Stephen Covey
Personal leadership is not a singular experience. It is, rather, the ongoing process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with those most important things.
Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character
Look at the weaknesses of others with compassion, not accusation. It's not what they're not doing or should be doing that's the issue. The issue is your own chosen response to the situation and what you should be doing. If you start to think the problem is "out there", stop yourself. That thought is the problem.
I can change. I can live out my imagination instead of my memory. I can tie myself to my limitless potential instead of my limiting past.
Synergy is everywhere in nature. If you plant two plants close together, the roots commingle and improve the quality of soil so that both plants will grow better than if they were separated. If you put two pieces of wood together, they will hold much more weight than the total of the weight held by each separately. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One plus one equals three or more.
In addition to self-awareness, imagination, and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment -- independent will -- that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.
Don't argue for other people's weaknesses. Don't argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it -- immediately.
As you live your values, your sense of identity, integrity, control, and inner-directedness will infuse you with both exhilaration and peace. You will define yourself from within, rather than by people's opinions or by comparisons to others.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
The way we see the problem is the problem.
How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.
Basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile.
Love - the feeling - is a fruit of love, the verb.
Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.
Rather than focusing on things and time, focus on preserving and enhancing relationships and on accomplishing results.
Many people seem to think that success in one area can compensate for failure in other areas. But can it really ? True effectiveness requires balance.
Until we take how we see ourselves (and how we see others) into account, we will be unable to understand how others see and feel about themselves and their world. Unaware, we will project our intentions on their behavior and call ourselves objective.
If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.
The "Inside-Out" approach to personal and self , even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self - with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.
Nothing is more validating and affirming than feeling understood. And the moment a person begins feeling understood, that person becomes far more open to influence and change.
Private victories precede public victories. You can't invert that process any more than you can harvest a crop before you plant it.
People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.
Effective people are not problem-minded , they're opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems.
We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.
Almost all of the world-class athletes and other peak performers are visualizers. They see it , they feel it, they experience it before they actually do it. They began with the end in mind. You can do it in every area of your life. Before performance, a sales presentation, a difficult confrontation, or the daily challenge of meeting a goal, see it clearly, vividly, relentlessly, over and over again. Create an internal "comfort zone''. Then, when you get into the situation, it isn't foreign. It doesn't scare you.
Until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday'', that person can not say, "I choose otherwise''.
Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.
You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage -- pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically -- to say 'no' to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger 'yes' burning inside. The enemy of the 'best' is often the 'good. '
No involvement, no commitment.
Between stimulus and response, one has the freedom to choose.
Be loyal to people in their absence. Then watch how others begin having more faith and confidence in you, because they know you won't be talking about them behind their backs.
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.
Basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile.
As a principle-centered person you try to stand apart from the emotion of the situation and from other factors that would act on you, and evaluate the options. Looking at the balanced whole -- the work needs, the family needs, the other needs that may be involved, and the possible implications of the various alternatives -- you'll try to come up with the best solution taking all factors into consideration.
Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually.
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
All things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation of all things. You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you've thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. Each day you go to the construction shed and pull out the blueprint to get marching orders for the day. You begin with the end in mind.
Keep in mind that you are always saying "no" to something. If it isn't to the apparent, urgent things in your life, it is probably to the most fundamental, highly important things. Even when the urgent is good, the good can keep you from your best, keep you from your unique contribution, if you let it.
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.
Dependent people need others to get what they want. Independent people can get what they want through their own efforts. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.
It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one's heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.
Whenever your present situation, I assure you that you are not your habits. You can replace old patterns of self-defeating behavior with new patterns, new habits of the effectiveness, happiness, and trust-based relationships.
We are limited but we can push back the borders of our limitations.
Begin with the end in mind.
Seek first to understand, then be understood
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.