Self Integrity. Have you heard that word in the online business space a lot lately? I have. I took me a while to come around to what people were talking about. It seemed hard to understand and to explain and to actually work on if you are in a place of needing to fix or grow or develop your self integrity.  I mean it’s a hell of a lot more easy to say:

• Well I’m busy

• My clients need too much

• My computer is too slow

• And so on…
  

It happens one of two ways. Either we put the blame for our circumstances out on everyone else’s or everything else’s shoulders. Or we shift the blame at all to ourselves—in the form of self-hatred and rejection, saying things like I’m too lazy, I’m not smart enough, I’m incapable…

We’re really just avoiding the big underlying issue

The big underlying issue. The issue to end all issues, perhaps, is that we don’t have any self-integrity. We don't BELIEVE in ourselves.

I don’t mean that in the cheesy instagram quote type of way, I mean like truthfully we don’t TRUST ourselves. That lack of trust shows up time and time again, usually pretty subconsciously, and it prevents us from making things actually happen in our lives and business. Let’s get specific here:

If you had a friend that said “let’s work out together! Tomorrow at 8am right?” and then tomorrow at 7:54am she said “hey I can’t today, sorry!” you’d probably be like, “dang that’s annoying.” And then if it happened again, you’d be like WOW this girl is annoying. And then if it happened AGAIN you’d be like, “omg I hate her wtf why am I getting up so early just to get bailed on.” And then if she was like “hey let’s grab drinks tomorrow at 4pm” you’d probably think “this girl can’t show up no matter what. She’s gonna bail on me again. I’m not doing it.” And you wouldn’t… Or maybe you think you would, but then she’d bail again and the next time you wouldn’t. 

In this scenario YOU ARE THAT GIRL you are the one who bails on the gym repeatedly. And your brain is you. Your brain is like WTF I thought we were making this thing happen or launching that thing or whatever promise you made yourself in recent history and haven’t delivered on. Tthat sounds harsh, but it’s okay… I mean it sucks, but it’s okay. You’re not a bad person, destined for failure.

You’ve just been conditioning yourself OVER and OVER and OVER again to not trust yourself. Now when you say you are going to do something your brain thinks, “RIGHT OOOKAY. We’ve heard that before.” and doesn’t try to hold you to it. It doesn’t fight back when you have an excuse the next day. It lets all your reasons of “I’m too busy” or “my computer is too slow” or even “I’m too lazy” win.

When I realized what was happening for myself, I suddenly realized that in some ways my brain that I was a liar. Despite being one of the most honest people I know, I was lying to myself. It hit hard

It really upset me because I struggled to figure out HOW to fix this. I wanted to know: how do I retrain my brain to TRUST me when I say I’m going to do something? How do I get my brain to work with me instead of against me? I talked about this with my coach and had the realization.

Before *~the realization~* I spent a ton of time beating myself up because I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out why. I couldn’t crack the code on why, for example, I would schedule something on my calendar and then let it fall through the cracks. It didn’t feel like pure laziness, because I was still getting some things done but not the work I needed or wanted to get done.

After *~the realization~* I understood that my brain put a higher value on client’s work than my own business. I was never late on client work, I never pushed off client work, I would go above and beyond for them. But my own business? Well, my brain had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t as important. I know a lot of my service-based and done-for-you clients feel the same. If it’s not your business versus your client’s businesses, then it’s finding the time to work out or be with your friends/family, or something else. Somewhere in your life there’s that feeling of “why does everyone else have this together but me?”

I’ve found an answer to try on: you’ve just conditioned your brain. You are like Pavlov’s drooling dog. For me, even when I was writing out my own work on a to do list in the back of my mind I could hear myself thinking, “we won’t get to that probably” and already accepting defeat.

Let’s talk about what to do with this information, if it’s resonating.

I’ll start by saying, if we were coaching around this, we’d look at it from a few angles. We’d look at if you’re needing better boundaries around client projects, or if it’s time to raise your rates, or if there’s a fear running the show. But all of those things would be layered on top of: Building your self integrity. Building your self-trust.

Building your belief back up in yourself, in your word. It’ll be damn near impossible to ever create anything if your brain and subconscious don’t actually believe anything you say. The work starts here.

If you look up “how to have integrity” or “how to build integrity” there’s a plethora of resources. They all say things like, ‘follow your word’, ‘do as you say’, ‘don’t lie to others’, etc. Those are all great for building your OUTWARD integrity—but that’s not what we need. We need to do all those practices internally, right? The conversation between your conscious and subconscious need the work.

In my experience, the work isn’t necessarily easy, but it is simple. And it can be done.

Here’s where I started with the help of my coach and what I’ve helped my clients do for themselves:

First, I stopped making big lofty plans of ALL THE THINGS I was going to do. You know, the “oh I’m going to wake up at 6am and workout. Then read a chapter of a book and meditate and journal and blah blah blah.” Because inevitably I wouldn’t do any of it, and I’d dig my hole of self-distrust even further. This is the scariest step for people. They think their whole life is going to go to shambles without these items on their to-do list, and then I remind them… well, you’re not doing them anyway?

Then I picked one simple thing that I knew I would do every day, no matter what—an existing habit. Something simple, like brushing my teeth. Right before I did that thing I’d remind myself, “hey, I told myself I was going to do this and here I am doing it.” I made brushing my teeth a celebration, a ritual, an experience. I’d affirm to myself over and over again, “I am someone who does what I say I will do. I said I was going to brush my teeth and look at me go.” It sounds silly, but I really, really gas myself up over brushing my teeth and tying the neural pathway of “I said I would do it” and “I am doing it” and “I did it” together.

People usually roll their eyes at that example. I want to point out that thinking about how dope you are for brushing your teeth all day is way better than what you are currently thinking about yourself all day (some form of “I’m a flake. I fucking suck” right?). Replace those unhelpful thoughts with reminders that you can trust yourself.

This effort is ongoing. The visual I hold is that we have dug a deep hole of self-mistrust. This is helping us just fill in the dirt and get us back to ground level. When we’re ready to start actually building it up, making that mountain of self-integrity and self-trust we will keep up with those existing actions and layer or stack in a new item. go back to that old list of things you wished you did (the 6am workouts, the book chapter, etc.) and pick the simplest, easiest one. Don’t overload yourself. Stack one thing in at a time. As you do it, keep that self-talk going.

The last thing I do here isa make a weekly list titled, “It’d Be Nice…” and I put all the things that I used to assign to myself on that list. It’d be nice if I read a chapter of a book every day. It’d be nice if I went for a walk during my lunch break. And I let myself do those tasks as I feel inspired, but without all the pressure and guilt.

An important note here is to recognize where you are and be really gentle and loving with yourself. It’s okay to be in progress here. It’s okay to be actively building your self-integrity and trust up. This, like anything, is a series of small decisions that add up. Don’t feel the need to rush it or force it, give yourself grace, and keep going.

If and when you do slip up and break a promise to yourself, I invite you to NOT make up an excuse. Don’t go back to blaming others or yourself. Don’t go back to beating yourself up. Simply take ownership over it, if you feel the need to reflect on the series of choices that led to that moment, do so, and release the guilt. Forgive yourself. Shame and guilt are vicious and will pull you back down into that distrust-hole, so let it go.

On the other side of this work, I can tell you that I feel a lot lighter in my mind and my day-to-day. There’s a lot less frustration or self-resentment. And I move towards the things I want with more ease. That’s available for you too!