You Can Say That Again! Mantras That Make You Stronger
Sound like a broken record player much? You can never repeat yourself too often when chanting personally significant sayings or phrases to summon your courage, grit or hope. We asked speakers at the Conference in California this month to share their favorite mantras. Feel free to adopt them for yourself!
When you share your light, you live in a brighter world.
“A lot of people operate from a premise of lack and limitation, thinking that they lose when they share. But the opposite is true: The more we share our knowledge, resources and insights, the bigger the pie gets. By mentoring, teaching and celebrating others, we help to unlock the greatness of more people who, then, use their talents to solve more problems and make the world better for everyone.”—Mary Spio, founder and president of social virtual reality company CEEK VR and author of It’s Not Rocket Science: 7 Game-Changing Traits for Uncommon Success
Failure is today’s lesson for tomorrow.
“Ignoring failures or trying to fix them right away deprives you of the opportunity to gain insights from what went wrong. But if you try to extract their lessons, you can put them to work and that will lead to your eventual success.”—Mark Coopersmith, senior fellow of entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and coauthor of The Other “F” Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.
“This is from Franklin Roosevelt and it helps me remember that I can be scared, and that doesn’t make me weak. I just have to reach inside and remember why I am doing what I am doing. When I second-guess myself and think someone else can do this better than I can, I remember it doesn’t matter. I am the right person for the job because I am showing up and fighting for these values I believe in, and that’s very grounding.”—Julia Hu, CEO and co-founder of Lark
The only two constants in life are time and change.
“My father used to always tell me this. So if you don’t like something, you can be sure that it will eventually pass. And conversely, if you love something, you have to treasure it because it will also eventually go away.”—Jay Newton-Small, author of Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works
Never place too much stock in any one person’s assessment of you.
“Years ago, I let an academic advisor’s opinion of my work paralyze me. It was hard to move forward, but getting through that experience made me tougher, more confident in my abilities and more determined. It also taught me that you should never take one person’s assessment too much to heart, because doing so allows that person to put limits on what you believe you are capable of achieving.”—Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research and author of Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times
Life is good.
“Many of us think, I’ll be happy when I get this BMW or that designer bag, but happiness doesn’t come from the outside. It’s inside us, and you don’t have to wait for it. Be happy now.”—Marshall Goldsmith, an executive coach and author of Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts, Becoming the Person You Want to Be