On Integrity - according to the Conscious Leadership Group

Psychology

Aug 12

Why integrity matters

Having integrity is crucial for being a well-adjusted individual and surrounding yourself with people who want the best for you, whatever that is based on circumstances. Being well-adjusted means being able to make others feel secure and trust that you will behave reliably. This can boost your confidence and improve the quality of your life since the nature of your relationships can significantly affect your overall well-being.

A high-integrity approach to life can enhance your degree of meaning and responsibility because it is a source of leverage that makes you someone people want to have on their side. Integrity—from the Latin “integer” (source)—in the behavioral context is a way of showing up in the world as a whole human, which makes life easier for others because they know they can rely on you; and for yourself because you know you can rely on yourself.

As the Conscious Leadership Group’s exponents underline, drama (emotionally charged interpersonal conflicts and events) arises from unkept agreements (often unspoken) or unaligned commitments (often unspoken too). Integrity is leaning into agreements and commitments with the whole body. Agreements are implicit or explicit rules of behavior with other people, which may manifest themselves in value statements in organizational settings. Commitments represent the whole-body conviction of sticking to the agreements with conviction and honesty.

“So to me, integrity is energetic wholeness. Now what that translates to very quickly for me is full aliveness. So when I am in integrity, I am energetically whole. I am fully alive.”

— Jim Dethmer

The pillars of integrity

According to the Conscious Leadership group, there are four pillars of integrity:

Radical Responsibility: understanding and accepting your role in shaping the circumstances around you and the impact of your present choices on the present and future.
Feeling our Feelings: mindfully letting feelings arise and pass away, with lighthearted awareness and acceptance. Feelings are an essential component of being a human, and denying their reality is foolish and dangerous for your well-being because repressed or oppressed feelings can become hungry sharks swimming in free waters close to the coastline during summer. Feelings have power, similar to surfable ocean waves. Their power needs acceptance and inner processing in order to vanish, like surfing a wave requires bodily relaxation and proprioceptive awareness.
Candor: telling the uncompromising truth and taking responsibility for your words and actions. Truth can be uncomfortable at times. It can also be liberating most often, and even essential to “feel your feelings”. Refraining from practical candor (honesty) means failing to take radical responsibility while doing a disservice to your authentic self and everyone around you.
Impeccable Agreements: who does what, by when. Or who does not do what, by when. That is an agreement. A seemingly simple concept that can result in heightened emotional responses and requires the three components above in order to be successfully implemented and kept.

“An agreement is anything we said that we would do (or wouldn’t do). Clear agreements include: who / does what / by when. One who is impeccable with their agreements keeps their agreements 90% of the time and renegotiates the the other 10% as soon as they realize they won’t keep the agreement. Arguably the biggest single cause of drama on a team (or family) are unclear, unkept, or unmade agreements. Shoring up this massive drama tax leads to massive returns in aliveness.”

— Kathlyn Hendricks

How to practice and internalize integrity

Those are the components of integrity, as defined by the Conscious Leadership Group and broader literature. Practicing integrity can lead to improved integrity, similar to how you may practice and refine a skill. The practice of integrity requires emotional discomfort in the first place, because it calls for leaning into feelings and candor, arguably two of the most silently powerful forces preventing peacefulness and clarity in everyday life and relationships. Leaning into the emotional discomfort of the practice is the practice itself. A meta-skill that allows you to learn the necessary art of descending into the abyss of the unknown to gain insights into the self and the dynamic world around you.