How easily, how readily, we see in others - we project onto others - what we don't want to see about our own lives. And how easily our projections turn others into an enemy to be corrected, scorned, hated or feared.How easily we end up enslaving ourselves with all this. We lock ourselves into battles in the outer world, when what we want to correct, what we hold in contempt, what we need most to be reconciled with is actually part of ourselves.
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Of course, any of our 
We human beings need rituals, and we create them everywhere. We have rituals for getting up in the morning, rituals for brushing our teeth, rituals for making breakfast, rituals for leaving the house, rituals for speaking to our families, rituals for paying the bills. And our organisational life is brimming with them - rituals for checking our emails, and rituals for responding to them; rituals for interviewing, hiring and promotion; rituals for the presentation of documents and proposals; and rituals for meetings.Each ritual, whether private or public, gives us a stable form for our actions and relationships - a way of navigating without having to reinvent ourselves again and again. But each is far more than just a repetition of particular behaviour. A ritual - with its particular structure and pace, style and mood, and with the specific roles taken up by those engaging in it - brings out and rehearses a kind of relationship with life and with one another. And the more we perform it, the more habitual and familiar that style of relating becomes for us.This, in itself, can be a fascinating area for study. Who am I being when breakfast is a coffee grabbed on the run from a street vendor on the way to the train? And who would I be if I made time to prepare food for myself with care and attention, and with enough time to eat? Who are we being when we gather in the meeting room, rehearsing the familiar pretence that we've read the agenda already and checking for emails under the table? And who would we be if we set our devices and papers aside, looked one another in the eye and talked about something really important until we were done?We don't have to continue simply enacting the rituals we've inherited in a thoughtless way. We could make a start by understanding that even the existing rituals with which we're familiar are fertile ground for reimagining - and that there are many interpretations available which could bring us into more truthful, engaged and alive relationships with ourselves and those around us.We could sometimes take up the ritual of travel from place to place as a way of cultivating wonder at the world. We could reinterpret the rituals of getting up in the morning as a way of bringing out exquisite care for ourselves and those closest to us. We could take on our rituals for spending money as an opportunity for cultivating sacredness rather than running afraid or getting just want we want. And we could even take up the ritual of meetings as an opportunity to build welcome, truth and openness rather than as a way of reminding ourselves who's in charge, how busy everyone is, and how in control of things we are. 
In recent days I have been studying my relationship with time, and how much trouble it can bring me. Most often there is not enough time. And I become sure of this as I become sure of all the poor choices I have made, all the hours I have wasted.Sometimes, if I'll quiet myself and look afresh, I'll see the questionable construct upon which all this stands. It starts with "there's something wrong" and includes "there's something wrong with me". It assumes that time is inevitably in short supply - that whatever I have done can never be enough. It assumes that enough is not, in fact, possible. And that I must use whatever time I have left in an impossible game of catch up, an attempt to atone for my mistakes, to redeem uncountable time already squandered.But what if it is the case that things just take the time they take? That trees take the time they take to grow? That the sun takes the time it takes to rise? That it takes the time it takes for human beings to live?What if we were to live lives in which we learned to trust in time, to befriend it, rather than run from it as if it were an enemy, or something to be grabbed at with desperate hands? What if we learned to savour time, like we might a good wine?And what if sometimes we trusted that we, and the work of our hands when attended to with diligence, attention and care, grow at a pace that is quite natural and not ours to control?
Life is too precious, and too important for us to believe the stories of our own unworthiness, to plead that we have a special kind of suffering unknown to anyone else, to wallow in shame at our incompleteness, our falling short, our confusion, our lostness.Yes, let's feel it all, but let's not take it to be the only truth about our situation. Because life is too short for us to wait until we feel better before we begin.Let's allow ourselves to look at life with childlike eyes that see again the wonder in things, and that live it all, fiercely and passionately. Let's learn to drop our defences, to give it all away, and use our experiences, all of our joys and all of our sorrows, as a channel for aliveness.Life is too short, too precious, and too important for us to waste our time doing anything else.
On Living and Working is four years old today.When I started, on a warm April afternoon in 2013, I had no idea of the possibilities that writing here would open. I have learned much about myself, and about what I care about, by putting thoughts and questions into words, and making them available in the public domain. And I have started enriching conversations with people from many parts of the world who have contacted me in response to what I've written. It has been an enormous gift to be part of what a project like this can make possible.Today I'm particularly aware of how dependent I am on the support of other people in having all of this happen. From people close-in: my friends, family and colleagues who offer advice and feedback and sometimes have searching questions to ask about what I'm saying. From those of you read, reply, comment and share with others. From those who have taught me, and those who have written the books and blogs, articles and lectures, podcasts and films that have inspired much of what's here. From the countless others who designed, manufactured, shipped, sold, connected and maintain the technologies upon which we rely to communicate with one another so widely and effortlessly. And from all those who guided, raised, fed, clothed, paid and otherwise cared for all of these people in the ever-widening circles of support that surround us.Many of us live in a culture that pays inordinate attention to individual achievement. It can lead us into narrow kind of self-obsession that in turn becomes a sense of entitlement - a belief that the world owes us a particular kind of life, and a particular kind of recognition for our efforts, as if what we do is solely the produce of our own hands, hearts and minds. Today, on the fourth anniversary of this piece of work, it seems to me that we have it the wrong way around.I am, we all are, truly indebted to a vast network of living interactions upon which we absolutely depend. A network that holds us, nourishes us, and makes what we do possible, always - and which we did nothing to earn. In a world so obviously filled with troubles, it is nothing short of a miracle that such support unfolds around us and renews itself minute by minute with such unerring grace. 
What if we gave up the idea that anyone else can have easy answers about how to live our lives? What would happen if we took up the project of cultivating our curiosity, our openness to life, our sense of wonder at ourselves and others?What could be if we started to look for the ways we keep ourselves running in habitual, tiny circles, avoiding and hiding so that we don't have to experience that which we don't want to experience?What could be if we could find practices - daily ways of living and cultivating ourselves - that bring us more fully into contact with the possibilities around us, with our own bodies and hearts, with the people with whom we're in relationship, and with our lives?What would it be to do this for ourselves? And what would it be to become more skilful at helping others do that too?I'm thrilled to be leading our regular two-day Coaching to Excellence programmes in London in 
Moods.A distraction? An interruption to our dispassionate, rational, critical faculties? Out of place in work? At home? Best ignored? Even better suppressed?No.A mood is a place from which we relate to the world.Moods are disclosive: they actively show the world to us, bringing forward some aspects so that they can be seen, and having others recede into the background.And it’s important that we pay attention to them because there is no dispassionate, uninvolved place from which to relate to the world. There is no ‘mood-free’ way to be which would show us everything all in one go, at least in everyday life.
Conversations frequently left out of the discourse of professional life:
That familiar feeling again. She said “You’ve let me down” and something dropped in your belly, your posture collapsed just a little, and the world seemed to lose its solidity. You know how this goes. You’ll deal with the deflation by apologising and the energy for all your projects and plans will slip away until long after you get home.Or you’re five minutes late for the meeting. Pulse racing. Tightness in your chest. You’re holding your breath, mind whirling, all the excuses and ways you’ll save face working out as you dash down the hall. You arrive hot, out of breath, mutter an excuse that blames the trains or the email system or someone else for holding you up, and then stay disengaged from the conversation, wrapped up in your shame and self-judgement.Or maybe he sent you an email telling you he wouldn’t be seeing you as you’d arranged. Fury and resentment knot your stomach. Your jaws clench, your shoulders tighten. “It’s always this way,” you tell yourself, “he’s so self-centred”. And already your fingers are tapping out a reply: cold, distancing, laced with judgements and sarcasm.Those feelings that are so familiar, that ‘feel like you’, are where your freedom can begin. Because every emotion conjours up a world, in which certain people loom close and others become far away, in which some actions become obvious – necessary even – and others seem impossible. And from the world that’s revealed to you by your moods you act: the combination of the familiar feeling and well-rehearsed action giving you a sense of who you are. In a way, over time, your way of responding indeed becomes who you take yourself to be.You can see that this is the case by observing yourself for a while. What kind of possibilities become available to you in love, hate, resentment, joy, boredom, anger, frustration, sincerity, cynicism, fear, panic, anxiety, gratitude? And what familiar actions do you tend to take? What results do they bring?The first steps towards your freedom are taken when you find out that there is no right ‘thing to do’ to respond to what you’re feeling. What seems so self-evident might just be the result of years of practice that’s conditioned you to react in a particular way. Don’t confuse its familiarity with appropriateness.Next time you find yourself propelled into action like this see what happens if you make a change – and just a small one – in your response.What happens if you do the opposite of that which your body seems to compel you to do? You may just find that new possibilities begin to open for you and those around you… that the world starts to open up in ways you’d never imagined.