Integrity - A holistic approach to integrity

I was asking Kiran Gulrajani, CEO of Co-Evolve and OIA Learning Hub: "Kiran, what are your thoughts about integrity." His answer was:

"Integrity is about 4 aspects:
1- Emotional literacy
2- Authentic speaking and deep listening
3- Keeping agreements
4- Responsibility"

In the line below, I will endeavor to shade more light on these 4 aspects. Each of them will - I am sure - generate more posts as they uncover wide area of learning, behaviors and theories...

Emotional literacy

Definition of Emotional Literacy by Steve Hein: The ability to express feelings with specific feeling words, in 3 word sentences. For example, "I feel rejected."

(Brief info on Steve Hein: "For the past 10 years or so I have been traveling around the world. I have now been to about 60 countries. I believe I have a lot of experience to share with people. I share many of these experiences freely on my main website EQI.org. I have also been doing a lot of volunteer work, particulary with emotionally abused youth. From them I have learned a lot about emotional intellignce and emotional abuse. My writing on these subjects now is in the top 3 on Google in both areas." )

Developing your emotional literacy (by Steve Hein)

"The purpose for developing our emotional literacy is to precisely identify and communicate our feelings. When we do this we are helping nature fulfill its design for our feelings. We must know how we feel in order to be able to fill our emotional needs. And we must communicate our feelings in order to get the emotional support and understanding we need from others, as well as to show our emotional support and understanding to them."

"Also, one of the first steps to developing our emotional intelligence is to improve our emotional literacy. In other words, to improve our ability to identify our feelings by their specific names - and the more specific we can be, the better. Though the term emotional literacy is not used in theMayer Salovey model of emotional intelligence, they do say that the first branch of emotional intelligence is ...the capacity to perceive and to express feelings. They then add that Emotional intelligence cannot begin without the first branch..." Mayer and Salove have also written that the "ability to label emotions" is part of the third branch of their model (Emotional understanding)"

"In the English language we have thousands of words which describe and identify our emotions, we just don't use many of them. (I have been compiling a list of such words since 1995 and the list is now over 3,000 words.)"

"There are a lot of reasons we don't make much use of this rich vocabulary which is available to us. One is that we just aren't taught to speak using feeling words. I have found, though, that many people can identify their feelings quite well when given a little help."

"If you are interested in working on your emotional literacy, the first step is to start using simple, three word sentences such as these:

I feel sad. I feel motivated. I feel offended. I feel appreciated. I feel hurt. I feel disrespected.

This may feel strange at first, since not many people do this. But it gets easier with time, and as you find other people who you can share your true feelings with. (See also emotional honestly)"

"In my experience, sometimes just by naming a feeling, we begin to actually feel the feeling. It seems that by naming the feeling we help our mind access the emotional part of the brain where feelings are stored. This step of identifying the feeling by name is, I believe, essential to a high development of one's innate emotional processing abilities. I also believe that most of the literature on EQ and EI fails to acknowledge the importance of this and of the importance of having a rich emotional vocabulary."

What is and isn't emotional literacy

Examples of Emotional Literacy	Examples of What is NOT Emotional Literacy
I feel.... criticized unimportant disrespected bored	I feel like ....I feel that... I feel like you .... (This is a "you message" in disguise. See below)

See also "Making Predictions vs. Expressing Feelings"
Taken from: http://eqi.org/elit.htm#Definition of Emotional Literacy

Authentic Speaking and deep listening
Based on Kiran Gulrajani's work

Resonant Listening : Openness to learning	To deeply learn the vital foundational skill and attitude that can transform relationships To be able to tune into the greatness and wisdom of another person	Realizing the 3 levels of listening through practice Appreciating what interferes with good and great listening- the science and the art Discovering the subtleties and nuances of being open, receptive which can impact productivity
Authentic Speaking: Friendship with reality	To find out how to communicate from the heart and hence reach to the others heart To deal with fears and hesitation which can interfere with speaking with honesty and caring	Learning to tap into the power of truth in communication which can be transformational in personal and team effectiveness Being able to speak with confidence and clarity things which are difficult to express normally

http://www.outdoorinasia.com/sales-excellence

Keeping agreements

What comes to mind here is the work of Gay Hendricks - especially as he puts it in the "Corporate Mystics"

The lines below are inspired by G. Hendricks work and written by Marlene Neufeld

HOW TO MAKE AND KEEP AGREEMENTS

Part of the art of successful living, successful working and successful relating depends on learning how to make and keep your agreements or change agreements that aren’t working. Many relationship issues rise out of conflict about agreements.

1. See agreements as contributing to your aliveness and energy. Many of us approach agreements as something that someone else is making us do. This approach keeps us from making clear agreements and contributes to our breaking of agreements. Learn to see when an agreement is necessary and how to proactively create agreements that you want to make, how to make agreements that are important to you. When you learn that making and keeping agreements is in your own best interest and when you learn how to do so easily and successfully, you will notice your life working better.

2. Think carefully before you make an agreement. It is much easier to not make an agreement than it is to get out of one you no longer want to keep. An agreement is anything you have said you would do, or anything you have said you would not do. Typical agreements that couples need to make for their lives to run smoothly range from mundane things like “who does what” to important agreements about how they express their sexuality with people outside of their relationship.

3. Make the right agreements. Make only agreements that you believe in; agreements that you want to make and keep; agreements that your whole body/mind says “yes” to. If you don’t have your whole self behind the agreement, whether it’s your child’s baseball game or attending the annual shareholder’s meeting, why bother? Agreements that are unimportant to you, but that you make anyway, have a tendency to come back and haunt you later because some intuitive person will perceive that you are not really there, or because something will stop you from keeping them.

4. Make agreements only about things that you have control over. For example, you can’t control how you feel but you can control how you express your feelings. It’s also not helpful to agree to do something or be somewhere, if you know that you have something else planned or aren’t going to be able to do it.

5. Make it safe for yourself and others to speak freely about any facts or feelings that are relevant, as you are formulating your agreement. Share any significant facts that will impact your ability to keep the agreement. Share your feelings, specifically:

• Anxiety, fear, nervousness
• Irritation, anger, aggravation, resentment
• Discouragement, sadness, resignation
• Excitement, happiness, exhilaration.

Keep tossing your agreement back and forth until it feels right to both of you.

© Marlene Neufeld, 2005 www.marleneandbob.com

based on the work of Drs. Gay & Kathlyn Hendricks, www.hendricks.com

Responsibility

Based on Kiran Guljani's training material

The Transformational Mindset: Responsibility… Discovering the freedom to respond creatively

To enable the participants to shift from helplessness and victim mentality to a proactive and creative stance To inspire them to shift from blaming to claiming their reality by being open to learning

Learning to utilize adversity as an opportunity§         Appreciating ‘Responsibility’ and ‘Commitment’ from a very powerful place Shifting from resignation to possibility thinking Discovering the power within to shift reality