Tom Butler-Bowdon Quotes

people choose between two ways of coming to conclusions or judgments: by thinking, using an impersonal process of logic; and by feeling, deciding what something means to them.

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran’s work with phantom limbs seems to confirm the brain’s remarkable ability to create a sense of cognitive unity even if the reality (of many selves, and of many layers of consciousness) is more complex.

Only 10 percent were middle class.

First, love your work

The fact that people don’t get along all the time suggests that we don’t understand or value the ways other people see the world. A

As life often seems to boil down to the outcome of such interactions, it is worth understanding what is happening below the surface of what is actually said, and how to manage an encounter while keeping everyone’s dignity intact.

Neo-Freudian Karen Horney believed that childhood experiences resulted in our creation of a self that “moved toward people” or “moved away from people.” These tendencies were a sort of mask that could develop into neurosis if we were not willing to move beyond them. Underneath was what she called a “wholehearted,” or real, person.

Honesty, which seems “old-fashioned” to the fast crowd, is the basis of all enduring success, since it brings with it knowledge of the self.

Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick.” Steven Pinker

To some extent this area was foreshadowed by pioneering humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who wrote about the self-actualized or fulfilled person, and Carl Rogers, who once noted that he was pessimistic about the world, but optimistic about people.

Douglas Stone and his colleagues give excellent advice on how to deal with some of the most challenging workplace encounters.

Cognitive therapy’s revolutionary idea is that depression is not an emotional disorder. The bad feelings we have in depression all stem from negative thoughts, therefore treatment must be about challenging and changing those thoughts.

Unpleasant feelings merely indicate that you are thinking something negative and believing it.

Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

While Freud wrote of the drive toward pleasure or sex, and Adler of a drive toward power, Frankl believed that the human will to meaning was at least as strong a force in making us into who we are.