The enlightened Jesuit priest Anthony De Mello gives us a clue in his barnstorming book Stop Fixing Yourself:

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The first thing to know is that it does not call for any great learning. It is so simple as to be within the reach of a ten-year-old child. 

What is needed is not learning but unlearning. Not talent, but courage. 

You will understand this if you think of a little child in the arms of an old, disfigured housemaid. The child is too young to have picked up the prejudices of its elders. So, when it snuggles in that woman's arms, it is responding not to labels in its head like "ugly," "pretty," "old," "young," "mother," or "maid." It is responding not to labels like these but to reality. 

That woman meets the child's need for love, and that is the reality the child responds to, not the woman's name and figure and religion and race and sect. Those are totally and absolutely irrelevant. The child has as yet no beliefs and no prejudices. 

This is the environment within which clear thinking can occur. To achieve it, one must drop everything one has learned and achieve the mind of the child that is innocent of past experiences and programming that cloud our way of looking at reality.

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There's too much to unpack here in a chirpy daily email like this one.

So I'll just say this:

Do not underestimate the difference between reality and the labels we place on reality. 

In my case, this was one of the three or four "hinges" which swung open the door from a job which was relentlessly heavy to a job which I don't need to escape from any more. 

That doesn't mean I float around the corridors in corporate fairyland or pretend my job is perfect. 

But it does mean that even when I get caught up in my head, I know I'm adding labels to reality rather than seeing reality. 

And more often than not, that's enough. 

If you're curious about what it would be like to work together on this sort of thing, the wait list for my coaching is here: 

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com 

To fulfilment, 

Tom