Stephen Covey - People Quotes

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Intrinsic security doesn't come from what other people think of us or how they treat us. It doesn't come from our circumstance or out position. It comes from within. It comes from accurate paradigms and correct principles deep in our own mind and heart. It comes from inside-out congruence, from living a life of integrity in which our daily habits reflect our deepest values.

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

Stephen Covey
Despite all our gains in technology, product innovation and world markets, most people are not thriving in the organizations they work for.

Stephen Covey
Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves.

Stephen Covey
You can't be successful with other people if you haven't paid the price of success with yourself.

Stephen Covey
If you can hire people whose passion intersects with the job, they won't require any supervision at all. They will manage themselves better than anyone could ever manage them. Their fire comes from within, not from without. Their motivation is internal, not external.

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
Trust is a function of two things: character and competence. Character includes your integrity, your motive and your intent with people. Competence includes your capabilities, your skills, and your track record. Both are vital.

Stephen Covey
Involve people in the problem and work out the solution together.

Stephen Covey
People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them.

Stephen Covey
We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.

Stephen Covey
People have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well.

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
Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential. They experience synergy only in small, peripheral ways in their lives. But creative experiences can be produced regularly, consistently, almost daily in people's lives. It requires enormous personal security and openness and a spirit of adventure.

Stephen Covey
Let natural consequences teach responsible behavior. One of the kindest things we can do is to let the natural or logical consequences of people's actions teach them responsible behavior. They may not like it or us, but popularity is a fickle standard by which to measure character development. Insisting on justice demands more true love, not less. We care enough for their growth and security to suffer their displeasure.

Stephen Covey
Our lives are the results of our choices. To blame and accuse other people, the environment, or other extrinsic factors is to choose to empower those things to control us.

Stephen Covey
Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.

Stephen Covey
Everyone has values; even criminal gangs have values. Values govern people's behavior but principles govern the consequences of those behaviors.

Stephen Covey
People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally 'being lived.' They are acting out scripts written by parents, associates, and society.

Stephen Covey
Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.

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
Churchgoing is not synonymous with personal spirituality. There are some people who get so busy in church worship and projects that they become insensitive to the pressing human needs that sourround them, contradicting the very precepts they profess to believe deeply.

Stephen Covey
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.

Stephen Covey
It is one thing to make a mistake, and quite another thing not to admit it. People will forgive mistakes, because mistakes are usually of the mind, mistakes of judgment. But people will not easily forgive the mistakes of the heart, the ill intention, the bad motives, the prideful justifying cover-up of the first mistake.

Stephen Covey
Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people. But it takes time and patience.

Stephen Covey
I believe that correct principles are natural laws, and that God, the Creator and Father of us all, is the source of them, and also the source of our conscience. I believe that to the degree people live by this inspired conscience, they will grow to fulfill their natures; to the degree that they do not, they will not rise above the animal plane.

Stephen Covey
People behave more on the basis of how they feel than how they think; unless there are good feelings between people, it is almost impossible to reason intelligently.

Stephen Covey
Because of the space between stimulus and response, people have the power of choice; therefore, leaders are neither born nor made — meaning environmentally trained and nurtured. They are self-made through chosen responses, and if they choose based on principles and develop increasingly greater discipline, their freedom to choose increases.

Stephen Covey
Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we are in control of it or not, there is a first creation to every part of our lives. We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people's agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits.

Stephen Covey