Wouldn’t you know a Google engineer would write one of the clearest, most straightforward, easy-to-compute books on mindfulness that I’ve read in a long time.  Actually it’s a book on mindfulness and emotional intelligence based on the seven week course being taught at Google called “Search Inside Yourself.”  Mindfulness is like having a search engine for your body, feelings, and thoughts, as well as for the ability to understand and relate to other people.

Mindfulness, once again, is proposed as the key for harnessing your ability to respond to your life instead of react to it.  In this book , the response you make to your life is one predicated on an increase of your emotional intelligence.  Daniel Goleman, who pioneered work on emotional intelligence, broke it down into five domains:  self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.   Not hard to see how competencies in these areas would be useful.

Chade-Meng Tan (more informally known as Meng) who wrote Search Inside Yourself and developed the course by the same name had the good fortune of working with and learning from Daniel Goleman (who wrote the book on Emotional Intelligence),  Philippe Goldin (a Stanford University scientist), Norman Fischer (Zen Buddhist priest and poet ), Mirabai Bush (co-founder of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society), Marc Lesser (CEO and Zen Teacher), and Yvonne Ginsberg (meditation teacher and professional coach ).  That’s a pretty impressive line-up.  And, I have to say, the results are FANTASTIC.

Buy the book and go to the Search Inside Yourself website and listen to Meng and his colleagues as they introduce the seven weeks on video.

I’d give you a money back guarantee (but I didn’t write the book).  Darn!