Stephen Covey Quotes

Everyone chooses one of two roads in life - the old and the young, the rich and the poor, men and women alike. One is the broad, well-traveled road to mediocrity, the other road to greatness and meaning.

Compliance does not foster innovation, trust does. You can't sustain long-term innovation, for example, in a climate of distrust.

If you don't have confidence in the diagnosis, you won't have confidence in the prescription.

The great apparent dichotomy is that the more we give, the more we get.

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

Building and repairing relationships are long-term investments.

Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust. Nothing is as fulfilling as a relationship of trust. Nothing is as inspiring as an offering of trust. Nothing is as profitable as the economics of trust. Nothing has more influence than a reputation of trust.

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

Whenever you experience stress of any kind, look into yourself and ask, In what way am I compromising my innermost values in this situation?

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

Empathic listening is so powerful because it gives you accurate data to work with. Instead of projecting your own autobiography and assuming thoughts, feelings, motives and interpretation, you're dealing with the reality inside another person's head and heart. You're listening to understand. You're focused on receiving the deep communication of another human soul.

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.

Whether or not we belong to a church or service organization or have a job that provides meaningful service opportunities, not a day goes by that we can't at least serve one other human being by making deposits of unconditional love.

When people have a real sense of legacy, a sense of mattering, a sense of contribution, it seems to tap into the deepest part of their heart and soul. It brings out the best and subordinates the rest.

Effective interdependence can only be built on true independence.

True independence of character empowers us to act rather than be acted upon.

Vision is about more than just getting things done, accomplishing some task, achieving something; it is about discovering and expanding our view of others, affirming them, believing in them, and helping them discover and realize the potential within them-helping them find their own voice.

To me, the essence of keeping the soul nourished is obedience to one's conscience. I don't think that the soul can be nourished unless people have a strong sense of conscience that they have educated and developed and soaked in the universal and timeless principles of integrity and service. This way, the individual's soul becomes part of the universal soul of service, contribution, and making a difference.

It is in the ordinary events of every day that we develop the proactive capacity to handle the extraordinary pressures of life. It's how we make and keep commitments, how we handle a traffic jam, how we respond to an irate customer or a disobedient child. It's how we view our problems and where we focus our energies. It's the language we use.

Leadership without mutual trust is a contradiction in terms.

You can't have the fruits without the roots.

In this knowledge-worker age, it's now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs - so the pressure to do well is really high.

One thing about trust is that everyone's for it.

Too many vacations that last too long, too many movies, too much TV, too much video game playing - too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance gradually wastes a life. It ensures that a person's capacities stay dormant, that talents remain undeveloped, that the mind and spirit become lethargic and that the heart remains unfulfilled.

Life is a mission, not a career.

Petty things become unimportant when people are impassioned about a purpose higher than self.

The greatest thing you can do for your children is love your spouse.

It's better to be humbled by the word than by the force of circumstances.

You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things.

Writing bridges the gap between the subconscious and conscious mind.

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

The key to success is dedication to life-long learning.

Success comes from the ability to view each arising problem as an opportunity for self improvement.

In the long run, you can never accomplish a worthy end with an unworthy means.

Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.

Nevertheless, the only way we can move from where we are now to where we would like to be is to accept where we are now.

We think we see the world as it is, when in fact we see the world as we are.

The best way to develop courage is to set a goal and achieve it, make a promise and keep it.

Response-ability is the ABILITY to choose our response to any circumstance or condition.

When we value correct principles, we have truth - a knowledge of things as they are.

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

Some habits of ineffectiveness are rooted in our social conditioning toward quick-fix, short-term thinking.

Once we are self-aware, we must choose purposes and principles to live by; otherwise the vacuum will be filled, and we will lose our self-awareness and become like groveling animals who live primarily for survival and propagation. People who exist on that level aren't living; they are being lived. They are reacting, unaware of the unique endowments that lie dormant and undeveloped within.

Instead, I have an abundance mentality: When people are genuinely happy at the successes of others, the pie gets larger.

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

More essential than working on attitudes and behaviors is examining the paradigms out of which those attitudes and behaviors flow.

He who has a why can deal with any what or how.

We could not have gotten where we are without coming the way we came.

One of the best ways to educate our hearts is to look at our interaction with other people, because our relationships with others are fundamentally a reflection of our relationship with ourselves.

We're constantly making choices about the way we spend our time. The issue is not between the good and the bad, but between the good and the best. So often, the enemy of the best is the good.

It's amazing how confused and distracted and misdirected so many people are.

Peace of counscious is greater than peace of mind. Peace of mind is more externally oriented. Peace of consciousness is when you know you have been honest in all your business dealings.

The great contributors in life are those who, though afraid of the knock at the door, still answer it.

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.

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.

Vital to quality of life is the ability to work together, learn from each other, and help each other grow.

If you focus on principles, you empower everyone who understands those principles to act without constant monitoring, evaluating, correcting, or controlling.

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.

Trust is a function of both character and competence. Of course you can't trust someone who lacks integrity, but if someone is honest but they can't perform, you're not going to trust them either. You won't trust them to get the job done.

If you carefully consider what you want to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success.

Leaders are not born or made - they are self made

Affirm people. Affirm your children. Believe in them, not in what you see but in what you don't see - their potential.

Everyone must be proactive and do all they can to help themselves to stay employed.

'Efficient' scheduling and control of time are often counterproductive. The efficiency focus creates expectations that clash with the opportunities to develop rich relationships, to meet human needs, and to enjoy spontaneous moments on a daily basis.

When I started teaching I realized that I had never had such a level of satisfaction and such a feeling of fulfillment and sense of contribution. Just like that. But, usually it's more cumulative, slow, evolutionary and less revolutionary.

If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.

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

Common sense is not always common practice.

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.

Win-win is a belief in the Third Alternative. It's not your way or my way; it's a better way, a higher way.

Every person in the organization must change inside their hearts and minds, so that they themselves become principle centred.

Seek to understand rather than be understood.

If there's one thing that's certain in business, it's uncertainty.

It doesn't really matter how fast you're going if you're heading in the wrong direction.

Life is not accumulation, it is about contribution.

Very few people have ever experienced the feeling of being completely understood. When they experience it, it can become one of the richest feelings they have ever had.

The essence of synergy is to value differences-to respect them, to build on strengths, to compensate for weaknesses

The role of the leader is to foster mutual respect and build a complementary team where each strength is made productive and each weakness irrelevant.

An empowered organisation is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organisational success.

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.

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

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

Listen to your conscience regarding something that you simply know you should do, then start small on it - make a promise and keep it. Then move forward and make a little larger promise and keep it. Eventually you'll discover that your sense of honor will become greater than your moods, and that will give you a level of confidence and excitement that you can move to other areas where you feel you need to make improvements or give service.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

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

Give no answer to contentious arguments or irresponsible accusations. Let such things "fly out open windows" until they spend themselves.

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.

It takes courage to realize that you are greater than your moods, greater than your thoughts, and that you can control your moods and thoughts.

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.

In addition to self-awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment - independent will - that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.

The power of transcendent vision is greater than the power of the scripting deep inside the human personality and it subordinates it [the scripting], submerges it, until the whole personality is reorganized in the accomplishment of that vision.

I am fortunate to have a very helpful team that enables me to spend time doing things that are important but not necessarily urgent. People who have no such team need to also make these larger decisions so that they can cheerfully say No to that which is urgent but not important.

The amateur salesman sells products; the professional sells solutions to needs and problems.

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

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 proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it.

True leadership is moral authority, not formal authority. Leadership is a choice, not a position. The choice is to follow universal timeless principles, which will build trust and respect from the entire organization. Those with formal authority alone will lose this trust and respect.

Every exaggeration of the truth once detected by others destroys our credibility and makes all that we do and say suspect.

Often we are so busy with sawing that we forget to sharpen the saw.

Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.