I find that coaches often need inspiration themselves to inspire others. I like quotes because they remind me of what I know deep inside of me but have perhaps forgotten in the face of a challenging situation. Here are some of my favorites:
by Winston Churchill
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
Never, never, never, never, never, never, never give up.
If you're going through hell, keep going.
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
by Nietzsche
Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.
There is no truth, there are only possibilities (paraphrased). Actual quote - "There are no facts, only interpretations."
by Johann Wolfgang vonGoethe
If your treat an individual... as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
by Buckminster Fuller:
I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeable advantage in all instances. Because our spontaneous initiative has been frustrated, too often inadvertently, in earliest childhood we do not tend, customarily, to dare to think competently regarding our potentials. We find it socially easier to go on with our narrow, shortsighted specialization's and leave it to others primarily to the politicians to find some way of resolving our common dilemmas.
by me:
One must remember that simple, complicated, chaos & complex often reflect our limited understanding more than the problem we are labeling
The primary question is not how to have the teams coordinate with each other as much as it is how do you reduce the need for them to coordinate. This, by the way, is difficult to do from the team level.
Dogma - you persistently work towards a goal without ever questioning your methods.
Persistence - you dogmatically work towards a goal without ever being committed to which method you use.
Busyness is bad business.
Whatever we don't challenge will become an impediment eventually
You don't need to know everything. You only need enough to take the next step.
The wonder of life is not that it is so hard but that we make it so hard,
Our path to greatness is not achieved by overcoming obstacles outside of us but by realizing we are great to begin with and overcoming our obstacles to manifesting that reality.
The power of faith is not in our beliefs, but in the actions that spring from these beliefs
There is value in answers-they can supply us with needed certainty in an uncertain situation. But we must recognize the certainty is false
The point is not to do Agile. the point is to be effective. Agile provides us insights.
And for those who like to say "you don't do Agile you be Agile" The point is not to be Agile. the point is to be effective. Agile provides us insights.
Al Shalloway
You can see more quotes at the Net Objectives Favorite Quotes Page.
