Stephen Covey Quotes
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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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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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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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Every person in the organization must change inside their hearts and minds, so that they themselves become principle centred.
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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 am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
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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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Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential.
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Putting first things first means organizing and executing around your most important priorities. It is living and being driven by the principles you value most, not by the agendas and forces surrounding you.
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...to learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.
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You will never be able to truly step inside another person, to see the world as he sees it, until you develop the pure desire, the strength of personal character, and the positive Emotional Bank Account, as well as the empathetic listening skills to do it.
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Success is when you realize obstacles you face are challenges to help you become better - and your response equals the challenge.
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We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.
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The greatest thing you can do for your children is love your spouse.
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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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If we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.
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Effective interdependence can only be built on true independence.
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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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The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values - carefully thought about, selected and internalized values.
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We are product of neither nature nor nurture; we are a product of choice, because there is always a space between stimulus and response. As we wisely exercise our power to choose based on principles, the space will become larger.
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Trust is the one thing that affects everything else you're doing. It's a performance multiplier which takes your trajectory upwards, for every activity you engage in, from strategy to execution.
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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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Our problems and pain are universal and increasing, and the solutions to the problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.
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As we create synergy among the roles of our lives, there's more of us to put into the time we have.