Many of us will say yes to anything.If you observe closely for a while, you'll discover that this is effectively a yes to nothing. Wrung out and over-extended, you find yourself in a half-hearted, resentful relationship with others and eventually with life itself. And although it might look to you like you're only trying to help, it turns out that you're serving your own sense of being needed more than really helping anyone.The antidote to all of this is neither giving up nor retreating from the world. It's finding a genuine, wholehearted yes which allows you to discriminate; a yes that goes beyond looking good, getting ahead, or feeling better about yourself; a yes which allows you to genuinely serve; a yes that at last allows some things to be more important than others.Commit to a yes that comes from your deepest principles, your integrity, and your heartfelt longing to contribute to something bigger than yourself, and you'll find that a new form of clarity emerges. Now it's possible to respond with discernment, to say yes over and over again in a way that serves everything and everybody. To care for yourself and for others. And to say no, to what was never yours to do in the first place.
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When you feel emptiness, what do you do?
When the conversation you are having dies, what do you do?Conversations die when you tune out of them, when you stop tracking your truthfulness about your experience, when you fall back on tired routines that mean little but keep you feeling safe, when you say what you think is expected rather than what's real, when you slip into jargon and abstract concepts, when you tell lies - even small ones - about yourself, and about others.When the conversation dies, what do you do?Many of us, I think, keep going as if nothing had happened.Occasionally, this is bound to happen.But repeated again and again, over hours, days, months, years - our diminished, fossilised conversations in turn diminish us and our relationships.Much of the corporate world seems to have made an art out of the dead conversation. Families, people who were once lovers, and whole organisations slip quietly into deadness without even noticing. Bringing the conversation back to life seems too risky, too vulnerable.The consequence?Feeling safe.And becoming ghosts.
I love Dan Pink's RSA talk on our mistaken assumptions about what makes good work possible.The subtitle of his talk could be 'Don't think you can manipulate people into making their most genuine contribution'.Paying bonuses for performance, argues Pink, works out only in very particular situations. Promise to reward people more for performing a mindless mechanical task, and often, yes, they'll find the wherewithal to do it better, or faster.But make bonuses the reason to do work that requires care, thoughtfulness, or imagination - especially if that's your primary method of engaging them - and you're most likely to see poorer results.I don't think this should surprise us. We know pretty quickly when we're being manipulated and it often makes us cynical and resentful.The very idea that bonuses would increase performance arises from the still-influential work of the behaviourist psychologists of the last century. They argued that the inner experience of human beings is irrelevant, and that we can decide what to do by looking just at outer stimulus and response patterns.In many organisations we're still caught up in the simplistic understanding of people that the behaviourists inspired. The consequence? The design of management practice based on the reward and punishment responses of animals such as rats.But we're human beings, with rich inner worlds that cannot be ignored just because they're hard to measure. We are brought to life by 
There are millions of books that you'll never read.Millions of films you'll never see.Places you'll never go to.People you'll never meet.Experiences you'll never have.Do you chase after what's unattainable with resentment and frustration, raging against life's limits? Or open in gratitude at life's richness?Here's George Steiner with a beautiful account of the move from fear to wonder on this very question, involving a fascinating story of the discovery and reburial of thousands of terracotta Chinese warriors.[youtube=http://youtu.be/Q1z3sMGYjNk]
In the 
When you're in the midst of a storm in life - some difficulty, confusion, fear, or uncertainty - it's easy to imagine that something must have gone terribly wrong.After all, aren't you meant to be successful? Aren't you meant to be on top of life? Aren't you meant to be in control? To have it all figured out by now?And if you're in trouble isn't it clear that it's your fault?The narrative of personal striving and personal success that so many of us have taken up as the benchmark for our lives doesn't help here. It's too individualistic, too solitary. It assumes you have infinite power to shape your life. And that your success or failure, your happiness or your despair are down to you alone. It's not a big enough story to account for the kind of difficulty you're in, to account for being a participant in a world that is so mysterious and so much bigger than you are.No, there's a bigger, more generous account of finding yourself in life's storm that goes far beyond blame and fault, far beyond success and failure. Haruki Murakami has found the words to express it beautifully and clearly, in his 
Could it be that it's time for you to give up looking good so you can be real instead?I'm not saying this lightly.Five summers ago, I found myself rendered momentarily speechless, mid-conversation, as a dear friend and I walked together for lunch. A few minutes later, flat on my back on the pavement, heart pounding, short of breath, mind racing.I knew for certain only after a few days - but had an inkling as it happened - that an undiagnosed blood clot that had been forming in my leg for some time had at that moment broken loose from its moorings.Terror, love, longing, hope, confusion.I called home while we waited for the paramedics to arrive."I'm fine," I said. "There's nothing to be worried about".Not, "I'm scared.". Not, "Please help me". Not, "I don't know if I'm going to be ok"."I'm fine".It was a hot June afternoon, blue skies, but there must have been clouds as I remember watching a seagull wheel high overhead against a background of grey-white."I'm fine".Just when I most needed help and connection I played my most familiar, habitual 'looking good' hand - making sure others around me had nothing to be worried about. A hand I've played repeatedly since I was a child.Even in the most obviously life-threatening situation I had yet experienced: "I'm fine". Too afraid to be seen for real, to be seen as something other than my carefully nurtured image of myself.It was there, on the pavement, that I started to understand in a new way the cost of holding myself back from those I