Starting the day in a focused way - with a few minutes meditation - is no guarantee that you'll still be focused by the time you've reached your first coffee break! All manner of things are sent to try us and they do.

So, remember, as you go through today, regularly take a few moments - seconds is all it takes - to become one with your breathing, to feel the air pass through your nostrils, to fee your lungs fill and then empty. Remember, each breath is unique - it will never happen again. Neither will this moment, neither will today... live today as if you mean it.

I recenlty spoke at a breakfast for the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce in Oxford. Afterwards, the conference organizer asked me how had I come to be invited to speak. "I asked!" I replied. He laughed and told me that, after the breakfast, a couple of people had asked him how they could go about becoming speakers - "Ask" is what he told them.

"Ask and you shall receive" - a quote from the good book that sums up an extraordinarily important and necessary step in achieving anything in life. The bizarre thing is that, over the years, many people have told me that they'd be afraid to ask - particularly afraid to 'cold call'. "What would people think of me?" they exclaim... "Who cares?" has to be the answer.

You've got to be brave and courageous. Of course, bravery and courage are the labels that ordinary people put on the actions of those who are focused enough to just go and do the necessary.

We've all heard, somewhere along the way, that a little stress is necessary - even good for you. Yet research has found there to be a direct correlation between ongoing low levels of background stress and coronary heart disease. In other words, the 'pain-in-the-ass' at work, the daily commute, the little family hassles, the financial cares of life... they are all slowly killing you - you'd be better off having a cigarette (the last comment was a joke... by the way!).

Stress is not good for you. Stress does not focus the mind - it muddles it. The only thing that focuses the mind is focus itself. Stress does not exist - why put up with what is a figment of your ordinary imagination. Psychology tells us that stress arises as a result of a two-step analysis of reality. Firstly, we consider whether the present circumstances represent a potential threat. If not - all's well with the world. If they do, we move onto step two: am I up to dealing with the threat? If I think I am... cool. If not, I start feeling stressed.

This two step process evaluates real reality by passing the relevant incoming data through the filter of our stored knowledge so we perceive our version of reality. The second step of the analysis is, by any standards, quite bizarre - we decide if who we think we are, based on our stored knowledge, is up to what we think is going on. The two steps take us, at the very least, two steps away from reality. This is all the more bizarre when you consider that our stored knowledge is decades out of date.

You know as well as I do that one person's stress is another person's motivation - stress is a uniquely personal experience - you choose to be stressed. I know the choice is normally automatic but that's because you haven't chosen to take control of your otherwise automatic mind. Why would anyone choose stress? Why would anyone cloud their perspective to 'enable' themselves become less focused on the reality of the moment and what action that reality demands of us.

If you think you are stressed, pull your head out from wherever it's buried and get a life... yours.