Chade-Meng Tan > Quotes

“There is a simple technique for self-regulation called “affect labeling,” which simply means labeling feelings with words. When you label an emotion you are experiencing (for example, “I feel anger”), it somehow helps you manage that emotion.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“The key is to let go of two things: grasping and aversion. Grasping is when the mind desperately holds on to something and refuses to let it go. Aversion is when the mind desperately keeps something away and refuses to let it come. These two qualities are flip sides of each other. Grasping and aversion together account for a huge percentage of the suffering we experience, perhaps 90 percent, maybe even 100 percent.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“happiness is not something that you pursue; it is something you allow.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming really interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Which is just another way of saying that the way to make a friend is to be one. —Dale Carnegie”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“The more we are able to create space between stimulus and reaction, the more control we will have over our emotional lives.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“When your meta-attention becomes strong, you will be able to recover a wandering attention quickly and often, and if you recover attention quickly and often enough, you create the effect of continuous attention, which is concentration.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“People who are optimistic react to setbacks from a presumption of personal power. They feel that setbacks are temporary, are isolated to particular circumstances, and can eventually be overcome by effort and abilities. In contrast, people who are pessimistic react to setbacks from a presumption of personal helplessness. They feel that setbacks are long lasting, generalized across their lives, and are due to their own inadequacies, and therefore cannot be overcome.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“The greatest freedom in life is to be aware of the moments that you are free from pain”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“She wrote two versions of her obituary. The first version reflected how things would turn out given her then-current life trajectory. The second version reflected the life she aspired to live.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“Thich Nhat Hanh has a very nice way of putting it: wilting flowers do not cause suffering; it is the unrealistic desire that flowers not wilt that causes suffering.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“He describes three types of happiness: pleasure, passion, and higher purpose.1            1.    Pleasure: This type of happiness is about always chasing the next high. It is the rock-star type of happiness because it is very hard to maintain unless you are living the lifestyle of a rock star.            2.    Passion: Also known as “flow,” where peak performance meets peak engagement, and time flies by.            3.    Higher Purpose: This is about being part of something bigger than yourself that has meaning to you.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“A beautiful way to practice mindfulness, which is almost guaranteed to improve your social life, is to apply mindfulness toward others for the benefit of others. The idea is very simple—give your full moment-to-moment attention to another person with a nonjudgmental mind, and every time your attention wanders away, just gently bring it back. It is just like the meditation we have been practicing, except the object of meditation is the other person. You”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“Or as Michael Jordan says, “You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“To quote Viktor Frankl, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“The real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Perhaps the most important thing is to constantly aspire to serve the greater good. If you always try to practice compassion and you are always trying to benefit the people around you and beyond, the good people around you will love you and want to help you.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters to what lies within us. —Ralph Waldo Emerson”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.2”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“The most important time is now, because now is the only time which you have some control over. The most important person is the person you’re interacting with. The most important thing to do is to do your best to serve the person you are interacting with.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“What we think, do, and pay attention to changes the structure and functions of our brains!”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“In every conversation, there are actually three conversations going on. They are the content conversation (“What happened?”), the feelings conversation (“What emotions are involved?”), and the identity conversation (“What does this say about me?”).”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“We have a mind condition that makes us itch for two types of pleasure: pleasure of the senses and pleasure of the ego. When our senses are pleasantly stimulated, as when we eat something tasty, or our ego is pleasantly stimulated, as when we are praised for something we did, we feel joy, which is good. What is even better is if we can feel joy independent of sense or ego pleasure. For example, when we are eating chocolate, we experience joy, and when we are just sitting there not eating chocolate, we still experience joy. In order to do this, we train the mind to access joy even when it is free from stimulation. This is also the secret of raising your happiness set point.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“In the context of the work environment, emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space.In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness. Mindfulness practice gives calmness and clarity which increases the space for us.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“If you want to become an agent of change, you have to remember to keep your sense of humor.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

“Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“Four very helpful general principles for dealing with any distressing emotions are:          1.  Know when you are not in pain.          2.  Do not feel bad about feeling bad.          3.  Do not feed the monsters.          4.  Start every thought with kindness and humor.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“The keyword is practice. Mindfulness is like exercise—it is not sufficient to just understand the topic; you can only benefit from it with practice.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness

“The main reason we do not listen to others is that we get distracted by our own feelings and internal chatter, often in reaction to what the other person said. The best way to respond to these internal distractions is to notice and acknowledge them. Know that they are there, try not to judge them, and let them go if they are willing to go. If feelings or other internal distracters decide to stay around, let them be and just be aware of how they may affect your listening. You can think of dipping as self-directed mindfulness during listening.”
― Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness