What do you want to fix in your career, business, finances, personal life... your life in general? If something isn't perfect now, it's up to you to fix it. So, choose one thing - just one, not asking for a major commitment! - that you can do today to move you towards fixing what you consider needs fixing.

After, all, everything will be alright in the end. And, if it's not alright, it's not the end!

Your Questions

I've had a couple of queries in the last week regarding what one should focus on whilst doing unguided meditation. Specifically, I was asked if you can meditate on the sounds in the room in which you're sitting or if you can meditate on, in effect, a memory of a particularly beautiful place.

The key practical purpose of meditation is to empty your mind of the useless self-distractive thoughts that divorce us from the reality of the present moment. As such, anything that will 'turn you on' to that clarity of mind can be used - after all, when you meditate it's your choice, on the basis that you have chosen to master your own though process.

Ultimately, however, as we progress in meditation, we should aim to meditate on the simple reality of what it feels like to sit where you're sitting, breathing in and out. You won't get much closer to reality than that.

First of all, before you attempt to take that on, you have to progress. And whatever helps you progress is worht doing.

As we progress in life - in our career or business, in our personal life - we tend to become more self-assured, more sure of ourselves. As a result, we grow in the belief that we know what we want out of life and, better still, how we are going to achieve it. Yet, life doesn't work that way.

For a start, some of the key people in your life were encountered initially by accident rather than design. If you look back on the key milestones that have got you to where you are, you may be struck by the extent to which coincidence appears to have had a hand in your life thus far.

Secondly, self-assurance is a dangerous thing for someone who hasn't taken the trouble to develop a keen state of mindfulness because, without a firm handle on reality, the ordinariliy conditioned mind cannot know what one truly wants and has even less of an idea as to how to achieve it. Our formative conditioning that creates our personality, augmented by our social conditioning through our formative and adolescent years, together with the more insidious conditioning corporate culture and social norms, means that, when we think about what we want out of life, we do so in a conditioned manner. And that is not a recipe for the pursuit of happiness.

Real self-assurance comes from knowing who you really are and what you're really capable of. It comes from self-awareness. Self-awareness only comes when we strip away all the aforementioned conditioning. Until you know who your really are, until you become fully acquainted with your self, you simply cannot know what you want. And, until you know what you want - or, more to the point, what is best for you - how can you focus on what you need to do to get there?