Change is perhaps the most sought-after goal in life. If we but had more money, more education, and less compulsion, could lose weight or stop smoking, be more popular and have more friends, and so forth, life would be perfect. Change is also perhaps the most frightening experience we can undertake. Change means giving up something, some belief, some habit, some pattern, some something. Change from the inside out can also mean great risk.

Genuine change often means letting go of acquaintances who hold different beliefs. It isn’t so much that we let go of them as they abandon us, for we no longer provide a sanctuary safe for “negative story” sharing. There are also plenty of naysayers. Like the smart chickens in the chicken house, they will tell you all this is nonsense. Some may even attack you with such words as hoax and fraud. Like most attacks, they are designed to produce feeling of insecurity, doubt, even stupidity.

It was 7:00 am on December 10, 1996. I awoke to the familiar tick-tick-tick of my compact disk player as it began winding up to play. Sleepily, I hit the snooze button just in time to catch the next mental wave back into dreamland. Here, in this magic land I call “Thetaville”—a surreal place of altered consciousness somewhere between dreams and stark reality—my spirit beamed beautiful, fluid, and free from the confines of normal reality.

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart

Sam Walton lived a life which displayed everything he believed in. Over the years, especially since Wal-Mart became a publicly traded company on the stock market, Sam’s vision and philosophy have slowly been forgotten. Although Wal-Mart may not offer the greatest customer service today, Sam’s words on the importance of customers to any business are timeless.

If business was to be compared to a car, customers would be the fuel. No fuel and the car cannot go anywhere. No customers and the business cannot go anywhere.

The pace of modern life has become so fast and intense that it has created an epidemic in our society. This epidemic that affects the majority of us is stress. You have probably heard how stress affects the human body. It is not unusual for people to suffer all kinds of psychological and physical problems because they are afraid of dealing with the factors responsible for their stress.

What are these factors?
Believe it or not, our personal belief system greatly affects the quality of our everyday life, and it’s one of the main causes of stress in our lives. In our relationships with our partners, our children, our co-workers, our friends, we find a world of opinions. We become vulnerable to these opinions because the relationships are important to us. Think back to your early childhood, and you will realize that since the time you learned to talk people’s opinions have mattered to you.