Quotes About Growth

You do not know me,' said Tortoise. 'I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.

As Viktor Frankl wrote, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." You have the power to choose how you respond. You are a product of your decisions, not your conditions. In

He summarizes his approach to change in this simple phrase (inspired by Aristotle's "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."): "We are what we practice and we're always practicing something. Thus, to make changes we need to practice something new and different.

What did you guys fail at this week?" "If we had nothing to tell him, he'd be disappointed," Blakely said.

one way to motivate a switch is to shrink the change, which makes people feel "big" relative to the challenge.

How can you make your change a matter of identity rather than a matter of consequences?

What have you failed at this week?

Rather than focusing solely on what's new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what's already been conquered.

If you're struggling to make a transition, create a defining moment that draws a dividing line between Old You and New You.

To experience more defining moments, we need to rethink the way we set goals.

When Blakely and her brother were growing up, her father would ask them a question every week at the dinner table: "What did you guys fail at this week?" "If we had nothing to tell him, he'd be disappointed," Blakely said. "The logic seems counterintuitive, but it worked beautifully. He knew that many people become paralyzed by the fear of failure.

What's working and how can we do more of it?" That's the bright-spot philosophy in a single question.

Relationships don't deepen naturally. In the absence of action, they will stall.

Buckingham has a fine series of books on making the most of your strengths rather than obsessing about your weaknesses.)

Make the change small enough that they can't help but score a victory.

Any new quest, even one that is ultimately successful, is going to involve failure.

The other advantage of scaling the miracle is that it demystifies the journey. Let

Everything can look like a failure in the middle." A similar sentiment is expressed by marriage therapist Michele Weiner-Davis, who says that "real change, the kind that sticks, is often three steps forward and two steps back." If failure is a necessary part of change, then the way people understand failure is critical.

when you seek out situations where you might fail, failure loses some of its menace. You've been inoculated against it.

The growth mindset, then, is a buffer against defeatism. It reframes failure as a natural part of the change process. And that's critical, because people will persevere only if they perceive falling down as learning rather than as failing.

motivation comes from feeling—knowledge isn't enough to motivate change. But motivation also comes from confidence. The Elephant has to believe that it's capable of conquering the change. And there are two routes to building people's confidence so that they feel "big" relative to their challenge. You can shrink the change or grow your people (or, preferably, both).

What's least commonsensical is that pits can sometimes be flipped into peaks.

Transitions should be marked, milestones commemorated, and pits filled.

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question "What's working, and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?