Another work week at an end!  Well for those whose work week runs Monday through Friday, it’s the end of another week in the marketplace.

This week, we’ve been talking about integrity with special focus on that aspect of integrity called ‘honesty’! 

Today, I want to express what I’ve come to believe is true of integrity and why it fits with what we know of the 2nd half of the journey.

As we’ve stressed so often in the past, the 2nd half of the journey has little to do with chronological age.  But everything to do with emotional age, life experiences and a level of maturity that flows within us.  It’s been my personal and professional experience that the 2nd half of the journey begins when we ‘wake up’ to the knowledge that something is different for us at a certain point.  I call it our ‘arrival point’ or the moment we see ourselves, others, our life and world from a totally different perspective.

What does that have to do with ‘integrity’?  I’ve observed that women who reach the ‘arrival point’ are often mid-30’s and beyond, and they’ve reached an awareness that what has gone before is not necessarily who they are, what they want and where they’re destined to head.

That’s the moment personal integrity meets me head on!

We’ve talked in the past several months about what brings each of us to the ‘arrival point’.  It can be a myriad number of things - something someone says that awakens us from ‘duh’ to ‘ah ha’!  It is often some kind of dramatic life experience that picks us up and sets us down in a different mental and emotional place (sort of an emotional ‘Dorothy in Oz’ experience).  It can be as simple or as complex as it needs to be to move us beyond who we are in the moment to the next phase of our life.

If integrity is only a matter of being true to self (what you see is what you get) then emotional age has nothing to do with integrity.  We can acquire it as a teen (and some actually do) or never acquire it at all.

Integrity isn’t just about being true to self.  It’s also about being honest with self and with others, regardless of the cost to self.

Does that make sense?  It does if you think of those around you who you experience as being persons of integrity!

Again, my personal - professional experience has been that those of us who’ve entered upon the 2nd half of the journey find acquiring greater personal and professional integrity an important acquisition of the rest of our lives!  And for the most part, remaining open to the learning experiences that lead to its acquisition is a hallmark of the journey. 

It takes emotional maturity to move into integrity - into honesty and trustworthiness.  It takes a willingness to explore our own motivations; reflect upon them and discover where we’ve ‘made it’ and where we still have much to learn.

Most importantly, it takes someone (or someones) who will hold us accountable.  Who love us enough to be totally honest with us and in whom we posit a great deal of trust ourselves. 

It takes developing our inclinations in the arena of ‘intuition’ with which women have been endowed by our Creator, so that we learn to trust our own ‘gut’.  And when in doubt, the ‘gut’ of someone(s) in a more objective position. 

And that requires not only integrity and maturity; but a level of confidence in ourselves.  It’s a fact that we can’t give away something we don’t have and we can’t give trust to ourselves or others until we’ve gained it in the first place.

So, as we wind up another week in the marketplace, we’ve learned that one of the distinguishing characteristics of women in the 2nd half of the journey is a sense of personal and professional integrity born out of the transitional time we’ve spent moving from one season to another in our lives. 

Ah, how will we know that we’ve acquired at least a piece of such an important characteristic?

Others will tell us so or in some way let us know that they view us as a person of integrity!

Thanks for letting me share on this subject which is so important to us as a building-block of the 2nd half of the journey.  I’ve had so much fun with this that I’m going to post a fun thing for us all as we head into the weekend.  I’ll do it later in the day, so come back as you head for home to see what awaits!

Until then, have an awesome day with much love and many blessings!

  Linda