Stephen Covey Quotes
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'In empathic listening you listen with your ears, but you also, and more importantly, listen with you eyes and with your heart. You listen for feeling, for meaning. You listen for behaviour. You use your right brain as well as your left. You sense, you intuit, you feel.' ... 'You have to open yourself up to be influenced'.
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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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In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.
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Beginners are many; finishers are few.
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Accountability breeds response-ability.
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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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The personal power that comes from principle-centered living is the power of a self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual, unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors, and actions of others or by many of the circumstances and environmental influences that limit other people.
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The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, 'Wrong jungle!' ... Busy, efficient producers and managers often respond ... 'Shut up! We're making progress!'
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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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Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).
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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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I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
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Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.
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I'm convinced that we can write and live our own scripts more than most people will acknowledge. I also know the price that must be paid. It's a real struggle to do it. It requires visualization and affirmation. It involves living a life of integrity, starting with making and keeping promises, until the whole human personality the senses, the thinking, the feeling, and the intuition are ultimately integrated and harmonized.
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Everyone chooses one of two roads in life - the old and the young, the rich and the poor, men and women alike. One is the broad, well-traveled road to mediocrity, the other road to greatness and meaning.
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The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it. This literally turns a failure into a success.
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Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.
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If my sense of security lies in my reputation or in the things I have, my life will be in a constant state of threat and jeopardy-a fear that these possessions may be lost, stolen, or devalued. If I'm in the presence of someone of greater net worth, fame, or status, I feel inferior. If I'm in the presence of someone of lesser net worth, fame or status, I feel superior. My sense of self-worth constantly fluctu-ates. I don't have any sense of constancy, anchorage, or persistent selfhood. I am constantly trying to protect and insure my assets, properties, securities, position, or reputation.
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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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Strategy is important, but trust is the hidden variable. On paper you can have clarity around your objectives, but in a low-trust environment, your strategy won't be executed.
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It doesn't really matter how fast you're going if you're heading in the wrong direction.
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The universal elements are integrity, vision, discipline, passion, governed by conscience. Conscience has been educated through studying and pondering the universal, timeless principles of all six major world religions.
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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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Principles are deep fundamental truths... lightly interwoven threads running with exactness, consistency, beauty and strength through the fabric of life.