strange days

Just making a note of some interesting thoughts i've come across lately, taken from a book that a workmate had sitting on his desk, called 'Daily Reflections for Highly Effective People' by Stephen R. Covey.  I'm not sure why i picked it up, as i expected it to be all corporate go-getter motivational bollocks, but it actually has a lot of quite sound common sense ideas on life in general, which seem to mirror ideas i'm coming across from various other sources.  Here's a few selected quotes that i particularly like:


- 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.


- How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us and, keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.


- If you are an effective manager of yourself, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will.  You are a disciple, a follower, of your own deep values and their source.  And you have the will, the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your moods, your impulses to those values.


- As you live your values, your sense of identity, integrity, control and inner-directedness will infuse you with both exhiliration and peace.  You will define yourself from within, rather than by people's opinions or by comparison to others.  Ironically, you'll find that as you care less about what others think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves and their worlds, including their relationship with you.  You'll no longer build your emotional life on other people's weaknesses.  


- Highly proactive people recognise their "response-ability" - the ability to choose their response.  They do not blame circumstances, conditions or conditioning for their behaviour.  Their behaviour is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feelings.


- Look at the weaknesses of others with compassion, not accusation.  It is not what they're not doing or should be doing that's the issue.  The issue is your own chosen response to the situation and what you should be doing.  If you start to think the problem is "out there", stop yourself.  That thought is the problem.


- Maturity is the balance between courage and consideration.  If a person can express his feelings and convictions with courage balanced with consideration for the feelings and convictions of others, he is mature, particularly if the issue is important to both parties.


- It takes a great deal of character strength to apologise 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 apologise.


- To relate effectively with a wife, a husband, children, friends or working associates, we must learn to listen.  And this requires emotional strength.  Listening requires patience, openness and the desire to understand - highly developed qualities of character.  It's so much easier to operate from a low emotional level and give high-level advice.


- Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They're either speaking or preparing to speak.  They're filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people's lives.  If they have a problem with someone - a son, a daughter, a spouse, and employee - their attitude is: "That person just doesn't understand".


- Seek first to understand, then to be understood.