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 have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples - the Israeli people and the Palestinian people - are ahead of their leaderships.
A rebellion is not a revolution. It may ultimately lead to that end.
Where there is no Standard there can be no Kaizen
Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.
When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives
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.
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