The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

by Stephen R. Covey

We began to realize that if we wanted to change the situation, we first had to change ourselves. And to change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.

“Search your own heart with all diligence for out of it flow the issues of life.”

It simply makes no difference how good the rhetoric is or even how good the intentions are; if there is little or no trust, there is no foundation for permanent success. Only basic goodness gives life to technique.

As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.”

It becomes obvious that if we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. ARISTOTLE

“No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal.”