Having honesty and integrity

 

When was the last time you lied?

What I’m talking about here is any kind of lie.

Maybe it was a really small one for your spouse or kids. Like “I really love your hair”, or “No Baby those pants don’t make your butt like BIG.” 

It doesn’t have to be a big lie.  Just be honest with yourself.

One more question.

When was the last time you lied to yourself?

It could have been about anything. Like, maybe…..

“It’s not your fault the dogs didn’t get fed this morning, one of the kids should have done it.”

Or maybe.

“I really need coffee/caffeine to wake up in the morning.”

Or it just might have been.

“It’s not my fault I didn’t get the promotion. There was nothing I could have done differently.”

I know that a few of you who were reading this just stopped right there. Because I asked you to be honest with yourself.

And that’s ok.  Honesty is HARD. I get it.

For those of you still with me, Thanks!

The thing about honesty is that Satan loves lies.

He gets you to think that it is ok to tell a small one. Because he knows that once you tell a small one and get away with it, it gets easier and easier to tell bigger and bigger ones.

To the point where you are willing to compromise your moral values to an extreme.

Like all things it starts small then it continues to build until it is so big that you don’t feel that you can stop. Because when you stop in your mind you feel like the whole world will come crashing down.

The reason I know so much about this is that I used to be a habitual liar.

It started small, then it turned into bigger and bigger lies. Until one day almost every word out of my mouth was a lie.  

I thought that I was doing an amazing job at lying to everyone, and I felt like I couldn’t stop lying because if I did, then everyone would know that I was a liar.

Then one day out of the blue, I just stopped lying.

I stopped lying to myself, my wife, my kids, my employer, my co-workers, to everyone.

When someone asked me something and I thought my answer would hurt their feelings, I found a way to tell the truth while not hurting their feelings. “Well Babe those pants don’t exactly help you to flaunt your best features. Because pants don’t show off attitude.” (PS Jenna never asks me this question, she knows that everything she wears makes her butt look good. To me.  Lol)

I also stopped lying to myself.

And guess what???

This helped me to increase my integrity.

By being honest my integrity rose by multiple levels too.

I did what I said I was going to do when I said I was going to do it.  I stopped lying to myself and others then more people became interested in what I had to say and actually listened.

Can I tell you a little story that is going to make me look really bad?  Will you try your best not to hold what I tell you against me and who I am?

Thanks.

Before we started Eclipse DOT (shameless pug www.Eclipse-dot.com) I was working for another company.  I had gotten my first “salaried” position and felt like I was truly becoming successful in life. (don’t ask me why being on salary made me think I was successful, but it did.)

I had been putting in LONG hours. I mean 10-12 hour days 5 days a week. To be 10% honest I was getting a little burnt out.

I had never been in a salaried position before, so I wanted to track my hours to see what my true hourly rate was. (Pro tip, never do this! It will just disappoint you) After doing the math I discovered that while I was making more $$ on my paycheck, I had actually taken a MAJOR pay cut.

At the time money was important to me. This really hurt my ego and made me think that I was getting screwed.

So, I tracked my hours honestly.  I kept records of time at the office, time out of the office, and any breaks that I took. When I traveled I tracked the time I started working until the time that I stopped. And I was really good about giving the company some “free” time when I answered my phone after hours or opened my computer in the evening while sitting in the hotel room.

Then one day I decided that I didn’t want to burn a vacation day. I mean I had been working so many hours and to my calculations, over the last 6 months, I had worked more than 163 hours extra that I didn’t get paid for. (Just an FYI, that’s not how salary works. Lol)

When we decided to go on a little trip I chose not to tell anyone about it. Instead, I loaded everyone up and we left. Without telling anyone at work anything about it.

I told Jenna that we couldn’t post any pictures on social media because I didn’t want anything to be traced back to the fact that I was not at work.

Do you think I enjoyed this “vacation”?

NOT AT ALL!!!!

The entire trip was 10X more stressful than it should have been.

Every time my cell would ring, before I would answer it I would make sure that I was in an area where no one would know that I was not at work.

I’ll bet some of you right now are thinking, “Well you deserved the time off, because of how much extra time you worked.” Or maybe, “If I caught you I would have fired you, you’re lucky you didn’t get caught in the act.”

The truth is that I did this several times before something snapped inside my head.

When things clicked I discovered that if I asked to have the time to go on a trip the worst thing that could happen is that they would say “No” and then I wouldn’t be able to go. 

Not a huge deal right?

From that point forward I gained massive amounts of honesty and subsequently, integrity followed.

In the end, when we decided to start Eclipse DOT I had made such an impression on the leadership team that every single one of them asked me what it would take to make me stay.

Do you have any idea how great I felt after those meetings?