Shift Quotes

Offence is so easily given. And where the 'minority' issue is involved, the rules seem to shift about: most of the time a person who is female/black/disabled/gay wants this not to be their defining characteristic; you are supposed to be blind to it. But then, on other occasions, you are supposed to observe special sensitivity, or show special respect. ~ Lynne Truss

There's about to be a shift in your life. Get ready for your blessings. You've been through enough and a breakthrough is on the way. Don't doubt it, just claim it! ~ Tony Gaskins

The more leeches there are affixed to a host, the less resources there are to siphon from said hosts, per parasite. The ability to only absorb energy, without the ability or desire to reproduce it in a productive manner, is a dangerous, unsustainable, albeit attractive long term method of collapse and decline. ~ Justin K. McFarlane Beau

Hey, suit guy! The man bellowed.
Chris bit back the urge to yell. He turned, expecting to be confronted by a hand held out for money. What he saw was a pair of enormous eyes, the same color as the spring sky, set in a face with high cheekbones and a delicate chiseled jaw. The man's short, spiked hair was dyed a vibrant purple, making his creamy pale skin glow. Letting his gaze shift downward in a sudden still silence, Chris took in the sleek, sculpted muscles under the snug green t-shirt, the faded jeans molded to slim hips and thighs.
He'd never in his life's seen anyone so beautiful. ~ Ally Blue

To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask? ~ Chip Heath

In general, one shouldn't be too rigid about anything because "to live meant to constantly shift colours. ~ Elif Shafak

When your sense of worth exceeds your conditions, conditions will shift to match your vision. ~ Alan Cohen

We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades. ~ Barbara Taylor Bradford

Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see?

Transparent images moving through light, "an infinite storm of beauty."
The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth's face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up- mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back.

A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cit ~ Annie Dillard

...Learn to concentrate, to give all your attention to the thing at hand, and then to be able to put it aside and go on to the next thing without confusion.
My husband said that being President of the United States meant that you saw more kinds of people, took up more subjects, and learn more about a variety of things than anyone else. But it required complete concentration on the person you were with and on what he was saying. When that person left the room, you pulled down a shade in your mind, and you were ready, with your attention free, for what the next person had to say. You might have to shift from banking to forestry, but each subject had the attention and concentration it required and each, in turn, was put in the back of the mind, ready to be called upon when needed. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Shift from being afraid of making a mistake to being afraid of not making a mistake. If you are not making any mistakes, you are not learning or growing ~ Susan Jeffers

I really feel like if everyone listened to their angels the world which shift. We wouldn't see any kind of greed or competition - it would really be the world of kindness . ~ Doreen Virtue

Reading for me, was like breathing. It was probably akin to masturbation for my brain. Getting off on the fantasy within the pages of a good novel felt necessary to my survival. If I wasn't asleep, knitting, or working, I was reading. This was for several reasons, all of them focused around the infititely superior and enviable lives of fictional heroines to real-life people.
Take romans for instance. Fictional women in romance novels never get their period. They never have morning breath. They orgasm seventeen times a day. And they never seem to have jobs with bosses.
These clean, well-satisfied, perm-minty-breathed women have fulfilling careers as florists, bakery owners, hair stylists or some other kind of adorable small business where they decorate all day. If they do have a boss, he's a cool guy (or gal) who's invested in the woman's love life. Or, he's a super hot billionaire trying to get in her pants.
My boss cares about two things: Am I on time ? Are all my patients alive and well at the end of my shift?
And the mend in the romance novels are too good to be true; but I love it, and I love them. Enter stage right the independently wealthy venture capitalist suffering from the ennui of perfection until a plucky interior decorator enters stage left and shakes up his life and his heart with perky catch phrases and a cute nose that wrinkles when she sneezes.
I suck at decorating. The walls of my apartment are bare. I am allergic to most sto ~ Penny Reid

When I was a child, the lessons my father taught me had been about perseverance, never to accept limitations that stood in my way. As an adult, watching him in his final years, I also saw how to come to terms with limits that couldn't simply be wished away. When to shift from pushing against limits to making the best of them is not often readily apparent. But it is clear that are times when the cost of pushing exceeds its value. Helping my father through the struggle to define that moment was simultaneously among the most painful and most privileged experiences of my life. Part of the way my father handled the limits he faced was by looking at them without illusion. Though his circumstances sometimes got him down, he never pretended they were better than they were. He always understood that life is short and one's place in the world is small. But he also saw himself as a link in a chain of history. ~ Atul Gawande

Sometimes, a truce can create dangers that outweigh any peace. ~ Charles Shift

Excuse me, Abigail, but whose shift did she get away during?' Townsend asked with a glare.
'Excuse me, Townsend, but who was supposed to booby-trap the doors?'
'I'm an agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service,' Townsend said, indignant. 'I do not do booby traps. ~ Ally Carter

Yeah, you like that? You like it when Big Papa gives you his hot and juicy wiener?" I pant, my hips hammering against her. Her fists yank my hair, pulling my head away from her neck so hard that I see stars. "Ow! What the fuck?" I complain as she gives me a dirty look. "You cannot say shit like that when we're fucking. You Just can't," she warns me, letting out a low groan when I shift my hips and grind my pubic bone against her clit.
"What's wrong with a little dirty talk? I thought you'd like it." "I like dirty talk. I LOVE dirty talk. What you're doing is not dirty talk. It's 'weird as fuck' talk. Repeat after me: I love fucking you, your pussy is so tight," Ava demands. (Well, damn, that was hot. I kind of wish I had a vagina right now). ~ Tara Sivec

Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes-indeed, deletes-the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Off come her skirts and petticoats, her lace cuffs and collar, her shoes and whalebone stay, until she lies on her side in nothing but a cotton shift and endless strands of pearls. Dust hangs in a crack of light between red velvet drapes, like stars.

Her dreams are glimpses, bewildered--celestial charts, oceanic swells, massive, moving bodies of water, the heavens as heavenly liquid, familiar whirlpools, the universe as a ship lost at sea--but the ship she imagines arrived safely, years ago, loaded with their possessions. ~ Danielle Dutton

As far as our relation to the physical world, I doubt there will be much more improvement. Our basic survival needs have been met, and much of our current progress is superfluous or downright troublesome. Most advancement is performed out of comfort rather than necessity. What we are lacking, what the world so desperately needs now, is adjustments of the mind. We need to see the world again with fresh eyes, and come to an understanding of who we are as individuals, and what drives us. ~ Chris Matakas

To strengthen the connection between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind is to gain access to a map and compass to help you move towards your dream. To gain access to the subconscious mind is to gain the ability to see and create the future, the ability to shift the present, and the ability to alter your own perceptions of the past. ~ Kevin Michel

It takes sacrifice to make something great. In order to shift your mindset and experiment with ideas, you have to choose a new path. You have to change your paradigm from consumption to creation. Then the possibilities are limitless. ~ Anonymous

You've got criminal courts and child welfare officials refusing to do their jobs and protect children so they can shift the cases over to family court where predatory professionals can turn a dirty buck off the atrocities committed against children. ~ Anne Stevenson

You cannot reduce the complexity of a given task beyond a certain point. Once you've reached that point, you can only shift the burden around. ~ Larry Tesler

It was something new for her. New roads, new people, new places, new opportunities and new perspective. This is the one thing that inevitably moves a person through the grief. Growth heals grief. ~ Kate McGahan

I have this clutter of questions all churned together in my mind and they won't stop churning. I've found out too much and not enough. there are too many pieces that could go together too many ways and I can't stop shifting them around. There has to be some way it all makes sense and it doesn't yet."
"You're asking a lot of life if you want it to make sense."
Most of the time, Joliffe was of the same opinion, but he shook his head against it now like against a fly's buzz and said nothing, frowning at the pen he was still twirling.
Basset watched him a moment, then said,
"Well, if you can't let it go, go at it as if you were trying to make a story of all these pieces you have. Shift them around and fill the gaps until they make the sense you want. ~ Margaret Frazer

LeaderSHIFT:
Surpass the status quo
Honor your values
Impact the world
Focus on your purpose
T​ranscend boundaries ~ Farshad Asl

As for the danger of alienating people with good intentions - well, one of the things that I learned from RaceFail (and also from general experience) was that people with good intentions are the ones to fear most. The overt racists are easy to deal with. You can spot them coming a mile away. But the well-intentioned people are scarier. They might not intend harm, but in most cases they haven't thought about all the racist (and other "-ist") messages they've absorbed from society. They haven't done the basic groundwork necessary to purge themselves of that passively-absorbed "-ism". So they say the most incredibly hurtful, self-absorbed, and utterly useless things, then compound the problem by getting upset when they're called on it. I liken these people to sleeper agents - they seem OK at first, but then they suddenly "activate" and stab you in the back, and then they come out of their fugue and freak because there's blood on their hands and they don't know how it got there and they refuse to accept that they're the ones who put it there, OMG, OMG. Meanwhile, you're on the floor bleeding out, unnoticed because of their histrionics.

The rage of RaceFail made many of these well-intentioned sleeper agents wake up. So while yes, I think the anger risked alienating some of them, I'm fine with that. They were always dangerous; I haven't lost anything by their alienation. The ones who wake up are a gain (or they will be, once they shift from "not causing harm" anymore ~ N.K. Jemisin

If our theology doesn't shift and change over our lifetimes, then I have to wonder if we're paying attention. ~ Sarah Bessey

Then there are the metabolic costs of switching itself that I wrote about earlier. Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We've literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviors. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain's need for glucose. ~ Daniel J. Levitin

However, when we shift our awareness or "frequency" from self-consciousness - where fear, impossibility or feelings of separation reside - to cosmic consciousness, which is in total harmony with the universe and where none of those feelings exist, then anything is possible. ~ Rhonda Byrne

What is healing, but a shift in perspectives? ~ Mark Doty

The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding. ~ Rem Koolhaas

When ever you allow your self to be non judgmental mostly to your self, and others, and with an open mind to the things and people who surround you - you have triumphed to a higher self of substance. A substance of your beautiful self. Because when you look back to those moments, you feel a sense of relief, a sense of accomplishment; and deep in your heart, you know you have carried out something that was right. I say : "Live up to your morals and values- whilst remaining aware of them, embrace your unique self, your individuality and be happy the way you are. Remembering to shift your focus to the goodness in your life, to let go of things that no longer is useful for the goodness of your being, genuinely and practically, rejoice in the fortune and success of others and most of all, LOVE the BEAUTY you possess within. ~ Angie Karan

Three or four plays cause the momentum to shift. We turned it over and gave Baylor a cheap score. ~ Bill Vaughan

Did you know that Judaism is based on paradigm shifts, Henry? First came Abraham, then came Moses. Then came the prophets, then came the rabbis. Pretty amazing stuff. Each iteration, reaching for the godhead. What comes next, Henry? What comes next? ~ Michael Davidow

It is difficult to decide what you mean when you say any of these words and easy to claim that anyone else's meaning is (or is not) the right one. There is a built-in indeterminacy in our use of language that allows us to shift responsibility for actions in Paris away from a religion to a minor strand in a religion, or to the actions of only those who pulled the trigger. This is the universal problem of secularism, which eschews stereotyping. It leaves unclear who is to be held responsible for what. By devolving all responsibility on the individual, secularism tends to absolve nations and religions from responsibility. ~ George Friedman

This death to the logic of emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, the shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, 'love of fate,' love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art ... ~ Joseph Campbell

At some point, you will hit a plateau. If you keep doing same things you did to get to that point, make a change. ~ J.R. Rim

VanessaPlace Inc. is a trans-national corporation whose sole mission is to design and manufacture objects to meet the poetic needs of the human heart, face, and form. What is poetry really worth? What is poetry's purpose - personally, culturally, politically, financially? VanessaPlace offers a language-based solution to these and other dilemmas facing the culture business today. The poetry-products of VanessaPlace turn cultural capital into capitalized culture through a game-changing, dynamic shift of focus from manifesto to manifestation. ~ Vanessa Place

My personal convictions drive me to join those like-minded, in the recruitment of a growing army without guns, no hatred or prejudice, but with a leadership voice of influence and harnessing resources to create the change they desire. The major problems facing the world, particularly our beloved African continent, will not be won by sanctions, cruelty, ethnic cleansing, revenge, guns or bullets. The challenges are not largely externally motivated, so the platform to change them must shift. Shift from selfish to selfless, from external to internal, from behaviours to beliefs. Some of them are externally sponsored but self-inflicted, whilst most of them are due to greed, short-sightedness, abuse and selfishness. ~ Archibald Marwizi

Sacrifice doesn't really exist on a national level anymore and that's a pretty new thing - most people aren't engaged nationally in some form of service and that changes the way you think about people in your country; you kind of think of them at a distance. And so there's that shift away from some sort of sacrifice - thinking of yourself as the most important thing in the world versus thinking of yourself as some sort of a whole. ~ Joe Meno

Mindfulness is an invitation to change that pattern and to become aware of where we are and how we got here. Mindfulness gives us a chance to listen to the wisdom of our hearts, to notice with more clarity where we get in our own way, and to shift from reacting out of habit to responding from our intentions. ~ Maia Duerr

I've had some terrible jobs, but working in a kitchen at Cracker Barrel is probably the worst I've ever had. I was a grill cook - awful! It wasn't the smell, it was the people. The music, too. We had to be 'country fresh,' so they played this terrible country music eight hours during the shift. It was a bleak existence - a very dark time. ~ Brittany Howard

The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them. A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth's crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonomous soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity. ~ Sylvia Plath

In accordance with the law of accelerating returns, paradigm shift (also called innovation) turns the S-curve of any specific paradigm into a continuing exponential. A new paradigm, such as three-dimensional circuits, takes over when the old paradigm approaches its natural limit, which has already happened at least four times in the history of computation. In such nonhuman species as apes, the mastery of a toolmaking or -using skill by each animal is characterized by an S-shaped learning curve that ends abruptly; human-created technology, in contrast, has followed an exponential pattern of growth and acceleration since its inception. ~ Ray Kurzweil

Whenever a new generation announces its radical and totally unprecedented culture shift, there is an evangelical movement that pressures churches to get on board if they want to adapt and survive the next wave. It's doubtful that cultures actually work like that. But it is especially disruptive for the ordinary growth of believers in a covenant of grace that extends to every culture and "to a thousand generations." There is change, to be sure, but what kind of change, to what end, and through what means? For that, Scripture rather than culture must provide the ultimate answer. ~ Michael S. Horton

If we only identify with the mortal world, then we identify with a level of scarcity and lack and brokenness, and that will be our experience. But if we shift our experience of self-identification - and this is what enlightenment is - from the body-self to the spiritual-self, then we place ourselves under an entirely different set of possibilities and probabilities. ~ Marianne Williamson

Night shift. Jamey raises his arm, and a hundred arms are raised. He smiles, with thousands of teeth. Jamey thinks of Narcissus bending to the pool. He thinks of how a swan on a calm lake is one with its reflection, and then lifting off, the bird divides from its self, and both parts becomes smaller and smaller. Division is more interesting than duplication, and an ax is a fascinating tool. It makes a fallen tree into wood that will keep your family warm. It does more than separate a whole into pieces; it changes the spirit of the thing, its use. He thinks about Elise checking her compact, and how he looks over her shoulder to catch her outlined eye in the mirror. Her eye, separated from the rest of her, floating. Normally he doesn't let his mind split into pieces, because it frightens him, but he's in a container here. He has so much time to think on the night shift. ~ Jardine Libaire

When you look at the Earth from the vantage point of space, our planet looks like a little blue marble. Seeing our world from that vantage point cognitively changes you. My orbital shift happened after breaking bread with my space station crewmates and my shuttle crewmates. it showed me how close we are as countries, as races, as a species. I marveled that on Earth we have all these distances and separations and geographic boundaries, but they vanish quickly in the weightless interior of the space station. ~ Leland Melvin

Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the flicker of recognition, the minute shift in expression as she registered what he was telling her. Watched as the bottom fell out of her world and the person she had been vanished in an instant. ~ Kate Morton

They were eating in the kitchen. Looking at the spoonfuls of pea soup entering Mama's mouth, she decided to shift her focus to Papa. "There's something ~ Markus Zusak

It's a huge thing, this Shift, just as big as I imagined. My brain doesn't want to think anymore; all of a sudden it wants to do. ~ Ned Vizzini

One of the most striking results of modern investigation has been the way in which several different and quite independent lines of evidence indicate that a very great event occurred about two thousand million years ago. The radio-active evidence for the age of meteorites; and the estimated time for the tidal evolution of the Moon's orbit (though this is much rougher), all agree in their testimony, and, what is far more important, the red-shift in the nebulae indicates that this date is fundamental, not merely in the history of our system, but in that of the material universe as a whole. ~ Henry Norris Russell

[In late 1989,] a New York Times/CBS News Poll reported that 64 percent of those polled - the highest percentage ever recorded - now thought that drugs were the most significant problem in the United States. This surge of public concern did not correspond to a dramatic shift in illegal drug activity, but instead was the product of a carefully orchestrated political campaign. ~ Michelle Alexander

You are brilliant beings of light. You have the power to shape-shift not only yourselves but the whole world. You, each one, are endowed with gifts you don't even yet know, and you,e each one, are what love and the possibility of a world in which our lives truly matter looks like. ~ Patrisse Khan-Cullors

In recent years, more and more businesses are shifting from the pipeline structure to the platform structure. In this shift, the simple pipeline arrangement is transformed into a complex relationship in which producers, consumers, and the platform itself enter into a variable set of relationships. ~ Geoffrey G. Parker

It is not OK for anyone to be obese. There needs to be a cultural shift. ~ Mick Cornett

To develop intuition, one of the things you can do is pay attention to what you eat. Eat as clean a diet as you can. Eat fresh fruits and vegetables without preservatives, without alcohol, caffeine, dyes, and organically grown if possible. But do what is comfortable for your. Don't try to shift into a lifestyle that doesn't fit, but be aware that the lighter you eat the lighter you will feel. ~ Gary Zukav

She didn't want to go out into a world where he didn't exist. So she watched the light shift and change, and let the world pass by without her. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Do that thing you always wanted to do "someday" in the future: get on a plane in your Jackie O shift dress and shades, take a train across Europe wearing red lipstick, buy that sporty two-seater car, spend your money on perfume. Otherwise you might wake up one day with a husband and kids and wonder what you did with all that free time you once had. And if you're already experiencing the domestic bliss of family life, savour every moment. ~ Rosie Blythe

This shift from automatic living to awakening parallels Carl Jung's Individuation, Dada Bhagwan's Self-realization, Dr. Abraham Mazlow's Self-Actualization, G.I. Gurdjieff's Self-Work and other related approaches to differentiating the innate being from the unconscious complexes we have mistaken for identity. ~ Antero Alli

It was just that she wondered when, exactly, she had become so old. Perhaps it had happened when her mother died. Some kind of generational shift. The mantel being passed. ~ Katarina Bivald

I am in a car with Mr. Assai at the wheel. He pauses to let a cow cross the road and then manages to ease in and out of people and bicycles and rickshaws. I look at his hand gripping the stick shift. I have never learned to drive a vehicle though I have seen men driving on buses. I always like to see what people's hands do while their eyes are on something else.
When I carve, I must look at my subject, but every now and again, when I have done something so many times, I can look away while my hands continue working. I can look away and forget I am a slave to this piece of stone. Even if it is becoming a beautiful angel with outstretched wings.
How can I love the stone and hate it at the same time? Because it is a piece of me. I know nothing else. How can the ox stand having the yoke put upon its neck day after day after day? Because it is all it has ever known. Nothing more, nothing less. ~ Nicole A. Seitz

If we're talented at music, that talent is of god. If something makes our heart sing, that's god's way of telling us its a contribution he wants us to make. Sharing our gifts is what makes us happy. We're most powerful and god's power is most apparent on the earth when we're happy. A course in miracles teaches that we are only truly happy when we're doing god's will. The only thing to be saved from is our own negativity and fear. The crux of salvation in any area is a shift in our sense of purpose. That shift is a miracle, as always we consciously ask for it: 'Dear god, please give my life some sense of purpose. use me as an instrument of your peace. Use my talents and abilities to spread love. I surrender my job to you. Help me to remember that my real job is to love the world back to health. ~ Marianne Williamson

Sheryl Sandberg writes in her book Lean In that women need to shift from thinking "I'm not ready to do that" to thinking "I want to do that and I'll learn by doing it."17 ~ Wendy Sachs

And even though body has entwined with body, vows have been whispered into the lover's ears in the throws of unimaginable passion, there's a pang still. One has not felt understood by the lover. And that is a different quality of loneliness. A constant dull hammering. Like static hum. Dissonance. Ultimately it translates into a plain inability to see the other's view. We shout betrayal. We shift blame. We feel inadequate. When it is plain inability. So their intimacy has a narrow gap running across, like a rift between two continents and it's only when you examine it from above, do you really see it. You realize that the gap could be the breadth of a hairline but it is deep. It's darkness stretches all the way down into a free falling abyss. ~ Sakoon Singh

Behavioral Shifts to Overcome Excessive Hesitancy

Important: So far we've been focusing on how tweaking your thinking can help shift your behavior. This is important, but it's only half the story. People are usually quite good at identifying how changes in thoughts or feelings may lead to changes in behavior, such as "When I have more energy, I'll do more exercise" or "When I have more ideas, I'll take more action." However, people tend to underestimate the impact of changing their behavior on their thoughts and feelings, such as "When I exercise more, l'll have more energy" or "When I take more actions, I'll have more ideas." Don't make the mistake of thinking you need to wait for your thoughts to change before you try behavioral shifts. Mental and behavioral shifts go hand in hand. When you start making changes in your behavior (even subtle ones), you'll notice that all kinds of thoughts, including your view of yourself, start to shift. Changing your behavior, without waiting for you thoughts to always shift first, is one of the best and fastest ways you can reduce your anxiety. That's why a cognitive behavioral approach focuses on both thoughts and behaviors. ~ Alice Boyes

For his part, Jazz knew he was handsome. It had nothing to do with looking in the mirror, which he rarely did. It had everything to do with the way the girls at school looked at him, the way they became satellites when he walked by, their orbits contorted by his own mysterious gravity. If attention could be measured like the Doppler effect, girls would show a massive blue shift in his presence. In the last year or so, he had even remarked the scrutiny of older women - teachers, cashiers at stores, the woman who delivered UPS packages to his house. What had once been a maternal flavor in their glances had taken on a lingering, cool sort of appraisal. He could almost hear them thinking, Not yet. But soon.
Despite his upbringing, despite the infamy of his father, they still watched him. Or maybe because of it. Maybe Howie was right about bad boys. ~ Barry Lyga

The late Curt Cobain captured the attitude of today's culture with the line, "Here we are; now entertain us." I believe that, unfortunately, many Christians have made Cobain's line the refrain of their friendships.
In my opinion, our cultural obsession with entertainment is really just an expression of selfishness. The focus in entertainment is not producing something useful for the benefit of others but consuming something for the pleasure of self. And a friendship based on this self-serving, pleasure-seeking mind-set can easily slip into a similarly self-serving romantic relationship that meets the needs of the moment.
But when we shift our relationship orientation from entertainment to service, our friendships move from a focus on ourselves to a focus on the people we can serve. And here's the punch line: In service we find true friendship. In service we can know our friends in a deeper way than ever before. ~ Joshua Harris

The more clearly we recognize how deep our commitment to self-protection operates in our relational style and the more courageously we face the ugliness of protecting ourselves rather than loving others, the more we'll shift our direction. ~ Larry Crabb

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way
like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows. ~ Dan Simmons

In an increasingly connected world it is less likely that a few people 'manage' everyone else. The new environment requires a shift in the organization of both institutions and societies, one of flexible teams of teams that come together around whatever change opportunities exist and then reform around the next. ~ Bill Drayton

All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others. ~ William Graham Sumner

We sealed my father's grave on a day of stark contrasts, of black against white, and it was the last time I'd ever find myself in a place of such extremes. Because in the months after the dirt fell on the coffin, my life began to shift to shades of gray, almost like the universe had taken a big stick and stirred up the whole scene at that cemetery, mixing up everything and repainting my world. ~ Beth Fantaskey

Sense of Wonder ( ... ) may be defined as a shift in perspective so that the reader, having been made suddenly aware of the true scale of an event or venue, responds to the revelation with awe. ~ John Clute

The Obama administration rarely demonstrated the ability to shift gears and change policy in its first year. Even in the face of historic events such as the continuing demonstrations against Iran's regime, it stuck devotedly to prior plans. ~ Elliott Abrams

Slow' and 'down' are modes of the soul; they are connective modes, ways of keeping connected to oneself and to one's environment. 'Slowing downwards' refers to more than simply moving slowly, it means growing down towards the roots of one's being. Instead of outward growth and upward climb, life at times must turn inward and downward in order to grow in other ways. There is a shift to the vertical down that re-turns us to root memories, root metaphors, and timeless things that shape our lives from within. Slowing downwards creates opportunities to dwell more deeply in one's life, for the home we are looking for in this world is within us all along. The lost home that we are seeking is ourselves; it is the story we carry within our soul. ~ Michael Meade

We urgently need a paradigm shift in our concept of the purposes and practices of education. We need to leave behind the concept of education as a passport to more money and higher status in the future and replace it with a concept of education as an ongoing process that enlists the tremendous energies and creativity of schoolchildren in rebuilding and respiriting our communities and our cities now, in the present. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

CUSTOMER: I'm always on night shift at work.
BOOKSELLER (jokingly): Is that why you're buying so many vampire novels?
CUSTOMER (seriously): You can never be too prepared. ~ Jen Campbell

The rewards that will flow from a successful shift to a low carbon economy are high. Neither governments nor business can afford to let these opportunities pass them by ~ Margaret Beckett

Explaining temptation by saying "God is testing me" or "Satan is attacking me" positions "me" either as the victim, if I am defeated, or the hero, if I prevail. But confessing that "My heart is desperately wicked" provides no such comforts. It heads off all attempts to shift blame, and cuts down all the pretensions of spiritual pride. ~ Colin S. Smith

One of the things I love about manned space exploration is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn't acceptable. And possible. It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. ~ Mary Roach

When painters feel the need to make a shift toward self-discovery, they turn to black and white for a time. ~ Barnett Newman

You will know when you are connected to your higher expression by the shift in your consciousness and the release of the constant demands of your ego. We, your expressions of SELF in higher frequencies of reality, are reaching out to you to assist you during your return to your true Multidimensional SELF. ~ Sue Lie

Good news: it's Christmas morning.
Bad news: I have to work on labour ward.
Worse news: my phone goes off. It's my registrar. I didn't set my alarm and now they're wondering where the hell I am.
Even worse news: I'm asleep in my car. It takes me a while to establish where I am or why.
Good news: it seems I fell asleep after my shift last night and I'm already at work, in the hospital car park. ~ Adam Kay

The digital paradigm shift is inevitable, keep digital fit means the fitting mindset, fitting attitude, fitting structure, and fitting speed. ~ Pearl Zhu

The displacement of class politics by identity politics has been very confusing to older Marxists, who for many years clung to the old industrial working class as their preferred category of the underprivileged. They tried to explain this shift in terms of what Ernest Gellner labeled the "Wrong Address Theory": "Just as extreme Shi'ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations. ~ Francis Fukuyama

But in one short span of time winds quickly shift direction, veering back and forth. ~ Pindar

Weak Forces

I enjoy an accumulating
faith in weak forces--
a weak faith, of course,
easily shaken, but also
easily regained--in what
starts to drift: all the
slow untrainings of the mind,
the sift left of resolve
sustained too long, the
strange internal shift
by which there's no knowing
if this is the raod taken
or untaken. There are soft
affinities, possibly electrical;
lint-like congeries; moonlit
hints; asymmetrical pink
glowy spots that are no
the defeat of something,
I don't think. ~ Kay Ryan

There are no winners and losers. We seek a win-win. Seeing opportunity in cri- sis. Believe in yourself, and those around. Celebrate each other's strengths; we do not celebrate when someone fails. It is a shift. With our insights and consciousness comes our vowed responsibility, our vowed compassion, and our vowed unity - with that comes power. The choice to do right. The choice to include. The choice to forgive. The choice to love anyway. This is your power. No matter what has been taken from you, what society has or hasn't allowed you, what labels or beliefs limit you, your choice, your response, your action is your power. ~ Emma Mildon

Correct Overestimated Feedback Fears

One of the reasons anxious people fear feedback is that they tend to judge their performance more harshly than others judge them. If you're feeling anxious, you'll probably overestimate the likelihood that any feedback you'll get will be negative - the negative predictions thinking error.
Let's say you need to get feedback on your delivery of an upcoming presentation. You fear that you'll get crucified, that people will say your presentation style is horrible and won't say anything nice. How likely does this feared outcome feel? You might say, "It feels 99% likely." How likely is it in reality? You think, "Objectively, maybe 50%?" Your answer of 50% may still be an overestimate, but at least it jump-starts the shift in your thinking. It alters you that your anxious feelings are, to some extent, clouding your perceptions.
Although it seems strange that people can shift their thinking just based on whether they are asked to think with their anxious mind or their objective mind, this isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. There's lots of research evidence that people's thinking changes based on how they're asked to think about something. For example, my own doctoral research asked people in relationships how their judgments of their romantic partner compared to reality. People recognized that they tended to view their partners more positively than warranted by reality.
Experiment: Think of a current area in your life wh ~ Alice Boyes

Good. Now the first thing you do is press in the clutch and slide the gear into reverse." She placed his hand on the gear shift in the center of her car, and showed him how to move it up and down. "You know, you really shouldn't fondle that in front of me, Grace. It's cruel." "Julian! Do you mind? I'm only trying to show you how to shift my gears." He snorted. "I wish you'd shift my gears like that. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

It's amazing, the mentality shift that occurs in pregnancy. All of a sudden you want to be good to yourself. ~ Elisabeth Hasselbeck

You have to kind of shift the way you look at life when you're in a group of people that you work with. It's not so much, do they make you feel good when you're around them all the time; it's how can you make everyone feel comfortable together. ~ Adam Duritz

It's the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from analogs to digitals. That word he uses about eleven times an hour. ~ David Foster Wallace

If only Jesus' followers shared his personality. That one shift alone would correct so many of the ridiculous and horrifying things that pass for popular Christianity. ~ John Eldredge

American family life has never been particularly idyllic. In the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of all children experienced the death of one of their parents ... Not until the sixties did the chief cause of separation of parents shift from death to divorce. ~ Richard Louv

Sometimes, all you have to do is shift your perspective to see someone else's truth. ~ Dan Brown

He made a conscious decision not to think about it, and accordingly spent the rest of his shift thinking about nothing else. ~ Tom Holt