What’s your secret project?I mean the one you’re up to most of the time, even if you don’t know it yourself. The one you took up as a child, and have kept going ever since. The one that most of the people close to you would probably be able to name, if asked. But which, unless they’re braver or more skilful than most, they’ll probably keep to themselves.Do you know what I’m asking about here?Mine? Having people see me as good.I’ve developed quite an armoury of skills in this regard. It doesn’t take much for me to portray myself as clever, intelligent, considered. Or to give others a strong sense that I know what I’m doing. Or that I’m acting with integrity. I can do what it takes to look kind, considerate, caring, attentive. I can calm down a conflict. I can be masterful at having you feel like I’m on your side…… even when none of is true.When I’m deeply enmeshed in the being-seen-as-good project you’ll probably not know how angry I am, or confused, or lost. You might not know how strongly I disagree with you, nor how bored or irritated I'm feeling. It might take a while for you to discover when I’m secretly taking care of my own needs and wishes at the expense of yours.Like I said, I can be a master at looking good, even when it isn't true.But, if we're lucky, it eventually starts to fall apart. Which, in my case, began about ten years ago. I found I could no longer successfully keep looking good while doing work from which my heart was so absent.Lucky? Yes, because one cost of a project such as this - and we all have one that we take up right from when we’re very young - is that we can hardly be ourselves. We’re managing all the time, creating a facade. We’re manipulating others so that they'll see us just the way we want to be seen, and no other. And so that we can see ourselves the way we want too.Perhaps it begins when we gradually start to feel how desperate we are. How out of touch with ourselves and life. When we start to feel how distant we are from ourselves. And when we get so tired - tired of all the effort and hyper-attentiveness keeping up such a project entails.And when our efforts fall apart, amidst all the confusion and uncertainty, the pain and bewilderment, we can begin to experience ourselves fully as human beings at last. Beautiful, contradictory, and flawed. And then, instead of bringing the world an act, a carefully constructed fiction, we can gradually begin to bring ourselves in a more honest, present, and generous way.Like I said, if we’re lucky.So what’s your secret project?And are you prepared to begin to let it crumble?
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Today, just a quote from Confucius.We seem to have such a high tolerance for mediocrity, and for letting things of importance pass. Confucius invites us to see the world afresh, to rediscover the urgency and depth needed to set things straight.I wonder what kind of life and what kind of organisations we'd bring about if we took a vow like this seriously:
Two days ago I wrote about 
The last thing those of us who lead - and that's most of us in one form or another - seem to want to do is to reveal our fear, our uncertainty, or what we don't understand.And it's exactly what we all need most to do. Because it's only when we do that we show up as human beings for others.And it's only when we're human that we have a chance of leading at all.
If you drive a modern, automatic car you can afford to be unaware of all the hidden inner workings that make it possible to move. You need know nothing about how fuel burns to create rapid expansion of hot gases, or how the resultant force is transferred into the turning of the wheels. You don’t have to know how the car shifts gears (or even, for most of the time, that there are gears at all). And you don’t need to know what a carburettor does, or even that such a thing exists.You can assume, quite safely, that your car is straightforwardly a going-machine, that requires your guidance through wheels and pedals, and that’s about the sum of it.All of this, of course, is rapidly called into question when you’re stranded on the side of the road with a breakdown. Many aspects of the car’s workings will be revealed to you, even if simply that you find out what it is that's broken. And if you’re prepared to learn about what's happened more deeply, you can open up whole worlds of possibility that were unavailable to you previously. Most notably you can give yourself the newfound capacity to get yourself moving again without waiting hours for an expert to assist you.And, not surprisingly, most of life is like this.In the face of a breakdown of some sort - an interruption to your plans or intentions, a disruption in the smooth, transparent workings of life - new aspects of the world are always revealed, if you’ll care to look. And new skills, which, if you took them up, would greatly expand your ability to take action. For some kinds of breakdown, whole new kinds of understanding of yourself and others appear.But you can’t step into a breakdown if you pretend it isn’t happening, if you deny your anxiety, if you won’t admit that this difficulty is new and that you’re confused. Many of us, in fact, invest a lot of energy in avoiding the possibility that we’ll ever have to face a breakdown at all. Whole organisations orient themselves this way.Of course, nobody can avoid breakdowns completely, no matter how hard we try. And it’s in them that our best opportunity to transform ourselves and our lives can be found.If we can’t stay in the inevitable breakdowns life brings us, we greatly diminish our capacity to grow and to learn. As well as our capacity to respond wisely to all the difficulties that life, sooner or later, is bound to bring us.
The values you’ve declared for your organisation are not things that you can put on your wall, or lock away in a safe. You don’t have them, and you can’t own them.You can’t even, in all truthfulness, say ‘these are our values’. Because values are, more accurately, works-in-progress, ongoing commitments to something that can never be completed.You don’t have fairness, dignity, compassion, justice, creativity, honesty or service. You bring them about, most importantly when they’re least in evidence, when they’re most challenged, when they're most called most into question by the complexities and compromises of life. And in each moment of action they are already in the midst of disappearing again.When you relate to values as things they become things. The objects of lip-service. Inert, lifeless, hardly practiced.Remember instead that values are a state of affairs that you’re actively working to bring about. Then they'll have a chance of remaining alive in your hands.
That feeling again. Perhaps you don't even recognise it as a feeling. But, in response to whatever-it-is, there you are, reaching for your phone, for your computer, for whatever device will soothe you.Email. Facebook. Twitter. The news headlines. Any of them will do it.With this little fix done, the feeling subsides for a while and you get on with life. But it brings with it an odd feeling of shallowness; a disconnection from yourself and everything.That feeling that might not even feel like a feeling is most probably some kind of anxiety. Anxiety at not being held by the world. Anxiety about not being safe. Anxiety about not being in control of everything. Anxiety at not being the centre of things. And the latest news, personal or impersonal and available to you at any moment, offers somehow a temporary relief.Wouldn't it be wonderful if you interrupted this habit (for habit it surely is), and dealt with the feeling a different way? Reached for a book - a novel, poems, science - something from which you could learn? Or for art? Or for pen and paper? Or for a person, with whom you could talk? Or just allowed yourself to feel it for a while?Practiced over time, you might find yourself less drawn away from the world. And invited into your life in a new, more engaged and connected way.
Perhaps you're living a life where happiness, fulfilment or meaning is dependent upon reaching some future goal:
Maybe your thoughts turn quickly to standards, checking always if you are good enough, and if you're right.Or maybe your thoughts turn to how you can help, and how you're probably letting people down already.Maybe your thoughts turn to what's been achieved, discounting anything that's not doing or producing.Or maybe they turn towards the particular sadness you're feeling.Maybe your thoughts go on and on, ever deeper into the intricacies of whatever your attention has settled upon.Or maybe you're scanning the situation for all that is dangerous and a cause for fear.Maybe your thoughts leap ahead into the future, away from now, and into the many possibilities you can see. Maybe they're looking for all the ways you can be in control of things once again.Or maybe they're discounting all that is troublesome and difficult, reassuring you and soothing you with stories about what is good and hopeful.Whichever of these is most familiar to you, maybe it's just a habit of thinking that's become invisible because of its familiarity.And maybe you've taken your own familiar thoughts, which are only one way of understanding your life, to be the one and only the truth.
One of the first of