Quotes from John Seymour

Emotions make excellent servants, but tyrannical masters.

To believe that someone else is responsible for your emotional state is to give them a sort of psychic power over you they do not have...we really do generate our own feelings. No one else can do it for us. We respond and are responsible. To think other people are responsible for our feelings is to inhabit a billiard ball, inanimate universe.

Once a response becomes a habit, you stop learning. Theoretically, you could act differently, but in practice you do not. Habits are extremely useful, they streamline the parts of our lives we do not want to think about...But there is an art to deciding what parts of your life you want to turn over to habit, and what parts of your life you want to continue to learn from and have choice about. This is a key question of balance.

Questions are also interventions. A good question can take a person's mind in a completely new direction and change his life. For example, ask yourself frequently, 'What is the most useful question to ask now?

When we believe something, we act as if it is true.

Why' questions have little value, at best they get justifications or long explanations which do nothing to change the situation.

As long as you believe it is impossible, you will actually never find out if it is possible or not.

No one can consistently get everything wrong. Such perfection does not exist.

Free your expectation of the future from the grip of past failure.

True learning involves learning other ways of doing what you can do already.

Any single person's viewpoint will have blind spots caused by their habitual ways of perceiving the world, their perceptual filters...How can we shift our perceptions to get outside our own limited world view?

What happens to our thoughts as we clothe them in language, and how faithfully are they preserved when our listeners undress them?

We all have beliefs and expectations from our personal experience; it is impossible to live without them. Since we have to make some assumptions, they might as well be ones that allow us freedom, choice and fun in the world, rather than ones that limit us. You often get what you expect to get.

Working on the assumption (and it is only an assumption) that we have one life each it is important to every one of us that we do the best we can with it. If society says to us: 'We are prepared to look after you from the cradle to the grave provided you live in a boring place and work at a boring job' then we should consider very seriously whether this is a bargain we want to accept.