Quotes About Values

An agreement means very little in letter without the character and relationship base to sustain it in spirit.

We're into managing with efficiency, setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.

Stephen R. Covey

I realized that Sandra and I had been getting social mileage out of our children's good behavior, and, in our eyes, this son simply didn't measure up.

Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.

Integrity includes but goes beyond honesty.

Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you'll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, "What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.

But shortly after World War I the basic view of success shifted from the Character Ethic to what we might call the Personality Ethic.

To begin with the end in mind means to approach my role as a parent, as well as my other roles in life, with my values and directions clear. It means to be responsible for my own first creation, to rescript myself so that the

paradigms from which my behavior and attitude flow are congruent with my deepest values and in harmony with correct principles. It also means to begin each day with those values firmly in mind. Then as the vicissitudes, as the challenges come, I can make my decisions based on those values. I can act with integrity. I don't have to react to the emotion, the circumstance. I can be truly proactive, value driven, because my values are clear.

Our image of ourselves, and our role as good, caring parents, was even deeper than our image of our son and perhaps influenced

There are organizations that talk a lot about the customer and then completely neglect the people that deal with the customer—the employees. The PC principle is to always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.

We knew that social comparison motives were out of harmony with our deeper values and could lead to conditional love and eventually to our son's lessened sense of self-worth. So

Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values.

There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living.

You can buy a person's hand, but you can not buy his heart.

The principles you live by create the world you live in.

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.

I'm convinced that too often parents are also trapped in the management paradigm, thinking of control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling. And leadership is even more lacking in our personal lives. We're into managing with efficiency, setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.

Each of us has many, many maps in our head, which can be divided into two main categories: maps of the way things are, or realities, and maps of the way things should be, or values. We interpret everything we experience through these mental maps. We seldom question their accuracy; we're usually even unaware that we have them. We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be.

When we value correct principles, we have truth—a knowledge of things as they are.

The place to begin building any relationship is inside ourselves, inside our circle of influence, our own character.2 As we become independent—proactive, centered in correct principles, value-driven, and able to organize and execute around the priorities in our life with integrity—we can choose to become interdependent: capable of building rich, enduring, productive relationships with other people.

You can't become principle-centered without first being aware of your paradigms and understanding how to shift them and align them with principles.

But one of the executives was proactive. He was driven by values, not feelings.