Example: As a teenager, it seemed like the only projects that Laurels could think of for their personal progress achievements were some kind of game day at the nursing home. I participated, albeit with extreme hesitancy, and when it came time for me to do a Laurel project, I never did one, because I thought that I had to do something at the nursing home and I wasn’t excited about that.

Now, here’s the funny part. I had been taking piano lessons for 12 years and my piano teacher gave “mini-recitals” frequently.. at NURSING HOMES and I had NO PROBLEM doing that!!! In fact, that didn’t scare me at all. I wish I had thought of doing that.

It took me TEN YEARS to realize my mistake.

Once I realized that I needed to look for opportunities to give service according to my abilities, I began to find them. And then I started to really enjoy giving service. Now, the word “service” evokes a sort of magic for me.

All you can do it focus on teaching correct doctrine, helping the group feel the spirit, and let the change come from within. Then your measurement of success changes from measuring the behavior of the group to measuring how effective you are at delivering your message and to what degree you felt the spirit. Those are things you can control and you leave the change up to the individual.

I think one of the greatest challenges this church has to overcome is to stop measuring success by the actions of other and start measuring it by how effective we are at teaching doctrine and feeling the influence of the spirit within ourselves. If we are able to create a learning and discussion environment in which we can feel the spirit strongly, participants will also feel that influence, depending on how in-tune they are. That is really all we can hope for. That is really the only way to help people change.

The more we focus on programs and false measurements of success, the less effective we will be and the greater our failure will be.

Like I said, though, I don’t know that one can measure whether s/he was successful in changing the mindset of a group of people.

How would you measure success? What metric would you use?

An approach such as public thanks to the person is a good start.

Ah-hoc awards are also good.

Regularly given out awards (employee of the month etc.) become routine, but an award for service is a direct recognition of a particular act or acts of service.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is to keep it personal and not institutional.

Sometimes, service is seen as a requirement and rather than praising those who offer it, we denigrate those who do not.

I believe that is the wrong approach.

What would be an example of an award for selflessness?