integrity

Let me be honest.

This post is nothing like the one I began to write for you. Nothing at all.

In fact, I’m not sure that I’m going to be writing the same kind of posts again that I’ve been writing over the last few months. I say “not sure” because I don’t ever like to be definitive about these things. All I can tell you right now is that something has changed and that you’re going to notice it.

See, this year, and indeed since I revamped this website and started writing here instead of over on A Different Kind of Work, I’ve been writing articles in quite a logical way. I got the Livingston Consulting creed down and then I thought – great idea – let’s take the creed’s themes and drill into them. One theme a month. I’ve been doing that. And, when I’m not on holiday, writing an article a week which I send out to my list.

As it turns out, I have been on holiday the last few weeks and so there have been no new articles but today was “writing this week’s article day”, and so I dutifully went back to my schedule to see what I’d planned out to write about.

Truth Clarifies

The theme I’d planned was Truth Clarifies. What, I thought, could I tell you about the truth? Spent a couple of hours surfing the internet for some inspiration, but all I could come up with felt somehow hollow.

Unable to come up with any meaningful, pithy content, I was really sweating it.

What would you think of me if I didn’t keep my commitment to post weekly? And post in accordance with how I said at some prior point I would?

Why is that important? Well, so much of it goes to the thing about integrity I keep going on about. It’s important to me that if I’ve said I’ll do something, I honor my commitment to it. I want to be a Servant Leader to the people who read and work with me. I want to serve.

But today, and after a conversation with John El-Mokadem, I’m seeing it a little differently. What’s changing is some greater insight into the nature of what’s going on for me here.

It was kind of funny. Today I turned up for my session with him with a list of things to talk about. It had to be the first, maybe the second time, that I’ve actually had an agenda. Normally I just turn up and we allow the conversation to take its own shape. Those conversations have been immense. Without fail, something important turns up and bites me on the bum in a way I hadn’t expected.

Consistency vs meaningfulness

But today was right down in the dirt of stuff. On the list: consistency versus meaningfulness. I told him of my thing about doing a post a week, and that, when I’d sat down to keep to my schedule today, I couldn’t get the words to flow.

As John said, “In the moment, the feeling was off.”

I think “off” was the polite way to put it!

Anyway, the way John helped me see it, at some point in time Thought took form – and if you don’t know what I mean by this, go check out this post here – and what that looked like was the idea that I should write weekly; that that was somehow “good”. I’d imagined that I was doing that from a clear, insightful place. And maybe I was. But come earlier today, I was caught up in figuring that getting that post written would somehow make me “okay”.

“If I can get this post out – oh, and let’s make sure it’s a wow post – it’ll mean something amazing about me. And then I can be happy.”

We had some conversation too today about structure generally. What it means if you have to turn up and operate within a structure. I had been holding onto some thinking that structure somehow suffocates me. And sometimes it does. But then it would if I have that belief since life only ever works inside-out.

What happens if I choose not to buy into the “structure suffocates” belief – what happens if I can see that’s just an “off” piece of thought form? Can I write here weekly? Not in some preconceived way, but in a more creative, in the moment way?

If I don’t need my turning up – or not – to mean anything, can I turn up and flow?

I don’t know.

Whatever, what’s clear is that my idea of myself has been looking important. I’d been looking at things in quite an egotistical way and putting shape around some concept of “Christine” believing that I am Christine and that I could self-invent. In fact, I’m not Christine.

Sure, you may think I’m Christine (actually, if you don’t quite get what I’m saying on this, you may also think I’m smoking!), and we may talk of one another as if personality is fixed and our lives very self-determining.

But it’s really not fixed. And we’re really not self-determining. Oh, sure, we can set ourselves what appear to be very me-centred goals – and maybe we’ll achieve them too if we push hard enough. But if we’re not allowing of something bigger of ourselves in the process, we’re going to feel exhausted. And produce little of any enduring value.

What has this got to do with you, your life, your business?

Well, everything.

I’ve been out of it for a couple of weeks and coming back in I see it more clearly. So, so much of our lives – whether work or play, and even if we run our own businesses or have quite autonomous leadership roles – is about fitting into some pre-agreed plan. It may or may not look that way. But so much of the time we’re trying to squeeze ourselves into some mold of our own or someone else’s making.

Sometimes that can feel suffocating. We can believe that we have to turn up in a certain way. That only one way of turning up will be acceptable.

We kick against the context but it’s not the context that truly constrains us. It’s our own thinking about our context.

Honestly, when I couldn’t find the words earlier to write, I thought I was going to have to mail my readers and tell them I was having an off day. Or share something I’d written before. Or make some excuse. But when I popped the Thought-bubble that had me in its grip I saw the best place to act from was truth.

Which reminds me of some other words I found recently care of Michael Neill:

“Before learning the truth, the mountains appear as mountain. When one begins to study truth, the mountains seem to disappear. After accepting the truth, the mountains again appear as mountains.”
– Zen proverb

Photo attribution: Copyright: / 123RF Stock Photo

Integrity.

It’s a missing ingredient of our time. Possibly the missing ingredient.

Let me tell you why.

Definition

But before I do, let me ask what it means to you. It’s one of these words that gets slung around in personal and leadership development circles, especially if you get into a discussion about values. But would you really know integrity if you saw it?

And I think that’s been part of its problem till now. It’s been up there as some high and mighty principle. But few people could describe why it’s relevant on a day-to-day basis.

Which is why I like Michael Jensen and Werner Erhart’s work on integrity. Because their definition cuts to the chase.

For them it’s simple. Integrity talks fundamentally of the wholeness of individuals, relationships or systems. There’s no implied value judgement in their view. Instead, they say, wholeness is an aspect of our being. It’s in our nature to expect things to be whole and complete. So when something lacks integrity, it affects us.

Things don’t jive for us the way they should. They don’t feel right. And whether we’re conscious of it or not, deep down we know.

Having integrity means honouring your word

How do you have integrity?

Well, to have integrity as an individual you must honour your word.

In an ideal world everyone would make commitments only to things they could deliver on. But life’s not like that for most of us.

Recognising that’s so – we’re human and goalposts change – we can nevertheless honour our word. Honouring your word means keeping your word, or whenever you won’t be keeping your word, saying so to everyone impacted:

a) that you won’t be keeping your word
b) that you will keep it in the future and by when, or that you won’t be keeping it at all
c) what you will do regards the impact on others of your failure to keep your word

In a nutshell: own your shit and clean it up.

What that looks like to you or me

I got excited about this as a concept because it made me realise how much better the world would be if we all adopted that philosophy.

Maybe you think you don’t have a problem with integrity. Oh yeah? Check out these scenarios:

You pack your diary full of appointments and then end up late for meeting after meeting. You say “sorry” to the people you keep waiting, but you can’t help feeling that in-the-moment pang of guilt.
You’ve a report you’ve committed to get done by a certain date and you’ve just been unable to get to it, so you say nothing and hope no-one notices. You feel a mixture of relief and disappointment in yourself when you send it off late with an apology note.
You promised yourself to eat healthily and get to the gym three times this week. But it’s been a crappy Monday. Wolfing down that tub of ice-cream in the evening gives only a fleeting sense of comfort, before the self-loathing voices kick in again.

You may think that these things count for nothing. That they’re all part of the human condition and “the way things are” when you work for yourself or do a big job. But the impact on ourselves, and on people around us accumulates as, drip after drip, we create the experience of not having integrity; of not honouring our word.

The bigger integrity challenge

When you start to really understand this, you can begin to see just how integrity is missing from life on a wider scale.

Look at Nick Clegg and his now infamous 2010 election promise to cut student fees, which he reneged on as soon as he got into power with David Cameron.

Or the whole sub-prime crisis of a few years back that was caused by mortgage products that had no integrity, sold to people who would struggle to pay, while a number of derivative traders made billions betting on their failure.

Once the banks had been dug out of their integrity gap, all kind of measures were implemented to ensure “something like this never happens again”. Regulatory frameworks were reviewed. Ethics training and the like was introduced.

I’m not suggesting that these don’t have their place. But isn’t it a little sad that integrity has to be legislated for?

And in any case we’ve subsequently had examples like Tesco, who inflated its prices for a while, only then to drop them back to what they had been charging while claiming to be offering a “Big Price Drop”.

Everything starts with our word

What I’m personally discovering from trying to stay more and more in integrity with myself is that life goes better; I feel better about myself; my relationships are better. And I see the impact it has on my work too.

For example, I recently got the timing wrong of an international coaching call and wrote to my client:

I’m so sorry. This is entirely my mistake. I put our call in my calendar for 2.30 GMT not CET….

Let’s reschedule.

I realise that my error means I’m out of integrity with you and apart from anything would like to ask you how I may meaningfully correct that.

Not only did he write back and say that my putting it that way had really made him think, but also over the weeks that followed I watched him consciously choose to stay more and more in integrity with himself, in what has been a tough business situation for him.

He came to coaching to smash some of his own glass ceilings. I think his insights on integrity served as a bit of a hammer for him.

Because really, if you have integrity, and you encourage others to live with integrity, you can achieve so much more and feel so much better.

It’s not a nice to have thing. It’s fundamental.

Start with yourself

So, don’t wait for the government to legislate on it, or for your company to write an integrity policy. Start with you and start now.

Where are you keeping your word to yourself? Where not? What are the ways in which you can clean up your act? How will that serve you? And how will it serve others around you?

photo credit: Ding Yuin Shan ???