When I say empathic listening, I mean listening with intent to understand. I mean seeking first to understand, to really understand. It's an entirely different paradigm. Empathic (from empathy) listening gets inside another person's frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel.

Life is a mission and not a career," and that we could find true happiness by serving others.

Seek first to understand. Before the problems come up, before you try to evaluate and prescribe, before you try to present your own ideas—seek to understand.

As an interdependent person, I have the opportunity to share myself deeply, meaningfully, with others, and I have access to the vast resources and potential of other human beings. Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make.

Our tendency is to project out of our own autobiographies what we think other people want or need.

The wisdom literature of thousands of years of history repeatedly validates the reality that the greatest fulfillment in improving ourselves comes in our empowerment to more effectively reach out and help others. Quality of life is inside-out.

The Golden Rule says to "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." While on the surface that could mean to do for them what you would like to have done for you, I think the more essential meaning is to understand them deeply as individuals, the way you would want to be understood, and then to treat them in terms of that understanding. As one successful parent said about raising children, "Treat them all the same by treating them differently.

To deal only with the superficial trivia without seeing deeper, more tender issues is to trample on the sacred ground of another's heart.

They move us progressively on a Maturity Continuum from dependence to independence to interdependence.

The more one forgives himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.

Love means to be willing to give until it hurts.

How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with LOVE, and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts.