My life has a tendency to be overly practical and real. When “life happens” I react to it, typically in very predictable ways. Most of the time I react in a way that is consistent with my character. So for the most part what you see me do is a pretty good reflection on who I am on the inside. But what if who I am and what I do are in conflict?

Integrity.

This word has changed me so much when I finally paid attention to what it actually meant. I assumed that someone with integrity was a fine upstanding model citizen.  However, this upstanding citizen may NOT be some one of integrity.  I would now argue that someone who is a total jerk, knows they are a jerk, and tells you they are a jerk is some one of integrity. They are an integrated person with all areas of their life aligned together. Someone that says one thing, but does another is a hypocrite and lacks integrity. All parts of their person don’t align. In the end, whether good or bad, moral or immoral, someone of integrity has their life aligned regardless of direction.

To some degree we all lack integrity. I know that I certainly do. Several years back I spoke with a counselor about some bad habits that I had fallen into and his words to me were profound. He told me that I could be a man of integrity and just quit saying I was one thing, when my behavior indicated I was something else. Or, what if I changed my behavior to better align with what I KNEW was in my character and be a man of integrity, but good, moral integrity.

These words were profound, because they gave me my choice back. Before I had felt a loss of control over situations and in some ways a loss of my sense of self. Now, I got a choice. I could be a man of integrity no matter the path I chose, but one way or another I had to stop pretending and start being real.

Let’s Be Honest

So the first step toward integrity with me was to start being honest with myself.  I had tended to look at my own actions with rose colored glasses.  I needed to spend time looking at who I really was, but how?  It turns out the best way for me to get an honest assessment of myself was to look at the things I had been doing and the words I had been saying.

Once I had this clearer picture of who I was, I then looked at what I believed of myself.  I asked myself these questions.  What was just a flat out lie?  What was untrue or broken but could still be made better?  Anything that was a lie I simply had to just own.

So the lie was that I was an empathetic person.  But, I was not a person of empathy and likely never would be.  My actions and my words showed clearly that empathy was not in my character.  Sure, I can feel sympathy for some one, but I just was not gifted with the ability to feel what some one else was feeling.  This was a freeing moment for me because I could now stop pretending that I was empathetic.  I no longer felt the needed to tell people that I knew what they were feeling, because I simply had no clue.

Now, one of the things that was broken that I discovered was that I genuinely cared and loved people.  My heart was there, but my actions didn’t quite line up all of the time.  Love was a part of my character, but it was raw and untrained.  I would say that it had been mis-trained.  The good news was that if I could spend some time retraining my love for others, I could get my heart, my actions, and my words to align.

What If I Were Better?

There’s a game I like to play, and it is called the “What If” game. I like it, because it allows my mind to process the world of fantasy as if it were real. I’m sure you’ve done it at some point in your life. What if I won the lottery? What if I could go back in time?

It’s fun to imagine and dream of the impossible, but what if I could “what if” the possible, playing out scenarios in my head that I could actually act upon.  What I do is take the broken alignment and then say, What if I were a more loving person?  What would I say and what would I do?

Now I have a list of things to go and do.  CS Lewis said in Mere Christianity, 

“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”

I tend to try to be integrated with words, and belief first.  Maybe that’s why I’ve had such a hard time trying to integrate myself.  So what if now I lead with action first even if my belief is broken and my words so far have been empty?  
 

Training Is Better Than Trying

I tried and I tried and I tried.  I had a belief and I spoke the words, and then I just tried.  But that never seemed to quite work how I thought it would.  So when that didn’t work, I would just try harder.  But this didn’t work either.  What I really needed was more training.

If I was going to love others, then I needed to train to do it.  Specifically, I needed to look at others who were actually doing the actions of loving others and then ask them for help.

I mention this kind of relationship in 3 Relationship For Lasting Personal Growth and 1 To Pass It On.  We need mentors and coaches.  These will be the people in our lives that either have run this race before us, or they have the ability to train these skills into our lives.

Summary

That’s exactly what I did.  I put in the hard work and I trained, hard.  I relentlessly self examined who I was and who I wanted to be.  I stopped believing the lies I had told myself and found the areas of my life that were broken.  I started imagining what life would look like if I started acting in such a way that these broken areas of my life were healed and whole.  And then I found a mentor and I found a coach to train these habits so that my belief system, my words and my actions would all align in the same direction.  In doing so my life became more integrated and I became more of a man of integrity.