Stephen Covey Change Quotations

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.

A mission statement is not something you write overnight... But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.

Synergy is better than my way or your way. It's our way.

Synergy is what happens when one plus one equals ten or a hundred or even a thousand! It's the profound result when two or more respectful human beings determine to go beyond their preconceived ideas to meet a great challenge.

There are three constants in life... change, choice and principles.

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.

You can retire from a job, but don't ever retire from making extremely meaningful contributions in life.

If you want small changes in your life, work on your attitude. But if you want big and primary changes, work on your paradigm.

Moral authority comes from following universal and timeless principles like honesty, integrity, treating people with respect.

Stop setting goals. Goals are pure fantasy unless you have a specific plan to achieve them.

The deepest desire of the human spirit is to be acknowledged.

We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.

If we do not teach our children, societ will. And they-and we-will live with the results.

The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.

To achieve goals you've never achieved before, you need to start doing things you've never done before.

I am personally convinced that one person can be a change catalyst, a 'transformer' in any situation, any organization. Such an individual is yeast that can leaven an entire loaf. It requires vision, initiative, patience, respect, persistence, courage, and faith to be a transforming leader.

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.

We immediately become more effective when we decide to change ourselves rather than asking things to change for us.

The key is taking responsibility and initiative, deciding what your life is about and prioritizing your life around the most important things.

Each of us guard a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside.

We can never really change someone; people must change themselves.

Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition - such as lifting weights - we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.

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.

"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."

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

Courage isn't absenct of fear, it is the awareness that something else is important

To change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.

My behavior is a product of my own conscious choices based on principles, rather than a product of my conditions, based on feelings.

Inevitably, anytime we are too vulnerable we feel the need to protect ourselves from further wounds. So we resort to sarcasm, cutting humor, criticism - anything that will keep from exposing the tenderness within. Each partner tends to wait on the initiative of the other for love, only to be disappointed but also confirmed as to the rightness of the accusations made.