Triggers Quotes

“Fate is the hand of cards we’ve been dealt. Choice is how we play the hand.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“getting mad at people for being who they are makes as much sense as getting mad at a chair for being a chair.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Never wrestle with a pig—because you both get dirty but the pig loves it”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“Peter Drucker, who said, “Our mission in life should be to make a positive difference, not to prove how smart or right we are.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“To avoid undesirable behavior, avoid the environments where it is most likely to occur.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Just because people understand what to do doesn’t ensure that they will actually do it.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“inside each of us are two separate personas. There’s the leader/planner/manager who plans to change his or her ways. And there’s the follower/doer/employee who must execute the plan.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“When we presume that we are better than people who need structure and guidance, we lack one of the most crucial ingredients for change: humility.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“An excuse explains why we fell short of expectations after the fact. Our inner beliefs trigger failure before it happens. They sabotage lasting change by canceling its possibility. We employ these beliefs as articles of faith to justify our inaction and then wish away the result. I call them belief triggers.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“The more aware we are, the less likely any trigger, even in the most mundane circumstances, will prompt hasty unthinking behavior that leads to undesirable consequences.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Every decision in the world is made by the person who has the power to make the decision. Make peace with that.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Sometimes the better part of valor—and common sense—is saying, “I’ll pass.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“Whether the subject is climate change or the life span of unicorns, when you cite demonstrable facts to counter another person’s belief, a phenomenon that researchers call “the backfire effect” takes over. Your brilliant marshaling of data not only fails to persuade the believer, it backfires and strengthens his or her belief. The believer doubles down on his or her position—and the two of you are more polarized than ever. If”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Accepting is most valuable when we are powerless to make a difference. Yet our ineffectuality is precisely the condition we are most loath to accept. It triggers our finest moments of counterproductive behavior.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“The most significant transformational moment in my career was an act of elimination. It wasn’t my idea. I was in my late thirties and doing well flying around the country giving the same talk about organizational behavior to companies. I was on a lucrative treadmill of preserving, but I needed my mentor Paul Hersey to point out the downside. “You’re too good at what you’re doing,” Hersey told me. “You’re making too much money selling your day rate to companies.” When someone tells me I’m “too good” my brain shifts into neutral—and I bask in the praise. But Hersey wasn’t done with me. “You’re not investing in your future,” he said. “You’re not researching and writing and coming up with new things to say. You can continue doing what you’re doing for a long time. But you’ll never become the person you want to be.” For some reason, that last sentence triggered a profound emotion in me. I respected Paul tremendously. And I knew he was right. In Peter Drucker’s words, I was “sacrificing the future on the altar of today.” I could see my future and it had some dark empty holes in it. I was too busy maintaining a comfortable life. At some point, I’d grow bored or disaffected, but it might happen too late in the game for me to do something about it. Unless I eliminated some of the busywork, I would never create something new for myself. Despite the immediate cut in pay, that’s the moment I stopped chasing my tail for a day rate and decided to follow a different path. I have always been thankful for Paul’s advice.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Whether you’re leading other people or leading the follower in you, the obstacles to achieving your goals are the same.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Integrity is an all-or-nothing virtue (like being half pregnant, there’s no such thing as semi-integrity).”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“People don’t get better without follow-up. So let’s get better at following up with our people.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“The most thankless decision I make is the one that prevents something bad from happening, because I can never prove that I prevented something even worse.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“None of this makes sense. At best, you’ve spent a lot of time failing to change someone’s mind. At worst, you’ve made an enemy, damaged a relationship, and added to your reputation for being disagreeable.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“We can change not only our behavior but how we define ourselves. When we put ourselves in a box marked “That’s not me,” we ensure that we’ll never get out of it.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“This is a natural response that combines three competing impulses: 1) our contempt for simplicity (only complexity is worthy of our attention); 2) our contempt for instruction and follow-up; and 3) our faith, however unfounded, that we can succeed all by ourselves. In combination these three trigger an unappealing exceptionalism in us. When we presume that we are better than people who need structure and guidance, we lack one of the most crucial ingredients for change: humility.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Structure not only increases our chance of success, it makes us more efficient at it.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“In her zeal to be a professional negotiator, she behaved like an amateur human being.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“If we’re satisfied with our life—not necessarily happy or delighted that we’ve exceeded our wildest expectations, just satisfied—we yield to inertia. We continue doing what we’ve always done. If we’re dissatisfied, we may go to the other extreme, falling for any and every idea, never pursuing one idea long enough so that it takes root and actually shapes a recognizably new us.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“Peter Drucker famously said, “Half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“As an experiment, I tweaked the questions using Kelly’s “Did I do my best to” formulation. • Did I do my best to be happy? • Did I do my best to find meaning? • Did I do my best to have a healthy diet? • Did I do my best to be a good husband? Suddenly, I wasn’t being asked how well I performed but rather how much I tried. The distinction was meaningful to me because in my original formulation, if I wasn’t happy or I ignored Lyda, I could always blame it on some factor outside myself. I could tell myself I wasn’t happy because the airline kept me on the tarmac for three hours (in other words, the airline was responsible for my happiness). Or I overate because a client took me to his favorite barbecue joint, where the food was abundant, caloric, and irresistible (in other words, my client—or was it the restaurant?—was responsible for controlling my appetite). Adding the words “did I do my best” added the element of trying into the equation. It injected personal ownership and responsibility into my question-and-answer process. After a few weeks using this checklist, I noticed an unintended consequence. Active questions themselves didn’t merely elicit an answer. They created a different level of engagement with my goals. To give an accurate accounting of my effort, I couldn’t simply answer yes or no or “30 minutes.” I had to rethink how I phrased my answers. For one thing, I had to measure my effort. And to make it meaningful—that is, to see if I was trending positively, actually making progress—I had to measure on a relative scale, comparing the most recent day’s effort with previous days. I chose to grade myself on a 1-to-10 scale, with 10 being the best score. If I scored low on trying to be happy, I had only myself to blame. We may not hit our goals every time, but there’s no excuse for not trying. Anyone can try.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“If you’ve ever binge-watched a season or two of a TV show on Netflix when you should be studying, or finishing an assignment, or going to sleep, you know how an appealing distraction can trigger a self-defeating choice.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“The Great Western Disease is “I’ll be happy when…” This is our belief that happiness is a static and finite goal, within our grasp when we get that promotion, or buy that house, or find that mate, or whatever. It’s inculcated in us by the most popular story line in contemporary life: there is a person; the person spends money on a product or service; the person is eternally happy. This is called a TV commercial. The average American spends 140,000 hours watching TV commercials.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be