Honesty and integrity go hand in hand, but in today’s world, it seems like people have gotten so laid back that these two traits have gone out the window. In fact, if you ask most young people today for the truest definition of honesty and integrity, they might tell you that being honest means telling the truth, but they probably won’t be able to tell you more than that.

Although most people understand honesty, telling the truth, do you understand what is involved in telling the truth? For example, yes, it’s wrong to lie, but isn’t it also wrong not to tell the whole truth, or the whole story, so to speak? Many people believe that hiding parts of the truth is the same as lying, and if you do this, you are not practicing honesty.

But then again, if you ask today’s youth about integrity, most of them won’t have a clue what you’re talking about. This is a word they know how to spell. They have little idea of ​​what that is, but no real idea of ​​what it means to have integrity, along with honesty. If you have integrity, it means that you live your life in a moral and ethical way. Honesty covers lying, but integrity seemingly covers everything else in life.

Once we grow up and are forced to face reality, we learn that the world can be a cold, harsh, and cruel place. As we go through life, we often lose sight of our own values. We are trying to pay the bills, educate the children, care for aging parents, try to keep our marriage together, and try to live to see our own retirement years and grandchildren. With all of this happening seemingly all the time, it’s not hard to lose sight of our values, which in turn affects our honesty and integrity, even if we never intended for that to happen.

Before you can live your life with honesty and integrity, you must first have a good sense of who you are and what you stand for in life. We all have strong feelings about certain issues, like abortion, firearms, and things of this nature. But as big as these problems are, these are the easiest. Here, you are on one side of the fence or the other.

But in the small things of the day to day, what is your position in terms of your values? For example, is your honesty and integrity so great that if you ran a red light, you would stop the next police officer you saw and insist that they give you a ticket? There’s a good chance you won’t. But if the cashier at the lunch counter gives you too much change, by the time you know it, are you going to give that extra money back? Hopefully, his honesty and integrity would come into play, and he would do everything in his power to pay that cashier back.

To live a life based on honesty and integrity, you need to know who you are and what you stand for, and you also need to monitor yourself on a daily basis, making sure you don’t do anything that conflicts with your own values. or moral code.