Quotes from Marshall Goldsmith

Lasting goal achievement requires lots of time, hard work, sacrifice & dedication to a process that is maintained over years.

The best way that we can begin to produce positive change is to make peace with what is in ourselves and others, and then work to move forward and make life even better.

To me, the #1 key to success is 'creating lasting positive change in yourself and others.' That is what is most rare, most difficult, and most valuable about leading people.

When we presume that we are better than people who need structure and guidance, we lack one of the most crucial ingredients for change: humility.

In our world, we have this huge focus on vicarious living - politicians, movie stars, athletes, coaches, all these people. What our research has shown very clearly is that people who are really happier and have more meaningful lives are people that focus on living their own lives.

In one of the largest studies ever done on the effects of executive coaching - over 70,000 respondents - we learned that the biggest mistake coaches make is in not following up. It didn't matter who the coach was or what method they used. Failing to follow up made any approach to coaching ineffective.

People that have integrity violations should be fired, not coached. How many integrity violations does it take to ruin the reputation of your company? Just one. You don't coach integrity violations. You fire them.

Accepting is most valuable when we are powerless to make a difference. Yet our ineffectuality is precisely the condition we are most loath to accept. It triggers our finest moments of counterproductive behavior.

People don't get better without follow-up. So let's get better at following up with our people.

It works because helping people be "right" is more productive than proving them "wrong.

Integrity is an all-or-nothing virtue (like being half pregnant, there's no such thing as semi-integrity).

There's nothing wrong with understanding. Understanding the past is perfectly admissible if your issue is accepting the past. But if your issue is changing the future, understanding will not take you there. My experience tells me that the only effective approach is looking people in the eye and saying, "If you want to change, do this.

In her zeal to be a professional negotiator, she behaved like an amateur human being.

If you want to change anything about yourself, the best time to start is now. Ask yourself, "What am I willing to change now?" Just do that. That's more than enough. For now.

We can change not only our behavior but how we define ourselves. When we put ourselves in a box marked "That's not me," we ensure that we'll never get out of it.

The most thankless decision I make is the one that prevents something bad from happening, because I can never prove that I prevented something even worse.

None of this makes sense. At best, you've spent a lot of time failing to change someone's mind. At worst, you've made an enemy, damaged a relationship, and added to your reputation for being disagreeable.

When you start a sentence with "no," "but," "however," or any variation thereof, no matter how friendly your tone or how many cute mollifying phrases you throw in to acknowledge the other person's feelings, the message to the other person is You are wrong.

Structure not only increases our chance of success, it makes us more efficient at it.

If we're satisfied with our life—not necessarily happy or delighted that we've exceeded our wildest expectations, just satisfied—we yield to inertia. We continue doing what we've always done. If we're dissatisfied, we may go to the other extreme, falling for any and every idea, never pursuing one idea long enough so that it takes root and actually shapes a recognizably new us.

going backwards is not about creating change. It's about understanding.

Improvement is hard. If it were easy, we'd already be better.

Successful people, however, believe there is always a link between what they have done and how far they have come—even when no link exists. It's delusional, but it is also empowering.

The only natural law I've witnessed in three decades of observing successful people's efforts to become more successful is this: People will do something—including changing their behavior—only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interests as defined by their own values.