Professionalism and respect

This week I’ve mainly been……

Thinking about professionalism and respect.

There’s very little of it here in Cambodia. It’s not a concept that has worked its way into the culture just yet. There are many reasons for this, education, language, and for the most part of a developing country, just not knowing what good looks like. It would therefore be easy to find yourself adopting some of this negative behavior and accepting that this is just the way it is. There’s an element of this certainly within the expat community.

But this is not an excuse. To me we should maintain professionalism and respect in everything we do. Just because someone else does something perhaps not normally acceptable, it is not a signal for us to copy that behavior. This week, I found myself becoming a little blase about some of the work I’d completed, and shocked myself when looking at the consequences.

Professionalism is a state of mind, as well as the actions to support it.

This is yet another one of those deep principles I’ve learnt since living here.