Quotes About Growth

It's just not possible any longer to figure it out from the top, and have everyone else following the orders of the "grand strategist." The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.

When our actions have consequences beyond our learning horizon, it becomes impossible to learn from direct experience.

That's why I think that cultivation, 'becoming a real human being,' really is the primary leadership issue of our time, but on a scale never required before. It's a very old idea that may actually hold the key to a new age of 'global democracy.

leaders' work as teachers often starts with their recognition of an important capacity that is lacking in an organization.

Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.

building an environment of reflectiveness starts with our own willingness to open ourselves, to be vulnerable, to be "exposed," as Saillant put it. This is unlikely to happen in any organizational environment that does not have a deep commitment to helping people grow, and to creating the trust and spirit of mutuality this requires.

It turns out that people can live very well with the situation where they make their case and yet another view is implemented, so long as the learning process is open and everyone acts with integrity.

The more you learn, the more acutely aware you become of your ignorance

The discipline of personal mastery starts with clarifying the things that really matter to us, of living our lives in the service of our highest aspirations.

it is no surprise that extraordinary leaders, like Mieko Nishimizu and Roger Saillant, often have deep personal stories of moments of awakening, when some old part of them died and a new part emerged.

learning organization"—an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.

It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.

The more severe the pain or illness, the more severe will be the necessary changes. These may involve breaking bad habits, or acquiring some new and better ones.

Be willing to be uncomfortable. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. It may get tough, but it's a small price to pay for living a dream.

For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.

Some persons are made more perfect by what befalls them, as is whatever befalls them can never make them less, can never bring them low, as it might others. --Gina Berriault, The Tea Ceremony

Non-physicality grew from Los Angeles's geographic/architectural/cultural climate.

She changed. But then you do, don't you? Otherwise what's the point of getting married? If it doesn't change you, I mean.

to follow her own path and leave him. Even the kids had complained when they were growing

lost a bit at a time, over the years; it didn't just happen overnight. But there were intense experiences, epiphanies of a kind, that brought about quantum leaps.

realized with a shock that the loss of innocence never stopped happening, that he was still losing it, that it was like a wound that never healed, and he would probably go on losing it, drop by drop, until the day he died.

We have to be something more than the accumulation of things that happen to us, don't you think?

Peter Robinson

where it revealed itself to him, and try not to dwell too much on his failures and losses.