What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualizat ion.
To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day towards self-actualisation.
Our culture is biased against quiet and reserved people, but introverts are responsible for some of humanity’s greatest achievements.
Self-efficacy is the belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the sources of action required to manage prospective situations.
Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.
The happiest people spend much time in a state of flow – the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.
There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.
In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.
Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That’s why they look alike.
We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.
Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.
What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.
Growth occurs when individuals confront problems, struggle to master them, and through that struggle develop new aspects of their skills, capacities, views about life.
We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.
What you are to be, you are now becoming.
In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?
The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.
Man’s inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively.