Change of being begins with changing your reactions to actual incidents of the day. This is the beginning of taking your life in a real and practical sense in a new way. If you behave in the same way every day to the same recurring events of the day, how can you believe that you can change?

To get to know yourself, begin with observing your behavior towards the events of a single day in your life. Notice how you react—that is, notice your mechanical reactions to all the little events that happen and to other people and notice what you say, feel, think and so on.

Try to make the work-exercise of behaving consciously for a small part of one day in your life. Because everything we do affects us for ever. A single moment in which one is conscious enough not to behave mechanically, if it is done willingly, can change many future results.

Maurice Nicoll, "On Work on Oneself” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 26)