If you're fortunate, you'll meet people over the course of your career who exceed your expectations in every way. When you work or spend time with them, you find yourself wanting to be a better person.
Mark GoulstonRead
The measure of self-assurance is how deeply and sincerely interested you are in others; the measure of insecurity is how much you try to impress them with you.
Interpretation
Self-assurance is demonstrated through genuine interest in others, while insecurity leads to attempts to impress them.
This quote emphasizes that true self-confidence comes from being genuinely interested in the well-being of others rather than focusing on oneself. When we are secure in ourselves, we are able to listen, empathize, and connect with others without the need for validation or approval, whereas insecurity often manifests in an excessive desire to impress or outshine those around us.
In practice
In a team-building workshop, you might say this quote to illustrate the importance of genuine interest in team dynamics.
If you're fortunate, you'll meet people over the course of your career who exceed your expectations in every way. When you work or spend time with them, you find yourself wanting to be a better person.
Why do people who consider themselves good communicators often fail to actually hear each other? Often it's due to a mismatch of styles: To someone who prefers to vent, someone who prefers to explain seems patronizing; explainers experience venters as volatile.
PTSD occurs following a trauma that was so awful that in retrospect you don't understand how you survived. What that causes is an extreme feeling of vulnerability that you get past but that doesn't go away.
Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness.
The way you start to break down systemic racism is to start building individual relationships with people who are not like you.
Having a loving relationship with our spouse or with our children is what leads to the long-term happiness we all seek.
If we stop believing in a future, if we stop doing things for something else but start doing them for now, some fundamental things change. Retirement becomes less about how much money you can squirrel away now and much more a matter of participating and contributing to your own community now so that they want to take care of you. … We’re going to move into a world where your retirement will be more secure if you’ve made lots of friends with young people rather than collected lots of dollars.
She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.
I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated
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