 Okay, unfasten your seatbelts. So, what a time we live in, I don't think any of us could have begun to imagine the intensity and the complexity of the times we're in, so as we begin I'd like to invite you just pause for a moment and look within and just be mindful of the questions that are most alive within you and stirring within you and keep in mind that those questions really serve to set the filters of your attention for what you pay attention to and can extract from the waves of intuitive intelligence that arise to you. We've been blessed and challenged to work with the U.S. military quite a bit and we're on base for six months full time running the once secret Jedi warrior training program, training 25 of the most elite soldiers on this planet to learn how to recognize and befriend their inner enemies and to stop the war inside. Needless to say the implications are huge. One of the most useful ideas we picked up in working with the military is this notion that we live in VUCA times, times that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and highly ambiguous. Can anybody else relate to that who's not in the military? Needless to say these are huge challenges and they're all pervasive and this meme is finding its way out into the mainstream in many places in business. We wrote an article on VUCA savvy leadership for the American Management Association a few years ago to us kind of the mantra and the meaning and the mission statement for the work we do is really around this quote from Einstein where he reminds us that we will not find solutions to the problems, the huge gnarly VUCA problems and challenges that we face, we won't find solutions to them unless we are able to substantially access and cultivate substantially new levels of consciousness or new degrees of thinking and I think that's really the basic premise for the work that we do. People were created to be loved, things were created to be used, the reason why the world is in such chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used, yeah. So interestingly, like a plant that will irritate your skin grows right next to one that will heal it, in the Zulu language the word VUCA means wake up. So I think in this word VUCA there's also the solution and we'd like to explore some of the ways that we've helped our colleagues in these many different organizations that we've had the privilege to work in over the last 40 years, wake up, wake up to their humanity, wake up to their interdependence and their interrelatedness with all things and with all life. This really wonderful quote by DHAC who's the founder of the VisaCard International Network really speaks to this core idea of inner self-management in leaders that we've helped to pioneer and that we're really fanning the flames of in our work. So just to read it out loud for you, here is the very heart and soul of the matter of leadership. If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself, your ethics, your character, principal purpose, motivation and conduct and invest at least 40% managing those with authority over you and 15% managing your peers. Here's the remainder to induce those you work for to understand and practice this theory. I use the terms work for, advisedly, for if you don't understand that you should be working for your mislabeled subordinates then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny. Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers and free your people to do the same all else is trivial. So these are three key elements, a triad of mind fitness elements that we really work with in organizing our approach and we'll be going exploring these together. These are intention to really be clear and to clarify our purpose and attention to refine our capacity to be present, to stay mindful and attentive to whatever we're doing, whoever we're involved and engaged with and to cultivate attitudes of mind that are, optimize our capacity to be resilient and to be present and effective. You can say that in the work that we all do, we can only manage what we monitor, be that manufacturing line and systems and the use of resources or our inner human resources. So we like you to keep in mind as we go into exploring these factors about tension, intention and attitude that as you train your mind you truly are changing your brain and increasing your capacity to rock your world. This is through this principle of neuroplasticity which when I first started doing EEG studies and brain research on consciousness and meditation back in the early 70s which needs us to say it was a colorful time to be studying consciousness. In those days I'd be sitting on a wooden stool in front of a 12-channel Beckman spilling ink all over scrolling paper. Can you imagine that? And now it's all on my laptop. It's so cool but we didn't know about neuroplasticity then so I just want to lay this down for you as we begin. Our lived experiences shape our beliefs, our worldview and our identity. Our worldview and our identity shapes our values and determines what we care about. What we care about determines our choices and our priorities. What we care about and pay attention to activates certain neural circuits which when they are activated grows stronger and more interconnected so that through the act of paying attention to what we care about we sculpt and change and rewire our brain and then that changes the set points and filters a perception which then feed back into how we experience and interpret our world. So as we're exploring these factors of attention, intention and attitude keep in mind that after 40 minutes or four hours or 12 hours of intentional mental cultivation of any of these qualities you are actually morphologically changing the structure and the functioning of your brain. So right now as you look through your eyes brighten your awareness. Be awake that you're awake. And as we sit here together looking out through our eyes and smiling to ourselves and going wow I'm really here right now. I'm awake and I'm surrounded by 300 colleagues who are also fully present in this room in this moment. How often have you ever been in a room with that many people who were fully present in the moment breathing in together and breathing out together? And can you imagine how rare this is in seven and a half billion people how many mindless zombie troublemakers are cruising around working hard, being active, going about their daily lives with the light of their attention, their mindfulness, their presence rather dim. And can you imagine as you turn off your phone? Can you imagine that as you brighten the light of your awareness that through the fabric of kind of cosmic gore text that links us in that links us into the fabric of all life and all being and the larger body of life we share that as we as you brighten the lights in your house the potential and the latency for the lights to come on brighter and the houses and the minds and the hearts of all beings is brightened and quickened. It has a ripple to it. Some years ago after Meng launched the Search Inside Yourself program at Google which started this excitement about not just looking out there for solutions but looking in here they realized that they needed to have the follow-up program for Search Inside Yourself. So we got a call one day saying, could you design and deliver the mindfulness and meditation laboratory which needless to say was a great gig for us. We don't always get to be as explicit about what we do. Oftentimes it's contextualized a bit more differently. But with this program we built on this notion of this thirst for people to wake up to bring these faculties more online to develop these capabilities and we did some local programs that were successful and they said well let's port this out to 24 locations around the globe and we'd have people in 24 locations for Google around the globe all linked in video conference to everybody on the screen able to see each other meditating together which they thought was very cool. And so did we. That started hubs in different locations of people that had an interest but there wasn't a critical mass so they started hooking up in Google Hangouts and meditating together and sharing ideas and best practices and as people's skills and confidence grew then they began to host gatherings and mindfulness sessions at the different sites. And within four years we went from just a smattering of early adopters interested in developing a new operating system not just mental apps but a new operating system for how they lived and worked to now hubs in each location where there's daily practice going on and every meeting within the Google organization now is encouraged to begin with a few quiet moments to just let people bring their minds to greater coherence and calm and focus and to open the portal for more creative ideas. It's called G-Pause, G for the Google. Let's do a G-Pause. Thank you for Tom. So within four years you could say the more you listen the more you will hear the more you hear the more and more deeply you will understand. And this wonderful reminder from Victor Frankel in Man's Search for Meaning reminding us of the pause, the pause that gives us freedom to choose and to be resilient rather than reactive. Between stimulus and response there's a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. We have the capacity within this pause if we're present for it to develop our higher executive functions in our frontal lobes of our brain rather than the higher executive functions in our new brain in our frontal neocortex that can override the old conditioned impulsive reactivity and then choice can follow awareness. We can choose how we really wish to act and to respond. So bridging here into intention, we've been looking at attention. Just like to invite you for a few moments to consider these questions that we have here just to pause to take it take you know give yourself the gift of this pause as you sit here just to listen for to be mindful of and clarify you know why you hear. What is your real intention and purpose in being at meaning? What are you seeking? What needs or questions are most present for you at this time in your life and your work? And to also be mindful of your initial default intention. Is it just about yourself? Your own personal needs? Or in being here does this have meaning and value beyond yourself? For your business? Your clients? Your community? For all beings? How big is your intent? And could you expand the scope of your intention to include more or all beings? Our intention really organizes our attention. It helps us to notice those resources, those people, those books, whatever it might be, those opportunities that can help to respond to our intention. Some years ago we were invited to Copenhagen when Intel was assimilating like the Borg, a small, very successful company, most successful company in Denmark at that time, Fiber Optic Company. So we're helping them through the transition with that. And at the beginning of the session, probably about 40 people in the room, we just posed the question, how many people will be touched by the decisions that we make here in the next three days? Let's just pause for a moment, expand our thinking to just feel ourselves embedded within that matrix of influence we have. One of the engineers after a few moments said, well, two and a half, three billion maybe, give or take a few hundred million. And the engineer next to him said, yeah, and I wonder if we're creating the kind of world we want our children to grow up in. And I think just this notion of beginning a meeting, calling all the stakeholders into the room, all of those who will be touched by the ripples of the decisions we make and the innovations we bring forth and the questions we ask is a fundamentally important technology for us to consider. Looking at this third, this triad of mind fitness essential elements of attitude, just consider for a moment what are the attitudes of mind, of heart, of spirit that really can optimize your intention and attention to be, to help you to be more resilient and to be more mindful and to discover greater meaning in your life and work. Some of the attitudes that we've discovered that really help is just this attitude of curiosity and openness and learning, having a beginner's mind rather than the sense of knowing and an expert's mind, attitudes of discernment and non-self-critical, non-judgmental, being self-compassionate with our learnings and our quote unquote failures to be more open to learning through them. Again, Victor Frankl, survivor of being in the Nazi concentration camp, discovered this great freedom of attitude. No one can give you your attitude of mind. No matter what's going on, no one can take your attitude away, no one can give you that attitude. It's up to us, each of us to create and develop and choose the attitude that will most optimize our response in any given circumstance. So just this notion that choice follows awareness. I think we were talking last night at dinner and somebody mentioned, I'm feeling grumpy, wonderful. You know what's real and true for you and you can work with that. Working with the military for me, in particular for both of us, I think was really a heart opener in many ways to just the incredible amount of compassion and altruism that was there, which was not quite what I expected. And a friend who works in the Navy, very high-ranking officer, sent us this quote at one point from a speech given by the admiral that he was working with who was closing one of the shipyards where he says, the true measure of a leader is how deeply they love their people and how deeply they are loved by their people. When as we were working with the military, I remember at one point the colonel who oversaw the Jedi warrior program was a remarkable man. He really, he'd come down and he'd spend as much time as he could with us in our lab, hooked up to the neurofeedback and biofeedback equipment, having these philosophical conversations, very deep soul. We didn't interview with him when he retired from the military. And we said, Ken, what are you most proud of from all of your years in service? He said, I'm most proud of the number of covert humanitarian operations that we ran. Under the radar that nobody ever knew about. Good attitude. This program really went deeply into the minds of the men and into their families. And I remember one night we were on a month long, silent, mindfulness, vipassana style meditation retreat called the encampment. Gave a talk one night on interdependence and how everyone and everything is infinitely interconnected in an infinitely consequential way. At the end of that time, one of the men raised his hand and said, but Joel, if what you're saying is really true, how can we kill anybody? And then we spent the next three or four hours trying to unpack that. So this work goes very deep and is very transformative in many ways. Another example was probably the world's first mindful organization outside of Asia, the biggest division of Hewlett Packard, which was in total disarray when we were called in. The GM had been recruited by the competition and had left. The general managers were trying to organize the organization. The division managers. We pulled it together and they decided of the five core values by which the organization would run, mindfulness was one of those five core values. And imagine a whole division of thousands of people really dialed into attention, intention, attitude, really showing up, listening deeply to themselves and each other as a way of business. Phenomenal and really good business results as well. So how many of you think the waves of change will get any smaller in the decades to come? I think the challenge for us is how can we serve these VUCA times? How can we develop the capacities we need not to freak out, not to go into overwhelm, not to burn out in the process? There are three keys that were offered by the number of studies just to cook it down into what it takes to be resilience. One is be mindful, an eyes wide open acceptance of reality. Understanding that resilient people face challenges straight on with their eyes open embracing their experience for what it is. And then they do whatever it takes to survive and ideally to thrive. And the second, which we're really engaged in here at this conference, a deep belief and a confidence that life is truly meaningful. There's purpose, there's a reason that we're here and that we have something meaningful to contribute. Resilient people have the open-mindedness, the creativity, the trust necessary to find positive meaning even in the traumatic experiences of our lives. And third, resilient people really tap into a sense of creative spirit that makes do with what's available as I think we saw so beautifully in the session on the makers this morning. To innovate, to improvise, to explore new possibilities. Resilient people use their creative intelligence and imagination to stimulate and evaluate scenarios that can improve the quality of our life, not just for ourselves, but our communities and our worlds. So you could say that really in many ways, our real advantage is in developing our brain power, our minds, our individual and our collective intelligence together. And that really gives us a huge advantage here. If you look at these brain scans of the skulls of a group of people on the right who have been introduced to some mind training techniques and sincerely engaged in them for seven days. And a group of people on the left that had experience ranging from 15,000 to 30,000 to 45,000 hours of practice. Virtuosos of contemplative science, if you will. You can see in terms of neurological activity, the neural connectivity. They're running a completely different operating system. And the premise that we want to put out here for you to consider is truly as you train your mind, you change your brain. And what kind of retooling is really going to be necessary for you and your organization to surf the waves of change that are coming? I think you are fortunate to live in a country full of all of its challenges that you are, but you have 95 to 100 MPs and lords in the House of Parliament. They're part of the all parliamentary round table on mindfulness. They're coming out with a report in the weeks to come called the Mindful Nation Report talking about the implications and applications of these inner technologies for healthcare, criminal justice, education, and business. It's an exciting moment for your country and I think for the world. So we've given you some ideas to reflect on here. We'd like to just wrap it up with a few juicy quotes that really distill the essence of this. This one, Francesco Varela, who's a biologist and neuroscientist, founder of the Mind and Life Institute, reminds us really one of the most important keys for resilience is connection, having a strong network of support that we can draw from and give back to. He says, if a living system is suffering from ill health or suboptimized in any way, the remedy is to be found by connecting it with more of itself, which is part of the gift of this conference. And Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership in the New Science. When we seek for connection, we restore the world to wholeness. Our seemingly separate lives become meaningful as we discover how truly necessary we are to each other. And finally, in this spirit and in closing, I'd like to invite all of us to join together and read this last quote from Einstein, where he not only frames the crisis and the problem, but offers a solution. So together, let's feed it. A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe. A part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in all of its beauty. Thank you for inviting us to join you and explore the deeper meanings we might find in our life and our work. And we'll look forward to continuing with you this afternoon in more depth to have some more experiential opportunities to go into these more deeply. Thank you so much. Thank you.