Stephen Covey Quotes
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People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them.
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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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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.
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Keeping a personal journal a daily in-depth analysis and evaluation of your experiences is a high-leverage activity that increases self-awareness and enhances all the endowments and the synergy among them.
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When you engage in a work that taps your talent and fuels your passion-that rises out of a great need in the world that you feel drawn by conscience to meet-therein lies your voice, your calling, your soul's code.
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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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Reducing children to a test score is the worst form of identity theft we could commit in schools.
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...people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well.
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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 you focus on principles, you empower everyone who understands those principles to act without constant monitoring, evaluating, correcting, or controlling.
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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.
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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.
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Be a function of your values rather than a function of the impulse or desire of any given moment.
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In addition to self-awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment - independent will - that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.
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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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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.
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A personal mission statement becomes the DNA for every other decision we make.
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Interdependence is a higher value than independence
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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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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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If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy.
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Our lives are the results of our choices. To blame and accuse other people, the environment, or other extrinsic factors is to choose to empower those things to control us.
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Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.
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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.