Favorite Inspirational Quotes

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Maybe no one can.  However, this is a lot easier said as an adult.  In our society, any child who is different will meet with those who pick on him.  Any child who takes a path that is unusual will also meet resistance and scorn.  It’s hard for a child to not come to feel inferior when he is treated that way growing up.

And no matter how much education, training and self improvement is carried out into adulthood, that inferiority can remain.  Yes, it is up to the individual to overcome it.  Few can help him.  But we need to open our eyes and see what we do to those who are different or unusual.

Now speaking as an adult, how do you keep from allowing others to make you feel inferior?  One thing we can do is stop running those images in our minds over and over where someone put us down, or made fun of us, or where we make a mistake.  Instead of running that movie over and over where we make a mistake, we should keep re-running the ones where we do well, where we are recognized and awarded, and where we feel good.

It goes back to the 30 Jun post, Find the Good, where we find the good and showcase it.  In this case, it is the good in our own lives we must find.  It is the things we have done well that we must showcase and play over and over again to ourselves.

Maybe make a victory log.  Keep mementos around of things we did well.  Anything that will help us focus on and see all the good and smart things we have done.

Tags: Eleanor Roosevelt

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

Johann Wolfgang von Geothe

If I were to put this quote into practice, I think the first thing I would do is to practice not making assumptions about the people I meet or even see passing by.  It seems to be our nature, or maybe it’s the way we are raised, but we make assumptions based on how people look (fat vs. thin, tall vs. short), how they are dressed, what type of car they drive, language they use, etc.  Our assumptions could be, and I would guess often are, incorrect.  So number one is stop making assumptions.

Next, I would be more polite to everyone.  People often treat those we think of as having a higher station in life than ourselves more politely and respectfully.  What if we treated everyone that way?

And what if we treated everyone as being fully capable and fully responsible of reaching their potential and being functioning members of society?  It’s like the classroom experiment they did.  Some teachers were told the class they were teaching was full of bright over achievers, so they treated the kids that way.  They expected more of them.  And, guess what?  The kids responded and met the expectations.  Even though they were average kids, they met the higher expectations.  How do we institute this into society as a whole?

One thing I do think is that we should apply this inspirational quote to ourselves.  We should treat ourselves as if we are what we ought to be.

Just think if we did that and that helped us become what we are capable of being.  The first thing I can think of here is to watch our self talk.  We must not be mean to ourselves, put ourselves down, or call ourselves names.  We sure wouldn’t do that to someone we respect.  Why do it to ourselves?

Also, we shouldn’t allow ourselves off the hook too easily when we fail.  We should expect more of ourselves.  So, how do I go about expecting more from myself?  I start doing the hard stuff in a disciplined way and focus.  And I quit messing around.

Tags: being kind

Being defeated is only a temporary condition; giving up is what makes it permanent.

Marilyn vos Savant

Why do these quotes so often seem to be just what I need when I need it?

Success is getting up one more time than you fall down.

I tried something new recently and it didn’t work.  I felt like giving up.  But if I did that I would have no chance of reaching my goal.  Perseverance is what it is all about.  I just needed to get through the downer mood that come after failure.  It could be that I just didn’t do the thing I tried in the best way.  So I need to become better educated about the topic.

Not sleeping well doesn’t help either.  I need to figure out how to get more restful sleep.

The biggest thing I need to do is create the habits that will carry me on to my stated goal - something I write down every morning.  Maybe I should write it down at night, too.  But whatever I do, I just need to keep my goal in sight and not give up no matter how many times the method I try doesn’t work out.  One day, one method will work and then I will just have to accelerate it.

Tags: Marilyn vos Savant