Stephen Covey Quotes
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It is in the ordinary events of every day that we develop the proactive capacity to handle the extraordinary pressures of life. It's how we make and keep commitments, how we handle a traffic jam, how we respond to an irate customer or a disobedient child. It's how we view our problems and where we focus our energies. It's the language we use.
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An effective goal focuses primarily on results rather than activity. It identifies where you want to be, and, in the process, helps you determine where you are. It gives you important information on how to get there, and it tells you when you have arrived. It unifies your efforts and energy. It gives meaning and purpose to all you do.
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See every problem as an opportunity to exercise creative energy.
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Each of us guard a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside.
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It's not what people do to us that hurts us. In the most fundamental sense, it is our chosen response to what they do to us that hurts us.
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If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.
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Innocent pleasures in moderation can provide relaxation for the body and mind and can foster family and other relationships. But pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment. The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of "fun," constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger "high." A person in this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it provides to the self here and now.
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When we pick up one end of the stick, we pick up the other.
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A long, healthy, and happy life is the result of making contributions, of having meaningful projects that are personally exciting and contribute to and bless the lives of others.
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Self-awareness involves deep personal honesty. It comes from asking and answering hard questions.
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It's incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it's leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy - very busy - without being very effective.
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Employees are given the chance to help shape their company by participating in a company-wide communications program making suggestions on waste reduction, environmental improvement, customer satisfaction, quality improvement, and safety issues.
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The heart and soul of loving yourself is integrity and the peace of conscience it inspires.
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At the core, there is one simple, overarching reason why so many people remain unsatisfied in their work and why most organisations fail to draw out the greatest talent, ingenuity, and creativity of their people and never become truly great, enduring organisations. It stems from an incomplete paradigm of who we are - our fundamental view of human nature. The fundamental reality is, human beings are not things needing to be motivated and controlled; they are four-dimensional - body, mind, heart, and spirit.
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A personal mission statement becomes the DNA for every other decision we make.
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Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Algebra comes before calculus.
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Be a light, not a judge, be a model not a critic. Little by little, your circle of influence will explode and you will avoid the emotional metastasizing cancers of complaining, criticizing, competing, comparing and cynicism, all which reflect victimization, all of which are the opposite of being proactive.
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The only thing that endures over time is the 'Law of the Farm.' You must prepare the ground, plant the seed, cultivate, and water if you expect to reap the harvest.
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Unless people feel that they are accepted and that they have a right to express their feelings without fear of embarrassment or ridicule, all they will do is react and rebel and struggle for their identity.
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Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
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Your systems are perfectly designed to get the results that you are getting.
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A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it's personal, it's positive, it's present tense, it's visual, and it's emotional.
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When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it's like giving them emotional oxygen.
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Live out of your imagination, not your history.