Stephen Covey Quotes

The idea of faking empathy to take a step forward to understanding - it's a really powerful idea.

Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.

I taught myself to tune in to another person's wavelength, figure out what they were looking for, and try to project that thing back at them.

Sometimes people just need to feel heard, and being an actor has taught me to really listen.

If we know how to listen to our own heart, we can listen to the hearts of others.

I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.

Changing your attitude from self-centerdness to understanding requires desire and commitment to always try to see things from the other persons point of view.

People just tell me I'm supposed to be sensitive, and I'm not. But I think I'm very emotional. I'm very caring.

In the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to.

If I can listen to what he can tell me, if I can understand how it seems to him; if I can see its personal meaning for him, if I can sense the emotional flavor which it has for him, then I will be releasing potent forces of change in him.

Only in an open, nonjudgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling. Only in an open space where we're not all caught up in our own version of reality can we see and hear and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly.

A man of understanding, a man who understands himself and others, always feels compassion. Even if somebody is an enemy you have compassion toward him because a man of understanding can understand the viewpoint of the other also. He knows why the other feels as he feels, he knows why the other is angry, because he knows his own self, and in knowing that, he has known all others.

The best way to establish rapport with people and to win them over to your side is to be truly interested in them, to listen with the intention of really learning about them. When the person feels that you are really interested in getting to know them and their feelings, they will open up to you and share their true feelings with you much more quickly.

It's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.

Vanity calculates but poorly on the vanity of others; what a virtue we should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs.

I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don't listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all - which is so important, too - to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force...When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.

Empathy grows as we learn.

Real maturity is the ability to imagine the humanity of every person as fully as you believe in your own humanity.

The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.

To listen with empathy is the most important human skill.

A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.

When dealing with people, let us remember that we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity. ...Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

We should be slower to think that the man at his worst is the real man, and certain that the better we are ourselves the less likely is he to be at his worst in our company. Every time he talks away his own character before us he is signifying contempt for ours.

Listening is terribly important if you want to understand anything about people. You listen to what they say and how they say it, what they share and what they are reticent about, what they tell truthfully and what they lie about, what they hope for and what they fear, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of. If you don't pay attention to other people, how can you understand their choices through time and how their stories come out?