Use Your Integrity to Find Inner Peace
Integrity is crucial to inner peace and fulfillment in life.
Integrity means aligning your values with your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Do you know your values? It took me many years to fully understand my values, and I’m still working on it.
If you’re not fully aware of your values, one way to look for them is to pay attention to your interactions with others.
When you do or say something (or even think and feel something internally) that you are not comfortable with, it may be a clue that you are out of alignment with your integrity – you might have a value that you are not respecting and that is causing discomfort.
Use that discomfort to identify where you might be out of step with your values.
As an example, I had a supervisor at work for whom I had very little respect. When I would interact with him at work, I would be curt and dismissive, disrespectful. Every time that happened, I would feel icky. I could blame that feeling on him or the situation, but ultimately, if I was honest, I DID NOT FEEL GOOD ABOUT MY BEHAVIOR. Even though he wasn’t even noticing and it wasn’t affecting my work, inside I did not like how I was feeling.
The value that I was out of alignment with was this: it’s important to me to treat EVERYONE with at least courtesy, even if I can’t respect them. Once I started treating my supervisor with courtesy, the discomfort disappeared. I could interact with him with a clear conscience and no uncomfortable judgments (about him or me) running through my mind.
When you’re in alignment with our values, and you think, feel, and act out of your integrity, you feel clean and clear in your relationships. That includes your relationship with yourself.
I have found the most relief in my own mind when I think, feel, and act from my integrity. I no longer generate or carry around self-judgment or regret. In my interactions with others, I stay clean and clear by keeping my behavior in alignment with my values.
I’m definitely not perfect, though, and have to continue to pay attention to discomfort as it arises. But at least I’m more quickly aware of disconnects between my values and my thoughts, feelings, and actions.
What are you suffering over today? Can you identify where the discomfort is coming from? Is your thinking, your feelings, or your behavior out of alignment with your values? This is a starting point for addressing and overcoming challenges to our peace of mind.
I’d love to hear what you’re worrying about today and what you think about these ideas about integrity as a way to understand and address the concerns.
Photo by Katrina Wright on Unsplash
