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 dream of Poland becoming a modern society that is defined not by the crippling nature of history, but by our individual achievements, a sense of our own self-worth and ideas for the future.
But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body and soul, to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild heritage and his memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him far and away.
Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he has done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States and the world. He walks us on a tightrope from birth.
It is not for us to forecast the future, but to shape it.
To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves. . . . New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.
... the spring, the summer, The chilling autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world By their increase, now knows not which is which.
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