Light Your Own Fire Audio Program Learn the secrets of feeling good about yourself. Improve your self-confidence and enjoy a new zest for life. Once you light your own fire, it will be easy to light someone else's. More Info and Free Samples http://www.lightyourfire.com/products_pre2.cfm Dr Ellen Kreidman is a relationship expert, but she is very knowledgeable in all aspects of human relationships ADVICE COLUMN - Dr. Ellen has developed a FREE Weekly Advice Column which presently goes out to 10,000 loyal subscribers. Each week she selects one of the hundreds of questions that she receives and answers it in detail. As her subscribers read about other people's problems and the advice given, they gain valuable insight into their own life. Through humor and personal experiences, she is able to captivate and relate to any type of audience, the dynamics of building a solid foundation for a more rewarding life.  She has been happily married for 36 years and has three grown children and four grandchildren.

 A Tunnel Without Cheese

Ellen Kreidman

If you put a rat in front of a bunch of tunnels and put cheese in one of them, the rat will go up and down the tunnels looking for the cheese.  If every time you do the experiment you put the cheese down the fourth tunnel, eventually, you'll get a successful rat.  This rat knows the right tunnel and goes directly to it every time.

If you move the cheese out of the fourth tunnel and put it at the end of another tunnel, the rat still goes down the fourth tunnel.  And, of course, gets no cheese.  He then comes out of the tunnel, looks the tunnel over, and goes right back down the cheeseless fourth tunnel.  Unrewarded, he comes out of the tunnel, looks the tunnels over again, goes back down the fourth tunnel again, and again finds no cheese.

Now the difference between a rat and a human being is that eventually the rat will stop going down the fourth tunnel and will go look down the other tunnels, and a human being will go down the tunnel with no cheese forever.  Rats, you see, are only interested in cheese.  But human beings care more about going down the right tunnel.

It is belief which allows human beings to go down the fourth tunnel ad nauseum.  They go on doing what they do without any real satisfaction, without any nurturing, because they come to believe that what they are doing is RIGHT.  And they will do this forever, even if there is no cheese in the tunnel, as long as they believe in it and can prove that they are in the right tunnel.