Unacceptable Change Quotes

Change the changeable, accept the unchangeable, and remove yourself from the unacceptable.

Chemistry is change and change is the core of your belief system. Which is good because that’s what we need more of—people who refuse to accept the status quo, who aren’t afraid to take on the unacceptable.

Accept what you can not change-change that which is unacceptable.

He was safe for the moment, here in the playground, but people all over the world were suffering, starving, fleeing, killing one another as they waged their wars. How much energy they put into harming one another. How little into saving. Would it ever change? What would it take to make it change? He thought of Luxa's hand pressed into Ripred's paw. That's what it would take. People rejecting war. Not one or two, but all of them. Saying it was an unacceptable way to solve their differences. By the look of things, the human race had a lot of evolving to do before that happened. Maybe it was impossible. But maybe it wasn't. Like Vikus said, nothing would happen unless you hoped it could. If you had hope, maybe you could find the way to make things change. Because if you thought about it, there were so many reasons to try.

HOW CAN I TELL IF A MAN I’M SEEING WILL BECOME ABUSIVE? • He speaks disrespectfully about his former partners. • He is disrespectful toward you. • He does favors for you that you don’t want or puts on such a show of generosity that it makes you uncomfortable. • He is controlling. • He is possessive. • Nothing is ever his fault. • He is self-centered. • He abuses drugs or alcohol. • He pressures you for sex. • He gets serious too quickly about the relationship. • He intimidates you when he’s angry. • He has double standards. • He has negative attitudes toward women. • He treats you differently around other people. • He appears to be attracted to vulnerability. No single one of the warning signs above is a sure sign of an abusive man, with the exception of physical intimidation. Many nonabusive men may exhibit a umber of these behaviors to a limited degree. What, then, should a woman do to protect herself from having a relationship turn abusive? Although there is no foolproof solution, the best plan is: 1. Make it clear to him as soon as possible which behaviors or attitudes are unacceptable to you and that you cannot be in a relationship with him if they continue. 2. If it happens again, stop seeing him for a substantial period of time. Don’t keep seeing him with the warning that this time you “really mean it,” because he will probably interpret that to mean that you don’t. 3. If it happens a third time, or if he switches to other behaviors that are warning flags, chances are great that he has an abuse problem. If you give him too many chances, you are likely to regret it later. Finally, be aware that as an abuser begins his slide into abuse, he believes that you are the one who is changing. His perceptions work this way because he feels so justified in his actions that he can’t imagine the problem might be with him. All he notices is that you don’t seem to be living up to his image of the perfect, all-giving, deferential woman.

As society has changed, what had formerly been unacceptable has become colourful.

The argument that Saddam Hussein was a bad man and had to be removed simply won't do. There are many bad men around the world who run countries and we don't topple them, and, indeed, in earlier years we actually supported Saddam Hussein when he was fighting Iran. The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and an unacceptable argument for regime change.

Discrimination on the basis of age is as unacceptable as discrimination on the basis of any other aspect of ourselves that we cannot change.

Wisdom can be gathered on your downtime. Wisdom that can change the very course of your life will come from the people you are around, the books you read, and the things you listen to or watch on radio or television. Of course, bad information is gathered in your downtime too. Bad information that can change the very course of your life will come from the people you are around, the books you read, and the things you listen to or watch on radio or television. One of wisdom's greatest benefits, is accurate discernment- the learned ability to immediately tell right from wrong. Good from evil. Acceptable from unacceptable. Time well spent from time wasted. The right decision from the wrong decision. And many times this is simply a matter of having the correct perspective. One way to define wisdom is THE ABILITY TO SEE, INTO THE FUTURE, THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR CHOICES IN THE PRESENT. That ability can give you a completely different perspective on what the future might look like... with a degree of intelligence and a hint of wisdom, most people can tell the difference between good and bad. However, it takes a truly wise person to discern the oh-so-thin line between good and best. And that line...[gives you the] perspective that allows you to see clearly the long-term consequences of your choices.

If we demand perfection from ourselves we are not living in the real world...The inherent problem in the relationship between the ideal & the real is that the ideal judges the real as unacceptable and brings down condemnation and wrath on the real. This sets up an adversarial relationship between the two and like all adversaries, they move further and further apart.

A red traffic light loomed, and Cecilia slammed her foot on the brake. The fact that Polly no longer wanted a pirate party was breathtakingly insignificant in comparison to that poor man (thirty!) crashing to the ground for the freedom that Cecilia took for granted, but right now, she couldn’t pause to honor his memory, because a last-minute change of party theme was unacceptable. That’s what happened when you had freedom. You lost your mind over a pirate party.

Nothing would change the fault in my brain that made me unacceptable.

There are many artists who’ve not yet gotten a good foothold or who are old war-horses at developing their creative lives, and yet and still, every time they reach for the pen, the brush, the ribbons, the script, they hear, “You’re nothing but trouble, your work is marginal or completely unacceptable—because you yourself are marginal and unacceptable.” So what is the solution? Do as the duckling does. Go ahead, struggle through it. Pick up the pen already and put it to the page and stop whining. Write. Pick up the brush and be mean to yourself for a change, paint. Dancers, put on the loose chemise, tie the ribbons in your hair, at your waist, or on your ankles and tell the body to take it from there. Dance. Actress, playwright, poet, musician, or any other. Generally, just stop talking. Don’t say one more word unless you’re a singer. Shut yourself in a room with a ceiling or in a clearing under the sky. Do your art. Generally, a thing cannot freeze if it is moving. So move. Keep moving.

Catastrophe here does not mean disaster. Rather, it means the poignant enormity of our life experience. It includes crisis and disaster, the unthinkable and the unacceptable, but it also includes all the little things that go wrong and that add up. The phrase reminds us that life is always in flux, that everything we think is permanent is actually only temporary and constantly changing. This includes our ideas, our opinions, our relationships, our jobs, our possessions, our creations, our bodies, everything.

We who have the power to make choices disproportionately shape outcomes and limit options for people who don’t have the power to make choices. It follows that if we don’t share the power to make choices, we will never see a change to those things we say are bad or unacceptable to our society. When those of us who have the means maximize our own children’s and our own families’ advantages, we are contributing to strengthening norms about achievement, success/failure, that undermine our fellow citizens’ well-being.

In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone? In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience? To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and live to hope till hope creates from it's own wreck the thing it contemplates. Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent. This had been the higher, diviner way which she had missed, this obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted. Now the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to honor she had forgotten the obligation of mercy.

To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it. You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed.

Movement is the province of the muscular system: a child who needs to inhibit his or her natural feelings, whether for healthy or unhealthy reasons, also unconsciously either inhibits muscles that would express those feelings or activates muscles opposing those muscles of expression. In either case, the effect is the same: using the muscular body to keep the unacceptable emotions "under wrap." Touch can disrupt the patterns of muscular tension intended to inhibit emotions; thus, touch can have the effect of changing a person's emotional responses and promoting emotional healing.

I hope I’m being clear, I didn’t say I hate feminists, that would be weird. I said I hate feminist. I’m talking about the word. I have the privilege living my life inside of words and part of being a writer is creating entire universes, and that's beautiful, but part of being a writer is also living in the very smallest part of every word. ...But the word feminist, it doesn't sit with me, it doesn't add up. I want to talk about my problem that I have with it. ...Ist in it's meaning is also a problem for me. Because you can't be born an ist. It's not natural... So feminist includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state. That we don't emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that's imposed on us. That we are indoctrinated with it, that it's an agenda... ...My problem with feminist is not the word. It's the question. "Are you now, or have you ever been, a feminist?" The great Katy Perry once said—I'm paraphrasing—"I'm not a feminist but I like it when women are strong."...Don't know why she feels the need to say the first part, but listening to the word and thinking about it, I realize I do understand. This question that lies before us is one that should lie behind us. The word is problematic for me because there's another word that we're missing... ...When you say racist, you are saying that is a negative thing. That is a line that we have crossed. Anything on the side of that line is shameful, is on the wrong side of history. And that is a line that we have crossed in terms of gender but we don't have the word for it... ...I start thinking about the fact that we have this word when we're thinking about race that says we have evolved beyond something and we don't really have this word for gender. Now you could argue sexism, but I'd say that's a little specific. People feel removed from sexism. ‘I'm not a sexist, but I'm not a feminist.' They think there's this fuzzy middle ground. There's no fuzzy middle ground. You either believe that women are people or you don't. It's that simple. ...You don’t have to hate someone to destroy them. You just have to not get it. ...My pitch is this word. ‘Genderist.’ I would like this word to become the new racist. I would like a word that says there was a shameful past before we realized that all people were created equal. And we are past that. And every evolved human being who is intelligent and educated and compassionate and to say I don't believe that is unacceptable. And Katy Perry won't say, "I'm not a feminist but I like strong women," she'll say, "I'm not a genderist but sometimes I like to dress up pretty." And that'll be fine. ...This is how we understand society. The word racism didn't end racism, it contextualized it in a way that we still haven't done with this issue. ...I say with gratitude but enormous sadness, we will never not be fighting. And I say to everybody on the other side of that line who believe that women are to be bought and trafficked or ignored...we will never not be fighting. We will go on, we will always work this issue until it doesn't need to be worked anymore. ...Is this idea of genderist going to do something? I don't know. I don't think that I can change the world. I just want to punch it up a little.

Wallace would have none of it. In reviewing The Descent of Man he wrote, ‘Are we to believe that the actions of an ever varying fancy for a slight change of colour could produce and fix the definite colours and markings which actually characterise species?’ Furthermore, he said, it was unacceptable to suggest that birds had an aesthetic sense. That would be crediting a bird with a human characteristic for which there was no evidence. It would be anthropomorphism at its most unjustified.

As Thomas Gordon pointed out, 'Parents who find unacceptable a great many things that their children do or say will inevitably foster in these children a deep feeling that they are unacceptable as persons.' That doesn't change just because the parents remember to say soothingly, 'We love you, honey; we just hate almost everything you do.

These groups [of disaffected youth] are not small, and they will grow larger. Certainly they are suffering. Demonstrably they are not getting enough out of our wealth and civilization. They are failing to assimilate much of the culture. As was predictable, most of the authorities and all of the public spokesmen explain it by saying there has been a failure of socialization. They say that the background conditions have interrupted socialization and must be improved. And, not enough effort has been made to guarantee belonging, there must be better bait or punishment. But perhaps there has not been a failure to communicate. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable. In this book I shall therefore take the opposite tack and ask, 'Socialization to what? to what dominant society and available culture?' And if this question is asked, we must at once ask the other question, 'Is the harmonious organization to which the young are inadequately socialized, perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up?' If this is so, the disaffection of the young is profound and it will not be finally remediable by better techniques of socializing. Instead, there will have to be changes in our society and its culture, so as to meet the appetites and capacities of human nature, in order to grow up.

Things can change if you stop accepting the unacceptable.

One of the many insights of Carl Rogers was that when people feel unacceptable they are immobilized, unable to change. It is, paradoxically, when people experience acceptance that they are freed to change.

Most of us accept that when we flip the light switch, the bulb will light up the darkness. When we turn on the tap, crystalline water will pour deliciously into our glass. When we are hungry, there will be something to eat. We also accept that others do not deserve the same. In the cities, we walk by the homeless each and every day. On the nightly news, we glorify hatred and rage. In entertainment, we celebrate the discomfort of others. We have learned to accept the unacceptable. It is a tragedy. Changing the world seems an impossible task. And not one among us can do it. Only when we each commit to small steps forward will we turn it all around.

The civil rights movement worked a major change in U.S. society in making open expressions of White supremacy culturally unacceptable. This was a far cry, however, from actually ending White racial mobilization. Instead, this mobilization, often orchestrated by White politicians, has continued over the last several decades in the form of interlinked panics about criminals, welfare cheats, illegal immigrants, and, most recently, terrorists.

In three weeks, the women's team had done more for soccer in the United States than any team had ever done. Yet, the United States Soccer Federation was unprepared and unwelcoming in its acerbic response to the women's success. With petty, resentful, chauvinistic behavior, the federation would bungle what should have been its greatest moment as a national governing body. Its leaders would criticize DiCicco instead of congratulating him, they would threaten to sue the women over an indoor victory tour and they would wait an unacceptably long period before entering into contract negotiations with the team. Then, at the end of the year, the federation would offer a deal that the women found insulting. Unwilling to trust that the federation was bargaining in good faith, the women would boycott a trip to a tournament in Australia. They would become champions of the world, embraced by the president, by the largest crowd ever to watch women play and by the largest television audience for soccer in this country, embraced by everyone, it seemed, but the officials who ran the sport with the vision of a student council. Increasingly, it appeared, the only amateurs left in sports were the people running the federations that governed them.

Change is never easy for anyone. And yet we do not ever remain the same, do we? Every moment, every hour, of every day of our lives is a stumble from one variation of our existence to the next. Constantly revolving, one can find it hard to adjust. Difficult to put one foot in front of the other without tripping over one's own well-polished shoes. Deciphering whether the change was good, or better still, deciding that it must be good - or rather ignoring the unacceptableness - was a strength I possessed.

What these “Why are you censoring me?” people misunderstand is that no one is forcing anyone to change the way they speak. You can say anything you want; you won’t face legal action for calling someone the N-word. But it doesn’t mean you can say it free of consequences. You can totally start your company emails to your boss with “Dear ugly bitch”—you’ll just get fired for it. By committing to march down the path of “political incorrectness,” you’re saying you’re willing to sacrifice relationships with anyone who finds your language unacceptable.

Now, just to understand better what's going on, let's imagine the shoe on the other foot. Let's imagine that hundreds of thousands of badly-educated Americans, white Americans, were pouring across the boarder into Mexico. And let's imagine that they were insisting on instruction in school in English rather than Spanish. Let's imagine they were asking for ballot papers in English rather than Spanish, they were celebrating Fourth of July rather than Sinco de Mayo, buying up newspapers, publishing in English, television stations, radios, all publishing and broadcasting in English ,and that there were so many of them coming in that they threatened to reduce Mexicans to minority. Do you think the Mexicans could possibly be tricked into thinking that this was enrichment, this was diversity, that this was great? No. No. They wouldn’t stand for it for a moment. This would be to them an impossible unacceptable invasion of their country. And you would find the same reaction in any non-white country anywhere in the world. Can you imagine say, the Japanese or the Nigerians, the Pakistanis, the Costa Ricans accepting this kind of wholesale demographic change that would change their country, transform their country, and reduce them to a minority? No. These things are impossible to imagine.

Chemistry is change and change is the core of your belief system. Which is good because that’s what we need more of—people who refuse to accept the status quo, who aren’t afraid to take on the unacceptable. But sometimes the unacceptable—your brother’s suicide, Calvin’s death—is, in fact, permanent, Elizabeth. Things happen. They just do.

What is the purpose of education? Is it to impart knowledge and facts or is it to nurture curiosity, effortful problem solving, and the capacity for lifelong learning? Educational historians have repeatedly shown that today’s schools were designed during the first half of the twentieth century to meet the demands of the industrial era, not an innovative knowledge economy. “Very few schools teach students how to create knowledge,” says Professor Keith Sawyer of Washington University, a leading education and innovation researcher. “Instead, students are taught that knowledge is static and complete, and they become experts at consuming knowledge rather than producing knowledge.” This is unacceptable. Change

Religion must now recognize that our deep antisocial impulses when denied and repressed do not disappear miraculously from reality; the more we treat them like criminals, the more vengeance they take against us. Adults who strive for total repression of their impulses in the realm of imagination wreak havoc either on their bodies or their spirits. The religion of the future should take a page from the notebook of the psychotherapist, encouraging men to tolerate their unacceptable impulses, to sublimate them, and at the same time to discipline themselves to a finer and more generous program of action. It must strengthen mature men and women to realize that everyone has desires and fantasies antisocial in nature. Only when their presence is acknowledged rather than repressed can they be prevented from exercising dominion over us in the realm of action.

big forces to worry about: growth and inflation. Each could either be rising or falling, so I saw that by finding four different investment strategies—each one of which would do well in a particular environment (rising growth with rising inflation, rising growth with falling inflation, and so on)—I could construct an asset-allocation mix that was balanced to do well over time while being protected against unacceptable losses. Since that strategy would never change, practically anyone could implement it.

(Some seem unaccepting of this transformation, and it indeed has been gradual. In a sense it began when the first simple machines were invented. But now, to deny the change requires a willful ignorance since, if you observe bodies clothed in steel flowing over highways, or how we’ve outsourced half our memory to these devices, these exobrains we carry around, and if you note how even our most intimate relationships occur remotely, at great distances from one another, if you see all this, well, it isn’t such an original observation, dear cyborgs, to say that human and machine long ago merged inextricably.)

You're a scientist, he said. "Your job is to question things—to search for answers. But sometimes—and I know this for a fact—there just aren’t any. You know that prayer that starts ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change’?” She frowned. "That's definitely not you." She cocked her head. "Chemistry is change and change is the core of your belief system. Which is good because that's what we need more of -- people who refuse to accept the status quo, who aren't afraid to take on the unacceptable -- your brother's suicide, Calvin's death -- is, in fact, permanent, Elizabeth. Things happen. They just do.

(When I say cyborgs, I of course mean us.) ... (Some seem unaccepting in this transformation, and it indeed has been gradual. In a sense it began when the first simple machines were invented. But now, to deny the change requires a willful ignorance since, if you observe bodies clothed in steel flowing over highways, or how we've outsourced half our memory to these devices, these exobrains we carry around, and if you note how even our most intimate relationships occur remotely, at great distances from one another, if you see all this, well, it isn't such an original observation, dear cyborgs, to say that human and machine long ago merged inextricably.)

Here we’ll describe four signs that you have to disengage from your autonomous efforts and seek connection. Each of these emotions is a different form of hunger for connection—that is, they’re all different ways of feeling lonely: When you have been gaslit. When you’re asking yourself, “Am I crazy, or is there something completely unacceptable happening right now?” turn to someone who can relate; let them give you the reality check that yes, the gaslights are flickering. When you feel “not enough.” No individual can meet all the needs of the world. Humans are not built to do big things alone. We are built to do them together. When you experience the empty-handed feeling that you are just one person, unable to meet all the demands the world makes on you, helpless in the face of the endless, yawning need you see around you, recognize that emotion for what it is: a form of loneliness. ... When you’re sad. In the animated film Inside Out, the emotions in the head of a tween girl, Riley, struggle to cope with the exigencies of growing up.... When you are boiling with rage. Rage has a special place in women’s lives and a special role in the Bubble of Love. More, even, than sadness, many of us have been taught to swallow our rage, hide it even from ourselves. We have been taught to fear rage—our own, as well as others’—because its power can be used as a weapon. Can be. A chef’s knife can be used as a weapon. And it can help you prepare a feast. It’s all in how you use it. We don’t want to hurt anyone, and rage is indeed very, very powerful. Bring your rage into the Bubble with your loved ones’ permission, and complete the stress response cycle with them. If your Bubble is a rugby team, you can leverage your rage in a match or practice. If your Bubble is a knitting circle, you might need to get creative. Use your body. Jump up and down, get noisy, release all that energy, share it with others. “Yes!” say the people in your Bubble. “That was some bullshit you dealt with!” Rage gives you strength and energy and the urge to fight, and sharing that energy in the Bubble changes it from something potentially dangerous to something safe and potentially transformative.

Many of us from dysfunctional families are struggling. We need more help, it takes a village and we're trying to find ours. We are looking to family and possibly some friends who are still displaying destructive patterns of behavior that we don't want passed on to our children. How do we break the cycle? It starts with us, we have to create new circles and change the people we surround ourselves with. It's not easy letting go but necessary for our personal growth and well being, as well as generations to come. Our children will embrace what we accept as the norm because they are looking to us for guidance and direction. We set the tone for what's okay acceptable and unacceptable. We are the leaders and they will follow suit.

This is like paradise, This is such a happy sight, This is how everyone spends their time, it must be great. If I disappear from here, can I start over? Will I be able to accept such an obvious happiness? If I lost my memories and changed my personality, I’m sure I could. But what does it mean to be born again? I would no longer be living my life. It would be someone else’s. I only have one chance to have my life, and it’s right here. It’s the only life I have. This is my life. I can’t give it to anyone else, It can’t be stolen, I can’t force it on anyone, or forget it, or make it disappear, or trample on it, or laugh it away, or beautify it. I have no choice but to accept this one cruel, meaningless life! That’s why I will fight, and why I will continue fighting. Because this kind of life, it’s unacceptable!

Peace cannot require Palestinians to acquiesce to the denial of what was done to them. Neither can it require Israeli Jews to view their own presence in Palestine as illegitimate or to change their belief in their right to live there because of ancient historical and spiritual ties. Peace, rather, must be based on how we act toward each other now. It is unacceptable for a Palestinian to draw on his history of oppression and suffering to justify harming innocent Israeli civilians. It is equally unacceptable for an Israeli to invoke his belief in an ancient covenant between God and Abraham to justify bulldozing the home and seizing the land of a Palestinian farmer. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which proposes a political framework for a resolution to the conflict in Ireland, and which was overwhelmingly endorsed in referendums, sets out two principles from which Palestinians and Israelis could learn. First “[i]t is recognized that victims have a right to remember as well as to contribute to a changed society.” Second, whatever political arrangements are freely and democratically chosen for the governance of Northern Ireland, the power of the government “shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions and shall be founded on the principles of full respect for, and equality of civil, political, social, and cultural rights, of freedom from discrimination for all citizens, and of parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos, and aspirations of both communities.” Northern Ireland is still a long way from achieving this ideal, but life has vastly improved since the worst days of “the Troubles” and it is a paradise on earth compared to Palestine/Israel.

Qatar & The West (The Sonnet) All of a sudden the entire west is peeved at Qatar, Because only the west has exclusive rights to exposure. All of a sudden we care about the migrant workers, The Afghans, Palestinians and Kashmiris no longer matter. Human rights issue here is, we don't care about human rights, We only care about filling the air with hypocrisy and mania. Our poster boy just dumped half his new workforce as garbage, We buy Oscar, ditch Batgirl, and we diss Qatar for buying FIFA! We are just peeved that the Arabs are showing off for a change, Sure it's unacceptable, since showing off is a western tradition. Yes, it's true that the Middle East reeks with human rights issues, But it is also teeming with passion beyond western comprehension. If you really care about human rights stick to a cause for more than a fortnight. Otherwise keep your trap shut, lest you open and be proved a privileged white.

And in return you preach to your employers the brands of metaphysics that are especially acceptable to them; and the especially acceptable brands are acceptable because they do not menace the established order of society.” Here there was a stir of dissent around the table. “Oh, I am not challenging your sincerity,” Ernest continued. “You are sincere. You preach what you believe. There lies your strength and your value - to the capitalist class. But should you change your belief to something that menaces the established order, your preaching would be unacceptable to your employers, and you would be discharged. Every little while some one or another of you is so discharged. Am I not right?” This time there was no dissent. They sat dumbly acquiescent, with the exception of Dr. Hammerfield, who said: “It is when their thinking is wrong that they are asked to resign.” “Which is another way of saying when their thinking is unacceptable,” Ernest answered

We have already seen that when positive authority suggests a change in behavior, the recipient will accept it provided he is capable of doing so and provided it does not require drastic modification of belief or frustrate important needs. By carrying out the suggestion, one can simultaneously reduce dissonance and preserve intact one's relation to positive authority. But what can reasonably be expected when the suggestion to change is beyond the recipient's capability or frustrates his deep needs or predispositions? In such a situation, a conflict arises between his desire to comply with authority and the abilities or needs which make compliance impossible. One way to resolve such a conflict situation (or to reduce the dissonance) is to change one's conception of authority. If a suggestion emanating from positive authority is unacceptable, the conflict may be removed by becoming disaffected with the authority and transforming it either into a negative authority or into a nonexistent one. This is exactly what Leon and Joseph did.

Imagine the following. Three groups of ten individuals are in a park at lunchtime with a rainstorm threatening. In the first group, someone says: “Get up and follow me.” When he starts walking and only a few others join in, he yells to those still seated: “Up, I said, and now!” In the second group, someone says: “We’re going to have to move. Here’s the plan. Each of us stands up and marches in the direction of the apple tree. Please stay at least two feet away from other group members and do not run. Do not leave any personal belongings on the ground here and be sure to stop at the base of the tree. When we are all there . . .” In the third group, someone tells the others: “It’s going to rain in a few minutes. Why don’t we go over there and sit under that huge apple tree. We’ll stay dry, and we can have fresh apples for lunch.” I am sometimes amazed at how many people try to transform organizations using methods that look like the first two scenarios: authoritarian decree and micromanagement. Both approaches have been applied widely in enterprises over the last century, but mostly for maintaining existing systems, not transforming those systems into something better. When the goal is behavior change, unless the boss is extremely powerful, authoritarian decree often works poorly even in simple situations, like the apple tree case. Increasingly, in complex organizations, this approach doesn’t work at all. Without the power of kings and queens behind it, authoritarianism is unlikely to break through all the forces of resistance. People will ignore you or pretend to cooperate while doing everything possible to undermine your efforts. Micromanagement tries to get around this problem by specifying what employees should do in detail and then monitoring compliance. This tactic can break through some of the barriers to change, but in an increasingly unacceptable amount of time. Because the creation and communication of detailed plans is deadly slow, the change produced this way tends to be highly incremental. Only the approach used in the third scenario above has the potential to break through all the forces that support the status quo and to encourage the kind of dramatic shifts found in successful transformations. (See figure 5–1.) This approach is based on vision—a central component of all great leadership.

HUNGER AND OBESITY The change in diets around the world is also creating a global obesity epidemic—and in its wake a global diabetes epidemic—even as more than 900 million people in the world still suffer from chronic hunger. In the United States, where many global trends begin, the weight of the average American has increased by approximately twenty pounds in the last forty years. A recent study projects that half the adult population of the United States will be obese by 2030, with one quarter of them “severely obese.” At a time when hunger and malnutrition are continuing at still grossly unacceptable levels in poor countries around the world (and in some pockets within developed countries), few have missed the irony that simultaneously obesity is at record levels in developed countries and growing in many developing countries. How could this be? Well, first of all, it is encouraging to note that the world community has been slowly but steadily decreasing the number of people suffering from chronic hunger. Secondly, on a global basis, obesity has more than doubled in the last thirty years. According to the World Health Organization, almost 1.5 billion adults above the age of twenty are overweight, and more than a third of them are classified as obese. Two thirds of the world’s population now live in countries where more people die from conditions related to being obese and overweight than from conditions related to being underweight. Obesity represents a major risk factor for the world’s leading cause of death—cardiovascular diseases, principally heart disease and stroke—and is the major risk factor for diabetes, which has now become the first global pandemic involving a noncommunicable disease.* Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to suffer heart disease or a stroke, and approximately two thirds of those suffering from diabetes die from either stroke or heart disease.† The tragic increase in obesity among children is particularly troubling; almost 17 percent of U.S. children are obese today, as are almost 7 percent of all children in the world. One respected study indicates that 77 percent of obese children will suffer from obesity as adults. If there is any good news in the latest statistics, it is that the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. appears to be reaching a plateau, though the increases in childhood obesity ensure that the epidemic will continue to grow in the future, both in the U.S. and globally. The causes of this surge in obesity are both simple—in that people are eating too much and exercising

You might well wonder how on earth, after all their countless betrayals and cruelties, men like Agathocles could sit safe on their thrones for years and even defend themselves against foreign enemies without their citizens ever conspiring against them; and this while many others, equally ready to use cruelty, weren’t even able to hold on to their power in peacetime, never mind in war. I think it’s a question of whether cruelty is well or badly used. Cruelty well used (if we can ever speak well of something bad) is short-lived and decisive, no more than is necessary to secure your position and then stop; you don’t go on being cruel but use the power it has given you to deliver maximum benefits to your subjects. Cruelty is badly used when you’re not drastic enough at the beginning but grow increasingly cruel later on, rather than easing off. A leader who takes the first approach has a chance, like Agathocles, of improving his position with his subjects and with God too; go the other way and you have no chance at all. It’s worth noting that when you take hold of a state, you must assess how much violence and cruelty will be necessary and get it over with at once, so as not to have to be cruel on a regular basis. When you’ve stopped using violence your subjects will be reassured and you can then win them over with generosity. If you don’t do all it takes at the beginning, because you were badly advised or didn’t have the nerve, then you’ll always have to be wielding the knife; and you’ll never be able to count on your subjects, since with all the violence you’re handing out they won’t be able to count on you. So get the violence over with as soon as possible; that way there’ll be less time for people to taste its bitterness and they’ll be less hostile. Favours, on the other hand, should be given out slowly, one by one, so that they can be properly savoured. Most of all, though, a ruler should have the kind of relationship with his subjects where nothing that can happen, good or bad, will force him to change his approach, because if hard times demand it, your cruelty will come too late, while any concessions you make will be seen as wrung out of you and no one will be impressed. 9 Monarchy with public support Now let’s turn to our second case, where a private citizen becomes king in his own country not by crime or unacceptable violence, but with the support of his fellow-citizens. We can call this a monarchy with public support and to become its king you don’t have to be wholly brilliant or extraordinarily lucky, just shrewd in a lucky way. Obviously, to take control of this kind of state you need the support of either the common people or the wealthy families, the nobles. In

As the months rolled on, John and Sarah began to understand themselves less as teachers and more as parents, living into the names Baba and Kama Kiwawa. It was clear the boys needed something Keu couldn’t provide, consistent support and affection. Sarah started giving out hugs and bandages, and John role-modeled manhood by providing food, shelter, and an education. But unlike many parents, John and Sarah didn’t dole out punishments. They left that to the council. On his first visit, Keu had appointed six boys with hair sprouting on their chins as the elders of Kiwawa. He spent a week with them on a hill near Kiwawa where he instructed them in the ways of a traditional elder council, showing them how to resolve problems that might arise according to the Pokot traditions. And each night after the guard heard John’s snores rumbling out of the camper, the council built a fire and legislated the day’s problems according to the nomadic values they had learned, sometimes choosing to defer ruling on more complicated matters until Keu returned. Stolen writing stick? The elders huddled together in the shadow of the illuminated acacia tree. The oldest returned and pointed at the offender: “Water-fetching duty for a week.” “Oee,” the boys would shout, the Pokot version of Amen. “Refusing to share meat?” “Three rope whippings.” “Oee.” “Crying because you miss your mother?” “Spend more time with Kama,” the oldest boy would say with compassion. “Oee.” “We were modeling the Pokot elders by becoming the keepers of justice and fairness. You see, Pokot elders can never settle a matter based on anger or some personal retribution. That is so unacceptable,” Michael explained. “A punishment is meant to reform the person as quickly as possible so the criminal can be brought back into the group. This is because every single person has a job to do, whether it is to fetch water, herd cows, or stand guard against Karamoja. And if you are gone, then someone else has to work harder in your absence. Nomads do not have prisons like the modern world, which changes our whole entire judicial system. In America you can lock somebody up in prison for two years for just a small crime like stealing a cow. And while in prison they are taken out of the community and are expected to think about what they have done. And then after those two years of isolation, a group of psychologists and lawyers and I don’t know who else will examine that person and see if they have changed their stealing ways. If not, then they lock them back up,” he said, turning an invisible key. “In America there is the potential to give up on somebody, to leave them outside of the community. But there are no prisons in the desert, and without prisons the elders are left with two choices: reform you or kill you. And as I said, if they kill you, they are not only losing a good worker, but also a brother and a son. And the desert has already taken so many of our sons.

SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.

The reason that I do not typically use the command word “stay” during training is because it is redundant.  If I instruct you to sit, I should not have to tell you to stay sitting.  What value is a sit without the stay?  Sit implies stay.  Once I have given the sit command, the assumption is that the dog should remain in that position until told otherwise.  That’s the standard.  The sit command can be considered the warning that it’s unacceptable to get up.  However, if you want to offer the additional information, you may say “stay” once the dog is sitting.  Then, that becomes the warning.  Only say it once.  That is the message that tells the dog of your expectations.  A warning should be delivered one time.  If the dog does not heed the warning, then the consequence must be delivered.  Otherwise, you will create a dog that will simply wait for the second or third or fourth warning word before changing his behavior.

All finished. Don’t look, though. You and your man must be surprised together.” “Siena,” Cass cautioned quickly. “He is not my man.” “If he looked at me the way he looks at you, I would not be so quick to denounce him,” Siena teased, her eyes brightening in a way that reminded Cass quite a bit of Feliciana. She stepped back from Cass and gave a satisfied nod. “And now--for me. Shall I change into something more revealing as well?” Cass realized that Siena intended to accompany her. “I--I think it’s better if Falco and I go off on our own.” Siena’s flawless skin paled. “Unchaperoned? But that’s unacceptable. If your aunt found out, she’d run me out of the villa, if she didn’t kill me first.” So true. Cass could just hear Agnese shrieking about what Matteo would think. “She won’t find out,” Cass promised. “She’ll be gone for days. And I won’t make a very realistic prostitute with a maidservant in tow.” Cass didn’t bother to point out that of all the rules she might break that evening, departing with Falco unchaperoned was the very least of them. Siena agreed reluctantly, but her good mood had vanished. She led Cass back to the portego, to where Falco waited. A slow smile spread over the boy’s face. “Almost perfect,” he murmured. He bent down and gave the seam of Cass’s dress a yank. Cass yelped. The shiny fabric slit up the side so that a hint of her shapely calf peeped out. “Now it’s perfect.” Cass glared at him. Siena gasped, then clapped a hand over her mouth. “Please be careful,” she begged. “Your aunt would never forgive me…” Falco flashed his dazzling smile at the lady’s maid. “Nothing bad will happen to her. You have my word.

Without Christ, the world was a joyless place and any place where he remains unknown and unaccepted is a joyless place. Everything has changed since Christ's birth yet everything remains to be changed as people come to receive the child in faith.

In order to deeply bury reprehensible emotions, your brain can cause physical pain to distract you. The pain is real. Laboratory tests demonstrate that the pain is caused when your brain cuts off oxygen to the afflicted area. Epidemiologists call this transfer of symptoms amplification.10 Amplification prevents unacceptable ideas from surfacing.

The Republican position is now to oppose even studying climate change as well as any and all proposals to reduce carbon emissions. Rational people may disagree about how governments might minimize or prepare for the effects of global warming. You are entitled to your own opinion. But refusing to accept its reality is a new and unacceptable posture. You are not entitled to your own facts.

Every culture and era flatters itself that we are finally seeing what previous eras and cultures could not see because of their own blinders and ideological lenses. To admit that we are in some sense no different from tenth-century peasants is unacceptable to most of us. It may be offensive. To accept it may take real courage.

When is the urgency rate high enough? From what I have seen, the answer is when about 75% of a company’s management is honestly convinced that business as usual is totally unacceptable. Anything less can produce very serious problems later on in the process.

The July 2009 Awake! article, “Is it Wrong to Change Your Religion?”, states: “No one should be forced to worship in a way that he finds unacceptable or be made to choose between his beliefs and his family.”3 This ironic statement, featured in their own literature, blatantly contradicts their shunning policy.

Don’t sugarcoat a difficult person’s behavior. You need to name the behavior for what it is: control, manipulation, and abuse. Doing this makes it clear that their behavior is unacceptable, not your fault, and not something you can change. Seeing harmful behavior for what it is can help you accept an imperfect solution, such as getting a divorce or not allowing your children to visit their grandparents.

But there is another sort of dying in between, a crueler death: when those you love begin to make choices they would never make if you were there. If you were alive. Things that would be thought-less, brutal even, but in your absence, become benign. Like giving away your clothes. Or removing the flurries of magazine clippings you carefully curated across your bedroom walls. Isn't it strange, how the rules change so fast? How an act that would be unacceptable one moment becomes instantly harmless, as soon as the burden of ownership is lifted?

These previously learned methods of adaptation to life do work. Getting drunk works. Getting stoned works. Being overweight works. Being sad works, particularly in a world where being angry or horny or expressively joyful are taboo. These are all methods of survival, and if they get replaced there is a risk that the new replacement will be a big pain to accomplish and not work as well as the old way. Problems that seem unacceptable start looking better after a little suffering that is greater than that associated with the problem. THis is why the context for each person's commitment to change has to include a perspective that allows for periods of greater discomfort than that caused by the problem they are trying to fix.

To counter apathy, most change agents focus on presenting an inspiring vision of the future. This is an important message to convey, but it’s not the type of communication that should come first. If you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present. To drive people out of their comfort zones, you have to cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss. “The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.” We can see this sequence in two of the most revered speeches in American history. In his famous inaugural address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened by acknowledging the current state of affairs. Promising to “speak the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” he described the dire straits of the Great Depression, only then turning to what could be, unveiling his hope of creating new jobs and forecasting, “This great nation . . . will revive and will prosper. . . . The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” When we recall Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, epic speech, what stands out is a shining image of a brighter future. Yet in his 16-minute oration, it wasn’t until the eleventh minute that he first mentioned his dream. Before delivering hope for change, King stressed the unacceptable conditions of the status quo. In his introduction, he pronounced that, despite the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation, “one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” Having established urgency through depicting the suffering that was, King turned to what could be: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” He devoted more than two thirds of the speech to these one-two punches, alternating between what was and what could be by expressing indignation at the present and hope about the future. According to sociologist Patricia Wasielewski, “King articulates the crowd’s feelings of anger at existing inequities,” strengthening their “resolve that the situation must be changed.” The audience was only prepared to be moved by his dream of tomorrow after he had exposed the nightmare of today.

      It never occurred to me that adopting a vegan diet would cause me to lose fifty pounds in two years, but that’s what happened. I lost the first twenty or so pounds before I left for college. People were beginning to notice that I was slimming down, but I didn’t notice a huge difference that first year until my mom took me shopping the summer before I left for my freshman year of college: I hadn’t worn a size medium shirt or a pair of pants with a 34-inch waist since I started high school.       The rest of the weight came off my freshman year, and that’s when the difference really became apparent. Gradually, over the course of that year, my body completely changed. My face looked slimmer, my waist leveled off at a size 32, and I even lost what my mother had always affectionately referred to as the “baby fat” on my hands.       Since the weight came off so slowly, it wasn’t until I went home for Christmas that year that I fully understood the extent of the changes. My friends and family couldn’t believe their eyes, and my grandmother found it rather unacceptable that I had yet to replace my new baggy clothes.       I didn’t get substantially more exercise or eat any less than I ate before: I just ate differently.

the consequences of this state of affairs have been drawn by the Hungarian-born American financier George Soros who, in an essay published in September 2012 (Soros 2012), argued that in order to avoid a definitive split of the euro zone into creditor and debtor countries, and thus a likely collapse of the EU itself, Germany must resolve a basic dilemma: either assume the role of the ‘benevolent hegemon’ or else leave the euro zone. If Germany were to give up the euro, leaving the euro zone in the hands of the debtor countries, all problems that now appear to be insoluble, could be resolved through currency depreciation, improved competitiveness, and a new status of the ECB as lender of last resort. The common market would survive, but the relative position of Germany and of other creditor countries that might wish to leave the euro zone would change from the winning to the losing side. Both groups of countries could avoid such problems if only Germany was willing to assume the role of a benevolent hegemon. However, this would require the more or less equal treatment of debtor and creditor countries, and a much higher rate of growth, with consequent inflation. These may well be unacceptable conditions for the German leaders, for the Bundesbank and, especially, for the German voters.

It is extraordinarily difficult to be clear in one’s mind as to just what Rodd and many others who make the same move (at least Rodd is candid!) think they are doing. The difficulty does not arise out of their refusal to accept the Bible’s normativity: they are perfectly frank about that. But the overt appeal to think of God in line with what appears acceptable to the contemporary spirit is a strange one—as if God changes with the cultural mood. If this is the approach, how on earth can one avoid domesticating God? Anything each generation does not like, it dismisses as uncivilized, or unenlightened, or unacceptable, and reshapes God to a more pleasing fancy. It soon becomes difficult to see how this differs very much from Kaufman’s postmodernist insistence that theology does not describe or expound some being called “God” but is a “construct of the imagination which helps to tie together, unify and interpret the totality of experience.”72 In any case, the result here is a God not clearly personal, and, if absolute, sufficiently remote to be of little threat and of little use.

When he got a good look at her, though, he found himself in the unusual position of having completely lost the ability to speak. Millie’s curly hair was tied back with a ribbon, making her appear remarkably young, while also lending her a rather flirty attitude. His gaze traveled from her hair to her face, and he felt his breath catch in his throat when he took note of the paleness of her skin, the panic in her eyes, and the slight trembling of her lips. A scratch marred her cheek, and as his gaze drifted down her person to make certain she wasn’t injured anywhere else, he blinked and blinked again. “Are you wearing . . . pants?” “Well, yes,” she said, right before she sent him the smallest of grins. The grin hit him like a fist to the stomach, and right there and then, in the midst of the tree, he finally realized what it was about his life that had changed. He, Everett Mulberry, one of society’s highest members, was attracted to Miss Millie Longfellow, the . . . nanny. It was completely unacceptable, ridiculous even, and almost seemed like a story Jane Austen would have penned. In fact . . . him being attracted to Millie was remarkably similar to the Pride and Prejudice story he hadn’t picked up for a day or two. And he realized now that he certainly wasn’t going to finish because . . . if Mr. Darcy did indeed end up with Miss Elizabeth, well, it was a silly fairy tale, plain and simple. He didn’t believe in fairy tales, even if Oliver seemed to have experienced one, but . . . no—he would not allow himself to think in that direction. The question that remained now, though, was how was he going to overcome this attraction—if that’s what he was actually feeling—for Millie? She

Unfortunately these days, hardly a day goes by without news of an incident of childhood bullying. Some of these are so horrific or tragic that they defy understanding. Those really grab our attention. Others are all too easily dismissed as some sort of rite of passage, an acceptable part of growing up. The truth, though, is that bullying of any kind has the power to change who a child is, the kind of person he or she grows up to be. When ignored, the victim can be scarred for life, emotionally, if not physically. The perpetrator grows up with a skewed value system that suggests it’s perfectly okay to make another person’s life miserable, to feel powerful, even for a moment, at the expense of someone weaker. It’s up to adults—parents, teachers, entire communities—to take a stand, to say bullying is not okay, not ever, not by anyone! And that’s exactly what happens in Serenity when schoolteacher Laura Reed and pediatrician J. C. Fullerton realize a student is being bullied. Both Laura and J.C. have experienced the damaging effects of bullying, so what’s happening to Misty Dawson is personal and unacceptable. While there are often subtle messages tucked away in my stories, I hope the message in Catching Fireflies is loud and clear. There is nothing cute or normal or acceptable about bullying, whether it’s a toddler on the playground or a teenager using the internet to torment a classmate. Pay attention to what may be happening to your children, no matter how young or how old. Pay even closer attention to how they’re treating others. Bullying is wrong. It needs to stop. And alert parents and teachers and a united community can make that happen. I hope you’ll enjoy spending time with all the Sweet Magnolias once more, and that you’ll take their message—and mine—to heart. All best, Sherryl

Leaders don't have to change history, but they do have to change "business as usual." To them, the status quo is unacceptable. Leaders challenge the process. They search for opportunities, and they experiment and take risks. Exemplary leaders also know that they have to be willing to make some personal sacrifices in service of a higher purpose.

We often want our enemies’ next step to be repentance because we want them to admit what they did to hurt us or how they are wrong. But there may be other steps they need to take first. Jesus accepted the people who were unacceptable and made it clear He wants us to do that too. Not many people ever get condemned into life change. But people get loved into life change all the time. It is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance (Rom. 2:4), and He empowers us to extend that same kindness to others.

No science and no analysis of the future consequences of various actions taken today can in itself tell us what to do. We need, in addition, to factor in what kind of future we value, and to what extent we care at all about the future compared to more immediate concerns here and now. The later aspect is usually modeled and economics by the so-called discount rate, which has played a prominent role in discussions of climate change on a decadal and centennial time scale, but hardly at all in the context of longer perspectives or the various radical technologies[.] We are less used to thinking about ethical issues on long time scales, so our intuitions trying to fail us and lead to paradoxes. These issues need to be resolved, because dodging the bullet would in my opinion be unacceptably irresponsible.

The nature of the moment is familiar but bears repeating: whether or not industrialized countries begin deeply cutting our emissions this decade will determine whether we can expect the same from rapidly developing nations like China and India next decade. That, in turn, will determine whether or not humanity can stay within a collective carbon budget that will give us a decent chance of keeping warming below levels that our own governments have agreed are unacceptably dangerous. In other words, we don’t have another couple of decades to talk about the changes we want while being satisfied with the occasional incremental victory. This set of hard facts calls for strategy, clear deadlines, dogged focus—all of which are sorely missing from most progressive movements at the moment. Even more importantly, the climate moment offers an overarching narrative in which everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations for historical wrongs like slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand project of building a nontoxic, shockproof economy before it’s too late.

Being an aging woman in this modern world can be either tragic‌—‌or magic. We watch the body of our youth go through such “socially unacceptable” changes: jiggles, furrows, dimples, puckers, and scars. So many of us feel trapped in a body that is now judged “over the hill” instead of over the top, “seasoned” instead of sexy, or the dreaded “matronly” instead of magnetic. We watch our diets and work out harder than we ever did when young in the attempt to lose those love handles, stop those spreads, or at least slow those sags, but the years and gravity are against us: We are aging, and we live in a society that still worships youthful beauty above all else in half of its population.

Despite what we learn daily about healthy exercise practices, healthy diets, and good medical care, the bottom line is that the most significant way of contributing to our own good health is through the quality of our thought processes. This power is a valuable gift, in light of the absolute lack of control we have over other aspects of life. Think about being on a turbulent flight in bad weather. You have no control over the winds, or the skills or the mental state of the pilot flying the plane. But you do have the power to minimize your discomfort. You can decide to read a book, strike up a conversation with the person next to you, take your antioxidants, wrap up in a warm blanket, sleep, listen to music, or watch the movie. Alternatively, you can listen to every engine noise and allow yourself to be debilitated by worry the entire flight. It’s your choice. Ultimately, you are the only one who can make significant deposits into your health bank account. This is not the job of your doctor, your nutritionist, your lover, or your parents. There is no supplement, no healthcare provider, and no exotic herb that can possibly do for you what you can do for yourself. The key is compassion for yourself. Dr. Hendricks has noted that any area of pain, blame, or shame in our lives is there because we have not loved that part of ourselves enough. No matter what you’re feeling, the only way to get a difficult feeling to go away is simply to love yourself for it. If you think you’re stupid, then love yourself for feeling that way. It’s a paradox, but it works. To heal, you must be the first one to shine the light of compassion on any areas within you that you feel are unacceptable (and we’ve all got them).

Make it simple, clear and coherent. #LessIsMore Strip out the tariffs and encourage problem solvers, not process monkeys. Agree visible consistencies that everyone commits to every day. Make it easy for adults and children to recognise good behaviour. Make emotional acceleration for adults unacceptable. Stay hard and fast to just three rules. Enshrine consistency in a single A4 collaborative agreement. Encourage restorative conversations. Replace detention for lack of work with impositions. Keep the time between action and consequence as short as possible.

the act of calling out domestic violence in public and bringing consequences for offenders is a huge cultural change in itself. ‘In my opinion, psychological and culture change is calling a domestic violence offender into our City Hall and having all of these people say, “Your violence is unacceptable. She may love you and she may be afraid of you, but we are not. She may feel like she is powerless against you – we are not. This is no longer about her – this is about us and you.” That is very powerful.

Working with meditation students, I also saw how self-judgment kept people from taking risks. It often felt like a lid that people used to keep themselves safe, small, contained, and under-potentiated. And this was painful to see — how sensitive, good-hearted human beings often focus on what they supposedly lack instead of their beauty, strength, possibility, and power to create. I started to see “unconditional self-acceptance” — being kind to ourselves no matter what is happening in our lives — as an immensely powerful life skill that most of us have not been taught. I started to see that being kind to ourselves is actually a human capacity that changes everything. It changes how we treat ourselves day to day, how we take risks, how we love, how we create, and how we make space for what seems “unacceptable” in others.

As an artist, I will rise up and make change” “It is unacceptable that women still don’t have rights; it’s unacceptable that the poor stay poor. Now is the time for art, for change, for beauty, and for human rights; I won’t take no for an answer.

With a quiet post-Olympics year ahead, U.S. Soccer secretary general Dan Flynn informed the players that the national team would “go dark” for 2005 and play between four and six games total that year. Rather than schedule the usual slate of games, the federation would instead focus on scouting new players. “If there are no games, where will the women play?” Langel asked. “The W-League,” replied Flynn. “Are you kidding me?” Langel said. The W-League wasn’t a professional league. It was a development league that included amateur, unpaid players. There was no comparison between playing international opponents with the national team and competing in the W-League. “We told them we don’t necessarily need a residency camp, but we don’t have anywhere to play at all,” says Cat Whitehill, who graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in communications. “They wanted nothing to do with us.” U.S. Soccer argued the next World Cup wasn’t for another three years and there were no major events the team needed to prepare for. It would be similar to the team’s schedule in 2001, when U.S. Soccer hosted just two home games for the national team. But for the players who had now made soccer their living and didn’t have the WUSA anymore, that was unacceptable. It’s not as if U.S. Soccer was simply scaling back friendlies. The federation said it had no plans to send the team to the annual Algarve Cup in Portugal, which the team always competed in. A team wouldn’t be sent to the Four Nations Tournament in China either, despite the competition being a usual fixture on the team’s calendar.

With a quiet post-Olympics year ahead, U.S. Soccer secretary general Dan Flynn informed the players that the national team would “go dark” for 2005 and play between four and six games total that year. Rather than schedule the usual slate of games, the federation would instead focus on scouting new players. “If there are no games, where will the women play?” Langel asked. “The W-League,” replied Flynn. “Are you kidding me?” Langel said. The W-League wasn’t a professional league. It was a development league that included amateur, unpaid players. There was no comparison between playing international opponents with the national team and competing in the W-League. “We told them we don’t necessarily need a residency camp, but we don’t have anywhere to play at all,” says Cat Whitehill, who graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in communications. “They wanted nothing to do with us.” U.S. Soccer argued the next World Cup wasn’t for another three years and there were no major events the team needed to prepare for. It would be similar to the team’s schedule in 2001, when U.S. Soccer hosted just two home games for the national team. But for the players who had now made soccer their living and didn’t have the WUSA anymore, that was unacceptable. It’s not as if U.S. Soccer was simply scaling back friendlies. The federation said it had no plans to send the team to the annual Algarve Cup in Portugal, which the team always competed in. A team wouldn’t be sent to the Four Nations Tournament in China either, despite the competition being a usual fixture on the team’s calendar. The players demanded to know how U.S. Soccer could justify skipping the tournaments. Flynn replied that it was “the technical director’s recommendation” to play a lighter schedule. The technical director? April Heinrichs. The players wanted to figure out if Heinrichs really believed the team should play so few games in 2005, so Julie Foudy reached out to her. “Is that true? Did you tell U.S. Soccer we should only play five games?” Foudy asked. “I never said anything like that,” Heinrichs told her. “I told them you should play 20 games.” If Heinrichs hadn’t recommended such a sparse schedule and, in fact, recommended around 20 games, it seemed that U.S. Soccer was making a decision that went against what was best for the players. The players saw a clear double standard—the men’s team hadn’t played so few games since 1987, almost two decades earlier. They concluded U.S. Soccer’s real reason was the same one behind most disputes between the players and the federation: money. The federation, it appeared, did not want to spend the money for training camps, player stipends, and travel for overseas competitions, even as it was sitting on a $30 million surplus at the time. “In 2005, they had no plans for us and wanted us to go quiet so they didn’t have to pay us the entire year,” says defender Kate Markgraf.

A physicist decides to demonstrate the inaccuracy of a proposition; in order to deduce from this proposition the prediction of a phenomenon and institute the experiment which is to show whether this phenomenon is or is not produced, in order to interpret the results of this experiment and establish that the predicted phenomenon is not produced, he does not confine himself to making use of the proposition in question; he makes use also of a whole group of theories accepted by him as beyond dispute. The prediction of the phenomenon, whose nonproduction is to cut off debate, does not derive from the proposition challenged if taken by itself, but from the proposition at issue joined to that whole group of theories; if the predicted phenomenon is not produced, the only thing the experiment teaches us is that among the propositions used to predict the phenomenon and to establish whether it would be produced, there is at least one error; but where this error lies is just what it does not tell us... In sum, the physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses; when the experiment is in disagreement with his predictions, what he learns is that at least one of the hypotheses constituting this group is unacceptable and ought to be modified; but the experiment does not designate which one should be changed.

In her passionate and meticulously argued book The Change, Australian feminist writer Germaine Greer suggests that society’s aversion to menopausal women is, more than anything, “the result of our intolerance for the expression of female anger.”5 But why do we find women’s rage so unacceptable, so threatening? It is for sure an attitude which is deeply embedded in the culture. Several studies conducted over the past few decades have reported that men who express anger are perceived to be strong, decisive, and powerful, while women who express the same emotion are perceived to be difficult, overemotional, irrational, shrill, and unfeminine. Anger, it seems, doesn’t fit at all with our cultural image of femininity, and so must be thoroughly suppressed whenever it is presumptuous enough to surface. One of the saddest findings of these studies is that this narrative is so deeply ingrained that it even exists among women — and we internalize it from an early age. Soraya Chemaly, American author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, writes: Studies show that by the time most children are toddlers they already associate angry expressions with male faces … Girls and women, on the other hand, are subtly encouraged to put anger and other “negative” emotions aside, as unfeminine. Studies show that girls are frequently discouraged from even recognising their own anger, from talking about negative feelings, or being demanding in ways that focus on their own needs. Girls are encouraged to smile more, use their “nice” voices and sublimate how they themselves may feel in deference to the comfort of others. Suppressed, repressed, diverted and ignored anger is now understood as a factor in many “women’s illnesses,” including various forms of disordered eating, autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue and pain.6 We hide our anger by refusing even to use the word — instead of saying we’re utterly furious, we talk about being “annoyed,” “upset,” or “irritated.” We take refuge in sarcasm, we nurse grudges, or we simply withdraw. And as a consequence of these actions and attitudes, anger is an emotion that, more often than not, makes women feel powerless — not just because we’ve been made to feel as if we’re not allowed to express it, but, accordingly, because we’ve never learned healthy ways to express it.

Many companies approach management and improvement from a standpoint that being wrong is unacceptable, therefore incentivizing bias for favorable results from each activity or else consequences shall be dealt to the one who attempted change.

Children who feel that they are unloved can believe that there must be something very wrong about them which makes them unacceptable. The stinging sense of being not right causes them confusion and hurt, but they do not give up the desire for love and acceptance. They despair of it, certainly. They pine for it and perhaps fear it. But their pursuit of love and acceptance will dovetail with an attempt to change themselves into someone the child himself can accept.

But as each theorist offers us a new redescription of the unacceptable — of what we are suffering from, of what we have to fear — they become, by the same token, the masters of our suffering. By punctuating our unhappiness, they make it legible. Like religious or political leaders, they tell us persuasive stories about where the misery comes from, and hence, by implication, what we might do about it. They want to change our (and their) relationship to the fear they have formulated for us. The expert constructs the terror, and then the terror makes the expert. If you are part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Experts, in other words, can give us descriptions that allow us to be unhappy in new ways.

...we have thousands upon thousands of UFO sightings that force two unacceptable answers upon us: 1. All the witnesses were mistaken or lying. 2. Some tremendous unknown civilization is exerting an all-out effort to manufacture thousands of different types of UFOs and is sending all of them to our planet. The governments of the world have seized upon variations of the first explanation. The UFO enthusiasts accept the second. I do not accept either one. Instead, I propose a third alternative. I think that some “hard” objects definitely exist as Temporary Transmogrifications. They are disk-shaped and cigar-shaped. They leave indentations in the ground when they land. Witnesses have touched them and have even been inside of them. These hard objects are decoys, just as the dirigibles and ghost planes of yesteryear may have been decoys to cover the activities of the multitudinous soft objects. My real concern is with these soft objects. They hold one of the keys to the mystery. There are countless sightings of objects that changed size and shape in front of the viewers or split into several smaller objects, each going off in a different direction. In some cases, this process was reversed, with several small lights converging together to form a single large one, which then went dashing off. Over and over again, witnesses have told me in hushed tones, “You know, I don’t think that thing I saw was mechanical at all. I got the distinct impression that it was alive.

That meant my body was becoming convinced by my mind. It was no longer repeating the story that death is imminent unless we’re on full alert at 12:45. The same thing happened the following night. That’s a positive change! It’s important to love our bodies. So often when they don’t behave, by getting sick or developing patterns like insomnia, we want the problems to go away. We ignore them, deny them, suppress them, get mad at them, or medicate them. If instead we can strive to understand our bodies and accept them just the way they are, we open the door to healing. Carl Rogers, the great client-centered therapist of the 20th century, called this the paradox of growth: We need to love ourselves just the way we are, with all our problems and limitations. When we do that, we start to change. When your body knows it will be listened to, it can speak quietly. A little rumble here. A slight pain there. We hear the message and take care of its needs. When I teach live workshops, I often work with people who’ve been ignoring or even hating their bodies for many years. They aren’t attuned to the body’s messages. They aren’t picking up those subtle signals. When its soft communications are ignored, the body has to speak more loudly. The small pain might become arthritis. If ignored, it might become a full-fledged autoimmune disorder. So many people are at war with their bodies, trying to mute their messages with medication or addictive substances. Growth begins with self-love. Healing begins with self-acceptance, even when circumstances seem unacceptable. Practicing self-love lowers our stress levels and opens our awareness to the potential of our lives. Through that window of possibility, the love, peace, and beauty of the universe can shine.

Many companies approach management and improvement from a standpoint that being wrong is unacceptable, therefore incentivizing a bias for favorable results from each activity or else consequences shall be dealt to the one who attempted change.

Meditation is not about accepting the unacceptable. It is about seeing the world with greater clarity so that you can take wiser and more considered action to change those things that need to be changed.

Beverly is obviously experiencing intense anger. Because she believes anger to be “unchristian,” she doesn’t want to call it anger, so she uses the word upset. However, the real denial was in her conversation with her brother. She gave him the impression that his actions were acceptable, whereas in reality she found them to be unacceptable. He doesn’t know that she is angry; but, in fact, she is seething inside with anger. If she doesn’t change her approach, the bombs of implosion will become deeply rooted inside of her and in due time her life will collapse. (See the likely results of implosive anger in next section

Rather than change these conditions so that public education is equal for all, we allow other people’s children to endure conditions that would be unacceptable for our own.

So that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely.

The key word in our definition of a disagreement (an unacceptable difference between two perspectives), isn’t “difference.” It’s “unacceptable.” Once the clash between perspectives becomes unacceptable, our motivation shifts from understanding minds to changing them, and from that shift springs a world of trouble.

He watched me grieve and he didn’t try to make things more comfortable by interrupting or analyzing the issue. He let me tell the story in whatever way I needed to say" "Of course, there are times when something just isn't right between therapists, and patient, when the therapist's countertransference is getting in the way. One sign: having negative feelings about the patient". "Our experiences with this person are important because we're probably feeling something very similar to what everyone else in these patients' life feels." "If you expect an hour of sympathetic head nodding, you've come to the wrong place. Therapist will be supportive, but our support is for your growth, not for our low opinion of your partner (our role is to understand your perspective but not necessarily endorse it)" "A therapist will hold up the mirror in the most compassionate way possible, to stare back at it and say "oh isn’t that interesting? Now what instead of turning away?" "The therapist explained that often-different parts of ourselves want different things and if we silence the parts we find unacceptable they'll find other ways to be heard." "So many of our destructive behaviors take root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out of something to fill it." "Whenever one person in the family system starts to make changes, even if the changes are healthy or positive, it's not unusual for other members in this family to do everything they can do to maintain the status quo and bring things back to homeostasis." "Once we know what we are feeling we can make choices about where we want to go with them. But if we push them away the second they appear, often we end up veering off in the wrong direction, getting lost yet again in the land of chaos." "I know that therapy won't make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from coming, or ensure that Ill always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. Therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknown yourself- let go of the limiting stories you've told yourself about who you are, so that you aren’t trap by them, so that you can live your life and not the story you've been telling yourself about your life." "The noonday demon: "The opposite of depression isn't happiness but vitality" "We marry our unfinished business" "Babies can die from lack of touch, and so can adults (adults who are touched regularly live longer). There is even a name for this condition: skin hunger" "What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person's type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity, It is not coincidence that people who had angry parents, often end up choosing angry partners.

I wonder who "they" are for him. Most of us have a "they" in the audience, even though nobody is really watching, at least not how we think they are. The people who are watching us - the people who really see us- don’t care about the false self, about the show we are putting on. I wonder who those people are for John?" "I thought about how many people avoid trying for things they really want in life because its more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place." "Every hour counts for all of us and I want to be fully present in the fully hour we spend with each one." "You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friends - and they will hurt you- because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal." "The more you welcome your vulnerability the less afraid you'll feel" "We all use defense mechanisms to deal with anxiety, frustration, or unacceptable impulses, but what’s fascinating about them is that we aren't aware of them in the moment. A familiar examples is denial- some, rationalization." "Generally when the therapy is coming to an end, the work moves toward its final stage, which is saying goodbye. in those sessions, the patient and I consolidate the changes made by talking about the "progress and process". What was helpful in getting to where the person is today? What wasn't? What has she learned about herself -her strengths, her challenges, her internal scripts and narratives- and what coping strategies and healthier ways of being can she can take with her when she leaves? Underlying all this, of course, is how do we say goodbye?" "Just like your physiological immune system helps your body recover from physical attack, your brain helps you recover from psychological attack." "But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can't mute one emotion without muting others. You want to mute the pain? You will also mute joy.

Whites impose these rules on themselves because they know blacks, in particular, are so quick to take offense. Radio host Dennis Prager was surprised to learn that a firm that runs focus groups on radio talk shows excludes blacks from such groups. It had discovered that almost no whites are willing to disagree with a black. As soon as a black person voiced an opinion, whites agreed, whatever they really thought. When Mr. Prager asked his listening audience about this, whites called in from around the country to say they were afraid to disagree with a black person for fear of being thought racist. Attempts at sensitivity can go wrong. In 2009, there were complaints from minority staff in the Delaware Department of Transportation about insensitive language, so the department head, Carolann Wicks, distributed a newsletter describing behavior and language she considered unacceptable. Minorities were so offended that the newsletter spelled out the words whites were not supposed to use that the department had to recall and destroy the newsletter. The effort whites put into observing racial etiquette has been demonstrated in the laboratory. In experiments at Tufts University and Harvard Business School, a white subject was paired with a partner, and each was given 30 photographs of faces that varied by race, sex, and background color. They were then supposed to identify one of the 30 faces by asking as few yes-or-no questions as possible. Asking about race was clearly a good way to narrow down the possibilities —whites did not hesitate to use that strategy when their partner was white—but only 10 percent could bring themselves to mention race if their partner was black. They were afraid to admit that they even noticed race. When the same experiment was done with children, even white 10- and 11-year olds avoided mentioning race, though younger children were less inhibited. Because they were afraid to identify people by race if the partner was black, older children performed worse on the test than younger children. “This result is fascinating because it shows that children as young as 10 feel the need to try to avoid appearing prejudiced, even if doing so leads them to perform poorly on a basic cognitive test,” said Kristin Pauker, a PhD candidate at Tufts who co-authored the study. During Barack Obama’s campaign for President, Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva asked the white students in his class to raise their hands if they had a black friend on campus. All did so. At the time, blacks were about 10 percent of the student body, so for every white to have a black friend, every black must have had an average of eight or nine white friends. However, when Prof. Bonilla-Silva asked the blacks in the class if they had white friends none raised his hand. One hesitates to say the whites were lying, but there would be deep disapproval of any who admitted to having no black friends, whereas there was no pressure on blacks to claim they had white friends. Nor is there the same pressure on blacks when they talk insultingly about whites. Claire Mack is a former mayor and city council member of San Mateo, California. In a 2006 newspaper interview, she complained that too many guests on television talk shows were “wrinkled-ass white men.” No one asked her to apologize. Daisy Lynum, a black commissioner of the city of Orlando, Florida, angered the city’s police when she complained that a “white boy” officer had pulled her son over for a traffic stop. She refused to apologize, saying, “That is how I talk and I don’t plan to change.” During his 2002 reelection campaign, Sharpe James, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, referred to his light-skinned black opponent as “the faggot white boy.” This caused no ripples, and a majority-black electorate returned him to office.

Who is not aware that schools in the United States are vastly unequal? Without white people’s interest or effort invested in changing a system that serves them at the expense of others, advantage is passed down from generation to generation. Rather than change these conditions so that public education is equal for all, we allow other people’s children to endure conditions that would be unacceptable for our own.

The ability to make rational decisions is limited, or bounded, by the extent of people’s information. To broaden employees’ understanding, a firm should promote a tradition of teamwork and interdependence and develop future leaders by rotating them among work assignments in different departments and geographic locations. In order to reduce structural secrecy, there may be short-term opportunity costs, but the long-term benefits are significant.12 Firms must think about long-term greed and what it means. Through actions and training, leaders must explain the pressures on short-term thinking and how the firm resolves the conflicts of short- and long-term goals. Potentially conflicting or confusing organizational goals, such as putting clients first while also having a duty to shareholders, require strong signals from leadership as to what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior. These nuances cannot be left to statements of principles; they must be modeled by leaders’ actions each day. Leaders must understand that external influences can shape the culture. For example, there are competitive, technological, and regulatory pressures. Responses to them can have unintended consequences, including drifting from principles. This can increase the probability of an organizational failure. An organization needs to understand to what extent models impact behavior, decisions made by business leaders, and organizational culture. For example, boards of directors of public companies should ask questions if earnings per share (EPS) estimates are too consistent with analysts’ estimates. They should ask whether the firm is managing to models or to what is in the best long-term interests of the firm. Leaders get too much credit and too much blame. Leaders need to uphold the firm’s shared values—and that is a key component to leadership.13 But too little emphasis is given to the organizational elements that shape behavior or provide an environment for leadership or change. An organization’s structure, incentives, and values last longer and have more impact than those of individual leaders. Usually when there is a change or loss or failure there is a tendency to blame one thing or one person, when typically there are complex organizational cultural reasons. It is the duty of leaders and board members to examine what is responsible, not who is responsible.

The healthy shaming process sets social boundaries as well as physical and stops us from doing socially unacceptable things like going to the toilet in the street or telling your auntie she has a big nose. Unfortunately, though, the shaming process doesn’t always work and can do severe damage to a child’s sense of self. It relies on a parent making the child understand that when he stops the undesirable behaviour he will be loved and affirmed again. If a child doesn’t get this reassurance, he can go from feeling shamed for a specific, correctable behaviour to feeling shamed about who he fundamentally is. The child’s understanding changes from ‘I’ve done something wrong’ to ‘I am wrong’.

I am disappointed that you have replaced some good, old-fashioned and humorous cartoons with distasteful ones. For example, "The Far Side" by Gary Larson is not funny, just lacking in good taste. "Calvin and Hobbes" by Watterson could be more acceptable if made less offensive (at times). "Doonesbury" and "Bloom County," I suppose, reflect our times. Far better for our newspaper to be working to change what is so unacceptable to us all in these times. Many other cartoons are funny, likable and reflective of the real and good in our country. -- Mary Kohler, Yonkers (letter published in the Herald Statesman, Yonkers NY, 11/12/86) Quoted in /The Bloom County Library/

The GIs didn’t like to talk about country or flag and were embarrassed by patriotic bombast. They were all American boys, separated by eighty years only—but that separation included World War I. The Great War changed the language. It made patriotic words sound hollow, unacceptable, ridiculous, especially for the next set of young Americans sent to Europe to fight over the same battlefields their fathers had fought over. Nevertheless, as much as the Civil War soldiers, the GIs believed in their cause. They knew they were fighting for decency and democracy and they were proud of it and motivated by it. They just didn’t talk or write about it.