Tools & Templates
- Assessment of Potential in Management vs Mastery
- Team Collaboration Assessment
- Influence Assessment
- Communication Assessment
- SCOPE of Leadership Assessment
- Individual Development Planning (IDP) Template
- Individual Life Planning (ILP) Template
- Goal Setting Worksheet
- Delta Roadmap (PDF version)
- Delta Roadmap (PPT version)
- Leadership Approaches Self-Assessment
- Leadership Effectiveness Assessment
- Opportunity Planning Template
- Meeting Template
- Offsite Meeting Planning Template
- How to Select an Executive Coach – Scorecard
- Skills, Abilities, & Interests Worksheet
- Trust and Respect Assessment
- Time Allocation Assessment Worksheet
- Conflict Template
- Emotions that Motivate Worksheet
- Setting the Example Worksheet
- Team Member Assessment of “Self” Competencies
- Partnership and Collaboration Self-Assessment
- Online Virtual Remote Leadership Training and Development
- Approach to Coaching Others in Changing Behaviors
- Why, What, How Approach to Influencing & Delegating
Additional tools and templates available to registered members.
Brochures
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Videos
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Mike's Blog
The #1 Role of Parents and Leaders
How to Be Trustworthy
Lecturing Doesn’t Work
When Change Requires the Extreme
In Conflict? Make It Their Problem
Books by Mike Hawkins
By reading Activating Your Ambition, you will discover how easy it can be to learn new skills, overcome bad habits, and improve performance. You will find out how to conquer the primary obstacles to improvement, how to move outside of your comfort zone, and how to turn your ambitions into realities.
The eight principles of Activating Your Ambition show you how to build confidence, be more successful at work, improve your health, and enhance your relationships. You will have clarity in your goals and be well on your way to focused improvement and long-term success.
Execution: Delivering Excellence describes the capabilities that leaders need to create competitive differentiation and deliver extraordinary value. Great leaders build a culture that achieves operational excellence as well as adapts to change and seizes new opportunities. By learning the competencies of making smart decisions, fostering innovation, enabling speed, and taking action, you are able to equip your team to sustain great performance for years to come.
Partnerships: Leveraging Teamwork illustrates how to build high-performing teams and work effectively with others across organizational boundaries. Great leaders do not lead a collection of individuals but rather a unified team of people who work for the good of the organization. By learning the competencies of internal and external partnering, you will gain synergy, establish a spirit of community, and leverage the value of collaboration.
Others: Developing People guides you in building the skills of others and developing top performers. Great leaders build teams of competent people who are able and willing to take ownership for the work that needs to be performed. By learning the competencies of coaching, enabling, and holding people accountable, you multiply your abilities, transfer your knowledge, and leave an enduring legacy.
Communications: Inspiring Performance describes how to influence people through positive and trustworthy interpersonal communications. Great leaders speak, write, and listen in a manner that connects with people and moves them to action. By learning the competencies of creating compelling content, engaging the audience, and maintaining communication flow, you are able to capture people’s minds and hearts as well as foster the healthy exchange of ideas and information.
Self: Setting the Example sets the foundation for the ability to lead others by developing the competencies of great self-leadership. Effective leaders possess intrinsic passion, character, courage, and confidence that others respect and want to follow. When you lead yourself well, operate productively, and think strategically, others notice and are motivated to attain the higher standards you demonstrate.
Leadership: Competencies That Enable Results explores the essentials of great leadership and establishes the principles that underpin the ability to coach, lead, and achieve high levels of organizational performance. Laying the groundwork for the competencies introduced over the course of the series, this book guides you in building a leadership roadmap for yourself and others to follow on the journey to enabling great results.
Favorite Quotes
C.S. Lewis
You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.
Hyman G. Rickover
Success teaches us nothing; only failure teaches.
E. M. Forster
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Fannie Flagg
Being a successful person is not necessarily defined by what you have achieved, but by what you have overcome.
George Matthew Adams
There is no such thing as a ‘self-made’ man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts.
André Maurois
To reason with poorly chosen words is like using a pair of scales with inaccurate weights.
William James
We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
Maya Angelou
We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated.
Maltbie Babcock
Our business in life is not to get ahead of other people, but to get ahead of ourselves.
Solon
In all things that you do, consider the end.
Albert Einstein
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Benjamin Franklin
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Benjamin Disraeli
There is no education like adversity.
Brian Tracy
People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.
Karl Popper
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
P.D. James
The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.
Carl Rogers
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
Napoleon Hill
The starting point of all achievement is desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your reactions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Denis Waitley
A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown.
Andreas Nikolaus “Niki” Lauda
What would life be like if we only did what is necessary?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
Audre Lorde
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Tim Fargo
Mistakes should be examined, learned from, and discarded; not dwelled upon and stored.
Peter F. Drucker
While the leader of the past knew how to tell, the leader of the future will know how to ask.
John Locke
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
Arnold Bennett
The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it by realizing that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.
Seneca
Valor withers without adversity.
Dale Carnegie
You can make more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
William James
In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
Marilyn Ferguson
It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place in between that we fear …. It’s like being between trapezes. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing to hold on to.
Pablo Casals
The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.
Theodore Rubin
The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.
Francis Bacon
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
Eleanor Roosevelt
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.
Warren Bennis and Bert Nanus
It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers.
Francis Bacon
If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.
Winston Churchill
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body, calling attention to an unhealthy state of things.
Nelson Mandela
If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.
Lawrence Bossidy
I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.
Peter Senge
People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.
Old Chinese Proverb
It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward.
Paul Marsden
Business is all about solving people’s problems — at a profit.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do..
Howard Schultz
Victory is much more meaningful when it comes not just from one person, but from the joint achievements of many.
Alexander Graham Bell
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
Publilius Syrus
Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
John Ruskin
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it.
Zig Ziglar
You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.
Jerome Kagan
Genes and family may determine the foundation of the house, but time and place determine its form.
Abraham Lincoln
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.
Henry Ford
Money doesn’t change men. It merely unmasks them.
George MacDonald
To have what we want is riches, but to be able to do without is power.
General Eric Shinseki
If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.
Nelson Mandela
Everyone can rise above their circumstances and achieve success if they are dedicated to and passionate about what they do.
Hank Aaron
Failure is a part of success. There is no such thing as a bed of roses all your life. But failure will never stand in the way of success if you learn from it.
Albert Pike
What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.
Albert Einstein
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Alexander Graham Bell
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
Calvin Coolidge
We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.
Sophocles
One must learn by doing the thing; though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.
Robert Hughes
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
Lewis Timberlake
Only 10% of people actually succeed at what they set out to accomplish. Another 10% accept defeat and try to resolve their feelings of anger and desperation by turning to drugs, alcohol and other obsessions. Finally, 80% of the population simply endures their frustration and blame their lack of success on circumstances.
Winston Churchill
To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.
Unknown author
Get comfortable being uncomfortable. That’s when you see the most growth.
Carl Sandburg
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Thomas Wolfe
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
Steve Jobs
I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard.
Auguste Rodin
Patience is also a form of action.
Carl Rogers
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
Andrew Carnegie
If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.
George Washington Burnap
Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Samuel Johnson
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
Roger Williams
The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world.
William Barrett
It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our noses is what we see last.
Thomas Edison
Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
William James
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
Vincent van Gogh
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
Seneca the Younger
The mind that is anxious about future events is miserable.
Marcus Aurelius
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
Arnold J. Toynbee
The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
Will Durant
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Elbert Hubbard
If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing — court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie.
Isaac Newton
Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.
Anais Nin
The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.
Sandra Day O’Connor
We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone … and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.
Moliere
The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.
Walter Scott
Too much rest is rust.
Tina Fey
Start with a yes and see where that takes you.
Robin Sharma
What you befriend, you’ll transcend.
Thomas Edison
I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes.
Melinda Gates
If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.
Haruki Murakami
When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
Marilyn Ferguson
Ultimately, we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.
James Cameron
Failure has to be an option. … No important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk.
George Bernard Shaw
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
Stephen Covey
Selfless service has always been one of the most powerful methods of influence.
Randy Pausch
The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.
Albert Einstein
Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: It is character.
Emile Chartier
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only one you have.
Will Durant
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Tom Peters
Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.
Theodore Roosevelt
The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is the knack of getting along with people.
Roger Bannister
The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.
Nikos Kazantzakis
True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.
Calvin Coolidge
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not, nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not, unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not, the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Zig Ziglar
You are who you are and what you are because of what has gone into your mind. You can change who you are and what you are by changing what goes into your mind.
Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Conrad Hilton
Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.
Lord Chesterfield
If we do not plant knowledge when young, it will give us no shade when we are old.
Leo Buscaglia
It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.
John Wooden
A player who makes a team great is more valuable than a great player.
Benjamin Disraeli
We are not creatures of circumstance; we are creators of circumstance.
Aldous Huxley
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Washington Irving
One of the greatest and simplest tools for learning more and growing is doing more.
Thomas Paine
It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.
Osho
The moment you accept yourself, you become beautiful.
Dany Garcia
Your job is not to run everything, but make sure everything runs.
William Butler Yeats
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past.
George Bernard Shaw
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
H.L. Mencken
There is always an easy solution to every human problem–neat, plausible, and wrong.
Marcus Aurelius
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
Lucille Ball
I’d rather regret the things I have done than regret the things I have not done.
Laozi
Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.
Davy Crockett
I have always supported measures and principles and not men. I have acted fearless and independent and I never will regret my course. I would rather be politically buried than to be hypocritically immortalized.
Viktor Frankl
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
Attach yourself to those who advise you rather than praise you.
Winston Churchill
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Alex Marwood
Most people have to get to a point where they don’t have a choice before they’ll change something.
Deborah Day
A positive attitude from you tends to produce a positive attitude toward you.
Vince Lombardi
Confidence is contagious; so is lack of confidence.
Seneca
Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.
Timothy Sykes
Remember this: No matter what happens after taking a risk, you’ll always learn from the experience.
J.K. Rowling
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.
Ann Beattie
People forget years and remember moments.
Marie Ebner von Eschenbach
We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don’t care for.
Aldous Huxley
Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted.
Neale Donald Walsch
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
Walter Elliott
Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.
Zig Ziglar
I believe that whatever your chosen profession, if you make a strong commitment and have a burning desire in your heart–combined with the conviction that you can make a difference–dogged persistence provides you the best insurance for success.
Thomas Fuller
All things are difficult before they are easy.
Marcus Garvey
With confidence, you have won even before you have started.
Alvin Toffler
The illiterate of the future are not those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Benjamin Franklin
There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.
Leo Tolstoy
A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.
Laurel Mellin
The essential pain is the downside, the risk, the reality of the human condition you must face to follow through with your reasonable expectation. The earned reward is the upside, the advantage, the blessing of life you will receive if you follow through. Experiencing them over and over is how we retrain our feeling brain and grow ourselves up from the inside out.
Thomas Edison
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
Calvin Coolidge
No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.
John Wooden
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
Ken Blanchard
People with humility don’t think less of themselves; they just think of themselves less.
Harold Geneen
In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.
Adlai Stevenson II
All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.
Vernon Law
Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
By leadership we mean the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it.
Gail Sheely
If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean a giving up of familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, relationships that have lost their meaning. As Dostoevsky put it, ‘taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.’ The real fear should be the opposite course.
Loretta Lynn
You’ve got to continue to grow, or you’re just like last night’s cornbread — stale and dry.
Steven R. Covey
If you aren’t feeling pain, there is rarely enough motivation or humility to change.
Robert Quillen
Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument is an exchange of ignorance.
Michael Jordan
I can accept failure; everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.
Harry S. Truman
In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves. … Self-discipline with all of them came first.
Marilyn vos Savant
Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.
Marshall Goldsmith
Our [delusions of achievement, status and contributions] become a serious liability when we need to change. We sit there with the same godlike feelings, and when someone tries to make us change our ways we regard them with unadulterated bafflement.
Abigail Adams
It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties.
William James
Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
Logan Pearsall Smith
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
E.E. Cummings
To be nobody but myself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
Ferdinand Foch
The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.
Desiderius Erasmus
Fortune favors the audacious.
Henry David Thoreau
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
Martin E. P. Seligman
A pessimistic attitude may seem so deeply rooted as to be permanent. I have found, however, that pessimism is escapable. Pessimists can in fact learn to be optimists, and not through mindless devices like whistling a happy tune or mouthing platitudes, but by learning a new set of cognitive skills.
Warren Buffett
In a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.
Saadi
That sorrow which is the harbinger of joy is preferable to the joy which is followed by sorrow.
Aristotle
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
Jack Welch
An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive business advantage.
Don Shula
I don’t know any other way to lead but by example.
Richard Bach
It’s like, at the end, there’s this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid?
Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
There are undeniably bad bosses, toxic work environments, difficult relationships and real life crises. Nonetheless, we have far more control over our energy than we ordinarily realize. The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. It is our most precious resource.
Denis Waitley
Time is the most precious element of human existence. The successful person knows how to put energy into time and how to draw success from time.
Tom Wilson
Many of us are more capable than some of us, but none of us is as capable as all of us.
Zig Ziglar
The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity.
Malcolm De Chazal
The man who can make others laugh secures more votes for a measure than the man who forces them to think.
Michael LeBoeuf
A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.
Abraham Cowley
Nothing so soon the drooping spirits can raise, as praises from the men, whom all men praise.
M. Scott Peck
The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.
Judy Garland
Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
Josh Billings
Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
Mahatma Gandhi
Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.
John Wooden
Manage yourself, so others won’t have to.
Vincent van Gogh
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
Calvin Coolidge
Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.
Brian Tracy
Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.
Lucretius
For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true.
Daniel Goleman
If people lack the previous experiences that allow them to master a given leadership competence, however, it is still not too late – but it requires motivation. The brain’s ability to sprout fresh connections continues throughout life. It just takes more effort and energy to learn in adulthood lessons that would have come more readily in our early years.
Jason Sudeikis
Being polite and grateful will make people more inclined to help you. And if people are willing to help you, you may accidentally get something you want.
Louis Nizer
A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
Laozi
Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.
Bobby Unser
In time, the people with desire will always rise to the top.
Murasaki Shikibu
No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly … and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.
Mark Zuckerberg
The only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
Thomas J. Watson
A man is known by the company he keeps. A company is known by the men it keeps.
John Wooden
Talent is God-given; be humble. Fame is man-given; be thankful. Conceit is self-given; be careful.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.
Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Eddie Rickenbacker
There can be no courage unless you’re scared.
Leo Tolstoy
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
John H. Zenger and Joseph Folkman
A key skill for all successful leaders is the ability to continuously improve themselves.
John Dewey
Education … is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
Bruce Lee
The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.
Warren Bennis
Managers are people who do things right, and leaders are people who do the right thing.
Mary Kay Ash
Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try.
Henry Kaiser
Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.
Sallust
They envy the distinction I have won; let them therefore, envy my toils, my honesty, and the methods by which I gained it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
Helen Keller
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Charles Darwin
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Cicero
The higher we are placed, the more humbly we should walk.
Fred Barton
You are surrounded by hundreds of people more timid than you are.
Margaret Fuller
Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
John Henry Newman
Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.
Publius Terence
Fortune favors the brave.
Alexander Pope
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying … that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
Richard Steele
Whenever you commend, add your reasons for doing so; it is this which distinguishes the approbation of a man of sense from the flattery of sycophants and admiration of fools.
Chinese proverb
If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.
Colleen Barrett
People admire your strengths, but they love your vulnerability.
J.K. Rowling
We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.
Henry Ford
One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again.
Colleen Barrett
Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.
Adam Lindsay Gordon
Life is mostly froth and bubble, / Two things stand like stone, / Kindness in another’s trouble, / Courage in your own.
Virgil
They can because they think they can.
John Maxwell
It’s easy to have faith in people who have already proved themselves. It’s much tougher to believe in people before they have proved themselves. But that is the key to motivating people to reach their potential.
Penelope Cruz
You cannot live your life looking at yourself from someone else’s point of view.
Lao Tzu
He who conquers others is strong; He who conquers himself is mighty.
Johann Gottfried Von Herder
Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant. There is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.
Henry David Thoreau
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
John Churton Collins
In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends.
Louis Pasteur
My strength lies solely in my tenacity.
Shannon Alder
The lesson will always repeat itself, unless you see yourself as the problem — not others.
Charles Kettering
If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.
Seth Godin
Anxiety is practicing failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It’s fear about fear, fear that means nothing.
Walt Disney
The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
Johann Sebastian Bach
I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.
Leo Tolstoy
The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.
Jack London
I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself..
John Lennon
Every child is an artist until he is told he’s not an artist.
Henry van Dyke
Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except the best.
Ray Charles
You got to set your mind right and the rest will come to you naturally.
Henry Ford
If you think you can, you’re right. If you think you can’t, you’re right.
George Woodberry
Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.
Yogi Berra
You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.
Joe Frazier
Champions aren’t made in the ring, they are merely recognized there.
Confucius
Do not be concerned that no one recognizes your merits; be concerned that you may not recognize others’.
Louis L’Amour
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.
George Matthew Adams
There is no such thing as a ‘self-made’ man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts.
Will Rogers
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
James Cameron
Don’t put limitations on yourself. Other people will do that for you.
Charles F. Kettering
A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
Desmond Tutu
Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.
Mark Twain
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.
Mike Ditka
You are never a loser until you quit trying.
Aristotle
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.
Norman Vincent Peale
Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.
Irish Proverb
You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
Naguib Mahfouz
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
Maria Robinson
Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.
Robert Collier
Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
Niels Bohr
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.
Niels Bohr
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.
Mary Shelley
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.
Nido Qubein
Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.
Willie Mays
What you are thinking, what shape your mind is in, is what makes the biggest difference of all.
Woodrow Wilson
Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
Joseph Joubert
The goal is not always meant to be reached, but to serve as a mark for our aim.
Mary Kay Ash
Making people feel important is precisely what a leader is paid for — because making people feel important motivates them to do better work.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
Frederick Douglass
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
Auguste Rodin
Patience is also a form of action.
Benjamin Disraeli
Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions.
M. Scott Peck
Our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
One’s ridiculousness increases in proportion as one denies it.
Warren Bennis
The crucible is an essential element in the process of becoming a leader. No matter how cruel the testing, they become more optimistic and more open to experience.
Horace Mann
A teacher who is attempting to teach, without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn, is hammering on a cold iron.
Christian Nestell Bovee
When all else is lost, the future still remains.
Claude Levi-Strauss
The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.
Earl Nightingale
We become what we think about.
Pablo Picasso
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Florence Welch
If you do something with your whole heart and it’s a mistake, you can live with that.
Stevie Wonder
We all have ability. The difference is how we use it.
Sam Walton
There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
Robert Frost
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
Warren Bennis
The truth is, we’re products of everything – genes, environment, family, friends, trade winds, earthquakes, sunspots, schools, accidents, serendipity, anything you can think of, and more. What distinguishes the leader from everyone else is that he or she takes all of that and creates a new, unique self.
Lao Tzu
A leader is best when people barely know that he exists. … When his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, ‘We did this ourselves.”
Jesse Owens
The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself — the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us — that’s where it’s at.
Erastus Wiman
Nothing is ever lost by courtesy. It is the cheapest of pleasures, costs nothing, and conveys much.
Carl Jung
What you resist persists.
William Shakespeare
Experience is a jewel, and it had need be so, for it is often purchased at an infinite rate.
Bob Black
You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you’ll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
W. Clement Stone
I think there is something more important than believing: Action! The world is full of dreamers, there aren’t enough who will move ahead and begin to take concrete steps to actualize their vision.
Ovid
Misfortunes often sharpen the genius.
C.S. Lewis
Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.
James Matthew Barrie
We are all failures, at least all the best of us.
Isaac Asimov
A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written.
Akira Kurosawa
There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.
Vince Lombardi
If you are not fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.
Ann Patchett
The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Aldous Huxleyt
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Berthold Auerbach
Discontent is the source of all trouble, but also of all progress, in individuals and nations.
Zig Ziglar
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.
Herbert Bayard Swope
I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure–which is: Try to please everybody.
Thomas Pynchon
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.
Paul Harvey
You can tell you’re on the road to success; it’s uphill all the way.
Ernest Hemingway
You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
Henri Matisse
Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.
Carl Rogers
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
The only thing I know that truly heals people is unconditional love.
Rosa Parks
I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.
Edmund Hillary
It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.
Marcus Aurelius
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Aesop
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.
Samuel Johnson
What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.
Blaise Pascal
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.
Thomas Sprat
What you dislike in another take care to correct in yourself.
Salvador Dali
The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.
Elbert Hubbard
A failure is a man who has blundered but is not able to cash in on the experience.
Dwight Eisenhower
What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.
Jeanette Winterson
It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.
Joseph Addison
There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.
C.W. Metcalf
Take your work seriously but yourself lightly.
Will Rogers
You’ve got to go out on a limb sometimes because that’s where the fruit is.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
Danny Kaye
Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.
Thomas Jefferson
Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.
Mark Twain
There are only two types of speakers in the world. 1. The nervous and 2. Liars.
John Locke
The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
Harold D. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps
For training and learning purposes, it’s important to create meaningful chunks that condense several pieces of information into one. This facilitates perception, learning and retention. By creating a single chunk, we reduce the short-term memory load.
T.S. Eliot
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
Anonymous
There are always two choices. Two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it’s easy
Earl Nightingale
Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.
Muriel Rukeyser
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
