“What are the chances that the busiest person you know is actually the most productive? We tend to associate busyness with goodness and believe that spending many hours at work should be rewarded. Instead, evaluate what you are doing, why you are doing it, and where accomplishing it will take you. If you don’t have a good answer, then stop.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 164)
“What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.”
Henry Ward Beecher, via Sunbeams (Page 111)
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived life of the parents.”
Carl Jung, via Sunbeams (Page 111)
“To be a whole human being, we have to acknowledge the existence of all our feelings, human qualities, and experiences and value not just the parts of ourselves that our ego has deemed acceptable, but everything that we have deemed wrong or bad. If we are willing to allow our dark side to be a part of the whole of who we are, we will find it comes equipped with all the power, skill, intelligence, and force needed to do great things in the world.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 133)
“Whatever we judge or condemn in another is ultimately a disowned or rejected part of ourselves. When we are in the midst of projection, it appears as though we are seeing the other person, but in reality we are seeing a hidden aspect of ourselves.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 117)
“Only when we stop pretending to be something we are not—when we no longer feel the need to hide or overcompensate for either our weaknesses or our gifts—will we know the freedom of expressing our authentic self and have the ability to make choices that are based on the life we truly desire to live.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 106)
“Heroes are only as strong as their villains.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 103)
“Every one of us has constructed an ego-based identity in which we have assigned ourselves an acceptable role that eventually smothers our full self-expression. Rather than being who we really are, we become a characterization of the person we think we ‘should’ be.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 100)
“We possess every human characteristic and emotion, whether active or dormant, whether conscious or unconscious. There is nothing we can conceive of that we are not. We are everything—that which we consider good and that which we consider bad. How could we know courage if we have never known fear? How could we know happiness if we never experienced sadness? How could we know light if we never knew dark?”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 95)
“One has not understood until one has forgotten it.”
Suzuki Daisetz, via Sunbeams (Page 109)
“It had done me good to be somewhat parched by the heat and drenched by the rain of life.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, via Sunbeams (Page 109)
“Anything that is given can be at once taken away. We have to learn never to expect anything, and when it comes it’s no more than a gift on loan.”
John McGahern, The Leavetaking, via Sunbeams (Page 109)
“One does not magically get one’s act together—it is a matter of many individual choices. It’s a matter of getting up at the right time, making your bed, resisting shortcuts, investing in yourself, doing your work. And make no mistake: while the individual action is small, its cumulative impact is not.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 161)
“The thing you earned, that you depend on, that was hard to do—it’s a gift from your former self. Just because you have a law degree, a travel agency or the ability to do calligraphy in Cyrillic doesn’t mean that your future self is obligated to accept that gift. We hold on to the old competencies and our hard-earned status roles far longer than we should. The only way to be creative is to do something new, and the path to something new requires leaving something else behind. New decisions based on new information are at the heart of leadership. But you can’t make those decisions if you’re also busy calculating how much the old decisions cost you.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“Only in the presence of an unwavering commitment to facing our demons does the doorway to self-discovery open.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 93)
“When we expose our dark side, we understand how our personal history dictates the way we treat those around us—and how we treat ourselves. This is why it’s imperative that we unmask it and understand it. To do this, we must uncover what we’ve hidden and befriend the very impulses and characteristics that we abhor.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 93)
“It’s ironic that to find the courage to lead an authentic life, you will have to go into the dark rooms of your most inauthentic self. You have to confront the very parts of yourself that you fear most to find what you have been looking for, because the mechanism that drives you to conceal your darkness is the same mechanism that has you hide your light. What you’ve been hiding from can actually give you what you’ve been trying hard to achieve.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 92)
“Poet and author Robert Bly describes the shadow as an invisible bag that each of us carries around on our back. As we’re growing up, we put in the bag every aspect of ourselves that is not acceptable to our families and friends. Bly believes we spend the first few decades of our life filling up our bag, and then the rest of our life trying to retrieve everything we’ve hidden away.”
Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect (Page 86)
“As far as the writing itself is concerned it takes next to no time at all. Much too much is written every day of our lives. We are overwhelmed by it. But when at times we see through the welter of evasive or interested patter, when by chance we penetrate to some moving detail of a life, there is always time to bang out a few pages. The thing isn’t to find the time for it—we waste hours every day doing absolutely nothing at all—the difficulty is to catch the evasive life of the thing, to phrase the words in such a way that stereotype will yield a moment of insight. This is where the difficulty lies. We are lucky when that underground current can be tapped and the secret spring of all our lives will send up its pure water. It seldom happens. A thousand trivialities push themselves to the front, our lying habits of everyday speech and thought are foremost, telling us that that is what ‘they’ want to hear. Tell them something else.”
William Carlos Williams, via Sunbeams (Page 107)