Internal Integrity: Does Your Audio Match Your Video? | Doing What You Say You're Going to Do
How you do anything is how you do everything. Focusing on small moments, helps to accomplish big things.
I’m always late.
Like…always late.
And despite it being a perma-point of contention with my wife, my family, Mike Birbiglia and pretty much anyone I’ve ever had anything planned with, I’ve never really done anything about it.
I just chalk it up to who I am! My authentic self ✨
But why does it matter anyway? Sure people’s time feels disrespected and all that jazz, but why does it really matter? Aren’t brilliant creatives late? Aren’t the innovators late? I bet Steve Jobs was late to stuff.
Yeah! Brilliant minds like mine can’t be contained to mere mortal timeframes! If it’s a choice between my wife’s happiness and my deluded perception of myself as a creative genius then the choice is clear! I’ll gladly make the couch my home at night!
…and so went my rationale.
But I truly never saw it as a big deal. As shitty as that was to everyone, it was how I acted. Being late was just a part of me and frankly didn’t seem like big enough of a deal to do anything about.
That was until last year.
Doing What You Say You’re Going to Do.
Does Your Audio Match Your Video?
It was the second week of the first coaching course I’d ever taken.
Before the course started, the coach had us sign an agreement saying - amongst other things - that we’d be on time to class and submit all the assignments fully completed.
Sure - whatever. I read it like Kyle read the iTunes Terms & Conditions. Next!
Miraculously, I had been on time for the first class. What a suck-up.
But for the second class, I logged in my normal 2 minutes late to the Zoom meeting. I had also completed about 3/4 of the previous class’ assignment. It was almost complete.
It wasn’t quite done, but who gives a shit right?? We’re not in middle school here.
Video on. Audio unmuted.
I was immediately greeted by my coach not-so-kindly pointing out two things:
If I was late again - even by 1 second - I was kicked out of the class and forfeited the $3k I paid for the course.
He, in fact, DID give a shit about my almost complete assignment. It was a big deal. Not because of the assignment itself - but because I said I would do the assignment and didn’t.
“That’s how you live your life, huh?,” he said.
Almost being on time. Almost finishing assignments.
Almost living how you want to live. Almost being the person you want to be.
Whoa.
Back the fuck off there buddy. I’m here to get coached not scolded like a 10-year-old.
How could your stupid little assignment and being 2 minutes late mean anything??
But, he stressed, it meant everything.
Because how you do anything, is how you do everything.
These silly little data points, he said - being a few minutes late, not fully completing an assignment you said you were going to complete - are evidence of a larger way of living that did very much impact the biggest areas of my life.
It was evidence of my lack of integrity.
And not integrity in the sense of doing the right thing or being a good person. It has nothing to do with the morality of good vs bad.
It was instead focused on how much your internal and external worlds aligned.
How much did my internal thoughts and external behaviors align?
Integrity, in this sense, is doing what you say you’re going to do. How sound was quality of your word. Or as my coach put it, does your video match your audio? Do the actions you take align with the words you say?
It’s the quality of your integrity, he argues, that determines the quality of your life. Because if your integrity is perfect, in theory, anything you say will become reality.
And as the quality of your internal integrity improves, so does the ease of your life - because there would cease to be any negotiation or waffling between what you said you wanted and what you actually did.
Once you said it, it would just be….done.
His favorite over-the-top metaphor of what would happen with perfect integrity was that if you said “a million bucks”, that $1 million would drop into your lap.
Would be a cool superpower.
But it’s a powerful point. Especially for someone who, to borrow another metaphor, has such a frequent disconnect between his audio + video.
The Small Moments Lacking Integrity are EVERYTHING
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. This is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.
-C.S. Lewis
Now look - before I go and shit on myself for being a person without integrity I suppose I’ll qualify this by saying that I’m a human, and it’s a very human thing to not take perfect action on what you said you were going to do. It doesn’t make you (me) a bad person. It just makes us human beings.
We’re all without integrity to some extent. It’s a relative concept and it’s unlikely we’ll develop the integrity to drop a million bucks into our laps (I just tried, didn’t work).
But when I started to pay attention to where I was lacking integrity, most of what I found were small moments:
Being a few minutes late to a meeting.
Not following through with the task I told my employee I’d complete.
Putting off a workout because I didn’t feel like doing it in the moment.
Hitting snooze on my alarm when I said I’d be up at 5:30AM.
Saying one thing to a person’s face and another behind their back
Things that are so easy to brush off as no big deal. Frankly, they’re things that I have brushed off for most of my life.
But, in actuality, they are smaller threads of the larger fabric of how I do everything in my life. Because how I do anything is how I do everything.
How you do anything, is how you do everything.
When you’re lacking integrity in the small parts of your life, you’re also lacking integrity in the big ones. The ones that matter. The existential ones that have tortured you for years. The White Whales we can’t seem to hunt down.
And so it follows that if you start to improve the integrity in the small moments, you start to reconstruct the fabric of your life one thread at a time. And when you start to rebuild your foundation of integrity, really cool things start to happen.
But how to start?
How to Improve Your Internal Integrity
How do you go about improving your integrity in these small moments? Here’s a few suggestions. I think #2 is the most important.
Pay Attention - notice where you’re lacking integrity (See list of examples above). Jot them down in a list when you become aware of them.
Remind Yourself That This Matters - I often find myself brushing off small moments as “not mattering”. As trivial. But an essential part of this process is accepting that how you do anything is how you do everything. And that even (perhaps especially) the small moments matter. I often have to remind myself that this does matter. It matters A LOT.
It’s Just a Game: Get Curious, Not Judgmental - The more you can view this process as a game to be played (and improved upon with each round) vs. a commentary on how weak-willed you are, the more successful you’ll be in changing behavior. Get curious, not judgmental - a la Walt Whitman/Ted Lasso, get curious about why you lacked integrity in that moment. What thoughts came about that prevented you from acting with integrity? What did you do to sabotage yourself? Try to limit your judgment. Observe your own actions as an ant biologist would observe an ant. No judgment or emotion. Just observation. These are clues that will provide the foundation for the next step.
Create a Plan for Next Time - be clear about exactly how you want the result to be different next time. How can you apply what you learned in your observations
Repeat
Here’s an example:
I didn’t exercise when I said I was going to.
It fucking matters! Even if I can do it later in the day.
I was impulsively doing work (without a plan) that I felt I was behind on and it bled over into the time I said I would exercise. I also didn’t coordinate with Jenna to make sure baby duties wouldn’t pop up and interfere. I also had a bunch of thoughts that doing that particular workout would be extremely hard and that I didn’t “feel like” doing it because it would make me too tired.
I need to have a clearer plan on exactly what I’m working on, so it doesn’t turn into an infinite black hole of impulsively working on everything. I need to have at least a 15-minute ramp-down period to wrap up whatever I’m working on AND to prep my workout gear/space before the actual time of my workout starts. I would want to check in with Jenna at the start of the day to make sure our schedules are aligned. I also know for a fact that exercising (especially intense exercise) is one of my favorite things to do. Any thoughts that try to make it out to be de energizing are absolutely silly.
Yeah, this is a lot. And you won’t be writing it down every time (although it’s extremely helpful). But eventually, this entire process will happen in a millisecond in your head.
But the biggest thing here is just noticing. Noticing and reminding yourself that it matters. Because so many of us simply hop from one internal capitulation to another throughout our lives.
And every time we do this, we reinforce the wiring of our brains to be ok with that. To be ok with not doing what we say we’re going to do.
But it’s in the awareness - the noticing - and reminding yourself that even the small moments matter, that the roots of change start to take hold.
The Magic of Living a Life in Integrity
As your integrity becomes more sound, two magical things begin to happen.
One - Your life starts to become easier. Getting up early or exercising or writing or going grocery shopping or whatever the fuck you want to do is less of a negotiation. Having a conversation that you would have labeled “difficult” in your previous state will be less of a big deal. When you say something is going to happen, it just…happens.
Two - You start to do things you actually want to do. You start tracking down those White Whales that have eluded you for so long.
Imagine a life where you actually do everything you say you want to do. A life where you’re in incredible shape, have incredible relationships, create incredible wealth, incredible art.
And have next to zero mental drama about any of it.
It’s a life that becomes a game. A game that’s less focused on if you’re going to do the things you say you want to do, and more focused on what kinds of interesting things you can use your new magical powers to do.
And it all starts with the small moments. So start noticing. Right now. In those small moments, start doing what you say you’re going to do.
Because how we do anything, is how we do everything.
