Asking questions - significant ones, sincere ones - is a powerful way of opening up possibilities for yourself and for those around you.The best questions are the ones whose answers don't come readily. Such questions have the capacity to undo what you're standing on, and to unravel what you're most sure about.That way, something new can emerge. Some new way of understanding yourself. Something outside of the familiar world you already inhabit.It is the process of asking and inquiring itself that can change things. If the question is big enough, important enough, you might find that instead of answering the question, you are answered by the question.Which question you choose is important, though. The bigger the question you can ask, the bigger the change that's possible.How do I earn more? is not as big as What kind of work do I want to do? which is not as big as What contribution am I called to make?And none of these is as big as that most important of questions, the one from which every other question flows: What kind of person do I wish to be?
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Of course it's not just by being 
Why do you do meetings in such an extraordinarily wasteful way?Perhaps because it makes you feel good. You get seen to be busy, involved, making things happen, even if the result of your time together produces disengagement, poor decisions made, and time wasted. Or perhaps because you've taken the form of meetings to be a fixed feature of the world - a 'truth' that is self-evident, unquestionable, just 'the way things are done'.But, simply put, meetings are just something that somebody made up. And you then took on. And, consequently, there is no 'right' way to meet.Which means when you find yourself, as so many do, locked in stultifying, oppressive meeting practices - that have you bored, overstretched, checking out, distracted, attending when you're not needed, or when you don't wish to be there - you're complicit in keeping things that way.Unless you choose to speak up. Unless you choose to change things.Which you could. If you stopped insisting that the way you do meetings is simply the way things are. And if understood that instead that meetings are an invention, ripe to be reinvented.
Given that we are the only creatures (that we know of) that can tell stories about ourselves;and given that we live totally, inescapably in the stories we tell;and given that stories of any kind can be more or less truthful, more or less kind, more or less generous, more or less creative, more or less freeing of our enormous potential...... given all of this, don't we have a profound responsibility to question the stories we were handed? To not just take things 'as they are'?And to actively find - and consciously live by - the most truthful, kind, generous, creative, possibility-freeing stories about ourselves, about others, and about life that we can?
We often feel that we're exercising choice when it would be more accurate to say we're on automatic.So much that we do is invisibly shaped, far beyond our awareness,
You asked everyone to join you for a meeting at 4.30pm."It will only last half an hour", you said.But it's now 5pm, and it's quite clear that the report you wanted everyone to read and comment on needs more time than you'd anticipated.Perhaps, somewhere, you knew half an hour was way too optimistic. And you were worried that if you were honest about the time it would take, nobody would come.But now the meeting has gone on way beyond the time you'd promised.What do you do to address this? Many people, it would seem, do nothing. The meeting's not finished, nobody seems to have left, and in any case, you all chose to be there, didn't you?It's embarrassing to own up to your miscalculation (or your deliberate manipulation). And so you save yourself from this by carrying on, as if nothing significant has happened.But you can be sure of something: the unremarked passing of your deadline is significant. You have broken a promise. And many of your participants, as embarrassed as you are to bring up that this is not what they agreed to, have checked out, mentally and emotionally, already.By continuing a meeting beyond its agreed time, and by keeping silent about it, you're making an unspoken request of your co-participants. "Please stay" (a request without a speaker, which you can 
Our attempts to hold back from the difficulty of our lives, paradoxically, bring us exactly what we are trying to avoid.Why? Because suffering, confusion, feeling lost - as well as joy, and fulfilment, and meaning - are an inevitable part of any life. How could it be otherwise? Life promises only that it will bring us change. And it does this, even when we wish it were not so, endlessly.Our attempts to deny our anxiety, fear and loss are attempts to control what cannot be controlled. They end up with us holding back life itself.And in this way, perhaps we could learn to see our difficulties as an invitation to step deeper into our lives, rather than turn away.I came across this, from Franz Kafka, recently, which says it beautifully:
When you're repeatedly irritated by someone - on your team, in your family - perhaps you could try to discover what you're really judging them for.It may not be quite what you think.On close inspection perhaps you'll see that you are irritated, not because they are irritating, but because they are not like you in the ways you wish them to be.