Real confidence comes from knowing and accepting yourself- your strengths and your limitations -in contrast to depending on affirmation from others.

The need for challenge, the need to burst through the constrictions of tasks and situations already seen and mastered, can affect anyone, even those enjoying the greatest gains from success.

I was appalled at how children had become the focus and gravitational center of the nuclear family around which parents orbited instead of the traditional arrangement in which children orbited around their parents. This is a huge change because a critical job in early childhood is to get children weaned away from the total narcissism normal to infancy. With the children as the center of the family's actions and decisions, narcissism is at a minimum prolonged and may never significantly decline.

In truth, it's usually failure, disappointment, and frustration that motivate people to reexamine that which they've taken for granted. It's rare to find big change without significant bad news. ... In that sense, the pain of failure creates the largest opportunities for progress.

When employees don't really care about the work they do and they take no pride in being in the specific organization where they work, they bring no enthusiasm, energy or passion to what they're doing. If, in addition, they feel abused, resentful, insignificant, betrayed, or taken advantage of...they want out. Naturally.

Schools are generally feminine places, institutions where conformity is valued, taught largely by conformist women.

The balanced life is a goal, but for us it is mostly a myth.