The people I work with are a family to me. Coincidently, it is a team of women, with a wonderful combination of strengths that run the retail shop that I currently work at. One of my favourite things about work is the quality of people I get to work with, and the thought-provoking conversations that we all can have.
Recently, a conversation with my colleague and friend, Kate, regarding integrity played a huge role in my life. What happened was something disgusting, but I choose not to put out my dirty laundry onto my blog. I prefer to take it as a lesson learned and move on.
What is Integrity?
Everyone uses that word and we all know how heavy of a word it is. However, do we all really know what it means? To be honest with you, I did not know what it meant on the day of that conversation, so I openly admitted my lack of knowledge and asked Kate what integrity really meant. I knew nothing more, apart from that it was a positive character trait that we all should strive for. Kate, who is a wonderful mother to two almost-adults, defined it as being stable or strong enough to stand your own ground. She explained what she had told her children.
She told them that everything else would come and go in life, apart from their integrity. She said that there are many things that the world can possibly take away from you, but not your integrity.
Kate interpreted integrity as a form of individuality. So basically, if nine people were to think a certain way, then the tenth person who has integrity would not feel coerced into agreeing with the rest of them. That's because integrity is being able to stand your own ground based on your morals and values. It doesn’t mean shattering someone else’s beliefs, but simply not letting them sway yours. In summary, her explanation was a beautiful elaboration on the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of ‘integrity’:
“The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.”
It really is a foundational trait for character development. After some thought into 'integrity', I'm sure that having a strong sense of integrity would assist us in many ways: individually (e.g. when making important decisions) and socially (e.g. friendships). My conversation with my friend eventually proceeded onto the latter end of the spectrum: integrity in terms of relationships.
Integrity & Relationships
Our conversation focused on a relationship between friends: aka. friendship. But I’m sure that it can be applied to all different sorts of relationships. I hope that by now, we all can establish that integrity is a foundational stone to character development. A friendship would only be successful, and worth your time and effort if you and your friend have developed that sense of integrity within yourself and are able to respect each other's individuality.
If two friends have exactly the same likes and dislikes, then that friendship is based on lies. That sort of a friendship is simply impossible.
A healthy relationship is where two people can agree to disagree and not let that difference of opinions disturb their relationship. It’s where the two individuals respect and love each other’s differences and still choose to give each other the attention and care needed for a relationship to survive.
All in all, that is the term ‘integrity’ applied to a friendship. Maintaining and respecting your own and your friend’s individuality is a keystone to a good friendship, or any other relationship.
Retaining YOUR Integrity
Going back to where I started: where integrity recently played a significant role in my life, we will take a slight look at integrity in terms of individuals. Integrity has a lot to do with your response to someone’s disruptive or horrible behaviour towards you. Very recently, I was really hurt emotionally by someone’s horrible actions towards me – someone relatively close. It damaged my trust in this world. I honestly felt, at that moment, that this world is a mean place, and I was surprised that it would stoop as low as that to deliberately hurt me. Integrity came into the picture when I was extremely tempted to do or wish for something horrible for revenge, but then I remembered that I’ve been raised with better morals and principles than that. Fortunately, I made the best from the situation and learned not to trust those people, and not to expect much from them and others. I remained calm and have decided to forgive. Because at the end of the day, I literally just lost an item of mine, but the person(s) lost their dignity. Now, dignity has many similarities with integrity, but is still different to it. It is something that I can go on about, but we’ll keep this blogpost limited to my shallow (yet, hopefully useful) understanding of integrity.
Leaving you all with this short video, with a little bit of a greater insight on integrity:
Signing off,
kiiranb
xo
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