Stephen Covey Quotes
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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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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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Fulfilling the four needs in an integrated way is like combining elements in chemistry. When we reach a "critical mass" of integration, we experience spontaneous combustion - an explosion of inner synergy that ignites the fire within and gives vision, passion, and a spirit of adventure to life.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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How many on their deathbeds wished they'd spent more time at the office - or watching TV? The answer is, No one.
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But with the steady disintegration of the family in modern society over the last century, the role of the school in bridging the gap has become vital!
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I win the private victory when I have made my mind up and commit to live by correct principles and to serve worthy purposes.
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During the first few minutes in lift-off, the astronauts were strictly controlled and were powerfully buffeted by the forces of nature struggling to keep them on earth. This is somewhat comparable to the pull of the flesh when our alarm goes off early in the morning. Unless we put "mind over mattress" and carry out the resolves made the night before, we will experience our first defeat that day. Not sufficient to finish. Mission aborted.
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Effective communication is built on the cement of trust. And trust is based on trustworthiness, not politics.
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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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Principles are the simplicity on the far side of complexity.
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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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We value the clock for its speed and efficiency. The clock has its place, efficiency has its place, after effectiveness. The symbol of effectiveness is the compass a sense of direction, purpose, vision, perspective, and balance. But the empowerment process itself is not efficient.
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The key to motivation is motive. It's the why. It's the deeper yes! burning inside that makes it easier to say no to the less important.
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You can buy a person's hands but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is.
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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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He who has a why can deal with any what or how.
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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 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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The problems in life come when we're sowing one thing and expecting to reap something entirely different.
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We are free to choose our response in any situation, but in doing so we chose the attendant consequence. If we pick up one end of the stick, we pick up the other.