What's Your Integrity Score? Why You Should Care.

At the end of the day, your personal integrity is all you have. Perhaps we are born with a perfect score, let's arbitrarily assign this as 100.

The penalties for doing something to decrease your personal integrity are permanent. Therefore, over your lifetime, your score can only go in one direction.

DOWN

Integrity defined has only two meanings; honesty & morals or structural quality.

Let's eliminate the structural quality part. We're not talking about hairline fractures in physical structures or poorly made products from China.

The good news here is that when you do something to decrease your score you have the chance to stop the bleeding and refrain from further degradation. The bad news is your score dropped and cannot rise. 

So stability becomes success. Over time, we all begin to believe that personal integrity, though less than perfect, is good. Maybe it is better to define your integrity score in a kind of RAG status of Red, Amber and Green or High, Medium and Low, though I don't know what Medium integrity is.

On second thought, there may be just two status' that deserve our attention. 

We either have high integrity or are a S***bag.

So what's a S***bag? Dictionary.com says " an offensive or despicable person.” I like that and think we're getting closer. The black and white nature of the definition clears the RAG status.

So what's a despicable person? Let's go back to Dictionary.com for the answer. Despicable is "distaste or disgust.” That's bad if that's how others see you. I am no angel and have never met one though the closest would have been my beautiful and wonderful sister who passed several years ago. She had high integrity. 

I have always surrounded myself with people who have high integrity lids. All "A" players have high integrity, and I think John Maxwell would have agreed with this assessment.

When I find myself in situations with S***bags, I leave. I have done this in my personal life and in several places where I have worked. In my career, I have quit, been fired and retired.

Where I have quit, there were S***bags. Where I have been fired, I refused to become one.

I found this limerick by @Dr. Bill Baker, which I think sums it up well. I am not connected to him in any way but hope to be.

“The Death of Integrity”  

“Here lies in this grave Percy Pollow

Whose days were quite empty and hollow;

When he cheated and lied

is integrity died—                

And life without meaning did follow.”                                               

-- Dr. Bill Baker (2015)

So I thought I would give a limerick a shot. Here goes:

" The Scum of Integrity"

“Believers are sinners

And heathens are spinners;

With integrity in the bag

So goes the red flag-

That S***bags are ringers posed as winners.”

Have a high integrity score and keep it there.

My best, Chris