A500.2.3.RB_SienkiewiczRaymond

In my life, I tend to place a high importance on maintaining standards of duty and reliability, the former of which may be a non-critical standard, and the latter listed in the text as a critical standard. These standards were admittedly not ones I was born with, but sometime towards the end of high school and the beginning of college it developed. Somewhere along the line, I made a generally solid effort to do what I told people I was going to do and stick with it, mainly as a matter of principle as well as trying to avoid being the very thing that often annoyed me in the form of people that didn't follow through. At this point, this was how I did my business, but it wasn't necessarily at the forefront of my thinking when I did something.

It was progressively through my time in college and ROTC that these standards became further fixed in my psyche and my daily routine. Initially, I think this developed more out of a cultivated sense that I could do better than I did in school up to that point, had I given a more sincere effort to my studies. ROTC added further incentive, as performance in the classroom and in our activities would play some role in our future career path. I fostered the mindset of “mission first”, and my mission at that time was to do well in school. However, it was during summer field training following my sophomore year that doing my duty and doing it reliably became deeply rooted. Besides getting the boot camp experience and being issued a few missing spine vertebrae, I'd taken more to not just simply doing my basic job on time, but I also became much more open to taking more up front responsibility for my achievements and my mistakes, and to going the extra mile for the greater good of the team even if it meant more effort or discomfort on my part.

In the roughly six years since then, I've held on to those same standards and continued to refine them in different contexts as an upper level college student, an officer trainee, and an active duty officer. I habitually take on additional taskings to help around the unit so long as I have the time available and my work doesn't suffer, and particularly if I can contribute one of my better developed skill sets. I make it a point to see tasks through and follow up on communication, and from this I have received a lot of positive feedback from my supervisors. Besides that, although I've found my current line of work as being a mixture of the mundane and the highly stressful, I've used these standards as my personal compass to keep me on course and press through any difficulties I come across. Although it would be very easy for me to simply stop caring and do the bare minimum to get paid, the certain something that gave me the drive to do more keeps kicking back in, refusing to settle for less.