A useful, simple, pragmatic definition of sincerity:
"Saying on the outside what's happening on the inside"
... so that when you ask, promise, declare or inquire those who are listening are offered the possibility of trusting what you have to say... so that when you speak you are also offered the possibility of trusting what you have to say... and so we don't have to spend so much of our time and energy playing games - trying to figure out what each other want, and need, and are really committed to.
Pick someone important in your life - a lover, friend, colleague. Your boss. A team member. Brother or sister. Mother or father.Now look - who are you having them be to you? What image are you projecting their way?Are you expecting them to take your pain away, to hold you in a perfect embrace (physical or metaphorical) in which you do not have to feel any worry or address any trouble?Are they an object for your resentment or your hate - propping up your self-esteem each time you belittle them in thought or deed?Do you have them elevated, on a pedestal, a constant reminder of your own inadequacy (and hence an excuse for the way you over-extend yourself or hold back)?Are they there to show you that you're loved and respected always? And when they fall short, to be the target of your frustration and woundedness?Are you expecting them to parent you? To excuse you? To soothe you? To excite you? To rescue you? To provide for you? To be an object of your scorn? To be a monster or an angel?And because of all of this, are you relating to them as them, or as an image?All of this matters because too often we find we're not in relationship with a person, but with a story. And as stories are smaller and more rigid than people are, it turns out that's not much of a relationship at all.
Behind all our activity, all our busyness, we live with the constant, gnawing sense that there's something missing.Often we try to hide it:From others. From ourselves. This is the root of much of our rushing and many of our addictions (shopping, email, browsing the web, eating). But numbing ourselves in this way numbs us to the rest of life too.Or we try to fill it:We imagine the perfect relationship, house, holiday or job title will have the feeling go away. We pursue power, money, sex, recognition, fame. We imagine there's a mythical island somewhere where we won't have to feel this way. And we imagine that others - upon whom we project the image of a perfect untroubled life - live there already. All of this fuels our suffering, our desperation, and our feeling that somehow we didn't work out how to live a properly successful life, while others did.The feeling that there is something missing is, to our surprise, not solved by having more. See Lynne Twist's book 
The very idea of 'professionalism' which demands that we separate ourselves from our emotions and personal concerns at work was invented in order to make mass production possible.To produce systematically, repeatedly and at large scale required people to behave as predictably as possible. And so we equated a machine-like, rule-based way of being with 'work', and did our best to fit ourselves and others into it.We're still doing this, insisting that we leave our lives and our emotions out, even in many organisations whose premise and purpose is nothing like the industrial-revolution production machines whose needs gave it birth.There are many difficulties in this, of course, and much suffering. But what I want to draw attention to here is how much trouble it causes us in learning from what we've done and developing our capacity to respond differently in the future.Because learning and reflection - particularly the kinds that support us in questioning our premises, undoing our rigidity and seeing what we're blind to - always involve emotions.In order to question ourselves we have to be able to feel and face and talk about our hopes and dreams, our longing and wishes (which sometimes have us doing the same thing again and again even when it's patently not helping), our shame and our fear (which keep us from admitting we ever did anything wrong, or seeing what we did that was right), our anger (when something we care for is violated), and our joy (at our successes, at the successes of those who matter to us).We have to be able to give our own inner-critical voices some ventilation and expose them to the insights of others (lest they hold us in small tight circles, or puff us up and have us fight off anything that might be troubling). And we have to be able to find and feel those emotions that show us when we're doing something that matters to us, that has integrity, and that we care about.And perhaps most importantly we have to be able to talk about our wish not to feel certain things - mostly shame, fear, embarrassment, uncertainty - and how it leads us to take actions that we dress up as 'reasonable' but which can be manifestly unhelpful.In a world where we can't talk about emotions, it's difficult to learn about and from any of these.And that gets us into no end of trouble.
The moment you say "I'm sure" is the moment you close off the future, turning away from the unknown that is always coming."I'm sure" is a claim to understand fully how things are.And how often, if ever, can you know life well enough, particularly how things will turn out, for this to be true?You could even say that you're at your most truthful, your most sure, when you let go of the thin veneer of certainty with which you prop yourself up: when you admit first to yourself, and then to others, that you don't know the whole truth, you don't fully know who you are, and, like all of us, you really don't know nearly as much as you say you do about what's going to happen.When we hear that from you, we can own up to our own lostness too. And then maybe, together, we can get up to something that matters rather than trying to make ourselves feel safe all the time.
Mindfulness, the art of paying attention to what's here and to what's happening now, has become a fashionable topic in recent years. Perhaps this is a way in which we acknowledge that there's a limit to the back-to-back scheduling of our lives, and the way that everything is always interrupting everything else.When our culture has us skate over life at a breakneck pace, when the only response we seem to muster to our busyness is more busyness, the idea of some peace - some respite - seems understandably appealing.But we misunderstand the practice of mindfulness, and the possibility of being present, if we see it as a technique to quell and soothe our restlessness.Because being present means we actually have to face our lives rather than run from them.When we quieten ourselves enough to really listen, we come to feel our own pain and our own anxiety - as well as our love and our joy and our deep unfulfilled longing . And if we stay still for long enough, we also begin to see all of this in others. And we are called to respond.Most of us, I think, don't want to experience that feeling, or that responsibility, for too long. We're happy to toy with the idea of being more present in our lives, without wanting to commit to it, at least not too much.And in this way being present in our lives becomes another fad, a passing phase, rather than something we'll dedicate ourselves to for its own sake.
Because we are story-telling beings, we humans have a million ways of avoiding being present to what is right in front of us - people, projects, possibilities, suffering - and what is within us - thoughts, feelings, and the sensations and wisdom arising in our bodies.We so easily spin stories, throw ourselves into guilt and reminiscence about the past, worry about and try to anticipate the future. And while each of these have their place, they so easily distract us from what we're most directly in the midst of.Missing what and who is here robs us of the opportunity to experience life in its richness as we go.More importantly for everyone else, it denies us the opportunity to bring ourselves at our fullest. Because in our distraction, we respond not to the needs of the moment, but to the needs of our fear, or to our wish to not have to face the world as it is.Our deepest possibilities for connection and contribution are muted - whenever here is not where we are, and now is not what we're responding to.
So many claims to truth.So many kinds of truth.The truth of science. The truth of the narratives we live in. The truth of our bodies. The truth of our feelings. The truth of our ideas.The truth of our commitments.The truth of our vows.What if truth is not something we have, a fixed entity or property, but an event, always in progress, always in the midst of being brought about in and by the way in which we live and how we work?And what if truth is not so much something we know, as much as it is something we do?
We have to stop imagining that every difficulty we face has a technical solution.For ourselves - if I just learned a new technique I'd have riches, fulfilment, love, power, or happiness. If I just followed the right steps my hollowness, longing, sadness or fear would go away.In our families - there must be a book that will tell me how to avoid conflict, resolve it, have my partner meet my needs, get my children in line or save them from difficulty.In our work - we'll bring in a new process, organisation chart, reporting line, software solution, feedback system, leadership model, competency framework, list of values, behaviour chart, compensation scheme, training course. Then our difficulties will go away - our misunderstanding, confusion, and anxiety. We'll know just what to do. Nothing will trouble us.The set of difficulties resolvable by technical solutions when there are other people involved is small. We've been blinded to this by our insistence that work and life can be reduced to science alone, or that people are like machines, or that logic is the sole source of truth, or that what worked well in one place (what we call best practice) can be transferred to another without regard to the particular people involved.No - when it comes to people, technical solutions alone will rarely do.Instead we have to do the difficult, exciting, principled, confusing, uncertain work of talking together: inquiring, wondering, relating, trusting, asking, promising, learning, committing, resolving, declaring, listening and understanding. None of which are easy, because they call on our courage and sincerity, our integrity and our willingness to make ourselves vulnerable.Which is why we'd rather convince ourselves that technology or technique will save us. Necessary though they are, and sufficient though they are not.
Every mood opens us to the world in its own particular way, and every mood closes something off to us.But we come to privilege certain moods and dismiss others as inconsequential, or intolerable. And this is not simply a personal choice - we are taught by our culture to value a few moods over many others.I think it's time we reconsidered, and allowed ourselves to discover, in our workplaces and wider lives, the particular gifts and wisdom of our boredom, confusion, uncertainty, anxiety, love and longing.