Leaders have integrity

Integrity is doing the right thing no matter what. It’s about making good choices. Are we always going to make the best choices? No. We’re going to learn, grow, and mess up a lot. But as long as you’re doing what you believe to be the right thing, you’re coming from a place of integrity.

Our integrity is our own. No one else has any say over what we do. If someone’s trying to get you to do something, and you don’t believe it’s right, your integrity says don’t do it. Your integrity is only on you. Just do what you believe to be right. Even if what you believe to be right now is not what you believe to be right in the future.

PLANNING CHOICES AHEAD OF TIME

Preparing ahead of time by preparing for choices is a great way to make integrity easier in your life. If you decide that in a specific instance, you will make a certain choice, it is almost like you’ve made the choice already.

Let’s make it easy by focusing on something like drugs. Say you’re at school, and your best friend offers you cigarettes or vape. In that moment, you have to come up with what you’re going to do, say, and how you react. It’s hard! You like your friend, you want your friend to like you. But you don’t think vaping is the right thing to do. Your brain is having a civil war about what choices to make.

Now let’s say that you planned beforehand what you would say and do if someone offered you vape. By doing that, you’ve basically already made the choices. Now you just have to follow through. While you still may have been caught off guard, your choices just became a thousand times easier!

So you might plan on saying, “Nah, man. I’m really not into that and don’t want to do it. I’ll catch up with you later.” Then you plan on removing yourself from the situation. Now all you have to do is stick to the script.

By planning ahead of time, it makes it so much easier than trying to come up with things on the fly. It is now easier to keep your integrity.

Now can you come up with every situation you might encounter? Of course not! Impossible! But this exercise of planning beforehand helps you as you continue to grow and learn while keeping your integrity.

NO MATTER THE OUTCOME

I’d love to tell you that if you do the right thing, it’s always going to have a good outcome, but that’s not life. But it’s still better to make good choices than to sacrifice how you feel about yourself to make life easier or less scary.

Let’s put ourselves in this situation. You’re hanging out with your friends, and one of your friends has been peer pressured and decides they’re going to do something they didn’t want to do. We’ll make it stupid and dangerous like they’ve been dared to jump off the roof when they get home. Your friend doesn’t want to do it, but because of pressure, they are following the group instead of making good choices for themselves. First, remember that we are not in charge of anyone else’s decisions. Other people get to act, think, and believe what they want. We only have control of our decisions.

Now, you have some decisions to make. Your friend is going to get seriously hurt and you know about it. You can decide to talk to your friend without others around. Maybe you can change their mind. Maybe it works and maybe doesn’t. If it didn’t work and they’re still going to jump, what do you do now? You’re going to have to do something that probably is going to hurt your relationship with your friend a bit. You have to go above their head, to someone in a position of authority. Like a teacher or parent. Now, is your friend going to be happy that you told or “tattled” on them? No. They wanted to be “cool” or fit in. And now they might be in trouble.

They feel betrayed by you. You snitched and didn’t “have their back”. But you were really just trying to do the right thing. And now your friend is not seriously injured, though they may not be your friend anymore.

So the situation isn’t always going to end up good and happy like everything is magical because you made a good choice. Sometimes making a good decision is tough, and it’s going to hurt. But if it’s doing the right thing, it’s still worth it.

We have to live with our choices, good or bad. We’ll have to live with the consequences, good or bad. We can choose the choice, we can’t choose the consequences.

When you live with integrity, you can feel it. You get to live with the knowledge that you really are a good person doing the best you can. You know that you have the character trait of integrity.

INTEGRITY VS OBEDIENCE

Now I’m going to use a word that I really don’t like: obedience. Obedience is doing or thinking the way someone else wants you to. It takes all your choices away. There can be no real growth in decision-making when you have no choices.

It involves other people. It’s what others want. It’s what others think. Integrity is about ME trying to do what I think is the right choice.

Obedience is what you need to have when you’re a really young child. Like, “Don’t go in the street.” It kept you safe as a child. But as you get older, more of your choices rely on you knowing what you should or shouldn’t do. The way you process the world around you may not be the same as the people around you.

Now while living at home or while at school, your integrity is probably pretty closely tied to what your parent’s rules are, but not always. You have to have the courage to stand up for what you believe is right. If someone’s trying to get you to do something you don’t believe is right, speak up…respectfully.

Followers are obedient. Leaders have integrity.