Stephen Covey Quotations | Page 5

If you don't let a teacher know what level you are -- by asking a question, or revealing your ignorance -- you will not learn or grow

What one great idea resonates deeper in the soul than any other...that we are free to choose. Next to life itself, the power to choose is your greatest gift.

The key to creating passion in your life is to find your unique talents, and your special role and purpose in the world.

Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought.

Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world.

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.

Management is formal authority given from above. Leadership is moral authority given from below and all around.

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.

...people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well.

In our own lives, having a mind-set of expecting to win increases our odds of winning. It helps us get better results. And better results help us increase our credibility and self-confidence, which leads to more positive self-expectancy, and more winning - and the upward cycle continues. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Remember, technology is a great servant, but a terrible master.

"If I make deposits into an Emotional Bank Account with you through courtesy, kindness, honesty, and keeping my commitments to you, I build up a reserve. Your trust toward me becomes higher, and I can call upon that trust many times if I need to. I can even make mistakes and that trust level, that emotional reserve, will compensate for it. My communication may not be clear, but you'll get my meaning anyway. You won't make me "an offender for a word." When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective."

The enemy of the "best" is often the "good."

Someone once inquired of a Far Eastern Zen master, who had a great serenity and peace about him no matter what pressures he faced, "How do you maintain that serenity and peace?" He replied, "I never leave my place of meditation." He meditated early in the morning and for the rest of the day, he carried the peace of those moments with him in his mind and heart.

To receive gratitude with grace is a form of gratitude by itself, and not always an easy art to master.

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are -- or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms.

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."

Through imagination, we can visualize the uncredited worlds of potential that lie within us.

You can't be successful with other people if you haven't paid the price of success with yourself.

When air is charged with emotions, an attempt to teach is often perceived as a form of judgment and rejection.

The greatest and most inspiring mountain climbing achievements in history are not so much stories of individual achievement, but are stories of the extraordinary power of a unified, talented, prepared team that stays loyally committed to one another and to their shared vision to the end.

If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character.

Principles don't die. They aren't here one day and gone the next. They can't be destroyed by fire, earthquake or theft. Principles are deep, fundamental truths, classic truths.

The heart and soul of loving yourself is integrity and the peace of conscience it inspires.

Treat them all the same by treating them differently.

Start small, make a promise and keep it. Then, make larger promises and keep them. Eventually, your honor will become greater than your moods or your circumstances, which includes your medical condition and other people's stereotypic observations. Once you overcome this comparison based mentality, your confidence will soar.

It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it and appropriately act on it.

Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people. But it takes time and patience.

I teach people how to treat me by what I will allow.

Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it.

Live simply and appreciate what you have. Give more. Expect less.

People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally 'being lived.' They are acting out scripts written by parents, associates, and society.

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.

We are limited but we can push back the borders of our limitations

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.

Effective leadership is the only competitive advantage that will endure. That's because leadership has two sides- what a person is character and what a person does- competence.

You have to water the flowers you want to grow.

I believe that a life of integrity I the most fundamental source of personal worth. I do not agree with the popular success literature that says that self-esteem is primarily a matter of mind set, of attitude-that you can psych yourself into peace of mind. Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.

Private victories precede public victories. You can't invert that process any more than you can harvest a crop before you plant it.

Private victories precede public victories.

People simply feel better about themselves when they’re good at something.

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.

The most effective way I know to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focused on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.

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.

Basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile.

Nothing is more exciting and bonding in relationships than creating together.

Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context.

As you care less about what people think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves.

Don't argue for other people's weaknesses. Don't argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it / immediately.

The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.

The environment you fashion out of your thoughts, your beliefs, your ideals, your philosophy is the only climate you will ever live in. The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.

At some time in your life, you probably had someone believe in you when you didn't believe in yourself.

Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential.

Your power to choose your direction of your life allows you to reinvent yourself, to change your future, and to powerfully influence the rest of creation.

The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings.

People and their managers are working so hard to be sure things are done right, that they have hardly have time to decide if they are doing the right things.

Quality relationships are built on principles, especially the principle of trust.

Only as we keep an open communication with our deep inner life will we have the wisdom to make effective choices.

If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication.

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.

People behave more on the basis of how they feel than how they think; unless there are good feelings between people, it is almost impossible to reason intelligently.

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.

When we listen with the intent to understand others, rather than with the intent to reply, we begin true communication and relationship building. Opportunities to then speak openly and to be understood come much more naturally and easily.

Synergy: The combined effect of individuals in collaboration that exceeds the sum of their individual effects.

Will we act upon life, or will we merely be acted upon?

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.

While we cannot always choose what happens to us, we can choose our responses.

Involve people in the problem and work out the solution together.

Innocent pleasures in moderation can provide relaxation for the body and mind and can foster family and other relationships. But pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment. The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of "fun," constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger "high." A person in this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it provides to the self here and now.

Until we take how we see ourselves (and how we see others) into account, we will be unable to understand how others see and feel about themselves and their world. Unaware, we will project our intentions on their behavior and call ourselves objective.

The 'Inside-Out' approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self, with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves recedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.

I believe that there are parts to human nature that cannot be reached by either legislation or education, but require the power of God to deal with.

Time management is a misnomer, the challenge is to manage ourselves.

Whatever your present situation, I assure you that you are not your habits. You can replace old patterns of self-defeating behavior with new patterns, new habits of the effectiveness, happiness and trust-based relationships.

You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut.

Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.

If we live out of our memory, we're tied to the past and to that which is finite. When we live out of our imagination, we're tied to that which is infinite.

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.

Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things.

The struggle comes when we sense a gap between the clock and the compass - when what we do doesn't contribute to what is most important in our lives.

We exhaust ourselves more from the tension and the consequences of internal disharmony than from hard, unremitting work.

Most people say their main fault is a lack of discipline. On deeper thought, I believe this is not the case. The basic problem is that their priorities have not become deeply planted in their hearts and minds.

Your economic security does not lie in your job; it lies in your own power to produce - to think, to learn, to create, to adapt. That's true financial independence. It's not having wealth; it's having the power to produce wealth.

Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.

We must not let the actions or words of others determine our responses. Magnanimous people make the choice to respond to the indignities of others based upon their own principles and their own value system rather than their moods or anger.

To live; to love; to learn; and to leave a legacy.

The real beginning of influence comes as others sense you are being influenced by them - when they feel understood by you - that you have listened deeply and sincerely, and that you are open.

I think the most significant work we'll do in our whole life, in our whole world is done within the four walls of our home.

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.

Want to improve your relationships? See love as a verb rather than as a feeling?

Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.

Our character is basically a composite of our habits.

To Retain those who are present, be loyal to those who are absent.

Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or as we are conditioned to see it.

When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.

Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.

If you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.

You can't change the fruit without changing the root.

How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.

Management works in the system; leadership works on the system.