Quotes from Stephen R. Covey

The reality is that most families are overmanaged and underled.

Someone inquired of a Hindu who had a great serenity and peace about him, no matter what pressures were put upon him, "How do you maintain that serenity and peace?" His answer: "I never leave my place of meditation." Every morning he meditated for thirty minutes. Then in his mind and heart he never left it—he maintained the spirit of that place all during his public life and pressures.

He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail.

Whatever your present situation, I assure you that you are not your habits. You can replace old patterns of self-defeating behavior with new patterns, new habits of effectiveness, happiness, and trust-based relationships.

While we do control our choice of action, we cannot control the consequences of our choices.

Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make. Dependent people cannot choose to become interdependent. They don't have the character to do it; they don't own enough of themselves.

President N. Eldon Tanner has said, "Self-discipline is doing what you know you should do when you don't want to do it.

When we set and achieve goals that are in our Center of Focus, we maximize the use of our time and effort. Interestingly, we find that as we do this over time, our Circle of Influence automatically increases. We find positive ways to influence more people and circumstances.

It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.

life is a mission and not a career

Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality. Independent people who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players. They're not coming from the paradigm of interdependence necessary to succeed in marriage, family, or organizational reality.

the best thinking in the area of time management can be captured in a single phrase: Organize and execute around priorities.

Our character, basically, is a composite of our habits.

Sincere apologies make deposits; repeated apologies interpreted as insincere make withdrawals. And the quality of the relationship reflects it.

How Many People on Their Deathbed Wish They'd Spent More Time at the Office?

If you don't make a conscious effort to visualize who you are and what you want in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape you and your life by default.

Samuel Johnson observed: "The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.

Principles are the simplicity on the far side of complexity.

Unless you're influenced by my uniqueness, I'm not going to be influenced by your advice. So if you want to be really effective in the habit of interpersonal communication, you cannot do it with technique alone. You have to build the skills of empathic listening on a base of character that inspires openness and trust. And you have to build the Emotional Bank Accounts that create a commerce between hearts.

If two people have the same opinion, one is unnecessary. It's not going to do me any good at all to communicate with someone else who sees only the old woman also. I don't want to talk, to communicate, with someone who agrees with me; I want to communicate with you because you see it differently. I value that difference.

Because the struggle continues, I retire frequently to the solitude of my own inner self to recommit to win my battles privately, to get my motives straight.

The real beginning of influence comes as others sense you are being influenced by them—when they feel understood by you—that you have listened deeply and sincerely, and that you are open. But most people are too vulnerable emotionally to listen deeply—to suspend their agenda long enough to focus on understanding before they communicate their own ideas.

We often get into ruts, on treadmills, caught up in patterns and habits that aren't useful. We don't stop to ask, what can I learn from this week that will keep next week from essentially being a repeat of the same?