Transcript: I want to talk to you about oneness, integrity, duality. These are the things I want to talk to you about. It comes from a great book, Principles, Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio on page 327 really describes the word integrity in a totally different way, he says integrity comes from the Latin word “integritas”, meaning one, or whole. So people who are one way on the inside and another way on the outside, that is they’re not whole, lack integrity. They have duality instead. And I’ve lived in my life with duality and fight that a lot of times. And you may live with duality too. And that’s really being a different person in different places. And that’s a hard way to live. It’ll actually mess up your head. Here’s what he says about what it will do. “People who are one way on the inside and another on the outside become conflicted and they often lose touch with their own values and it’s difficult for them to be happy.” That is wild, and that points to the importance of having integrity.

Now, integrity we normally think of what is integrity, integrity is the thing that we think, well we don’t lie, right? But actually integrity is about being one. It’s about having a wholeness to who you are. And that bleeds out into not lying, right? Because if you’re a person who doesn’t lie then no matter what, no matter what situation you’re in, you’re not going to lie, for example. That’s being one and that’s being whole, a whole person wherever you are. Now this kind of concept can take you into this work life balance discussion too. Because you are not a person at work and a different person at home. You’re not. You’re the same person. And a lot of times we struggle with balancing because we put up walls in those two places and we say that cannot come over here and this cannot go over there. And you know what, we’re actually defining duality in our life when we’re doing that. And I think that’s what we struggle with balancing. That’s when we struggle balancing our life. Because we’re trying to actually be two different people and we can’t.

In our firm we like to tell our team, all that you are, we want to bring all of you into the firm. Now, we can’t solve your personal problems, but we care about it and we love you and we want to know about it. So we build places and times when we can hear our team talk about it.

And you know what, I need it too. I hope our team accepts me and accepts my partner with the brokenness that we bring too, because we want to say you get all of us, you don’t get part of us, you don’t get the dual minded person. You don’t get the work person and not get the personal person. No, in our water cooler room and our virtual online chat system, we’re posting stuff about our personal lives. Our dogs, families, marriages, babies, all of that, because we want the whole person. Because we know there is an integrity to wholeness. And if we can let the team come fully into this firm and be embraced for all that they are, the good and the bad, then they don’t have to fight the balance and they can trust. They don’t have to fight the balance of going, work-life balance, right. Because that’s just a duality that I don’t think there is a balance. There’s not a balance to a work-life balance, right? There’s being yourself everywhere. That’s what it is. Being balanced is being one in the integrity of your mind and who you are.

So as you’re thinking through how you lead your firm, how you lead your team, how you lead yourself. Don’t try to be one person at home and one person at work. Have integrity, invite everybody’s everything into the firm. Now it can’t distract the work, right? But embrace everybody and the fullness, the wholeness of who they are. Embrace that whole person.

Because when you embrace that whole person they get to be healthy. They don’t have to hide or cut off part of themselves to you. Because if you build a company where you make people cut off part of who they are, they’re going to come into your company as half of a person. And leaders too, to have integrity, you can’t display a fakeness to your leadership.

Authenticity is about being whole. Authenticity is about sharing all of the stuff of who you are. It’s about saying, hey, I’m the leader, I’m going to lead, and I don’t get this right all the time. It’s being honest and open about that and bringing your whole self as a leader to your company.

So these are the kind of things we talk through in Thriveal and in some of our events like our Deeper Weekend conference. We’ve got our 10th anniversary conference coming up in October. 10 years we’ve been doing this. And we invite about 100 firm entrepreneurs to Greenville, South Carolina to talk about these deep things, the things that truly are the root issues to help us run our firms in solid ways, in real ways. So we want to invite you. You can go to dw.thriveal.com. The sites not even fully built out yet, you’ll see some 2019 stuff up there because we just had it last October. But it’s filling up. It’s already filling up. There’s a lot of tickets that are already purchased of the 100 of people that we can let come. So we want you to come so we can care for you, the whole person, the whole person of who you are. And you need that kind of care so we welcome you to Deeper Weekend and Thriveal and all the things that we do. So I hope that discussion on what is integrity is helpful for you. Thanks for watching, we’ll see you.