Triggers Quotes

“Getting better is its own reward. If we do that, we can never feel cheated.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“There is immeasurable satisfaction—even pleasure—in taking a big risk and fighting a battle you believe in. It’s your life, your call. No one else can make it for you. AIWATT”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“When we regret our own decisions—and do nothing about it—we are no better than a whining employee complaining about his superiors. We are yelling at an empty boat, except it’s our boat.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“I privately refer to this attitude in my clients as the “dramatic narrative fallacy”—the notion that we have to spice up our day by accepting more, if not all, challenges, as if our life resembled a TV drama where the script says we overcome seemingly insurmountable odds rather than avoid them. That’s okay for recreational pursuits, like training for a triathlon. But life becomes exhaustingly risky if we apply that attitude to everything. Sometimes the better part of valor—and common sense—is saying, “I’ll pass.” Golfers”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“You can continue doing what you’re doing for a long time. But you’ll never become the person you want to be.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“Excusing our momentary lapses as an outlier event triggers a self-indulgent inconsistency—which is fatal for change.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“We can’t admit that we need to change—either because we’re unaware that a change is desirable, or, more likely, we’re aware but have reasoned our way into elaborate excuses that deny our need for change.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“It’s the little moments that trigger some of our most outsized and unproductive responses:”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“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?”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“We treat effort as a second-class citizen. It’s the condolence message we send ourselves when we fail. We say, “I gave it my best shot,” or “I get an A for effort.” But after a few days, quantifying effort rather than outcome reveals patterns that we’d otherwise miss.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“This is how feedback ultimately triggers desirable behavior. Once we deconstruct feedback into its four stages of evidence, relevance, consequence, and action, the world never looks the same again. Suddenly we understand that our good behavior is not random. It’s logical. It follows a pattern. It makes sense. It’s within our control. It’s something we can repeat. It’s why some obese people finally—and instantly—take charge of their eating habits when they’re told that they have diabetes and will die or go blind or lose a limb if they don’t make a serious lifestyle change. Death, blindness, and amputation are consequences we understand and can’t brush aside.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“We think we control our environment but in fact it controls us. We think our external environment is conspiring in our favor—that is, helping us—when actually it is taxing and draining us. It is not interested in what it can give us. It’s only interested in what it can take from us.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“When we take highly vocal umbrage at disappointing food in a restaurant by abusing a friendly waiter and making nasty comments to the maître d’—neither of whom cooked the food—it’s not because we regularly display the noblesse oblige of Louis XIV. Our behavior is an aberration, triggered by a restaurant environment where we believe that paying handsomely for a meal entitles us to royal treatment. In an environment of entitlement, we behave accordingly. Outside the restaurant we resume our lives as model citizens—patient, polite, not entitled.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Because our environmental factors are so often outside of our control, we may think there is not much we can do about them. We feel like victims of circumstance. Puppets of fate. I don’t accept that. 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

“Effective leaders know this intuitively. They know who on their team can be left alone and who needs more direction. Other strong leaders learn it through observation and trial and error.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“I blame it on a fundamental misunderstanding of how our environment shapes our behavior. It leads to a phenomenon that Dutch sleep researchers at Utrecht University call “bedtime procrastination.” We put off going to bed at the intended time because we prefer to remain in our current environment—watching a late-night movie or playing video games or cleaning the kitchen—rather than move to the relative calm and comfort of our bedroom. It’s a choice between competing environments.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“The moral: there’s never anyone in the other boat. We are always screaming at an empty vessel. An empty boat isn’t targeting us. And neither are all the people creating the sour notes in the soundtrack of our day.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“It takes extraordinary effort to stop doing something in our comfort zone (because it’s painless or familiar or mildly pleasurable) in order to start something difficult that will be good for us in the long run.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Not all of us require a violent life-threatening knock on the head to change our behavior. It only seems that way.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Apologizing is a magic move. Only the hardest of hearts will fail to forgive a person who admits they were wrong. Apology is where behavioral change begins.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Feedback—both the act of giving it and taking it—is our first step in becoming smarter, more mindful about the connection between our environment and our behavior. Feedback teaches us to see our environment as a triggering mechanism. In some cases, the feedback itself is the trigger.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“If I change I am “inauthentic.” Many of us have a misguided belief that how we behave today not only defines us but represents our fixed and constant selves, the authentic us forever. If we change, we are somehow not being true to who we really are. This belief triggers stubbornness. We refuse to adapt our behavior to new situations because “it isn’t me.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“The pain that comes with regret should be mandatory, not something to be shooed away like an annoying pet. When we make bad choices and fail ourselves or hurt the people we love, we should feel pain. That pain can be motivating and in the best sense, triggering—a reminder that maybe we messed up but we can do better. It’s one of the most powerful feelings guiding us to change.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Lamenting the past is a waste of time. I learned my lesson. Let’s move on.” That’s one way of looking at regret—if only as a form of self-protection from the pain of knowing we missed out. We’re comforted by the fact that no one is immune to regret (we’re not alone) and that time heals all wounds (the only thing worse than experiencing pain is not knowing if and when the pain will go away).”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“Regret is the emotion we experience when we assess our present circumstances and reconsider how we got here. We replay what we actually did against what we should have done—and find ourselves wanting in some way. Regret can hurt.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“we feel regret’s sharp sting when we reflect on the opportunities squandered, the choices deferred, the efforts not made,”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch, He said to me, “You must not ask for so much.” And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door, She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?” —Leonard Cohen, “Bird on a Wire”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be

“a changing environment changes us. The”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“We think we control our environment but in fact it controls us.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last

“We think we are in sync with our environment, but actually it’s at war with us.”
― Marshall Goldsmith, Triggers: Sparking positive change and making it last