Thomas M. Sterner

A paradox of life: The problem with patience and discipline is that it requires both of them to develop each of them.

Habits are learned. Choose them wisely.

We waste so much of our energy by not being aware of how we are directing it.

All the patience you will ever need is already within you.

Simplicity in effort will conquer the most complex of tasks.

If you force your mind to stay in the present moment and to stay in the process of what you are doing, I promise you, so many of your problems will melt away.

With deliberate and repeated effort, progress is inevitable.

The feeling of “I’ll be happy when” will never bring you anything but discontentment.

When we make staying focused on the process our real goal, we experience a sense of success in every moment.

Non-judgment is the pathway to a quiet mind!

Call it what you will—peace, productivity, profit, joy from being immersed in the present moment, from being in the process of achieving your goals, from being fully engaged in the experience of expanding your life—a new paradigm is taking us human beings to the next level.

As awareness of your thoughts increases, the opportunity to choose how you experience this moment also increases.

Try to look at situations that normally stress you out as an opportunity to play the game.

Your goals should inspire you, not serve as a reminder of what you have left to accomplish. Understanding all that is involved in reaching your goals frees you to experience the joy of achieving them.

The most powerful and dependable way of changing your experience of these situations is with a premeditated procedure. Creating a plan for how to deal with stressful situations and people before you’re actually confronted by them can drastically change how you experience those situations.

The perfect life is constant change because the opposite of change is stagnation, lack of growth.

Your mind will create thoughts with or without your permission. It can be your master or your servant. Awareness offers you the opportunity to make that choice.

In sports as in life, no one has their A game all day every day. My jazz piano instructor, whose skill level was off the charts, said that the reason we practice is so that our worst performance is acceptable. We should always try to focus on that instead of judging each moment of our daily performance against our best.

True perfection is the ability to expand infinitely; it must be endless in nature.

Over and over again, I tell those I am mentoring that thought awareness is the key to the prison door. It’s the engine that runs personal change. The deliberate thinker lives the mantra: ‘I am not my thoughts. I use my thoughts. I don’t allow my thoughts to use me.’

If you learn just one thing from reading this book, the mantra ‘interpretation creates experience’ would be the most important in my opinion.

If you are not in control of your thinking the majority of the time, if you are not deliberate in your thinking, then you are not in control of what you feel or what shows up in your life, and your ability to realize your potential is limited by default.

A mantra I often ask clients to repeat is this: ‘I am not my thoughts. I have thoughts. Some thoughts I create but most I do not, and it is those thoughts that can unknowingly create me.’