I’m sure you know folks who have a strong sense of integrity. They feel sturdy, reliable, and trustworthy. They show up on time and do what they say they’ll do.
The good news is you can use practices to consciously cultivate integrity.
What Is Conscious Integrity?
Conscious integrity is the link that binds your actions to your ethics and your word. I’ll walk through each of these in a moment. But first, it’s helpful to convey that you can either be ‘in integrity’ or ‘out of integrity.’
The best way to tell if you are in or out of integrity is by feeling. If you are ‘in integrity,’ you’ll feel strong, whole, relaxed, and proud of how you’re showing up. You are acting like the person you want to be.
If you are ‘out of integrity,’ you’ll feel weak, shaky, and remorseful—even if all subtly. It’s as if you are acting like someone who you don’t want to be. When you act out of integrity, it disintegrates your solidity.
The Two Sides of Conscious Integrity
Now let’s explore what it means to be in or out of integrity with regard to your ethics and your word.
Conscious Integrity Aligns Your Actions With Your Ethics
We each have our own sense of right-and-wrong.
The more you study/think about morality and the more you mature, the more your own sense of right-and-wrong evolves. It is a dynamic entity.
However in any given moment you have the moral compass you have. And when an ethical decision presents itself to you, you can either do what you believe is right or what you believe is wrong.
To be in integrity with your ethics means that your moral actions are in alignment with what you believe to be right. Living this way has your hands feel clean and can instill a fierce and empowering sense of honor into your heart.
To be out of integrity with your ethics means that you are taking action that you believe to be wrong. Perhaps you didn’t slow down to consult your moral compass, or perhaps you caved to other pressures. Either way, this tends to come with a feeling of guilt, shame, or remorse.
People with naturally strong consciousnesses don’t necessarily have better ethical frameworks, but when they do what they believe is wrong, they feel immensely guilty (shout-out to all the cubscouts out there!). On the flip side, there may be some ethical philosophers out there with a perfect moral framework, but they lack an integrity backbone and never act on their ethical theories.
If you pay attention closely, you’ll see that there are endless tests to act in accordance with your ethics. Pretty much every day. Especially if you espouse truth-telling as a moral principle, you’ll be shocked at just how difficult and nuanced it is to commit to always telling the truth.
Conscious Integrity Aligns Your Actions With Your Word
We all have promises, agreements, and commitments in our life. To be in integrity is pretty simple – you only make agreements you believe you can honor, and once you make an agreement, you strive to keep it. Doing so will make you a person others can trust and rely on. And how spectacular and rare it is to have collaborators who always do what they say they’ll do!
If you are out of integrity with your word, it means you are breaking a commitment, agreement, or promise you made.
Your word is sacred.
Your word is an emblem of trust and power. The more you honor and adhere to your word, the stronger it becomes. With a strong word, you can etch declarations into the fabrics of reality and trust them to actualize—just like every other time your word has come true.
Each time you give your word and then violate it, not only do others lose trust in your reliability, but you also lose trust in your reliability.
Commitments with yourself
Conscious integrity with your word extends to yourself as well. You also have agreements, commitments, and promises with yourself. Maybe you promised yourself no more YouTube for the rest of the night, or perhaps you agreed with yourself that you’d finish this ten-mile run, no matter how hard it gets.
The more you keep your commitments to yourself—and stay in integrity with your word—the more you’ll trust yourself and the more powerful your word will become. If you continually violate your word to yourself, it (and you) will become weak and floppy, and you will lose trust in yourself.
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4 Tips to Living in Conscious Integrity
Now that we know what it means to be in integrity, here are a few ways to practice.
1. Care about your integrity
This. one is kind of meta, but it’s really the most important.
I only build connections with people who care about their integrity. They don’t need to be perfect or the best at integrity, but they need to at least care about it. Otherwise, that’s not a person there I can lean on or trust.
Action Step: Journal on the following:
- Why might I want to cultivate my integrity?
- Why would I want to become more trustworthy?
- How would having stronger integrity improve my relationships with others and myself?
2. Be cautious with your word
If someone asks you to keep something confidential, take a pause first and check in with yourself if you think you can.
If you engage in a coffee chat with an acquaintance, don’t say, “I’d love to do this again!” if that isn’t true for you.
Let’s say you are late for a meeting with a collaborator, and you automatically assure them “I won’t be late again.” Don’t say that unless you mean it. If you are late next week, your word will take a hit.
Action Step: Before making any commitments or agreements, pause. Get in conversation with yourself if you mean and can stand by what you’re about to say.
3. Do your best!
This one is kind of obvious, but it’s worth stating outright.
Once you’ve made a commitment, do your best to keep it! And try to stay true to your ethics!
4. If you fall out of integrity, make repairs and be kind to yourself
You are going to fail. And that’s not even pessimistic bad news – it’s just real!
You will cower away from doing what is right. You’ll catch yourself gossiping. You will falter on your agreements. Many times.
To be in conscious integrity does not mean that you will be perfect. It means that as soon as you notice that your actions are not aligning with your ethics or your word, you acknowledge it (to yourself and to anyone else impacted), take responsibility, make any necessary repairs, and then do your best next time.
Plain and simple. Half of the game is just noticing when you’ve fallen off track, catching yourself with a loving hand, and bringing yourself back into right effort.
Action Step: If you notice you are out of integrity, do the following:
- Identify exactly where you fell out of integrity
- Acknowledge how it harmed you and any other people
- Take responsibility for your actions
- Apologize to anyone you harmed
- Contemplate why you fell out of integrity
- Brainstorm how you can do better next time
5. Take on the “embrace imperfection” frame
While it’s important to try to stay on track, it’s equally (if not more!) important to be gentle with yourself.
Sometimes doing the right thing will ask more of you than you can give.
For example, when I hear people say homophobic comments, I try to speak up. I come across such comments more than I’d like because I play basketball and sometimes go to clubs, so I do encounter a fair amount of “Bro” energy. Sometimes I’m able to stand up and ask people to question their language; other times I can’t muster the courage in the moment.
If I fail to speak up, it actually doesn’t help to beat myself up.
This took me many years to learn this. In the past, when my integrity would slip, I used to equate the amount of guilt I felt with the likelihood I’d improve my behavior. But this formula didn’t work. In actuality, self-compassion is the most effective and sustainable way to do better.
Know that you can’t be perfect.
Action Step: If you act out of integrity, first practice self-compassion. Find a kind part of yourself that can truly say “it’s okay. we’re doing our best. everything is okay.”
Then take on the frame of “embracing imperfection.” What does it feel like to hold the possibility that you can’t be in perfect alignment with your ethics and word all the time?
6. Create practice containers
There are so many ways to practice empowering your word.
I have a practice where every time I read a book, I give myself the first 50 pages to feel it out. At page 50 I can either abort the book or commit to finishing it. If I do commit, I do my damn best to finish that book – because my word is on the line. I make it a practice of commitment, a chance to fortify my word.
And I’m not perfect—sometimes getting through a book feels like walking through mud with ankle weights, and it feels right to abort the book despite having committed to it. There is, after all, a time and place to change commitments.
But when these moments of broken commitments do arise, I have the growth opportunity to better understand why that commitment fell through. Was it the wrong commitment to begin with? Or did my follow-through falter?
It is very powerful to build your capacity to complete your own promises. Because perhaps you’ll want to see just how big of promises you can make yourself.
Action Step: Pick something hard or scary you want to do (meditate for 30 minutes a day for a week, or compliment a stranger, or do 100 pushups). Then find a way to formalize a commitment to doing it (through a snap of your fingers, or signing your name on a piece of paper). Then do the thing!
Here’s an article that dives into some further practices to bolster your commitment muscles.
Integrity versus Integrated
One last topic I’ll touch on is the distinction between “integrity” and “integrated.”
They both come from the etymological ancestor: ‘integer‘ (which is a ‘whole’ number. Eg 3.0 is an integer, 3.1 is not).
As we’ve covered, to be in integrity means your actions align with your ethics and your word.
To be integrated, one the other hand, is to be whole. It means that all parts of you are welcome—light and dark. Every aspect of your being is brought out of shame and fear and into conscious awareness. Integrated into the whole. The beautiful and the grotesque.
To become trustworthy, you must have integrity and be integrated.
No matter how punctual someone is, if it feels like they have a massive repressed monster inside of themself that they have been unwilling to look at, can you really feel safe and trusting with them?
And on the flip side, if someone knows and accepts every inch of their being, but they lie, slither, and cheat, then how much could you trust this person?
Both integrity and integration are necessary.
If you’d like to work on your integration, then there are two main approaches:
- Self love. Which is to bring loving acceptance to everything that comes into your awareness (usually with the intention to heal).
- Shadow work. Which is to actively bring pleasure to the critters of your being hiding in the darkness.
I Hope You Enjoyed This Post!
Hopefully you got something out of these topics. I wish you luck on your own journey of integrity 🙂
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đź’• Mike
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