21 Quotes by Rosamund Stone Zander

Who am I being that they are not shining?

Recognizing Pablo Picasso in a train compartment, a man inquired of the artist why he did not paint people “the way they really are.” Picasso asked what he meant by that expression. The man opened his wallet and took out a snapshot of his wife, saying, “That’s my wife.” Picasso responded, “Isn’t she rather small and flat?” 5.

The history of transformational phenomena – the Internet, for example, or paradigm shifts in science, or the spread of a new religion – suggests that transformation happens less by arguing cogently for something new than by generating active, ongoing practices that shift a culture’s experience of the basis for reality.

We keep looking so hard in life for the “specific message,” and yet we are blinded to the fact that the message is all around us, and within us all the time. We just have to stop demanding that it be on OUR terms or conditions, and instead open ourselves to the possibility that what we seek may be in front of us all the time.

Usually the impetus for transforming your own past will come from a feeling of hopelessness in the present, a sense that you have been through the same frustrating experience time and again. Our analytic powers don’t seem to help, though some of us never weary of exercising them.

The rain in Florida may be bad for us and good for the citrus crop. A canceled flight may wreck our schedule and bring us face to face with our future spouse in the airport lounge. A forest fire may seem to destroy an ecosystem in the short term, yet renew it with vigor for the long term. When a splendid osprey eats a beautiful fish, it is neither good nor bad. Or, it’s good for the osprey and bad for the fish. Nature makes no judgment. Humans do.

When you give an A, you find yourself speaking to people not from a place of measuring how they stack up against your standards, but from a place of respect that gives them room to realize themselves.

VISION IS A powerful framework to take the operations of an organization of any size from the downward spiral into the arena of possibility. Yet, while most organizations use the term “vision” liberally, we have found that few have articulated a vision in such a way that it serves that purpose.

Imagine how profoundly trustworthy you would be to the people who work for you if they felt no problem could arise between you that you were not prepared to own. Imagine how much incentive they would have to cooperate if they knew they could count on you to clear the pathways for accomplishment.