Cudgels Define Quotes

Define Your Options

When people are spinning their rumination wheels about a particular problem, they often don't concretely define what their options are for moving forward. To shift out of rumination and into problem-solving mode, concretely and realistically define what your best three to six options are. For example, imagine you've recently hired a new employee but that person is not working out. Instead of mentally slapping yourself around about why you made the hire, it would be more useful to define what your options are at this point:

--Giving the employee more time
--Shifting the employee's responsibilities to simpler jobs
--Giving the employee checklists of the steps needed to complete each task
--Having another employee work with the individual
--Firing the employee

Defining your options relieves some of the stress of rumination and helps you shift to effective problem solving. Keeping your list of options short will prevent you from running into choice-overload problems. Research shows that if you consider more than three to six choices, you're less likely to end up making a choice.
Experiment: Practice concretely defining your best three to six options for moving forward with a problem you're currently ruminating or worrying about. Write brief bullet points, like in the example just given. You can use this method for all sorts of problems. For example, a friend just used it to come up with ideas for how t ~ Alice Boyes

Think of a single word. We'll use soul as our example. How do you define soul? Is it the same definition I use? Can it ever be it? My soul is not your soul. Our souls, our definitions, are shaped by the singular and cumulative experiences in our lives, the emotional weight we attach to a concept forever locked in the space behind our own eyes. ~ Chris Kluwe

There are certain people who come into your life, and leave a mark ... Their place in your heart is tender; a bruise of longing, a pulse of unfinished business. Just hearing their names pushes and pulls at you in a hundred ways, and when you try to define those hundred ways, describe them even to yourself, words are useless. ~ Sara Zarr

The thing about love is one can never define it exactly. And as much of a mystery as that is and as familiar it is when we acknowledge it, words just aren't enough. So we find ourselves scratching the walls while our hair is falling out. Then we can't live without it. We become addicts. ~ Kevin Fuller

And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people its not, but for me its a choice, and you dont get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if its a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesnt matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not. ~ Cynthia Nixon

Everyone tries to define this thing called Character. It's not hard. Character is doing what's right when nobody's looking. ~ J. C. Watts

God is love, but He also defines what love is. We don't have the license to define love according to our standards. ~ Francis Chan

I have felt so many loves so deeply: love of friends, love somewhere between friendship and romance that our society doesn't define, love of art, love of life, love of death, love of language, so many loves such a multitude more than romance. Yet I have never been in a "relationship. ~ Noella Handley

I think pure country music includes rock and roll .. I've never been able to get into the further label of country-rock .. how can you define something like that ? - I just say this: It's music. Either it's good or it's bad; either you like it or you don't ~ Gram Parsons

The main difficulty encountered is to define the relationship between God's sovereignty and man's responsibility. Many have summarily disposed of the difficulty by denying its existence. A certain class of theologians, in their anxiety to maintain man's responsibility, have magnified it beyond all due proportions, until God's sovereignty has been lost sight of, and in not a few instances flatly denied. Others have acknowledged that the Scriptures present both the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man, but affirm that in our present finite condition and with our limited knowledge it is impossible to reconcile the two truths, though it is the bounden duty of the believer to receive both. The present writer believes that it has been too readily assumed that the Scriptures themselves do not reveal the several points which show the conciliation of God's sovereignty and man's responsibility. While perhaps the Word of God does not clear up all the mystery (and this is said with reserve), it does throw much light upon the problem, and it seems to us more honoring to God and His Word to prayerfully search the Scriptures for the complete solution of the difficulty, and even though others have thus far searched in vain, that ought only to drive us more and more to our knees. ~ Arthur W. Pink

Your determination and actions define your destination. ~ Debasish Mridha

Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man's inhumanity to man. ~ Aberjhani

You are the author of your own life ... Don't let others define it for you. Real power comes by doing what you are meant to be doing, and doing it well. ~ Oprah Winfrey

To Witches, the cosmos is the living body of the Goddess, in whose being we all partake, who encompasses us and is immanent within us. We call her Goddess not to narrowly define her gender, but as a continual reminder that what we value is life brought into the world ... She has infinite names and guises, many of them male. ~ Starhawk

How do I define who Usher is? I'm still doing it - every day, every new opportunity, every stage, every interview, every other thing that I've done, every time that I've invested in anything that is all the definition of who I am. ~ Usher

If you have not taken the time to define what happiness means to you, what have your spent your whole life pursuing? ~ Bo Bennett

A lot of people say there is no happiness in this life, and certainly there's no permanent happiness. But self-sufficiency creates happiness. Happiness is a state of bliss. Just because you're satisfied one moment - saying yes, it's a good meal, makes me happy - well, that's not going to necessarily be true the next hour. Life has its ups and downs, and time has to be your partner. Time is your soul mate. Children are happy. But they haven't really experienced ups and downs yet. I'm not exactly sure what happiness even means. I don't know if I personally could define it. ~ Bob Dylan

Thoughts not only manifest into reality,
they define it. ~ Jorge Gw

It is increasingly clear to me that my art relates more and more to a sublimation of my closeness to the natural world, it's events, light itself, and the positive it is a personal expression based on observation and reaction, that I am not able to define except in terms of the work itself. ~ Ansel Adams

Insofar as theology is an attempt to define and clarify intellectual positions, it is apt to lead to discussion, to differences of opinion, even to controversy, and hence to be divisive. And this has had a strong tendency to dampen serious discussion of theological issues in most groups, and hence to strengthen the general anti-intellectual bias ... ~ Bill Vaughan

There is no scientific answer for success. You can't define it. You've simply got to live it and do it. ~ Anita Roddick

The Madingley paper56 represented a kind of closure for me, a climax to the first part of my scientific career, beginning in my early twenties and ending in my early thirties. At this point, I took off in an entirely new direction, never to return to those youthful mathematical pastures. That new direction, which was to define the rest of my career, and approximately the second half of my life, opened up with the publication of my first book, The Selfish Gene. ~ Richard Dawkins

It's not the disability that defines you; it's how you deal with the challenges the disability presents you with. ~ Jim Abbott

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account,
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beared and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
'Tis thee (myself) that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days. ~ William Shakespeare

My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets. Streets to define you and streets to confine you, with no sign of motorway, freeway or highway. ~ Morrissey

I can't re-define music every week! ~ Arthur Baker

On a surface level, regionalism is gone, if we define regionalism as human culture. But, what if we define regionalism as something older than human culture? ~ Cynthia Daignault

Instead of blaming yourself for something you cannot undo, let it define you. ~ Shaun Hick

The past is a tricky thing and we let it define us when we should embrace the here and now, and all that's still coming. You need to let yourself live from a place of love, not from a place of fear over the things you can't control. ~ Jennifer Farwell

I think I may have to grow up without growing old. I think we're going to have to define differently what I'm going to be. We're going to have to define my growing up differently. ~ Mattie Stepanek

Most films made about the future acquiesce toward death, and I don't want to be told how to define my future. ~ Val Kilmer

Your thoughts define your life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The things you rebel against are the things that define you ~ Charles Sheehan-Miles

Non-violent resistance to evil is a quintessential element of the character of a real human being. If someone does wrong to me, I may be physically capable of breaking his jaw with one blow of my fist, but such violent reciprocation does not define the strength of my character as a real human being. If I succeed in resisting my limbic urge to do harm in return, then only can I be hailed as human being of real character. ~ Abhijit Naskar

It's not a persons mistakes which define them - it's the way they make amends. ~ Freya North