Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.

After a while, we start really believing these things are true. People who have had self-defeating behaviors for a long time, such as people who have been overweight since they were children or people with longtime addictions, actually believe there is no other alternative.

Our intention creates our reality.

Each person must decide for himself what he wants each day. As a leader, I will expose you to the options and the likely consequences of those options. I'll even share my opinion if asked, but I'll never confuse it with the opinion, which simply doesn't exist.

Not only are we going to shift in our own lives - away from always trying to identify ourselves on the basis of what we have, what we do, and who we are better than, and so on - but shift into more reaching out, more service, more kindness, more living the virtues that Lao Tzu spoke about twenty-five hundred years ago.

The paradigm helps a person identify the thought system, which is almost always false, that is behind the rationale for the continuation of excuses. It helps them really look at excuses from an objective point of view and realize that everything they've been thinking is just as likely to be not true as it is to be true.

You have to recognize that God isn't something outside of you - a cosmic bellboy to whom you pray in order to get this or that if you do the right things. Those kinds of understandings are all ego talk. Everybody - you, me, Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler - we all came from the same Source. Then we took on these egos and began to practice all kinds of things based in not having reverence for life, whereas that which is God has reverence for all life. All excuses are nothing more than misalignments with God.