I remember a long time ago a manager talking to his people. It was in the context of underperformance and morale issues; people were moaning, demotivated, complaining, ... you can imagine the drill.

He observed that most people looked for reasons outside themselves to justify their behavior. As if the environment justified them not giving it all, not being productive, not moving ahead! I don't want to push the logic but so doing a thief could also justify his behavior - bad childhood, not been treated fairly, others had more chances, etc etc ... It boils down to ethics.

The manager recommended his people to look in the mirror before going to sleep and ask themselves whether they were proud of what they had achieved during the day. Ask themselves what their family or children would say. I think it is a nice "acid test", an interesting thought. I am sure - if people still have a conscience - this little daily introspection will increase people's self-awareness and improve their behavior.

Cheers! I am going to look in the mirror,

Chris

“Wind of change” is one of my favourite songs, very inspiring.
Driving to my work, listening to its words, I start dreaming…
Change is in the air, I can feel it now. Do you feel it?
Look into the mirror, do you see it?
Blowing with the wind of change, take me to the magic,
Mieke

Self-reflection capacity is an essential characteristic of human beings: we are the only animals able to think about themselves. So essential... so rare... This is probably why it is so difficult to be a perfect mirror, so difficult to detect when we are distorting mirrors, changing the image so that it looks nice enough for us to accept it.

In that way, asking ourself wether we are proud of what we did is an exercise at "advanced" level, because it deals with what we _are_: it asks us to perform a judgement about our being.

So, in order to get trained, let's rather start with actions: they should be easier to assess in an objective way. I suggest questions such as: "How much improvement did I bring to the company every hour of the day, today?"; "What about the actions I carried out one month ago: did they finally appear to be so positive, afterwards?".

Or think about a little child asking "why are you doing that?": how many levels of "why?" could you answer? (simple examples to start with: "why are you sending this email to this person?", "why are you attending this meeting?", "why are you asking this report?").

When each of us will very precisely know why (s)he is doing what (s)he is doing, we will start hearing the buzz...

Quote Barack Obama :

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. "