This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple, San Francisco. Zen Center. Well, I was told that the theme for this practice period are what are called the four immeasurables, which are loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. And that's not what I'm going to talk about today. But I am actually going to talk about what I think of as a practice that supports the practice of those four immeasurables, and that I think really supports the ability to practice being a human being in this world and to practice Zen, which is the practice of confidence.

[01:16]

And I looked up the definition of confidence, and it means to firmly know, to have full trust and reliance upon. The first image that came into my mind was of Shinru Suzuki, or Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center of this temple. And I have this image of him leaving his very kind of rural and somewhat feudal temple in Japan and making the trip from Japan to the United States, of course, wearing full robes. and showing up, getting off an airplane, and appearing in San Francisco with this sense, what confidence that must have taken for him to have done that. And there's also many stories. There's a story of, I think this was one time when he was in Japan, they were very, very poor. And they were so poor that they hardly had any food to eat.

[02:19]

And his rice box was getting lower and lower and nearly empty. And despite that, when neighbors would come over, he had the confidence to give away. He was giving away rice, even at that time. And the story goes that his neighbors noticed that, and they noticed how empty his rice box was, and they started filling it. And that when he came here, people would call and say they want to practice Zen. And his response was, I sit every morning. at 5.15 or 5.30, and if you want to practice, just show up. And at the same time, there was recently a funeral here for a man named Jerome, a monk, Jerome Peterson, who lived here for many, many years, I think maybe 40 plus years. And it was said at his funeral that he may have been the only student to have come to Zen Center who answered a classified ad.

[03:25]

So despite the kind of confidence that Suzuki Roshi had, still someone was putting classified ads in. So I thought that confidence doesn't mean a blind faith. And in fact, the way I want to talk about it is that it is a kind of ability to fail. That confidence in a way has to do with the effort we make and also to have the confidence to fail. I did a workshop this was not so long ago at Esalen called Accomplishing More by Doing Less and it was basically a workshop about integrating Zen practice and business practice and at some point the people in the workshop started talking about that they kind of thought that since I was a Zen guy that I was clearly a kind of a whatever the universe brings you kind of business person and at some point I realized it made me uncomfortable.

[04:26]

And I stopped them and said, I'm not, you know, when it comes to the world of work, I'm not a whatever the universe brings you guy. I'm a write the freaking business plan kind of guy. So I think, you know, it was Suzuki Roshi who said that we must have confidence in nothing. to believe in something that has no form and color, something that exists before all form and color. If you're always prepared for accepting everything we see as something appearing from nothing, at that moment, you will have perfect composure. So I think this is a wonderful, powerful definition of confidence. And then the question is, well, how How do we practice with that? How do we practice with this confidence in nothing?

[05:28]

And Suzuki Roshi goes on to say, we should begin with enlightenment and proceed to practice and then to thinking. We should begin with enlightenment. Usually we think we need to work up to it. We don't have the confidence to begin with enlightenment. That would be kind of crazy. But he's kind of prodding us and saying, no, this is the place where we want to begin. Begin with freedom. Begin with enlightenment. Begin with complete confidence in your own practice. And I think it takes real confidence to sit meditation. I've been noticing, I seem to work with a lot of people these days trying to help people to begin a meditation practice. And it seems like the early part, actually getting through those first few 20 or 30 minutes of sitting on the cushion seems to be the hardest, that it takes a real confidence.

[06:37]

You can't think about it so much, right? In order to sit, in a way there is, you have to sit with a sense that you start. You have to start with enlightenment. If you think about it, It's like it doesn't make any sense when you think about it, but when you do it, when you have that, just make that sincere effort of putting yourself there on the cushion, this takes a kind of confidence. I've been, as usual, I've been reading way too much, I've noticed, and I want to talk about a few books I've been reading. One that I just started, the other day is called adapt why success always starts with failure by a fellow named Tim Harford and he talks he gives some some really wonderful examples about failure and confidence and he tells a story one is about Twyla Tharp the brilliant choreographer dance dancer and

[07:47]

And she's had many, many years of success, and she apparently recently opened a new performance in Chicago that totally failed and that just got bombed by the press. And rather than her say, well, they don't know what they're talking about, she actually started talking to people and went around asking people, how could this be better? What is it? How could I make this performance better? And she totally reworked her performance, did it again, and it opened in New York and got really rave reviews as being a really successful performance. And he also talks about, there was a person, I didn't write his name down, but a man who studied thousands of experts, and how these experts in business and economics and psychology are always making predictions. Well, he decided to actually see how good their predictions are, how good experts' predictions are, and studied, I think, like 10,000 or 15,000 of these predictions and found that they were terrible, that so-called experts actually are... It's almost useless listening to experts about predicting the future.

[09:02]

Apparently, they're slightly better than people who know nothing about the topic, but very little. And so he comes up with... three practices that he recommends around adapting and what I think are three practices that are good for practicing confidence. One is to try new things and expect that some will fail. Two is to make failure survivable. Don't do things that are going to really break you up emotionally or physically, but do things, do a lot of experiments, but make sure that you can get through them. And three is, and this is the hardest, is to pay attention and know what failure is. And a lot of his book talks about, you know, a lot of real world examples about how we do everything we can to avoid failure. We want, you The idea of ourselves and the actuality, we have a way of making sure that they're in alignment with each other and that we have a tendency to make failure kind of sugarcoat it in a way.

[10:20]

I recently found myself, I was sent I was sent by a Silicon Valley high-tech company recently to lead some workshops in the Middle East. And it was about 24 hours of travel. And I showed up at this company in the Middle East where I went up to the 26th floor of this office building to meet the person who I was supposed to connect with. And I walked into this office and the receptionist greeted me by saying, the person I was looking for, they never heard of. And that the workshop that I was scheduled to lead, they didn't have on the schedule at all. And I clearly was in the wrong country. And I was there to teach workshops in stress relief and productivity.

[11:30]

And I was pretty stressed. And I started calling all the numbers I had. Eventually, my contact person, this woman, just kind of walks out and greets me and says, sorry, she's late. And apparently, she was there from another office, from another town, and flew in to greet me. And I didn't know that, and neither did the receptionist. So by this time, this was a workshop that was supposed to start at 9 a.m., And we kind of scramble around and go down. And in fact, there was a workshop. There were about 45 people sitting in this room waiting for me. And we scramble around and set up my computer. And I look up and I start teaching this workshop about stress relief and productivity. And I feel a little bit like I'm a high school teacher in a class of people who don't want to be there. People seem kind of distracted.

[12:34]

And they're talking to each other in a foreign language. I have no idea what they're saying. And I'm kind of going forward, teaching. And at some point, I notice that I'm really sweating a lot. And I see this woman lean over and whisper something to a man in another language. And I'm imagining she's saying... he's here to teach us stress relief, and he's sweating like a pig. And it came up for me, the question came up for me, what should I do? What should I do? And actually, I thought I could just kind of talk about what's happening with me right now, or I could just kind of push through and carry on. And I actually feel like I made the wrong decision, which was I decided to push through and carry on.

[13:35]

And it all turned out fine once I got them meditating. At some point, I said, OK, now I want everyone to put everything away, put things down, turn everything off. And actually, I said, we're going to practice some attention training. I've more and more been noticing that the word meditation can conjure up lots of ideas for people. So I often start by saying, attention training. And then after we do attention training, I congratulate them on doing meditation. But I left that day not feeling so good. I felt like I wasn't actually kind of walking my own talk, that it would have been a lot better. And I have no idea what would have happened, but I wished I had said that. I'm sweaty. I'm nervous. I got greedy. Here's how my day started. And to have made that connection. And I did notice that at first when I left there, my own inner critical voice was pretty strong.

[14:44]

But I actually felt pretty good that I was able to shift from that inner critical voice to saying, what could I do differently? How would I do it differently the next time? Well, the next day, I took a train to another city in this country. And I show up. And there, they had my workshop. They were ready for me. And they had a chair set up in the middle of their cafeteria. And I felt like I had processed what I had learned before. And I immediately said, this is not going to work. we can't do this workshop here in the middle of the cafeteria. And people responded, and we moved it. And there was a way that just, I felt like I showed up in a whole different way. And the connection and the quality of the way that we were working together was immediately really different. So one of the things that I was teaching in this workshop around

[15:55]

stress and productivity is that if you want to be stress-free or you want to reduce stress or at least embrace stress and increase your productivity, confidence is actually one of the core practices. And the way that confidence is taught as a practice is that it begins with the practice of self-awareness. And that self-awareness begins with the practice of emotional awareness. So again, it was really interesting looking back at seeing how, in that situation, fear kind of took over. And I think in that moment, I was kind of failing. And it was hard for me to admit that I was failing. And I think it would have been good to have done that. So it's interesting that confidence begins with how we can cultivate emotional awareness. And also, and how we can really look, you know, but we use these words like emotional awareness.

[17:05]

But what it means in this context is the ability to perceive and accept our biggest weaknesses, our most unpleasant thoughts and emotions. The things that we normally try and hide, not only from others, but usually we try and hide from others. from ourselves. So how can we embrace that, that this is the beginning of confidence? You know, I was surprised, I went for a walk recently with a woman who is a very, very successful executive coach who works with kind of the, she is a coach for some of the most successful business leaders in Silicon Valley. And I think of her as being one of the most confident, successful people that I know. And one of the first things she was telling me is that she just got back from a weekend workshop in looking at working with the inner critic.

[18:07]

That she herself has this, though she's successful in the world, inside she is really dealing with her own critical voice. And that this, I think we all we all tend to think that our own inner critic is so much stronger than everyone else's. But I've noticed that this, well, that's only true for me. That it's our own voice. It's something that seems to be part of the human condition. But once we can work with how we think about ourselves, we can then admit what our own strengths and weaknesses are and accept them, own them, reflect upon them, and work with them. And that this is, I think, what confidence is about. So in order to develop confidence, we begin by developing self-awareness and emotional awareness.

[19:15]

And how do we do this? And this is... mindfulness practice and meditation practice, that self-awareness begins with attention training and meditation. Another book that I've been reading is called The Social Animal by a man named David Brooks. David Brooks is a New York Times writer, and I've become a big David Brooks fan. This book is about emotional intelligence, which is really interesting. I heard David be interviewed not so long ago, I think it was by Terry Gross, in which he said that his wife says that David Brooks writing a book about emotional intelligence is like the Dalai Lama writing a book about the stock market. that he's a PBS newscaster, and he's not the most emotionally expressive guy, but he's a really brilliant guy.

[20:23]

I'm curious, how many of you are familiar with the marshmallow study of kids? Several. Yeah, I think it was... I think Malcolm Gladwell talks about it in Blink, but... Basically, it's a famous study done in the 1970s where it was an experiment done, I think, with four-year-olds in which kids were put into a room with, I think it was with two marshmallows, and they were said that if you don't eat them now, if you wait for 15 minutes, you can have two. You can have these two marshmallows if you just wait. And it turns out that they then studied the lives of these kids who ate the marshmallows and the kids who waited and didn't eat the marshmallows. And the kids who waited 15 minutes, it turns out that they scored an average of 210 points higher on their SATs.

[21:27]

They had significantly higher incomes and they were much more likely to be emotionally intelligent and not have various addictions. And I thought, oh, this is Zazen practice. We train ourselves to not eat the marshmallows. We train ourselves to just sit there. And it's day after day we learn to just sit and to not feel that we need to act upon our impulses, to act upon our thoughts, that we can see that we learn over and over that we are not our thoughts. that our thoughts don't define us. And again, I think this is what Suzuki Roshi was saying. This is the practice of believing in nothing, that we get to practice. We actually practice putting our attention on something outside of our thinking mind, outside of our emotional and impulsive minds.

[22:30]

So if you want to score higher on your SATs, practice zazen. This is the message. Actually, I think there are huge benefits. There's now all of this neuroscience about meditation, and I sometimes in the business world will say, what if there were a pill that you could take that would make it so that it would relieve your stress, it would help you reduce stress, diseases like psoriasis and heart disease, and actually would make you happier, and that this pill doesn't cost anything except for 20 or 30 minutes of your time each day, and that this pill exists, and it's called zazen. It's called meditation practice or attention training. One of the interesting things about this marshmallow study

[23:37]

was that the strategies that children used to not immediately eat the marshmallow. If children tried to focus on the marshmallow and said, I will not eat this marshmallow, that did not work. That strategy overwhelmingly was a failure. The strategy that worked was developing ways to use your imagination. to look at the marshmallow and say, oh, it's a cloud. This isn't food. It's a cloud. Or this is a picture of a marshmallow. Or in some way, people develop ways to use their imaginative minds in ways that were productive and successful. And again, I think it's a little bit like if you're sitting in meditation, and you feel pain in your leg, it doesn't work so well to say, pain, won't move, don't move. I think we learn to develop strategies of, like, bring your attention to your breath.

[24:44]

Like, just notice your breath. Breathe. If you're feeling some pain or if you're feeling an itch, what about bringing your attention to your breath or bringing your attention to your body and see what happens? And then you can decide, oh, this is something I need to take care of, I need to move, or not. So it was Dogen who said, Zazen is not learning to do concentration. It is the Dharma gate of great ease and joy. So Dogen was the founder of Zen in Japan. And again, I feel like he's saying this kind of same thing that Suzuki Roshi is saying, is to start, to start with a belief in nothing, to start with a sense of enlightenment and move from there. And there's also this expression by one of the greats of Buddhism, a man in the second century India named Nagarjuna, who said, the mind that fully sees into the uncertain world of birth and death is called the thought of enlightenment.

[25:54]

And I want to briefly talk about one other book that I read a long time ago and recently re-read is a book called Transitions by a man named William Bridges. It's a great name. William Bridges wrote a book about transitions. And in there he talks about I think he talks about confidence from the point of view that we're always in transition and that and that we should look at our lives from that point of seeing how sometimes transitions are thrust upon us, like we're fired or hired, or people die, or people leave us, or we get older, that these are transitions that we don't have much say over in terms of their happening. And sometimes we choose transitions. We make certain choices. We start something or we leave something. But in some way, we're always in transition.

[26:58]

And he came up with this kind of outline of a way to look at our transitions that, in a way, it's so obvious. But I found it really helpful in rereading this book to look that transitions start with what it is we are letting go of, that what's ending, and to acknowledge what it is that's ending. And And then the second part of transitions is to actually be in a place of not knowing, to be in a place where we don't know what will happen. And this is uncomfortable, right? Usually we, again, most of us, we want to skip this step. I know I do. I usually want to go right from, I can acknowledge what I want to let go of, but I want to go right to that new beginning. So the third place is that new beginning, like what's new, what's opening. It's a little bit like I was just with a woman who's just grieving because she's graduating high school.

[27:58]

And she loved high school. And she recognizes that never again in her life will the same... She won't be with her friends in the same way. And she's grieving about that. And now she's... School is over. And she hasn't started what's next. She's planning... she's already been accepted to college, but she's in this not knowing period. And in a way, every time we sit down to do meditation practice, it's a little bit like that. We sit down, and it's like we have to give up something. We actually have to give up something to sit down. There's lots of other things we could do, but we give up something. And then we sit, and there's something often not so comfortable place. In fact, we very intentionally place ourselves on our cushion in which we don't know what will happen. In fact, this is the point of placing ourselves in a place where we don't know with a sense of confidence.

[29:06]

And it's not that we're waiting for some great new beginning. We don't know what will happen. And it's sometimes described that this is the practice with every breath that we take, that we don't know what will happen. I want to... Just before I was leaving my house, I was wondering if I had ever written anything or ever talked about this subject before, and I... I realized that I... This is a book called ZBA, Zen of Business Administration, that I wrote several years ago. I debated. I forgot to check with you, Michael, whether I should read from this or not. It's like, is it arrogant or is it confident or is it okay? Is it okay? But this is a story...

[30:11]

that I wrote says, it's about appreciating uncertainty. Last summer, my 20-year-old son, Jason, worked in my company's warehouse. I received the benefits of his insights about the company as well as his suggestions for improvements. Fairly often, my son Jason would suggest that I take him to lunch. And though that this meant spending more money than I normally would, the opportunity made me happy. During one of our many lunch discussions, Jason asked me, do you think of yourself as a confident person? This was the day before I was scheduled to give a lecture at Green Gulch. He went on to say that he was trying to understand how I could be giving lectures, teaching and running a company. He saw me as somewhat quiet and shy and had a difficult time seeing me as a teacher. After all, you've never taught me anything, he blurted out. After my initial surprise at hearing these words, I teased him by responding that I'd been planning a lecture series for him, which was scheduled to begin next week.

[31:32]

I went on to explain that as a Zen teacher and as a businessman, my confidence lies in the knowledge that I'm certain of nothing I have no idea where I came from or where I am going. I have no idea what will happen to this company in the future. Realizing and facing this directly, how do we find our own calm, flexibility, and freedom? I think that this is the kind of confidence that Zen students and people in the work world are constantly cultivating. Tremendous confidence and trust in our own sincerity and in our effort and in our ability to meet whatever comes our way. The confidence in our ability not to get in the way of whatever our deepest intentions are. Should I have people talk to each other, Michael?

[32:42]

What do you think? So, I'd like everyone, without saying a word, turn to the person next to you. Without saying a word, just turn to the person next to you. So I'd like you to have a... We're going to do this for a total of four minutes. So each person is roughly going to have two minutes. I'm not going to time per person. And I'd like you to speak about what is it that supports your own confidence?

[33:46]

What allows you to feel like you can fail? What's something that supports you in being confident about yourself? And I'd like you to try on speaking with some confidence. Be willing to fail right here in how you speak so that you might say something that surprises you. You might say something that you haven't said a thousand times before. And also see if you can listen with confidence. So listening with confidence means to really listen. Notice there's a difference between speaking and listening. And listening isn't preparing for what we're going to say. Listening is really listening, even willing to fail, because you might not have anything to say. So take a breath, relax.

[34:50]

And you need to keep voices low because it can get really loud in here. So speak as lowly as you can so the person can hear you. So again, just two minutes each and maybe I'll give a halfway signal if I can. So go ahead and make sure both people get a chance to speak about confidence. What supports your confidence? Well, it seemed like people had something to say. You were confident enough to speak. In my conversation that I had with Mary, we were talking about... what's called the imposter syndrome, which apparently affects a good deal of business leaders, people who are in very high-profile positions, who, when you talk to them, when they take off their game faces, you find out that they exert a lot of energy, afraid that they're going to be found out to be imposters.

[36:11]

And I think we all do this, right? We all, I think, if we could realize that, we're all imposters. We're all imposters. And I think what helps me in shifting that, there's a wonderful book that I think is out of print now, which I read... hadn't thought of this in a long time by Pablo Casals the great celloist wrote an autobiography and people asked him about his experience being on stage playing the cello and I think maybe someone said you know do you ever feel nervous or worry about making mistakes and and he said all I think about is how can I love my audience all I think about is how can I love them and I find when I can do that, that shift from am I doing okay to how can I love people helps.

[37:20]

And I think I'm going to end with this poem. This is called West Wind No. 2 by Mary Oliver. You are young, so you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water. Let your arms rest and your heart and heart's little intelligence. And listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied.

[38:24]

When you hear a mile away and still out of sight the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil fretting around the sharp rocks when you hear the that unmistakable pounding. When you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming, then row, row for your life toward it. Read it again, a little poem about confidence. When you are young, you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water. Let your arms rest and your heart and heart's little intelligence. And listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny or a scuffed shoe.

[39:29]

It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water, as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks, when you hear that unmistakable pounding, when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming, then row, row for your life toward it. let yourself be confident in your ability to love yourself and love others and to keep practicing. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma.

[40:33]

For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:44]

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