Focal Points of Personal Growth

Personal Developement Articles

Focal Points of Personal Growth -Integrity

To get you a little more focused in on this concept, let’s take a look at a few synonyms: honesty, honor, reliability, uprightness. Integrity is consistently, not perfectly, adhering to a code of moral values. Integrity can help you overall, help you in your relationships, and how you feel about your self. This is a major factor in achieving growth in all areas of life. But let’s get into what integrity is in a little more detail.

According to Abraham Maslow, the father of humanistic psychology, integrity is a characteristic that belongs to people who are self-actualized, or the motive to realize all of one’s potential. Note: not some potential but a desire to achieve or reach all of one’s potential.

Integrity is simply a desire to achieve moral growth. Unfortunately, we see little of this today. When the word achievement is invoked we often think of those achieving in academics, sports, business, the arts, science, and politics. Very rarely do we admire, look to, or think of great moral achievers, especially in a day and age when self-service and winning is a priority over and above valour and honesty.

Nevertheless, we admire, at times even come close to worshipping these great achievers: Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordon, David Ortiz, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Madonna. A point to keep in mind is that even high achievers, or those who have self-actualized in their careers to a greater degree than others, often times suffer a majority of failure. Tiger Woods, of course, a great winner, still loses about seventy-five percent of the time. Michael Jordan, even with all his success, missed more shots than he made and won the championship only six out of the fifteen years he played. David Ortiz, one of the most prolific and clutch hitters in Major League Baseball, still fails seventy percent of the time. And even the most successful people in business and entertainment, like those listed above, still fail more than they achieve. But it is this human desire to achieve that is above all else an innate desire, and this innate desire to achieve, to work towards perfection requires one to use many of the attributes I’ve listed above to get there. They are essential to helping you work towards your potential.

Knowing oneself heightens a person's integrity. And there are a couple of other very important elements of self-actualization: lack of preudice and acceptance of facts. For now, let's take a closer look at morality.

Morality. What does that mean? It is not, according to some, a shifting or changing principle, meaning that one can modify it according to one’s needs and desires or as they see fit. For example, it is not right to say that stealing is immoral and then qualify it when you find some money on the street and say, "Well, attempting to track down this person is futile. Finders keepers." Now I’m not saying that we should all be a goody-two-shoes (what does that mean anyway?) but more that we should look at this issue of morality and focus on its absolute definition. However, when you look up the definition, it is not absolute, meaning it’s a little vague. What gives? So how do we know what is, according to the dictionary definition, "right or just behaviour" or what it means to have a "sense of what is right or wrong"?

"It is one of the strange ironies of this strange life [that] those who work the hardest, who subject themselves to the strictest discipline, who give up certain pleasurable things in order to achieve a goal, are the happiest people."-- Brutus Hamilton

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