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Integrity is an inside job. It is between you and yourself.
Everyone has two selves, one that is perfect, and the other that is flawed.
The perfect one is generous, loving, unconditionally. It is compassionate.
The flawed one KNOWS, i.e. assumes that it is judged, looked down upon, and is full of hatred, anger, fear, anxiety, rebellion, and expects to be loved and accepted the way it is… and even though is loved, and accepted… it can only feel its own emotions.
This is so with every emotion. You can’t feel the love that is coming towards you. You can only feel the love that you feel for the other, Your love. Your anger. Your hate.
So no matter how much the perfect self loves the flawed self, the flawed self will feel judged… hated, despised, etc.
I have been observing my clients and my students, and there is one common characteristic that only varies in intensity: and that is self-hate… and stinginess towards self… as in punishing the self for not being perfect.
In technical terms: every time you disappoint yourself, you don’t live up to your own expectations of yourself, you hate yourself and punish yourself.
The number that expresses this alienation from self is expressed in the concept of integrity, or the integrity number on your Starting Point Measurements.
Obviously integrity has levels of difficulty, but in this article I want to talk, in detail, about the aspect of integrity where you disappoint yourself because you don’t live up to your own expectations.
There is a quote about happiness: it says something like this: want to be happy? lower your expectations.
My hunch is that most of the 421 million pages talk about lowering your expectations for life, for results for happiness itself…
But in the context of integrity and in the context of self-love/self-hate, you want to lower your expectations of how you should be, what you should achieve… because most likely your expectations are pie in the sky, unrealistic, delusional, and based on moments of brilliance, or on comparison with giants, like the creators of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and such.
The faster you can cut your expectations down to size, the faster you’ll get to self-love and a chance to actually produce something in life worth writing home about.
I had to go through this process myself, and it was painful.
I remember when I declared that I was stupid. That was my first step to start becoming realistic about my capabilities.
I had an IQ that was slightly above average… so I could expect of myself to produce results a little bit above average, but NOT genius type of results. That hurt. It felt like I was letting myself off the hook, but surprisingly that was the starting point for a period of 24 years, so far, of growth.
You cannot grow from where you are not. You can only grow from where you are.
Start where you are… said Wallace D. Wattles. He meant it figuratively and literally.
My underachiever clients and students fancy themselves higher, better, smarter, than they are. This is why they can’t and don’t grow. This is why they never go back and listen to our webinars again and again, until they absorb them.
Instead they think they got it because they are so f…ing smart… while they are actually just ordinary folks, or like me, have an IQ slightly above average.
When you look at the average, you’ll find out that it is a very low IQ. So being slightly above it is nothing to write home about.
I know it may sound like bragging, but my IQ at the present time clocks in at 165. The average IQ is 70… it used to be 100, but it is lower now.
My students’ IQ range from 70 to 100.
Interestingly the lower your IQ the bigger the gap between how you are and how you think you should be, so you hate yourself.
Secretly everyone thinks that they should be twice as big, twice as smart, twice as pretty as they seem to be for others.
Some soul corrections self-hate is turned outwards… other soul corrections turn violently against themselves.
I can see that when people get their Starting Point Measurements. I don’t have the IQ measured there… that would make people even angrier with me.
But I’ll say it again: you cannot grow from where you are not… you can only grow from where you are.
For me it took taking it on that I was stupid… in my world it simply meant: not very smart, by the way. Definitely not as smart as I had thought myself previously, not even as smart as many other people thought I was. I was a normal person, with some sechel… meaning some brains, but definitely not as much as some really smart people.
Even though my number is much higher now, I am still slow on the uptake. It still takes me a loooong time to even have questions about what I am studying, or what I am hearing.
But because I still consider myself not very smart, I substitute elbow grease for smarts, and I make efforts to understand, and execute or implement what I study or hear.
That is the most important benefit I got from that declaration back in 1996. That I am putting in the work… while before I didn’t, and while others don’t.
And ultimately that is what people whose gap between their real self and fancied self is very big don’t do. They don’t do the work. and they continue hating themselves, and oftentimes me.
Let’s put the little voice of self-hate on loudspeaker
So what is the inner voice of those who hate themselves?
“I should be smarter, more this and more that than I am, I should have more, etc.”
And what is the inner voice of those who love themselves?
I should be exactly where I am. Why? Because that is where I am. And there is never anything wrong in reality.
But I expanded it to everything. For example when I can’t fall asleep, I say: I should not be asleep because I am not.
When I eat something that doesn’t agree with me and I feel sick… I say: I should be sick… because I am.
When I am angry, sleepy, tired, annoyed, etc. I say: I should be angry, (sleepy, tired, annoyed, etc.) because I am.
And I even expand it to other things: There should be a Dark Side attack… because there is. It should be cold-hot because it is.
And to other people: They should be stupid (lazy, forceful, ungrateful, pretentious, lying, rude, selfish, etc.) because they are.
This way I am not fighting what is… and always start from where I am, from where it is.
And when, occasionally, I slip, I am unhappy too, and I also hate myself. Luckily not for long… a day or two. Max.
Want to learn a method that increases your level of integrity and with it your self-love? It is called the Integrity workshop… and it starts on March 27, 2021.
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