The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (& World Peace)
How do we get from inner peace to world peace? Chade-Meng Tan (CMT), Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow” and author of New York Times-bestseller Search Inside Yourself, gave insights and practical guidance on how each of us can develop mindfulness and bring kindness, compassion, and peace to our daily lives and philanthropic endeavors.
CMT: I bring attention to my breathing. It runs away. I bring it back. How can this possibly benefit me? To answer the question let’s use an analogy. The analogy is, imagine I just show you one bicep curl. If I do that you should be asking the same question. I take a heavy object, I move it up, I move it down. How can this possibly benefit me? If, however, you know about exercise you know the answer. The answer is every time I do one of these this thing strengthens a little bit more. So if I do a lot of this, I develop a quality called strength, right. It’s through training I develop strength. Same thing here. Every time the mind wanders away I bring it back. Every time I bring it back it’s like doing one bicep curl for the mind. And specifically you’re strengthening the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain over here. And if you do a lot of this, this part becomes strong and gains mastery over attention.
So attention no longer masters over you. You master over attention. And through mastering over attention, you then develop the ability to calm the mind on demand. This is inner peace. And with that ability you begin to develop inner joy, and with that, compassion. There’s one intermediate step, which to me is a really important step between inner joy and compassion. And the step is loving kindness, or kindness for short. So the question is: what is the difference. Sounds like the same thing. I’m going to give you the technical definition. Technically kindness is defined as wishing for others to be happy. Compassion is defined as wishing for other to be free from suffering. Sounds the same, so what are differences?
The first difference is that compassion necessarily involves motivation. Kindness doesn’t always involve motivation. The second difference is, because of that, kindness is easier. And because it’s easier it’s a gateway drug to compassion. So next question, how do you train kindness? The way to do that is with a mental habit. The mental habit of kindness is looking at a random human being and thinking, “I wish for this person to be happy.”? That’s the first thought that comes to mind.
Imagine developing this habit. Habit becomes personality. Personality becomes character. Character becomes you. And therefore by just developing a habit it becomes you. You become a kind person.
This, to me this is mindful philanthropy. There is the inner component (mindfulness, inner peace, inner joy) and then this outer component, which is compassion, which necessarily involves motivation and action.
If everybody in the world develops these qualities, together with ending poverty, injustice and environmental destruction, then I think we have the necessary and sufficient conditions for world peace in our lifetimes. That’s what I’m trying to do.
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In conversation with Angélique Kidjo, Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and founder of the Batonga Foundation Video & transcript
As a singer, Angélique Kidjo (AK) uses her voice to reach people in places of power as well as in places where people are really disenfranchised. At the Members Meeting, Angélique explained to GPC member Monica Winsor the roots of her desire to go back to Africa and help women in those communities.
AK: Every time I go back to Africa I’m reminded by the women of Africa that one lesson that we can teach every woman, every single human being on this planet: we have to be open to fail to be able to prevail. If you don’t fail you don’t know what life is. Once you fail, don’t stick on the ground too long. Get yourself back up and start thinking about how you project yourself in the future, not blaming anybody for the outcome of your failure but just moving out of that place. Move forward and just take the world for you because you belong to the world.
And those African women, I wish I can bottle their energy and their smiles and give it to people around. When I was recording my last album the women of Benin and Kenya, they showed me grace. They showed me strength. During this process of recording not only did the women talk about their own daughters, how they are passionate about the education of their girls, but also how they are perceived outside of Africa. And no one ever talked to me like that about it. One woman there said to me, “Can you explain to us. You live in America. You go to France. You travel all over the world. Can you tell me and explain to me why is it that the western countries, the rich country want to portray us always through the lens of poverty, being naked, having fly in our eyes? Just, we are misery. We are raped. We are this. We are that. We are never positively presented on the media in your country there where you live. There are women in the country where you live, they’re all really fortunate. Nothing ever happens to them.” And that took me aback. Why do we do that? If we see African women as victims we never can help them get out of poverty. It’s not the condition that matters. It’s the trust. And that is something I’m reminded of and that’s what I fight for. Give voices to the African women, to the African young girl, the teenagers, the woman of tomorrow, the one that will transform my continent and the world. Give them the platform they need to tell you what they need to prevail.
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In conversation with Eileen Fisher, designer and founder of Eileen Fisher, Inc.
A self-described shy kid, Eileen Fisher (EF) talked with Peggy Dulany on how she sees mindfulness practices, such as moments of silence or pauses before meetings, benefitting her company and employees.
EF: I think it helps us to get to more clarity, to make better decisions, to come into the moment. We’re all carrying baggage. For me it is family stuff, or it’s whatever that we carry into the meetings. Or we just carry the last meeting into this meeting and our minds are going a mile a minute. So if we just can stop when we come into the meeting then we have more chance of making more conscious choices. And what we’ve seen that’s actually been very interesting is a real sort of deepening of the work, and more caring, and more seeing the opportunities from where each different person sits about what they can do to make a difference through the company. It’s been very interesting. We’ve had people just totally light up around sustainability. We have massive efforts in the company to change the way we do business from our dye houses, to organic cotton, and organic linen, and chlorine-free wool, all those levels. People see how they can treat each other differently. People see how we can work together better, just so many different opportunities.
In our company, it’s around creativity, intuition, instincts about what’s going on underneath, all of that. I think the more embodied we are the more conscious, and more mindful, and more enlivened, and all those things come along with it.
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Insight Talks
Insight Talks give GPC members a platform for sharing personal insights, impressions, and perspectives from their work with the wider Circle. At the 2015 meeting, Albina du Boisrouvray introduced the FXB Village Toolkit, a field-tested, transparent roadmap of FXB International’s learnings and methodology for eradicating extreme poverty. Bobby Sager took us on a virtual journey with him and his family as they visit and build understanding of communities and poverty factors at the grassroots level. Finally, Ron Bruder, founder of Education for Employment,
Albina du Boisrouvray
We are a step for the ultra-poor. The FXB Village model we created simultaneously targets the five drivers of poverty, which are food, health care, housing, nutrition, and an income. Extreme poverty is a complex cycle, as we all know, that is very hard to break. Yet when we tackle simultaneously the five drivers of poverty, we can build families’ ability to overcome that poverty and put all of us on a better path to achieving the sustainable development goals by 2030. With the global release of the FXBVillage Model Toolkit and Planning Guide, we’re asking researchers, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, policymakers, non-profit organizations, and community leaders to apply this model that works for a more sustainable world. And we feel that sharing with others and replicating is the way to scale up, which is always the goal that governments look for.
Ron Bruder
Unemployment for college graduates is roughly double what it is for those that have just gone to high school. And that ratio applies throughout the Middle East - North Africa region. The bottom line is the more training you get, the less your opportunities are because the things you’re learning are not the things that are needed in the workplace. So we decided to form it nine years ago little differently. We believe that if these societies are going to prosper and be peaceful and be good global citizens, it’s necessary that the youth have reasonable opportunities and have the same opportunity that we do. As we go into these countries and do more and more, I think we’re beginning, in some instances, to create a tipping point where if we enough training it becomes unacceptable for other institutions to have business as usual and for their kids to go through programs and not get a job.
Bobby Sager
Sixteen years ago my wife and I decided, that’s enough business, we made enough money. We only ever wanted to make money so we could have choices in life, and then it’s a matter of what you do with those choices. We took our kids out of school. At the time they were eight years and six years old. We said, “What we’re going to do is go live around the world, staying in a place long enough and close enough to the ground to really understand what’s going on, to really listen and to really understand.”? The idea was to see if there was a way that I could reapply the same skills that I used to make money to make a difference-knowing how to hire the right people, knowing how to make a plan, just knowing how to do deals and get things done. And the most critical part was my wife and I saying to one another, “how can we use the family resources to help make the kids more thankful, more filled with gratitude?” because from our standpoint, and I’m sure that you would agree, being thankful is the absolute center of being happy. Let’s go into the world. Let’s go outside of our bubble. And as a result of that let’s try to help a whole bunch of people in a way that you can’t do from a distance.
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Conversational breakouts
Topic A: Impact investing
Facilitated by Irene Pritzker and Elliott Donnelley
Topic B: Technology for scale
Facilitated by Alexandre Mars and Hylton Appelbaum
Topic C: Guided meditation and journaling
Facilitated by Chade-Meng Tan
Topic D: Building trust for partnerships
Facilitated by Jerry Hirsch and Peggy Dulany