Developing Personal Integrity In A-Players

Monday. Here, we, go! From this week's newsletter training!

We’re going to show you how to develop one of the most important foundations in developing the ability to execute and follow through on a MASSIVE scale…

Personal Integrity.

Integrity is doing what you said you were going to do - delivering on your promises. 

Personal integrity is delivering on your promises to yourself.

With a foundation of personal integrity, you eliminate overthinking, you develop massive self belief, self trust and self confidence, and you back yourself to swing for the fences.

The problem is that most people have conflicting promises. They don’t know how to manage when 2 things they said they were “definitely” going to do, come into conflict with each other. Or how to prevent this from happening in the first place. 

“Discipline is doing what you said you were going to do, when the feeling that you had when you said it has gone.”

The biggest problems that cause people to lose personal integrity are:

1. They make promises to others that they can’t keep (without realising it)
2. They make promises to themselves they don’t mean
3. They’re stuck in firefighting mode
4. They’re stuck in perfectionism

Personal integrity requires the following:

1. STRIP AWAY THE NON-ESSENTIAL BS

Firstly, start saying no to direct requests.

If you can’t fulfil a request, given your time and resources, say no. 

If a request isn’t the most important thing you can be doing with your time and resources, say no. 

At first people will be disappointed. But very quickly they will respect you more for saying no. 

If you keep saying yes, you are only teaching others that you will always say yes!

If you’ve been a people pleaser in the past, then this requires that you develop the courage to be disliked, and the courage to have difficult conversations.

Secondly, start saying no to indirect requests. Stop volunteering for last minute assignments. Stop jumping in on email trails. Stop attending meetings if you don’t need the information, or if you don’t have a direct contribution to make. 

Many high achievers have built their careers and their reputations on going above and beyond and on “proving themselves”. 

But if you always need to prove yourself, then you’ll create work for yourself unnecessarily and become stretched too thin. Your stress will increase and your quality of work will decrease.

Become ruthlessly protective over your time and your schedule. If something isn’t the most important thing you could be doing, don’t do it.

As a result, you’re only making promises that you can keep, you start enjoying your work again, and you reclaim your personal time, space and energy for keeping your promises to yourself.

2. CHOOSE YOUR PAIN

When most people set goals, they choose the rewards they want - a great body, a career promotion, or a business that gives them autonomy, financial freedom and time freedom.

However, the most important question is, what is the pain you are choosing?

Not just what you’re willing to tolerate and begrudgingly suffer through, whilst you secretly wish you didn’t have to!

But what is the pain that you consciously, and voluntarily choose?

When you choose all the pain that goes with your promises, you stop negotiating with yourself, you get out of your head and you get into action. 

Jocko Willink has a great quote: “Discipline equals freedom”.

Most people understand this from the perspective of, “if you’re disciplined today, you can live a life of freedom tomorrow”. Which is true.

However, it has a deeper, and more important meaning. Most people see discipline as a lack of freedom, because now they don’t get to change their mind at the last minute, to be spontaneous, or to do whatever they feel like doing.

But if you’re not disciplined, then by default you don’t know what your personal standards are or what your non-negotiables are. Which in turn means that you inevitably end up negotiating with yourself. 

You end up in a fight with yourself. Even if you win the fight, it’s still exhausting and a complete waste of mental space and energy. 

If you lose the fight, then you waste even more mental space and energy beating the crap out of yourself. Not to mention the long term damage to your personal integrity, confidence, self trust and self belief.

That’s not freedom! 

Discipline equals freedom because discipline frees up so much space in your brain. It is mental and emotional freedom. You stop wasting time and energy fighting with yourself. You get out of your head and into action. 

3. KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DONE AND PERFECT

Perfectionism is a topic that we cover a lot, so we won’t repeat too much here.

However, when it comes to personal integrity, perfectionism - paradoxically - causes you to break your own promises to yourself over and over again.

Here’s why…

1. Tasks take 10X longer than they need to, which depletes your ability to deliver on all your other promises.
2. Since perfectionism is so stressful, you train your brain to hate your work. Which means you end up procrastinating on important tasks because they feel overwhelming.
3. It leads to the all or nothing mindset. If you can’t get it perfect then what’s the point in even trying?! Which, for some people, means they give up - breaking their own promise to themselves again.
4. One day you’re supposedly “all in”. The next day you’re disheartened and don’t see the point.

When you learn the difference between “done” and perfect, you get more done in less time with less stress. 

“Done” doesn’t mean having low standards or inadequate standards. It means having intelligent standards based on outcomes and progress, instead of impossible standards based on the irrational fear of being judged and criticised. 

“Done” means that you’re able to deliver on all your promises, Instead of doing one thing “perfectly”, hating the process, dreading doing it again, exhausting yourself, and wasting so much time that you give up on your other promises.

4. MASTER MINIMAL EFFECTIVE DOSE

The campaign lifestyle is where you live your life through campaigns. 

You have a work campaign to finish the project, raise the funding, complete the merger, or close the deal. You go “all in”... at the expense of everything else!

After you’re exhausted from the work campaign, you go on a holiday, unplug, disconnect, or party campaign.

Then you realise your body has turned to blancmange so you go on a fitness campaign.

Then your fitness campaign gets interrupted at the most frustrating time by yet another work crisis. So you ditch the health kick, tell yourself you’ll get back on track later, and resume another work campaign.

And round and round you go.

Constantly breaking your own promises to yourself. Telling yourself, “this is the last time, I’ll get back on track afterwards, I really mean it this time, this really is one of those exceptional circumstances…”

And with each cycle, your personal integrity, faith, and trust in yourself disintegrates in the background. 

A key solution to eliminating the campaign lifestyle is minimal effective dose.

Most people do the most they can get away with in order to get the fastest result possible.

As with the “done” principle, minimal effective dose does NOT mean having low standards. 

Minimal effective dose is still effective. It is your non-negotiable standard that you never drop below regardless of how busy, stressful or chaotic work and life get.

When you know your non-negotiable standards with your parenting, with your spouse, with your food, with alcohol, with caffeine, and with fitness, you never have to break your promises to yourself again.

You will always be able to deliver on your minimal effective dose, no matter how busy work gets - especially when you combine this principle with everything else we’ve discussed so far.

TL;DR SUMMARY

Strip away the non-essentials. Be ruthlessly protective over your space and time. Say no to direct requests that aren’t your priority. Stop volunteering for indirect requests.

Develop discipline by choosing your pain - voluntarily, consciously, and willingly.

Choosing done over perfect

Master minimal effective dose. Turn your minimal effective dose into non-negotiable standards.

Love Rachel & David 

xxx