Because the struggle continues, I retire frequently to the solitude of my own inner self to recommit to win my battles privately, to get my motives straight.
We often get into ruts, on treadmills, caught up in patterns and habits that aren’t useful. We don’t stop to ask, what can I learn from this week that will keep next week from essentially being a repeat of the same?
But knowing I need to listen and knowing how to listen is not enough. Unless I want to listen, unless I have the desire, it won’t be a habit in my life. Creating a habit requires work in all three dimensions.
You have control over three things: what you think, what you say, and how you behave. To make a change in your life, you must recognize these gifts are the most powerful tools you possess in shaping the form of your life. – SONYA FRIEDMAN.
As Eleanor Roosevelt observed, “No one can hurt you without your consent.” In the words of Gandhi, “They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.” It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that hurts us far more than what happens to us in the first place. I.
Look at the word responsibility – “response-ability” – the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior.
These four gifts – self-awareness, conscience, creative imagination, and independent will – reside in the space we.
The principles you live by create the world you live in. So when you change the principles you live by, you can change your world. Your mission statement serves to summarize the principles you want to live by.
Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education. Thoreau taught, “How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?
Reactive people are also affected by their social environment, by the “social weather.” When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don’t, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.
We hear a lot today about identity theft. The greatest identity theft is not when someone takes your wallet or steals your credit card. The greater theft happens when we forget who we really are, when we begin to believe that our worth and identity come from how well we stack up compared to others, instead of recognizing that each of us has immeasurable worth and potential, independent of any comparison.
T. S. Eliot’s observation: We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.
So if you’re living your life around a temporary role and allowing your treasure chest to remain barren in terms of your only real permanent role, then you’re letting yourself be seduced by the culture and robbed of the true richness of your life – the deep and lasting satisfaction that only comes through family relationships.
Changing a planning tool or a method won’t create significant change in the results we’re getting in our lives – although the implied promise is that it will. It’s not a matter of controlling things more, better, or faster; it’s questioning the whole assumption of control.
In the words of Thoreau, “For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.” We can only achieve quantum improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get to work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.
The thing I learned is that you don’t invent your mission, you detect it. You uncover it, as it were.
What you alone can contribute, no one else can contribute. Viktor Frankl said we don’t invent our mission; we detect it. It’s within us waiting to be realized.
It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness. You become a trailblazer, a pathfinder. You open new possibilities, new territories, new continents, so that others can follow.
The message sent to one is truly sent to all because everyone is a “one,” and they know that if you treat one that way, all it takes is a change of circumstances and you’ll treat them that way, too.
The reality is that most families are overmanaged and underled.