inspiredtobeyou – Inspired to be you

What does Integrity mean to you?

Integrity is my highest value. I do my best to live by it every single day. I struggle when I see people say and do things that are disingenuous. Lying, cheating, stealing, taking advantage of others for their own (selfish) gain. All the things someone might do to step on others to advance themselves, to make things better for themselves alone, to get ahead of the game.

Honestly, I don’t like it.

What is integrity? What does it mean exactly?

A good place to start with these things is a dictionary definition of course. So here is one to consider.

A Google search of the word ‘integrity’ came up with this from the Oxford Languages dictionary came up with:

the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.

the state of being whole and undivided.

Let’s ponder this for a moment together, shall we?

The ‘quality’ of being honest and having strong moral principles. Does this mean being moralistic, that only you know what’s ‘right’ and what’s ‘wrong’? Do you get to decide that for everyone? No, but do you get to decide that for yourself? In a sense, yes. It’s about knowing what sits right with you and what doesn’t, what feels right to you and what doesn’t. Does that mean you get to impose your meaning of right and wrong, your ‘standard’, upon everyone else? No, but it does mean you have a standard that you uphold for yourself.

And, of course, we haven’t yet talked about the ‘honesty’ part. Yes, honesty is the best policy and all that as we go about our lives, as we all know, but more importantly, honesty is also the best policy when we look upon ourselves, look upon our own lives, our behaviours, actions and beliefs and take the time to really, truly, face ourselves. Which, of course, is not easy to do.

What about the part of ‘being whole and undivided’? I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty easy to pick ourselves apart, divide ourselves up into the parts we like and the parts we don’t. What then though? Just throw away the parts of ourselves we don’t like? The flaws? The ‘ugly’ bits? If only it was that simple. Of course, it’s not.

Nor should it be. Nothing, and no-one, is perfect in life.

We are all divinely imperfect.

This is what you are, what I am, what we all are.

Without the flaws, we wouldn’t appreciate beauty. Without the parts we don’t like, we wouldn’t know what we do like. Without the tension between these contrasts, we wouldn’t find peace in the harmony when all the pieces come back together, whole and undivided, in integrity.

Living a life in integrity is about living a life that is true for you, what lights up your world, what makes your heart beat. It’s about finding out what’s right for you, what has meaning to you, then making decisions and behaving in alignment.

Easy to say, not so easy to do, especially if you, like me, aren’t sure what is really true for you. Self-exploration is the key to unlocking this. This is the hard part, the part where we may find out things about ourselves we don’t like and don’t want to face, question what we thought we wanted but discover we don’t, realise we don’t actually believe long-held ‘beliefs’ and points of view.

It will shake you, potentially to your core. It’s rocked me. As the pieces of me have become unstuck and fallen to the ground, I have been slowly picking through them, trying them back on for size to see what actually is the right fit for me – and what isn’t. This is no easy task. It’s confronting, questioning yourself, your core beliefs, even things you have used for so long to identify yourself. However, to live in integrity, everything needs to be peeled away from you, examined from a distance, and only brought back close to you if it truly feels right.

Only then will you know what is right for you, the standard that applies to you, that guides you in your life.

Challenge yourself to really get to know who you are, rise to the occasion of figuring out what’s right for you, and, set your own high standard for your life.

I’m doing it, by sharing my experiences here with you on this blog. It’s exciting and terrifying at the same time. It’s also in alignment with me – raw, honest, vulnerable and hopefully empowering you to do the same.

Live in Integrity

What does it mean to you to be You?

This is the age-old question of ‘identity’ – what does it mean to me to be Me?

It’s simple – I just need to find out who I am, what matters to me, where my place is in the world, what my purpose is, what I do and don’t like, what drives me and what stops me.

Ok, whoa. There’s a lot here. Maybe it’s not so simple.

Hmm, where do I start??

Another tough question. Fortunately, there are many books, tools, resources and modalities to choose from to start exploring who we really are and what really matters to us. I’ve been exploring a number of these and I am sharing on this website my experiences with them. This is what this WHOLE website is all about!

I think one of the best places to start is to be aware of and understand your values. These are what really matter to you. These guide you through your life whether you realise it or not. When things feel great, you’re around people you feel comfortable with, you are doing things you really like, chances are you are in a situation where your values are aligned with the people and circumstances around you. When things don’t feel so great, chances are there is some misalignment with your values.

Your values guide you through life. To fit in with life, on occasion you may have to be flexible and bend away from them slightly, though you should always come back into alignment with them. They are the centre point/core/backbone of you. If you bend away from them too much, you will ‘break’ and fall out of alignment with yourself and eventually find yourself dissatisfied, unhappy, stuck, yearning for more or something different to what you have. Which is what happened to me.

Now of course, the world isn’t meant to be a place that completely aligns to our own values – it doesn’t work like that. However, when you know who you are and what matters to you, you can make choices and choose people and situations that are a better match for what is really important to you.

For me, my highest value is integrity. Integrity trumps everything in my book, and in my little corner of the world. That’s why you’ll see on this website ‘Live in Integrity’. It’s important to me so I’m making sure it lives here on my website too.

I think finding out and knowing your values is an important first step on the pathway back to you. I think an important second step on that pathway is really coming to understand what beliefs you hold, what you honestly believe to be true – about you, about your life, about your experiences, about your corner of the world.

Once you can gain a real understanding of your values and beliefs and really become aware of them, you will start to see yourself for who you really are. And then, you will know when you are being true and authentic to you – and when you are not.

But how do I find out what I value and believe? Stay with me as I explore tools and resources on this website to help you answer this question and take those first two steps.

We’re nowhere near exploring any of the other questions yet – What is my purpose? What is my place in the world? What drives me and what stops me? We’ll get to those.

And so, I ask you again, what does it mean to you to be You? Do you want to know? Do you dare to find out? Let’s explore that together. One stepping-stone at a time.

Be true and authentic to you

How we get tangled in ourselves

Oh, what a tangled web we weave… when we don’t really know who we are, what we want or what is truly right for us.

How does this tangled web get woven you ask? Good question. It’s a question I have often asked myself in all its various forms.

How did I get here?
Why does this keep happening?
Did I take wrong turn somewhere?

I DON’T UNDERSTAND!!!

It’s so very frustrating and a war I have been battling within myself for some years that had no particular starting point or trigger, but just grew over time as feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration slowly crept up on me.

I started asking myself these questions.

How did I get here?

Well, this was fairly easy to answer. I took the sensible path, a path that is a combination of what I thought was expected of me and what I thought I needed to do to give myself what I believed I needed – security – via a safe, sensible career, a roof over my head and the funds to travel. It was a conscious choice. Objectively it was the right choice as I did achieve those things. However, I knew that just lying beneath the surface I had made a sacrifice. Of what, I wasn’t sure. I just knew it was costing me something, but I was prepared to pay that price. And so I did.

Why does this keep happening?

This was a little trickier to answer. As you go through your life, you may start to see repeating situations occur and if you have a questioning mind like I do, inevitably you ask yourself ‘why’ (one of my favourite questions by the way). That’s all very well, but what happens when you can’t come up with a rational explanation for why you continuously come across so-called friends who do the wrong thing by you or why ‘difficult’ colleagues choose to inflict their ‘difficult’ behaviour on you and all you can come up with is ‘I’m the common denominator here’.

To be clear, this is about observing what is going on in your life, seeing the patterns which are ultimately about ‘lessons’ (we’ll get to that), and the part I played. This is what I had to get crystal clear about.

Did I take wrong turn somewhere?

This was by far the hardest question to answer and something I continue to ask myself regularly as I’m constantly working on coming to truly believe that there are no wrong turns in life. There are choices, always choices, and we make our choices to the best of our knowledge and ability at the time we are making them.

I do believe that we are always in the right place at the right time no matter how challenging or downright wrong it may feel. I do believe everything happens for a reason. I have experienced that even when things don’t feel like they are going to turn out right, they always turn out the way that is best for you, again even though it seems challenging or wrong at the time. Hindsight, in its 20/20 beauty, will eventually show you this.

In my quest to answer this question, it has pushed me to turn to myself, to trust myself and to trust and have faith in the course of ‘life’. This requires an inimitable amount of faith in you and the choices you make.

Take a step back to have a look at the tapestry of your life that you have weaved together. Take in the whole picture – do you like what you see?

The picture is a tapestry of the choices you have made where you had the power and the opportunity to make a choice.

I’m looking at what I’ve weaved together – there are some tightly woven plaits, some loose threads, a few knots here and there among the different coloured threads. I’m taking the time now to unpick a few of the knots and pick up some of the loose threads to see what new tapestry I can weave together. And this time, I am doing this consciously, with intention, carefully choosing what I want my tapestry to look like.

First, I must untangle myself.

Be intentional with your choices

Welcome!

Welcome! This website/blog is intended to be a safe place for you to explore choices you have made in your life, to stop for a moment and question the life path you find yourself on, especially if you are unsure how you arrived here/on it in the first place. And then guide you in how to work out what’s right for you.

Most of us make choices in our lives that take us along certain pathways – education paths, career paths, family paths etc. Often, there comes a point in time where we start to wonder, ‘how did I get here?’. Quite quickly, the next question that usually comes is – ‘Is this what I want?’.

The ‘Should’ pathway

Many of us make choices in alignment with what we think we ‘should’ do – to please parents or family members, or following some well-intentioned advice we have received from someone ahead of us on a pathway we think we want to go down. Usually, a clear set of steps lies ahead. Do this degree to enter that profession. Take this course to learn that skill to get that job. Invest your time finding a partner if you want a family because biology says (we all know what it says!). Then we tend to make ourselves ‘fit’ the path. And by fitting the path, we narrow our focus. A good idea if you have a particular destination in mind.

But what do you miss out on along the way? Freedom? Space to experience and explore life? Being you?

The ‘I’m living in the moment’ pathway

We all know someone who never quite seems to have a clear plan, a desired destination, an aim. We see them move from place to place, job to job, circumstance to circumstance. They seem free as a bird, carefree, not a worry in the world, meandering along seemingly going nowhere and usually ending up somewhere, for a while anyway. Nothing permanent though.

Their focus is wide, taking in every chance, every opportunity, every experience.

They may not be lost, they may not be found. They seem free. But are they? Would this have been a better pathway for you? A pathway without intention?

The ‘I fell into it’ pathway

An opportunity arose, it sounded pretty good. You liked your circumstances and surroundings. So you went with it. Then, another opportunity arose. It fit neatly with your current circumstances, so you took it. Then another opportunity came up. By this stage, you have some time and life experience behind you. It seemed like a sensible progression, a ‘logical step’ if you will.

Someone comes along and asks you how you got to where you are now. Your answer, “Oh, I just fell into it”. You repeat that a few more times as the question comes up again and again and you start to realise, perhaps you didn’t choose your path. It chose you and you just stayed on it. But is it right for you?

Of course, there are many other pathways in life – these are just a couple of the paths that when we read about them, numerous people spring to mind that have followed one of them, most likely including you.

The ‘You’ pathway

Which brings me to the point of this website. Here, you will find guidance to help you find the ‘you’ pathway – the one that is right for you. It may well be the path you are already on. It may be a completely different pathway. It may be the freedom to meander along several pathways.

There is value in making intentional choices in our lives aligned with our true selves. Often, we make intentional choices that align with someone else’s version of us, not ours. This may be out of the strength of influence they have over us. This may be out of our choice to follow in their footsteps because we want what they have so treading the same path should get us there, shouldn’t it? We want to follow their trail to the same destination as theirs.

Or this may simply be out of the fact that we have become so conditioned by our life’s experiences, we have lost touch with our true selves – who we are, what matters to us, how we feel, our vision for our life.

There are a range of offerings that can help put us on a path back to ourselves. You will find some of them here.

Gather your courage. Come explore. Open yourself up to finding out about you. Are you ready to find the pathway back to ‘you’?

Be inspired to be you!