We often think that if circumstances changed – if we had a new job, moved to a better area or won the lotto then our life would be different. We would be happier, more at ease with the world. We could live a better life, be more generous and share our success with family and friends. Perhaps we would give more to charity and help those less fortunate than ourselves.

But what if we deserve the life that we live and experience on a daily basis? Surely this is a really useful idea. It means that how we are inside influences our life experiences. That means we can take responsibility for our attitudes and opinions and for how we behave.

Taking responsibility for what happens around us means we can actually do something to change our world. But, rather than embarking on a campaign to tell everybody else what’s wrong with the world and how they should fix it, we can adopt a more practical and quietly intelligent approach. We can take a different path. We can work on the one thing which we can surely change – ourselves.

The sequence of change moves from the inner to the outer. An inner movement in consciousness creates a change in the condition of an individual. That change in condition enables the person to act in a particular context to transform events through a modification of the chemistry of events. The sustained conscious transformation of the chemistry of our relationships transforms the culture of our organisations from within, thereby, in turn, transforming the ‘climate’ of the planet. Such a transformation from within is conscious growth.