Quotes & Sayings About Challenging Yourself

Take it slowly. The deepest resentments are wrapped up in a lot of hurt and pain. We think we're protecting ourselves by not forgiving. Acknowledge that and go easy on yourself. Forgiveness means that you've decided not to let it keep festering inside even if it only comes up once in awhile. Forgiveness is a powerful yet challenging tool that will support and honor you, even in the most extreme circumstances. — Howard Martin

We believe and we hold our beliefs to be true and sacred until the day we discover that we were duped. The end of belief is a challenging moment. You feel lonely, unconnected, with nothing to hang on. Your life becomes empty and aimless. You curse the day doubt entered your mind but you cannot undo the damage. You need to find a new direction for your life, something new to hang your hope on to continue living. And most of the time that thing is you. At that junction in life you will need to believe in yourself to continue living. — Bangambiki Habyarimana

I've really learned to appreciate the magic of challenging yourself. Seeing yourself somewhere new. There's a whole world out there. — Stacie Hammond

I feel like life is really short, and it's important to enjoy yourself and embrace whatever comes your way, whether it's a challenging day or a great day, just welcome it with open arms. No matter who you are, you can't escape challenges; they are part of life. — Miranda Kerr

The best way to defeat yourself is by challenging obstacles — Thabiso Monkoe

You don't want to continue to do one thing and only one thing. You want to keep challenging yourself and if you do well at it, great, if you fall on your face, you tried. Like, she's really terrible at comedy! Who knew? But if you didn't try and put yourself out there you'd never know. — Lucy Liu

As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice. — Paul Auster

Unfortunately we often get praise for things that weren't particularly difficult to achieve. If we focus on the props and encouragement of those who have low expectations for us, we become mediocre. It can be challenging to set our sights on excellence, particularly when we're hearing that we're already there. One of life's greatest lessons, which we all must learn, could be expressed in the phrase "That was nothing. Watch this." Challenge yourself and others to call the normal things normal and save that word excellent for things that really are. — Alex Harris

If you're a manager and you're stuck doing the same thing year after year, you're going to get stale and not know how to motivate people. Part of becoming better at what you do requires challenging yourself on a constant basis. — Art Briles

I find the roller-coaster ride of auditioning most challenging. It's always about putting yourself out there, being rejected, and then getting back out there and trying again. — Jenn Proske

Every movie that I do, I always try and better myself in the next one and try and find a part which is more challenging. It's a little vulnerable to do that, to always push the envelope. You position yourself for a lot more flack or a lot more critique because you're trying to do something different. Sometimes you're good at it and sometimes you're not, but it's a chance you have to take to make life exciting. — Priyanka Chopra

Its hard to measure yourself if nobody is challenging you. — John Tomac

Keep challenging yourself to think better, do better, and be better. — Robin Sharma

Everyone doesn't have to do everything," she told me. "People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I've had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging things created by other people, things I could never make or do. I wouldn't trade that for anything. — Will Schwalbe

You're not challenging anyone else but yourself. I'd like to have a 300-pound bench, 500-pound deadlift, and a 400-pound squat. — Aaron Tippin

Never stop challenging yourself! Never loose enthusiasm! — Haider Ackermann

You win a race, the next race it's a question mark. Are you still the best or not? That's what is funny. But that's what is interesting. And that's what is challenging. You have to prove yourself every time. — Michael Schumacher

Would you like to go to a doctor who had taken his last medical course in 1948? You have to keep changing and keep learning so that you are constantly challenging yourself, adding a few new songs to your program every chance you get. If you don't, the world will pass you by. — Harvey MacKay

I'd like to do a lot of different stuff. I think it's important as a creative person to keep challenging yourself and keep doing new stuff. If you end up trying to repeat yourself it's death. It just becomes boring and takes the passion out of it. You gotta find stories and characters that you really want to hang out with. — Darren Aronofsky

One of the fun things about being an actor is stepping outside yourself and outside of your own experience. It's challenging yourself to totally commit to something that in your core is so wrong. — Jason Priestley

If you can't fail then how can you possible develop as a communicator or as a creator of anything? We are locked into a deeply unhealthy notion that somehow you've got to succeed all the time. An appalling notion. Any painter or writer will tell you that that is no way to proceed. One of the things that will kill off a decent actor, especially a young actor early on and they will never recover from it, is too much success. It's disastrous. You stop being criticized, therefore you stop challenging yourself. You then can't afford to fail because there's too far to fall. — Emma Thompson

As an industrial designer, you design the thing by yourself, and then it goes away from you, whereas fashion is in constant relation to the body and to psychology. It makes it more complicated, and it makes it more challenging. — Raf Simons

One of the things is challenging yourself to do a Rome show when everybody's done a Rome show. To find some aspect of food culture or chef culture that people can look at in a new way. — Anthony Bourdain

Everyday on the bike is a different day. Just when you think your on top, you find yourself towards the back of the pack. It is probably the hardest sport I ever done it continues to be challenging and different. — Robin Farina

Healthy parenting is especially challenging when our own childhoods weren't healthy. It requires energy, attention, and constant restraint. Realize that you need healing. Take time out to nurture yourself. — Vimala McClure

If you're just addressing your own emotions and challenging yourself to find some sort of harmonious sense of being in life and questioning authority and questioning what's given and questioning what's expected of you, you're already on the cusp of finding something in yourself, and maybe waking something in somebody else. — Saul Williams

Often, feelings of sadness, uneasiness, and loneliness are vague and unattached to specific events. This makes it more challenging to find ways to turn you mood around. When you find yourself in a funk, focus on what you're feeling. — G. Alan Marlatt

If you face a challenging task from God today, ask yourself, "How would Jesus handle this?" Then go and do the same. — David Jeremiah

If you're unwilling to leave someplace you've outgrown, you will never reach your full potential. To be the best, you have to constantly be challenging yourself, raising the bar, pushing the limits of what you can do. Don't stand still, leap forward. — Ronda Rousey

Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it's not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives. A — Carol S. Dweck

No matter what challenging situation you may find yourself in, imagine the best outcome of it and feel it! When you do, you will change the circumstances, and you will change the situation into what you want! — Rhonda Byrne

Maturity is about Challenging yourself and Improving!
And then taking that experience to help others ... — Tsem Tulku Rinpoche

The most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you can find someone to love the you that you love, well, that's just fabulous. — Sex And The City Episode Guide Team

It's really difficult to navigate attention and stardom and celebrity status and still try to maintain yourself and hold onto your intelligence and integrity. It's really challenging. — Shirley Manson

You have to keep challenging yourself. I've always tried to do that, and I'm not saying I've always been successful. Maybe I've rewritten the same song; it's inevitable, but I've always been mindful of taking the writing somewhere else. You can't stick in your little comfort zone. — Paul Weller

Dealing with all the questions once the book is out and unchangeable, forces you to permanently give opinions about - in this case - sensible, challenging topics that you are basically only half the expert you would have to be if you wanted to explain yourself in a trustworthy, intelligent and helpful manner. — Sasa Stanisic

Acting can be pretty challenging. I can't say making a romantic comedy is challenging, but to do anything well, you have to put yourself into it. — John Cusack

New mothers enter the world of parenting feeling much like Alice in Wonderland.
- Being a mother is one of the most rewarding jobs on earth and also one of the most challenging.
- Motherhood is a process. Learn to love the process.
- There is a tremendous amount of learning that takes place in the first year of your baby's life; the baby learns a lot, too.
- It is sometimes difficult to reconcile the fantasy of what you thuoght motherhood would be like, and what you thought you would be like as a mother, with reality.
- Take care of yourself. If Mommy isn't happy, no one else in the family is happy either.
- New mother generally need to lower their expectations.
- A good mother learns to love her child as he is and adjusts her mothering to suit her child. — Debra Gilbert Rosenberg

You live your life day by day and find ways to get through it. You grow up through things that are challenging and you find the joy. You realize there are so many people that have it much worse and remind yourself. I have been very blessed. — Kelly Rutherford

Movie acting is a great job for your twenties: You travel all over, you have affairs with people, and you throw yourself into one part and then another. It gets more challenging as you get older, and it's not just having a daughter, it's wanting to have your own life and be yourself. — Helen Hunt

Keep in mind the challenging fact that your aim is not to get ahead of others, but to surpass yourself; to begin today to be the person you want to be. — Hugh B. Brown

If the material is challenging, it forces you to challenge yourself when handling it. — Joel Coen

I think you have to be scared every morning that you go out to shoot, or you lose your edge. With actors, there has to be that adrenaline and you have to keep challenging yourself, and I certainly challenge myself, as a director. — Susanna White

Protecting yourself is very challenging in the hostile environment of the Internet. Imagine a global environment where an unscrupulous person from the other side of the planet can probe your computer for weaknesses and exploit them to gain access to your most sensitive secrets. — Kevin Mitnick

One aspect of soulful healing that is most challenging and therefore most fruitful is the need to release a part of your story that may be lying underneath and behind the illness. Healing requires a willingness to rewrite the story you tell yourself about what has happened in your life and
why it's happened. There is often an emotional attachment to the pattern
that doesn't allow for easy change. — Robin Rose Bennett

Change is like the skin peeling off of a snake. It is slow. It is sticky. And sometimes you have to rub against a hard place to pull yourself through it. But in the end, you realize that it was worth it all to get the the new place and new person you have become. — Stella Payton

Leadership is a difficult practice personally because it almost always requires you to make a challenging adaptation yourself. What makes adaptation complicated is that it involves deciding what is so essential that it must be preserved going forward and what of all that you value can be left behind. Those are hard choices because they involve both protecting what is most important to you and bidding adieu to something you previously held dear: a relationship, a value, an idea, an image of yourself. — Ronald A. Heifetz

It's important to know that at the end of the day it's not the medals you remember. What you remember is the process
what you learn about yourself by challenging yourself, the experiences you share with other people, the honesty the training demands
those are things nobody can take away from you whether you finish twelfth or you're an Olympic Champion. — Silken Laumann

Pursuing your dreams in spite of opposition is a revolution against mediocrity. By challenging yourself, you transform those around you. — M.J. Stoddard

A solid sense of self develops from confronting yourself, challenging yourself to do what's right, and earning your own self-respect. — David Schnarch

What happens so often as an actor is that you retain the information about the scenes that you yourself shot and you obsess over certain scenes that you found the most challenging or interesting. The rest of the film kind of falls away in your memory or it fades a little bit. — Olivia Wilde

From this point of view, to avoid your strengths and to focus on your weaknesses isn't a sign of diligent humility. It is almost irresponsible. By contrast the most responsible, the most challenging, and, in the sense of being true to yourself, the most honorable thing to do is face up to the strength potential inherent in your talents and then find ways to realize it. — Donald O. Clifton

As women of the western world, we see our sisters in other lands being raped, maimed and even executed simply for trying to exercise the most basic freedoms, such as taking a bus alone or wearing a bright red sweater. And when we look at our own world, we see that it too still lacks equality for the sexes.
It's a terrible thing to go through one's entire lifetime not getting to do all the things we dream of doing just because others say we're not permitted to do them, and to know that they will hurt us if we try.
But far, far worse than that is when there's not a thing or a person outside that's stopping us from living exactly as we wish, but we stop ourselves; internally we do not give ourselves permission, simply because we're too scared of what will happen if we dare. — PatriciaV. Davis

The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun. — Benedict Cumberbatch

I'm a big believer in always challenging yourself and learning new skills. — Gretchen Carlson

Continual improvement involves an appreciation that there is always a better way to do things irrespective of how much you have achieved or how comfortable you might be with where you currently are in life. As a young international rugby player I learnt a valuable lesson about sacrifice. The bottom line was the phrase 'long after the price is forgotten the quality remains'. Undertaking JOLT Challenge involves sacrifice but it is well worth it as you explore creative and innovative ways of challenging yourself for constant improvement in many areas of life. — Nick Farr-Jones

Loneliness is an old friend standing beside you in the mirror, looking you in the eye, challenging you to live your life without it. you can't find the words to fight yourself, to fight the words screaming that you're not enough, never enough never ever enough . — Tahereh Mafi

Just keep challenging yourself. I think that's a great thing. — Yuichiro Miura

It's fun to get away from myself for a while when I take on these roles that have very different personalities from my own. I get to say things I normally wouldn't say or act in ways I normally wouldn't act. After all, such roles are more challenging because you really have to immerse yourself in the character. — Kelsey Chow

you cannot overcome something, without first standing toe to toe with it, then challenging yourself to defeat that which you want to change — Rick Ferreira

I do think you have to scare yourself. That's where your creativity or your growth comes from. Scaring yourself, challenging yourself, taking those risks, and not caring about what anyone thinks. — Rita Wilson

Writing is an act of hope. It means carving order out of chaos, of challenging one's own beliefs and assumptions, of facing the world with eyes and heart wide open. Through writing we declare a personal identity amid faceless anonymity. We find purpose and beauty and meaning even when the rational mind argues that none of these exist. Writing therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page? — Jack Heffron

No one ever said your life would be easy. The nature of being human makes life for all of us a challenge. The most important thing to consider here is this. Your life is only as challenging as you think it is. Think of challenge as a teacher and yourself the student. It's up to you to figure out what the lesson is to be learned. To learn that lesson and build the strength and courage to face other challenges ... . — James A. Murphy

When you pick a career like acting, it's challenging, but it's a lesson every time you put yourself out there. I wouldn't change it for the world - I love what I learn every single day. — Lisa Rinna

True revolutionary change begins by first challenging yourself -- not the world. Until you own your story and the complexities of your experience, no matter how much you may strain against it, you will still be enslaved -- if not by your oppressor, by your past. — Sil Lai Abrams

Define your own success: If you're going after a million bucks with your own startup, you've already failed yourself. Instead, do something because it's interesting, challenging, it offers you the chance to learn something new or gives you the chance to work with really interesting people. Most startups that are designed to make money, especially in this environment, don't. — Tara Hunt

Don't create Success and reveal in it in a state of inertia. Keep challenging yourself as challenges keeps you energized. If you are steadily conquering challenges, you are happy. — Pravin Agarwal

It's much harder to work for yourself, by yourself, than to create work for a gallery, because there are no limits and you can do anything you want. It's always easier when you have a parameter, when you have a limit. You can work within the limit and push it and walk the line, but when you're given absolutely no limits, it's harder. You must really think. It's more challenging. — David LaChapelle

If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If peace mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be Spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations. You would immediately accept the situation and thus become one with it rather than separate yourself from it. — Eckhart Tolle

When you do a slasher film, you find yourself repeating the same kind of scene, then it becomes not very challenging and not very interesting. — Alexandre Aja

Healing is a different type of pain. It's the pain of becoming aware of the power of one's strength and weakness, of one's capacity to love or do damage to oneself and to others, and of how the most challenging person to control in life is ultimately yourself. — Caroline Myss

And even when you're ready to let go. When you're ready to break free. When you're ready to be brand-new. Loneliness is an old friend standing beside you in the mirror, looking you in the eye, challenging you to live your life without it. You can't find the words to fight yourself, to fight the words screaming that you're not enough never enough never ever enough. Loneliness is a bitter, wretched companion. Sometimes — Tahereh Mafi

THE INITIAL STEP IN INDIVIDUAL TRANSFORMATION REQUIRES THAT YOU ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE HONEST, OPEN, & VUNERABLE TO ADMIT YOUR SHORTCOMINGS; LOOK AT THE PATH YOU'VE TRAVELED; ACKNOWLEDGE ,THAT UNFAVORABLE EVENTS QUITE POSSIBLY WERE THE CONSECUENSE OF YOUR POOR CHOICES; DEVELOPE A STRATEGY TO GET BACK ON TRACK WITH A WELL ALLUMINATED PATHWAY FOR REASONABLY ACHIEVABLE SUCCESS, WHATEVER WAY YOU DEFINE IT; AND KNOWING WHAT IS REQUIRED: POSSESING THE COURAGE, WILLINGNESS, & DESIRE TO IMPLEMENT POSITIVE CHANGE; CONSTANTLY & CONSISTENTLY FOREVER CHALLENGING YOURS ELF TO STRIVE FOR GREATNESS. — TA Guimont

Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself. — Brian D. McLaren

My biggest musical dream is to keep playing all my life. There's nothing bigger than that and that's very challenging because you have to satisfy yourself at every stage. — Hiromi

You stand up to that challenging shot, you put yourself into that shot, and you pour yourself into it confidently. Stand up and commit yourself completely. If you miss it, you miss it certainly. You've done everything you can. — Debbie Massey

Life is challenging. I wish I could tell you that you'll always be on top of the mountain, but the reality is that there are days when nothing will go right, when not only will you not be on top, you may not even be able to figure out which way is up. Do yourself a favor, and don't make it any harder than it has to be. In those moments, be careful how you speak to yourself; be careful how you think of yourself; be careful how you conduct yourself; be careful how you develop yourself. — Tony Dungy

No matter what your profession is, it's good to scare yourself a little from time to time! It's crucial to keep challenging yourself and to learn from people who are more accomplished than you are. — Lisa Kleypas