To figure out what your triggers are, ask yourself the following questions:

• When was the last time someone said something that annoyed me more than it did others around me? Why did I feel so strongly about it?

• What would my closest friends say my pet peeves are?

• Who have I met that I’ve immediately been wary of? What made me feel that way?

• What’s an example of a time when I’ve overreacted and later regretted it? What made me so worked up in that moment?

Knowing what lifts you up or brings you down is enormously valuable. Like how athletes have structured diet and exercise regimens to keep them competing in peak condition, the work you do to help yourself operate at your best will lead to many more winning days on the job.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is,to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it - but take whatever comes with great trust, and only if comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

“For your loves to turn into contribution, pay attention only to the specific activities you love, not the outcomes of those activities. Pay attention to what you are going to be doing, rather than why. “What,” in the end, always trumps the “why.”

Ask yourself: In this role, what precisely will I be paid to do?

Ask yourself: What will a regular week in this new role look like?

Ask yourself: What will I be doing at 9 a.m. on a normal Wednesday morning, or 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon?

Radical self-inquiry is the path to seeing habits and patterns. Questions that drive us toward that insight are endlessly helpful:

• ‘What parts of me are being projected onto the other person?’ 

• ‘How do I reclaim those parts of me?’ 

• ‘What do my reactions say about me?’ 

• ‘Why do I do what I do?’ 

• ‘Why do they do what they do?’ 

• ‘What need for love, safety, or belonging might they be trying to meet with their irrational behavior?

This being fierce with the reality of what is requires the bravery to ask of oneself three challenging and yet powerfully liberating questions:

• What am I not saying that needs to be said? 

• What am I saying (in words or deeds) that’s not being heard? 

• What’s being said that I’m not hearing?