Stephen Covey - Personal Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfillment. The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase 'to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.' The need to leave a legacy is our spiritual need to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence, and contribution.

Stephen Covey
The ability to establish, grow, extend, and restore trust is the key professional and personal competency of our time.

Stephen Covey
Keeping a personal journal a daily in-depth analysis and evaluation of your experiences is a high-leverage activity that increases self-awareness and enhances all the endowments and the synergy among them.

Stephen Covey
Creating and integrating an empowering personal mission statement is one of the most important investments we can make.

Stephen Covey
Management is clearly different from leadership. Leadership is primarily a high-powered, right-brain activity. It's more of an art it's based on a philosophy. You have to ask the ultimate questions of life when you're dealing with personal leadership issues.

Stephen Covey
The roots of the problems we face in the world, in our national life, and in our family and personal lives are spiritual.

Stephen Covey
Self-awareness involves deep personal honesty. It comes from asking and answering hard questions.

Stephen Covey
People and organizations don't grow much without delegation and completed staff work because they are confined to the capacities of the boss and reflect both personal strengths and weaknesses

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
You will never be able to truly step inside another person, to see the world as he sees it, until you develop the pure desire, the strength of personal character, and the positive Emotional Bank Account, as well as the empathetic listening skills to do it.

Stephen Covey
When it comes to developing character strength, inner security and unique personal and interpersonal talents and skills in a child, no institution can or ever will compare with, or effectively substitute for, the home's potential for positive influence.

Stephen Covey
The personal power that comes from principle-centered living is the power of a self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual, unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors, and actions of others or by many of the circumstances and environmental influences that limit other people.

Stephen Covey
Values are social norms — they're personal, emotional, subjective, and arguable. All of us have values. Even criminals have values. The question you must ask yourself is, Are your values based upon principles? In the last analysis, principles are natural laws — they're impersonal, factual, objective and self-evident. Consequences are governed by principles and behavior is governed by values; therefore, value principles!

Stephen Covey
A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it's personal, it's positive, it's present tense, it's visual, and it's emotional.

Stephen Covey
The more authentic you become, the more genuine in your expression, particularly regarding personal experiences and even self-doubts, the more people can relate to your expression and the safer it makes them feel to express themselves. That expression, in turn, feeds on the other person's spirit, and genuine creative empathy takes place, producing new insights and learnings and a sense of excitement and adventure that keeps the process going.

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
Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it.

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
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
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
Principles always have natural consequences attached to them. There are positive consequences when we live in harmony with the principles. There are negative consequences when we ignore them. But because these principles apply to everyone, whether or not they are aware, this limitation is universal. And the more we know of correct principles, the greater is our personal freedom to act wisely.

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
What one thing could you do in your personal and professional life that, if you did on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your life? Quadrant II activities have that kind of impact. Our effectiveness takes quantum leaps when we do them.

Stephen Covey