After living with their dysfunctional behavior for so many years, people become invested in defending their dysfunctions rather than changing them.
Interpretation
People often cling to their unhealthy behaviors instead of seeking change due to emotional investment.
This quote by Marshall Goldsmith highlights a common psychological trap where individuals become so accustomed to their dysfunctional behaviors that they defend these habits rather than confront them. Over time, the familiarity of dysfunction can create a sense of identity that makes it difficult for people to pursue positive changes, as they may fear losing a part of themselves or their established routines.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming personal challenges.
Active questions are the alternative to passive questions. There is a huge difference between, 'Do you have clear goals?' and 'Did you do your best to set clear goals for yourself?' The former is trying to determine the employee's state of mind; the latter challenges the employee to describe or defend a course of action.
Treat every piece of advice as a gift or a compliment and simply say, βThank you.
The only thing I don't think people don't understand about good leaders is that they're both good and lucky. A lot of it is timing.
Life is short. Do whatever you can to help people - not for status, but because the 95-year-old you will be proud if you did help people and disappointed if you didn't.
If we become aware of what's happening before we act, behaviour becomes a function of choice rather than a result of an impulse or trigger. You begin to control your world more as opposed to the outside world controlling you.
A leader who is self-aware enough to know that he or she is not adept at everything is one who has taken the first step toward being a great leader.
I will grow. I will become something new and grand, but no grander than I now am. Just as the sky will be different in a few hours, its present perfection and completeness is not deficient, so am I presently perfect and not deficient. I will be different tomorrow. I will grow and I am not deficient.
Be the compromise you want to see in the world.
I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come - and gone. It's time for change in America.
I remember back in the 1960s - late '50s, really - reading a comic book called 'Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story.' Fourteen pages. It sold for 10 cents. And this little book inspired me to attend non-violence workshops, to study about Gandhi, about Thoreau, to study Martin Luther King, Jr., to study civil disobedience.
An end of something means the beginning of something else, and I don't think that something else is going to be the death of the manned space program.
The door might not be opened to a woman again for a long, long time, and I had a kind of duty to other women to walk in and sit down on the chair that was offered, and so establish the right of others long hence and far distant in geography to sit in the high seats.
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