May 18, 2014 7:27AM  |
 Chade-Meng Tan’s job description would never get past most companies’ human resources departments. As the head of mindfulness training at Google, his role is to enlighten minds, open hearts and create world peace.But he hopes that one day, his role will become commonplace. A growing awareness of the importance of our emotional fitness, he says, is mirroring the same journey of acceptance that physical exercise took in the last century. And he believes that scientific evidence of the benefits of the Buddhist practice of mindfulness will be instrumental into catapulting it into the very heart of the business world.Tan, who is officially known as the search engine giant’s Jolly Good Fellow, likes to live up to his image of joking around and points out that mindfulness is moving away from its association with mysticism — or with people from San Francisco. “If you are a company leader who says employees should be encouraged to exercise, nobody looks at you funny,” Tan says. “The same thing is happening to meditation and mindfulness, because now that it’s become scientific, it has been demystified. It’s going to be seen as fitness for the mind.”
Through the development of apps and other software, tech companies such as Google will have a major part to play in mainstreaming mindfulness, he predicts. In the same way that the pedometer has influenced exercise, these apps could similarly popularize mindfulness, Tan says. He speaks, for example, of devices that will be able to show how meditation impacts brain waves, potentially creating a whole industry of professional trainers. “Just imagine setting a goal like ‘a year from now, I want to be able to calm my mind in 40% of the time it takes me now’ and my personal trainer is accountable to that target,” he says. But what has all this got to do with the cutthroat world of business? Tan says that mindfulness opens the doorway to loving kindness, which is at the heart of business success. “In many situations, goodness is good for business,” he says. “If you, as the boss, are nice to your employees, they are happy, they treat their customers well, the customers are happy to spend more money, so everybody wins. “Also if you treat everybody with kindness, they’ll like you even if they don’t really know why. And if they like you, they want to help you succeed. So it’s good for your soul and it’s good for your career.” (continued…)
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