Please, tell me - why is it that you are so sure that your inner voice is telling you the truth about you?Do you believe everything that others tell you in this way?Do you give your inner conversations credence simply because they are so close in (so close that only you can hear them)?Is distance reason enough to give up your questioning? your capacity to seek truth?What would you do, do you think, if you found out how many inner inaccuracies about yourself you were in the midst of believing - and acting upon - every day?
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To be a consumer (as we're all told we are these days) is to look at the world with ever-judging eyes. Too hot, or too cold, not fast enough, or productive enough, helpful enough, entertaining enough, loving enough, committed enough, or rewarding enough... We come to look at our relationships, our employees, our colleagues, our every experience of life as if framed always by potential disappointment. This is what a consumer, in the end, is - the one who reserves the right to complain or withdraw at any moment.It only takes a little thought about this to see how inappropriate a consumer orientation is for most of what's important in life. In friendship, in intimate relationships, in a marriage and in a family being 'consumer' reduces us to an endless stream of demands and the thinly disguised threat that if we're not pleased any more we'll leave and look for something better. It's perhaps harder to see that a consumer orientation to the people who work with us (in which they are only ever really ok if delivering to the targets and standards upon which we've insisted) is equally limited. The problem in all these cases is that being a consumer means replacing commitment with a demand. We stay in relationship only as long as we feel satisfied, a stand which seriously undermines the very trust upon which all meaningful relationship rests.Our encounter with just about everything else in the world can be similarly compromised by being a consumer. We stop experiencing the inherent wonders of nature, technology, art and relate not to the thing in itself but to our own momentary like or dislike of what we're experiencing.What possibilities we can open when we look at life, and all it brings, with much bigger eyes than this. And what would we discover if we were willing to see beyond our like and dislike, our demand that every experience and every person do something for us, and appreciate each part of our lives - people, objects and all - simply for its own sake?
Our workplaces are riddled with mechanisms, procedures, evaluations and assessments that are designed around generating approval rather than taking action of consequence.Can you see this in your own work? And can you see the cost?And what would become possible if you were willing to do what you do, bring what you bring, not because of other people's applause but because it matters?
We necessarily spend the first part of our lives learning to hold back so we can fit in with the family and culture into which we're born.Even our rebellions are usually, in one way or another, defined by this (a reaction against what's around us rather than something truly new).So our responsibility in adulthood is to work out how to give up holding ourselves back so that the life that we are - creative, flowing, responsive - can be expressed and so that we can make the contribution that is ours to bring.And this perhaps is the biggest and most important work any adult, and anyone who wants to lead or touch the lives of others, can take on.
When you’re irritated or annoyed with someone for the way they’re being, you may think “I would never be like that”.But the intensity of your irritation could be a sign that you’re experiencing a shadow side ofyourself – a part of you, seen reflected in them, that you deny and which you do your best to keep out of view.Pushing the other person away is an attempt to push away the part of yourself you’d rather not see.And instead of believing all your judgements, you could start to recognise that what you’re seeing in them is, indeed, just like you. And then you have the possibility of reaching out to them with compassion rather than hostility, learning more about yourself, and healing what’s pushing the two of you apart.
We are systematically schooled away from gratitude.It begins as soon as we start comparing ourselves with each other. We learn to do this at school (there's always a better grade we should be getting). And, later, our workplaces often draw on our comparisons with others as a way of having us push harder (forced-distribution performance ratings set this up in particular, see 
What kind of attention would you pay to the person speaking with you right now, if you really understood that this could be the very last time you'll ever get to hear her? If you understood how temporary, how fleeting, and how unpredictable human life is, despite all our attempts to control and secure and have ourselves feel safe?If you really understood this, would you allow yourself to tune out, to defend, to hold back from others as much as you do? Or would you do whatever you could to open yourself, to be here, and allow yourself to be affected by what other people are bringing you?
We're often, without knowing it, subtly projecting our experience in one domain of life onto our experiences elsewhere. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than the ways in which we project our experiences of growing up onto situations we're in the midst of now.This should not surprise us. Our very relationship with life itself, and with the world, was mediated through the family situation in which we first discovered our sense of ourselves as distinct human beings.If you turn your attention to it, you may start to see in particular how you're projecting your childhood memories onto people you work with now, especially those who have some kind of hierarchical authority over you.