Living with Integrity - Laura A. Diaz, BCC
Living with Integrity - Laura A Diaz, BCC
Living with integrity includes living with integrity with your values and being honest with yourself first. What this means to me is that when I live the values that are important to me and empower me as a person and as a professional, I am living in integrity with my life.
One of the areas of living with integrity is keeping your agreements. The following excerpt is from my book, Choose Confidence. This section I discussed keeping agreements.
“Keeping our agreements with ourselves can be a challenge. After studying the book, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, I started to appreciate the value of keeping my agreements. One of the agreements in his book is to “be impeccable with your word.”
I found it was essential to cultivate trust with myself as I was on the path of personal transformation and becoming a leader in my career. When I started keeping agreements with myself, I increased my trust and I also noticed that my self-esteem and self-confidence increased.
I find it’s common to hear that people promise themselves they’ll do something and later they don’t keep their agreement. They make an excuse or make up a good reason why they didn’t follow through.
We think this is okay because no one knows we messed up or we think we can do it later. However, later may not come and the promise we made with ourselves can be shelved to “someday.”
Remember, any kind of agreement you make with yourself is as important as any agreement you make with another person. For example, when you say, “I’ll take a walk tomorrow morning” and then you don’t because you didn’t feel like it, this is an excuse and a breach of your agreement.
After my experiences of keeping and not keeping my agreements, I realized it made a difference in how I saw myself. As a result of keeping my agreements, I increased the trust with myself, I built a confidence in my decisions and I increased my self-esteem.
Now I deliberately make agreements only if I intend to keep them. If I don’t for some good reason, I re-negotiate my agreement. Do I always keep my agreements with myself? Not 100%! Like most people, I’m a work in progress and I’m working purposely to keep my agreements more often than not.”
