A: I know the feeling of regret about an action or word. I used to feel this often. Now I go by the feeling in my chest -- if I feel the pressure of my heart, or its beat, then I am confident that whatever I said or did was the best that I could have done. Otherwise, my mistakes are proof of how necessary it is for me to be in my heart.

I used to notice that I was especially silly around my teacher. I would always manage to say or do something really childish in his presence. He never seemed to notice, but I was frequently embarrassed. Now I see it as the effect of his overwhelming presence and the lifting of my artificial formality. It doesn't happen anymore; when I meet with him now he's like an old colleague and my oldest friend.

I think it's very nice when there is someone who so softens our heart that we can't maintain the carefully-crafted personality we've built up. While we seem to fall apart, it's just an opening of a hitherto-hidden energy source and an exploration of an unfamiliar part of our being. The best thing you can do in such a situation is smile. Your smile is disarming. It vanishes all judgments and criticism.

What makes a personality beautiful is not the clever repartee or skillful maneuver. As Hazrat Inayat Khan puts it, the two things that give charm to the personality are openness and sincerity. They're qualities of the heart. That's what you want to work on; leave the rest.

You can be pleased with yourself in an interaction with someone if (A) you didn't hide from the other person; you remained present and your emotions were available to you; you felt emotionally connected to them; and if (B) you expressed yourself honestly and sincerely, saying what you mean, meaning what you say, avoiding sarcasm, and overcoming the urge to put someone down, including yourself.

You can't think about how to act and also behave that way in real-time. The mind is too slow to do that. You can't plan it all out ahead of time either, because then you would act out the role you've designed, which is neither emotionally honest nor open to the other person. You can look back on what happened, as you describe, but then you inevitably regret it. Your mind has a different sense of priority than your heart. The heart is considering, "Did I get closer to that person than I was before, or did I express my heart sincerely?" The mind thinks, "Did I get what I wanted from that interaction, did I make a good impression, and did I learn something I can use?"

So since you can't develop heart-centered behavior by thinking it through during, before or after the fact, my recommendation is that you give up the analytic judgment and rely on your heart to do what is intuitively and naturally right and beautiful. However, people who try to be natural and intuitive usually become random or idiosyncratic without the control of willful concentration. That's not what we want either. Still, when the heart is conscious and active, your action does become harmonious and beautiful.

The key is to have feedback from your heart that tells you it's in charge and can be trusted to do the right thing, the thing that is so amazingly right that you'll look back on it and marvel at its appropriateness. That feedback is a physical sensation of the heart: either the pulsing heartbeat or the constant sense of pressure. When you have these signals, you can just open your mouth and speak and your heart will be talking. Trust these signals and dare to proceed, with your mind following along afterward, learning from what your heart has done.