Someone took credit for your work in a meeting. In front of your boss. In front of the team. You sat there and smiled while your stomach tightened into a fist. Yesterday, we covered the H.A.L.T. Method: the first interrogation the AUDIT step runs on you. Are you Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired? Good. Run that check. But even if you pass it clean, you are not done. The AUDIT goes deeper. Because the most dangerous decisions are not made by people who are physically compromised. They are made by people who feel perfectly fine, perfectly justified, and completely certain that what they are about to do is the right thing.

This is where ego and righteousness part ways, and this is the heart of today's work in the Watchman's Protocol.

Ego is patient. It is not loud and obvious. It does not walk in wearing a name tag. Ego disguises itself as principle, as justice, as necessary truth-telling. "Someone has to say it." "I am not letting this stand." "This is about integrity." These are not always lies. Sometimes they are true. But ego has learned to wear those phrases like a uniform, and it wears them convincingly. Underneath the righteous language, ego is almost always seeking one thing: vindication. It wants the record corrected. It wants credit restored. It wants the other person to feel the weight of what they did. It wants, if we are honest, to win.

Righteousness asks a different question entirely. Not "how do I prove I was right?" but "what does restoration look like here?" The goal of righteousness is not victory; it is repair. Proverbs 11:14 does not say there is safety in many advisers because advisers help you win arguments. It says there is safety in counsel because shared pursuit of what is actually good produces better outcomes than any one person's vindication. Righteousness is interested in what happens to the relationship, the team, the situation. It is not indifferent to truth, but it does not mistake winning the argument for serving the truth.

This is why the Watchman's Protocol places this question inside the AUDIT step, before any action is taken. The diagnostic you need is not "is my reaction justified?" Most reactive decisions feel justified. The question is: "If I do this, who gets the glory?" This is not a guilt question. It is an information question. If the honest answer is "I do," that is not automatically disqualifying. But it is a flag. It tells you to keep auditing. Because decisions driven by ego dressed up as principle consistently produce wreckage, and they do it with complete righteous conviction. They always feel right on the way in.

Here is a practical test. Take the action you are considering and run it through two questions. First: if this works exactly as I intend, what is the best-case outcome? Second: who benefits most from that outcome? If the primary beneficiary is your reputation, your standing, your sense of having been wronged and now set right, you are in ego territory. If the primary beneficiary is the relationship, the team, the truth of the situation, or a person who genuinely needs defending, you may be in righteousness territory. The distinction is not always clean. But the honest answer to "who gets the glory?" will cut through a lot of fog.

The goal of the AUDIT is not to paralyze you. It is to give you clean credentials. A watchman at the gate does not ask for ID because he wants to slow things down. He asks because he needs to know who is actually standing there before he opens the gate. Ego with righteous language is one of the most common things trying to get through, and it rarely announces itself accurately. The credential check is not an accusation. It is the protocol.

Tomorrow, we move into the third A: ALIGN. Once you have examined your source and answered the glory question honestly, you need to calibrate against something outside yourself. That is what ALIGN is for, and it is where the Three Witnesses come in. But none of that work lands right if you have not done the AUDIT first. A person who skips this step will find Scripture and counsel that confirms exactly what ego already wanted to do. The Watchman does not just check credentials. He checks them honestly. That is the difference between a guard and a doorman.

Think about the last reactive decision you almost made. Ask yourself honestly: who would have gotten the glory if you had gone through with it? That answer tells you more about your decision than any justification you could construct.

I write about leadership at the intersection of timeless principles and modern workplaces. Follow for weekly insights on building teams that actually work. For more articles like this consider subscribing to my Substack at: https://christianleadership.now