Integrity - A path of reconciliation #1

I’m writing to refine my thinking on personal integrity.

May these reflections also benefit our clients and colleagues who work with integrity in life coaching, career guidance, recruitment, life orientation, leadership development, organisational culture, ethics, values, and purpose work.

In this series, I will reflect on:

• Martha Beck’s Book: ?Way of Integrity.
• My experience working (15 years) with psychometric integrity assessment in the workplace.
• Dialogue as a practice - holding space for possible reconciliation.
• and open, at the edge of my thoughts to see what this journey brings...

?Martha’s book, 'The Way of the Integrity – finding the path to your true self',? speaks of Integrity, rich with metaphors akin to being on a spiritual path of self-discovery. She tries to steer clear of Integrity as a moral concept and aims at

1.) ?Integrity - as wholeness, being in a state of undividedness.

Dante’s poem - The Devine Comedy forms the roadmap for a process: finding and facing up to our inner division, duplicity, and misalignment—healing inner splits that cause suffering—and aligning our outer behaviour with our newfound inner clarity to be in Integrity.

Though I can’t recall Beck referring to Carl Jung, these quotes point to the book’s inquiry. ?

Man becomes whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when he is living in accordance with his inner nature.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

In this context, I take passion to mean, ‘to suffer’ and an 'emotional state that befalls us'. ?From these bitter experiences, we build a capacity for compassion as the mindful response to come alongside the suffering of another. It also forms the foundation of my interest in accompaniment and companionship.

The ideas of 'my truth', 'true self', and 'true nature' fill the book's pages, which makes sense concerning integrity as an internal compass, yet raises some questions I hope to address in later writings. The warnings are around self-confinement, self-alienation and solipsism - an integrity that runs the risk of being self-righteous, closed and rigid. The book also guards against these errors of judgement, in such a way that we may realise that dodging the moral and social is neither possible nor desirable.

Integrity as wholeness, is often the first definition mentioned in dictionaries and most often neglected when Integrity is mentioned in the working environment.? ?Talk of Integrity as wholeness and healing (heal/health's root meaning is also being whole) is frequently used in a spiritual language that may seem foreign in most corporate settings.?

I think another likely reason for the lack of seeing Integrity as Wholeness in business is that there is a second definition of Integrity –

2. Having and being committed to living according to, one’s moral values and principles.

Organisations establish codes of conduct, ethics, and values that envision the working ethos and environment. These codes can be part of corporate governance, reputation management, risk management, values-driven business models, etc… Many individuals want to show that their organisations have integrity and can be trusted to do business with them. It makes sense that?Integrity?is one of the most cited values in business alongside?innovation?and?sustainability. Living up to your espoused values is integrity, otherwise, you only expose your hypocrisy.

Wouldn't it be refreshing, if a company upon feeling the urge to tell others their values, put them up as ‘Wanted’ posters - A sign of life, rather than empty words on the wall?

Interestingly, when asking our trainees to define Integrity, one of the most cited answers is,

3. “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching”.?

So regularly does it come up, I am convinced it must be found in some South African psychology textbook. ?The internet both attributes and informs me of the misattribution to C.S. Lewis.? ?

At first glance, the sentence claims we should do the right thing for the right reasons, which is not based on social approval.? This could be a call to be guided by your inner truth, as in the case of Beck's 'Way of Integrity'. The question remains what makes an act right? Since our values and virtues are normative societal constructs built by the approval of our culture to act in a particular way.? I could easily say that Integrity is also winning the approval of others in an honourable way. Take for example this quote from Thomas Jefferson,

“Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching”

In a dialogue, we could hold these different perspectives in full appreciation of where they may take us, and what new insight might emerge when we bring them together, or mirror it back to our own worldviews. From a participatory space for sharing in meaning, we prepare the common ground for growing our self-knowledge, tolerance, empathy and imagination. A great support for living a life of integrity.

(Personally) I am interested in exploring integrity as harmonising the 'conversational nature of reality'(David Whyte), to be alive and attentive to our creative participation in the cosmos.

Here comes the end of the opening move of this series. A lot is still left unsaid and unaccounted for; your critiques, comments and questions are most welcome in this continued inquiry...