Iyanla Vanzant Quotes

To think that I know what's best for anyone else is to be out of my business. Even in the name of love, it is pure arrogance, and the result is tension, anxiety, and fear. Do I know what's right for me? That is my only business. Let me work with that before I try to solve problems for you.

One must first learn to live oneself before one blames others.

I know when to say no and when to say yes. I take responsibility for my choices. The victim? She went somewhere else. The only one who can truly victimize me is myself, and 99 percent of the time I choose to do that no more. But I need to continue to remember the key principles: boundaries, letting go, forgiveness after feeling my feelings—not before, self-expression, loving others but loving myself, too.

I think the difference between finding happiness, or moments of happiness, is how you choose to interpret things. That's a rather shocking responsibility. That we're responsible for our own happiness. It's not those around us.

We're going to be human, and we are going to make mistakes, but you really should understand the power that you have and embrace it in a positive way.

It can be very frustrating and very deflating to be constantly defined and described by other people, so I've stopped reading anything written about me, and I find it much healthier. I just sort of concentrate on what I do and don't worry too much about that.

I've been accused of being too flexible, too willing to mold myself to men, and that's something I'm constantly working on.

I don't have to go around trying to save everybody anymore; that's not my job.

My moms always told me, 'How long you gonna play the victim?' I can say I'm mad and I hate everything, but nothing really changes until I change myself.

I think, for a long time, I didn't have people who understood where I was coming from. They were giving me advice on what would be good for them.

You have to accept people for who they are. You can guide. You can give people chances. But you cannot hold on to people in fear that you are bad because you can't keep everyone you've hired.

It's critical to be able to see things in other people that sometimes they don't see in themselves.

At some point you have to take responsibility for who you are and where you are and being able to listen to other points of view, whichever side of the tracks you're on.

I think all of us make the mistake of thinking we're going to change people when we get together. But we're not. People are who they are. And people change in their own time.

I have a very good relationship with myself. My favourite quote is, "What you think about me is none of my business."

What other people think of me is none of my business. Sometimes, it hurts my feelings, but I have to just keep going.

What do you do when it seems as if people want to stay in their pain. They have a story to tell and they tell you every chance they get. Well, believe it or not, they may like where they are. Our job is to leave them there. You can point the way out of pain, but you cannot force them to get out. You can support the move beyond their limitations, but you cannot make the move for them.

I think that there is a tragic misfit at the core of me, and I've just done a lot of work on myself. I love a good self-help book; I've read a ton of them. I love self-help seminars and therapy and all that. I think that probably, at my core, if I had done no work on myself, I would probably be Laura from The Mysteries Of Laura, but I worked hard to be a more stable person because that's what I wanted out of my life.

Even painfully shy and awkward people are not painfully shy or awkward when they are alone. The way to access this natural, comfortable alone-self when you are with others is by choosing to forbid yourself to wonder what "they" are thinking. Instead, force yourself to exist in the instant, then take it- and give it- as it comes.

My parents never put a lot of pressure on us to be any kind of way.... I have my funny moments where I look at myself and think, Oh, this is a disaster. But you have to give yourself a reality check and go, All right, if I feel this way, I'm going to do something about it that's healthy. I can't look at somebody who is 6 feet tall and 120 pounds and say, I'm going to get that body. That's just never going to happen. You have to work with what you've got.

Today I acknowledge that I am not in position to judge what mistakes anyone is making or what lessons anyone needs to learn. I don’t know how far someone has come or when that person will have a breakthrough, I simply don’t know what other people should be doing. But when I think I do know, I clearly am not doing what I should be doing, which is taking responsibility for my own life.

The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.

Maturity involves being honest and true to oneself, making decisions based on a conscious internal process, assuming responsibility for one's decisions, having healthy relationships with others and developing one's own true gifts. It involves thinking about one's environment and deciding what one will and won't accept.

In deep self acceptance, grows a compassionate understanding.

I often feel like saying, when I hear the question 'People aren't ready,' that it's like telling a person who is trying to swim, 'Don't jump in that water until you learn how to swim.' When actually you will never learn how to swim until you get in the water. And I think people have to have an opportunity to develop themselves and govern themselves.