Be Impeccable With Your Word

Photo Credit Wolfaguerra's Blog- http://wolflaguerra.wordpress.com/

“Be impeccable with your word”.

I have found this to be an essential part of personal integrity and maybe even the starting point from which we can achieve higher and more consistent levels.

All we have in this world are our actions and words. Who we are, what we believe, and what we choose to value only comes into reality when we speak or when we act.

Author’s Note: I first learned about this concept in the book, “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz, who has a chapter titled “Be impeccable with Your Word”. For anyone interested in integrity, I highly recommend their work, http://www.toltecspirit.com/four-agreements/impeccable-word/

When I think about it though, most of us tend to speak a lot more than we act.

I haven’t noticed many Clint Eastwood types walking around these days; you know the “man of few words”. I’ve heard the saying “actions speak louder than words” and I agree, but I believe we tend to focus and worry about our actions a lot more than our words. Most of us know we are supposed to tell the truth and if we make a verbal commitment, we should follow through, but what about all the other words we use? Is it possible to tell the full and complete truth as we see it, and to follow through with our commitments, but to still be unintegrious? I believe so. I have recently learned this myself. Many of our daily conversations seem fairly insignificant, but when it comes to integrity, they are not.

If we are going  to live an integrious life then the words that come out of our mouth must be integrious. At the very least, we must make the effort.

How many thousands of words do we say without thinking them through? When we add up all these words they should be consistent with our deepest beliefs and highest values. I have noticed some bad habits in myself recently in this area. For example, recently I was having a bad day and my natural inclination was to tell someone about it and share my feelings. However, what I really wanted to hear is that “things will get better”, or “it’s not my fault”.

Granted, there are times when we need someone to listen and sympathize, but this shouldn’t have been one of those times. The point is that I was not being impeccable with my word because it was not an extension of me or what I value. In this case my words were used for selfish reasons. I just didn’t realize it at the time. Probably because I became conditioned to do this at an early age.

However, after thinking it through and being aware of this behavior I now choose to deal with it differently. One of my values is taking responsibility for myself and inherently that means not complaining, which means dealing with the occasional bad day myself, internally.

A good starting point  is simply to start speaking less, listening more, and to consciously think about what we say, before we say it. It is a good habit to ask ourself “how and why am I choosing these words? Are they congruent with the person that I am and the values I want to live by?” 

In doing this we will end up speaking with more authenticity, and our words will have more of an impact in exactly the way we want them to. And who knows we might even end up learning more because we are truly listening instead of just waiting for our chance to speak.