Top 6 Quotes & Sayings by Edwin H Friedman

Attitudes are the real figures of speech.

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change.

Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them.

The function of a leader within any institution: to provide that regulation through his or her non-anxious, self-defined presence.

Leadership can be thought of as a capacity to define oneself to others in a way that clarifies and expands a vision of the future.

A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.