“When leaders lead in ways that people’s brains can follow, good results follow as well.”

If you are building a culture where honest expectations are communicated and peer accountability is the norm, then the group will address poor performance and attitudes.

Good pain is pain in the service of a purpose. Bad pain is pain endured because we are resisting a needed growth step.

When you encourage someone, it literally changes their brain chemistry to be able to perform, sends fuel to the brain.

To rescue people from the natural consequences of their behavior is to render them powerless.

When truth presents itself, the wise person see the light, takes it in, and makes adjustments. The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it.

Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children’s most primitive fears.

One of the worst things you can die with is potential.

Love can only exist where freedom and responsibility are operating.

You will not grow without attempting to do things you are unable to do.

If your boundary training consists only of words, you are wasting your breath. But if you ‘do’ boundaries with your kids, they internalize the experiences, remember them, digest them, and make them part of how they see reality.

The amount of truth a relationship can handle is proportional to the amount of perceived love that’s present.

In a very real way, ownership is the essence of leadership. When you are ridiculously in charge, then you own whatever happens in a company, school.

The human heart will seek to be known, understood, and connected with above all else. If you do not connect, the ones you care about will find someone who will.

If people are really narcissistic or have a need to be seen as more than they really are, or to be admired as having it all together, then they cannot be followed and trusted by others.

Encourage literally came from “in courage.” The courage is put “into” you from outside. Our character and abilities grow through internalizing from others what we do not possess in ourselves.

For someone’s character to grow, it has to be free from internal attack. Falling down never stopped children from developing. But getting yelled at, criticized, and put down can stop them for life.

Health and cheerfulness naturally beget each other.

To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

Just live well. Just live

Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.

I got a fan letter on the back of a prison menu. And I remember thinking, ‘Well, they get pie. It’s not so bad. They get pie on the weekends.’ I want to say blueberry and also a Boston cream pie. Not so bad.

People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.

There are worse things than a lie… I have found… that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.

But mad people never die. That’s a well-known fact. They’ve nothing to trouble them, and they live for ever.