Stephen Covey

The key is taking responsibility and initiative, deciding what your life is about and prioritizing your life around the most important things.

A cardinal principle of Total Quality escapes too many managers: you cannot continuously improve interdependent systems and processes until you progressively perfect interdependent, interpersonal relationships.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it's like giving them emotional oxygen.

Every human has four endowments - self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.

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.

One of the best ways to educate our hearts is to look at our interaction with other people, because our relationships with others are fundamentally a reflection of our relationship with ourselves.

Human beings are not things needing to be motivated and controlled; they are four dimensional - body, mind, heart, and spirit.

The environment you fashion out of your thoughts, your beliefs, your ideals, your philosophy is the only climate you will ever live in. The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.

The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.

The exercise of true leadership is inversely proportional to the exercise of power.

By behaving in ways that build trust with one, you build trust with many.

Humility is the mother of all virtues, courage the father, integrity the child and wisdom the grandchild.

Moving along the upward spiral requires us to learn, commit, and do on increasingly higher planes. We deceive ourselves if we think that any one of these is sufficient. To keep progressing, we must learn, commit, and do-learn, commit, and do-and learn, commit, and do again.

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.

To ignore the unexpected (even if it were possible) would be to live without opportunity, spontaneity, and the rich moments of which "life" is made.

Almost all of the world-class athletes and other peak performers are visualizers. They see it; they feel it; they experience it before hey actually do it. They begin with the end in mind.

Interdependency follows independence.

To be successful we must live from our imaginations, not from our memories.

Only after we can learn to forgive ourselves can we accept others as they are because we don't feel threatened by anything about them which is better than us.

Find your voice, and inspire others to find theirs. Don't ignore that longing to make a difference.

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