Trust—or the lack of it—is at the root of success or failure in relationships and in the bottom-line results of business, industry, education, and government.

The fundamental problem has nothing to do with your behavior or your attitude. It has everything to do with having a wrong map.

Our behavior is governed by principles. Living in harmony with them brings positive consequences; violating them brings negative consequences.

And unless we value the differences in our perceptions, unless we value each other and give credence to the possibility that we're both right, that life is not always a dichotomous either/or, that there are almost always third alternatives, we will never be able to transcend the limits of that conditioning.

Make decisions based on our values and not how we felt in the moment.

If there is little or no trust, there is no foundation for permanent success.

Principles are guidelines for human conduct that are proven to have enduring, permanent value. They're fundamental. They're essentially unarguable because they are self-evident.

There must be something changeless that is true! When we are anchored and invulnerable down deep, we can be open and vulnerable on the surface of our lives by flowing with changes, loving unconditionally, and viewing life as a marvelous exciting adventure.

The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view. T

Principles are like lighthouses. They are natural laws that cannot be broken.

We create many negative situations by simply assuming that our expectations are self-evident and that they are clearly understood and shared by other people.

How many times have you made assumptions similar to the store manager's? It's easy to do, because we all see things in different ways. We all have different paradigms or frames of reference—like eyeglasses through which we see the world. We see the world not as it is, but as we are—or sometimes as we are conditioned to see it.