On Integrity

Living with integrity as a core practice is tough love. It means we listen to the voice within us repeating the truth as we know it, echoed through our beings from the ancestral and unseen realms. We mute the other inner voice describing an easier or more comfortable outcome, or the one that saves face. The practice of integrity is radical self-leadership.

Practicing integrity will not only change your life, it will transform people around you. The soft and comfortable places that have gone unexplored in others will feel the piercing light of consciousness radiating from your inspiring leadership. That means some people will not want to be in your presence, as they will feel that sting of awareness and want to soothe it. Others still will prefer and meet your friendship, because you will invite resilience of intimacy into the messiness of human relationship.

The practice of integrity is like building any kind of muscle. You must continually meet challenge and choose integrity of word and action. As you develop resilence of character, these challenges will not end, it becomes easier to decide to act from the deeper truth. This resilience will atrophy when you choose to rest in the reputation you cultivated yesterday. We are all human beings, and we all have the drive to be comfortable and soothed when we are afraid or stressed. And you may still create an unintended impact of harm, even with the very purest of intentions. Having integrity means you decide to have restorative conversations from a place of openness and humility, knowing these conversations are healing the wounds we carry together.

Those who are in the power dynamic of Leadership who do not practice integrity as a matter of community health will harm their cause, and the relationships associated with the cause, because their leadership is sourced from manipulation rather than authenticity.

Integrity is a Bridge of Consciousness. Build it so it can support the weight of many.