Most people think of a balanced life in terms of how much time is given to the various sectors of a life. While time is one measure of involvement, I think the critical variable is passion. How energized, fascinated and absorbed are you in each sphere in which you are engaged? They are rarely, and usually only briefly, equal.

Judith M Bardwick

Nothing creates more self-respect among employees than being included in the process of making decisions.

Judith M Bardwick

decision process self

Real confidence comes from knowing and accepting yourself- your strengths and your limitations -in contrast to depending on affirmation from others.

Judith M Bardwick

domestic-violence knowing real

In the end, leadership is not intellectual or cognitive. Leadership is emotional.

Judith M Bardwick

emotional intellectual ends

Trust is perhaps the most critical single building block underlying effectiveness. Without trust leaders do not have followers. Without trust, leaders are impotent despite great rhetoric or splendid ideas. Trust rests on the belief among followers that the leader is transparent: What you see is what there is. Trust means followers believe there is no duplicity; no manipulation just to satisfy the leader's ego. Very simply: The effective leader is transparent; that's why that person is trusted.

Judith M Bardwick

block mean believe

Very few people are ambitious in the sense of having a specific image of what they want to achieve. Most people's sights are only toward the next run, the next increment of money.

Judith M Bardwick

ambition sight running

If the mood is overly anxious, then anxiety must be reduced by lowering uncertainty. Very simply, uncertainty is reduced when people are told what's going on and what will happen to them. In the vacuum of no news, people imagine the worst. Since disappointment is much easier to handle than anxiety, then, good news or bad, honesty is honestly the best policy.

Judith M Bardwick

honesty disappointment people

The message to organizations is this: You have to increase the number of categories of contributing, or the types of career paths, which people can experience as successful. You cannot restrict esteem to the fewer and fewer who will be climbing up the management ladder. You need to have the majority of your people feeling like winners.

Judith M Bardwick

climbing careers successful

There are still many women - and their spouses and children - who view a reflected self - I'm Mrs. Smith, not Mary Smith - as psychologically healthy. Those people are not motivated to change. But it is really dangerous to live through others'. What ever your circumstances, it is not a good idea to be wholly dependent on responses from others to like, respect or love yourself. Your children will grow up and start their own families; the divorce rate has remained at 50 percent for decades.

Judith M Bardwick

growing-up love-you children

Credibility is lost when there are big discrepancies between what leaders say and what they do. ... Increasing credibility requires openness. Hidden agendas will destroy trust.

Judith M Bardwick

discrepancies-between agendas leadership

In truth, it's usually failure, disappointment, and frustration that motivate people to reexamine that which they've taken for granted. It's rare to find big change without significant bad news. ... In that sense, the pain of failure creates the largest opportunities for progress.

Judith M Bardwick

pain disappointment change

Schools are generally feminine places, institutions where conformity is valued, taught largely by conformist women.

Judith M Bardwick

conformity taught school

The Psychological Recession is the cluster of feelings that the present is really scary and the future will likely be worse. It comes from the sense you have no control over what's happening to you and you don't see a way to get your life back under control. It's the feeling that life is unfair; you paid your dues, you worked hard, and you ended up naked and vulnerable. There is no comfort to be found in the dismissal of the Psychological Recession as being just an idea; it is a real phenomenon with real consequences, all of them bad.

Judith M Bardwick

scary real feelings

With air travel there is no distance, there is only time.

Judith M Bardwick

time-flies distance air

For workaholics, all the eggs of self-esteem are in the basket of work.

Judith M Bardwick

workaholic eggs self-esteem

... we know that productivity suffers when uncertainty is high. But we've failed to realize the equally destructive effects of too little anxiety. ... By protecting people from risk, we destroy their self-esteem. We rob them of the opportunity to become strong, competent people.

Judith M Bardwick

strong self-esteem opportunity

When employees don't really care about the work they do and they take no pride in being in the specific organization where they work, they bring no enthusiasm, energy or passion to what they're doing. If, in addition, they feel abused, resentful, insignificant, betrayed, or taken advantage of...they want out. Naturally.

Judith M Bardwick

passion pride taken

I am impressed and distressed at how passive hierarchical organizations make people. There's often a lot of overt activity, but it's not going anywhere, it's game-playing. It's play-acting at work.

Judith M Bardwick

organization games play

motivation is highest when the probability of success is 50 percent: We don't get involved if the task is too easy or too hard.

Judith M Bardwick

motivation tasks easy

Institutions which have too much security ... tend to become bureaucratic. They add layers of people and layers of rules in order to assure the security of not making mistakes.

Judith M Bardwick

mistake order people

Self is a construct, a feeling, an identity that is internal and can neither be given nor taken away by others. We develop and nurture that identity by embracing inter-dependence.

Judith M Bardwick

taken identity feelings