If you overcome your fear to ask someone for a date, a raise, or help with a project, that is an act of self-assertiveness. You are moving out into life rather than contracting and withdrawing.

Moved by a passion they do not understand for a goal they seldom reach, men and women are haunted by the vision of a distant possibility that refuses to be extinguished.

Whether your focus is on preserving and strengthening family ties in a world of increasingly unstable relationships, gaining access to a decent job, growing and evolving as a person, or guiding a company through the stormy seas of a fiercely competitive global marketplace-whether your goals are material, emotional, or spiritual-the price of success is the same: thinking, learning. To be asleep at the wheel-to rely only on the known, familiar, and automatized-is to invite disaster.

It's not that achievements prove our worth but rather that the process of achieving is the means by which we develop our effectiveness, our competence at living.

It is easy enough to say, Be true to your values. But what if your values are irrational? Or what if the virtues you have committed yourself to are so much against human nature that they cannot be practiced consistently? Be careful of what you accept as your code of morality. Think carefully about whether its tenets serve your life and well being. Exercise critical judgment. Realize how much is at stake-your life, your happiness, your self-esteem.

If you have high self-esteem, you might still know times of emotional suffering, but less often and with faster recovery-your resilience is greater.

One of the characteristics of love relationships that flower is a relatively high degree of mutual self-disclosure - a willingness to let our partner enter into the interior of our private world and a genuine interest in the private world of that partner. Couples in love tend to show more of themselves to each other than to any other person.