That is called integrity. Unfortunately it is not something you can buy or steal.
- The L Word
The easiest way to understand the basic concept of integrity is: doing the right thing when no one is looking and no reward forthcoming.
The delicious irony of the second sentence of the quote is that buying someone's good will or stealing anything would be the opposite of having integrity.
Does integrity exist today or is it a virtue more comfortably left in the past?
No one can claim to be pure and noble. We all have our weaknesses and strengths. None of us is perfect. When we demonstrate moral weakness, we join the vast majority of humanity that is not consistent about integrity.
Most of us try to do our best most of the time. Whether anyone is watching is or not, whether we may get a reward or not. If we don't, we may have trouble sleeping at night, we may suffer stress and its resulting anxiety beyond what we should, our relationships with those we love will surely suffer eventually.
Our media fill our minds with examples of every kind of immoral behaviour that is anything but integrity. Yet, somehow, most of us keep trying to do what is right.
Whether we have integrity or we act the opposite way, a large part of the responsibility lies with our parents. In the first five years of life, parents teach us by example or by actively teaching us lessons to live with integrity or to work against the benefit of society as a whole to gain for ourselves. As adults, we each make decisions for ourselves. Yet most of us, especially after age 40 (usually sooner), follow the life lessons and role models given to us by our parents.
Integrity is how we survive instead of descending into chaos as families and communities and nations.
Why should we care about our community as a whole if our community seems to not care about us? Actually, it does. Communities don't have good enough social skills to express to us how much they appreciate us. What they do have is a penchant for whining and crying when its citizens misbehave. They whine and cry because they have not yet gained sufficient maturity to know what to do to solve its problems and avoid them in the future.
As sophisticated as we have become technologically and to a lesser extent scientifically, socially as communities we are just entering our adolescence. Seven billion of us live in an immature world that only our descendents will see into adulthood.
Just as we can't force an adolescent of 14 years to act like an adult in all ways, we can't push our communities to act more mature when they don't know how.
We can only do the right thing, do our small part to see that the community we belong to grows in a healthy way.
That means living with integrity.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children into adults who live comfortably with integrity and maturity.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label self help. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self help. Show all posts
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Thursday, February 28, 2008
You Can Be Free
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Roman emperor, stoic philosopher (121 - 180 CE)
As emperor for about two decades of the greatest empire until modern times, Marcus Aurelius knew what it would be like to allow external problems to prey on his mind. Though he was known as one of the five great emperors of Rome, there was always a lineup of powerful men who wanted the job and had the swords and henchmen needed to cause him to lose his life.
Any empire has problems and a great emperor has great problems that prey on his mind day and night. He had the wisdom to separate the operations and vicissitudes of his position from the conducting of his life. Not an easy task, surely.
Considering the number of quotations attributed to him that pass around the internet nearly two millennia after his death, Marcus Aurelius distinguished admirably between himself and his people, his empire and its conquered people and occupied lands, even between himself and life itself.
Thus he knew well that to allow external influences to cause you pain and worry was to adopt the pain and worries of the world. He wouldn't do it. He respected himself too much.
Look back at your own life for a moment. Remember back ten years. What sorts of things troubled you then? Do they still trouble you now? Almost no one can say their problems of old still trouble them, unless one of their problems is lack of self confidence.
A decade ago my life seemed to be hanging by a thread due to financial problems. Sometimes I wished I could just die so that the pain would go away. Until one day I had coffee with a friend who is a chartered accountant. Just when I was thinking that my next meal might have to come from a soup kitchen, he said "You're a long way away from being bankrupt, or even from severe financial hardship."
When I stepped away from my self destructive thoughts after our casual meeting, I could see that by rearranging my finances I could pay all my bills and have a decent life. My fear of becoming poor kept me from doing what I could to improve myself. I had emotionally hog-tied myself and thrown myself into a downward spiral.
That all ended that same day. As Marcus Aurelius said, I used my power to revoke external influences that were ruining my life.
When I consider how far I have come in the past ten years, that very special life lesson that came at a time of great personal crisis in my life may have been one of the best things that has happened to me.
The amazing thing to me is not that life changed for me, because others long before me obviously knew that could happen. The amazing lesson for me was that I had the power to refuse to allow problems I had no control over to affect my life.
Since that time I have developed two different medical syndromes which impact every day and hour of my life. But I know how lucky I am that I don't have to let them bother me. I emphasize the positive in my life and ignore the negative, at least I refuse to give it any power over me. I am the positive part of me; the negative comes along, but no one cares about it, including me.
I enjoy freedom today that I never had before my great crisis (or previous ones) because I refuse to let problems I can't control affect me. And the ones I can control, I fix.
Try it. I give you the gift of freedom, if you choose to accept it.
Bill Allin
, a book that shows adults how making small changes in their own lives can improve them, the lives of their children and everyone else who knows them. It tells you what you need to know.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Roman emperor, stoic philosopher (121 - 180 CE)
As emperor for about two decades of the greatest empire until modern times, Marcus Aurelius knew what it would be like to allow external problems to prey on his mind. Though he was known as one of the five great emperors of Rome, there was always a lineup of powerful men who wanted the job and had the swords and henchmen needed to cause him to lose his life.
Any empire has problems and a great emperor has great problems that prey on his mind day and night. He had the wisdom to separate the operations and vicissitudes of his position from the conducting of his life. Not an easy task, surely.
Considering the number of quotations attributed to him that pass around the internet nearly two millennia after his death, Marcus Aurelius distinguished admirably between himself and his people, his empire and its conquered people and occupied lands, even between himself and life itself.
Thus he knew well that to allow external influences to cause you pain and worry was to adopt the pain and worries of the world. He wouldn't do it. He respected himself too much.
Look back at your own life for a moment. Remember back ten years. What sorts of things troubled you then? Do they still trouble you now? Almost no one can say their problems of old still trouble them, unless one of their problems is lack of self confidence.
A decade ago my life seemed to be hanging by a thread due to financial problems. Sometimes I wished I could just die so that the pain would go away. Until one day I had coffee with a friend who is a chartered accountant. Just when I was thinking that my next meal might have to come from a soup kitchen, he said "You're a long way away from being bankrupt, or even from severe financial hardship."
When I stepped away from my self destructive thoughts after our casual meeting, I could see that by rearranging my finances I could pay all my bills and have a decent life. My fear of becoming poor kept me from doing what I could to improve myself. I had emotionally hog-tied myself and thrown myself into a downward spiral.
That all ended that same day. As Marcus Aurelius said, I used my power to revoke external influences that were ruining my life.
When I consider how far I have come in the past ten years, that very special life lesson that came at a time of great personal crisis in my life may have been one of the best things that has happened to me.
The amazing thing to me is not that life changed for me, because others long before me obviously knew that could happen. The amazing lesson for me was that I had the power to refuse to allow problems I had no control over to affect my life.
Since that time I have developed two different medical syndromes which impact every day and hour of my life. But I know how lucky I am that I don't have to let them bother me. I emphasize the positive in my life and ignore the negative, at least I refuse to give it any power over me. I am the positive part of me; the negative comes along, but no one cares about it, including me.
I enjoy freedom today that I never had before my great crisis (or previous ones) because I refuse to let problems I can't control affect me. And the ones I can control, I fix.
Try it. I give you the gift of freedom, if you choose to accept it.
Bill Allin
, a book that shows adults how making small changes in their own lives can improve them, the lives of their children and everyone else who knows them. It tells you what you need to know.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, January 21, 2008
Objectives: Peace And Happiness
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
- Mitch Hedberg, stand-up comic
Good line. Seems like one you would laugh at then throw away. Let's look closer.
"I'm sick of following my dreams." If you take the words literally, he has followed something but doesn't know what the destination is. Without knowing the objective or goal of a project, it would be hard to commit to it.
Imagine someone dreaming about peace in the world. Something many people wish for, but don't take seriously. They don't take it seriously because they have no idea how peace could be accomplished. They might take some initiatives, such as attending a seminar or being part of a demonstration for peace, but these activities are usually without goals or objectives (other than to advance the careers or reputations of the organizers).
It wouldn't take long or participation in many events for peace before most people would realize that it's a wish without a goal or even a plan to achieve it.
What would peace in the world look like? Surely genocide such as we have seen all too often in the past century would be a thing of the past. War might be forbidden, by international decree, with intervention by the United Nations (an independent security force) or some future version of NATO being a requirement where two or more parties seemed unwilling or unable to participate in dialogue.
Compared to today, Iraq was peaceful before the fall of Saddam and Afghanistan was at peace before the fall of the Taliban. Would rule by an iron-fisted theocracy be acceptable, or a dictatorship where one culture dominated others within the same country be tolerated?
Looking closer to home (for those of us not in war zones), would pharmaceutical companies still be able to control medical studies and sway democratic governments to make people believe that living unhealthy lifestyles and taking drugs to try to fix what we broke ourselves be allowed to continue?
Most health authorities with a conscience agree that too many people live unhealthy lifestyles that cause them to contract cancer, diabetes and dozens of other afflictions, resulting in their deaths much earlier than the average. Would democratic governments in peacetime fund and promote the results of fair studies so that everyone would know what their bodies need and what kinds of activities would compromise their health?
Would oil companies that now make fortunes daily by supplying fuel to fighting militaries settle for simply providing fuel for homes and vehicles and industries that manufacture hundreds of the items most of us use every day?
Would our religions that have continued to gain our attention, devotion and contributions for centuries be able to convert from their violence-supporting ways to teaching us how to live in harmony? No other existing agencies could manage such a mammoth task.
Peace, like many dreams, remains elusive so long as we don't have a clear idea of what it would mean. We can't reach an objective if we don't know what objective to aim for. Most people, I suspect, would have little idea what a world at peace would be like and how life would change for them.
Peace can only be achieved one person at a time, one mind at a time, one life at a time. Until we can feel peace within ourselves, we can never know peace in our families, our communities, our countries or the world.
Peace, like happiness, begins within ourselves. If we look for them from others, we will never achieve them.
Each of us is like a state within one body. Until that state is at peace within itself, it can't manage to have peaceful relations with other states. Until the state is happy with itself, it will have trouble being happy with others.
Dream what you like, but know the objective you want or you will never achieve it.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, when and what to teach children so that they can lead peaceful and healthy adult lives, even if their parents grew up on a different kind of environment.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Mitch Hedberg, stand-up comic
Good line. Seems like one you would laugh at then throw away. Let's look closer.
"I'm sick of following my dreams." If you take the words literally, he has followed something but doesn't know what the destination is. Without knowing the objective or goal of a project, it would be hard to commit to it.
Imagine someone dreaming about peace in the world. Something many people wish for, but don't take seriously. They don't take it seriously because they have no idea how peace could be accomplished. They might take some initiatives, such as attending a seminar or being part of a demonstration for peace, but these activities are usually without goals or objectives (other than to advance the careers or reputations of the organizers).
It wouldn't take long or participation in many events for peace before most people would realize that it's a wish without a goal or even a plan to achieve it.
What would peace in the world look like? Surely genocide such as we have seen all too often in the past century would be a thing of the past. War might be forbidden, by international decree, with intervention by the United Nations (an independent security force) or some future version of NATO being a requirement where two or more parties seemed unwilling or unable to participate in dialogue.
Compared to today, Iraq was peaceful before the fall of Saddam and Afghanistan was at peace before the fall of the Taliban. Would rule by an iron-fisted theocracy be acceptable, or a dictatorship where one culture dominated others within the same country be tolerated?
Looking closer to home (for those of us not in war zones), would pharmaceutical companies still be able to control medical studies and sway democratic governments to make people believe that living unhealthy lifestyles and taking drugs to try to fix what we broke ourselves be allowed to continue?
Most health authorities with a conscience agree that too many people live unhealthy lifestyles that cause them to contract cancer, diabetes and dozens of other afflictions, resulting in their deaths much earlier than the average. Would democratic governments in peacetime fund and promote the results of fair studies so that everyone would know what their bodies need and what kinds of activities would compromise their health?
Would oil companies that now make fortunes daily by supplying fuel to fighting militaries settle for simply providing fuel for homes and vehicles and industries that manufacture hundreds of the items most of us use every day?
Would our religions that have continued to gain our attention, devotion and contributions for centuries be able to convert from their violence-supporting ways to teaching us how to live in harmony? No other existing agencies could manage such a mammoth task.
Peace, like many dreams, remains elusive so long as we don't have a clear idea of what it would mean. We can't reach an objective if we don't know what objective to aim for. Most people, I suspect, would have little idea what a world at peace would be like and how life would change for them.
Peace can only be achieved one person at a time, one mind at a time, one life at a time. Until we can feel peace within ourselves, we can never know peace in our families, our communities, our countries or the world.
Peace, like happiness, begins within ourselves. If we look for them from others, we will never achieve them.
Each of us is like a state within one body. Until that state is at peace within itself, it can't manage to have peaceful relations with other states. Until the state is happy with itself, it will have trouble being happy with others.
Dream what you like, but know the objective you want or you will never achieve it.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, when and what to teach children so that they can lead peaceful and healthy adult lives, even if their parents grew up on a different kind of environment.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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