To be truly honest with others, you must first be impeccably honest with yourself. You must be true to yourself. You must be true to the best that is in you, to the very best that you know, to your potential, off-sides, and limitations. Only a person who is living consistent with his or her highest values and virtues is really living a life of integrity. Think of it, how many people around you have this issue of lack of buy-in to what they say, which is basically driven from their acts on the other hand. When you commit to living to your values, you will find yourself continually raising your own standards, continually re-defining your definition of integrity and honesty.
We all have small lies, no one is perfect, I know is some situations we all flaunt things that are against our beliefs, and we think that we are doing the right thing because this is the norm; well if you come to think of it, it is indeed the norm, but it is not NORMAL though! Simply not walking your talk makes this gap between your self-image and your self-ideal grow bigger, hence decreasing your self esteem and letting go your values. You can tell how high your level of integrity is by simply looking at the things you do in your day-to-day life. You can look at your reactions and responses to the inevitable ups and downs of life. You can monitor the behaviors you normally take on in and you will then know the person you are.
The way to demonstrate high integrity is high-quality work. A person who is totally honest with himself or herself will be someone who does, or strives to do, excellent work on every possible opportunity. The totally honest person recognizes, sometimes unconsciously, that everything he or she does is a statement about who he or she really is as a person, and that makes the difference between a regular job done, and an extra mile walked.
Two colleagues can have the same job description, doing exactly the same tasks, one of them however, always exceeding the expectations of the stakeholders, being it the clients, the superiors or the fellow employees, and the other is just doing what he is asked to do; it makes the whole difference. Throughout my training and coaching workshops and seminars, I meet both kinds, and I am always asked about what makes one employee exceed another, and this is always the case, Integrity.
When you start your day earlier, stay a little later, work a little harder, start to pay attention to little details that you didn’t focus on before; you are starting to practice integrity in your workplace. And whether you know it or not, your true level of integrity is apparent and is obvious to everyone around you. Perhaps the most important rule you will ever learn is that your life only becomes better when you become better, inside out and not the other way around, life is lived from the inside out.
At the very core of your personality lie your values about yourself and life in general. Your values determine the kind of person you really are. What you believe has defined your character and your personality. It is what you stand for, and what you won’t stand for, that tells you and the world the kind of person you have become. Mind it goes both positively and negatively; in my last seminar before launching this book, titled also “Decisions Make Destinies” I had one intervention from one girl in the audience stating that it is not about “what you know” nowadays, it’s about “who you know”, claiming her sincere belief that nowadays if you want to get a job, you have to know someone, and she expressed this demonstration as she is currently working as a waitress, which has nothing to do with what she is studying, and that even this waitress job that she took was by the factor of “who you know”, and she was debated by another young woman who applied for the same company, same job, every week, and just by this persistence that she got the job of her dreams, and that matches her qualifications and studies. Guess what, they are both right! If you see it internally as the first lady does, you will always be after “who you know” which won’t help a lot as you get to demonstrate your work afterwards, I mean, who wants to hire someone who lacks skills just because of this factor, unlike the second lady, who, with only her persistence, have the drive not only to get the job, but also to demonstrate her values in it every day.
