I read an article today about what integrity supposedly means in a Landmark Education kind of a way on a blog today, and it struck me as something useful to discuss. The article distinguishes integrity from morality and ethics, and defines it as honoring one’s word.
One reason I find this interesting is that I’ve noticed that this is a place some critics of Landmark Education like to attack the company and its ideas. Apparently, some critics feel that by defining integrity as different from morality or ethics, it somehow means that Landmark is asserting that morality and ethics aren’t important and that Landmark must have neither.
Whether this misreading in intentional or not, it is clearly a misinterpretation of what’s actually being said. It’s not saying that morality and ethics are unnecessary or useless. To me, it’s saying that by focusing on integrity solely in these terms, there is something left out that could have great value to people.
Said another way, one honors one’s word solely because it is the right or good thing to do, then it is likely that one won’t necessarily be inclined to do so in situations where it isn’t particularly right or wrong to honor one’s word. And this definition of integrity in this article points to the fact that there is an impact on a person when they don’t honor their word even if they aren’t wrong for doing so.
Here’s an example. I promise myself that I will eat right and exercise several times a week. I get busy in my life and I don’t keep that promise. Now, I don’t think many people would say that this makes me a bad or immoral person. However, the impact on my health from not keeping my promise is very real, and it has nothing to do with whether or not it was moral to break my word. Moreover, there is also probably an impact on how I view myself; I may start to believe that I’m lazy or that I can’t be counted on to keep promises to myself.
The point is that whether one honors one’s word or not causes a big impact in one’s life independent of the morality of breaking or not breaking one’s promise. If I’m taking a holiday in Greece, and I miss my plane flight, one could say that I didn’t honor my word to myself to be on the plane and go on the vacation. Now, I’m not a bad person for missing the flight, but I still suffer the impact of having missed the flight and what that’s cost me in terms of my vacation.
Said another way, I believe we tend to notice the moral impact of not keeping our word, but not so much the impact on power and effectiveness in our life.
Read the article on this ‘Life after Landmark’ blog; you’ll find it interesting.
