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 Watch this Video of Covey on Priorities Covey’s Advice on How to Get There. Habit #1 "Be Proactive"
In an exclusive interview with Success Television, Stephen Covey gives advice on leadership and living an enriched life. Stephen Covey says the way to have more choices and expand your ability to react the way you want is to take the little steps, especially risky steps that make you grow.
Have a big vision for yourself, like being a happy, healthy, fit person or succeeding in your career, but first, take the little steps of self-control along the way i.e., don’t eat that brownie if you want to lose weight, exercise when you’d rather plop down in front of the tube, think through a problem and move toward solution before you go to your boss with a complaint.
Covey says, “I also think that if you just simply get physical control over your appetites and your passions, you’ll find yourself able little by little to enlarge the space and to have more control …..of your choices under tough situations.” In other words, the more you’re already working on yourself and inserting discipline, taking risks and growing, a setback or a problem won’t freak you out. You’ll have expanded yourself to handle them.
Think of this like a personal insurance policy.
Covey says, “However small or large the space is, it can get larger if you will take responsibility and initiative and focus on it and use it little by little. It gets larger and larger until eventually your response changes the very stimulus of your life. That’s why I say that leaders are not born or made, they are self-made.”
“I think if you work on that which you can have influence with, well, that it will gradually enlarge your circle, simply because people see good things coming out of your circle of influence. They see that you’re not a complainer, a moaner, someone that is living with what I call the “metastasizing cancers” of criticizing, complaining, comparing, competing, about someone who takes responsibility and magnifies their own present circle of influence.”
And, on the issue of leadership, Covey gives the ultimate motivational advice: “I think our relationship with each other should be based on so much reverence, because you see people differently and that’s kind of my definition of leadership. That it is communicating people’s true worth and potential so clearly they come to see it in themselves; they’re inspired to see it in themselves.
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