Professional Ethics? Why?

Confucius quote "“Don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you.”

Ever standing golden words. Let me tell me it is not easy. It is hard and the pain is enormous when you choose not to exploit a life time opportunity on ethical grounds.

Our financial needs, career aspirations, family bondage and commitments keeps chasing us to the ends of temptation to avail such opportunities. But these are merely illusions. Many of us might have realized or will realize if we hold to our values and stay focused and take the pain and claim the credit for the pain, this turns out a bigger and enormous opportunity of living our lives to its fullest.

Having a strong affinity, diviner compassion towards ethics in what ever we do in our life. We should target to deliver it consistently to our consciousness in most of the things we do. In practice, there are places where we might have made blunders not necessarily by temptations but due to lack of awareness. But the key is how we correct and move forward.

Few cases where I thought should share:-

1. A Tier 1 Corporate entity suppose to settle the Provident Fund for an employee. The employee had been following up with the corporate entity for payments since he was penny less. The Provident Fund controller of the entity took his own time in processing the PF and after hard follow ups the cheque with a duly signed statement was sent to the employee.
2. The employee was shocked by looking at the cheque amount. There was an error of commission. The cheque was issued for INR 90,00,000 instead of INR 9,00,000. An addition of zero.
3. Poor guy was mad and he was already running out of money and giving this back again will take couple of months for the corporate entity to process and come back. But then this guy took a hard decision and hit back the PF controller of the corporate entity and asked him to correct and issue with immediate effect otherwise the issue will be escalated to the PF Controller of that State region. It was corrected on the same day and issued back.

How many of us will do this? Good if I hear the word "Many of us"

An employee just joined an organization for a lesser pay that what the market pay was due to his financial commitments and time delays in the working offers. Within 3 months, this employee gets an opportunity offering double the amount + benefits + higher role. The organization that offered is a Tier 1 global player in the market. The employee was tempted and the employee had no assurances that his current company will appreciate his ethical moves.

It was a very tough decision to get away from the temptations. But the employee took a hard decision to politely reject the offer on the ethical grounds. He did inform his current organization of the decision that he took to let them know this is ethical behavior. However, the current company failed to exercise the employee loyalty back to him and even failed to pay the monthly salary on time.

In my experiences, I have been consistently rejecting many opportunities considering ethics which could have made me exponentially wealthier than what I am now.  I don't regret. Rather this has added a higher degree and magnitude of inner strength which made me bigger than the opportunity.

Being the smallest of all the smallest makes it bigger.

I did have fear and doubts along the way. "am I losing all the opportunities that I encountered on my way and and was I not smart enough to exploit?"

But every time, the values delivered by ethics made me stronger and stronger of myself.

Every time I rejected an opportunity on ethical grounds, it added me immense power, exponential strength and makes me live the life to its fullest. I am sure I wouldn't have attained these if I would have chosen the other way.

Following ethics in what we do may make us to feel all kind of pain like illusions. Yes, they are painful tentatively. The strength in not giving up matters. If we value what we followed, stay stronger and focused, it does heads us towards the kingdom of wisdom which can never be paralleled!

I would be thankful if this message draws your inner attention.

Have a great weekend!