Quotes from Stephen Covey

It also requires independent will, the power to do something when you don't want to do it, to be a function of your values rather than a function of the impulse or desire of any given moment.

I am not suggesting that elements of the Personality Ethic—personality growth, communication skill training, and education in the field of influence strategies and positive thinking—are not beneficial, in fact sometimes essential for success. I believe they are. But these are secondary, not primary traits.

Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us. OBJECTIVE INTROSPECTION Until we see ourselves from the outside objectively, we will automatically project our motives onto other people.

if you organize your family life to spend even ten or fifteen minutes a morning reading something that connects you with these timeless principles, it's almost guaranteed that you will make better choices during the day—in the family, on the job, in every dimension of life.

We have such a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But we often fail to take the time to diagnose, to really, deeply understand the problem first.

In stark contrast, almost all the literature in the first 150 years or so focused on what could be called the Character Ethic as the foundation of success—things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is representative of that literature. It is, basically, the story of one man's effort to integrate certain principles and habits deep within his nature.

Most people see effectiveness from the golden egg paradigm: the more you produce, the more you do, the more effective you are.

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.

Leadership is communicating others' worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.

The gravity pull of some of our habits may currently be keeping us from going where we want to go.

conditioning of a lifetime? The influences in our lives—family, school, church, work environment, friends, associates, and current social paradigms such as the Personality Ethic—all have made their silent unconscious impact on us and help shape our frame of reference, our paradigms, our maps.

In the words of William George Jordan, "Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be."