A to Z of Success

Integrity

Everyone in prison probably regrets (for the most part) what they did and wish that they could go back to the time of their crime and do it again, but this time don’t do the crime. Accountability for their crime is their’s and if they had made better decisions and stuck to their integrity they wouldn’t be eating prison food.

Integrity is defined as “basing one’s actions on internally consistent framework of principles.” In other words it is a code of honor. Depth of principles and adherence of each level to the next are key factors. One is said to have integrity to the extent that everything one does is derived from the same core set of values. While those values may change, their consistency with each other and with the one’s actions determine the degree of integrity.

Most of the principles on which we base integrity are spiritual in essence and words that spring to mind are commitment, honor, courage, loyalty love, trust and perseverance to name just a few, but they are mainly based on religious concepts. no matter what your religion these qualities are promoted.

We live in a world where integrity seems to be ignored. Integrity suggests going past “what’s in it for me,” but rather “what’s the right thing to do?”

Too often we here of people claiming to be “Christians” (or other religions) and then acting in a manner which clearly shows they are not. The news is full of people claiming to be living in integrity to these principles, and then going out to be thieves, robbers, prostitutes, corrupt and all the other evils of the world we see.

We are tempted with many things to steer us away from the life of integrity, but this is just a test to see if we really are in integrity or merely giving it lip service. Man pretends to be honest, yet he hides his income from the authorities and tries to cheat. Man asks his customers to trust him and then shows that they cannot be trusted by producing false invoices to hide money.

I have lost money because I would not “forget” the VAT content on projects when asked by my customers to do so. I work on this theory - If my customer does not respect my honest, then he will not respect my dishonesty and when it all goes wrong it will come back to you.

You should not have to think about your integrity. It should be a subconscious operation. People should know that when they deal with you - they can trust you.

Personal integrity is a major part of business and lack of integrity is a major part of failure. Your customers, friends and even family will leave you if you speak with forked tongue. If you know of the story of “the boy that cried wolf” you will know what I mean.

There will be times every day when your integrity is called to test and you can either do what you should do or do what you want to. You are in control.