When you pursue a career that pulls you away from your true self, your talent and enthusiasm will quit on you like a bored intern. Every task will feel as distasteful as poisoned food, and leave you just as weak. You’ll probably have a sequence of mistakes and unlucky breaks at work (actually these are lucky breaks, your true self stopping you from

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” When we focus on creative response rather than on blame and defense, fear drops from our attention.

This violates what psychiatrist Alice Miller calls the cardinal rule of all cultures: DON’T EVER MENTION THE RULES. In other words, never articulate that there’s an unspoken code everyone in the room has been trained to follow.

Throughout history, people who feel attacked by “others” ignore the perspective of their opponents, rev up their righteous minds, and set out to cause harm. This can trigger similar righteous-mind destructiveness in others, who stop acting creatively and fight back in their own righteous rage, which makes the other side even angrier, and so on. The

Your true self, by contrast, is pure nature. It doesn’t give a tinker’s damn who wore it best, or if anyone wore it at all. Olympic medals and Pulitzer Prizes interest it only because they’re shiny. Your true nature loves things for their capacity to bring genuine delight, right here, right now. It loves romps, friends, skin contact, sunlight, wate

One study showed that people who present “an idealized image of themselves” had higher blood pressure and heart rates; greater hormonal reactions to stress; elevated cortisol, glucose, and cholesterol levels; and reduced immune-system functioning. Lying and keeping secrets have been linked to heart disease, certain cancers, and a host of emotional

First, we must become the observers of our suffering, instead of drowning in it like swimmers sucked into a maelstrom. Second, we must question each belief that traps us in misery until we figure out where it diverts us from our sense of truth. At that point, our infernal chains break, and step three—moving on—is almost automatic.

The reason I ignored all these signals and kept working was that I’m strongly attached to a belief that’s very common in our culture: continuing to work is always more virtuous than stopping to rest. Now, I’m not saying that tenacious persistence isn’t a good idea sometimes.

Every day you make thousands of tiny decisions about what to do with your time. Every single choice is a chance to turn toward the life you really want. Repeatedly putting a little less time into what you don’t love, and a little more into what you do love, is your next step on the way of integrity.