Search Inside Yourself: How Google Brought Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence to the Forefront

I am a rational person; I feel a lot, but I am also very rational. I want (maybe even need) to understand the why, the how, the purpose of something to really ‘get it’, believe it, buy into it, and most importantly, do it. Mindfulness has always been one of those things where intuitively I understood the ‘why’, but still had trouble understanding the ‘how’, or potentially believing in the ‘how’. If you’ve read my previous piece about Culture Change, you might know by now that I am not one for buzzwords. I like to break things apart, chew them up, throw them around, and then put them back together in a way that makes sense to me. This is what I’ve done for mindfulness and emotional intelligence… with a little help from a Jolly Good Fellow (which nobody can deny).

No seriously, Jolly Good Fellow (which nobody can deny), also known as Chade-Meng Tan, an ex-Software Engineer now-Emotional Intelligence guru, is the leader of the Search Inside Yourself personal development programme at Google. On the 24th of April, Tan addressed a room of 650 people congregated in London to hear him speak of his work. And yes, that really is his job title!