Stephen Covey Quotes

You can buy a person's hands but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is.

Strategy is important, but trust is the hidden variable. On paper you can have clarity around your objectives, but in a low-trust environment, your strategy won't be executed.

They [Nazi captors]had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he [Viktor Frankl] had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options.

If we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to keep getting what we're getting.

The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are.

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

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

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.

Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic

Humility is the mother of all virtues, courage the father, integrity the child and wisdom the grandchild.

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

People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them.

The process of building trust is an interesting one, but it begins with yourself, with what I call self trust, and with your own credibility, your own trustworthiness. If you think about it, it's hard to establish trust with others if you can't trust yourself.

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.

Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

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.

Accountability breeds response-ability.

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

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.

Love is a verb. Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others. Love - the feeling - is a fruit of love the verb.

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

To set and work toward any goal is an act of courage.

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

Employers and business leaders need people who can think for themselves - who can take initiative and be the solution to problems.

Principles are the simplicity on the far side of complexity.

The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

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.

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

To listen with empathy is the most important human skill.

Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust.

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.

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.

In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Our character is basically a composite of our habits.

As we create synergy among the roles of our lives, there's more of us to put into the time we have.

Every time I see high-trust cultures, I see a lessening of adversarialism.

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

None of us see the world as it is but as we are, as our frames of reference, or maps, define the territory.

'In empathic listening you listen with your ears, but you also, and more importantly, listen with you eyes and with your heart. You listen for feeling, for meaning. You listen for behaviour. You use your right brain as well as your left. You sense, you intuit, you feel.' ... 'You have to open yourself up to be influenced'.

We must seek to understand the intent of communication without prejudging or rejecting the content... Communication, after all, is not so much a matter of intellect as it is of trust and acceptance of others, of their ideas and feelings, acceptance of the fact that they're different, and that from their point of view, they are right.

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

"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 main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

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.

Frustration is a function of our expectations, and our expectations are often a reflection of the social mirror rather than our own values and priorities.

Don't prioritize your schedule, schedule those priorities.

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.