I06 · Identity and Personal Change
Insecurity and self-doubt
Doubting one's competence, feeling like an imposter or shrinking in demanding rooms.
Cues
Showing 20 of 28 cues
“How can a man come to know himself? Never by thinking, but by doing. Try to do your duty and you will know at once what you are worth.”
“But, on the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it ...”
“Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own submerged inner resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths ... Dig deeply. You possess strengths you might not realize you have. Find the right one. Use it.”
“It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.”
“It’s time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.”
“Concentrating hard on something that is important is ... I can’t succeed at all without doing it. I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”
“No one is laughed at who begins by laughing at himself.”
“But whether easy or difficult, Alcibiades, still there is no other way; knowing what we are, we shall know how to take care of ourselves, and if we are ignorant we shall not know.”
“To be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself ... the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”
“When someone fervently wants for a very long time to seem something, it will eventually be difficult for that person to be anything else. The profession of almost everyone, even of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, with an imitating from outside and a mimicking of what works effectively.”
“What our age thinks of as the “shadow” and inferior part of the psyche contains more than something merely negative.”
“You can completely lose track of incredibly positive things about yourself - your beauty, goodness, strength, and virtue ... the so-called Golden shadow.”
“We fear our highest possibilities. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments ... We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves ... And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities.”
“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
“What does your conscience say? ‘You shall become the person you are’.”
“You need not, and in fact cannot, teach an acorn to grow into an oak tree, but when given a chance, its intrinsic potentialities will develop. Similarly, the human individual, given a chance, tends to develop ... the unique alive forces of his real self; the clarity and depth of his own feelings, thoughts, wishes, interests; the ability to tap his own resources, the strength of his will power ... All this will in time enable him to find his set of values and aims in life.”
“There is a certain extra gain in having conquered [inner] territory entirely through one’s own initiative, courage, and perseverance.”
“Speak not of gifts, or innate talents! One can name all kinds of great men who were not very gifted. But they acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’.”
“We deny that these differences [between expert performers and normal adults] are immutable ... Instead, we argue that the difference between expert performers and normal adults reflects a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”
“Why do you take pleasure in praise from those you cannot praise yourself?”