Stop what you're doing - which actually means stop reading this right now. But, just before you do, read the following instructions:

1. When you finish reading this, close your eyes - even if it's only for a few seconds in the midst of an open-plan office.
2. Take a three deep breaths - but not so that anybody else will notice.
3. Feel the cool air brush against the little hairs inside your nostrils as you breathe in. Notice that, when you breath out, the air is warmer.

That's all... that'll be good enough to see you focused for now.

Over the next few weeks, many will revel in the freedom that the annual holiday promises: freedom from pressure, stress, the whims of a difficult boss, the hassle of a difficult client, the demands of the business or the job... To take full advantage of the break, remember...

• you're on holidays. The number of holiday-makers that I see getting stressed about nothing is awful.
• to relish the moment - it'll pass all too quickly.
• take your time, whatever you're doing

And forget... the camera, the 'phone and/or the iPad and the news (it's all bad)... Live the moment.

The modern mind evolved to enable you make it through the day... hardly the kind of attitude that would enable you excel! In fact, as evolutionary psychology tells us, you are ill-equipped for life in the 21st century! At the same time, psychology has established that your brain will restructure itself according to how you choose to use it. In other words, just like the choices I talk about in Today's Reflection, the actual structure of what's between your ears - and what it will do for you - is down to the choices you make.

That's the starting point for my forthcoming one-day workshop in Dublin. What the ending point is, really depends on you...

Following on from today's video and the concept of "good enough", I want to explore what "good enough" means when it comes to meditation - it's an important question because, time and again, clients contact me to tell me that they feel that they are falling short in their efforts at meditation, that they're not "getting the same high" that they got at some point in the past.

There are three key points that I'd like you to appreciate:

1. Comparing today's meditation to some other day's meditation is comparative thought - a sickness from which we normal people constantly suffer - "he has less qualifications than me but earns more"; "how come she's driving a better car?"; "how come they go on better holidays?": "why do they seem to have things easier?"... many of the things that annoy us have nothing to do with our absolute situation... they are related to our comparative situation. And it's a total waste of time and mental energy. Exactly the same thing goes for comparing one meditation to another.
2. Hoping to find peace and calm during meditation is contrary to what you're actually supposed to be doing in meditation... focusing on the here and now. You don't set goals for meditation other than the goal of actually doing it - which leads me to the most important point I want to make:
3. Doing your five or ten minutes is good enough. Meditation is about bringing discipline into your otherwise mentally undisciplined existence - it is about deliberately sitting down and taking five or ten minutes - it is about making a choice to meditate.

The point is that we're very very bad at making any choice, never mind the right one. In our normal state of mind our choices are made for us, automatically, by a subconscious mind that uses, as its basis for making each choice, a set of data that was relevant when we were approximately three years old. Our automated choices can never be right - that's why we loose our temper when it's least appropriate; why we avoid doing the brave and courageous things we need to do to change our lives; why we waste time reading emails when we know we've something really important that we should be doing instead.

Choosing to meditate and actually following through on that choice is good enough. It reminds you that you can exercise deliberate choice. Exercise your deliberate choice to meditate often - in disengaging the psychological autopilot in this way, you will become accustomed to making deliberate choices - and following through on them - in ways that will transform the very essence of your life.