Top 307 Quotes & Sayings by Martha Beck

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Martha Beck.

Last updated on December 22, 2024.

Martha Nibley Beck is an American author, life coach, and speaker who specializes in helping individuals and groups achieve greater levels of personal and professional success. She holds three degrees, a BA, MA and PhD from Harvard University. Beck is the daughter of deceased LDS Church scholar and apologist Hugh Nibley. She received national attention after publication in 2005 of her best-seller, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith in which she recounts her experiences of surviving sexual abuse. In addition to authoring several books, Beck is a columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine.

American - Author | Born: November 29, 1962

Source: Wikipedia

Creating ways to be happy is your life's work, a challenge that won't end until you die.

Martha Beck

To complete your daily mental hygiene, observe any part of you that is upset or anxious, and offer that part of yourself the following simple wishes: 'May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free from suffering.' Repeat this until you actually mean it.

Martha Beck

You have the freedom to live and let live, to love and let love. Granting yourself that freedom is one of the healthiest, most constructive things you can do for yourself and the people who matter to you.

Martha Beck

People are so afraid of authority figures and doctors are authority figures.

Martha Beck

Hopeful thinking can get you out of your fear zone and into your appreciation zone.

Martha Beck

The way we do anything is the way we do everything.

Martha Beck

Whatever causes you to drop your plan forward and open to your vision, your own, deeply personal vision of what your life could be at its very best, that's what I call meeting your rhinoceros.

Martha Beck

No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.

Martha Beck

I practice staying calm all the time, beginning with situations that aren't tense.

Martha Beck

I feel about aging the way William Saroyan said he felt about death: Everybody has to do it, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case.

Martha Beck

Sometimes a psychic tells you something and it feels wrong and others may be right on the money. It's your choice about whom to trust, and giving that trust is something we do ourselves.

Martha Beck

The process of spotting fear and refusing to obey it is the source of all true empowerment.

Martha Beck

Self-improvement books, friends, and polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing, and solving our real problems.

Martha Beck

Do whatever it takes to convey your essential self.

Martha Beck

I have come to believe that there are infinite passageways out of the shadows, infinite vehicles to transport us into the light.

Martha Beck

The average adult laughs 15 times a day; the average child, more than 400 times.

Martha Beck

Whoever said love is blind is dead wrong. Love is the only thing that lets us see each other with the remotest accuracy.

Martha Beck

Getting bogged down in old stories stops the flow of learning by censoring our perceptions, making us functionally deaf and blind to new information. Once the replay button gets pushed, we no longer form new ideas or conclusions - the old ones are so cozy.

Martha Beck

Realizing that we've surrendered our self-esteem to others and choosing to be accountable for our own self-worth would mean absorbing the terrifying fact that we're always vulnerable to pain and loss.

Martha Beck

Only since the Industrial Revolution have most people worked in places away from their homes or been left to raise small children without the help of multiple adults, making for an unsupported life.

Martha Beck

Many of us have spent a lifetime trying to be what we're not, feeling lousy about ourselves when we fail and sometimes even when we succeed. We hide our differences when, by accepting and celebrating them, we could collaborate to make every effort more exciting, productive, enjoyable, and powerful. Personally, I think we should start right now.

Martha Beck

Not having time or energy for weight loss makes no sense. Does it take more time or energy to eat fish than prime rib? No.

Martha Beck

Ten years ago, I still feared loss enough to abandon myself in order to keep things stable. I'd smile when I was sad, pretend to like people who appalled me. What I now know is that losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.

Martha Beck

Although beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, the feeling of being beautiful exists solely in the mind of the beheld.

Martha Beck

When you meet people, show real appreciation, then genuine curiosity.

Martha Beck

Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.

Martha Beck

Self-pity, a dominant characteristic of sociopaths, is also the characteristic that differentiates heroic storytelling from psychological rumination. When you talk about your experiences to shed light, you may feel wrenching pain, grief, anger, or shame. Your audience may pity you, but not because you want them to.

Martha Beck

I really do think that any deep crisis is an opportunity to make your life extraordinary in some way.

Martha Beck

Caring for your inner child has a powerful and surprisingly quick result: Do it and the child heals.

Martha Beck

As soon as you think you know someone else's truth better than they do, you are in deep water.

Martha Beck

Indecision may come from an instinctive hunch that there's more you need to know - which means it's time to learn everything you can about the pros and cons of each option. You can continue on this track, however, only as long as you're unearthing genuinely new information.

Martha Beck

Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury.

Martha Beck

If I tell a man he needs to quit his soul-sucking job, he has to go home and fight with his wife or fight with his parents and fight with his in-laws and fight with everybody, because men aren't supposed to be happy; they're supposed to do well.

Martha Beck

If we're stuck with having expectations, there's a very good reason to embrace positive ones: It's that we often create what we anticipate.

Martha Beck

Denial exists because human infants, though equipped with trust-o-meters, are built to trust, blindly and absolutely, any older person who wanders past.

Martha Beck

Sacred play is anything that takes you into that right hemisphere of your brain. It turns out that this move away from left to the right hemisphere, that sense of expansiveness and everything, can be accomplished through unusual rhythmic action, or any action that requires so much attention away from words that you cannot think in words.

Martha Beck

No one else can take risks for us, or face our losses on our behalf, or give us self-esteem. No one can spare us from life's slings and arrows, and when death comes, we meet it alone.

Martha Beck

Whatever terrible things may have happened to you, only one thing allows them to damage your core self, and that is continued belief in them.

Martha Beck

The great power of separating the watching mind from the thinking mind is that the watching mind is innately loving. Some call this part of the psyche the 'compassionate witness.' Sharing our difficult feelings with a compassionate witness is the crucial step that heals the infinite small wounds inflicted upon the soul by everyday life.

Martha Beck

In fact, when care appears, unconditional love often vanishes.

Martha Beck

As a life coach, I love makeovers, from new clothes to surgery, pedicures to highlights. But redoing makes you feel better only if approached with the right attitude.

Martha Beck

Basic human contact - the meeting of eyes, the exchanging of words - is to the psyche what oxygen is to the brain. If you're feeling abandoned by the world, interact with anyone you can.

Martha Beck

If you're living completely on your own, break out of solitary confinement. Seek to understand others, and help them understand you.

Martha Beck

Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don't. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life.

Martha Beck

Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.

Martha Beck

Rest until you feel like playing, then play until you feel like resting, period. Never do anything else.

Martha Beck

All mental hygiene is based on the core practice of doing nothing. Most of us are good at wasting time, staring at the wall while telling ourselves we should be working. We call this doing nothing, but our brains are furiously active. We think constantly, and our thinking is often rife with distress.

Martha Beck

Polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing and solving our real problems.

Martha Beck

Fact: From quitting smoking to skiing, we succeed to the degree we try, fail, and learn. Studies show that people who worry about mistakes shut down, but those who are relaxed about doing badly soon learn to do well. Success is built on failure.

Martha Beck

To know what that true self is without social pressure is to know your true nature.

Martha Beck

Tiny steps will get you to your goal months and months sooner. A little is better than a lot.

Martha Beck

If you're totally sedentary and eat 2,500 calories a day, don't instantly go to 1,200 calories and hours of aerobics - your weight loss will be sudden and violent, but also fleeting.

Martha Beck

Children who assume adult responsibilities feel old when they're young.

Martha Beck

The way we can allow ourselves to do what we need to, no matter what others may say or do, is to choose love and defy fear.

Martha Beck

Instead of fretting about getting everything done, why not simply accept that being alive means having things to do? Then drop into full engagement with whatever you're doing, and let the worry go.

Martha Beck

Every day brings new choices.

Martha Beck

When fear makes your choices for you, no security measures on earth will keep the things you dread from finding you. But if you can avoid avoidance - if you can choose to embrace experiences out of passion, enthusiasm, and a readiness to feel whatever arises - then nothing, nothing in all this dangerous world, can keep you from being safe.

Martha Beck

It takes about four days of virtuous living to create a little weight loss. That also happens to be the time required to get used to eating less. In other words, if you can get past day three of a fitness regimen, things improve.

Martha Beck

Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look.

Martha Beck

Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.

Martha Beck