While we can't always control what happens to us, we can always choose how we react to life's challenges.

The more closely our maps or paradigms are aligned with these principles or natural laws, the more accurate and functional they will be. Correct maps will infinitely impact our personal and interpersonal effectiveness far more than any amount of effort expended on changing our attitudes and behaviors.

You can't become principle-centered without first being aware of your paradigms and understanding how to shift them and align them with principles.

To change the situation, you must first change yourself. To change yourself, you must first change your perceptions.

Just as junk food and lack of exercise can ruin an athlete's condition, those things that are obscene, crude, or pornographic can breed an inner darkness that numbs our higher sensibilities and substitutes the social conscience of "Will I be found out?" for the natural or divine conscience of "What is right and wrong?

And to change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.

We are not our feelings. We are not our moods. We are not even our thoughts. The very fact that we can think about these things separates us from them and from the animal world.

While individuals may look at their own lives and interactions in terms of paradigms or maps emerging out of their experience and conditioning, these maps are not the territory. They are a "subjective reality," only an attempt to describe the territory.

It means to be responsible for my own first creation, to rescript myself so that the paradigms from which my behavior and attitude flow are congruent with my deepest values and in harmony with correct principles.

I can change. I can live out of my imagination instead of my memory.

Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny," the maxim goes. Habits are powerful factors

Frustration is a function of our expectations, and our expectations are often a reflection of the social mirror rather than our own values and priorities.