Why can't women get along? Because we're afraid. We're afraid to be vulnerable. We're afraid to be soft. We're afraid to be hurt. But most of all, we're afraid of our power. So we become controlling and aggressive and vicious.
Iyanla VanzantRead
Comparing yourself to others is an act of violence against your authentic self.
Interpretation
Comparing yourself to others undermines your true identity and self-worth.
This quote highlights the detrimental effects of self-comparison on one's personal growth and authenticity. When individuals measure their worth against the achievements or qualities of others, they can lose sight of their unique value and potential, leading to a negative self-image and emotional distress. Rather than embracing their true selves, they may feel compelled to conform to external standards and expectations, resulting in an inner conflict that represses genuine self-expression.
In practice
During a motivational speech about self-acceptance.
Why can't women get along? Because we're afraid. We're afraid to be vulnerable. We're afraid to be soft. We're afraid to be hurt. But most of all, we're afraid of our power. So we become controlling and aggressive and vicious.
Challenges come so we can grow and be prepared for things we are not equipped to handle now. When we face our challenges with faith, prepared to learn, willing to make changes, and if necessary, to let go, we are demanding our power be turned on.
Feminine power is silent, dark, mysterious, healing, nurturing. A woman can walk into a room and control it. She doesn't even have to open her mouth if she knows where her power is.
You know when I was 20 and 30, they were insecurities. Now they're just a new normal. I'm 60 years old, so my expectations of who I am and how I look and how I show up in the world had to shift. Not because I couldn't help it, or not because I did anything wrong, but because I had to get into the natural flow of my being as a woman.
Your greatest adversary is also your greatest teacher. Like it or not, it is the job of certain people to bring out the worst in you. What they trigger is already in you. They are here to reveal the sore, tender wounded places in your heart and mind, and they are providing you with a wonderful and divine opportunity for healing.
You have a right to say no. Most of us have very weak and flaccid 'no' muscles. We feel guilty for saying no. We get ostracized and challenged for saying no, so we forget it's our choice. Your 'no' muscle has to be built up to get to a place where you can say, 'I don't care if that's what you want. I don't want that. No.'
Each of us has interests which conflict the interests of everybody else... 'everybody else' we call 'society'. It's a powerful opponent and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it to his own advantage. But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.
I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.
If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.
We discover that we are at the same time very insignificant and very important, because each of our actions is preparing the humanity of tomorrow; it is a tiny contribution to the construction of the huge and glorious final humanity
What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.
Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.
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