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.

To live consciously means to seek to be aware of everything that bears on our actions, purposes, values, and goals—to the best of our ability, whatever that ability may be—and to behave in accordance with that which we see and know.

The stability we cannot find in the world, we must create within our own persons.

Sometimes the subconscious mind manifests a wisdom several steps or even years ahead of the conscious mind, and has its own way of leading us toward our destiny.

Integrity means congruence. Words and behavior match.

If we attach more importance to what other people believe than to what we know to be true - if we value belonging over being - we will not attain authenticity.

The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.