Who decided that you weren’t going to become the person you wanted to be when you were growing up? Who took the dreams you had and squeezed them through the tube of “reality” to pop out who you are now? The answer is easy – you did.
Sure, you had a coach who didn’t think you were good enough, so you rode the bench to your current life instead of into the sunset of NFL stadiums like you deserved. Maybe your high school counselor said you couldn’t get into your college of choice and crushed your dreams of IV League status. That boss that promoted everyone else over you and stole your dream of corporate success? You hate that guy.
Unfortunately for you, those are all excuses to shed the blame of your own choices. Who chose to listen to those voices? Who failed to see the opportunities in those obstacles? Who didn’t think enough of themselves to persevere and try anyway? All you.
My story isn’t different that yours. I had dreams of professional baseball and IV League degrees. I trained hard, my parents paid a bunch of money for lessons, teachers worked with me daily, but I always had the voices telling me no. My high school baseball coach put me on the bench, my counselor told me I didn’t have what it took to follow in my grandpa’s footsteps to Princeton, and my dad told me to “just get a job”. You know what I did? I listened. I never tried to play baseball beyond high school, I didn’t go to Princeton, and I owned a mental approach of getting a job instead of creating my own life.
Don’t hear me wrong, my life now is great, but I realized when we fail to chase our dreams, we fail to maintain our integrity. You don’t have to actually attain your dreams to keep integrity in tact but if you don’t even try, or you give up too early because someone on the outside told you to, you let integrity slip.
When we fail to chase our dreams, we fail to maintain our integrity.
This past week, I intentionally shared a few shots on social media of me working on my current book. They portrayed a writer. Someone working hard to make serious progress on a big project. They were genuine but they didn’t show you that until this week, the project had sat on the sideline for almost two months. A friend (I guess that title could be questioned now) asked me a couple of months ago, “why are you trying to write a book? You don’t have that much to write about, do you?” That was enough. I quit. I dropped my integrity. I stopped walking the walk to match my talk of wanting to write.
“Why are you trying to write a book? You don’t have that much to write about, do you?” That was enough. I quit.
I want us all to think more clearly about how we can avoid doing what I did. This is going to be an oversimplification but here are three ideas to help maintain integrity for the person you are working hard to be.
Process to Product
The person we want to be is often seen as a product. We say things like, “I want to be the best dad for my kids.” That’s awesome but it ignores the fact that your standing as a dad is certainly not a product. Can you point to the one person who has “dad” perfect? I don’t think so. Instead being the best dad, is on ongoing process. Inky Johnson, a renowned thought leader and motivator, says it plainly and powerfully – “It’s not about the product. It’s the process.”
When you look at your goals as a product, your integrity is much easier to let go. But if you see them as a process, integrity becomes small, daily decisions to move in the right direction. If your goal is to attain the product of winning an ultramarathon but along the way you give up, it isn’t a big deal and pretty much everyone would excuse you for it because they know they couldn’t run an ultra either. But if you see it as a process of taking one step after another, and training every day, it’s hard to deny yourself that promise because it’s simple and tangible right now. It’s not the product in the distance you’re chasing, it’s the six miles you need to put in after work today.
To maintain the integrity of your dreams, learn to love the process instead of the product.
Obstacles as the Reason to Continue (Not Stop)
Our integrity lacks most when we run up against obstacles. That bike race you promised yourself you’d compete in can easily be let go when you get hurt. The boss who decided not to promote you, hands you the best excuse you could have for why you’re not going to move up. Integrity to follow through stalls and the dream slips away.
Instead, you must see obstacles as the reason to continue, not the reason to stop. Ryan Holiday wrote an entire book on the subject that I highly recommend called The Obstacle is the Way. In it, he says our “obstacles are actually opportunities to test ourselves, to try new things, and ultimately, to triumph.” To navigate an obstacle with your integrity intact requires creativity and finding pieces of yourself that you may not have known existed. It might not be comfortable but there’s no growth in comfort anyway.
To maintain the integrity of who you said you’d become, start seeing obstacles as reasons to push forward not reasons to hit the brakes.
Hear Everyone, Listen to Someone
The voices against you are going to be loud. There’s a phenomenon out there called the “rule of the rotten tomato”. Essentially it means, much like a batch of tomatoes, one rotten comment can quickly spread and ruin the good ones. Even if you get a lot of positive encouragement from your family, one hater on Instagram can make you forget integrity and give up.
The voices are too loud to pretend that we don’t hear them. But we have a choice to listen or not. The Brother’s LIFE Council was built around this idea. All four of us have big dreams to chase and we have people around us that love to tell us all the reasons we can’t achieve them. To maintain our integrity, we hear them, but we choose to listen to the men of the Council who have our best interest in mind. Remember my piece on the crabs pulling each other back into the bucket? Same idea. You can hear those other crabs yelling for you to stop escaping and all the reasons why, but you have to choose to listen to the one cheering you on from the outside who knows what real freedom is.
If you value your integrity, hear everyone but listen to someone. Oh, and remember, the people who talk behind your back only do so because they’re behind you – leave them there and let them talk.
If you can love the process of your dream more than the product of it, find the tremendous value in the obstacles put in front of you, and find the right voices to listen to, your integrity will be easier to maintain. It is one thing to give up integrity and lie to someone else but to give up on your own vision for your life is a whole different level of depletion.
Weekend Challenge
This weekend, I want you to start to fight for your dreams and maintain the integrity to get there. You can go all sorts of ways to do this but here’s an exercise I use to stay on track with my dream to write a book:
| Action | Example – writing my book | |
| 1. Remember what your dream was | Writing my book draft this year | |
| 2. Make an integrity commitment to pursue | Write at least 1 page per day and let momentum build | |
| 3. Love the process and stick to your commitment for a week no matter what | I wrote a page at 4:30 am yesterday before my workout and that’s all I got done for the day | |
| 4. Journal the obstacles during that first week | I found time to be an obstacle, so I journaled how I would turn it into an opportunity to reprioritize my day | |
| 5. Listen to the right people | I told my Council brother, Matthew, that I was back on the book so he knew I was recommitted to the dream and I could listen to his encouragement |
Go about it however you want but make sure you go to bed Sunday with a renewed vision of the person you want to be and a step you can take on Monday to maintain your integrity and start marching toward it.