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Action(s)
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While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.
-Stephen Covey
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Chance
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If you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.
-Stephen Covey
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Change
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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.
-Stephen Covey
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Character
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Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconcious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character
-Stephen Covey
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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.
-Stephen Covey
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Control
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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. We are limited but we can push back the borders of our limitations.
-Stephen Covey
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Decisions
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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.
-Stephen Covey
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You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, 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".
-Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
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Discipline
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Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.
-Stephen Covey
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Ethics
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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
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Feelings
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Lose/Win people bury a lot of feelings. And unexpressed feelings come forth later in uglier ways. Psychosomatic illnesses often are the reincarnation of cumulative resentment, deep disappointment and disillusionment repressed by the Lose/Win mentality. Disproportionate rage or anger, overreaction to minor provocation, and cynicism are other embodiments of suppressed emotion. People who are constantly repressing, not transcending feelings toward a higher meaning find that it affects the quality of their relationships with others.
-Stephen Covey
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Freedom
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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
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Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.
-Stephen Covey
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Imagination
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Live out of your imagination, not your history.
-Stephen Covey
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Love
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Love - THE FEELING - is a fruit of love, the verb.
-Stephen Covey
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Management
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Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
-Stephen Covey
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The ability to manage well doesn't make much difference if you're not even in the right jungle.
-Stephen Covey
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Mistakes
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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.
-Stephen Covey
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Potential
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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
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Power
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Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.
-Stephen Covey
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Principles
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You can't live principals you can't understand.
-Stephen Covey
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Problems
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It is in the ordinary events of every day that we develop the proactive capacity to handle the extraordinary pressures of life. It's how we make and keep commitments, how we handle a traffic jam, how we respond to an irate customer or a disobedient child. It's how we view our problems and where we focus our energies. It's the language we use.
-Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, 1989
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Prophecy
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It's easy to say no! when there's a deeper yes! burning inside.
-Stephen Covey
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Relationships
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The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won't be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.
-Stephen Covey
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The Inside-Out approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness means to start first with 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 recedes 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.
-Stephen Covey
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Books by and about Stephen Covey