Top 105 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Goulston - Page 2

If you're fortunate, you'll meet people over the course of your career who exceed your expectations in every way. When you work or spend time with them, you find yourself wanting to be a better person.

Without the ambition to raise oneself to life's challenges, growth and innovation would never happen.

It's no fun being a salesperson when it feels like you're talking to a wall. That's what it feels like when you haven't learned your customer's points of interest.

As a general rule, when your child, or anyone in the work force, doesn't know what he/she wants to do, they should instead always be developing skills and competencies that will qualify them for the jobs that companies are most looking to fill and increase their hireability.

If instead of completely focusing on what you are doing, you are racing ahead to something shinier or to the next best thing, you will not develop excellence.

When you're actually talking over someone, it's as if you're just pontificating and they're not even there. And their body language - they're trying to get away from you. And if you're pontificating at an audience, and there's a break, the non-martyrs in the audience are not going to come back. I mean, they just want to get away from you.

Over time, many CEOs realize that being able to quickly and effectively confront conflict in their company is a leadership opportunity because people's respect often rises and falls on whether their leader deals with conflict head on or avoids dealing with it.

When you know you haven't been connecting with, persuading, or getting through to someone, consciously pause before meeting them and say to yourself, 'During this conversation, I am committing to being present and to connecting.'

When someone is complimenting you, they are sharing how your actions or behaviors impacted them. They are not asking if you agree.

It really takes something for someone to get up the nerve to share the impact you have had on them, and to them, giving you that recognition is liking giving a gift.

When winning is everything and everyone does whatever they need to win and to not lose, including lying, you have a world in which 'basic trust' is lost.

People who can't take advantage of opportunity take advantage of people.

Presence is in the eye and ear and gut of the beholder. When you are totally present in a conversation or in a meeting, others around you perceive you as totally focused on the matter at hand and on being of value to them.

The more comfortable you become at accepting recognition, the more comfortable you will be with giving it.

When men act up by being degrading, dismissive, condescending, shut off, or sullen, that can often dumbfound you as a woman and get you off balance. At that point, you can feel and look like a deer in the headlights, which makes you even more vulnerable to such a man's next volley of vitriol.

Given the choice between instant gratification and the lasting satisfaction of earning the esteem of someone you respect and admire, all but the most small-minded would choose the latter.

More often than not, CEOs are conflict-avoidant because their role is to define vision and strategy than it is to get into confrontations with negative and toxic people which they can't stand.

Salespeople are in the decision business. Their livelihood depends on the decisions of others.

One of the best ways to see how critical being present is to effective leadership is to notice what being absent, distracted, hiding something, and/or agenda-driven does to people's ability to trust, respect, and have confidence in you.

If there was one key to happiness in love and life and possibly even success, it would be to go into each conversation you have with this commandment to yourself front and foremost in your mind, 'Just Listen' and be more interested than interesting, more fascinated than fascinating, and more adoring than adorable.

Be comfortable in your own skin. Comfort and discomfort are contagious.

President Reagan preached 'trickle down economics' but naively did not reckon on the fact that the wealthy would only care about getting more for themselves instead of caring about helping those with less.

You may have heard the saying, 'When you're in love, smoke gets in your eyes.' Well when you're talking, smoke gets in your eyes and ears. Once you're on a roll, it's very easy to not notice that you've worn out your welcome.

Happy couples resist the temptation to go to bed at different times. They go to bed at the same time, even if one partner wakes up later to do things while their partner sleeps.

Women have always run the world; maybe it's time to give them a chance at ruling it.

Gen X entrepreneurs are frequently smart, tough, tenacious, and self-made. That said, to succeed in their companies, they often have sacrificed being emotionally involved in their marriages and with their children.

Too often, founders make decisions before determining whether they are the right thing to do. These decisions often create chaos in their companies where people are having to jump from the last 'great idea' to yet another unproven-and-about-to-be-poorly-executed one.

Customers are your best teachers. Learning about your customer's beliefs, values, and priorities teaches you which selling points you should emphasize.

I can still remember my first experience of standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and looking into it. It was so awesome, it took a fair amount of restraint to prevent me from jumping into it, because I was certain I could fly.

Do something to help your community or people around you. That will help you feel more worthwhile and less alone.

Buying involves decision-making. It's a performance activity, like sports or acting.

People really don't like to be inconvenienced. If you don't agree with that, ask yourself how you like it when it happens to you.

People often say, 'I don't need recognition,' and the truth is they are right. We don't need it. But like healthy food and exercise, life is a whole lot better with it.

The best way to learn to be present and develop presence is to have the experience of someone you respect and admire being present with and for you.

Have you ever heard someone tell a story but felt they are just mouthing the words without being emotionally connected? When you do this, you often create a more negative reaction than if you hadn't told a story at all. That's because others can see that you're just going through the motions.

People act on what they want more often than what they need.

If and when they have a disagreement or argument, and if they can't resolve it, happy couples default to trusting and forgiving rather than distrusting and begrudging.

In my executive advising role, my persona, which seems to work very well with both women and men, is being 'the big brother you always wanted.' I am fortunate to have two such big brothers, so this isn't just a theoretical construct.

MIA stands for 'missing in action,' which is the way others can experience you when you're too busy multi-tasking, being pulled at by the world and by everything that's going on in your head, and, essentially, when you're too busy being busy.

I think people don't want to be persuaded. And people don't even like to do the persuading.

Be more interested than interesting.

Wealth is what you take from the world; worth is what you give back.

Understanding a person's hunger and responding to it is one of the most potent tools you'll ever discover for getting through to anyone you meet in business or your personal life.

Human beings invent just as many ways to sabotage their lives as to improve them.

The measure of self-assurance is how deeply and sincerely interested you are in others; the measure of insecurity is how much you try to impress them with you.