“Core Value is an emotional awareness that no problem, behavior, or event can reduce your value as a person….
“The impulse to control or harm tells you that your Core Value is too low….
“People experience Core Value most frequently as motivation to improve, appreciate, protect, or connect.”
— Steven Stosny, Manual of the Core Value Workshop, p. 14
Please understand that what other people do to you is not about you. You heal and grow by acknowledging that the most important things about you are your inherent value as a person, along with your strengths, talents, skills, competence, resilience, compassion, and personal power.”
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 69
“It is nearly impossible to understand other people’s perspectives when you’re angry or resentful. You never have a complete view of a negotiation, even when your part is factually right.
“It’s not a communication problem. You’re not capable of seeing their side.
“Anger and resentment amplify and magnify only the negative aspect of something, which blows it out of proportion and takes it out of context.
“Anger and resentment make you oversimplify and see only one negative aspect of something. Even if you are right in your appraisal of that negative aspect, you are oversimplifying when you’re resentful or angry.
“The person you’re angry at will not see that you are right as long as he or she feels devalued.
“You can’t be defensive and listen at the same time.”
— Steven Stosny, Compassion Power Boot Camp
“When people feel valued, they cooperate, when they feel devalued, they either resist or submit with resentment.”
— Steven Stosny, Compassion Power Boot Camp
“Blame makes you powerless.
“Responsibility gives you the power to make your life better….
“To grow and heal, you must remove the magnifying glass from others, and focus it exclusively on you….
“Power is the ability to act in your long-term best interest. It is behaving according to what you believe to be the most important things about you as a person.”
— Steven Stosny, Manual of the Core Value Workshop
“As the primary indicator of our ‘true feelings,’ emotions have become our new inner self, taking the place once occupied by the soul, the spirit, or the conscience. Now to question our anger, infatuation, sadness, and many other emotions is to question what is most sacred about us. It not only seems dishonest to let go of misery; it seems like a betrayal of who we really are.
“This redefinition of our core has thrown us deeper into chaos, especially since we have also redefined integrity, which used to mean being faithful to our core….
“Look at the dilemma we have gotten ourselves into by deciding that our emotions are our truest self. How can we be ourself if our self is changing every few minutes, as emotions invariably do? Not only are feelings never constant, we have layers of feelings heading in different directions….
“Emotions are like layers of files seen on a computer screen. The one we notice is merely the one we have clicked on. Even that analogy is an oversimplification because the contents of the files have lives of their own and the mouse likes to do a little extra browsing on its own. The bottom line is that if you make your emotions your inner self, you have chaos at your core.
“There is a place within us where we can touch the changeless and beautiful, a place where our real self is experienced in peace. This self does not have to be periodically vented, defragmented, or even defined. In gentleness and ease it is clearly seen, and everything about it is familiar — because this self is consistently whole.”
— Hugh Prather, The Little Book of Letting Go, p. 90-91