What's the best advice you're ever been given?

[Flickstix]

Be it from mumsnet or real life!

Manners cost nothing.

You catch more flies with honey.

Actually, the flies with honey and manners ones are true. I used to work within the emergency services and I always made more progress with difficult people when using a smile and a please, than I ever did with shouting at people.

Sign up for a occupational final salary pension scheme. Ignore the dodgy financial advisor telling you to get a personal one.

Thanks Dad

'Draw a line under it and move on.' Has helped me maintain focus when it's gone up shit creek.

Don't worry about things at night that you can't fix til the morning. No matter how much you pay for hosiary, it will always tear or pull. True love really does come to those who wait. No matter how much you do for your pupils, they will find a way to break your heart. Less is really just less. Before embarking on a relationship try and sniff that patch of skin just behind the earlobe.

"Being bitter is like drinking poision and expecting somebody else to die.

Soooo true, people let bitterness and resentment eat away at them whilst the person who made you feel like that is not affected at all, they dont give a shit, you're only ruining your own life and wasting your own time. "

totally agree with every word of this!

i have had reason to cut a few people out of my life recently and some people have said i'm bitter and i'm holding a grudge. well actually it's the opposite of that. i've cut them out of my life so that i can let go of the feelings the encourage in me. i dont seethe every day about the fact that they exist or what they have done. because i have cut them out i neer see them and have very few reminders so i feel so much freer and lighter. it is a very liberating thing to do. it ties in with my "engage at the level you're comfortable with" mantra.

Life isn't a rehearsal.

No one can make you feel inferior except yourself.

Blood is thicker than water... but love is thicker than blood.

Be more kind than you need to be.

If there's a tractor coming towards you, there's always going to be an idiot about to overtake it.

If you drop/ knock over the iron, do not try too catch it .

From my mum, when teaching me to iron.

Perfectionism is the enemy of achievement.

Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition is stupidity.

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

Fake it until you make it.

This too shall pass - used to whisper that to myself over and over in my sleep deprived hours when first DS and then DD didn't sleep AT ALL unless attached to me...........

Loads.

When I got caught bunking and was crapping it an older friend of my sister's said "Don't worry, this will NOT be the worst day of your life". She was right.

Don't worry about what people think of you. You'd be surprised at how infrequently they do.

Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves (troo dat )

Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor (Sondheim)

No-one's looking at you, they're too worried about looking like arses themselves, so just get up there and dance.

'Your first reaction is usually the right one'

Said to me by my dad when I found the straw that broke the camels back and decided to chuck exH out

The worst thing in life is not being alone, it's being surrounded by people that make you feel alone.

Never put yourself down, there are plenty of others out there who will do it for you.

This is apparently the AA prayer but it got me through the delivery of my stillborn child xxx

The original, attributed to Niebuhr, is:

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things I cannot change,
Courage to face the things
which must be changed,
and the Wisdom to know the difference.

Chanting and breathing this got me through

When I was an earnest adolescent I asked an elderly lady friend of the family if there was anything she wished she'd known when she was my age (14 at the time). Her answer was 'moisturised by neck!'

my

Count your blessings

Wear suncream!

What I said to a friend who was stressing out of her newborn baby..she keep saying, but the book says I should be doing this etc etc....

'The book wasn't written for you and DC, put it down, you know your baby'

Kindness kills. The mantra of all passive-aggressives.

Be kind.
Love is a decision.

You are allowed to say no.

Aw some of these are great. I really appreciate " The worst thing in life is not being alone, it's being surrounded by people that make you feel alone"

On stressing about raising small children my sister's friend told her this and she abided by it - then told me and so did I:
"Don't stress about when they can and cannot do things (milestones). As long as by the time they go to school they can walk, talk, are out of nappies and don't have a dummy then the rest of the timings don't matter a jot."

Made all of the compettitive mummy talk / stress fade away for me.

When you bear a grudge you are just carrying around someone else's shit. Put it down and walk away.

Don't trip over something behind you.

It's not time to worry yet (spent most of my life thinking this was something my dad said to us as kids only to realise when I read To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time in decades that it was Atticus Finch! Has comforted me through many a panic. It has only really been time to worry a handful of times in 40+ years.)