Gail Blanke quotes: on letting go of baggage, evolving, how to do the tough stuff when you don’t feel like it, and more.
“As English writer, George Elliott, quoted: ‘It’s never too late to become… what you might have been.'”
“Nothing really big, really bold, or really beautiful was ever created in a country, in a company, in a family, or in a life without a vision: a clear picture of what good would look like, of how, if anything were possible, it would be.”
“Oftentimes when people fail to achieve what they want in life, it’s because their vision isn’t strong enough.”
“There are those times when the thing that you’re working on doesn’t work out for one reason or another. But we don’t think of that as failing; we think of that as learning and moving forward.”
“If you want to grow, you gotta let go. That means eliminating all the clutter—physical and emotional—that holds you back, weighs you down, or just makes you feel bad about yourself.”
“I think most really good conversations that involve change start, not with, ‘Okay. Let’s make some changes around here.’ But rather, ‘What would good look like for us?’ You know, you have to create a vision. I always loved to quote Walt Disney. He always said, when they were building a new theme park in any part of the world, he would say, ‘Build the castle first because, you know, that’s where the magic is. And if you’ve got the castle to look to, you can do all the tough stuff to bring the rest of the theme park to life.'”
“If you create a vision of how good you can make it (your own castle) and you flesh it out and color it in, then it enables you to do all the things that might have seemed hard, but won’t seem so hard, to bring that fabulous castle to life. Maybe you think about going back to school. Maybe you think about learning new skills. Maybe you think about losing weight or quitting smoking or learning a new language. One of the things that I’ve found is that when you feel the magic, you can go the distance every time.”
“It’s about being an adventurer. Being a discoverer. And the whole thing about an adventure is, you don’t know how it’s going turn out. So, while you want to build that castle and bring that to life, you want to be open to all different ways of doing it, all different kinds of people, all different kinds of solutions. Look for surprising delight. Look for unpredictable, wonderful things that want to happen to you. And people that you never could imagine would appear in your life, and there they are. Which all helps you to see yourself in a new way.”
“What we need is our energy and our optimism back. And a good way and an easy way to get that is to let go of the past.”
“What could we do differently or how could we think about it differently? Then, you’ve got a nice conversation going where there’s a solution that you’re trying to arrive at together and, you know, I would introduce humor and, you know—and, again, anything to keep yourselves from getting worked up about it.”
“It’s okay to be afraid. Most of us are really afraid of the whole conversation because we’re afraid that, you know, we’re just not going to be good at this, that we haven’t been good at it in the past. We’ll never be good at it and it makes us feel bad about ourselves. And the point is, you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to get into the game. You just have to begin to tackle it.”
“A friend of mine defines the word fear as False Evidence Appearing Real and so we get worked up about the worst case scenarios and all this stuff that isn’t even happening that absolutely paralyzes us. So let that go. That’s something to shred. Your old fears. You know, your old fear of just not being good enough.”
“That 50-pound Hefty bag that we’re all carrying around, that we fill up with all our old fears, all our regrets, all our negative assumptions, all the times when we came up a little bit short. And you can’t fly, you can’t get loft, if you’re carrying all that baggage. You’ve got to let it go.”
“When we throw out the physical clutter, we clear our minds. When we clear out the mental clutter, we clear our souls.”
“We all are ‘between’ in some area of our life. You’ve got to let go of the old one—the old view, the old way, the old idea, the old title—before you can reach out and grasp that new one. And in between, you’re not holding onto anything.”
“Once you’ve hit 50 (you’ll be surprised how easy it is to get there) and once you’ve thrown out that too-tight belt and too-small view of yourself, you’ll be ready to step out into the clearing and into the next, and greatest, segment of your life.”
“It’s also the best of all possible times, because it’s where you discover who you are now and what you’re passionate about now and what’s possible now. You might even discover new talents and new people and new ideas, so that you can, in fact, reinvent yourself.”
“We need to be open to discovering who we could be become. We don’t want to stay stuck in an old idea of ourselves. We have this whole thing about what type we are and aren’t that we got when we were little and someone said, ‘Oh, you’re the mathematical type’ or ‘You’re the creative type.'”
“I speak to so many people who will say, ‘I’m not the entrepreneurial type, the corporate type, the stand-up-in-front-of-people-and-talk type, the salesman type, the creative type.’ And if someone says, ‘Maybe you’d like to start a company of your own,’ we say, ‘Oh, no, I’m not the entrepreneurial type.’ When we get so wedded to this ‘type’ thing, we shut out a lot of great possibilities for ourselves.”
“At any given moment in your life, something happens, somebody says something, and you get to decide what it means. Usually, we make it mean something negative. The way to handle a situation like this is to ask yourself, ‘Okay, at this particular moment, what am I committed to in my life, in my work?'”
“I really envision myself floating on this raft in the middle of this loving river and casting aside the things I think I should have done differently, any old anger that I have; or what I call stored anxieties. And you really want to envision yourself casting them (I do) overboard. And you have to practice. Some of this stuff, you have to practice and, if you practice, you can let it go. You really can.”
“Don’t just stand for the success of other women; insist on it.”
“I will not compare myself with others, nor them with me. I will appreciate myself and others for what I and they contribute.”
“Courage comes with action. The minute you step forward, the minute you declare your decision, the minute you say, ‘This is how it’s going to go,’ courage comes. It floods through you and energizes every single fiber of your being. You don’t have to wait for it. It’ll be there.”
