Stephen Covey Quotes
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I'm convinced that we can write and live our own scripts more than most people will acknowledge. I also know the price that must be paid. It's a real struggle to do it. It requires visualization and affirmation. It involves living a life of integrity, starting with making and keeping promises, until the whole human personality the senses, the thinking, the feeling, and the intuition are ultimately integrated and harmonized.
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Trust is a powerful accelerator to performance and when trust goes up, speed also goes up while cost comes down - producing what we call a trust dividend.
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We're constantly making choices about the way we spend our time. The issue is not between the good and the bad, but between the good and the best. So often, the enemy of the best is the good.
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Would you not agree that relationships are built on trust? Would you not also agree that most individuals think more in terms of "me-my wants, my needs, my rights? What would wisdom dictate - would it not direct us to focus on trust-building principles and sacrificing 'me' for 'we'?"
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Our lives are the results of our choices. To blame and accuse other people, the environment, or other extrinsic factors is to choose to empower those things to control us.
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..people are working harder than ever, but because they lack clarity and vision, they aren’t getting very far. They, in essence, are pushing a rope...with all of their might.
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When trust is high, the dividend you receive is like a performance multiplier, elevating and improving every dimension of your organization and your life.... In a company, high trust materially improves communication, collaboration, execution, innovation, strategy, engagement, partnering, and relationships with all stakeholders.
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Live, love, laugh, leave a legacy.
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Principles are deep fundamental truths... lightly interwoven threads running with exactness, consistency, beauty and strength through the fabric of life.
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Real excellence does not come cheaply. A certain price must be paid in terms of practice, patience, and persistence - natural ability notwithstanding.
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Make small commitments and keep them. Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic. Be a part of the solution, not the problem.
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We can never really change someone; people must change themselves.
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Once we are self-aware, we must choose purposes and principles to live by; otherwise the vacuum will be filled, and we will lose our self-awareness and become like groveling animals who live primarily for survival and propagation. People who exist on that level aren't living; they are "being lived".
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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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I believe that God is the source of all the universal, timeless principles. And to Him, I give all the credit and the glory. However, to a person who is not religious, I believe they can live to the highest level of their conscience and develop spiritual intelligence that surpasses most people, including many religious people, who profess but do not practice.
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Where you are headed is more important than how fast you are going. Rather than always focusing on what's urgent, learn to focus on what is really important.
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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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In the long run, you can never accomplish a worthy end with an unworthy means.
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The great apparent dichotomy is that the more we give, the more we get.
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More essential than working on attitudes and behaviors is examining the paradigms out of which those attitudes and behaviors flow.
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An empowering mission statement has to become a living document, part of our very nature, so that the criteria we've put into it are also in us, in the way we live our lives day by day.
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Whenever you experience stress of any kind, look into yourself and ask, In what way am I compromising my innermost values in this situation?
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Always surround yourself with people who are even more talented and competent than you.
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Do what is important, not what is urgent.