 Welcome. Here we have Ralph to tell us about the value of mindfulness and how it came to Google. Give him some clap. So, have you ever been so angry at someone at work, some time that you really yelled at him or shouted at that person? Or have you ever enjoyed that slight nice experience in your body when you crashed the productive pipeline of your company? I certainly did have that experience when I still was a student and was hired my first week in a research lab to extend the image processing pipeline by a new functionality and I have to say I fucked up my first deployment completely. The entire image pipeline came complete hauled, all the batch jobs crashed and none of my colleagues, all the scientists weren't able to work any longer. So, when they came to see me at the end to see what was going on, they must have seen something like that. I was completely devastated, my stress level was at 100% percent, I was almost panicking and my inner system was basically upside down. So, what happened to me? Let's get meta, let's look from the outside what has happened. Initially, there was just one single fact, a bug. A bug didn't have a real connotation with itself, it's something we attribute to the bug. So, my fantasies I had what the consequences would be of this incident was the worst case I could get fired. At that time, I was a student, my funding was over and I had no money, I was completely broke, so that was my worst case that could happen to me. The second bad one was to be embarrassed in front of all the others. So, this is a real personal thing, so everybody has his own worst case scenario, so find your own and put them here and then you know how it feels for you. What happened in my brain at that moment? In our mammalian brain, we have a little structure called amygdala and the function of the amygdala is to monitor everything that we think, all our thoughts and everything that we perceive and give that an emotional color. That's the way how we feel something about what's going on. If the amygdala thinks that something poses a real threat for us, a physical threat for survival, then it can send really strong signals into our body and fire up the sympathetic nervous system. And if it's really strong, it can take over control over our neocortex and neuroscientists call that amygdala hijack. The way we perceive that is basically danger, so everything fires in our body and we are really ready to battle that situation. And that leads us or that restricts the choice of reactions or reaction patterns to the famous three Fs. The first one is fight, so you're trying to battle that situation. If you see you have no chance to succeed there, you turn to the second one, which is you try to escape from that situation. And if neither fighting or fighting has a chance, then the third one is to freeze. That's what a mouse does when a cat is there. A mouse does have no chance to fight the cat. It does have no chance to run away from the cat. The only chance it has not to move because the view of the cat can only see moving targets. So which one of these three is really optimal for fixing software bugs? None. So let's look at the workflow that happened in my mind. There was a bug, an interpretation, an emotion and a reaction. So where can we interrupt this cascade? In principle you have a good chance to interrupt that right after the fact appeared. And that you can do with seniority in software, if you have more experience in software development, you know, okay, I had bugs in the past, nothing happened, nobody killed me, and I could fix that within three days. That's maybe not possible when the Mars mission is three minutes before landing and your software crashes. And usually it rushes through and then you get a second chance. That's here when the amygdala gets activated but before it fires. And that is a very hard place to intervene because the amygdala is always much faster than the neocortex and it's always much stronger than that. So usually we rush through the last one, the emotion is expressed, and then we can see, can we create enough gap between the emotion and the reaction? And that's something we want to learn. And the tool or the set we can apply to that is emotional intelligence, which is actually a set of skills we can get familiar with. And emotional intelligence basically means that you're able to monitor your inner stays and you're able to react in a proper way to them or respond to them. Dan Goldman, a psychologist, has written a book which has become very famous in the bestseller I think in 2002 or 2005, where he described what the five pillars of emotional intelligence is, the five tools we should get more advanced or more trained in to deal with these kind of situations. And in that talk I will stress the first two ones, basically mainly self-awareness and self-regulation. So now we are on a Python congress, so I thought, oops, one way, we are in a Python congress, so I thought we should explain self-awareness in a Pythonic way. So let's program a class doing that. How would we start that? So we program a class human and how would we implement awareness? So self-awareness is we want to explore our inner state, which is the best library module in Python which we have at hand. Now the inspect module. With the inspect module we explore how the inner state of our interpreter. And if you look up the documentation, inspect live objects, wonderful. So how would you use that one? We started so much later. Self-awareness is basically an endless loop where you inspect what's going on inside. The inside function will become 2.8 if it ever comes, it's quite alpha, so don't expect to read up the documents on it. How would we translate that to our human situation? And there we come to mindfulness. That's the tool which corresponds to inspect.inside. And mindfulness is a practice where you direct the attention of your mind inside your body away from your thoughts into the present moment. So I announced that this talk should be maybe a little bit practical, so I would like to invite you to make a short experience with me now here during the talk. Let's practice mindfulness on the body. So the way that works is most easily if you maybe close your eyes for maybe a minute because you have less distraction, but you can also do it with open eyes. And then imagine that the attention that's currently focused to the outside, you're listening, you're hearing, it's focusing, it's drifting down from your head through your neck like with an escalator into the center of your body. It doesn't matter where in the belly, in the breast, and when you're there in your body, just let your attention float around and just see what you are perceiving. It's not about thinking, it's about perceiving what is going on. You might feel how your buttocks sits on the chair or you might feel how your breast or your belly raises at the in-breath and lowers again at exhaling. So that's what it's meant by having the attention on the body. And that way you feel what is your current inner status, your current inner state. So since we don't have that much time, I would like to ask you to come back. But try to continue with that exercise now during the rest of the talk by keeping maybe 5% or 10% of your attention in the body while you're listening to me. And I come back to that later. So back to the code. What else is to do in that loop? Nothing. Self-awareness is just you notice what's going on and you continue with the loop. Really? Really? Nothing else to do. The problem is when challenges come up and the two main challenges are judgment and distraction. Let's continue with distraction, with judgment. The judgment is if you apply the evil eval function on your inner state. The outcome of that is either bad or good. So if it's bad, you usually try to deny or suppress what you're feeling. That really usually kicks you out of the loop. If it's good, then you're trying to attach to it and that works like a carpet. You get stuck in there. So the advice I would like to give you is whatever bubbles up from the inside by watching it, by feeling it, just watch it, don't judge it and be gracious. I mean, sometimes things come up which you don't like. It doesn't matter what air bubbles up the air bubble at the surface of the water just dissolves in itself. Now, how do we address distraction? That's a bit more difficult. You have to understand that mindfulness is not a state. It's a continuous process of refocusing, of refocusing your attention. So if you look at that graph here, you see we start with attention on the body or on the breath. Then at some point there comes a distraction. It would be a thought which carries your way. So usually that takes time until you realize that by applying meta attention. So waking up and then say, oh, I lost my meditation or my mindfulness. And then you refocus your attention and you go back to the breath. And so that's a continuous process like that. You do it for a minute or two or whatever. And noticing the distraction is actually the difficult part. So mindfulness can be summarized as simpler do as we saw in our little exercise. But it's really not so easy to sustain. How would we improve mindfulness? In Tibetan there's a word called gom. And there's a literal translation of that word to English, which means to familiarize with, to get trained, to get used to something. And in European language or in English language, that's usually translated to the word meditation. Which has, for many people, strange side effects, sounds maybe esoteric or very hard to do. But meditation actually is just a family of mental practices which you apply to get used to a certain inner process. So it's really a mind training. It's not believing something. It's really applying a real training to your mind. The other connotation we have is when we do meditation, we have to sit still for two hours and are not allowed to move. And that's actually not possible. That destroys everything. A much better approach to meditation is to apply it short moments and repeat those often. My favorite training situation is a red traffic light. So you sit in the car, there's anything, nothing you can do. And in Germany it's not even allowed to use a mobile phone. So you really can take that 30 seconds, keep your eyes open. So you see when the light turns green. And just feel into your body. You can do the same thing in an escalator going up or when you wait for the bus. These are excellent situations where to apply it. You don't need extra time, extra space, you don't have to dress red like me or whatever. So it's just that nobody sees that. It's much more difficult to apply mindfulness when you work on a computer. At least I find that. It's hard to find the moments to remember that. And the good technique I found is a Pomodoro technique. So in principle, you have an alarm clock that you set to 25 minutes. And then we're going to task. And then after 25 minutes you put a break of five minutes, practice meditation, practice mindfulness. And then you go on four or five times. And then you have, in a natural way, have moments of mindfulness where you recreate also your system during your work. You can see the details on the Pomodoro page. So a short reminder who still keeps presence in his body while talking. And you can see a few of them. Okay, great. So what the heck is that good for? Just to feel well. With that question we come to the second, the list of then-gold men from self-awareness to self-regulation. And self-regulation is the outcome of being aware of what you perceive. So if you don't know what's going on, you cannot regulate it. Self-regulation is extremely important when it comes to strong emotions. The strong emotions have the problem that we think or we identify with them. We think it's really existential. I am angry. I am sad. We don't get any distance to what's happening. So with mindfulness you will be able to see an emotion as a physiological event going on in your body, which you can watch actually. And that helps you to create a little distance between what's going on and how you feel. And that will allow you at the end to regulate down from your neocortex the amygdala, which again regulates down the physical expression in your body. And that's actually the way to really respond if something is going on in your current situation. So at the end that leads to that you are going to respond to triggers, instead to reacting them. Reaction is fight, flight or freeze. Responding is to make a decision of what I want to do next. So some big companies have seen that emotion intelligence is a real valuable asset. And so Google initiated a program in about 2000, which was driven by Jadimeng Tang, a software engineer working there from the early days on. And he understood very quickly, he was a Buddhist, but he understood quickly that all of that doesn't make sense if people just have to believe something. They invited neuroscientists and psychologists to see what part of the Buddhist techniques can we take into an environment which is really science driven. And so they assembled a curriculum that you can go there and learn that and study with them. And that ended up in this, and it's completely written up in that book Search Inside Yourself. It's a 10 euro book. It's absolutely worth reading. It collects everything and goes much further on what I have been now explaining. So I would really recommend getting a copy. And if you go on their website, they have even a video tutorials and the guy you see here, that's Meng. And he explained in, I think, in 10 or 20 minutes sessions all different chapters of that book in nicely viewable sections. So definitely have a look at that. Who's using that in industry? There are a couple companies who have applied or are applying these kind of techniques in their company. And I'm one specifically stress SAP because I personally know the two trainers there. They have been sent a couple years ago or two or three years ago to California, really to Google to run through that program, and become a real official trainer. And now they are running courses at SAP in Heidelberg for 100 or even 1000 people in a regular way. So it's a part of the business strategy in the meantime. Who still remembers the exercise? Great. So the mantra I would like to give you home as short moments repeated often. That's the easiest way to apply mindfulness during the normal day. And it will change you and it will possibly change your life. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Rolf. Who has questions? That's far. Don't stumble. Hi. First the comments. I'm really, really happy to see this talk here because it seems like the employer always have an assumption that we are all grown up emotionally stable human beings. So this is a great contribution. I wanted to ask you in the practices of applying mindfulness at work. How does that... Is there like a dedicated place for beginners or how does the company encourage its employers to be mindful? Oh, that really depends on the company you're working on. I'm doing that right on my desk. Or I leave my desk and that's usually what I recommend with the Pomodoro technique. Don't do the mindfulness moments in front of the computer because you have the tendency to be stuck back into your work immediately. So I would recommend stand up, walk a little bit around, have a breath at the window. And if your company doesn't provide real rooms for that, which most companies don't do, then you have to really find your own solution. I don't know SAP if they have meditation rooms. I mean, I started a project there on Monday for two months. So I will definitely get in touch again with these guys and see from inside how they are doing that. But I don't know today. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you for the great talk. I'm wondering, when you talk about getting distance from your emotions so you're not angry but you understand that you have anger, does that make you less happy because you can't be happy as a person? And does it make you harder to experience happiness? Happiness is something really special. I didn't touch that here because it's not so easy to explain. All the Buddhists talk about there's something in you which is called happiness without reason. So if we get free of all our fears and all our tensions and all our sorrows and really settle down our mind, there's an instance in us where the happiness comes out from the inside without you doing anything. And that's something you also can just realize or recognize, but there's nothing to do with it because it doesn't distract you from anything. So there you don't have to apply this distinction between something that distracts me or harms me or whatever it is because it's just a nice floating feeling in your body. Happiness without reason. Thank you. But I'm also thinking about other positive feelings, maybe excitement which maybe aren't just natural but are positive. So again, I come back to the Buddhist point of view and they say nothing is persistent, everything goes away. So if you attach too much to your excitement, then at the end you will be disappointed when it's no longer there. So they say, okay, feel the excitement, see that it's there, but don't attach too much to it. That was one of the loops I programmed. So detachment is the problem to it. You can feel it, you can have it, but you don't cling to it. Any more questions? Meanwhile, could you please put the slide for the video? I didn't catch the slide with the video for the meditation. Ah, okay. I have two questions. This one? The first one is when you are meditating, but you were previously working on fixing some bug and suddenly during meditation you have idea how you could fix it. Then what you do? This is the first question and the second one, because the practice is of religious origin. Have you had any issues in the company? I mean, if you were somehow criticized as if you were doing religious propaganda. So the first question was, I have a great idea while you're meditating. I think that happens quite a lot because when you're meditating, your mind settles somehow. You don't know these snowballs where you can shake, there's snow all over there and thinking is a constant shaking of that snowball. So the snowflakes there inhibit a clear view. If you let the snowball settle, then suddenly your mind gets clear and then you can see solutions which you haven't seen because you were blocked by conceptual thinking. So that happens quite a lot. Usually I trust that I remember that after my meditation. If it's really necessary, put a piece of paper next to you and just write it down quickly and then let it go again and continue your meditation. That's what I would recommend. The second one is to be called religious when you start with mindfulness or something like that. I mean, that risk has also been here for me on that conference. I think it's depending on the way how you present it to your employer. The Search Inside Yourself book, I think it's a perfect way to suggest how that could work for people who are really rational thinking and what we all are, but don't really like having a religious color to it. So by reading that book, I think you will find a lot of arguments to go for this subject without touching the religious part. So that's what I would maybe suggest to you. Is that answer your question a little bit? Unfortunately, we have no more time for questions. Be mindful of the lightning talks. Thank you, Ralph.