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Conformity begins the moment you ignore how you feel for acceptance.
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Shannon L. Alder
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[Abusers] blame the world - circumstances, other people - for their defeats, misfortune, misconduct, and failures. The abuser firmly believes that his life is swayed by currents and persons over which he has no influence whatsoever (he has an external locus of control).
But there are even subtler variants of this psychological defense mechanism. Not infrequently an abuser will say: "I made a mistake because I am stupid", implying that his deficiencies and inadequacy are things he cannot help having and cannot change. This is also an alloplastic defense because it abrogates responsibility.
Many abusers exclaim: "I misbehaved because I completely lost my temper." On the surface, this appears to be an autoplastic defense with the abuser assuming responsibility for his misconduct. But it could be interpreted as an alloplastic defense, depending on whether the abuser believes that he can control his temper.
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Sam Vaknin (Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited)
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When the locus of evaluation is seen as residing in the expert, it would appear that the long-range social implications are in the direction of the social control of the many by the few.
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Carl R. Rogers (Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory)
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I ran upstairs, loving, weeping. I will run downstairs, unloving, not weeping.
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Fay Weldon (The Life and Loves of a She Devil)
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ACOAs often develop an external locus of control, believing that something outside of themselves will decrease the emptiness or the pain they feel inside. Thoughts such as “If the house is clean enough, I will be good enough” or “If I win the big one at the casino, I will be somebody important” are attempts to control blocked pain and fear.
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Jane Middelton-Moz (After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma)
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Whatever circumstances life brings you, you will be more likely to succeed and find happiness if you take responsibility for making your decisions well instead of complaining about things being beyond your control. Psychologists call this having an “internal locus of control,” and studies consistently show that people who have it outperform those who don’t.
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Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
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Focus on what you can control. That is always enough.
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Hunter Post
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When you get stronger everything in the world gets easier. Change yourself and you've changed everything.
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Hunter Post
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locus of control.” The more that you believe that you are in control of your life, your actions and your future, the happier and more successful you’ll be. There
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Mel Robbins (The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage)
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Whereas cascaded goals are a control mechanism, cascaded meaning is a release mechanism. It brings to life the context within which everyone works, but it leaves the locus of control—for choosing, deciding, prioritizing, goal setting—where it truly resides, and where understanding of the world and the ability to do something about it intersect: with the team member.
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Marcus Buckingham (Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World)
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locus of control theory, a subfield of personality psychology that argues that motivation is closely connected to whether people feel like they have control over their ultimate success in an endeavor.
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Cal Newport (A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload)
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If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier, Quintanilla's drill instructors had told him. That's why they asked each other questions starting with "why." Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,” a team of psychologists wrote in the journal Problems and Perspectives in Management in 2012.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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But there is a critical point about differences between individuals that exerts arguably more influence on worker productivity than any other. The factor is locus of control, a fancy name for how people view their autonomy and agency in the world. People with an internal locus of control believe that they are responsible for (or at least can influence) their own fates and life outcomes. They may or may not feel they are leaders, but they feel that they are essentially in charge of their lives. Those with an external locus of control see themselves as relatively powerless pawns in some game played by others; they believe that other people, environmental forces, the weather, malevolent gods, the alignment of celestial bodies-- basically any and all external events-- exert the most influence on their lives.
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Daniel J. Levitin (The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload)
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Those who experience persistent feelings of indignation, which they view as righteous, tend to shield themselves from personal responsibility for their actions. They hold a pre-identified scapegoat responsible for all of their pain, traumas, and hurts; that scapegoat is ultimately accountable for their misdeeds.
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Dr Val Thomas (Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice)
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All underachieving persons need help. All. No underachieving adult or child can reverse his underachievement by himself. With resilience and an inner locus of control, an underachiever can try though, but it wouldn't be as effective as getting help. Without help, an underachieving person would literally get little results compared to the effort put in.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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This theory suggests how we can help ourselves and others strengthen our internal locus of control. We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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The researchers discovered that there was a dramatic shift from an internal to an external locus of control in children of all ages, from elementary school to college. To give you an idea of how great a shift it was, young people in 1960 were 80 percent more likely to claim that they had control over their lives than children in 2002, who were more prone to say they lacked such personal control.
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Jessica Joelle Alexander (The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids)
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Even if we don’t go as far as Descartes’s belief in an immaterial soul that somehow interacts with our body, it’s tempting to visualize a dictatorial “self” inside our brain that is the locus of our self-awareness. Philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the term “Cartesian theater” to describe the supposed mental control room containing a tiny homunculus who gathers all of the input from our sensory organs, accesses our memories, and sends out instructions to the various parts of our bodies. Consciousness
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Sean Carroll (The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself)
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The remarkable writings of Oliver Sacks, for instance, show that the brain continually works to create and maintain the feeling of an “I” that is in control, even if there is in fact no part of the brain that can be identified as the locus of “self feeling.
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Tom Butler-Bowdon (50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books (50 Classics))
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Orientarea pe locus intern de control lucrează direct cu încrederea intrapersonală a clientului și cu convingerile limitative ale acestuia.
În același timp, fiecare sesiune de coaching în sine este, pentru client, un exercițiu de încredere interpersonală, adică un exercițiu de poziționare față de locusul extern de control.
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Iulia Dobre-Trifan (Provocări și echilibru în coaching executiv pragmatic)
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What I expected of my wife was an internal locus of control. I did not for one single second control or want to control one single thing that she did or didn't do. I hoped she would do these things because SHE wanted to do them, because they were the choices that she made in HER life ON HER OWN. I believed with all my heart that she was free, that we were free, to do as we pleased when we pleased to do it. We make our decisions and we roll with the consequences. If she didn't want to be a mother or didn't want to be a wife than I expected her to be honest about it, to say it, so that we could take steps and bring reality into line with our mutual desire.
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Keith Aaron Gilbert (Just Sane Enough)
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Because incentives trigger a primitive, engrained response, they produce a number of unintended consequences. First, they strongly reinforce self-aggrandizement, so much so that people can dedicate highly creative energy toward the counterproductive purpose of gaming the system. Second, they focus people’s attention on the incentive, rather than on customers. Third, they reduce the sense of agency and locus of control in workers, placing it instead in the hands of those who are creating the incentives and providing the rewards. This not only undermines the ability to be self-managing, it also infantilizes people. Thus it is small wonder, given the ubiquity of this practice, that Americans struggle to see themselves as engaged, empowered participants in their own democratic institutions.
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Carol Sanford (The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes)
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Trying to eliminate antipathy, dislike, ridicule, and insult from the human heart and mind is a task to make that of Sisyphus seem like an afternoon stroll: precisely the type of task that authoritarian governments love, for it gives them the locus standi to interfere ever more intimately with the lives of their subjects. Hatred is hydra-headed, the task is never done, it grows with its very elimination, or rather the attempts by government at its elimination. Failure is the greatest success, since it requires ever more of the same, namely control over society.
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Theodore Dalrymple
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Islam asserts itself as the religion of the ayat, which is customarily translated as verses, but literally means signs, in the semiotic usage of the word. The Koran is a group of signs to be decoded by al-'aql, the intellect, an intellect that makes the individual responsible and in fact master of himself/herself. In order for God to exist as the locus of power, the law, and social control, it was necessary for the social institution that had previously fulfilled these functions - namely, tribal power - to disappear. The hijab reintroduced the idea that the street was under the control of the sufaha, those who did not restrain their desires and who needed a tribal chieftain to keep them under control.
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Fatema Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam)
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The good news is that positive construal can be taught. “We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things,” Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of stimuli in different ways—to reframe them in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the stimulus. You can train people to better regulate their emotions, and the training seems to have lasting effects.
Training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression. The same goes for locus of control: not only is a more internal locus tied to perceiving less stress and performing better but changing your locus from external to internal leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.
Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.
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Maria Konnikova
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The history revealed by even a cursory examination of the press, memoirs, and similar sources generated by Palestinians flies in the face of the popular mythology of the conflict, which is premised on their nonexistence or lack of a collective consciousness. In fact, Palestinian identity and nationalism are all too often seen to be no more than recent expressions of an unreasoning (if not fanatical) opposition to Jewish national self-determination. But Palestinian identity, much like Zionism, emerged in response to many stimuli, and at almost exactly the same time as did modern political Zionism. The threat of Zionism was only one of these stimuli, just as anti-Semitism was only one of the factors fueling Zionism. As newspapers like Filastin and al-Karmil reveal, this identity included love of country, a desire to improve society, religious attachment to Palestine, and opposition to European control. After the war, the focus on Palestine as a central locus of identity drew strength from widespread frustration at the blocking of Arab aspirations in Syria and elsewhere as the Middle East became suffocatingly dominated by the European colonial powers. This identity is thus comparable to the other Arab nation-state identities that emerged around the same time in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.
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Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
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Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that renders place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning. These three cornerstones of human experience—nature, time and place—form the basis of culture, and liberalism’s success is premised upon their uprooting and replacement with facsimiles that bear the same names.
The advance of this anticulture takes two primary forms. Anticulture is the consequence of a regime of standardizing law replacing widely observed informal norms that come to be discarded as forms of oppression; and it is the simultaneous consequence of a universal and homogenous market, resulting in a monoculture that, like its agricultural analogue, colonizes and destroys actual cultures rooted in experience, history, and place. These two visages of the liberal anticulture thus free us from other specific people and embedded relationships, replacing custom with abstract and depersonalized law, liberating us from personal obligations and debts, replacing what have come to be perceived as burdens on our individual autonomous freedom with pervasive legal threat and generalized financial indebtedness. In the effort to secure the radical autonomy of individuals, liberal law and the liberal market replace actual culture with an encompassing anticulture.
This anticulture is the arena of our liberty—yet increasingly, it is rightly perceived as the locus of our bondage and even a threat to our continued existence. The simultaneous heady joy and gnawing anxieties of a liberated humanity, shorn of the compass of tradition and inheritance that were the hallmarks of embedded culture, are indicators of liberalism’s waxing success and accumulating failure. The paradox is our growing belief that we are thralls to the very sources of our liberation—pervasive legal surveillance and control of people alongside technological control of nature. As the empire of liberty grows, the reality of liberty recedes. The anticulture of liberalism—supposedly the source of our liberation—accelerates liberalism’s success and demise.
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Patrick J. Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed)
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The Importance of Language on a Rainy Day “One of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first year of Jack’s life was parents who have unproductive language around weather being good or bad. Whenever it was raining, you’d hear moms, babysitters, dads say, ‘It’s bad weather. We can’t go out,’ or if it wasn’t, ‘It’s good weather. We can go out.’ That means that, somehow, we’re externally reliant on conditions being perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time. So, Jack and I never missed a single storm, rain or snow, to go outside and romp in it. Maybe we missed one when he was sick. We’ve developed this language around how beautiful it is. Now, whenever it’s a rainy day, Jack says, ‘Look, Dada, it’s such a beautiful rainy day,’ and we go out and we play in it. I wanted him to have this internal locus of control—to not be reliant on external conditions being just so.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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It’s called “locus of control.” The more that you believe that you are in control of your life, your actions and your future, the happier and more successful you’ll be.
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Mel Robbins (The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage)
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The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning. Choosing to climb a mountain can become an articulation of love for a daughter. Deciding to stage a nursing home insurrection can become proof that you’re still alive. An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence. A student with a strong internal locus of control, for instance, will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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Understanding your Locus of Control is being able to separate what you can control (or strongly influence) from what you can't. Trying to control things that aren't under your control is a recipe for eternal frustration
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Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business)
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Blaming and judging others, rather than taking responsibility for your actions and developing resilience, produces a culture of victimhood and division, bullying, and abusive behaviours.
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Dr Val Thomas (Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice)
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Two people can have vastly different appraisals of the same scenario—it is the appraisal that causes their experience, and not the scenario. Some appraisals of life simply lead to more stressful outcomes. If you’re the kind of person who, for example, has an external locus of control (i.e., you don’t see your life as really under your control, but influenced by luck, randomness, or other people), then you may see a certain new situation as a threat rather than an exciting challenge. And once you’ve told yourself it’s a threat, you will behave as if it is—and get anxious.
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Nick Trenton (Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present (The Path to Calm Book 1))
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Mastery is the point at which dopamine bows to H&N. Having done all it can do, dopamine pauses, and allows H&N to have its way with our happiness circuits. Even if it’s only for a short time, dopamine doesn’t fight the feeling of contentment. It approves. The best basking is basking in a job well done. Mastery also creates a feeling of what psychologists call an internal locus of control. This phrase refers to the tendency to view one’s choices and experiences as being under one’s own control as opposed to being determined by fate, luck, or other people.
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Daniel Z. Lieberman (The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race)
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The American West serves as a prototype for examining urban/hinterland relations under capitalism in still another way. Because the most powerful elements in capitalist social relations derive their authority from the ability to control allocative resources, it follows that the most significant places of capital accumulation would be the locus for decisions affecting the tiniest of hinterland outposts. In Appalachia, John Gaventa found that the forces "which propelled the development of a capital-intensive, resource extractive" economy "lay not in Appalachia but in the economic and energy demands of the British and American metropolis." ... Urban areas thus grew in accord with the degree and volume of capital invested in the adjacent countryside.
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William G. Robbins (Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West)
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La maestría también crea una sensación que los psicólogos llaman un locus interno de control. Esta expresión hace referencia a la tendencia a ver las decisiones y experiencias personales como si estuvieran bajo el control de uno mismo en lugar de estar determinadas por el destino, la suerte u otras personas.
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Daniel Z. Lieberman (Dopamina: Cómo una molécula condiciona de quién nos enamoramos, con quién nos acostamos, a quién votamos y qué nos depara el futuro (DIVULGACIÓN) (Spanish Edition))
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Las personas con una fuerte sensación de locus interno de control son más propensas a conseguir buenos resultados académicos y trabajos bien remunerados.
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Daniel Z. Lieberman (Dopamina: Cómo una molécula condiciona de quién nos enamoramos, con quién nos acostamos, a quién votamos y qué nos depara el futuro (DIVULGACIÓN) (Spanish Edition))
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Play helps children develop many essential life skills. Resilience, coping and negotiation skills, and self-control are just a few of the valuable lessons learned in unstructured play—as well as stress management, which lowers children’s chances of struggling with anxiety as adults. Play helps develop an internal locus of control, giving kids confidence in their own capabilities, which powerfully lays the groundwork for happiness. Authenticity helps children develop a strong internal compass because they learn to trust their emotions. Teaching honesty to ourselves and to our children fosters a strong character value. And remember that all emotions are OK. Furthermore, different types of praise affect children differently in terms of how they come to see themselves in the world. Giving empty praise or focusing too much on being smart can set kids up for feeling insecure and risk-averse. By engaging in process praise, we foster a growth mind-set rather than a
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Jessica Joelle Alexander (The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids)
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Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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Essentially those with an external locus think the outside world controls their destiny, and that they are almost powerless to change their fate. No Zer says outright, “I feel as though there is an external locus of control over my life.” Instead, the thinking develops on a much deeper level due to the struggles currently enveloping society. One small example of this is McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey, which shows generation Z’s financial trepidation. Nearly 23% of the ~25,000 respondents queried say they don’t expect ever to retire. Only 41% ever hope to own a home15
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Matthew Weiss (We Don't Want YOU, Uncle Sam: Examining the Military Recruiting Crisis with Generation Z)
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A secure attachment combined with the cultivation of competency builds an internal locus of control, the key factor in healthy coping throughout life.7 Securely attached children learn what makes them feel good; they discover what makes them (and others) feel bad, and they acquire a sense of agency: that their actions can change how they feel and how others respond. Securely attached kids learn the difference between situations they can control and situations where they need help.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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There’s an important concept in psychology put forth by Julian Rotter in 1954. It’s called “locus of control.” The more that you believe that you are in control of your life, your actions and your future, the happier and more successful you’ll be.
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Mel Robbins (The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage)
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Another image was for a very different audience: the “Extroverted and Disagreeable” swing voter. This slide depicted a woman. “The ‘Extroverted and Disagreeable’ voter needs a message that is all about her ability to assert her rights,” I said. “This type of voter likes to be heard. On any topic,” I said. “She knows what’s best for her. She has a strong internal locus of control and hates to be told what to do, especially by the government.” The woman on the slide was wielding a handgun, a fierce expression on her face. The text below read, “Don’t Question My Right to Own a Gun, and I Won’t Question Your Stupidity Not To.
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Brittany Kaiser (Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again)
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Getting rid of the monoculture isn’t just about hiring or promoting people. It’s about figuring out how to organizationally shift the locus of power and control away from those who’ve had it, without question, for so long. This is, in a sense, a radical change when it comes to power dynamics inside companies, and the process will likely create some sort of tension. But it’s wrong to think of these changes one-dimensionally—as a power grab, or an overthrow of an old regime. That kind of thinking is zero-sum, destined to fail, and not how inclusion actually works.
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Anne Helen Petersen (Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home)
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A secure attachment combined with the cultivation of competency builds an internal locus of control, the key factor in healthy coping throughout life.7 Securely
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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A secure attachment combined with the cultivation of competency builds an internal locus of control, the key factor in healthy coping throughout life.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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An individual with an external locus of control sees life as happening to him; he believes his fate is determined by circumstances and outside forces. He sees himself as a helpless victim, and is often plagued by stress, anxiety, and depression as a result. An individual with an internal locus of control believes he can shape his life through his actions and decisions and that he himself is responsible for his destiny. He is more confident, more likely to seek growth and be a leader, more disciplined, and better able to deal with stress and challenges. What we might call the “Invictus Individual” (“I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul”), does of course face forces that are not, in fact, within his personal control, but he navigates them by working on what is: his own reactions and actions. Instead of asking, “Why is this happening to me?” he asks, “What can I do to make this situation better?” The mature man acts; the immature man is acted upon.
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Brett McKay (The 33 Marks of Maturity)
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My hardest labor, however, happened in my head and heart as I made the transition in my spiritual quest from camel to lion. This phase of inner change involves one of the most dramatic paradigm shifts in the human psychological repertoire: the move from what psychologists call an “exogenous locus of control” to an “endogenous locus of control.” It means the process of dropping one’s dependency on external structures and establishing a sort of moral guidance system that comes from within.
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Martha N. Beck (Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith)
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You Are Already Whole We believe that the fundamental sexual unit is one person; adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun, and companionable but does not complete anybody. The only thing in this world that you can control is yourself—your own reactions, desires, and behaviors. Thus, a fundamental step in ethical sluthood is to bring your locus of control into yourself, to recognize the difference between what is yours to control and what belongs to other people. With practice, you can become able to complete yourself—that’s why we call this “integrity.
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Dossie Easton (The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love)
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A student with a strong internal locus of control, for instance, will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts. A salesman with an internal locus of control will blame a lost sale on his own lack of hustle, rather than bad fortune.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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Internal locus of control is a learned skill,” Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who helped conduct that study, told me. “Most of us learn it early in life. But some people’s sense of self-determination gets suppressed by how they grow up, or experiences they’ve had, and they forget how much influence they can have on their own lives. “That’s when training is helpful, because if you put people in situations where they can practice feeling in control, where that internal locus of control is reawakened, then people can start building habits that make them feel like they’re in charge of their own lives—and the more they feel that way, the more they really are in control of themselves.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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Studies have repeatedly shown that children, adolescents, and adults who have a strong external locus of control are predisposed to anxiety and depression—they become anxious because they believe they have little or no control over their fate, and they become depressed when this sense of helplessness gets to be too great.
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Jessica Joelle Alexander (The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids)
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A secure attachment combined with the cultivation of competency builds an internal locus of control, the key factor in healthy coping throughout life.7 Securely attached children learn what makes them feel good; they discover what makes them (and others) feel bad, and they acquire a sense of agency: that their actions can change how they
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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I hope to have made clear that white supremacy is something much more pervasive and subtle than the actions of explicit white nationalists. White supremacy describes the culture we live in, a culture that positions white people and all that is associated with them (whiteness) as ideal. White supremacy is more than the idea that whites are superior to people of color; it is the deeper premise that supports this idea—the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm. Naming white supremacy changes the conversation in two key ways: It makes the system visible and shifts the locus of change onto white people, where it belongs. It also points us in the direction of the lifelong work that is uniquely ours, challenging our complicity with and investment in racism. This does not mean that people of color do not play a part but that the full weight of responsibility rests with those who control the institutions.
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Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
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The killer was bitter and revenge-motivated. He could not control his aggression. He felt that he had been a victim in life and had no internal locus of control. He would probably assault his wife and would not tolerate any resistance. The killer was cold-hearted and had absolutely no respect for human life.
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Micki Pistorius (Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story)
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Studies show that someone’s locus of control can be influenced through training and feedback. One experiment conducted in 1998, for example, presented 128 fifth graders with a series of difficult puzzles. Afterward, each student was told they had scored very well. Half of them were also told, “You must have worked hard at these problems.” Telling fifth graders they have worked hard has been shown to activate their internal locus of control, because hard work is something we decide to do. Complimenting students for hard work reinforces their belief that they have control over themselves and their surroundings.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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That’s when training is helpful, because if you put people in situations where they can practice feeling in control, where that internal locus of control is reawakened, then people can start building habits that make them feel like they’re in charge of their own lives—and the more they feel that way, the more they really are in control of themselves.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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When we discovered that a low sense of control is enormously stressful and that autonomy is key to developing motivation,1 we thought we were onto something important. This impression was confirmed when we started to probe deeper and found that a healthy sense of control is related to virtually everything we want for our children, including physical and mental health, academic success, and happiness. From 1960 until 2002, high school and college students have steadily reported lower and lower levels of internal locus of control (the belief that they can control their own destiny) and higher levels of external locus of control (the belief that their destiny is determined by external forces). This change has been associated with an increased vulnerability to anxiety and depression. In fact, adolescents and young adults today are five to eight times more likely to experience the symptoms of an anxiety disorder than young people were at earlier times, including during the Great Depression, World War II, and the cold war.
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William Stixrud (The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives)
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Naming white supremacy changes the conversation in two key ways: It makes the system visible and shifts the locus of change onto white people, where it belongs. It also points us in the direction of the lifelong work that is uniquely ours, challenging our complicity with and investment in racism. This does not mean that people of color do not play a part but that the full weight of responsibility rests with those who control the institutions.
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Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
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research by the U.S. Marine Corps revealed “the most successful Marines were those with a strong internal locus of control – a belief they could influence their destiny through the choices they made.
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Peter Morville (Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals)
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Adolescence is an inside job. In the 1990s, Suniya S. Luthar, Ph.D., studied adolescents and found that ninth-graders with an internal locus of control - those who felt they had some command over the forces shaping their lives - handled stress better than kids with an external orientation - those who felt others had control over forces shaping their lives...Locus of control is not an all-or-nothing concept. None of us are entirely reliant on one or the other...But more and more often, the teenagers I observe aren't even partially internally motivated. They persistently turn outward toward coaches, teachers, and parents...A startlingly large number of these teens are behaving like younger children. They're stuck performing the chief psychosocial tasks of childhood - being good and doing things right to please adults - instead of taking on the developmental work of separation and independence that is appropriate for their age. When faced with teenage-sized problems, they often have nothing more than the skills of a child.
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Madeline Levine (Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World)
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internal locus of control, the key factor in healthy coping throughout life.7 Securely attached children learn what makes them feel good; they discover what makes them (and others) feel bad, and they acquire a sense of agency: that their actions can change how they feel and how others respond. Securely attached kids learn the difference between situations they can control and situations where they need help. They learn that they can play an active role when faced with difficult situations. In contrast, children with histories of abuse and neglect learn that their terror, pleading, and crying do not register with their caregiver. Nothing they can do or say stops the beating or brings attention and help. In effect they’re being conditioned to give up when they face challenges later in life.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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I began thinking about the key insight from chapter one and the ideas that Gen. Charles Krulak used to redesign Marine Corps boot camp by strengthening recruits’ internal locus of control: • Motivation becomes easier when we transform a chore into a choice. Doing so gives us a sense of control.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)