Stephen Covey Quotes
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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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Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual phrased, it, "like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic".
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Moving along the upward spiral requires us to learn, commit, and do on increasingly higher planes. We deceive ourselves if we think that any one of these is sufficient. To keep progressing, we must learn, commit, and do-learn, commit, and do-and learn, commit, and do again.
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The ability to establish, grow, extend, and restore trust is the key professional and personal competency of our time.
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When we pick up one end of the stick, we pick up the other.
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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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Self-awareness involves deep personal honesty. It comes from asking and answering hard questions.
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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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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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The heart and soul of loving yourself is integrity and the peace of conscience it inspires.
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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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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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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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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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Interdependency follows independence.
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Your systems are perfectly designed to get the results that you are getting.
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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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Live out of your imagination, not your history.
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Many people seem to think that success in one area can compensate for failure in other areas. But can it really?... True effectiveness requires balance.
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The fire inside people is like a match; the way to ignite that flame is initially through friction, then other matches are lit through warmth.
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Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Algebra comes before calculus.
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Trust is the glue that holds everything together. It creates the environment in which all of the other elements win-win stewardship agreements, self-directing individuals and teams, aligned structures and systems, and accountability can flourish.
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Synergy is everywhere in nature. If you plant two plants close together, the roots commingle and improve the quality of the soil so that both plants will grow better than if they were separated. If you put two pieces of wood together, they will hold much more than the total weight held by each separately. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One plus one equals three or more.
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The first job of a leader-at work or at home-is to inspire trust. It's to bring out the best in people by entrusting them with meaningful stewardships, and to create an environment in which high-trust interaction inspires creativity and possibility.