Stephen Covey Quotes
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Every exaggeration of the truth once detected by others destroys our credibility and makes all that we do and say suspect.
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We can never really change someone; people must change themselves.
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As we create synergy among the roles of our lives, there's more of us to put into the time we have.
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If you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.
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Effective people do two things: they strive to do excellent work, and they prioritize.
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We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.
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Highly effective people tend to be proactive. They decide to find a better job or to have better health, rather than of responding to whatever curves life throws at them.
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Our problems and pain are universal and increasing, and the solutions to the problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.
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A mission statement is not something you write overnight... But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.
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Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it's holy ground. There's no greater investment.
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Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we are in control of it or not, there is a first creation to every part of our lives. We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people's agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits.
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While I believe in the power of positive thought, I do not believe that you or I can simply psyche ourselves into success or peace of mind.
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If we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.
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Most of us think we don't have enough time to exercise. What a distorted paradigm! We don't have time not to. We're talking about three to six hours a week - or a minimum of thirty minutes a day, every other day. That hardly seems an inordinate amount of time considering the tremendous benefits in terms of the impact on the other 162 - 165 hours of the week.
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In addition to self-awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment - independent will - that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.
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You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut.
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There is so much we can do to render service, to make a difference in the world - no matter how large or small our circle of influence.
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We accomplish all that we do through delegation - either to time or to other people.
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Management works in the system; leadership works on the system.
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Humility is the mother of all virtues. Humility says we are not in control, principles are in control, therefore we submit ourselves to principles. Pride says that we are in control, and since our values govern our behavior, we can simply do life our way.
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If the only vision we have of ourselves comes from the social mirror - from the current social paradigm and from the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around us - our view of ourselves is like the reflection in a crazy mirror room at the carnival.
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Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.
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The key to success is dedication to life-long learning.
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All things are created twice, but not all first creations are by conscious design. In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances outside our Circle of Influence to shape much of our lives by default. We reactively live the scripts handed to us by family, associates, other people's agendas, the pressures of circumstance - scripts from our earlier years, from our training, our conditioning.