From Mindfulness to Action - with Dan Goleman

[Music] thank you Richard is my Mike being Mike I can ignore these you hear me okay yeah I'm good so I was told that Mohandas Gandhi spoke in this hall some time ago and I wonder if this is where he said when he was asked what do you think of Western civilization he is an she was it would be a good idea I think action for happiness is a step in that direction so let me start with a story which I think I may have told before but it's worth repeating it's actually very well known experiment in psychology called the good samaritan study it was done with divinity students who were told they're going to give a practice sermon and be evaluated on it half of them were given as their text the parable of the Good Samaritan the man who stopped to help the stranger in need by the side of the road the other half were given random Bible topics they each have a few minutes to prepare and then one by one they go to another building to give the sermon to be evaluated and as they went over to the building crossing a courtyard they pass a man who's bent over in pain and moaning and the question is do they stop to help the stranger in need what do you think does it matter if you're thinking about the parable of Good Samaritan you'd assume so right no it's didn't matter what makes a big difference was how much time they felt they had if you fight you were late there was no way you were going to stop and help the stranger in me and in a sense that's the story of our lives in the modern world there's a spectrum that runs from self-absorption my to-do-list my the thing I'm late for what's on my mind to noticing there's another person present to pay attention to that person to tuning in to empathizing to sensing is that person any mean and then can I help and then acting and whether we go down that road is I think one of the most compelling questions particularly for action for happiness do we act a help because there are people everywhere they can be helped in various ways and the opportunities for each of us are are quite large but we have our lives so how do we balance those things let me also consider how mindfulness plays a role in this are people in action for happiness doing mindfulness generally which is our mask yeah so as Richard mentioned I just finished a book it's going to be called the science of meditation here in the UK you can order it online although it won't come out till September and we reviewed systematically the more than 6,000 studies have been published and peer review articles on meditation and we boiled them down to the 60 most compelling studies and the most studied method of all kinds of meditation it turns out is mindfulness and the results are quite encouraging but first I have to confess to having spread some neural Mythology starting in that book destructive emotions you may have heard that mindfulness shifts the brain from the sector of negative emotions to positive emotions anybody ever hear about that study oh good very few it turns out it's not necessarily true and one of the things we were doing in the book is kind of cutting through the hype it turns out I just was at a business summit this morning and many many people are selling mindfulness to business god bless you Alex this is my caffeine jet lady so the fair ones on yeah business okay so business is being sold mindfulness and it's being sold mindfulness on the basis of studies that aren't that sentence so let me tell you what's really sound first of all but one very clear finding online since it does stand up has to do with what's called an amygdala hijack an amygdala hijack occurs when something triggers us and there are three signs we have a very strong emotional response so something like very angry or very anxious or panicked it's very quick very sudden and the third sign is after the dust settles we wish we hadn't done what we did why did I say that why did I do I'm sure it never happens here you're all in action for happily so amygdala hijacks the amygdala is the brains radar for threat right now our amygdala is asking us am i safe and if the answer is no then it triggers a hijack of the prefrontal area the prefrontal areas the part of the brain that is mindful that comprehends that analyzes that makes good decisions that learns and if we're hijacked the prefrontal cortex is paralyzed it and it's taken over by the amygdala which just wants to do whatever we need to do to survive is anybody here old enough to remember when television had something called static that's what the amygdala sees a staticky picture what's going on and because it's a role in evolution as being to help us survive it would rather be safe than sorry so it airs on the side of we better respond now just to be safe and it's responding today to symbolic reality it's not biological threat so we get you know in a situation which say we think we being treated unfairly and it triggers a hygienic and when we're hijacked our attention become mindless our attention fixates on what we think is the threat it's all we can think about and another thing that happens is that our memory hierarchy changes so that only what's relevant to the threat is what we can remember most easily so let me give you a piece of advice if you are in the midst of a really heated argument with your spouse or partner or loved one those are two amygdala hijacks happening at the same time it is very hard because of this memory shift to answer the question at that moment why am i with this person so just wait twenty minutes give your amygdala time to cool down and you'll remember oh yeah right I love this person okay so in a middle hijack we act in ways that we wish we had one of these strongest findings on mindfulness is that the amygdala becomes less reactive and the more you do mindfulness the less reactive it becomes it doesn't mean it's out of commission but it isn't hijacking us so much anymore and mindfulness when it's combined with say cognitive therapy - was NBCT as it's called is very powerful because it let it gives it shifts our relationship to our thoughts and our feelings and we can let those triggering thoughts come and go instead of taking us over I think that's one of the the powers anybody here familiar with NBCT guides it's a very very powerful entity a second of finding is that and this should be no surprise mindfulness enhances our attentional abilities this is really important today because people are more distracted than ever in human history the reason is let me ask how many people have a smartphone with them exactly that's the problem because they are very seductive devices all of our districts not all of our but they're full of really juicy distractions our smart phones there's Facebook there's Instagram whatever it is that you like to watch so a very smart cognitive scientist Herbert Simon I think won a Nobel made an observation a long time ago assistant what information consumes is attention a wealth of information means a poverty of attention today we get on average five times more information in a day than was true twenty years ago we're inundated with the flow of information not only that there was an article ten years ago in Time magazine a big magazine in America when there were magazines in America and it's it had a little squib it said there's a new word in the English language the word is pizzle it's a combination of puzzled and pissed off and then it means that it refers to that moment when you're walking down the street with someone and they pull out their blackberry and start talking to someone else you know that this is data because they said blackberry nobody has a right hand but the point is that the ground rules the norms for attention both individually and interpersonally have shifted silently and inexorably you go to a romantic restaurant with table claws and candlelight and a couple of sitting face to face and they're not looking at each other's eyes they puff looking at their phones this is what's happened in modern life but but one of my granddaughter's was at our house and five family members happen to be looking at screens simultaneously and she said so how's everyone doing it was like a radical idea we could talk to each other but that's how things have shifted so mindfulness has become more important because it it strengthens what's called cognitive control cognitive control is the ability to pay attention to the task at hand and ignore distractions how we get worked up it's how we engage with one another and it's more important than ever that we have a way to strengthen the muscle of the mind it's called attention though there's a mention gym and mindfulness is a workout in that gym in the mental gym you focus on one thing say your breath and your mind wanders and then you notice it wander that's the moment of mindfulness and you bring it back that is the identical action in terms of your mental strain circuitry as going to a gym and lifting the weight every time you lift the weight and do a repetition you strengthen the muscle bit and the same with bringing your mind back my view is that the real action and mindfulness is noticing when your mind what did anybody have the mind wander drink mindful of course they hit a study at Harvard they gave people an app for their phones and it rang them at random times day and night and it asked two questions what are you doing now and what are you thinking about the gap between them are those two things of course is whether you're paying attention now you're mindful or not 50% of the time our minds are wandering they're wandering ninety percent when we're commuting when we're in front of a video monitor and when we're at work I know about you but those other people that work so it wanders least ten percent of the time according to this data when during romantic moments but I could would answer an app like that during it I had to have that data but anyway so the mind is wired to want wander feet article title is a wandering mind is an unhappy mind because it turns out that where the mind tends to wander is what's bothering us particularly in our relationships so we tend to think about now why didn't she invite me to the party why didn't he answer my email why did they say this to the things that are trouble on our mind so mindfulness is a real move toward mental health in the sense that you have more freedom of a choice in what you think about so that's another factor in mindfulness and cognitive control itself is extremely important I don't know if you know the marshmallow test it's a famous study in psychology they did it Stanford with four-year-olds from the preschool they bought him to a room they sent him down a little table put a big juicy marshmallow on the table and they said to the child you can have this now if you want but if you don't eat it till I come back from an errand you can have to then and then the experimenter leaves the room and that poor child is there handed there with a marshmallow and about a third of them grab it on the spot they just can't stand it and about a third wait the endless seven or eight minutes and they get to the payoff for this finding comes 14 years later when the kids are tracked down and it turns out that the kids who grabbed compared to the kids who waited don't get along as well with their friends still can't delay gratification pursuit of their goals that's what direct tests and on the college admission exam of 1600 total points the kids who waited had a 210 point advantage huge difference so cognitive control is really important there was a study done in New Zealand where they track kids from four to eight they measured cognitive control they did it with a marshmallow test several other converging measures track them down at 32 the strongest predictor of good health and financial success was cognitive control in childhood it was not your IQ and it was not the wealth of the family you grew up in this is something that is independent of those very powerful effects I was in Manhattan visiting a school where in a very impoverished area is called Spanish Harlem and the kids there seven and eight-year-olds had something they did every day it was called bellied bunnies they go to the cubby and get the favorite stuffed animal and find a place to lie down on a rug and put the animal on the belly and watch it rise on the in-breath fall on the out-breath 1 2 3 m inverse 1 2 3 on the out-breath that is an age-appropriate lesson in mindfulness and in that school those kids half of whom have had what are called special needs you know learning disabilities hyperactivity and autism so on I thought the class would be totally chaotic it was very calm and the kids were very focused and the teacher said it's because of belly buddies so mindfulness he is this kind of mindfulness I argue is something we should be teaching all children it should be part of the school curriculum in fact when you do teach it kids can learn better they behave better it should be part of what's called social-emotional learning which is not only looking at you know emotional lines and development and social lines of development but attention is also a part of a child's development and the child's brain doesn't mature anatomically until the mid-twentieth during that time right now we leave emotional social and attentional abilities to random chance why don't we teach every child this basic skill mindfulness so if you do you get better cognitive control and that predicts a happier life a healthier life and better wealth another finding working memory this is interesting working memory from cognitive science point of view is your ability to pay attention to what's happening now long enough that it transfers to long-term memory so you can remember it later it's the essence of learning so it turns out that mindfulness increases you working memory they did this at the University of California and it turned out the students in the study who had mindfulness training did better on the graduate school entrance exam why because they're able to to learn better finally there's multitasking I don't know everything I won't ask if you're a multitasker we all try but you know multitasking is actually a myth the brain does not multi do things in parallel it switches rapidly and it turns out if you're really into something like you're working on this report or you're doing this mathematical problem and then you decide to take that email or to go online or do a text or whatever and then you come back to it you've diminished the power of concentration for the original tasks it takes time to build up except if you have a mindfulness session 10 minutes of mindfulness reverses the debilitating effect of multitasking upon concentration so those are good news on attention but the best news actually comes with empathy and compassion there are three kinds of empathy there is cognitive empathy I understand how you see the world how you think about things that kind of empathy that you'd be a very good communicator because you know the terms to use of someone will understand the second kind of empathy is emotional empathy I feel what you feel I feel with you and the third kind of empathy is technically called empathic concern it's caring about the person I not only know what you're thinking and what you're feeling but I want to help you if I can't that's the basis of compassion there's very good work being done now but Tania singer over the Max Planck Institute in Germany she finds it each of these kinds of empathy is based in different circuitry in the brain the concern the caring is based on the same circuits that are activated in a parents love for a child that the mammalian caretaking circuits very basic and the first to think about the first two kinds of empathy cognitive I know how you think emotional I know how you feel put those together it could be called marketing isn't it what makes the difference what gives us an ethical rudder is the third the compassion the Karen so it turns out the brain is really happy and ready to get more caring and the way to do it is often paired with what we just did the mindfulness it's called loving-kindness practice and I'm going to take you through it because I think we all should do it's very appropriate for action for happiness so if you would sit up in a dignified position and I recommend you close your eyes or just let your gaze go kind of neutral and bring to mind someone in your life who has been very kind to you you feel very grateful for the presence in your life and just feel the love and gratitude toward that person and wish them well that they be safe happy healthy free from suffering that they have a life of fulfillment and happiness and then think of yourself in the same way and wish for yourself that you'd be safe happy healthy tree from suffering if you have a fulfilled life and now bring to mind the people you care about most your loved ones and make those same wishes for them that they'd be safe and happy healthy free from something that they learn fulfills lives and now make those same wishes for everybody in this city everyone develop Munden throughout Great Britain throughout Europe throughout the world extend the wish to everyone everywhere that they be safe happy healthy free from suffering that their lies be fulfilling and you can open your eyes so that's a simple method and it turns out to be a psycho active technique it strengthens the circuitry for caring and compassion the Dalai Lama you know I wrote the book for the force for good and for his 80th birthday actually says has a program it's a vision here's what he would love people to do this is the best present you could give me he says and by the way if you want to know more about it there's a website called join a force for good and the four is the number for join a force for good but he says there's basically three steps the first is to compose yourself be mindful or NBCT whatever helps you be calm and clear the second is adopt an attitude of compassion it's an ethical outlook it's a predisposition to help and then the third is to act now in whatever way you can and he has a map he says there four or five areas where actions you really needed he I'll tell you what they are not the only ways to help that I find the very very helpful the first he said is we know we really need transparency the world is full of corruption and collusion he lives in it in Asia and a lot of Asian countries the graph the color black shoes is explicit it's a cultural norm there are other countries like say my country I don't know about your country where there is a lot of collusion at the highest level we have a president who's trying to make give big tax breaks to the richest people he happens to be one of them that's a kind of collusive Act so the Dalai Lama says this is very dangerous the world it arose trust and it's just not fair and whatever you can do to expose me says there's dirty business dirty politics dirty science dirty religion they all need to be cleaned up and they need three things transparency and accountability so you know I think of the Catholic Church and there's all the sex abuse that went on or all the private schools the fancy private schools was just coming out there was no transparency and no accountability now this transparency next step is made people responsible for their actions and by the way he's a big fan of a pope the Dalai Lama because the new pope he says is that finally he says we have the Christian Pope we have someone who's look because he's doing all of these things the second is economics he said you know the growing gap between rich and poor around the world is a moral crime the system we have and Richard is one of those economists who's trying to find a new way around it the system we have just does not work because it favors owners and handicaps workers owners share of the pie gets bigger and bigger faster than workers and workers share do I have this right Richard more or less is that right workers share is shrinking yeah yeah I just want to check your knees against Newton and he says not only do we need to reinvent the economy but we need businesses that operate for the good not just for profit and I was talking to him about it a bakery in New York it was started by a Zen teacher whose zendo was in a very poor neighborhood in that area called the Bronx and he wondered what they could do to help people in the neighborhood and they realized that the neighborhood was full of you know single moms on welfare and you know ex-felons who couldn't get any job any so they decided to start a bakery and didn't have been in Jerry's ice cream in this country if you've ever eaten been in Jerry's chocolate fudge brownie flavor so I recommend the brownies in that ice cream come from the Greyston bakery in the box the this bakery supplies they send two truckloads of brownies up to Vermont every day the motto of the Greyston bakery is we don't hire people to bake brownies we bake brownies to hire people it's a new business model it's good sometimes it's called the B corporation which means in the very charter of the company it's not just for stockholders interests like ordinary corporations it also has a mission an environmental or social or compassion occasion and the shareholders want to see that mission fulfilled as much as they want to make money so it gives a dual responsibility to the people operating the company and then there's you know many corporations have what's called corporate social responsibility I like the one that surprised me is you and Libra I'll tell you a story about Unilever it's a big company here right your lever was founded by a guy who was a son of a [ __ ] he was a robber baron who was known and hated throughout the Netherlands and Belgium because in the late 19th century this I have to tell you it was his own grannies who told me this I met her she said everybody hated him because he claimed he had a patent on margarine which was like a big new discovery in the late 19th century and he put everyone else who was a competitor out of business and he ended up owning all those companies he unified all the margin makers in Benelux through strong-arming basically he had a company called uni uni ii in french and he realized that the main ingredient in margarine was palm-oil and that he could have an economy of scale if he would combine with a soap maker and there was a lever but in Britain making soap so they joined forces that invented Unilever fast forward several decades that was the foundation of Unilever a friend of mine is coach to the one of the co-ceos of Unilever at the time they bought Ben & Jerry's did you know that Unilever owns Ben & Jerry's why did they buy Ben & Jerry's because they wanted the idealistic DNA of Ben and Jerry's to infect Unilever that was a strategy that was the hope now Richard and I were a couple years back at Davos World Economic Forum another guy who is there was Paul Polman who's the CEO of Unilever he announced there that they had a number of corporate goals one of them was not only a drastic reduction in carbon footprint another was to incorporate a half million small farms in the third world into their supply chain that that is big because it meant they had to help those farmers upgrade their operations so that they could be dependable suppliers which means that those farms which had boom and bust cycles would have steady income the World Bank's is the best way to help the education and health of an economy of a local community in the rural third world is exactly that steady jobs so what they're doing is a social good is also probably as good for their flexibility in in supply chain so it's dual role there's a company in California called Salesforce it's a big marketing company has a very idealistic CEO he has what he calls one one one one percent of profit one percent of people's time one percent of product to carry and he's gotten a lot of other big tech companies too do the same so there are many many ways for companies big and small to to be models and the dial on what applaud all of it a third and this is one that I think is probably done a lot here in this community of action for happiness committee it's helping out people in need and whatever that need may be the dollar arms system can interesting he says something that other people are saying to which is the best way to help people in need is to help them help themselves if you can you can find a way you know teach a skill whatever Greyston bakery is a good model another one is the US and them thinking which is created that divides around the world and is always a cause of war what we did is a big challenge when we went from compassion and wishing well people we love towards neutral people other people in London and people everywhere it also includes some very unpleasant people but it may include people across that divide whatever divides we personally may have but he says that is the key step that if we had the sense of oneness of humanity we wouldn't have these troubles between groups he really lives I've seen this he pays no attention to you know status rank income he doesn't care about any of them you someone who's traveled with him for a long time said back when Gorbachev was in the Kremlin he was went to the Kremlin to visit him he's going up the steps to the Kremlin currently there are a lot of steps and from the Kremlin and there's a guy standing there with the collegian ACOG like the guards at Buckingham Palace and him not moving the Dalai Lama sees him it goes over and shakes his hand very warmly and the guard said later 25 years of standing here no one has noticed me but that's that's the Dalai Lama he sees everyone really the same it treats them that way then there's the environment the environment is a really interesting one because design Armas is if you're really going to understand and help you need to analyze the system that's created the problem and come up with a systemic fix if you really want to be effective and the problem with the environment is this the global warming which is a byproduct of our everyday activity these lights everything that we wear that we use the chairs the stage has what's called an embodied footprint what an embodied footprint is is the cumulative impact on the eight global systems and support life on the planet carbon is just one water is another potable water it is going to be a desperate thing probably more before way before the climate crisis anyway we all inadvertently are part of a very large system which is slowly destroying the ability of our planet to support life so once you understand that then you see that you know this is what's called the Anthropocene age you know this is the part of my talk is really like a little depressing so just bear with me it gets more uplifting later so and coming so the ants machine age is the first geological age where one species us is impacting the entire world geologically and meter logically and so on the problem is that our brain was designed during the Pleistocene during a different age where as I said the amygdala which is the the Sentinel the radar for safety evolved and so our sensory system evolved during the same period and our sensory system it turns out is oblivious to the impacts of what we do the changes are too small to micro or to macro for us to see here sense in any way so we're oblivious to the harm we do not only that our amygdala our whole survival threat system is wired for another range threat you know it's the saber-tooth Tiger the car that's about DNS it's not climate warming in fact our survival system in the brain kind of shrugs so we need a different we need a workaround we need to think systemically one of the proposals is that we have radical transparency radical transparency would take this glass and say this is not a product this is a process it starts with sand that's gathered and chemicals that are made and mixed together and then it's all heated at a very high temperature for a very long time by the way a Bronze Age technology we still use for glass steel concrete and bricks is one of the worst causes of climate warming but hey you know works before so they break it down there's a new discipline it's called Industrial ecology they have something called lifecycle assessment they take this glass down into almost two thousand separate steps at each step they can analyze impacts in air water soil carbon so on in other words there is now a way a methodology for understanding at a very fine grain level the impacts of all of this if you recycle your yogurt carton right have you if you have yogurt in a little cart you have it in glass or plastic cart plastic cart okay so you can feel good by recycling your yogurt card do you know how much of the carbon impact you remediate by recycling your plastic yogurt cup five percent in other words we are oblivious to the other ninety five percent which is most cows cows produce a lot of methane which is even worse than carbon and they do it because industrial farming gives them a kind of feed that their stomach is not used to but it helps make a lot of yogurt very quickly the other point is that whenever the earth is being degraded pretty much someone is making money somewhere so hand in hand with rethinking economics is rethinking environmental impacts the bottom line is we not only need to reinvent systems I think we need radical transparency about impacts because we as consumers could make very different decisions and if we create a market force that favors the better way of doing things then companies will start to shift but also we need to reinvent everything I know if anyone here has any entrepreneurial interest but everything in the material world is made in the way that harms our planet because we didn't know what the impacts were we never thought about it in those days there are two students at a Technical School in the States reinvented styrofoam styrofoam is one of the worst things for the earth it never disintegrates ever petroleum doesn't mix with water so they reinvented styrofoam by coming up with something that works the same but is made out of rice hulls natural byproduct of milling rice and mushroom roots Wow it's called eco Vasia as the company and this is fantastic this is a model of products for the future so these are a kind of high level you might think ways of changing things but there are a thousand ways each of us can act in any of these realms and the Dalai Lama says it does not matter what specifically we do what matters is that we act now I love that this is called action for happiness he says you have to stay optimistic too he says he met the Queen Mother Queen Elizabeth's mother when she turned 100 he said to her you've lived a century do you think things are getting better or getting worse and she instantly said oh they're getting better what she meant was that when she was young the world was a very different place you know that look at women's rights it's a change over the centuries look at the fact and as an American I'm very grateful for this that this country which once was a huge colonial power has virtually no colonies anymore they're independent nations she saw that as progress if you look at the newspaper I'm a reformed journalist I used to get the New York Times you look at the newspaper the headlines are designed for the amygdala you want to know what the danger is what the threat is and you want to be prepared implicitly so that's what kab that's what sells newspapers but if you were to take all of the acts of oppression hostility and hatred on the one hand and all the acts of goodness on the other people making lunch for their kids or you know just civility kindness in every form the acts of kindness far outweigh the acts of negativity and hostility every day of the year it's just not real it's just not news we take it for granted so the fact is that we can all be agents in a force for good it's up to each of us to find a particular way that we can act thank you [Music] and thank you so much we've got time before we sort of act on this call to action which we do want to vote specifically do detect some questions so there's some microphones going around the audience if you'd like to raise your hand to give a show of whether made you some interesting questions either on mindfulness and the science or on how we put this idea into practice for a happier world I'm going to cheat and abuse my position slightly down by asking you the first question which is one of the things about meditation that often I hear the criticism is this idea of there are so many things going wrong in the world how is sitting still and being calm and not very anything you know possibly help with that now of course you've already shown to some extent why that is a sort of hypothesis but you see quite a lot this idea that how will sitting there effectively doing nothing helped change the problems of ceará so first of all you're not doing nothing and second what do exercise yes why because of physical health and mood basically looks like a waste of time to me thank you thank you here's a metal gym is a metal check yeah yeah so let's see what we're worthless gentlemen here this hand if anyone else raising their hand elicitation with one over there with Jada key let's start here thank you very much dr. Gorman um I know I like your loving-kindness approach for everybody but I was a little concerned that it was limited to the consciousness of human beings for a lot of conscious beings on this world particularly domesticated animals that we don't seem to care very much about at all I'm a little bit worried about this focus on people but we could ignore that so my request to you is can you extend this approach to consider all conscious beings on the earth rather than just human beings yeah that's actually the real way to do this that it ends with may all beings everywhere be safe happy healthy I admitted with people I don't know you all very well and I didn't know how react if I said beans now I know thank you lovely question lovely answer Jane you've got never happy thank you for such an inspirational and an optimistic talk I especially enjoyed your focus on the environment with which you talk a good game so my question to you is what's your take on veganism what was the way vegan if and bigger be veganism I think I applied veganism do I need to say more I think and I take your point very well we you know one of the kind of blinders we have apart from the impacts on the planet of every of what we buy use and so on what we do is as a kind of species hist approach we value humans we don't value animals and is Matthew Picard spoke here before right matthieu ricard yeah so Matthew has just written a wonderful book which is an argument for vegetarianism where he really depicts in graphic detail the reality of industrial farming and you could extend that to all farming we don't really need animal protein these days to survive maybe we did in the wild maybe we did when our brain was designed but things are different now and in terms of compassion I think it should extend beyond the cats and dogs and horses we love to every sentient being I however have a ways to go I've given up red meat I'm still not so good on fish and afraid and my granddaughter is a vegetarian not a vegan they have it thank you and so let's identify a couple more Sookie there's one that's you here and then we'll come and pick this on the front row and then we'll take something further hi um I work in them in a big corporation I guess and I wanted to know if you have seen any good ways and introducing mindfulness in in corporations I've seen it sometimes done before at the company but it doesn't seem to be something that then people continue to do in their life maybe was introduced to the company it was yeah and you just I guess the way it was done they just didn't really work yeah so the culture really needs to support mindfulness foot to stick that means high level people need to talk about its value affirm it I once went to a company where everyone spends hours of the video monitor hunched over and typing and they have to meditation rooms I was told that if you were seeing using those rooms too much you'd be fired though you have to really understand what the culture I'm working on an initiative to try to help companies change culture to support that kind of activity for well-being but we have a long way to go however as I was telling Richard at dinner 20 years ago when I wrote a book called emotional intelligence they said you cannot use the word emotion in business and now like it's like a hot you know leadership playing emotional intelligence cultures change cultures - thank you let's come down here it seems like we live in a world which computer algorithms are increasingly playing an important part in the search results that come up and your Facebook friends etc etc one of the things I've been thinking about recently is in what way could you inject compassion into those algorithms ah I don't know if you've got any weapons this share of my yes it's interesting that we assume those algorithms have no compassion I think that's right it's but the problem is not an algorithm problem is the people who create the algorithms because what they're doing is modeling the value system implicitly in the algorithms so I think the answer is to have more compassionate systems I was just working with the school systems called the International Baccalaureate schools they're kind of global the very high standard and they're introducing a curriculum and compassionate systems I didn't mention it but the last area the dial AMA really encourages people don't think about is education helping kids learn these values learn these skills early in life including compassion so we'll go through life making decisions and acting in ways which create a better world and I think that's a place to start Google is another place for Dan I was really struggling you you talked about this us us and then culture which I think has been so prominent recently in for example we that the dialogue around the UK decision to leave the European Union or perhaps some of the rationale behind voting in Trump and so on this idea of fear of the other yes and once this and compassion gets away from that I think the Facebook and online algorithms things very interesting because of course we're now increasingly seeing our own bubble view so we're not seeing the viewpoints of others and window so I'm wondering if this mindful compassion in a way of being able to step outside and see the other's perspective in a way that hopefully a compassion begins with empathy was understanding the others perspectives I have a nephew who does international water mediation and this means he goes from round-the-world places like Central Asia or the Middle East where countries share a river system but hate each other or attitude and in order to survive they need to manage that water system cooperatively so he starts the meeting people come in the room with the attitude us in them and we want ours and he starts not by asking people what the position is but what's the spiritual meaning of water in your culture in other words it's he starts with a commonality with an emotional valence everyone shares and then works for matter and I think that's an interesting model for us and them I think it because we gave back to our common humanity thank you I promise to take a question from higher-ups and gentlemen the blue jacket had it onif and then we'll go up to behind you get up there with a lady with a handle I wonder if you could say anything about the what the research is showing is the limitations of mindfulness and by that I mean maybe some of the assumptions we may have made about a mindfulness that have subsequently been proved not to be the case well I think that in some ways particularly the business world mindfulness is overhyped that is that the claims made go beyond what the research actually shows and when I reviewed the findings those are the ones that have held up most strongly I don't know what those claims are nor do I want to point fingers but I know that there are many results of mindfulness that are sold which actually are not well supported by research so far and yes for the question Airlines not forced to go to the lady the back okay so I'm not really sure how to compare this but I was just wondering what your opinion is on overlap between mental health spirituality and mindfulness and whether people presenting where their mental health conditions such as bipolar might be experiencing something which is in all some sort of altered state of consciousness which perhaps is also accessible through mindfulness I didn't hear the part about the bipolar could you say that again whether people who are exhibiting something like a like bipolar manic phase are actually perhaps also accessing perhaps aspects of mindfulness so I decided yeah so a manic phase can be feeling very energetic and happy or very angry actually - it isn't doesn't necessarily look like mindfulness but I think the general relationship between mindfulness well-being and mental health is positive core except when you come to biologically based disorders like autism like schizophrenia or like bipolar disorder and then a different dynamic isn't work and there was this one of the wrangling the question about whether they lead to spirituality they have done as well as very oh yeah portrayals whether there's any kind of connection between mental well-being indeed mentally ill being and whether that's related spiritual so I would say that spirituality a sense of mystery and and larger meaning in the universe is also positively correlated with well-being mindfulness may or may not be connected with that mindfulness is taught here in the West and very secular fashion in the East is talked with in a spiritual context but I see oh I see yeah yeah so so that's the positive side of the manic episode is you can have transcendental experiences it's not always that way for everybody and I'm not sure I would say this I would say there's some overlap between the kind of ecstatic states that you can get say on a retreat or advanced meditators sometimes experience and some of the ecstasy perhaps of bipolar state a very extremely positive bipolar state and the reason I'm sure this biochemical I just don't know the basis so thank you for that question and for sharing that it's very interesting and thank you Dan for that response so I promised to take the lady's question in the back in the 90s which attention that I started on for a moment so thank you very much for amazing lecture this evening my interest is basically in memory training and my question is with regard to people who suffer from minor memory issue I'm talking about short-term memory and Alzheimer's was a mindfulness be appropriate and help in those particular situations thank you very much so there there's as yet no well-designed study that suggests directly that mindfulness training would help delay the onset of outsiders Alzheimer's symptoms are largely again biologically cause you know plaque in the brains on there is some sign I mentioned one that mindfulness enhances working memory in other words it would if that were true and if you could bring that to pre Alzheimer's people I would suspect it would slowly onset let's switch over to this side I just saw this man on the peppermint that blue jacket on with his hand at the mental I'll take one over there a DJ Kurs ardently mine was just a comment to help the person from who asked about corporations is that Richard and Tessa have created in Parliament an all-party parliamentary group on mindfulness and a hundred and fifty MPs and Lords and 250 staff there have done an eight-week course on mindfulness and it makes a difference in terms of the interaction in that place so I just know a wonderful thank you Richard please hear happy yeah you can hear me so I think I've got two questions if that's all right through the first one is about taking mindfulness and mindfulness as I know it is about being present in the moment being aware of your senses in a non-judgmental way and often you know connection nature as well so bringing that awareness to tell that presence to your experience so obviously as you were saying it really gets you away from those thoughts which are fleeting all over the place about the future about the past etc but connecting it to your work you know about emotional intelligence there seems to be an opportunity there is been missed to take it one step further and just be aware of the emotions that are present in that moment so I suppose it's a bit of a comment it's also a question see what you would say in response to that right so I wrote a book called focus which says hey you know what I didn't realize it because I never thought of it but attention and mindfulness is interwoven with emotion intelligence the first component of emotional intelligence is self-awareness well mindful this is nothing but enhancing self awareness awareness Pods awareness of feelings so I think the two go hand-in-hand in fact I told that to an audience of 500 businesspeople this morning in London I agree with you hundred percent yeah second question yeah the second question is about mindfulness and Transcendental Meditation I practice TM for sure and I have done certain number of years and find great benefits from it and I think my for me the way I see mindfulness is it's coming but it's a very fashionable thing so people engage in it and it's popular and it of doing a lot of good in the world but it seems that TM has a lot more research into it and can actually take us to the next level so if you have any experience with TM or how you relate it yeah I actually went to a TM Teachers Training course I did see him for several years before I met India and then I wrote a book which I'm a little embarrassed by now called the meditative mind I'm embarrassed because I didn't know what I didn't know but I I think TM is a very powerful technique and the research that we review how the liver with light on TM because many studies of meditation including many of p.m. failed that I was called an active control group an active control group means someone who is just as positive and enthusiastic about a method which they practice for just a lifetime but which does not influence attention mindfulness concentration TM as I remember you start your mantra and then your MA long as you gently start the mantra again does that ring a bell with you yeah you you allow yourself to come back as you were saying with the mindfulness exercise you just allow yourself to come back to the unsure so so in a sense it's a functional equivalent from my way of thinking to mind for us although we could have a longer discussion about that but I think that TM like most meditation methods I it has very positive benefits I suspect that the benefits differ slightly from meditation - meditation so it may be that the benefits of TM when they're well researched turn out to be a little different but maybe overlapping with those of mindfulness and then the advanced level we deal with on our in the book - which just remind you is called the science of meditation and can be ordered now on Amazon I think exactly we get promised to wrap this event about half-past eight we are going to take one more question of these and I have I would like us to do this lovely sort of wrap up around ways we can take this forward so please do stick around for that and look at something rather exciting to announce as well but I wanted to just sort of get sense of who's in the room on these two topics so he only has got some form of mindfulness practice does some kind of meditation some kind of awareness focus I mean that's a tremendous percentage so thank you for that and then who here would say that they're also passionate about contributing to a happier world and this idea of social action and wanting to build a better world so we've got the perpetuity instead under terms of this these two themes so thank you for effective or attracting both of those so much could we [Applause] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Action for Happiness

Views: 77,861

Rating: 4.7604561 out of 5

Keywords: mindfulness, happiness, wellbeing, compassion, happier world, social change, action for happiness, daniel goleman

Id: byOdu4r6N-Y

Length: 60min 50sec (3650 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2017