Share Your Strength of Character
Every morning when you wake up and look at yourself in the mirror, what do you see? Are you pleased or embarrassed? Proud or ashamed? Impressed or depressed? Excited or bored? Energetic or listless? Engaged or isolated? Powerful or weak? Do you feel meaningful or meaningless?
Every morning, whether you like it or not, you wake up inside your own skin – which means you have to live with yourself, your feelings, your choices, and your behavior. And, just like compounded interest in a bank account, there are long-term effects to those choices and behaviors.
At the end of the day, the measure of your life is inevitably determined by your CHARACTER and all its strengths and weaknesses. So, what is the condition of your character? What are your basic governing values? What are the moral principles by which you want to live?
The essential qualities for Strength of Character include:
Integrity: Honesty, legitimacy, the straight stuff, the full disclosure. The willingness to be unpopular at times, by telling the truth. The absence of lying, tap-dancing, pretending, spinning, stalling, distracting and avoiding.
Responsibility: Your life is completely your responsibility. If life is going well for you, you probably made it happen. If life is going poorly, you did that too. The cards dealt to you are yours to play with; good or bad. So take accountability, make your choices, take your lumps and get on with it. The energy spent on whining, complaining, and problem describing will be so much better spent on problem solving.
Generosity of Spirit: This part of your Strength of Character is about giving more than taking, contributing more than consuming, caring more than expecting, investing more than expensing. This part of you is where you are comfortable inside your own skin because you can find your faith, live in the light, derive meaning, and hear the quiet. “You get more than you give when you give more than you get.” (Hmm… random acts of kindness.)
Establish a higher standard for yourself and your life. Commit to Integrity, Responsibility and Generosity of Spirit… and then share your values and spread them around. You are quite a role model!
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