Living in integrity is hard but it’s the only way to live happily.

The thing about living in our integrity is that we need to show up as the person we profess that we are. That’s not always easy because we are so much better at talking about values and integrity than living our values inside of our integrity.

Maya Angelou has a saying “ Courage is the most important value because without courage we can’t practice any of the other values consistently. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous or honest.”

The biggest barrier to living with courage and staying aligned with our own values in relationships is around BOUNDARIES. We don’t know how to identify what’s ok and what’s not ok in our relationships in order for us to move forward with integrity and extend the most generous assumptions about others.

Another barrier to living in our integrity and our values, is FEAR. The fear of loss and the fear of grief is too overwhelming for us. How many of us stay in relationships where we are perpetually resentful because it’s easier to do that than to say this is how it’s always going to be, I have to decide if this is ok for me and then I have to find a way to live with it? Or I have to accept that this person is doing the best that he/she can and cannot meet my expectations therefore I have to let him/her go.

We would much rather be angry and resentful because the other person is not able to meet our expectations because facing the truth about their limitation is just too painful.

Integrity requires that we act with courage, we give up the comfort zone and we live our values of truth and honesty in our relationships. And here’s the biggie, we have to start with our relationship with ourselves. Because when we are dishonest with ourselves and we pussy foot around the truth we make everything ok and we remove the boundaries in all our relationships.

If we want to change our relationships and the way we connect with people, we have to show up and live in our own integrity by relating to others as the person we say we are.