Keith

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“Similarly, the understanding that one can get more change in a family or organization by working with the motivated members (the strengths) in the system than by focusing on the symptomatic or recalcitrant members totally obliterates the search for answers to the question of how to motivate the unmotivated.”
― Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix

“A leader must separate his or her own emotional being from that of his or her followers while still remaining connected. Vision is basically an emotional rather than a cerebral phenomenon, depending more on a leader’s capacity to deal with anxiety than his or her professional training or degree. A leader needs the capacity not only to accept the solitariness that comes with the territory, but also to come to love it. These criteria are based on the recognition that “no good deed goes unpunished”; chronic criticism is, if anything, often a sign that the leader is functioning better! Vision is not enough.”
― Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix

“The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.”
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book