lifestyle

Integrity and the Real Thing

In a day that is no longer with us, wood looked like wood, steel looked like steel and concrete looked like concrete.  Today we have steel with timber-look patterns printed on it, timber with thin veneers of stainless steel on it, and concrete embossed and painted in timber grain.  What we see isn’t always what we get.  Doesn’t something feel wrong about this? 

Integrity demands that something look like it actually is.  If that something is a person, it is so much more important.  We all have a distrust for someone who claims to be something that they aren’t.  To be able to trust someone, we need them to have integrity.  To be trusted by others we need to have integrity with our true selves.

Personal integrity is a simple concept, but difficult in practice.  It is more than just practicing what we believe, and it is more than just being true to ourselves.  It also includes presenting a truthful image of ourselves to the world, and living lives in harmony with our own values.

Integrity is most obvious when it is absent:

•  When someone claims something that is not true about them. 
• When someone says one thing but does another
• When someone lives behind a manufactured persona
• When someone is untrustworthy with their dealings in the world

When these sort of things occur.  The lack of integrity causes relationship breakdowns.  It is impossible to maintain relationships of trust with people who lack essential integrity.  If we cannot trust each other then we can not rely on cooperation and teamwork.  The person without integrity risks missing out on the advantages of working with other people simply because he or she cannot be trusted.

I should warn you that I struggle with integrity as much as the next person.  The key term here is struggle, because it is definitely a struggle to always live with integrity.  In fact it is impossible for anyone to live with integrity 100% of the time.  The closest we will ever come is recognising and rectifying where we lack integrity.  This takes serious time.

Integrity doesn’t mean that we won’t have various faces to show the world, just that they all must be true faces.  Consider a diamond.  It will usually have about 58 facets (faces) cut into its surface, but some extremely fine diamonds are cut with up to 221 facets.  Each of these facets exhibit the diamond from a particular angle and together they make up the brilliance that we admire in the stone.  The important point to note is that each of the individual facets shows one true aspect of the diamond, none of them give a misleading view at all.  In this respect, we can choose which aspect of our selves we will put on display to the world.  We can select this based on what the world needs to see about us or on what we want the world to see about us.  So long as it is a correct and reliable view of us, then we still have integrity even if the world cannot see all of our life at once.  All of our facets must be true and not be in conflict with any other.

The perfect example of integrity is our internet persona.  It is no surprise that there are many people online who are larger, if not just substantially different, than real life.  We have middle aged men, pretending to be young women, we have couch potatoes dressing up their lives as if they were high flying CEOs, we have wannabees claiming to be gurus.  It is easy to create a persona online, that either partly or even completely misrepresents your real self.  This hasn’t been helped by popular advice to “Fake it until you make it”.  As a result, the first point of attention for many people, is to design who they will be online.  They decide that whoever they really are, is not going to be the most effective persona to achieve their results, so they throw integrity out the window and draw up a new persona.

Classic, persona makeovers are:

1.  Overstating your achievements (current and past)
2. Changing your  gender or your appearance (especially in social networking)
3. Reducing your age if you are “over the hill”, or increasing it if you are too young to command respect
4. “Modifying” defining statistics like body weight, RSS subscribers, daily hits, dollars earned or number of satisfied clients
5.  Constructing your own qualifications, affiliations and relationships.
6. Giving a deliberately vague image in a way that people jump to untrue (but desirable) conclusions

All of these measures (and a lot more) seriously undermine your integrity.  Follow them at your peril, because unlike presenting a truthful picture of yourself to the world, they are simply a lie.  They will reduce the tendency for others to trust you.  No matter how careful you are, you will be caught out one day.  Continually presenting a lie and having to keep a constant check on lying consistently, will harm any one’s sense of self esteem.  It is impossible to live a lie without ending up in personal turmoil and uncertainty.  How much better to present an accurate picture and live in peace with yourself.

As a side benefit, those who can read it, value truthfulness.  I believe that most people respond better in the long run to reality than hype.  We all have a built in lie detector that gets fidgety when we are around people who lack integrity and when we are sane, we tend to affiliate ourselves most closely with those that we can truly trust.  In this way, in the long run, integrity works. 

As a result, I have decided that I should be honest with you all and practice what I preach.  Despite what you may have read about Tom O’Leary here and elsewhere, it has all been a lie.  In reality I am:

1. A six foot blond 23 year old female model
2. CEO of a major international corporation
3. Graduate of Harvard, Oxford and Yale in everything from beetle mechanics to international law
4. Mother of 15 children
5. Elite athlete
6. Caring and compassionate
7. Extreme philanthropist and adventurer
8. Environmental activist
9. Ferrari driving 
10. Generally a very attractive person

Will anyone be my friend on stumbleupon?

Thanks

Tom (?)