Personal Change Quotes & Sayings

Personal law is simply the thought that controls your mind and your life more than any other thought. Finding that thought is the most valuable knowledge that you can have about yourself. It is like the leverage on personal change. It enables you to change very efficiently. — Leonard Orr

You are the only problem you will ever have and you are the only solution. Change is inevitable, personal growth is always a personal decision. — Bob Proctor

The gap between thought and action, between belief and will, prevents us solving our most pressing individual and societal problems. — Paul Gibbons

Deceit for personal gain is one of history's most recurring crimes. Man's first step towards change would be thinking, counter-arguing, re-thinking, twisting, straightening, perfecting, then believing every original idea he intends to make public before making it public. There is always an angle from which an absolute truth may appear askew just as there is always a personal emotion, or a personal agenda, which alienates the ultimate good of mankind. — Criss Jami

What is your personal definition of "good"?
A world in which everyone is universally empathetic and exercises love and respect with full change-making power. — Bill Drayton

A willingness to let go of an old self and allow creative thoughts to remake a person into a better version of oneself requires an act of courage. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Transformation is an acquired taste - not for the faint of heart. — Bob Anderson

If we understand how larger systems are contributing to our shame and we choose only to change ourselves, we become as negligent as the person who says, "I'm not changing myself, because the system is bad." Context is not the enemy of personal responsibility. Individualism is the enemy of personal responsibility. — Brene Brown

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side. — Eric Hobsbawm

The world is fast changing and until you learn to adapt and adjust to stand out from the masses, you will fade into oblivion — Bernard Kelvin Clive

The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances. The second step in transforming a society is to change people's external circumstances. The Stoics would add that if we fail to transform ourselves, then no matter how much we transform the society in which we live, we are unlikely to have a good life. — William B. Irvine

You must take personal responsibiity. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of. — Jim Rohn

A belief system usually evolves over time. It's something that we grow into, as our needs and goals develop and change. Even when we find a system of beliefs that works for us, we hone and fine-tune it, working our way deeper and deeper into its essential truth. Everything we experience, every thought we have, every desire, need, action, and reaction - everything we perceive with our senses goes into our personal databank and helps to create the belief systems that we hold now. Nothing is lost or forgotten in our lives.
You don't have to remain a victim of your conditioning, however. You can choose for yourself what you believe or don't believe, what you desire and don't desire. You can define your own parameters. Once you do that, you can start consciously creating your destiny according to your own vision. — Skye Alexander

When you journey inwardly exploring yourself, a sense of personal trust begins. — David W. Earle

In my very first term there was an issue that brought us [George Mitchell, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd] together in a very deep, emotional, and personal level.It was called 'spousal impoverishment' and it meant that for one person [to go into] a nursing home, the family [ ], could go near bankruptcy, and then they'd end up with a lien on the family farm or the home. And so I wanted to change that. — Barbara Mikulski

To say, "I've been converted and that's that," is to say you have decided to quit growing. If life is about anything, it is about growing. The day I quit changing and learning is the day I die. — Steve Goodier

Changing yourself changes everything. — Bryant McGill

You can't change the past, but all of us have the power to change the future. — Michael Hyatt

For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished. I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself. — Edward Snowden

The personal things should be left out of platforms at conventions. You can argue yourself blue in the face, and you're not going to change each other's minds. It's a waste of your time and my time. — Barbara Bush

True change doesn't happen overnight; it has to happen gradually. You first have to have a change of heart, then a change of mind, and then your actions will follow. — Kaiylah Muhammad

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change. — Harriet Lerner

The more belief and confidence we feel toward achieving our goal, the higher the probability of our making the changes required to hit our targets. — Michael Hyatt

There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Resolving to influence and persuade others will require a degree of personal passion and a depth of caring that you are willing to express and act on. I can tell you this: it will make you feel very vulnerable. The only antidote is to believe you are after a worthwhile change and that you are likely to be the right one to lead this particular charge. — Charlotte Beers

Abby Von Normal - And I'm like, Don't change the subject, Kung Pao, what I want to know is if you're ready to spend some up-close and personal time with ninety pounds of barbarian woman-flesh! Sorry, I don't know how much that is in kilos. — Christopher Moore

Ascribing personal responsibility to the obese individual is not a rational argument for an eminently practical reason: it fails to advance any efforts to change it. The obesity pandemic is due to our altered biochemistry, which is a result of our altered environment. — Robert H. Lustig

I regret, most of all, my shrivelled heart. So focused on the numbers. On the maths of my personal equation. Can a man change his heart? Are there ways to improve the spirit of who you are? Of why you choose? — Andrew Miller

Basically, we've grown up very focused on the institution. The institution tells me what to do. It tells me where to go. It tells me what my career path is, and then I, sort of, attach my own personal desires, my own personal interests. I think we're living in a time where we're going to have to change - to put people in the center. — Michael Mullen

My personal convictions drive me to join those like-minded, in the recruitment of a growing army without guns, no hatred or prejudice, but with a leadership voice of influence and harnessing resources to create the change they desire. The major problems facing the world, particularly our beloved African continent, will not be won by sanctions, cruelty, ethnic cleansing, revenge, guns or bullets. The challenges are not largely externally motivated, so the platform to change them must shift. Shift from selfish to selfless, from external to internal, from behaviours to beliefs. Some of them are externally sponsored but self-inflicted, whilst most of them are due to greed, short-sightedness, abuse and selfishness. — Archibald Marwizi

The ego is our pain, but it is what we know and we resist moving out of it. The effort it takes to grow out of painful patterns often feels more uncomfortable than remaining within them. Personal growth can be so painful because it can make us ashamed and humiliated to face our own darkness. But the goal of personal growth is the journey out of dark emotional patterns which cause us pain to those which cause us peace. — Marianne Williamson

I wrote seven Myron Bolitar novels in a row, and I never want to write a Myron book where he just solves a crime. Every one of them I want to be personal, and I want him to grow and change. The problem with that is, it makes the series limited, you can't write a series where a guy is always going through some kind of crisis. — Harlan Coben

Writing out a goal allows us to see it in words. It creates a statement that does not change; it is something that we can go back to repeatedly for direction and clarity. — John Patrick Hickey

We are living in a renaissance of personal writing. People are rebalancing the impersonalization endemic to modern society with an increase in personal introspection. We have enough common psychology under our belts to know that psychology doesn't explain or heal everything and that it isn't the fulfillment of awareness, but its beginning. We are undergoing a shift in paradigms in which we are trying to develop new models for humanness and human responsibility. This is no small task. Our individual lives are placed under increasing pressure to respond adequately to both inner and outer change. — Christina Baldwin

A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment. — Gerhard Richter

An abundance of money, alcohol, or power doesn't change you, it simply reveals who you truly are. — Rob Liano

It's taken years, but part of my own personal growth has involved deciding that I can learn something from even the most annoying person. — Auliq Ice

Those dreaming of the perfect match are outnumbered by those who don't really want it at all, though perhaps they can't admit it. After all, our culture makes individual freedom, autonomy and fulfillment the very highest values, and thoughtful people know deep down that any love relationship at all means the loss of all three. You can say, 'I want someone who will accept me just as I am,' but in your heart of hearts you know that you are not perfect, that there are plenty of things about you that need to be changed, and that anyone who gets to know you up close and personal will want to change them. — Timothy Keller

Our need for social and personal change and power is often co-opted and trivialized into an adolescent and self-centered kind of rebellion. — Jean Kilbourne

The teachings of the Mage Guild were that none of these others was real, no one else and nothing anywhere was real, that everything around him was merely a shadow born of Alain's own illusions. He had accepted that wisdom - until he had met Mari. In a world where nothing was allowed to change, Alain had been changed.
He could let himself feel emotions again. He had learned what it meant to help someone else. He had learned what a friend was. He had forgotten what love was. Until he had fallen in love. — Jack Campbell

The change "grief cycle", for some people, may be excitement, enthusiasm, engagement, effort, and excellence. — Paul Gibbons

I'm too old for change," she explained. "I'm too old to pursue good health and new relationships. The past breathes for me. It is my life. You are young, Dr. Scarpetta. Someday you will see what it is like to look back. You will find it inescapable. You will find your personal history drawing you back into familiar rooms where, ironically, events occurred that set into motion your eventual estrangement from life. You will find the hard furniture of heartbreak more comfortable and the people who failed you friendlier with time. You will find yourself running back into the arms of the pain you once ran away from. It is easier. That's all I can say. It is easier." "Do — Patricia Cornwell

Always keep an open mind and to listen to what those around you have to say about you. You might actually learn something that may help you become a better person! — Auliq Ice

Don't just create; create to change; change to improve; improve to increase. Aspire to inspire. — Israelmore Ayivor

A philosophical thought is not supposed to be impervious to all criticism; this is the error Whitehead describes of turning philosophy into geometry, and it is useful primarily as a way of gaining short-term triumphs in personal arguments that no one else cares (or even knows) about anyway. A good philosophical thought will always be subject to criticisms (as Heidegger's or Whitehead's best insights all are) but they are of such elegance and depth that they change the terms of debate, and function as a sort of "obligatory passage point" (Latour's term) in the discussions that follow.
Or in other words, the reason Being and Time is still such a classic, with hundreds of thousands or millions of readers almost a century later, is not because Heidegger made "fewer mistakes" than others of his generation. Mistakes need to be cleaned up, but that is not the primary engine of personal or collective intellectual progress. — Graham Harman

In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged ... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression ... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths. — Audre Lorde

What matters in the story of our human relationships is not whether they lead to happily ever after but who and what they make of us. All relationships are our teachers, and this is especially so in a time of societal unraveling. — Carolyn Baker

Christopher Kennedy Lawford's new book Recover to Live will be a force with the power to educate as well as motivate transformational personal change. Recover to Live may alter the way broader society looks at the disease of addiction and those who are suffering from it. — Drew Pinsky

Socrates repeatedly emphasized the point that moral knowledge is not mere acquisition of information but personal change. To know the good is to do it, Socrates declared. That is, if you really know the right thing to do in a situation, then your behavior will prove it. To act immorally is to prove your ignorance. — Steven B. Cowan

Nothing will change until we demolish the "we-they" mentality. We are human, and therefore all human concerns are ours. And those concerns are personal. — Sam Hamill

At Vatican II my mind was growing through the embryonic beginning of a reversal of moral conscience unlike any I had known. I found myself increasingly critical of the Freudian psychoanalysis that had long shaped my interest in personal behavior change. I better recognized the long captivity of Protestant pastoral care to contemporary psychology and became a critic of the very accommodation to modern consciousness that I myself had advocated throughout the preceding decade. — Thomas C. Oden

Change leads to growth. Resistance leads to rigidity. Rigidity leads to ... — Gary Rohrmayer

Perhaps after all, for all our talk of change, redemption or personal growth, for all our dependence on therapists, religious faith or mood-altering drugs both legal and non, we're doomed simply to go on repeating the same patterns over and over in our lives, dressing them up in different clothes like children at play so we can pretend we don't recognize them when we look into mirrors. — James Sallis

As you get older, you realize just figuring out how to be nice to the people in your personal sphere is almost more challenging than trying to change the bigger culture. — Mike White

The speed of change today is faster than the human psyche seems able to handle, and it's increasingly difficult to reconcile the rhythms of our personal lives with the rapidity of a twenty-four-hour news cycle. — Marianne Williamson

... move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change. — Bell Hooks

Writer's groups work for some new writers, not for others. I was never cut out for a writer's group. So much depends on the people in it. What are they criticizing about your work? Grammar, syntax, plot holes? Or are they criticizing your personal style, your world view and your personal philosophy? If they're criticizing the latter, it's not a good group for you, no matter what support you might think you're getting from it. Your style, your perspective, and your philosophy of life are the main things you have to sell; they are what make you different, and you shouldn't
in fact you can't
change them. — Dean Koontz

Personal growth will cause a ripple effect as the growth in consciousness of enough people, one by one, can create general change, and lasting social improvements. — Bud Harris

Your level of success, will rarely exceed your level of personal development, because success is something you attract by the person you become," I stopped in my tracks. This one philosophy was going to change my entire life. — Hal Elrod

How much time, creative energy, and emotion do we expend resisting change because we assume growth must always be painful? Much personal growth is uncomfortable, but it's worse to thwart the ascent of your authenticity. — Sarah Ban Breathnach

Due to a combination of dispositional characteristics and personal performance histories, functional performers typically expect positive performance outcomes, and dysfunctional performers typically expect negative performance outcomes. Over time, these beliefs become strongly held and difficult to change. In addition, these belief sets can become self-fulfilling because they affect how the performer interprets challenge or threat in performance situations (Sbrocco & Barlow, 1996). For — Frank Gardner

Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding. — Martha Beck

When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change. Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection. — Peter Hans Kolvenbach

Yes, I decided, a man can truly change. The events of the past year have taught me much about myself, and a few universal truths. I learned, for instance, that while wounds can be inflicted easily upon those we love, it's often much more difficult to heal them. Yet the process of healing those wounds provided the richest experience of my life, leading me to believe that while I've often overestimated what I could accomplish in a day, I had underestimated what I could do in a year. But most of all, I learned that it's possible for two people to fall in love all over again, even when there's been a lifetime of disappointment between them. — Nicholas Sparks

As anywhere else, political instability provided an opportunity for local scores to be settled, for personal grievances to be aired, for heroes to be acclaimed and discarded, giving full reign to the fickle fortunes of war. — Charles Emmerson

Our personal journey is rarely easy, and our global journey is even less so. Because everything is interdependent, we have to work on both of these levels at once. Trying to change society without deeply understanding our heartmind won't work. Your own road home can never be separated from society's journey. We need a unifying theory and language that allow us to link the lessons of our personal journey with the situation facing our world. The important question then, a question laced with a gorgeous irony, is, "How do we get home from here?" Or, maybe more appropriate, "How do we get here from here? — Ethan Nichtern

be fair, when I was young, the elections could not have been less interesting; the mediocrity of the 'political offerings' was almost surprising. A centre-left candidate would be elected, serve either one or two terms, depending how charismatic he was, then for obscure reasons he would fail to complete a third. When people got tired of that candidate, and the centre-left in general, we'd witness the phenomenon of democratic change, and the voters would install a candidate of the centre-right, also for one or two terms, depending on his personal appeal. Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm. — Michel Houellebecq

We need to build millions of little moments of caring on an individual level. Indeed, as talk of a politics of meaning becomes more widespread, many people will feel it easier to publicly acknowledge their own spiritual and ethical aspirations and will allow themselves to give more space to their highest vision in their personal interactions with others. A politics of meaning is as much about these millions of small acts as it is about any larger change. The two necessarily go hand in hand. — Michael Lerner

The reasons why institutions fail and societies change are complex, and simplistic explanations should evoke automatic suspicion. Sometimes external causes - droughts, plagues or foreign invasions - can unsettle a nation, or its leadership may prove inadequate because of personal factors. In every case, a society faces problems, and is solutions or lack of response set a course for the future. — Thomas W. Africa

I am willing for the participant to commit or not commit himself to the group. If a person wishes to remain psychologically on the sidelines, he has my implicit permission to do so. The group itself may or may not be willing for him to remain in this stance but personally I am willing. One skeptical college administrator said that the main things he had learned was that he could withdraw from personal participation, be comfortable about it, and realize that he would not be coerced. To me, this seemed a valuable learning and one that would make it much more possible for him actually to participate at the next opportunity. Recent reports on his behavior, a full year later, suggest that he gained and changed from his seeming nonparticipation. — Carl R. Rogers

One might be tempted to think that the many slights and rejections we scientists must suffer are somehow a necessary part of our education. But I don't think that way anymore. My experience with the music business has taught me to cherish every bit of feedback I can get, and not to think of the hundreds of unreturned phone calls or ignored pitches I must face as signs of personal failings. It was this change of perspective,
and the pressure it removed from my life, that first made me want to try systematically applying what I learned in the music business to the world of science. — Marc J. Kuchner

Many an individual has turned from the mean, personal, acquisitive point of view to one that sees society as a whole and works for its benefit. If there has been such a change in one person, there can be the same change in many. — Mahatma Gandhi

Merely wanting something is disempowering. Being committed to change your personal life and circumstances is empowering. — Shannon Tanner

As you see the need to change your partner to save the relationship, it is then time to end it. — Charles F. Glassman

In the past, changing the self and changing the world were often regarded as separate endeavors and viewed in either-or terms. But in the story of the Great Turning, they are recognized as mutually reinforcing and essential to one another. — Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone

Helping professionals, therapists, life coaches, healers can greatly assist you in changing your life for the better, but they pale in comparison to the power thats gained from developing a relationship with yourself. It's you that holds the power for change — Renae A. Sauter

An authentic faith-which is never comfortable or completely personal-always involves a deep desire to change the world, to transmit values, to leave this earth somehow better than we found it. — Pope Francis

To change the limitations of our personal pasts, our minds need a reason to change what we believe-and a good one at that. — Gregg Braden

Change cannot and will not happen overnight. But the intent to evolve will produce opportunities for growth. — Robin D. Hart

It is vital that we are equipped with the humility to understand that changing the world and keeping innovation alive require that we change ourselves. — Whitney Johnson

Recognizing that you are not where you want to be is a starting point to begin changing your life. — Deborah Day

Neurotic guilt," like that often fostered by religion, is a different matter. It tends to be excessive and inappropriate, based on the expectations of others instead of personal values or dwelling on the error rather than using the guilt feelings to make a change. In your religious experience, committing a sin made you a sinner, a bad deed made a bad person. This global condemnation creates low self-worth and more neurotic guilt and misery. — Marlene Winell

Q: Have you been released or are you still a Beta version?
A: No official release of myself will ever follow!
Q: Then, you are not!
A: I — Rossana Condoleo

Even in the pages of the New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet 'virtuous,' when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue - become a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment. — Michael Pollan

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change or lives. — Ben Okri

There is a certain kind of pain that can change you. Even the strongest sword, when placed in a raging fire, will soften and bend and change its form ...
Trust me on this one. I know this from personal experience. I hope that you never will, but, since you're a person, and therefore prone to making horrible, soul-splitting mistakes, you probably will one day know what this kind of guilt and shame feels like. And when that time comes, I hope you have the strength ... to take advantage of the fire and reshape your own sword. — Adam Gidwitz

Life is in a constant state of change and by evolving in the present with change - Matthew Donnelly — Matthew Donnelly

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance. — Richard M. Nixon

Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities. — Anais Nin

I was raised in a typical Puritan Midwestern Methodist home and there was a lot of hurt and hypocrisy in those times. And I think that whatever part Playboy played and that I managed to play in terms of the sexual revolution came out of what I saw in the negative part of that life and tried to change things in some positive way so that people could choose alternate personal ways of living their lives. — Hugh Hefner

Self-realization is largely a matter of achieving a person's formative personality definition. People whom lack self-realization oftentimes fail to integrate their desired personality traits into all phases of their life including social life, family life, and work life. In order to achieve satisfaction with oneself, a person must know what they wish for, know how to go about achieving their goals, be capable of recognizing where they now stand, and understand how they must change in order to attain their ultimate visage. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The enormity of problems like hunger and social injustice can certainly motivate us to act. We can be convinced logically of the need for intervention and change. But it is the story of one individual that ultimately makes the difference - by offering
living proof. — John Capecci And Timothy Cage

For those of us who have come to believe that unless we are thinking we are wasting time, it may be challenging to simply linger with a beautiful sunset, an exquisite painting, or an arresting piece of music. The intellect often reacts to the seductions of beauty by attempting to recapture us. — Carolyn Baker

I leave the governor's office next week, and with it public life[which] has been on the whole a pleasant one. But for ten years and over my salaries have not equalled my expenses, and there has been a feeling of responsibility, a lack of independence, and a necessary neglect of my family and personal interests and comfort, which make the prospect of a change comfortable to think of. — Rutherford B. Hayes

In this digital age with its speed of change, any brand that refuses to innovate will die — Bernard Kelvin Clive

I'm honored that PBteen has seen me as someone who can help a broader audience understand the need to use recycled, repurposed and organic materials. Global conservation is a focal point of the capsule collection and it falls right in line with the change and direction I'm working towards, on a professional and personal basis. In collaborating with PBteen, we are creating a subtle and natural feel with this collection - something that has an authentic appeal for teens and their parents alike. — Kelly Slater

Treating ourselves like appliances that can be unplugged and plugged in again at will or cars that stop and start with the twist of a key, we have forgotten the importance of fallow time and winter and rests in music. We have abandoned a whole system of dealing with the neutral zone through ritual, and we have tried to deal with personal change as though it were a matter of some kind of readjustment. — William Bridges

We all begin with a story of ourselves that we believe to be true. But perhaps true personal change, even healing, can only happen when we change that narrative, when we begin to tell ourselves and others a different story. Surely — Thrity Umrigar

As an advocate for kids for over twenty years, I have watched things change since I was in school. Thankfully, this book made me face what I intuitively knew was real but pretended wasn't: The youth of our culture have been deeply wounded by our collective neglect and adult-driven self-focus. Young people need adults to understand what they are going through and people to care about them without a personal agenda. This book was very helpful to me, and my attitude toward teens will never be the same. — Doug Fields