Mary Kay Blakely Quotes

You have to actually believe in your capacity to change for habits to permanently change.

The only way you can sustain a permanent change is to create a new way of thinking, acting, and being.

Habits start out as off-hand remarks, magazine advertisements, friendly hints, experiments - like flimsy cobwebs with little substance. They grow with practice, layer by layer - thought on thought - fused with imagination and emotion until they become like steel cables - unbreakable. Habits are attitudes which grow from cobwebs into cables that control your everyday life. Self-discipline alone can make or break a habit. Self discipline alone can effect a permanent change in your self image and in you. Self-discipline achieves goals. Self discipline is not 'doing without,' it is 'doing within.'

I've managed to completely reeducate myself into making eating secondary. I used to eat all the time because the food was there. Now I feel like a kid in school who is gaining points for behaving. And I love myself for it.

If you try to force yourself into change, then change will never stick.

It is important for children to learn, whether they want to pursue music or any other field.

Bad habits are easy to develop but difficult to live with. Good habits are difficult to develop, but easy to live with. If you are willing to be uncomfortable for little while, so you can press past the initial pain of change, in the long run, your life will be much better.

It is our continuing love for our children that makes us want them to become all they can be, and their continuing love for us that helps them accept healthy discipline--from us and eventually from themselves.

What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.

Good habits are hard to develop but easy to live with; bad habits are easy to develop but hard to live with. The habits you have and the habits that have you will determine almost everything you achieve or fail to achieve.

Develop discipline of self so that you do not have to decide and re-decide what you will do when you are confronted with the same temptation time and time again. You need only decide some things once.

I'm interested in avoiding two types of behaviour [in my children]: one is the sense of guilt and the other is a sense of entitlement. If these two are avoided, then the rest is up to them.

It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.

The ultimate goal of discipline is to teach self discipline.

When self control is lacking in small things, the ability to apply it to matters of importance withers away. Every day in which one does not at least deny himself some trifle is badly spent and a threat to the day following.

I'm learning real skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life...procrastinating and rationalizing.

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.

All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection

Physical punishment teaches children that the larger, stronger person has the power to get his way, whether or not he is in the right, and they may resent this in the parent-for life.

Your actions become your habits. Don't let yourself make a pattern of slipups or they'll become habits!

Do not have your child's hair cut by a real hairdresser in a real hairdressing salon. He is, at this point, far too short to be exposed to contempt.

Before something can become a habit it must first be practiced as a discipline.

...the more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury. Boys should be allowed to climb tall trees and walk along the tops of high walls and dive into the sea from high rocks... The same with girls. I like the type of child who takes risks. Better by far than the one who never does so.

I'm doing a lot of speaking and talking about habits, which is this subject that obsesses me. That's a lot of fun.