Quotes from Stephen R. Covey

successful families don't just happen. They take every bit of energy, talent, vision, determination, and rescue efforts a person can muster. They take prioritizing, planning, and sacrificing. They require family members to be willing to say, "I'm sorry," and to do whatever is needed to make adjustments. Yes, in times of storm or calm, families need someone who is prepared to step up, not give up. Someone who is ready to lead.

For another example, suppose in my effort to build a relationship with you, I told you something someone else had shared with me in confidence. "I really shouldn't tell you this," I might say, "but since you're my friend…." Would my betraying another person build my trust account

If ten seconds can have that kind of impact on the way we see things, what about the conditioning of a lifetime?

There are some people who interpret "proactive" to mean pushy, aggressive, or insensitive; but that isn't the case at all. Proactive people aren't pushy. They're smart, they're value driven, they read reality, and they know what's needed. Look

What would you like each of the speakers to say about you and your life?…

Family itself is a "we" experience, a "we" mentality. And admittedly, the movement from "me" to "we"—from independence to interdependence—is perhaps one of the most challenging and difficult aspects of family life.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood

If people have not agreed to a common set of principles that guide them and a common purpose, then they get their security from the outside and they tend to freeze the structure, systems, and processes inside and they cease becoming adaptable. They don't change with the changing realities of the new marketplace out there and gradually they become obsolete.

Your attitude determines your altitude," "Smiling wins more friends than frowning," and "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.

You cannot change the direction of the wind, but you can adjust your sails to always reach your destination." So it is that when disasters occur in our lives and we go within to discover our inner strength or to seek discernment, we have choices to continue in the same direction the storm of life has paved for us, or adjust our sail and get back on track to what we believe and know to be our path in life.

But Win/Win is nice… and tough. It's twice as tough as Win/Lose. To go for Win/Win, you not only have to be nice, you have to be courageous. You not only have to be empathic, you have to be confident. You not only have to be considerate and sensitive, you have to be brave. To do that, to achieve that balance between courage and consideration, is the essence of real maturity and is fundamental to Win/Win.

So you have to weigh that consequence against the other consequence and make a choice. I know if it were me, I'd choose to go on the tennis trip. But never say you have to do anything.

I will be a self-starting individual who exercises initiative in accomplishing my life's goals.

Vision is the best manifestation of creative imagination and the primary motivation of human action. It's the ability to see beyond our present reality, to create, to invent what does not yet exist, to become what we not yet are. It gives us capacity to live out of our imagination instead of our memory.

as soon as the germ theory was developed, a whole new paradigm, a better, improved way of understanding what was happening, made dramatic, significant medical improvement possible.

I began to feel more and more that much of the success literature of the past 50 years was superficial. It was filled with social image consciousness, techniques and quick fixes—with social Band-Aids and aspirin that addressed acute problems and sometimes even appeared to solve them temporarily, but left the underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface time and again.

Most of us learn to base our self-worth on comparisons and competition. We think about succeeding in terms of someone else failing—that is, if I win, you lose; or if you win, I lose. Life is a zero-sum game. There is only so much pie, and if you get a big piece, there is less for me.

But as the story shows, true effectiveness is a function of two things: what is produced (the golden eggs) and the producing asset or capacity to produce (the goose).

The term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his highly influential landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently.

The fact that we know it—and that it doesn't get translated into the fabric of our daily lives—is the frustration of the gap between the compass and the clock. Our

play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut.

Integrity includes but goes beyond honesty. Honesty is telling the truth—in other words, conforming our words to reality. Integrity is conforming reality to our words—in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations. This requires an integrated character, a oneness, primarily with self but also with life.

Out of his private victories, public victories began to come.