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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.
Stephen Covey -
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.
Stephen Covey
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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.
Stephen Covey -
Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Algebra comes before calculus.
Stephen Covey -
If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.
Stephen Covey -
A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it's personal, it's positive, it's present tense, it's visual, and it's emotional.
Stephen Covey -
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.
Stephen Covey -
We exhaust ourselves more from the tension and the consequences of internal disharmony than from hard, unremitting work.
Stephen Covey
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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."
Stephen Covey -
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.
Stephen Covey -
I am personally convinced that one person can be a change catalyst, a 'transformer' in any situation, any organization. Such an individual is yeast that can leaven an entire loaf. It requires vision, initiative, patience, respect, persistence, courage, and faith to be a transforming leader.
Stephen Covey -
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.
Stephen Covey -
Interdependence is a higher value than independence
Stephen Covey -
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.
Stephen Covey
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To ignore the unexpected (even if it were possible) would be to live without opportunity, spontaneity, and the rich moments of which "life" is made.
Stephen Covey -
Trust is the one thing that affects everything else you're doing. It's a performance multiplier which takes your trajectory upwards, for every activity you engage in, from strategy to execution.
Stephen Covey -
Principles are deep fundamental truths... lightly interwoven threads running with exactness, consistency, beauty and strength through the fabric of life.
Stephen Covey -
Look at the weaknesses of others with compassion, not accusation. It's not what they're not doing or should be doing that's the issue. The issue is your own chosen response to the situation and what you should be doing. If you start to think the problem is "out there," stop yourself. That thought is the problem.
Stephen Covey -
...people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well.
Stephen Covey -
When a person has access to both the intuitive, creative and visual right brain, and the analytical, logical, verbal left brain, then the whole brain is working...And this tool is best suited to the reality of what life is, because life is not just logical-it is also emotional.
Stephen Covey
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Beginners are many; finishers are few.
Stephen Covey -
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.
Stephen Covey -
True effectiveness is a function of two things: what is produced (the golden eggs) and the producing asset (the goose).
Stephen Covey -
Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).
Stephen Covey