perceived falseness and perceived “in-group” or “out group”
  • Foundational empathy practices:
    • seeing similarities in others
    • Offering kindness
  • Listen for feelings

Leadership

  • Leading with compassion
  • Communicating with insight
  • Think, feel, make sense → Behavior → Influence
  • Start to build awareness on our current leadership status
  • Practice compassion for you and others to be happy

Mindfulness, happiness

↑

⭕

↓

Worry, emotional suppression

“Leading was not about their success but the success they could create by empowering others to lead.” -Bill George, HBS

Difficult conversations: verbalize 3 levels of the conversation

  1. Content
  2. Feelings
  3. Identify
    • Am I competent?
    • Am I a good person?
    • Am I worthy of love and respect?

Check your intention and decide whether to raise the issue

Start from the “third story”

Explore their story and yours

Problem-solve – It’s easy to have others or our own emotions take up large parts of our mental space

And that’s a wrap (or rap?) my friends. 😉

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