Showing Personal Integrity
Personal integrity generates trust and is the basis of many different kinds of deposits.
Lack of integrity can undermine almost any other effort to create high trust accounts.
People can seek to understand, remember the little things, keep their promises, clarify and fulfill expectations, and still fail to build reserves of trust if they are inwardly duplicitous.
Integrity includes but goes beyond honesty. Honesty is telling the truth -- in other words, conforming our words to reality.
Integrity is conforming reality to our words -- in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations. This requires an integrated character, oneness, primarily with self but also with life.
One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present. In doing so, we build the trust of those who are present. When you defend those who are absent, you retain the trust of those present.
Suppose you and I were talking alone, and we were criticizing our supervisor in a way that we would not dare to if he were present. Now what will happen when you and I have a falling out? You know I'm going to be discussing your weaknesses with someone else.
That's what you and I did behind our supervisor's back. You know my nature. I'll sweet-talk you to your face and bad-mouth you behind your back. You've seen me do it.
That's the essence of duplicity. Does that build a reserve of trust in my account with you.
On the other hand, suppose you were to start criticizing our supervisor and I basically told you I agree with the content of some of the criticism and suggest that the two of us go directly to him and make an effective presentation of how things might be improved. Then what would you know I would do if someone were to criticize you to me behind your back?
For another example, suppose in my effort to build a relationship with you, I told you something someone else had shared with me in confidence. "I really shouldn't tell you this," I might say, "but since you're my friend..." Would my betraying another person build my trust account with you?
Or would you wonder if the things you had told me in confidence were being shared with others? Such duplicity might appear to be making a deposit with the person you're with, but it is actually a withdrawal because you communicate your own lack of integrity.
You may get the golden egg of temporary pleasure from putting someone down or sharing privileged information, but you're strangling the goose, weakening the relationship that provides enduring pleasure in association.
Integrity in an interdependent reality is simply this: you treat everyone by the same set of principles. As you do, people will come to trust you. They may not at first appreciate the honest confrontational experiences such integrity might generate. Confrontation takes considerable courage, and many people would prefer to take the course of least resistance, belittling and criticizing, betraying confidences, or participating in gossip about others behind their backs. But in the long run, people will trust and respect you if you are honest and open and kind with them.
You care enough to confront. And to be trusted, it is said, is greater than to be loved. In the long run, I am convinced, to be trusted will be also mean to be loved.
When my son Joshua was quite young, he would frequently ask me a soul-searching question.
Whenever I overreacted to someone else or was the least bit impatient or unkind, he was so vulnerable and so honest and our relationship was so good that he would simply look me in the eye and say, "Dad, do you love me?" If he thought I was breaking a basic principle of life toward someone else, he wondered if I wouldn't break it with him.
As a teacher, as well as a parent, I have found that the key to the ninety-nine is the one – particularly the one that is testing the patience and the good humor of the many. It is the love and the discipline of the one student, the one child, that communicates love for the others. It's how you treat the one that reveals how you regard the ninety-nine, because everyone is ultimately a one.
Integrity also means avoiding any communication that is deceptive, full of guile, or beneath the dignity of people. "A lie is any communication with intent to deceive," according to one definition of the word. Whether we communicate with words or behavior, if we have integrity, our intent cannot be to deceive.