Stephen Covey Quotes
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We often get so busy "sawing" (producing results) that we forget to "sharpen our saw" (maintain or increase our capacity to produce results in the future).
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You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things.
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Role modeling is the most basic responsibility of parents. Parents are handing life's scripts to their children, scripts that in all likelihood will be acted out for the rest of the children's lives.
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Synergy is better than my way or your way. It's our way.
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The 8th Habit, then, is not about adding one more habit to the 7 - one that somehow got forgotten. It's about seeing and harnessing the power of a third dimension to the 7 Habits that meets the central challenge of the new Knowledge Worker Age. The 8th Habit is to Find Your Voice and Inspire Others to Find Theirs.
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Inevitably, anytime we are too vulnerable we feel the need to protect ourselves from further wounds. So we resort to sarcasm, cutting humor, criticism - anything that will keep from exposing the tenderness within. Each partner tends to wait on the initiative of the other for love, only to be disappointed but also confirmed as to the rightness of the accusations made.
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If we know how to listen to our own heart, we can listen to the hearts of others.
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when you get a good night's sleep and wake up ready to produce throughout the day.
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Distinguish between the person and the behavior or performance.
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Leaders are not born or made - they are self made
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What you do has far greater impact than what you say.
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When you have too many top priorities, you effectively have no top priorities.
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Consult the wisdom of your heart as well as your mind.
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Character grows in the soil of experience with the fertilization of example, the moisture of ambition, and the sunshine of satisfaction. Character cannot be purchased, bargained for, inherited, rented or imported from afar. It must be home-grown. Purely intellectual development without commensurate internal character development makes as much sense as putting a high-powered sports car in the hands of a teenager who is high on drugs. Yet all too often in the academic world, that's exactly what we do by not focusing on the character development of young people.
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You may be good, but what are you good for? You've got to be good for something. You've got to be about some project, some task that requires you to be humble and obedient to the universal principles of service. You've got to live a life of complete and total integrity in order to give this kind of service. This integrity enables you to love other people unconditionally, to be courageous and kind at the same time, because you have integratedness inside your own soul.
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It is one thing to make a mistake, and quite another thing not to admit it. People will forgive mistakes, because mistakes are usually of the mind, mistakes of judgment. But people will not easily forgive the mistakes of the heart, the ill intention, the bad motives, the prideful justifying cover-up of the first mistake.
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If you don't set your goals based upon your Mission Statement, you may be climbing the ladder of success only to realize, when you get to the top, you're on the WRONG building.
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You basically get what you reward. If you want to achieve the goals and reflect the values in your mission statement, then you need to align the reward system with these goals and values.
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None of us see the world as it is but as we are, as our frames of reference, or maps, define the territory.
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Principles don't die. They aren't here one day and gone the next. They can't be destroyed by fire, earthquake or theft. Principles are deep, fundamental truths, classic truths.
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In our own lives, having a mind-set of expecting to win increases our odds of winning. It helps us get better results. And better results help us increase our credibility and self-confidence, which leads to more positive self-expectancy, and more winning - and the upward cycle continues. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.
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The most effective way I know to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focused on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.
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You can't have the fruits without the roots. It's the principle of sequencing: Private Victories proceed Public Victories. Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.