Welcome to Gentle Reminders, a podcast where we accept that life is amazing and full of choices. I’m your host, Trina, and I love the beauty of choice. I love how human beings get to make choices and how we get to explore them, including the realm of consequence, both negative and positive, without having to go through the action itself. I truly believe and am living proof that your choices create your life’s path, and I also believe that with my privilege I can help others remove obstacles in their path. But that privilege piece? That’’s for a whole other day.
With choice and consequence, I believe that those processes, on the inside, when you start digging into them, start with personal integrity. Oxford Languages defines integrity as the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness. Not to be confused with uppity. I have a few quotes for you today on integrity so let’s dig in:
Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching.
Our whole society is based on performance. You perform at work, school and for your friends and family. Now, that sounds like a lot of pressure, doesn’t it? It sounds like everyone has to create extra personas in order to show up for their performance. That sounds exhausting. I’d rather show up as my whole self and practice being a better person every day then carefully crafting masks that differ from situation to situation. This quote reminds me that people who practice wholeheartedly being themselves are willing to embrace and struggle through being true to themselves, even when they are tired, in pain or simply not in a good place.
For me, the capturing point in this quote, what draws me in is “when no one is watching”. I think that is such a special time for each of us. Now, for a bit of background on me. I had to get good at being alone. I have never lived alone. I don’t have the experience of truly diving deep into myself, of being reliant on myself and by myself. In learning how to experience being alone, I have gone through anxiety attacks, crying myself to sleep and layer upon layer of personal discovery. I have found nuggets of myself within the context of being alone. I have come to enjoy being alone because that is my time to truly frame my life, to craft moments of time into contributions like this one. Gentle Reminders was born when no one was watching. I believe that when no one is watching, we have the opportunity to close our eyes and feel our creativity, free from the judgment of society and ourselves. Our societal showings of ourselves shed. When we are alone, we can imagine. We can explore. We have so many cans in our lives and, my lovely humans, they don’t all have to be soup.
The inspiration and power of what we can do when we’re alone leads me to my next quote.
Integrity is making sure that the things you say and the things you do are in alignment.
When you have the time to quietly craft your magical universe threads, the colours are more full of life, more full of sparkle. More full of you. There are so many ways to approach planning for life, for demonstrating who you are, for sharing your gifts with the world and my sweet darling, when you are in alignment, it is so easy to glow. When you weave the imagination of your dreams into your life, you are ready to go. You are energized and excited in a way that you know is right. You are serving with those fibres of your being. You deserve to feel that freedom and support.
But Trina… how?
Sincerely darlings, I don’t know because your journey and your imagination are going to have special threads just for you. What I do know is that finding your values and sticking to them is important.
Having values allows you to build integrity into your many decisions each day. As a very basic example, if you decide that one of your tenets is health, then you will likely brush and floss to support your health.
To that end, I do know that part of practicing integrity and values is showing up for yourself first. When you are alone, you have an opportunity to align your actions and your words.
Then when you are with others, your values and the alignment or your actions when no one was looking is one thing that people can catch onto quite quickly. It’s where you make a choice about your impact. If you want to be seen as a person of integrity, make sure that your dedications to others is in alignment. That means making sure that you deliver, show up, glow up, give up and jump up to contributing. Make sure that you understand that delivery goes both ways and lands in the realm of yes AND no. Let’s say that your kids have asked you to play a game with them. You’re tired, it’s been a long day. However, you know that the migraine you’ve got coming on is not going to let you be as present as you want to be. Be straight up and engage with integrity as you explain to your kids what’s going on and how they can help.
Let’s say that you took on a few tasks at work. Folks won’t remember if you got it done, but they’ll definitely talk about it if you don’t. And honestly, if you get it done over and over, your role as a dependable, organized, and thoughtful team mate will be cemented with your colleagues.
Let’s say that you told your partner that you wouldn’t nag for a whole week. Okay, this is a personal story but hey, I created Gentle Reminders to call myself in too! I was tired of being a nagging wife. That’s not what I signed up for. I needed a new approach and I needed it to show results just from my actions. What I did was I tried the Kindness Challenge for a month. Now, this challenge wasn’t flawless or smooth. But it did change the way I speak to my husband and improved my marriage.
I had to stick to these three rules for 30 days:
- Say nothing negative about that person – either to them or about them to anyone else.
- Each day find one positive thing you can praise or affirm about that person and tell them and tell someone else.
- Each day, do one small act of kindness or generosity for them.
It was a true test of my personal integrity.
Let’s take a moment to reflect on our two quotes:
Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching.
Integrity is making sure that the things you say and the things you do are in alignment.
How are you feeling about your personal integrity right now? Maybe rate it on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being low.
Are your actions in alignment with what you say?
Are you being honest with yourself?
For me, that is the crux of integrity, being honest with yourself. And that can be HARD. When no one is watching, you are not pressured to perform and I believe that is when you are your truest self. It can be very hard to be disciplined and do the right thing. It can be very easy to skip out on yourself. It can be very very easy to forget that you matter, especially when you’re alone or no one is paying attention to you. Being in alignment with what you say and do is a boost, as you don’t have to worry about keeping your masks in order.
Thank you all for being here with me today and I invite you to keep the conversation going. I love to hear from you!
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