QUOTES

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.” - Albert Einstein

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“You are the architect of your life. You can choose to continue allowing undesirable behaviors to form a destructive pattern that suffocates you in a world of negativity and hurt, like a cancer.

“You can let your mind trick you into believing that you cannot find your way out. This feeling consumes you, but at the same time becomes comfortable. It gives you an excuse for everything that is going wrong in your life. You fall into the trap of living by default, not really living at all, because you are not choosing, but rather allowing what has become the norm for your life.”

From The Journey to Be Your Own Best Friend: How to Discover Your Power Within, by Paula Klee Parish

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“In my efforts to heal myself, I’ve learned that the self-help game requires discovering the underlying code of rules that governed the behavior of my ancestors. All families have rules to live by in order to be loved, even though these rules may be unspoken.

“Because our natural response is to be loyal to our families since they are the initial source of love, we may hold on to these subliminal rules, despite their fallacies.”

Rebecca Linder Hintze [from rebeccahintze.com] - author of Healing Your Family History: 5 Steps to Break Free of Destructive Pattern.



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Maggie Gyllenhaal on the emotional challenges of acting

Maggie Gyllenhaal: [about her film SherryBaby] Obviously, I understood that all the things that happened in the movie were painful for her, but I didn’t let that into the work. Then all the terrible things I’ve had to go through surfaced after we’d finished shooting.

And I got over it. I don’t think I could play that part now. I don’t know that I could be okay with the things I had to be okay with in order to play her.

Continued on The Inner Actor



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Is it a disorder, or just shyness?

“As a child, I was very shy. Painfully, excruciatingly shy. I hid a lot in my room. I was so terrified to read out loud in school that I had to have my mother ask my reading teacher not to call on me in class.” - Kim Basinger

Many of us were shy as children, and continue to be. In more extreme versions, it may be labeled social phobia or social anxiety disorder, but maybe it is usually a personality trait, related to introversion and high sensitivity. A number of psychologists and others argue that shyness can be viewed as an ordinary variation in personality, and should not be pathologized or treated as a medical condition to be overcome.

Actor Sigourney Weaver has commented, “Sometimes because I am very shy, when I meet a director and they are shy too, we just sort of sit there.”

Many other actors describe themselves as shy. Nicole Kidman has said she is “very shy - really shy - I even had a stutter as a kid, which I slowly got over, but I still regress into that shyness. So I don’t like walking into a crowded restaurant by myself; I don’t like going to a party by myself.”

Many of us avoid crowds or social contacts that are too anxiety producing, and it works. But if this kind of anxiety and protective behavior gets to be overly self-limiting, holding us back from expressing our talents, there are ways to deal with it.

Continued on Highly Sensitive



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Resetting our happiness set point

Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., an experimental social psychologist, notes each of us is born with a particular “happiness set point” – “a baseline or potential for happiness.” She has conducted “the first controlled experimental intervention studies to increase and maintain a person’s happiness level over and above” this set point.

In her book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want she explains, “50 percent of individual differences in happiness are governed by genes, 10 percent by life circumstances, and the remaining 40 percent by what we do and how we think - that is, our intentional activities and strategies.

“The secret of course lies in that 40 percent. If we observe genuinely happy people, we shall find that they do not just sit around being contented. They make things happen. They pursue new understandings, seek new achievements, and control their thoughts and feelings.

“In sum, our intentional, effortful activities have a powerful effect on how happy we are, over and above the effects of our set points and the circumstances in which we find themselves.

Continued on Talent Development Resources



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Heather Thomas on trophy wives and feminizing influences

Heather Thomas based her new novel “Trophies” on Hollywood trophy wives - who, she says “get a bad rap, and there’s a lot of misconceptions about them. But really, there isn’t a hospital wing or a library in this city that wasn’t the result of some trophy wife’s efforts.”

Here is an excerpt from the mediabistro blog GalleyCat:

Thomas readily admits that she and her fellow philanthropist/activists are held up for ridicule, dismissed as intellectual lightweights, sometimes even by the ostensible political allies who come courting the money they control. “If you’re a wealthy second wife,” Thomas says, “you’re like a poster child for schadenfreude…

“But as a feminist, I don’t think we should attack other women. I’ve never met a bimbo trophy wife. I think women label other women because we’ve been socialized to compete with one another—but when we stop attacking each other, we’ll realize how powerful we are.”

It’s a subject she cares passionately about, and her argument about contemporary political activism is peppered with references to Leonard Shlain’s theories about the different ways men and women process information…

Continued on Women and Talent



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