Stephen Covey Quotes
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Treat them all the same by treating them differently.
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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.
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Live out of your imagination, not your history.
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The role of the leader is to foster mutual respect and build a complementary team where each strength is made productive and each weakness irrelevant.
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I find most meetings are a waste of time, because they are so ill-prepared and there's little opportunity for true synergy in producing better solutions than what anyone originally thought of. So I work hard to only attend those meetings that have strategic importance and miss all kinds of other seemingly urgent meetings.
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Balance isn't either/or; it's 'and'.
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If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character.
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The reflection of the current social paradigm tells us we are largely determined by conditioning and conditions.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. No involvement, no commitment.
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we're responsible for our own lives.
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Our struggle to put first things first can be characterized by the contrast between two powerful tools that direct us: the clock and the compass. The clock represents our commitments, appointments, schedules, goals, activities - what we do with, and how we manage our time. The compass represents our vision, values, principles, mission, conscience, direction - what we feel is important and how we lead our lives. In an effort to close the gap between the clock and the compass in our lives, many of us turn to the field of "time management."
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Habit 7 is taking the time to sharpen the saw. By renewing the four dimensions of your nature - physical, spiritual, mental and social/emotional, you can work more quickly and effortlessly. To do this, we must be proactive. This is a Quadrant II (important, not urgent) activity that must be acted on. It's at the center of our Circle of Influence, so we must do it for ourselves.
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You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.
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Listen, involve, synergize at work. Then you will bury the old and create an entirely new winning culture which will unleash people's talents and create complementary teams where strengths are made productive and weakness are made irrelevant through the strengths of others.
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We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.
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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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Every human has four endowments - self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.
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Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance.
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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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Our character is basically a composite of our habits.
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In effective personal leadership, visualization and affirmation techniques emerge naturally out of a foundation of well thought through purposes and principles that become the center of a person's life.
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Only 20 percent of employees working in large organizations surveyed feel their strengths are in play every day. Thus, eight our of ten employees surveyed feel somewhat miscast in their role.
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A moment of choice is a moment of truth.
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Many people think in terms of either/or: either you're nice or you're tough. Win-win requires that you be both. It is a balancing act between courage and consideration. To go for win-win, you not only have to be empathic, but you also have to be confident. You not only have to be considerate and sensitive, you also have to be brave. To do that-to achieve that balance between courage and consideration-is the essence of real maturity and is fundamental to win-win.