Leadership is a choice, not a position.
Stephen Covey
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.
Stephen Covey
The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
Stephen Covey
Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.
Stephen Covey
Listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply.
Stephen Covey
Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.
Stephen Covey
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 Covey
Listen with your eyes for feelings.
Stephen Covey
There are three constants in life… change, choice and principles.
Stephen Covey
When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.
Stephen Covey
When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.
Stephen Covey
Accountability breeds response-ability.
Stephen Covey
Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
Stephen Covey
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.
Stephen Covey
Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.
Stephen Covey
The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it.
Stephen Covey
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.
Stephen Covey
Stop setting goals. Goals are pure fantasy unless you have a specific plan to achieve them.
Stephen Covey
Synergy is better than my way or your way. It’s our way.
Stephen Covey
Instead, I have an abundance mentality: When people are genuinely happy at the successes of others, the pie gets larger.
Stephen Covey
If you want small changes in your life, work on your attitude. But if you want big and primary changes, work on your paradigm.
Stephen Covey
When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.
Stephen Covey
The deepest desire of the human spirit is to be acknowledged.
Stephen Covey
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Stephen Covey
It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.
Stephen Covey
People and organizations don’t grow much without delegation and completed staff work because they are confined to the capacities of the boss and reflect both personal strengths and weaknesses.
Stephen Covey
Remember, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Stephen Covey
The key is taking responsibility and initiative, deciding what your life is about and prioritizing your life around the most important things.
Stephen Covey
Reactive people… are often affected by their physical environment. They find external sources to blame for their behavior.
Stephen Covey
Moral authority comes from following universal and timeless principles like honesty, integrity, treating people with respect.
Stephen Covey
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
Stephen Covey
Life is not accumulation, it is about contribution.
Stephen Covey
When it comes to developing character strength, inner security and unique personal and interpersonal talents and skills in a child, no institution can or ever will compare with, or effectively substitute for, the home’s potential for positive influence.
Stephen Covey
Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.
Stephen Covey
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.
Stephen Covey
If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.
Stephen Covey
You can retire from a job, but don’t ever retire from making extremely meaningful contributions in life.
Stephen Covey
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.
Stephen Covey
We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.
Stephen Covey
We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.
Stephen Covey
We become what we repeatedly do.
Stephen Covey
Your most important work is always ahead of you, never behind you.
Stephen Covey
Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconcious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character.
Stephen Covey
Employers and business leaders need people who can think for themselves – who can take initiative and be the solution to problems.
Stephen Covey
Between stimulus and response, there is a space where we choose our response.
Stephen Covey
In school, many of us procrastinate and then successfully cram for tests. We get the grades and degrees we need to get the jobs we want, even if we fail to get a good general education.
Stephen Covey
Every time you think the problem is ‘out there,’ that very thought is the problem.
Stephen Covey
There’s strong data that, within companies, the No. 1 reason for ethical violations is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations.
Stephen Covey
How can you possibly reconcile the justice of God with the idea that only through Christ can you be saved? Most of the world lives and dies and never even hears of Christ. There has to be some mechanism set up for all those who have ever lived to have an opportunity to hear of Christ.
Stephen Covey
It’s amazing how confused and distracted and misdirected so many people are.
Stephen Covey
What air is to the body, to feel understood is to the heart.
Stephen Covey
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.
Stephen Covey
The true identity theft is not financial. It’s not in cyberspace. It’s spiritual. It’s been taken.
Stephen Covey