Stephen Covey - Effective Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

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Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships — marriages, families, and organizations of every kind — together.

Stephen Covey
Effective people are not problem-minded; they're opportunity minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems.

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

Stephen Covey
The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings.

Stephen Covey
Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

Stephen Covey
Effective people stay out of Quadrants III and IV because, urgent or not, they aren't important. They also shrink Quadrant I down to size by spending more time in Quadrant II...Quadrant II is the heart of effective personal management.

Stephen Covey
It's incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it's leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy - very busy - without being very effective.

Stephen Covey
The character ethic, which I believe to be the foundation of success, teaches that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.

Stephen Covey
Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.

Stephen Covey
If you are an effective manager of your self, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will. You are a disciple, a follower, of your own deep values and their source. And you have the will, the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your impulses, your moods to those values.

Stephen Covey
If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication.

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
The most effective way I know to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focused on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.

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
By centering our lives on correct principles and creating a balanced focus between doing and increasing our ability to do, we become empowered to the task of creating effective useful and peaceful lives.

Stephen Covey
An effective goal focuses primarily on results rather than activity. It identifies where you want to be, and, in the process, helps you determine where you are. It gives you important information on how to get there, and it tells you when you have arrived. It unifies your efforts and energy. It gives meaning and purpose to all you do.

Stephen Covey