Stephen Covey Quotes

345 Sourced Quotes

The environment you fashion out of your thoughts, your beliefs, your ideals, your philosophy is the only climate you will ever live in. The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.

Stephen Covey
In effective personal leadership, visualization and affirmation techniques emerge naturally out of a foundation of well thought through purposes and principles that become the center of a person's life.

Stephen Covey
I know it is possible not only to restore trust but to actually enhance it. The difficult things that we got through with the important people in our lives can become fertile ground for the growth of enduring trust - trust that is actually stronger because it's been tested and proved through challenge.

Stephen Covey
Only as we keep an open communication with our deep inner life will we have the wisdom to make effective choices.

Stephen Covey
The greatest and most inspiring mountain climbing achievements in history are not so much stories of individual achievement, but are stories of the extraordinary power of a unified, talented, prepared team that stays loyally committed to one another and to their shared vision to the end.

Stephen Covey
'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'.

Stephen Covey
We can never really change someone; people must change themselves.

Stephen Covey
True independence of character empowers us to act rather than be acted upon.

Stephen Covey
Keep in mind that you are always saying "no" to something. If it isn't to the apparent and urgent things in your life, it is probably to the most fundamental, highly important things.

Stephen Covey
Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. No involvement, no commitment.

Stephen Covey
Conscience connects us with the wisdom of the ages and the wisdom of the heart.

Stephen Covey
Contrary to what most people believe, trust is not some soft, illusive quality that you either have or you don't; rather, trust is a pragmatic, tangible, actionable asset that you can create.

Stephen Covey
Look at the word responsibility-"response-ability"-the ability to choose your response. 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.

Stephen Covey
The first job of a leader-at work or at home-is to inspire trust. It's to bring out the best in people by entrusting them with meaningful stewardships, and to create an environment in which high-trust interaction inspires creativity and possibility.

Stephen Covey
I'm convinced that we can write and live our own scripts more than most people will acknowledge. I also know the price that must be paid. It's a real struggle to do it. It requires visualization and affirmation. It involves living a life of integrity, starting with making and keeping promises, until the whole human personality the senses, the thinking, the feeling, and the intuition are ultimately integrated and harmonized.

Stephen Covey
Our problems and pain are universal and increasing, and the solutions to the problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.

Stephen Covey
The problems in life come when we're sowing one thing and expecting to reap something entirely different.

Stephen Covey
It's not enough to have values without vision; you want to be good, but you want to be good for something. On the other hand, vision without values can create a Hitler. An empowering mission statement deals with both character and competence; what you want to be and what you want to do in your life.

Stephen Covey
When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.

Stephen Covey
In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances to shape our lives by default.

Stephen Covey
Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.

Stephen Covey
Vision is seeing a future state with the mind's eye. Vision is applied imagination.

Stephen Covey
When a person has access to both the intuitive, creative and visual right brain, and the analytical, logical, verbal left brain, then the whole brain is working...And this tool is best suited to the reality of what life is, because life is not just logical-it is also emotional.

Stephen Covey
All the well-meaning advice in the world won't amount to a hill of beans if we're not even addressing the real problem.

Stephen Covey
What difference would a clear vision of my principles, values, and ultimate objectives make in the way I spend my time?

Stephen Covey