Being and staying in Integrity

Since I just returned from an amazing convention for work where many people left there making big promises to themselves and their friends, I thought that today would be the perfect day to discuss the concept of Personal Integrity. Personal Integrity is when your words, your thoughts and your actions are in line with each other.  In other words, you do what you think and say you will.

The interesting thing is that we go in and out of integrity many times each day.  The key is to become aware of the times that we do this and work on making sure that we keep ourselves aligned.  For example.. If you think that you want to lose weight, tell your friends that you are going to lose 15 pounds but go to a birthday party and eat cake, you are out of integrity.

Nobody got hurt in the eating of the cake so it wasn’t really that big of a deal, right?  Well that depends on how often you tell yourself these little white lies.  Yes, when you fall out of integrity, it is the same as lying to yourself.  The problem is that if you lie to yourself too often you begin to lose belief and trust in yourself, just like you’d lose trust in somebody in your life if they were continuously lying to you.  So even though, no one got hurt over that tiny piece of cake, you lost a little faith that you can follow through on the promises that you make to yourself.  Overtime these “broken promises” add up and the result is that it kills our confidence and can lead to sadness, anger, depression and prevent us from moving forward in our lives.

So what’s the answer?  That’s easy.  Live in INTEGRITY.  If you think that you are going to do something, say that you are going to do something, then by all means possible make sure that you take ACTION and do it!  No excuses!