Top 100 Martha Beck Quotes
#1. Most of my clients don't realize that the way they look and the way they think about their looks are two separate issues.
Martha Beck
#2. As a life coach, I love makeovers, from new clothes to surgery, pedicures to highlights. But redoing makes you feel better only if approached with the right attitude.
Martha Beck
#3. Welcoming imperfection is the way to accomplish what perfectionism promises but never delivers. It gives us our best performance and genuine acceptance in the family of human
and by that I mean imperfect
beings.
Martha Beck
#4. Anyone who comes into your life, under any circumstances, has something to teach you.
Martha Beck
#5. Every worldview I chose, it seemed, edged me toward belief.
Martha Beck
#6. You can't stay well without telling
and living
the truth.
Martha Beck
#7. Learning to quit while you're not ahead, when the dull ooze of depression tells you things are not going to get any better, is one of the best financial and life skills you can master.
Martha Beck
#8. The only thing scarier than telling my secrets would be keeping them. When the "sensitive information" you carry is your own history, going mute to protect the system doesn't keep you from being destroyed; it just means that you destroy yourself.
Martha N. Beck
#9. What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence.
Martha Beck
#10. There's tons of magic in the world, and it's all science.
Martha Beck
#11. I'm not saying we have power over everything in our lives - if that were true, my hair would look so, so different - but I am saying that there's no circumstance in which we are completely powerless.
Martha Beck
#12. To live a life that is wrong for you is a form of dying. There are people who have lives that look perfect. They try to be happy, they believe they should be happy, they are trying to like it, but if it's off course from their north star, they aren't satisfied.
Martha Beck
#13. The most common reason we stumble into the delusion of powerlessness is that we're afraid of what other people would do or say or feel if we were to act as we wanted.
Martha Beck
#14. If you feel stuck in your present life, if you feel no enthusiasm for anything, if you think you have no purpose or that you lost that purpose somewhere along the way, I guarantee you are living in a dungeon made of stories. And that none of those limiting stories are true.
Martha Beck
#15. Fact: From quitting smoking to skiing, we succeed to the degree we try, fail, and learn. Studies show that people who worry about mistakes shut down, but those who are relaxed about doing badly soon learn to do well. Success is built on failure.
Martha Beck
#16. You'll never be hurt as much by being open as you have been remaining closed.
Martha N. Beck
#17. To attract something that you want, become as joyful as you think that thing would make you.
Martha Beck
#18. Truth itself is something you live, not something you think.
Martha Beck
#19. It reminds me that we are born innocent but ignorant, and that to remedy the second of these conditions we inevitably surrender the first.
Martha N. Beck
#20. The average adult laughs 15 times a day; the average child, more than 400 times.
Martha Beck
#21. We virtually never feel our age, but thinking that we should can lead to disaster.
Martha Beck
#22. The more you claim your own destiny, the easier it will be to love unconditionally .
Martha Beck
#23. Any moment you spend attacking yourself is a moment away from your higher purpose and your power to love. Don't go there.
Martha Beck
#24. Think through the well-meaning motivations of both your Dictator and your Wild Child, until you really understand that within their limited perspectives they're doing their very best. Then offer them both kindness.
Martha N. Beck
#25. In one century, we've added 28 years to our average life span - a change so rapid that our brains couldn't possibly have evolved to accommodate it.
Martha Beck
#26. we don't just react to the world as it is. We react to the world as we think it is - the
Martha N. Beck
#27. Many people think passion is a fuzzy feeling that makes taking action effortless. In fact, it's the gritty courage and tenacity to forge onward ...
Martha Beck
#28. When I tell a woman you really need to quit your soul-sucking job, she goes home, and she can tell her husband, 'I need to quit,' and he's like, 'O.K., let's do it.'
Martha Beck
#29. Polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing and solving our real problems.
Martha Beck
#30. Do something today that you think is too delicious,
too selfish, too wacky to fit within the rules of your life.
Martha Beck
#31. Just one mental shift-focusing on the abundance of your environment-switches your psychological settings so that your life automatically improves in many areas you may think are unrelated. This is essentially a leap from fear to faith.
Martha Beck
#32. In the developed world, hundreds of millions of us now face the bizarre problem of surfeit. Yet our brains, instincts, and socialized behavior are still geared to an environment of lack. The result? Overwhelm - on an unprecedented scale.
Martha Beck
#33. You're exactly where you're meant to be, meandering along a crooked path.
Martha Beck
#34. Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look.
Martha Beck
#35. This very moment of your life, if you experience it fully, will show you astonishing wonders and exquisite delights.
Martha Beck
#37. I majored in Chinese. I was never really good at Chinese but I really, really benefited from having been exposed to Asian philosophy early in my life.
Martha Beck
#38. The way to find your own North Star is not to think or feel your way
forward but to dissolve the thoughts and feeling that make you miserable.
You don't have to learn your destiny
you already know it; you just have to unlearn the thoughts that blind you to what you know.
Martha Beck
#39. We also believe thoughts like "I'm hungry" or "I need pie" even when they aren't true. We react to these inaccurate statements as though they were scientific fact. As
Martha N. Beck
#40. Take off your watch: the divine is speaking to you.
Martha Beck
#41. My own nature hovers between neurotic and paranoid. I've developed the habit of mentally listing things that make me optimistic about the future. I do it every day.
Martha Beck
#42. Rest until you feel like playing, then play until you feel like resting, period. Never do anything else.
Martha Beck
#43. I want you to notice is that-right here, right now-you're okay. You may be in pain, you may be in fear, you may be in grief. But you're here, you're surviving; this moment is okay.
Martha Beck
#44. Getting bogged down in old stories stops the flow of learning by censoring our perceptions, making us functionally deaf and blind to new information. Once the replay button gets pushed, we no longer form new ideas or conclusions - the old ones are so cozy.
Martha Beck
#45. people with weight issues often feel judged and attacked, partly because they spend so much time judging and attacking themselves.
Martha N. Beck
#46. Caring for your inner child has a powerful and surprisingly quick result: Do it and the child heals.
Martha Beck
#47. Don't hide love. If you feel it, express it-not to demand that others love you back, but simply to live outwardly the best of what you feel inwardly. The worst that can happen to your heart is not rejection by another person but failure to act on the love you feel.
Martha Beck
#48. Learning to spot narcissists and deal with their destructive behavior can save you the world of hurt that awaits anyone who mistakes the near enemy for a friend.
Martha Beck
#49. Hopeful thinking can get you out of your fear zone and into your appreciation zone.
Martha Beck
#50. Ten years ago, I still feared loss enough to abandon myself in order to keep things stable. I'd smile when I was sad, pretend to like people who appalled me. What I now know is that losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.
Martha Beck
#51. When you're weary, find relief. When you're strong, find delight.
Martha Beck
#52. Whatever causes you to drop your plan forward and open to your vision, your own, deeply personal vision of what your life could be at its very best, that's what I call meeting your rhinoceros.
Martha Beck
#53. Heading towards that inner home will take you places-both inside yourself and in the external world-which your heart will recognize as its native environment, even though you have never been there before.
Martha Beck
#54. Use anything you can think of to understand and be understood, and you'll discover the creativity that connects you with others.
Martha Beck
#55. Here is the crux of the matter, the distilled essence, the only thing you need to remember: When considering whether to say yes or no, you must choose the response that feels like freedom. Period.
Martha Beck
#56. You will know how to stop suffering as soon as suffering ceases to be valuable. If you are in pain, you are being led.
Martha Beck
#57. I'd like to help repair the earth's ecosystems, and to fully live until I'm fully dead.
Martha Beck
#58. it becomes a problem when we mistake the stories in our minds for The Truth.
Martha N. Beck
#59. Sometimes a psychic tells you something and it feels wrong and others may be right on the money. It's your choice about whom to trust, and giving that trust is something we do ourselves.
Martha Beck
#60. You do not owe anyone your time. When you realize that, others will respect your time much more.
Martha Beck
#61. Most unhappy people need to learn just one lesson: how to see themselves through the lens of genuine compassion, and treat themselves accordingly.
Martha Beck
#62. If you ask people (as I often do) how they make decisions, 'lucky' people will talk about tuning in to information and instincts, while 'unlucky' people often mention pushing away the uncomfortable feeling they were headed for trouble.
Martha Beck
#63. When you meet people, show real appreciation, then genuine curiosity.
Martha Beck
#64. If you'd rather live surrounded by pristine objects than by the traces of happy memories, stay focused on tangible things. Otherwise, stop fixating on stuff you can touch and start caring about stuff that touches you.
Martha Beck
#65. A designated patient 'carries' the group's dysfunction. A designated issue performs the same service for an individual, dominating our psyches so that other troubles can go unnoticed.
Martha Beck
#66. My point is that perceptual bias can affect nut jobs and scientists alike. If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we ignore or avoid evidence of anything that might change our mind.
Martha Beck
#67. The really potent part of love is that it allows you to carry around beliefs about yourself that make you feel special, desirable, precious, innately good. Your lover couldn't have seen [these qualities] in you, even temporarily, if they weren't part of your essential being.
Martha Beck
#68. The idea is to identify a destructive thought pattern, then simply label it and watch it and let it pass by whenever it appears in your mind.
Martha Beck
#69. The way we can allow ourselves to do what we need to, no matter what others may say or do, is to choose love and defy fear.
Martha Beck
#70. Tiny steps will get you to your goal months and months sooner. A little is better than a lot.
Martha Beck
#71. The position that I take partly as a result of living in Asia is where you stop living according to your expectations and you become available to experience things as they are.
Martha Beck
#72. The knowledge of your destiny is available to you, well before
it actually happens, as a message streaming continuously from
your heart to your brain, written in the language of longing.
Martha Beck
#73. Instead of fretting about getting everything done, why not simply accept that being alive means having things to do? Then drop into full engagement with whatever you're doing, and let the worry go.
Martha Beck
#74. Everything I've ever taught in terms of self-help boils down to this - I cannot believe people keep paying me to say this - if something feels really good for you, you might want to do it. And if it feels really horrible, you might want to consider not doing it. Thank you, give me my $150.
Martha Beck
#75. My anguish came from my hypothesis that other people's hypothetical hypotheses about me mattered. Ridiculous!
Martha Beck
#76. Comparing and contrasting is a valuable human skill - and not just during high school English exams. Our ability to rank-order things is invaluable in making choices and setting priorities.
Martha Beck
#77. The repercussions of one person living in stubborn gladness are incalculable.
Martha Beck
#78. If you begin to face your fears, something bittersweet
is going to happen to you: You'll grow up.
Martha Beck
#79. Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don't. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life.
Martha Beck
#80. Make a plan to change the world. For
one night, don't disbelieve that you can.
Martha Beck
#81. In the moments I get it right, every step I take seems to be matched by a universal mystery, which obligingly, incredibly, creates what I can't.
Martha Beck
#82. No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.
Martha Beck
#83. I practice staying calm all the time, beginning with situations that aren't tense.
Martha Beck
#85. You are consciousness dressed in form, my love. Consciousness is divine. Matter is divine. Creation is divine. Everything is divine. Are you somehow the only exception?
Martha N. Beck
#86. Research has shown that focusing on appreciation and gratitude has all kinds of positive health effects, lowering indicators of disease-causing stress and increasing the flow of healthy hormones in our bloodstreams.
Martha N. Beck
#87. Perpetually doing, without ever tuning in to the center of our being, is the equivalent of fueling a mighty ship by tossing all its navigational equipment into the furnace.
Martha Beck
#88. Your life follows your attention. Wherever you look, you end up going.
Martha Beck
#89. There's more God in one hurt child than in all the religions humans ever created.
Martha N. Beck
#90. Stop trying to change your behavior; instead, rethink your beliefs
Martha Beck
#91. By the end of your incredibly arduous, disappointing, stressful journey, you will be your true self, in a place where you belong, with friends who truly understand you and bring all sorts of opportunities your way.
Martha Beck
#92. Seek art from every time and place, in any form, to connect with those who really move you.
Martha Beck
#93. The way we do anything is the way we do everything.
Martha Beck
#94. Whether you've seen angels floating around your bedroom or just found a ray of hope at a lonely moment, choosing to believe that something unseen is caring for you can be a life-shifting exercise.
Martha Beck
#95. Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.
Martha Beck
#97. If you're doing something you love with people you love in a place you love, you are going to create something of value to the world.
Martha Beck
#98. Once we're willing to confront our emotional suffering, we begin making choices based on attraction instead of aversion, love instead of fear. Where we used to think about what was 'safe,' we now become interested in doing what seems right or fun or meaningful or ripe with possibilities.
Martha Beck
#99. To really boost your sense of self-efficacy, think of ways you could modify your usual tasks to suit your personal style.
Martha Beck
#100. The past doesn't exist except as a memory, a mental story, and though past events aren't changeable, your stories about them are. You can act now to transform the way you tell the story of your past, ultimately making it a stalwart protector of your future.
Martha Beck
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