Dream Believe Inspire

A Thousand Yes’s

I went to the Directions Conference yesterday after winning tickets at school.  I love conferences; so much positive energy.  Being surrounded by people filled with hope and enthusiasm is invigorating.  Received a lot of positive messages.

One that I definitely value was “find out what motivates you” and do it every day.  I decided I was going to be a writer when I was five, and I picked up a pen and started writing.  Yes, a pen.  But I’ve been having a hard time wrapping my head around writing lately, it’s gotten difficult, and I need to get back into it.  It’s one of my passions, and something I’m never going to let go of, so that’s it.  We’re back to writing!

Which brings me to the other thing that I heard.  “Blog.  A lot.”  I’ve always kept journals … I don’t even know how many online journals I’ve had …  But it dawned on me, that I’ve even stopped blogging (and I blogged before it was “blogging” :S ).

The last bit of advice came to me kind of backwards.  I was listening to one of the speakers during a table discussion on entrepreneurship and the topic turned to morals and ethics in the younger generation. 

I, like everyone else, prefer to hold the world to higher standards, and we’re all painfully aware that people in positions of higher authority (and public figures) perform less than admirably and more often than not do not recant their decisions or actions.  Or when they do, it’s 10, 15, or 20 years down the road when they’ve already influenced groupings of generations interpretations of social culture and appropriate conduct.  Or, my personal favorite, they further reinforce their behavior by becoming worse still, and shining all the brighter.

During the table discussion, I was both surprised, and not surprised to learn how an executive would routinely hire 10 individuals, keep the one or two that worked the hardest and fire the other eight because they were unmotivated, or scraped by doing the bare minimum “job description stuff.” 

When asked why he thought there were so many problems with motivation in response to work in today’s economy, he explained that he felt it was due to bad parenting. 

I do appreciate that he took the time to give advice on working, and working well, but I don’t agree with his assessment, or with the way that he addressed the problem.  And it reminded me of the same way that public figures aren’t fully aware of the effect of their actions. 

I thought, actually, of all of the people that he fired. 

I thought about training I’d received as a Respite and Support Worker, and being told that it takes a thousand yes’s to undo a single no … and I wondered to myself, how many of those people are going to continue being unmotivated because they keep getting fired?  Because no one says to them, “Hey, you did a good job today.”  Or “Is there something wrong, do you want to talk about it?”  “What would motivate you?”

Maybe people just need to know flat out where they stand.  That people care and notice and WANT them to do better.  People have been giving me labels all of my life.  From offensive racist ones, offensive sexist ones, to the plain old “you’re stupid, you’re never going to go anywhere in life.”  And honestly, that last one was a lot harder to deal with than any of the other horrible things I’ve been called.

Just my personal opinion, but I think we’d have less of a problem with motivation, moral and ethics if everyone tried to be accountable.  Public figures and business people alike.

It takes a community to raise a child; so why place blame solely on bad parenting?  We’re all accountable.  Those children grow up to be community members like you and me.