It's obvious when you think about it. Our intellectual understanding of the behaviors and attitudes we would like to acquire comes to us relatively quickly and easily. The courage, however, to act on that understanding doesn't come as readily-because it's hard work to find the courage, and the work itself is painful. This is why, even when we can use our intellects to clearly envision the benefits of decisive change and fresh courses of action, it may take us considerably longer to gather the will, motivation, and self-discipline to enact those bold changes.

Like wealth itself, pain is also relative. Tess had a sensitivity and awareness that brought her to the threshold of more pain than she was willing to tolerate any longer. Pain works in different ways in each individual's life. In the following story Amy's, Claudia's and Kevin's experiences with pain and their responses to those experiences are all very different from each other.

I first met Amy when she was in her twenties. She came into my office at the urging of a friend. She longed for a settled and fairly traditional life with a family of her own, but so far she had found this goal to be terribly elusive. We started our work with her fear of relationships, her attitude of entitlement, and a certain rudderless quality to her existence. But she faced her challenges with courage and energy. To her credit, she saw that the only way she could possibly reach her goal was through her own efforts: no one could do it for her. I became her coach.

During our work together, she met and began dating Kevin, twenty-five, a man new to Seattle, where they both lived. He immediately struck her as smart, very funny, wild and loose, great fun to be with, just her type, she thought. He also was quite wealthy, which didn't particularly impress or interest her since she herself was an inheritor of several million dollars. They were together for most of a year, during which time she discovered he was a womanizer. Naïve as Amy was, she knew she definitely wanted marriage in her future, and she broke off the relationship on the basis of his womanizing alone.

She continued to work on her relationship skills in therapy and practiced them in

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