Integrity!

What is integrity anyway? According to Wikipedia, “the word “integrity” stems from the Latin adjective integer (whole, complete). In this context, integrity is the inner sense of ‘wholeness’ deriving from qualities such as honesty and consistency of character. As such, one may judge that others ‘have integrity’ to the extent that they act according to the values, beliefs and principles they claim to hold.” In other words honoring your word. Doing what you say you’re going to do. How many of us being in integrity? Well, the answer to that on the first tier is how is it working for you keeping promises to yourself? I’m going to lose weight, someday I’ll travel to, I’m going to stop procrastinating, I’m going to go back to school, I’m going to stop beating myself up, etc., etc., etc. This could be an eternal conversation, couldn’t it? One way of determining how good our relationship is with our self is by looking at our integrity with our promises to ourselves. And then I ask you how can we truly Love ourselves if we are constantly breaking promises to ourselves? Hmmm, interesting. The second tier of integrity involves keeping our word to others. Now I ask you, how the hell are we going to keep our word with others when we can’t even keep our word with ourselves? If it’s okay to break promises with self, it certainly will be okay to break our promises to others. All there is in relationships is word. That’s it! Communication and integrity are everything! We are not whole and complete when we are dishonoring self and others. So here’s the good news, as human beings we are always in and out of integrity. However, we usually make excuses as to why we did not keep our word. That keeps us as victims of our circumstances. What works is restoring our integrity. Here’s an example: I was not on time and I’m out of integrity. From here on out I promise to be on time. When we acknowledge being out of integrity without all the reasons, we can begin to be in integrity more and more. This is also called taking 100% responsibility for what we’ve given our word to. Try it out. I’ll talk more about keeping our word and integrity in the next blog.

Gratitude,

Rusty