It is quite possible that somebody has their eye on you now. Who exactly are they? And what exactly are they watching for? They are waiting for you to mess up.

Before you run off to pick up a tinfoil hat or label me as a conspiracy theorist, hear me out.

For the purpose of this post, ‘they’ are not necessarily people who would benefit from your business or your reputation going through rough times. This is all about managing your image really and the need to actively work to improve it.

Take for example Rockefeller. He was not a bad person; however by not controlling his image, he was not well liked. Anyone who makes massive amounts of money is easily targeted by those not as fortunate and Rockefeller was certainly no exception.

It took him years of philanthropic work to recoup the ground he had lost from the public’s eye. When he died in 1937, he had spent almost 40 years of his life trying to regain his image.

But that’s old news, a lot of people know about that. Let’s move on to some more recent events. The US president George W. Bush was recently caught speaking rather candidly about the Middle East. I don’t want to get into the politics involved, but his image will no doubt will have taken a beating for this.

When I say ‘they’ are watching, it could be anybody, anybody at all. In our president’s case, it was a Russian TV crew that caught the footage.

Who captures footage of you can be irrelevant. If you constantly act in a way that would tarnish your image, you are eventually going to be caught. The best way to prevent this from happening is to simply not do things you wouldn’t want other people to know about.

Building a reputation as a trustworthy person, company, or other entity doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and effort.

If you aren’t ethical all the time you might get away with some things but it’s hard to know when people are watching. It’s better to simply be the best that you can be every time.