Stephen Covey Quotes
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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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Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
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"If I make deposits into an Emotional Bank Account with you through courtesy, kindness, honesty, and keeping my commitments to you, I build up a reserve. Your trust toward me becomes higher, and I can call upon that trust many times if I need to. I can even make mistakes and that trust level, that emotional reserve, will compensate for it. My communication may not be clear, but you'll get my meaning anyway. You won't make me "an offender for a word." When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective."
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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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Love is a verb. Love – the feeling – is the fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her.
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To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you're going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.
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We must not let the actions or words of others determine our responses. Magnanimous people make the choice to respond to the indignities of others based upon their own principles and their own value system rather than their moods or anger.
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They Nazi captors had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he Viktor Frankl had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options.
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Above all, success in business requires two things: a winning competitive strategy, and superb organizational execution. Distrust is the enemy of both. I submit that while high trust won't necessarily rescue a poor strategy, low trust will almost always derail a good one.
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What we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. There are people we trust because we know their character. Whether they're eloquent or not, whether they have human-relations techniques or not, we trust them and work with them.
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Contrary to what most people believe, trust is not some soft, illusive quality that you either have or you don't; rather, trust is a pragmatic, tangible, actionable asset that you can create.
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When your happiness comes primarily from the happiness of others, you know you have moved from a 'me' experience to a 'we' experience. And the whole problem-solving and opportunity-seizing process changes.
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The problems in life come when we're sowing one thing and expecting to reap something entirely different.
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People who end up with the good jobs are the proactive ones who are solutions to problems, not problems themselves, who seize the initiative to do whatever is necessary to get the job done.
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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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In the absence of wake-up calls, many of us never really confront the critical issues of life.
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We exhaust ourselves more from the tension and the consequences of internal disharmony than from hard, unremitting work.
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Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers. You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart; his heart is where his enthusiasm is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is. Treat employees as volunteers just as you treat customers as volunteers, because that's what they are. They volunteer the best parts - their hearts and minds.
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When two people in a marriage are more concerned about getting the golden eggs, the benefits, than they are in preserving the relationship that makes them possible, they often become insensitive and inconsiderate, neglecting the little kindnesses and courtesies so important to a deep relationship. They begin to use control levers to manipulate each other, to focus on their own needs, to justify their own position and look for evidence to show the wrongness of the other person. The love, the richness, the softness and spontaneity begin to deteriorate.
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True effectiveness is a function of two things: what is produced (the golden eggs) and the producing asset (the goose).
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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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People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them.
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Lose/Win people bury a lot of feelings. And unexpressed feelings come forth later in uglier ways. Psychosomatic illnesses often are the reincarnation of cumulative resentment, deep disappointment and disillusionment repressed by the Lose/Win mentality. Disproportionate rage or anger, overreaction to minor provocation, and cynicism are other embodiments of suppressed emotion. People who are constantly repressing, not transcending feelings toward a higher meaning find that it affects the quality of their relationships with others.
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Begin each day with the blueprint of my deepest values FIRMLY in mind then when challenges come, make decisions BASED on those values.