Top 100 Stephen R Covey Quotes
#1. The more closely our maps or paradigms are aligned with these principles or natural laws, the more accurate and functional they will be
Stephen R. Covey
#2. Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships.
Stephen R. Covey
#3. Sincere apologies make deposits; repeated apologies interpreted as insincere make withdrawals. And the quality of the relationship reflects it.
Stephen R. Covey
#4. 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.
Stephen R. Covey
#5. It's incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it's leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy - very busy - without being very effective.
Stephen R. Covey
#6. It simply makes no difference how good the rhetoric is or even how good the intentions are; if there is little or no trust, there is no foundation for permanent success.
Stephen R. Covey
#8. We are free to choose our actions, based on our knowledge of correct principles, but we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Remember, If you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.
Stephen R. Covey
#11. He (Anwar Sadat) records that he was almost loathe to leave his prison cell because it was there that he realized that real success is success with self. It's not in having things, but in having mastery, having victory over self.
Stephen R. Covey
#12. You can't talk your way out of a problem you behaved your way into!
Stephen R. Covey
#14. Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it every day and soon it cannot be broken.
Stephen R. Covey
#15. Remember that quick fix is a mirage. Building and repairing relationships takes time.
Stephen R. Covey
#16. We not not our feelings. We are not our moods. We not even our thoughts.
Stephen R. Covey
#17. Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.
Stephen R. Covey
#18. You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness.
Stephen R. Covey
#19. The person who doesn't read is no better off than the person who can't read.
Stephen R. Covey
#21. 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.
Stephen R. Covey
#22. If I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control - myself.
Stephen R. Covey
#23. Effective people lead their lives and manage their relationships around principles; ineffective people attempt to manage their time around priorities and their tasks around goals. Think effectiveness with people; efficiency with things.
Stephen R. Covey
#24. 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
Stephen R. Covey
#27. How you treat the one reveals how you
regard the many, because everyone is ultimately a one.
Stephen R. Covey
#30. To try to change outward attitudes and behaviors does very little good in the long run if we fail to examine the basic paradigms from which those attitudes and behaviors flow. This
Stephen R. Covey
#31. Happiness - in part at least - the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice waht we want for what we want eventually
Stephen R. Covey
#32. It's sometimes a painful process. It's a change that has to be motivated by a higher purpose, by the willingness to subordinate what you think you want now for what you want later.
Stephen R. Covey
#33. There is no effectiveness without discipline, and there is no discipline without character.
Stephen R. Covey
#34. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently.
Stephen R. Covey
#35. Unless there are good feelings between people, reasoning intelligently is almost impossible.
Stephen R. Covey
#36. Dependent people need others to get what they want. Independent people can get what they want through their own effort. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success. If I were physically dependent - paralyzed or disabled or limited
Stephen R. Covey
#37. Begin each day with the blueprint of my deepest values FIRMLY in mind then when challenges come, make decisions BASED on those values.
Stephen R. Covey
#38. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.
Stephen R. Covey
#39. The undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites and passions
Stephen R. Covey
#40. To judge someone before understanding that person is a form of human rejection and feeds upon itself. It intensifies personal insecurities, necessitating more judgment (prejudice) and less understanding. The processes continue in this vicious cycle.
Stephen R. Covey
#41. One man asked another on the death of a mutual friend, "How much did he leave?" His friend responded, "He left it all.
Stephen R. Covey
#42. We are free to choose our actions, ... but we are not free to choose the consequences of these actions.
Stephen R. Covey
#45. While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.
Stephen R. Covey
#46. 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.
Stephen R. Covey
#47. If you want to achieve your highest aspirations and overcome your greatest challenges, identify and apply the principle or natural law that governs the results you seek.
Stephen R. Covey
#48. 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.
Stephen R. Covey
#49. 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.
Stephen R. Covey
#50. I've set and met my career goals and I'm having tremendous professional success. But it's cost me my personal and family life. I don't know my wife and children anymore. I'm not even sure I know myself and what's really important to me. I've had to ask myself - is it worth it?
Stephen R. Covey
#52. what is the truth about the inner motivations, character, and ambition of those who hold power?
Stephen R. Covey
#53. understanding. As one successful parent said about raising children, "Treat them all the same by treating them differently." Attending to the Little Things
Stephen R. Covey
#54. Referring, for example, to the principle of fairness, out of which our whole concept of equity and justice is developed. Little children seem to have an innate
Stephen R. Covey
#55. Courage isn't absenct of fear, it is the awareness that something else is important
Stephen R. Covey
#56. It is much more ennobling to the human spirit to let people judge themselves than to judge them. And
Stephen R. Covey
#57. My behavior is a product of my own conscious choices based on principles, rather than a product of my conditions, based on feelings.
Stephen R. Covey
#58. habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.
Stephen R. Covey
#59. For those filled with regret, perhaps the most needful exercise of proactivity is to realize that past mistakes are also out there in the Circle of Concern. We can't recall them, we can't undo them, we can't control the consequences that came as a result.
Stephen R. Covey
#61. Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.
Stephen R. Covey
#62. It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that hurts us far more than what happens to us in the first place.
Stephen R. Covey
#63. Some people say they have 20 years experience, when in reality, they have 1 year's experience repeated 20 times. (Stephen M R Covey to Richie Norton when Norton asked if he was too young to train older executives for Covey.)
Richie Norton
#64. The principles you live by create the world you live in. So when you change the principles you live by, you can change your world. Your mission statement serves to summarize the principles you want to live by.
Stephen R. Covey
#65. If I am emotionally interdependent, I derive a great sense of worth within myself, but I also recognize the need for love, for giving, and for receiving love from others.
Stephen R. Covey
#66. Consequences are governed by principles, and behavior is governed by values, therefore, value principles!
Stephen R. Covey
#67. Churchgoing is not synonymous with personal spirituality. There are some people who get so busy in church worship and projects that they become insensitive to the pressing human needs that sourround them, contradicting the very precepts they profess to believe deeply.
Stephen R. Covey
#68. remember to keep working from the inside out and keep getting back on track when we blow it.
Stephen R. Covey
#69. Many people who give mechanically or refuse to give and share in their marriages and families may never have experienced what it means to possess themselves, their own sense of identity and self-worth.
Stephen R. Covey
#71. We could spend weeks, months, even years laboring with the personality ethic trying to change our attitudes and behaviors and not even begin to approach the phenomenon of change that occurs spontaneously when we see things differently
Stephen R. Covey
#72. Basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile. While we do control our choice of action, we cannot control the consequences of our choices.
Stephen R. Covey
#73. But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise.
Stephen R. Covey
#74. Proactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They work on the things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase.
Stephen R. Covey
#75. Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance,
Stephen R. Covey
#76. The first job of a leader - at work or at home - is to inspire trust. It's to bring out the best in people by entrusting them with meaningful stewardships, and to create an environment in which high-trust interaction inspires creativity and possibility.
Stephen M.R. Covey
#77. Becomes obvious that 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.
Stephen R. Covey
#78. The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don't like to do,
Stephen R. Covey
#79. Animals do not possess this ability. We call it "self-awareness" or the ability to think about your very thought process.
Stephen R. Covey
#80. People are working harder than ever, but because they lack clarity and vision, they aren't getting very far. They, in essence, are pushing a rope ... with all of their might.
Stephen R. Covey
#81. The way we see things is the source of the way we think or the way we act
Stephen R. Covey
#82. Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and
he will become as he can and should be.
Stephen R. Covey
#83. I realized that Sandra and I had been getting social mileage out of our children's good behavior, and, in our eyes, this son simply didn't measure up.
Stephen R. Covey
#84. When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd.
Stephen R. Covey
#85. Interdependence is the paradigm of we - we can do it; we can cooperate; we can combine our talents and abilities and create something greater together.
Stephen R. Covey
#86. What lies behind us is nothing compared to what lies within us and ahead of us.
Stephen R. Covey
#87. All the well-meaning advice in the world won't amount to a hill of beans if we're not even addressing the real problem.
Stephen R. Covey
#88. The reflection of the current social paradigm tells us we are largely determined by conditioning and conditions.
Stephen R. Covey
#89. Show me someone who is humble enough to accept and take responsibility for his or her circumstances and courageous enough to take whatever initiative is necessary to creatively work his or her through or around these challenges, and I'll show you supreme power of choice.
Stephen R. Covey
#90. Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).
Stephen R. Covey
#92. Chasing after the poisonous snake that bites us will only drive the poison through our entire system. It is far better to take measures immediately to get the poison out.
Stephen R. Covey
#93. Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three
Stephen R. Covey
#95. When air is charged with emotions, an attempt to teach is often perceived as a form of judgment and rejection.
Stephen R. Covey
#96. 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.
Stephen R. Covey
#97. Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.
Stephen R. Covey
#98. One of the most inspirational people I have ever known is Viktor Frankl,
Stephen R. Covey
#99. As you care less about what people think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves.
Stephen R. Covey
#100. Attending church does not necessarily mean living the principles taught in those meeting. You can be active in a church but inactive in its gospel.
Stephen R. Covey
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