CHAPTER 1

Achieving Inner Peace

Inner Peace is the foundational building block of becoming a Hyper-Learner. To engage in Hyper-Learning requires your Best Self—your highest-quality performance emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally—and you cannot operate at that level until, as a baseline, you cultivate a state of Inner Peace.

Inner Peace is an internal quietness or stillness, which I define as being fully present in the moment with an open and nonjudgmental mind and a lack of self-absorption. It’s a state of positivity with limited stress and fear. With those internal qualities, you are more open to:

   Learning

   Stress-testing your beliefs (not values)

   Listening to learn, not to confirm

   Embracing opportunities, differences, novelty, and the unknown

   Considering opinions that differ from yours

   Building caring, trusting relationships

   Having High-Quality, Making-Meaning Conversations

   Attaining states of flow and collective flow with colleagues

   Cultivating openness and trust with others

   Managing your fears and insecurities

With Inner Peace, you’re more able to exercise choice in your thinking, emotions, and behaviors.

You can decide between allowing your mind to wander and being present.

You can either engage with the negative emotions that hinder learning or take steps to mitigate their impact by taking deep breaths to relax or by actively thinking about something else or by reframing the situation. For now, the key point to recognize is that you can choose to let emotions control you, or you can choose to manage your emotions. You can choose to actively generate positive emotions and “own” your emotions, or you can give others the power to determine your state of mind or state of heart by allowing their behaviors to heavily influence you for long periods of time.

Inner Peace can help you mitigate natural tendencies that can get in the way of Hyper-Learning, such as:

   Being risk-adverse and insecure

   Wanting to be liked and fearing exclusion from the “right” groups

   Wanting too much to win and generally viewing others as competition in a zero-sum game

   Being heavily influenced and consumed by your ego and constant mind chattering

   Overestimating the importance of “smarts” and underestimating the power of the heart

   Overvaluing logic, speed, and efficiency

   Undervaluing slowing down to really engage and really listen with a nonjudgmental, open mind

   Undervaluing the power of emotions and the power of your subconscious

   Undervaluing just being rather than always doing

   Dismissing the need to master self and emotionally invest in building trusting relationships

Another way to think about Inner Peace is as the foundation of certain powers.

The 10 Powers of Inner Peace

   The Power of Serenity

   The Power of Humility

   The Power of Slowing Down

   The Power of Presence

   The Power of Reflective Listening

   The Power of Positive Emotions

   The Power of Reflection

   The Power of Emergence

   The Power of Being

   The Power of Owning You

Cultivating Inner Peace can help you remove internal noise and distraction and help you align your inner world—your mind, body, brain, and heart—so you can better engage with the outer world. From this quiet state, you can allow your uniqueness to emerge.

This chapter describes the four underlying elements of Inner Peace—a Quiet Ego, a Quiet Mind, a Quiet Body, and a Positive Emotional State—and provides practical guidance on how to cultivate them.

THE SCIENCE OF US

To fully understand the power and necessity of Inner Peace for Hyper-Learning, you need to have a basic understanding of how the human brain, mind, and body work together. It’s beyond the scope of this book to explain in detail the science of human thinking, emotions, perceptions, and behavior, but the following is a high-level summary of what the research says and how it challenges common beliefs. Making you an expert on brain science is not the object of this book. The purpose is to give you some background on how your thinking, emotions, and perceptions emerge so you have a sense of your starting point.

Each human being is a complex adaptive system influenced materially by his or her genes, social environment, and past experiences.

Humans are wired to seek safety and to fight or flee when survival is threatened, but we’re also wired to make meaning and connect with others.

Evolutionary science and psychology have also shown that we are social animals at our core. We survived as a species because we learned how to work together to adapt to volatile changing circumstances.

Research into our history and biology shows that we are not primarily competitive but have deeply ingrained tendencies to cooperate with others.¹³

We have our brains and our bodies—made up of physical matter, chemicals, and electrical parts. And we have our minds—mental phenomenon and experiences created by complex neurophysiological processes.

Our Brains and Our Bodies

The human brain makes up only about 2 percent of the body’s mass but uses 20 to 25 percent of its energy. For that reason, it has to work efficiently. Rather than lying dormant until triggered by stimuli to react or perceive the world, your brain is intrinsically active at all times, predicting what to do next to keep you alive and well.

It is constantly guessing which combination of past experiences and prior knowledge this current situation or sensation is most like in this context and what should be done about it. Neuroscientists describe this process as one of active inference according to Bayesian probability.¹⁴

Your brain isn’t just making predictions about what you will experience, however—it’s actually constructing your every experience. Because the brain can’t experience the world directly, it has to constantly create a simulated model of those experiences based on the bits of information it receives from internal and external sensations. Your brain makes meaning of that information—both anticipates it and explains the consequences of it—based on the data it already has from your past experiences and social and cultural learnings.

In other words, your brain is always predicting what you will see, feel, and do well before you have conscious awareness of those predictions, and then based on those predictions, your brain actively constructs every thought, perception, and emotion you experience.

Put simply, your brain does not experience reality, it constructs it.

As neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains it, “Your brain is wired for delusion: through continual prediction, you experience a world of your own creation that is held in check by the sensory world. Once your predictions are correct enough, they not only create your perception and action but also explain the meaning of your sensations. This is your brain’s default mode.”¹⁵

To keep you alive and well, your brain has to anticipate and make sense of what’s happening externally (in your environment) and internally (what’s happening with your organs, tissues, nervous system, heart, hormones, immune system, etc.). The state of your physical body and the accompanying sensations (what is called interoception) are key to your brain’s predictions and thus key to every thought, perception, and emotion you have.

Most of the time your brain makes the right predictions about internal and external sensations. When actual stimuli do conflict with a prediction, however, your brain can either update the prediction (i.e., it can learn or update its mental model) or it can ignore the conflict. The latter happens far more often than you’re probably aware of, because your brain likes cohesive stories that fit within the mental model it already has.

Your brain likes efficient shortcuts and assumptions and is operating mostly outside of your awareness, so it takes immense motivation and effort to update your mental models—to recognize your own biases, challenge your own assumptions, think outside of the box, and learn something new. This is why scientists say that we actually “see what we believe” rather than the reverse.

In fact, research suggests that because children have fewer prior experiences and assumptions to draw from, they are better learners of novel information than adults and are more receptive to updating their beliefs.¹⁶

Because of brain plasticity, however, the opportunity exists for all of us to continually rewire our brains, update our mental models, and improve our thinking.

For example, you can expand the range of experiences your brain draws from to interpret and predict what you perceive, think, and feel. Expanding your perspectives and knowledge is one of the purposes of Hyper-Learning.

Our Subconscious and Conscious Minds

If our brains and bodies are our hardware, then our minds are our software, and many of us have an unrealistically positive view of our software’s ability to process information. Our conscious minds can only process about 40 bits of information per second—about a short sentence. Our visual system can process 10 million bits per second, but only a small portion of that goes into our conscious minds.¹⁷

As Edward O. Wilson says, “In our daily lives we imagine ourselves to be aware of everything in the immediate environment. In fact, we sense fewer than one thousandth of one percent of the diversity of molecules and energy waves that constantly sweep around and through us.”¹⁸

The subconscious mind processes far more information than the conscious mind and plays a large role in every conscious thought, perception, and feeling. Contrary to dualistic perspectives, however, the distinction between our conscious and subconscious minds is not clearly delineated, nor can we say that one is better than the other. We actually operate at multiple fluid levels of awareness, and we engage in various types of thinking. For example, we can have highly focused, task-oriented conscious thoughts, and we can have spontaneous, meandering, and imaginative mostly subconscious thoughts, such as when we’re daydreaming or dreaming while asleep.

Our minds actually wander a lot—according to research, about 50 percent of the time. When our minds are wandering, we aren’t focused on the present moment, and we can get stuck ruminating about the past or obsessing about the future. As a result, mind-wandering can inhibit learning, reflective listening, emotional engagement, and effective collaboration. We all have an inner chatterbox—a constant self-talker, self-evaluator, or commentator of whatever is going on in our lives. It is this “monkey mind” that is constantly worrying about what other people think of us. (Well, they are probably not thinking about you because they are thinking about what you think of them. That is how the self-referential monkey mind plays.)

But mind-wandering can also be a great aid in thinking of new ideas, imagining different futures, and sensing new insights from data. Have you ever awoken in the middle of the night or in the morning with a cool new idea? I bet you have. Where did that come from?

Have you ever taken a break from work and gone for a walk outside in nature, just resting and enjoying the smells, the quiet, and the colors, and a new idea or an answer to a current problem you were working on pops into your mind? That is the power of your subconscious, which is key to your ability to create, innovate, and imagine.

Understanding the interplay between conscious and subconscious thinking and knowing how best to manage and leverage that interplay is becoming a very valuable human skill in the digital age.

Emotions

How do emotions emerge? It seems obvious, doesn’t it? Someone acts in a certain way or something happens that automatically triggers an emotional response and then a certain behavior. That is what I was taught. According to the latest science of emotions, however, your brain constructs an instance of something you’ve learned to call a particular emotion based on your past experiences and knowledge and the social and cultural norms that you’ve internalized. It may feel automatic to you, but your brain is, in effect, guessing that the situation you are in now with this set of factors and these sensations is like another situation in which you’d constructed an instance of a particular emotion. But again, your brain is sometimes wrong, such as when it constructs an instance of anger but you’re actually just hungry, or when you experience what you believe to be warranted frustration, but really, you’re just sleep deprived.

Like most people, you probably experience your emotions as inevitable, but it turns out that you (your brain) orchestrates them. That means you can choose to drill down and consider if a particular emotion you’re experiencing is in fact appropriate in this instance, and you can choose how to behave in response. You can slow down, turn off auto-pilot, and prevent inappropriate or unproductive emotional reactions. One way to regulate your emotions, according to research, is to get really granular about how you’re truly feeling and to label that sensation—deconstruct it. You can also pause to ask yourself if the facts truly warrant the emotional response predicted by your brain. These kinds of steps can help you manage your emotions in the moment, but they can also help rewire your brain so that the next time the situation comes up, your brain has a better prediction.

Brain-Body-Mind Connection

What the science is clear on is that our brains, bodies, minds (including all our thoughts, emotions, and perceptions) are profoundly interconnected. When I studied cognitive psychology decades ago, I was taught that humans have a rational side of the brain and an emotional side and that being rational does not involve emotions. Well, modern science has proven that way of thinking to be wrong because our emotions are involved in every part of cognition—what we perceive, what we process, how we process it, how we file data, and how we recall data. Our emotions are integral to how we think. Our body is integral to our emotions and how we think. And vice versa. Later in the chapter, I’ll explain the importance of positive emotions to thinking like a Hyper-Learner and to overcoming our often overactive physiological fight-or-flight response that can impede Hyper-Learning.

The body plays an integral role in how we make social connections as well. We communicate with other people through our facial expressions, tone of our voice, and body language. If we truly trust the person we are interacting with, we often mirror his or her body language and can sync up physiologically, releasing oxytocin, a neuropeptide that plays a role in social bonding and is often called the trust or cuddle hormone.

The brain-body-mind connection is why taking care of and listening to your body is so important to operating at your best. That brings nutrition, quality preventive healthcare, sleep, and exercise into the journey to your Best Self. Nurturing the body with sleep, taking work breaks (especially walks in natural settings), and not abusing the body in terms of food and drink are also crucial. You want a body that is sending positive signals to your brain.

I have posed the following questions to more than 2,000 senior executives:

   How do you think?

   How do you emotionally connect with others?

Very few can explain. Most say, “It just happens” or “I just do it.”

Now is the time to truly understand how it happens and to actively manage your human hardware and software.

You can learn to take better control and more ownership of YOU—how you think, how you manage your emotions, how you behave, how you influence your body chemistry (I am not talking about drugs or alcohol), and how you overcome your ingrained automatic responses.

Here are my five top takeaways from the summary above. I am not advocating, and I am most definitely not saying these points are the right answers. I am sharing solely to encourage you to think deeply about what new opportunities are available to take more ownership of how you behave. Also, please understand that I have a big head start in that I have been studying this for years and have had time to try out and adopt new practices regarding the science:

1. We have far more control over our emotions than we realize. That is a game changer in how we approach our day and how we come across to others.

2. We can interrupt the seemingly automatic link between our emotions and our behavior by slowing down to process and evaluate whether our feelings are warranted or justified and to choose the appropriate response.

3. We can impact our thinking and emotions by nurturing and calming our bodies and being more sensitive to body signals.

4. Our brain is a prediction machine. It is not perfect. It makes mistakes. That raises important questions for us. For example, when should we slow down and stop to evaluate what our mind is telling us to do? In what kinds of circumstances is our brain likely to be wrong? What do the facts say? What is the downside if our brain is wrong?

5. We tend to undervalue the power of our subconscious minds.

Regarding the last point, I have learned how to utilize my subconscious more and that has produced positive new ideas. A perfect example of that is this Reflection Time exercise. As I was writing this chapter, I thought I needed a break and so I went for a 20-minute walk in a natural setting and did not intentionally think—instead I focused on the colors of the leaves and flowers and the shapes of clouds, and I did deep breathing as I walked. I was resting my conscious mind and allowing my subconscious mind to work if it wanted to. Toward the end of the walk, guess what popped into my mind? The idea that I needed this Reflection Time in this part of this chapter. Yes, it just popped up and it immediately felt good and I felt a smile happening on my face—even my emotions predictor got in the game.

Now that you understand a little more about the science of how you operate, the necessity of cultivating Inner Peace should make a bit more sense. Now let’s explore the four underlying components of Inner Peace.

A QUIET EGO

We know from neuroscience that there is no physical place in your brain that houses your ego. So, what is it? And where does it come from? Is it your self-image? Is it your story about who you are? Is it how you identify or define “you”? Is it the degree to which you are self-centered or self-absorbed? All of the above? Please take a minute or so to come up with your answer.

For our purposes, let’s define ego as how you identify who you are—the thing you’ve linked your positive self-image to—the thing about yourself that makes you feel good or that you feel the need to defend.

I believe people with Quiet Egos in most cases react to being challenged by first trying to understand other people’s positions. For example, they ask questions about the data another person is basing his or her views on or about why the other person disagrees with particular points. Then people with Quiet Egos might share the data behind their beliefs and start an open-minded conversation about how to get to the best data-driven answer.

A Quiet Ego is crucial to Hyper-Learning because it enables open-mindedness, reflective listening, and the abilities to seek out disconfirming and novel information, emotionally connect and relate to others, and effectively collaborate.

To have a Quiet Ego, you first have to admit that you have a non-Quiet Ego!

As I’ve already said repeatedly, ego is one of the two biggest inhibitors of Hyper-Learning. Your goal, I hope, is to become a very good Hyper-Learner, and if your ego gets in the way even a little bit, you will suboptimize your performance.

As I look back upon my career in the business world, I was very self-centered as an executive between the ages of 34 and 40. I was a kind, “big ego” guy. I was not brash or the type of person who filled a room or who had to be the center of attention. I was just self-absorbed in my work and focused on being the best at what I did. I was outstanding at knowing, and I was awful at not knowing. I listened to confirm what I already knew, and I viewed collaboration as a competition. I loved getting the right answer before anyone else.

Eventually I hit a wall personally, and that forced me to take a hard look in the mirror and get a professional coach to tell me the truth. I had to change how I measured myself. I had to change how I identified myself and what I valued as success. I had to quiet my ego and redefine myself.

I had to be much more appreciative of all the people who helped me do what I do.

Welcome back! Ready to go? I am refreshed. How about you?

Now that you understand the purpose of quieting your ego, how do you do it? There are at least three ways that I know of: (1) Make a conscious decision to change what you have invested your identity in, (2) practice mindfulness meditation, and (3) engage in acts of gratitude.

Change How You Define Yourself

For many people who’ve already experienced success, their self-worth goes back to elementary school when they were first told by a teacher that they were smart. The teacher probably told them they were smart because they got high grades on tests and made few mistakes.

Other successful people identify with the prestige of the schools they attended, the clubs or associations they’ve joined, or the employers for whom they work. Some people define themselves by their professional titles, rank, seniority, or income. Some identify with what they own (e.g., a fancy home, an expensive car, particular brands of clothing).

What makes you feel good about yourself?

If your ego is wrapped up in being smart or getting promotions and raises at work, how might that influence how you work?

Will it impact your willingness to be open-minded, stress-test your beliefs (not values), take on projects that have risk, or be a good listener and collaborator?

If your ego is all wrapped up in being liked by others or being part of the “in-group” or getting pay raises or not making mistakes, I invite you to think about whether having that kind of ego will enable or hinder you in becoming a Hyper-Learner.

Will it enable you to excel in new areas that are characterized by more unknowns than knowns and in which learning occurs by doing iterative experiments that in reality will fail most of the time?

We all have egos. What you must confront is the question of whether your ego is so loud that it impedes your ability to become a Hyper-Learner. If there is any risk that the answer for you is yes, then you need to work on cultivating a Quiet Ego.

If you have a loud ego, what should you identify with instead? How else should you define yourself?

This question is probed further in chapter 2. For now, I’ll give you one possible answer based on the concept of NewSmart that co-author Katherine Ludwig and I wrote about in our book Humility Is the New Smart.

In a nutshell, a NewSmart identity would be reflected in the statement: “I will no longer define myself by what I know or how much I know but rather by the quality of my thinking, listening, relating, and collaborating.”

Another answer could be: “I will no longer define myself as being the smartest person in the room but rather as being the best Hyper-Learner I can be.”

Another answer could be to define yourself as: “Striving to be my Best Self every day!” (assuming you define Best Self as having a Quiet Ego, etc.).

Practice Mindfulness Meditation

In all, there are three kinds of wisdom: the wisdom of hearing, the wisdom of reflection, and the wisdom of meditation.
— Matthieu Ricard¹⁹

Meditation is thousands of years old and the fundamental practice of many Buddhist traditions. It is only in recent decades that Western scientists have begun to study the psychological and brain-based effects of certain kinds of meditation, particularly mindfulness meditation. Many of these effects are relevant to cultivating a Quiet Ego and a less self-focused approach to life.

According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, a physician and developer of the world-renowned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, “Mindfulness is awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a sustained and particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”²⁰

Mindfulness meditation is a way of bringing all of your awareness to something specific like your breath or a part of your body or an object or mantra and continually bringing your attention back to that thing every time your mind wanders off, which it inevitably will do.

William James, who is considered the father of American psychology, said, “Voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”²¹

When you are not focused on a particular task in the present moment, your mind typically reverts to the default mode of thinking—self-referential mind-wandering. Research suggests that certain types of meditation, including mindfulness, may quiet down our brain’s default mode, leading to less self-referential mind-wandering. It also suggests that training in mindfulness can lead to an ability to let go of thoughts rather than fixate on or identify with them.

Kabat-Zinn says, “These arisings in the mind—whether they are thoughts or emotions or sensations—self-liberate, dissolve on their own. They don’t lead to anything else, they don’t capture us and pull us away, if we don’t feed them.”²²

In their book Altered Traits, noted author Daniel Goleman and leading neuroscientist and meditation researcher Professor Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin explain that “our sense of self emerges as a property of the many neural subsystems that thread together . . . our memories, our perceptions, our emotions, and our thoughts” and that the goal of many meditation traditions is to make our relationship with all of that less sticky—to train attention away from self-reference and self-identification with thoughts.²³ That is what a Quiet Ego is.

It is somewhat ironic that in order to master ourselves, to become our Best Selves, our “selves” need to become more “selfless”—that is, we need to reduce the amount of time we are consumed by self-referential thinking in order to be more effective with the world outside of us and with others.

If you’ve never tried mindfulness meditation, you could start by practicing placing all of your attention on, say, your breath for two to three minutes without losing focus. If you are new to meditation you will probably struggle. Over and over again, your mind will wander off and you will need to practice not engaging with whatever thoughts it wanders off to (e.g., thoughts about how bad you are at meditating or how hard it is to stay focused) by bringing your attention back to your breath as quickly possible. After a week or so of practicing, you’ll probably be able to expand your practice to 5 minutes. If you practice daily for a couple of months, you’ll probably be able to work up to meditating for 20 minutes at a time.

With enough practice, it’s likely your monkey mind or mind chattering will start to diminish, and you will be more fully aware of and really present with whatever you are doing. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to go into work meetings, one after the other, totally focused on what is happening with inner silence?

As you will see throughout this chapter, mindfulness meditation is actually Inner Peace “superfood.”

Research shows that meditation helps you cultivate all of the qualities of Inner Peace—a Quiet Ego, Quiet Mind, Quiet Body, and a Positive Emotional State—by helping you:

   Enhance your ability to regulate your attention

   Enhance your awareness of subtle body activities

   Regulate your emotions

   Be less self-absorbed and self-centered

   Reduce emotional defensiveness and self-identification

   Improve immune function

   Increase positive emotions

   Reduce reactivity to inner experiences

   Enhance sensory awareness without judgment

   Enhance cognitive functioning

   Decrease heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate

   Be calm

   Reduce activity in the amygdala—the area of the brain involved in responding to emotional stimuli (e.g., anxiety and fear)²⁴

Now I have a question for you. If you want to become a Hyper-Learner why in the world would you not take up mindfulness meditation?

Engage in Acts of Gratitude

All of us owe our successes to the help of mentors, teachers, parents, friends, and work colleagues—the people who opened doors for us, helped us learn, helped us get past difficult times, or unconditionally loved us by always offering support and positive encouragement.

Taking steps to express our gratitude for this help can reduce our tendencies to be self-centered and thus cultivate a Quiet Ego. Example steps include saying thank you in the moment, writing thank-you notes, keeping a gratitude journal, and every night reflecting back on—and thanking silently with exact words—the people who’ve had the biggest positive impacts on your life. All of these steps involve daily reminders that individual success is not all about “me,” and that none of us got here all by ourselves.

Practicing gratitude regularly has other benefits too. According to gratitude researcher Robert A. Emmons, “Clinical trials indicate that the practice of gratitude can have dramatic and lasting effects in a person’s life. It can lower blood pressure, improve immune function, promote happiness and well-being, and spur acts of helpfulness, generosity, and cooperation.”²⁵

Now let’s move on to the second part of achieving Inner Peace.

A QUIET MIND

A Quiet Mind is a calm, silent mind focused on the present moment. There is no chatterbox or monkey mind self-talk going on. It is a quiet state in which you are not intentionally thinking. Let me share what it feels like as best I can. A person with a Quiet Mind has trained his or her mind to, for example, go to a team meeting and focus 100 percent of his or her mind on what the other person is saying without self-talk, without a wandering mind, without silently judging or critiquing what the talker is saying, and without thinking about his or her response while the speaker is speaking.

With a Quiet Mind, you can be in receiving mode—you can focus all of your attention on what another person is communicating—not just on the words being said but on the speaker’s body language, tone, volume, and emotional cues so you can truly understand. A person with a Quiet Mind can go from meeting to meeting all day long with the ability to be totally present with that same calm, silent mind and to give his or her undivided attention to other people as they talk and respond.

A Quiet Mind is not a competitive mind. It is a mind that is trying to perceive the world as it is, not as we personally want it to be. It is totally focused on being fully present in the moment of perceiving—not judging or multitasking or ruminating about the last meeting or planning for the next meeting or worrying about how much longer this meeting is going to last.

The best way to train for a Quiet Mind is through that Inner Peace superfood: mindfulness meditation.

I first tried meditation more than 10 years ago, but I was not dedicated, disciplined, or patient enough to continue. Then I met Ray Dalio, founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, Bridgewater Associates, LP, and builder of a company culture designed to optimize learning and thinking by mitigating ego and fear. I spent a lot of time studying Bridgewater and writing a 50-page chapter on the firm in a prior book, Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization. I spent time with Ray, and he talked about the big influence that meditation had on his life. Watching him conduct meetings and have conversations with colleagues, it was very noticeable that he had learned how to manage himself.

Because of those conversations and observations, I started my second meditation journey eight years ago. This time I was committed. I read some books and listened to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s guided meditations. I started trying to do 3 minutes of mindfulness meditation every day. I worked up to 5 minutes, then 10, then 20, then 30 minutes. I experimented with focusing on my breath, then my heart, then a full body scan. Focusing on my breath works best for me. Today I do 20 to 30 minutes of mindfulness meditation every day. It has changed me and my life all for the better. Thank you, Ray!

Meditation was a big step in my journey to becoming my Best Self (I am still on that journey) and to Inner Peace. I can go through a full workday, from meeting to meeting or conversation to conversation, and have a Quiet Ego and a Quiet Mind. I am not bragging—I am sharing that this stuff works and is achievable. It has enabled me to become a much better listener and a much more open-minded thinker.

About four years ago, I started reading more about Buddhist and Stoic philosophy and Cognitive Behavior Therapy as I was exploring more deeply how I could help clients change behaviors. That led me to try other forms of meditation, including loving-kindness meditation (LKM), which involves cultivating a sense of warmth and goodwill toward others. Studies have linked LKM to increases in positive emotions, compassion, empathy, and social connection, among other benefits. Sharon Salzberg is a well-known LKM expert. Her wonderful book Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connections was my loving-kindness and compassion “coach.” In LKM, instead of focusing on an object as you do in mindfulness meditation, you bring certain people into your awareness and imagine wishing them a life of ease, health, happiness, and the like. Traditionally, you start LKM by sending these wishes to loved ones and then you move on to neutral people and then all living beings.

In addition to mindfulness meditation, I’ve added 5 to 10 minutes of LKM to my daily practices. The words that have worked for me are “I wish you love, joy, peace, and happiness.” I place my right hand over my heart when I do this. What did I learn? After doing this awhile, I found that I felt more kindness toward other people. I was more patient with others and more accepting of the reality of human frailty.

And it did not take long at all for it to help me see the need for more gratitude practice in my life. It brought my heart more to the front and center. Now, every night, right before turning out the light, I do a gratitude meditation, silently talking to people who have passed away without me being as grateful for their help as I should have been, and I do my standard LKM, wishing people I care about who are still alive much love, joy, peace, and happiness, person by person, visualizing them.

So far, we have explored a Quiet Ego and Quiet Mind. Now let’s get our body into the game.

A QUIET BODY

A Quiet Body is a body at peace with itself. It is calm and running smoothly; it is not tense, chronically stressed, anxious, angry, fearful, or experiencing pain. A Quiet Body is key to cultivating Inner Peace and operating at the level of our Best Selves; therefore, it’s key to Hyper-Learning.

To truly cover the complex interrelationship of our bodies, nervous systems, brains, minds, cognition, and emotions is beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that our body is sending signals to our brain all the time and those signals impact us physically, emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally. Our brains respond by triggering responses designed to alleviate what it perceives as potential harm or in ways that maintain the status quo or in ways that enhance our body’s replenishment or enrichment.

Our bodies are constantly seeking energy efficiency and homeostasis, but several factors can upset the balance, including negative emotions, illness, attachment to past disappointments, negative experiences, insecurities and fears, poor diet, inadequate sleep, and generally not taking care of our bodies.

You can enable a Quiet Body by certain meditation practices and by deep breathing practices. These practices can help you calm your body and positively influence your heart rate. We have explored meditation in our discussions about a Quiet Ego and a Quiet Mind. Remember I said in the beginning of this chapter that meditation was a superfood for Inner Peace. Please let me share with you my recent experience with deep breathing.

In January 2018, I started practicing deep breathing exercises that the Navy SEALs do and monitoring my heart rate daily. Now I do my breathing exercises a couple of times a day to regulate the pace of my body—the speed at which I am doing things—in the pursuit of slowing down to be more in the moment. I have become very sensitive to my heart rate, body temperature, and stress. And when I experience a fast heart rate, rising temperature, or stress in parts of my body, I immediately do my deep breathing and my self-talk. I tell myself to slow my motor down, and I try to experience a micro-joy—feeling very positive about someone or nature or something positive in my life.

In October 2019, I added another breathing exercise—Coherent Breathing (breathing five breaths per minute)—which I learned from the book The Healing Power of the Breath by Dr. Richard P. Brown and Dr. Patricia L. Gerbarg. I now use their app for a five-minute breathing exercise in which you take five breaths per minute sitting with your feet on the floor, eyes closed, back straight, and hands resting on each other on your lap. I usually do this early in the morning before I read what I call my Daily Intentions for cultivating Inner Peace. And I do it during the day whenever I feel I am going too fast or being overreactive. Deep breathing, like meditation, is an effective tool for cultivating Inner Peace.

Besides my deep breathing exercises to regulate my body, I have become very disciplined about what and how much I eat. I eliminated alcohol, started exercising regularly, cut my TV watching time down to maybe an hour a week on average, and increased my daily reading time (not counting my research reading) to 60 to 90 minutes a day. Every week, I also listen to a couple of podcasts from thought leaders in a field or discipline that I know little about.

All of this came about because of meditation. I know it sounds like a lot. Some of my students, clients, and friends have argued that my work productivity must have decreased because of all the time allocated to “bettering myself” activities. I tell them that, believe it or not, my work has become more productive and more meaningful because a different me comes to my classes and consulting workshops, and a different me is doing the research and writing. That me is more present. I bring more of the real me to the table, so to speak. I am more able to generate positivity; regulate my emotions, attention, and inner motor; and give my subconscious time to work and do its thing. All of that increases the quality of my engagement as compared to my past. So, by investing in my journey, I am ahead in the game, not behind.

Likewise, I invite you to invest in yourself.

Now let’s move on to the fourth component of achieving Inner Peace.

A POSITIVE EMOTIONAL STATE

Cultivating positive emotions is crucial to becoming your Best Self because the science is crystal clear: when you are in a Positive Emotional State, you are better able to learn and be creative and you have more positive interactions with other humans. While negative emotions like anger, frustration, and fear are known to narrow attention and inhibit prosocial behavior, decades of research in positive psychology strongly correlate positive emotions with less rigid thinking and being more open to new ideas and disconfirming information. Positivity is also associated with better problem solving, better recall of neutral or positive stimuli, and mitigation of ego defenses. This means generating positive emotions is key to Hyper-Learning.

Barbara Fredrickson is a professor and renowned researcher of positive psychology. In my estimation, she is the mother of positivity—the science of positive emotions. She has stated: “In fact, science documents that positive emotions can set off upward spirals in your life, self-sustaining trajectories of growth that can lift you up to become a better version of yourself.”²⁶

Fredrickson is an expert on what she calls positivity resonance, which is the highest level of human connection that results from the sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another. It is a synchronicity between your and another person’s biochemistry and behavior that reflects mutual care and a motive to invest in each other’s well-being. It is clear that the strongest human connections are dependent upon positive emotions, biobehavioral synchrony, and mutual care.

Positivity resonance is highly relevant to Hyper-Learning because, as we have discussed, the types of thinking that humans increasingly will be needing to do in the digital age require the assistance of small teams, and the effectiveness of those teams depends in large part on those teams attaining positivity resonance.

It is not possible for any of us to be in a Positive Emotional State all the time. Nonetheless, the science is clear that we can learn to generate more positive emotions. Since positive emotions are so important as a learning enabler, I have included a Positive Emotional State as a key component of Inner Peace. Positive emotions bring joy and happiness to us, and that is a different kind of peace than is needed for a Quiet Ego, Quiet Mind, and Quiet Body.

Here are some ideas for how to generate more positivity:

   Start with deep breathing—taking slow breaths in and letting your breath out slowly for a couple of minutes.

   Think of a loved one and your last joyous time together and wish him or her joy, peace, and happiness or practice LKM.

   Smile at people—big honest smiles—and wish them a good meeting or a good day. Smile a lot. Smile at people you do not know and say, “Have a good day” (and really mean it).

   Engage in acts of gratitude. You cannot say thank you enough.

   Think of a joyous experience you’ve had.

What has worked well for me is creating micro-joys during my day. For me some micro-joys are focusing mindfully on the beauty of nature, the beauty of colors, the joy of a young child, the unconditional love of a pet, watching a young couple holding hands, seeing a friend in passing and wishing them a good day, thanking a custodian for keeping the bathroom so clean at work, and going out of my way to smile and express gratitude to fellow workers for specific things I have witnessed.

Being kind to others, caring about others, being thankful for what you have, and experiencing simple daily joys all contribute to having a Positive Emotional State.

To raise your positivity, you can also focus on limiting your negative reactions and emotions. I am not talking about avoiding sadness, grief over a lost friend, or the worry that accompanies your own or a loved one’s health crisis. I am talking about actively regulating negative emotions in the workplace when, for example, a co-worker hurts your feelings. You have a choice over how long to allow those kinds of negative emotions to fester. The easiest way to take your mind off a negative emotion is to actively think about something other than your hurt feelings. Rather than ruminating on the negative thoughts, think about a project or your next meeting. Another way is our friend deep breathing. Breathe it away. Another way is positive self-talk.

SHOWING UP WITH INNER PEACE

The day I was finishing this chapter, I spent the morning consulting with a global organization, talking with 70 leaders about Hyper-Learning and the themes in this book. During a break, a senior leader came up to me to discuss a workplace example I gave about Inner Peace, enabling something called emergent thinking (which you will learn more about in part 2). She asked me how she could make emergent thinking happen more often at her place of work. I invited her to consider showing up at more meetings in a state of Inner Peace. She got this sparkle in her eye and said, “That means I need to bring my best self to work every day.” I gave her a big heartfelt smile as my answer. And she returned that smile.