A Quote by Stephen Covey

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.
It is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.
Making promises to myself, in my personal writing practice, has been important to me all my life. In practical application it is so much easier for me to make promises to others, and keep them, than it is to make promises to myself. "Why is that?" and the answer I gave myself is that in making promises to others I create a model of accountability and reinforcement. I duplicate that in my writing and have grown increasingly better at making and keeping promises to myself.
You can't have the fruits without the roots. It's the principle of sequencing: Private Victories proceed Public Victories. Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.
Most of us are pretty good at keeping promises to others and pretty bad at keeping promises to ourselves.
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.
Others may question your credentials, your papers, your degrees. Others may look for all kinds of ways to diminish your worth. But what is inside you no one can take from you or tarnish. This is your worth, who you really are, your degree that can go with you wherever you go, that you bring with you the moment you come into a room, that can't be manipulated or shaken. Without that sense of self, no amount of paper, no pedigree, and no credentials can make you legit. No matter what, you have to feel legit inside first.
Private victories precede public victories. You can't invert that process any more than you can harvest a crop before you plant it.
The most important promises are the ones we make to ourselves. The promises we makes to ourselves are the things that assure us we have the capacity to keep our promises to others.
If either person isn't 100% committed to scale every mountain that comes before you to make your relationship work then you aren't ready to enter into it. That's part of the reason the divorce rate is so high. People are entering into the commitment they're making without having the strength of character, fortitude, and resolve to keep the promises they're making to each other and also to God. God cares VERY MUCH that we keep our marital promises -He enters into the marriage with you whenever you marry so your promises aren't only to each other but also to Him.
Even you, who’ve lived inside your body for 64 years, would apparently be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to think of your ear or one of your eyes or elbow, also familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
By what you decide to put on your body, for example, you're already making a personal judgement. That's an incredible thing that happens...we set our own standards even before we walk out the door. Most of the time, those standards are self insulting. Most of the time we belittle ourselves, because we can't have the things we think we're suppose to have. That's what we've bought into.
The wizard [of Oz] says look inside yourself and find self. God says look inside yourself and find [the Holy Spirit]. The first will get you to Kansas. The latter will get you to heaven. Take your pick.
When you squeeze an orange, you'll always get orange juice to come out. What comes out is what's inside. The same logic applies to you: when someone squeezes you, puts pressure on you, or says something unflattering or critical, and out of you comes anger, hatred, bitterness, tension, depression, or anxiety, that is what's inside. If love and joy are what you want to give and receive, change your life by changing what's inside
Perhaps the greatest mistake we can make, which causes loss of self-respect, is making the opinions of others more important than our own opinion of ourselves. You'll find no shortage of opinions directed at you. If you allow them to undermine your self-respect, you're seeking the respect of others over your own, and you're abdicating yourself.
You could carve out the inside of a brick and hide your money in it for safe keeping. It’s certainly safer than keeping it in the bank!
When you start moving into the internal stuff, you start learning how you don't get your power from your muscles. You open up the energy channels inside your body and you shoot something through them and all of a sudden, you've got many times the power you could get physically, or even if you don't, some other things. To get this power to come from inside you, this chi, this energy from inside you, you have to learn how to completely relax.
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