Stephen Covey Quotes
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Patience is emotional diligence.
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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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We can't live without eating, but we don't live to eat.
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Unless you’re continually improving your skills, you’re quickly becoming irrelevant.
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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.
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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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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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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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Beginners are many; finishers are few.
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The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
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The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won't be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.
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Free your heart from hatred - forgive. Free your mind from worries - most never happen. Live simply and appreciate what you have. Give more. Expect less.
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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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Be a function of your values rather than a function of the impulse or desire of any given moment.
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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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Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other.
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Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.
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There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.
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The process of building trust is an interesting one, but it begins with yourself, with what I call self trust, and with your own credibility, your own trustworthiness. If you think about it, it's hard to establish trust with others if you can't trust yourself.
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In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.
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Compliance does not foster innovation, trust does. You can't sustain long-term innovation, for example, in a climate of distrust.
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In a very real sense, there are only two roles in organisations: customers and suppliers. Everybody functions simultaneously in both roles, whether inside or outside the organisation the essence of good business, therefore, is the quality of the relationship between customer and supplier.
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To listen with empathy is the most important human skill.
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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.