Stephen Covey Quotes
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I believe that the habit of constant reading of good books and scholarly periodicals and magazines in many disciplines is vital to give a larger perspective and to constantly sense the interdependent nature of life.
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Once you've found your own voice, the choice to expand your influence, to increase your contribution, is the choice to inspire others to find their voice.
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Unless you’re continually improving your skills, you’re quickly becoming irrelevant.
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But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise.
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Sacrifice really means giving up something good for something better.
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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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All things are created twice; first mentally; then physically. The key to creativity is to begin with the end in mind, with a vision and a blue print of the desired result.
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Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.
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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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In many situations involving service recovery - the problem itself became the catalyst for the creation of even greater trust as the companies took the issues head-on and worked through the difficult problem in a way that restored confidence.
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It's not only a matter of when to do things, but whether or not to do them at all.
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An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success.
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Live, love, laugh, leave a legacy.
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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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...people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well.
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Where you are headed is more important than how fast you are going. Rather than always focusing on what's urgent, learn to focus on what is really important.
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An empowering mission statement has to become a living document, part of our very nature, so that the criteria we've put into it are also in us, in the way we live our lives day by day.
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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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Real excellence does not come cheaply. A certain price must be paid in terms of practice, patience, and persistence - natural ability notwithstanding.
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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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Look at the word responsibility-"response-ability"-the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.
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All things are created twice, but not all first creations are by conscious design. In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances outside our Circle of Influence to shape much of our lives by default. We reactively live the scripts handed to us by family, associates, other people's agendas, the pressures of circumstance - scripts from our earlier years, from our training, our conditioning.
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As you live your values, your sense of identity, integrity, control, and inner-directedness will infuse you with both exhilaration and peace. You will define yourself from within, rather than by people's opinions or by comparisons to others.
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If the only vision we have of ourselves comes from the social mirror - from the current social paradigm and from the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around us - our view of ourselves is like the reflection in a crazy mirror room at the carnival.