Favorite Quotes to Spur Reflection
“When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.” — Dr. Seuss
What choice are you making?
"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but building the new." —Socrates
What sacred cows are you holding on to?
What changes are you resisting? What beliefs, assumptions and biases are fueling the resistance?
"It's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble but what you know that just ain't so!" -- Mark Twain
What are you pretending not to know?
What are you afraid to admit you don’t know?
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." — Marie Curie
What fears are haunting you?
What do you need to more deeply understand?
"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning how to dance in the rain." — Vivian Greene
What’s an example of you learning to dance in the rain?
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy.” —Martin Luther King Jr.
How are you stepping up and being your best self / leader right now?
“Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.” — Joseph Campbell
What are the sources of your courage, perseverance, creativity, and resilience?
“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius
What unproductive self-talk and negative/fear-inducing thoughts are you aware of? How do you access your real power and shift your thoughts?
“The last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
What spirit and attitude do you choose?
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” —Sun Tsu
How do you find your center in chaos?
“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” — Jimmy Dean
What is the crisis teaching you? What insights have you had? What meaning are you finding in this time?
“Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” — Napoleon Hill
Which of your beliefs are limiting? Which are empowering?
“Logic will get you from A to Z; Imagination will get you everywhere.” — Albert Einstein
How are you harnessing your and your team’s wonder and imagination?
What’s possible?
“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples.” — Mother Teresa
What is one small thing you’re doing that makes one small difference?
“The greatest compassion is the prevention of human suffering through patience, alertness, courage and kindness.” ― Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou
“To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
How are you demonstrating that you care?
What are you learning about the people you work with?
What is the impact of your listening, recognition, and appreciation?
“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” — Winston Churchill
What does your giving look like? How does it feel?
“Do or do not. There is no try.” — Yoda
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” — Michael Jordan
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” — Theodore Roosevelt
What decisions, commitments, and actions do you and your team need to take now?
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain
What risks are you willing to take to move forward and seize the opportunities ahead?
“Strive not to be a success but rather to be of value.” — Albert Einstein
What value could your be creating for customers as their problems and needs change?
“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.” — Stephen Covey
What are you learning about how you make decisions and how you could make better decisions going forward?
“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” — Henry Ford
What are the greatest headwinds you face? How can you use these to take off?
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
What seeds are you planting for the future of the culture and customers?
“Hope begins in the dark. The stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.” — Anne Lamott, Novelist
What is the nature of the hope that keeps you going?
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.” — Helen Keller
“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.” — Dalai Lama
What are you willing to accept and be open to?
"With freedom, books, flowers and the moon, who could not be happy?" — Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
What are you grateful for?
“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.” — Goethe
How are you responsible for your reality?
“Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.” — George Bernard Shaw
What does “expand your capacity for experience” mean to you?
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. — Albert Einstein
What demands that you change your perspective or context?
“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.” —Herman Melville, Moby Dick
How do you keep your sense of humor?
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” —John Steinbeck, East of Eden
How are you guiding your team with regard to “perfect” “excellent” “good enough”?
“Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” — Michael Porter
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
— Sun Tzu
How do you know your strategy is working?
What strategic choices do you need to make?
“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” ― Niels Bohr
“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” ― Niels Bohr
What is the paradox you’re grappling with?
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” — Plato
How does this quote speak to you?
“Be the change you want to see in others.” — Ghandi
What is the big change you want to see in someone close to you or on your team?
How is this a projection of a part of you you dislike or disown?
“I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.” —The Invitation, Oriah Mountain Dreamer
What sustains you? What’s it like to be with yourself?
Who are you yearning to know in this way?
“My parents gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person: he believed in me.”
— Jimmy Valvano, basketball coach
Who needs to know you believe in them?
“…Where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.” — Peter Senge
What does this spark?
“Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.”
— George Bernard Shaw
What could you clean up and brighten up?
“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” — Maya Angelou
Is it time to trust the song inside you? What is it?
“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.” — John Milton
What is your experience of gratitude?
How do you cultivate gratitude?
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead
Where do you see or experience this?
“None of us is as smart as all of us.” — Phil Condit?
How well are you leverage your team, peers, and board?
“Luck is where opportunity meets preparation.” — Seneca
Are you ready for luck?
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.” — Martha Graham
To what extent are you expressing your vitality?
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor E. Frankl
What are you doing to expand this space?
What does this freedom empower in you?
“It’s not what you don’t know that kills you; it’s what you believe to be 100% true that just ain't so!” — Mark Twain
Where are you attached to your truth and to being right?