20 Favorite Quotes from Stephen R. Covey (1932-2012)

Stephen R. Covey

The man is gone, but we still have his wisdom.

Back in 1989, I guess I was one of the first of the millions of people who bought and read Stephen Covey's classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. As I began reading, my first thought was: Only seven?

But I discovered that he was really writing about the full range of personal strengths. He wrote to help people grow stronger as human beings. And he did it so well that even managers and employers purchased the book for their employees, and the book became an all-time best-seller. Probably it will never, ever be out of print.

The most thorough student of personal development who ever lived, what he wrote always rang true, because it was true. And he shared his wisdom in a way that made it stick in the mind, so today as I browse through my collection of favorite Stephen Covey quotes, I see that I have over 40. Here are my top favorites. 

Covey on self-development...

“Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.”

“If I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control - myself.

“To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.”

"We are limited but we can push back the borders of our limitations."

If you've read any of his books, you know that what he was trying to do was to help people get their act together - so they'd be able to work on the important things first and get them done. But in doing that, he had a lot to say about character, values and the principled life, because you have to be strong as a person to do the hard things involved in achievement.

Covey on character...  

"Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character."

“Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition - such as lifting weights - we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.”

Covey on accountability...

"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."

"Accountability breeds response-ability."

“We are free to choose our actions, but we are not free to choose the consequences of these actions.

“You can't talk your way out of a problem you behaved your way into!”

“My behavior is a product of my own conscious choices based on principles, rather than a product of my conditions, based on feelings.

More favorites...

COMPASSION - “How you treat the one reveals how you regard the many, because everyone is ultimately a one.”

CREATIVITY - "Live out of your imagination, not your history."

DECISIVENESS - "We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice."

FOCUS - “Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.”

OPEN-MINDEDNESS - "Seek first to understand and then to be understood."

PASSION - “Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.”

PROACTIVITY - “Start with the end in mind.”

SELF-DISCIPLINE - "It's easy to say 'no!' when there's a deeper 'yes!' burning inside."

TRUST - “Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships.

VISION - “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

Do any of these sound familiar to you? Do they ring true? Pass them along to the people you care about...

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength .

Conscious Personal Strength - Self-Awareness and Proaction

I recently posted about an incident that happened to me at the San Antonio airport after Kathleen and I returned from Nashville. My thoughts have returned to this incident several times since. I've learned that when that happens, something's going on in my brain and I should check it out.

In summary, here's what happened. I was confronted with a bit of everyday adversity. But before I reacted, I focused on my feelings, my thoughts and my behavior. I asked myself which personal strength behavior patterns I should engage to be effective in that situation. 

Yes, I really am a walk-my-talk kind of guy; and yes, I talk and write a LOT about personal strength. But you wanna know something? I've never done this before. I've never consciously and proactively created an intention to exercise specific personal strengths and then followed through. Typically, I just try to do the right thing, keying off ingrained personal strength behavior patterns.

I guess my brain keeps coming back to this incident because the results were positive. I've concluded that this kind of self-awareness and conscious action are an intelligent way to behave in challenging situations.

I'm aware, though, that this isn't the way most people behave. Most people aren't self-aware and self-analyzing while they go about their business. They just do what they feel they have to do without a whole lot of analysis. Which really is the way to go when your goal is enjoyment. But maybe there's a lot to be said for consciously managing your thoughts and behavior in difficult situations - to increase your chances of doing the right thing.

So today when I should have been taking a nap, here's what I was thinking. One of the things that makes human beings unique from other animals is our prefrontal cortex, which comprises
25% of the thinking part of our brain. It's the part of the brain that two and two together to determine "what things mean" - how things relate, why, cause-and-effect, reasoning, and planning. Other mammals have limited prefrontal cortex, though it's not organized by language or logic. Cats have about 3% prefrontal cortex. Chimpanzees have nearly 10%. The vast human potential for this kind of thinking separates us from all other creatures, which rely largely on instinct to take action.

Stephen Covey focuses on this uniqueness in a remarkable video clip. He suggests that instead of being driven by stimulus-response, humans are capable of stimulus-analysis-response - a HUGE difference. In short, we can think before we act, which is what I was doing at the airport. 

Actually, I was doing something more than that. I was thinking about how I should think. I was managing how I should analyze my situation. I started by being self-aware. What am I feeling right now? What am I thinking? What's important? What should I do? Not just how to solve my problem. But how should I behave while solving my problem?

It occurred to me that while we have a word for the stimulus-response way of acting - "reaction" - we don't have a word that represents the stimulus-analysis-response way of acting. Well, I think it's an important enough aspect of life to warrant its own word. So to do my part to promote and nurture this part of our human potential, I hereby coin a new, much-needed word - "proaction" (pronounced pro-action). It means consciously intended, planned action. Stimulus-analysis-response. It's related to another word: "proactivity," which I've been using for years, meaning the tendency to plan ahead  before taking action.

Now that I have this cool new word, I can more easily talk about what I'm trying to do on this blog. I'm trying to encourage people to exercise proaction, to think about the concepts of personal strength as they go about their daily life. Consciously intended action will help them repeatedly exercise the right personal strength behavior pattern until it becomes an ingrained habit.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2010. Building Personal Strength . (Photo by Thomas Lersch, granted permission to use under GNU Free Documentation License from Wikimedia Commons.)

Stephen Covey - Success Is a Matter of Choice

According to Stephen Covey, genetics (nature) and environment (nurture) aren't the only two determinants of a person's behavior. Unlike other animals, in the human brain there's something special going on between the "stimulus" and the "response" that has nothing to do with nature or nurture. That something is choice - the uniquely human ability to analyze options, decide what to do, and follow through with action.

But is that "something special" a small something or a large something? In this three-minute video, you'll hear a fascinating analysis by one of the great personal development teachers of all time.



Have you enlarged your ability to make choices in that space between stimulus and response?

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., , Copyright 2010. Building Personal Strength .