Google Developed A Mindfulness & Emotional Intelligence Course!

I'm going to spill the beans for you...but first, a story...

In October of 2018 I was working as a Business Manager & Human Resources Analyst and was on the hunt for my next career move. Earlier that year, I had completed my first 10-day silent meditation course where I learnt how to meditate, and it totally transformed my life - BIG TIME! I knew that I wanted to find a way to share some of the incredible outcomes (such as a quiet mind, less anxiety, less stress, learning how to respond vs react, sleeping better, feeling inspired, more control over actions and time) in my next role. I loved working in HR, being able to support employees with their questions and challenges, but now I wanted to take HR to the next level. I wanted to help others on a deeper, personal, and root level; in a way that would get to the bottom of the universal challenges we face as humans and have a ripple effect on other important areas of our life (much like this meditation course did for me). But I had NO idea how I was going to do this!

In my search of new emerging fields of work in the HR and wellness space, I came across a video of Peter Bostleman, the Director of Mindfulness at SAP. I was shocked that Mindfulness was an actual department, and at a company like SAP! In this video Peter spoke about the Search Inside Yourself Program, the Mindful based Emotional Intelligence Program developed at Google. He took the course, became a certified teacher of this program and has been rolling it out across SAP globally. After countless hours excitedly researching this program, I knew this is how I was going to bring mindfulness out into the world. I bought my ticket to the next upcoming public program that was being run in San Francisco in Dec of 2018, bought my flight, booked accommodations and was PUMPED. I also started my teacher application immediately! After completing the 2-day course in Dec 2018, I returned to Calgary and finished my teacher application in Jan 2019, got accepted in Feb 2019, started the teacher training in March 2019 at Berkeley and became officially certified in March of 2020! 🎈

Now, the beans...

Search Inside Yourself (SIY) was born at Google in 2007 as an internal course for Google employees. This program was put together by a team of leading experts in mindfulness, neuroscience, leadership and emotional intelligence . The aim of SIY was to help people develop the skills of mindfulness, empathy, compassion and overall emotional intelligence to create the conditions for individual and collective thriving. Due to high demand from other organizations for this program, it was spun off from Google and the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) was founded as an independent non-profit institute.

SIYLI is now a globally recognized institute with tens of thousands of people attending its programs in over 50 countries. The program is 1/3 content and 2/3 experiential practices (including journaling, meditations, dyads and group work) to develop Emotional Intelligence using mindful based practices. I loved how hands on the program was and how many practices there were. There is SO much information out there, but what we really need is the time to implement the tools and content that we learn! This is where we experience the impact and power of the exercises. The program is both a personal and professional course to cultivate qualities such as self-awareness, self-management, empathy and compassion. The tools and frameworks shared are backed by scientific research making the content relevant, accessible and tangible!

Program Structure:

The program is run over 4-6 virtual session (formerly run 2 days live in-person) followed by a 28 day virtual challenge and a Capstone Webinar to wrap up! We also run pre- and post- surveys so you can see tangible results of the impact on your workplace.

Program Benefits:

SIY has been known to be "life changing" as it delivers tools & frameworks along with creating space for internal transformation. Some other tangible outcomes are:

Feedback from 1500+ participants worldwide show some stellar results!!!

Do you want to see these results at your organization? Book a complimentary call here to chat and let's get to it!

"Tahira Jamani co-taught a 2-day Search Inside Yourself program at GoDaddy in December 2019. As a high-impact leader I was thrilled to be able to bring this program to my department. I found the program content to be incredibly insightful for my leaders and for myself. It gave us the tools to reflect on how we work together, how we interact, how we make decisions as a team and to take a moment to reflect on our individual awareness of ourselves, our mindfulness and equally important of others. I enjoyed the disruption of the course from the normal working day. We mediated together. We connected together in a way that was super human, a little strange at first and then very powerful. The smallest new tools that we learned, for example take a minute as you start a meeting to allow folks to “arrive”, I still use this today. These tools have supported me to improve the dynamic of my team and show up stronger and more compassionate, more connected as a leader. Tahira was an outstanding presenter, connecting with my team immediately, and shared the concepts in a straight forward and compassionate manner. If something was not understood, she would take a moment to go back and say it differently, so everybody was brought along. This program continues to have a positive impact on our Care organization and I can see this impact show up in our performance. Both execution for our customers and ability to land our big programs. I had tremendous feedback from this course, it was bold, courageous, risky and wonderful, from my directors and leaders. I without hesitation would recommend this course if you’re looking to step up the connectedness of your team, of yourself, and become stronger together. Folks were skeptical coming in, nobody was skeptical coming out. Go for it."