16 Oct 3 tips for more happiness at work
by Minda Zetlin from Time Business (online – HERE)
Working at a start-up can be stressful. Just ask Chade-Meng Tan, who as Google’s 107th employee, experienced the company back when it was a start-up instead of the behemoth it is today.
Tan was an engineer, and engineers at Google are famously given “20% time” to work on projects of their own choosing. Tan used his 20% time, working with experts, to create a course called “Search Inside Yourself,” designed to help Googlers improve their emotional intelligence and mindfulness, making them happier and more productive employees, and better bosses. Ultimately, his goal is to make the world in general a happier place for everyone.
Tan, whose official Google title is “jolly good fellow (which nobody can deny)” has been teaching “Search Inside Yourself” for the past five years, and participants often report that it changed their lives–in fact one attendee reversed her decision to leave Google after taking it. Tan’sbook, distilled from the course, is now a New York Timesbestseller.
Here are three mindfulness skills Tan recommends for every entrepreneur:
1. Learn inner calm.
Working in a start-up company often entails an endless stream of financial pressures and stresses. “The ability to arrive at a mind that is calm and clear on demand is very useful,” Tan says. “The analogy is a deep ocean: The surface is choppy but the bottom is very calm. If you’re able to go deep inside, you can access that calmness and exist in a world where you can be calm and in action at the same time.”
Sound like a tall order? “Gaining this skill turns out to be very easy,” Tan says. “It comes from mindfulness, and mindfulness is about the training of attention in a way that allows your mind to stabilize.” One way to achieve this is with a brief daily meditation session, but Tan says you can also get there by quietly focusing your attention on your breath from time to time throughout the day. “Three breaths, every now and then,” he says. “Or even every now and then be aware of taking one breath. You don’t have to train very deep.”
2. Increase emotional resilience.
“Entrepreneurs fail all the time, and if your job involves innovation, that always entails failure,” Tan says. “Begin with the recognition that failure is a physiological experience in large part. For me, it’s tightness in my chest, my stomach dropping, a lack of energy. I feel horrible. And the reason I feel horrible is because of the sensations in my body.”
…keep reading HERE to find out the 3rd happiness at work tip : )