This books' purpose is to help those with people-centered values discover their true and peaceful place by following 3 lessons. Those of us with people-centered values feel a humility and humbleness around others. We feel a deep warmth inside when we help those we care for and love. So, we place great importance on our love for family and friends; we seek to satisfy our need to improve our relationships and see the ones we love happy and at peace. And we believe that life is basically good, worth preserving, living for, and dedicating oneself to improving.
Yet, many of us feel stuck between our daily actions and what we truly value. We feel stuck between working to build the perfect life and feeling unfulfilled no matter what we do. We mistakenly believe a perfect life is the answer to dealing with the struggle and difficulty of life. In truth, living a perfect life is impossible and prevents us from finding true peace of mind. And so, we have not found the personal fulfillment found by committing to a true-life direction. We are not at peace with our past, present or possible future.
By following the 3 lessons we will enjoy loving relationships and relieve our disappointment with the actions of others. We will improve our self-esteem greatly without changing who we are; we will discover who we are meant to be. We will feel real hope for our future as we begin to enjoy life in the here and now by giving-up any unrealistic expectations of making ourselves perfect. Then we will be free to share in the pulse of life and the steady beat of personal actions that brings a special kind of peace.
Thus, we will feel relief of our anxiety that results from the self-judgement of failing to fulfill our dream of a perfect life. We will feel relieved by letting-go of our dream and realizing that deep-down that we actually like who and what we are. Most importantly, our anxiety will be relieved by accepting that the future is at least partly out of our hands. Then we will no longer hold our self responsible for those things we cannot control. We will realize the future is unpredictable, so we will give our self permission to accept an unknown future-to put the future in God's hands and the responsibility for the present in our own.
