A few years ago, I signed up for something called a 360 review.
(Laughter)
If you've ever worked in the corporate world, you probably have heard of this diabolical exercise.
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It’s an anonymous survey with your bosses, peers and direct reports, and the idea is to get a panoramic sense of your strengths and weaknesses. I opted for the colonoscopy version of a 360 review.
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Which included my wife, my brother and two of my meditation teachers. In all, 16 people gave hour-long confidential interviews, and I was then handed a 39-page report brimming with blind quotes. I can tell you're looking forward to hearing the results. Sadists.
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But I'm going to make you wait a second, because I should give you a little background on me. I used to be an anchorman. I worked at ABC News for 21 years. It was a very stressful job. In fact, I had a panic attack live on the air in 2004 while delivering some otherwise mundane headlines. The good news is that my nationally televised freakout ultimately led me to meditation, which I had actually long rejected as ridiculous. I was raised by a pair of atheist scientists. I'm a fidgety, skeptical guy. And that kind of led me to unfairly lump meditation in with aura readings, vision boards and dolphin healing. But the practice really helped me with my anxiety and depression. And so my goal became to make meditation attractive to my fellow skeptics by ditching the New Age cliches and liberally using the f-word.
(Laughter)
To my great surprise, this unorthodox approach turned me into a quasi self-help guru. And a few years into this trip, I decided that I wanted to get a sense of whether my inner work was having outer results, you know? Was meditation making me a nicer person? And that's why I signed up for the 360. And now I will tell you about the results.
The first 13 pages were dedicated to my sterling qualities. People talked about how hardworking and intelligent I was. Many also said meditation had made me more caring. But then came 26 pages of beatdown.
(Laughter)
The first blow was that some reviewers noted that I had a penchant for being rude to junior staffers, which was deeply embarrassing. But it only got worse. I was called emotionally guarded, a diva and an authoritarian.
(Quiet laughter)
I don't know why that's funny.
(Laughter)
Some people even questioned my motives for promoting meditation. It got so bad that at one point my wife, who was reading it with me, got up and went to the bathroom and cried. I think for me the most painful part was realizing that the aspects of my personality that I was most ashamed of and had really tried to hide were in fact on full display for everybody. And those included my two most prominent and problematic demons: anger and self-centeredness.
(Clears throat)
Sorry. I've never talked about this publicly before.
(Applause)
Thank you.
I thought we weren't supposed to applaud authoritarians here at TED.
(Laughter)
Bottom line, meditation had helped, for sure, but I clearly retained the capacity to be a schmuck, and I am not alone in this. All kinds of bad behavior have been on the rise. Reckless driving, unruly airline passengers, violent crime, online bullying, workplace incivility, tribal antagonism, even general self-centeredness. At times, it can really feel like our social fabric is unraveling.
So after my 360, I decided to do some work on myself and to see if I could also learn some things that, by extension, might help the species. I pulled every lever at my disposal. I did psychotherapy, communications coaching, bias training, couples counseling and more. And while I was really grateful to be able to do all of this stuff and all of it helped, I was still finding myself too often getting selfish or snippy. So I signed up for a nine-day silent retreat where I would practice a kind of meditation that has been shown to boost your capacity for warmth. It’s called “loving-kindness,” which, as you might imagine, sounded to me like Valentine's Day with a gun to my head.
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But I was in it to win it. I really wanted to be a nicer person. I kept getting tripped up though, because the woman who was running the retreat, my teacher, her name is Spring Washam, she kept insisting that if I wanted to be less of a jerk to other people, I needed to start by being less of a jerk to myself, which I thought was the kind of thing you hear from Instagram influencers and spin instructors, so --
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And she even went so far as to suggest that when I saw my demons emerging in meditation, I should put my hand on my heart and say to myself, "It's OK, sweetie. I'm here for you."
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Hard pass.
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Pasadena. I was not going to do that.
But over the ensuing days of nonstop meditation, I did notice that my twin demons were in full effect. My anger had me rehearsing glorious, expletive-filled speeches I would deliver to my boss about the various promotions I deserved. My self-centeredness had me writing my own five-star Amazon reviews for my various books, praising my elegant prose and rugged good looks.
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And in the face of all of this roostering and rage, I layered on an avalanche of self-criticism. I told myself a whole story about how I was an incurably self-obsessed, cranky monster who had cloven hooves and a retractable jaw.
After about five or six days of drinking from this fire hose, I caved. Mid-meditation, I put my hand on my heart, and while I definitely was not going to call myself "sweetie," I did silently say to myself, "It's all good, dude, I know this sucks, but I've got you." This was very strange and embarrassing, but in this moment, I had an epiphany. I realized that my demons were actually just ancient, fear-based neurotic programs, probably injected into me by the culture, by my parents. And they were trying to help me. It was the organism trying to protect itself. And when I stopped fighting them, they calmed down for a few seconds. I didn't have to slay them. I just had to give them a high five. And this counterintuitive extension of warmth was not, I realized, it was not indulgent. It was radical disarmament.
Here's the way I think about this. At any given moment, we humans have two choices or two spirals that are available to us. The first is what my friend Evelyn Tribole calls the toilet vortex. The reason why this looks childish and ridiculous is that I drew it myself.
(Laughter)
It's OK, sweetie. You're good at so many other things.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
I probably shouldn't make fun of the thing I'm going to try to get you to do, but ... The toilet vortex might start like this. You're picking on yourself because you don't like the way you look in the mirror. You're unhappy with your level of productivity or you have failed to achieve ketosis, whatever. And then you take that out on other people and then you are feeling more miserable, and then down you go.
The vastly superior alternative is what I call the cheesy upward spiral. This one was drawn by a professional.
(Laughter)
As your inner weather gets balmier, because you've learned how to high-five your demons, that shows up in your relationships with other people. And because relationships are probably the most important variable when it comes to human flourishing, your inner weather improves even further and up you go. And that is the whole point here. Self-love, properly understood, not as narcissism, but as having your own back, is not selfish. It makes you better at loving other people. And the flip side of this was on full display in my 360. All the ways in which I was torturing myself showed up in my relationships with other people. And as those relationships suffered, so did I.
Taken together, my two excellent drawings represent a kind of amateur unified field theory of love. I call it “Me, A Love Story.”
(Laughter)
That's a deliberately ridiculous name, but I am actually pretty serious about using the word "love." Granted, it's a confusing term because we use it to apply to everything from our spouses to our children to gluten-free snickerdoodles. But I am comfortable embracing the broadness of the term. I consider love to be anything that falls within the human capacity to care, a capacity wired deeply into us via evolution. It's our ability to care, cooperate and communicate that has allowed Homo sapiens to thrive. And it is a failure to exercise that muscle, it is a lack of love that I think is at the root of our most pressing problems, from inequality to violence to the climate crisis. Obviously, these are all massive problems that are going to require massive structural change, but at a baseline they also require us to care about one another. And it is harder to do that when you're stuck in a ceaseless spiral of self-centered self-flagellation.
(Applause)
Thank you.
So I guess what I'm trying to say here is there's a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together.
(Laughter)
And the massively empowering news is that love is not an unalterable factory setting. It is a skill that you can train. It's actually a family of skills. After my 360, I learned a whole bunch of practices for upping my love game, and I'm going to share two with you right now that I think would be very easy to integrate into your life. The first is to boot up a practice of loving-kindness meditation. I should say that it does not require you to subscribe to some fancy metaphysical program, and it shouldn't take up too much time. Maybe a few minutes a couple of times a week to start. The instructions are really simple. Find a reasonably quiet place. Assume a comfortable position, close your eyes and begin by envisioning a really easy person. Maybe a good friend, maybe a pet. And then you repeat in your mind four phrases: "May you be happy, may you be safe, may you be healthy, may you live with ease." After you've generated a little warmth, you do a bait-and-switch and move onto yourself. Once again, you conjure the image and send the phrases. After that, it's on to a mentor, somebody who's helped you in your life. Then a neutral person, somebody you might overlook. Then a difficult person, probably not hard to find. And then we finish with all beings everywhere. To some of you, this may seem forced and treacly, but it's worth noting that the research shows that this practice has physiological, psychological and even behavioral benefits.
The other practice I'm going to recommend is to start consciously counterprogramming against your inner critic. Next time you notice yourself going down the toilet, if nobody's looking, put your hand on your heart and talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend. For ambitious people, this may be a little scary. You might fear it's going to erode your edge. But research shows that this process of replacing your sadistic inner tyrant with a supportive inner coach, who has high standards but is not a jerk about it, makes you more likely to reach your goals.
Now, I will cop to the fact that even though I've now retired from my job as a news man and am a full-time meditation evangelist, I still go down the toilet on the regular. But I'm much more likely to access the upward spiral these days. In fact, three years after my 360, I got another one, because I never learn. And this one was way different. People gushed about how much I had changed as a friend and a mentor and a colleague. They talked about specific meetings where I used to be a prosecutor and was now delightful. One person said, “His ego is shrinking,” which I think was a compliment. And another person said, “He’s finding his heart,” which the new me let pass.
(Laughter)
After she finished reading, my wife turned to me and said, "Congratulations, now you're boring."
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I'm hoping that was a joke because in my opinion, upping your love game is anything but boring. It’s countercultural because it cuts against the never-enoughness and always-behindness that society seems to want us to feel. It’s courageous because it’s hard to look at your demons. And it’s happiness-producing because when you high-five your demons, they don't own you as much. And all of that makes you more generous and more available. If that sounds grandiose or touchy-feely to you, let me put it to you another way. The view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass.
(Laughter)
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
