Stephen Covey
Stephen Covey
Stephen Richards Coveywas an American educator, author, businessman, and keynote speaker. His most popular book was The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His other books include First Things First, Principle-Centered Leadership, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, The 8th Habit, and The Leader In Me — How Schools and Parents Around the World Are Inspiring Greatness, One Child at a Time. He was a professor at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University at the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSelf-Help Author
Date of Birth24 October 1932
CitySalt Lake City, UT
CountryUnited States of America
The spirit of America has nurtured responsibility and community unlike any other country.
We all go through stages. Concerns about appearances, making good impressions, being popular, comparing yourself to others, having unbridled ambition, wanting to make money, striving to be recognized and noticed and trying to establish yourself, all fade as your responsibilities and character grow.
The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.
If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.
As we make and keep commitments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and others, little by little, our honor becomes greater than our moods.
We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.
Role modeling is the most basic responsibility of parents. Parents are handing life's scripts to their children, scripts that in all likelihood will be acted out for the rest of the children's lives.
The key is taking responsibility and initiative, deciding what your life is about and prioritizing your life around the most important things.
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.
Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.
Leadership is a choice, not a position
What air is to the body, to feel understood is to the heart.
A little over 5% of the world's population produces almost 29% of the world's goods and services.
When the external factors over which one has no control in a way start to become negative, it starts to affect our creative juices.