good better best....

My formative years in work were subject to many days of training, all aimed at making me better at what I was doing and would do in the future. The organisation I worked for adopted "Total Quality" and later used the EFQM model. They talked about the target of having an excellent workforce. The ongoing performance management echoed that. There was a continuous improvement ethos that was built in and embedded to everything we did.

In my horsemanship it has never been much different. And a certain natural horseman has a string of sayings all aimed at improvement, excellence, quality. One of which I remember my father quoting when I was a young girl:

Good, better, best
Never let it rest
Til your good is better
And your better best.

Recently a project management discussion forum posed a question "what would make you leave project management ?"

My initial answer was that it would be working for an organisation that knowingly asked me to do something second rate.

Today I had an interesting conversation when someone from HR suggested that he thought maybe I set my standards too high. While I suspect he was trying to say I was being too tough on myself, wasn't he effectively saying "don't be the best you can be" ?!

Here's a quote to sum up how I feel about that: 

It's not about changing who you are, it's about being the best you can be. 

Eileen J Roden