Quotes About Growth

Learning about ourselves can be painful—sometimes brutally so—and the feedback is often delivered with a forehead-slapping lack of awareness for what makes people tick. It can feel less like a "gift of learning" and more like a colonoscopy.

Want to fast-track your growth? Go directly to the people you have the hardest time with. Ask them what you're doing that's exacerbating the situation. They will surely tell you.

So here we are. Torn. Is it possible that feedback is like a gift and like a colonoscopy? Should we hang in there and take it, or turn and run? Is the learning really worth the pain? We are conflicted.

You know the problem is her—she brings out your worst. But it is your worst. It's you under pressure, you in conflict. It's here that we often have the most room to grow. When we are under stress or in conflict we lose skills we normally have, impact others in ways we don't see, are at a loss for positive strategies. We need honest mirrors in these moments, and often that role is played best by those with whom we have the hardest time.

Managing truth triggers is not about pretending there's something to learn, or saying you think it's right if you think it's wrong. It's about recognizing that it's always more complicated than it appears and working hard to first understand. And even if you decide that 90 percent of the feedback is off target, that last golden 10 percent might be just the insight you need to grow.

Moving Toward a Learning Conversation

This book will help you turn difficult conversations into learning conversations by helping you handle each of the Three Conversations more productively and improving your ability to handle all three at once.

Creating pull is about mastering the skills required to drive our own learning; it's about how to recognize and manage our resistance, how to engage in feedback conversations with confidence and curiosity, and even when the feedback seems wrong, how to find insight that might help us grow.

Don't Exaggerate with "Always" and "Never": Give Them Room to Change

The evaluation conversation needs to take place first. When a professor hands back a graded paper, the student will first turn to the last page to check their grade. Only then can they take in the instructor's margin notes. We can't focus on how to improve until we know where we stand.

These are the purposes that emerge from a learning stance, from working through the Three Conversations and shifting your internal orientation from certainty to curiosity, from debate to exploration, from simplicity to complexity, from "either/or" to "and.

After observing O Sensei, the founder of Aikido, sparring with an accomplished fighter, a young student said to the master, "You never lose your balance. What is your secret?" "You are wrong," O Sensei replied. "I am constantly losing my balance. My skill lies in my ability to regain it.

Mistakes can bring us to spiritual heights, or depths, which we would have otherwise not visited.

Living in the answer, while forgetting the question that gave birth to it, will cause the answer to become mechanical, habitual, or dispirited. Conversely, living only in the question can lead to confusing or debilitating uncertainty and ambiguity. We need both.

Learning the lessons of life can be so simple if you believe in immortality.

Cuando le echamos la culpa a las circunstancias, al pasado, a nuestro prójimo o a cualquier evento de lo que nos sucede, estamos desaprovechando una enseñanza que, adecuadamente vista, tiene como razón de ser y objetivo el ayudarnos a quitar un filtro, desembarazarnos de una máscara, resquebrajar una estructura o trascender un prejuicio que nos mantenía encarcelados.

Fluir significa aceptar que nadie más que uno mismo es el responsable de lo que nos pasa, aceptar que lo que acontece es siempre un reflejo de nosotros mismos y una oportunidad para crecer. Crecer significa acercarse a lo que verdaderamente somos y esto es la totalidad en la que todo lo que sucede acontece dentro. En esta condición no existe lo externo sino solamente uno mismo.

Fluir en la vida acontece cuando se alcanza la libertad y ésta no es otra cosa más que el logro de la trascendencia con respecto a toda estructura limitante.

Let us move into the New Year with a great sense of the thrill of living.

You can't change what you don't acknowledge.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.

If things start happening, don't worry, don't stew, just go right along and you'll start happening too.

Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.

He had to admit that the biggest inhibitor to change lies within yourself, and that nothing gets better until you change.