3 Mindful Minutes: Living with integrity

0:00 Hey, it's cast. While I take a little planning break to prepare for the next season of Crappy to Happy, I want to share with you something I created back in twenty twenty called three Mindful Minutes. These shortcasts were incredibly popular and got many people through some tough times, so I hope you enjoy this brief episode. Hi. There, I'm cast. Done. Clinical psychologist, mindfulness meditation teacher, host of the Crappy to Happy podcast, and author of the Crappy to Happy books. Welcome to today's three Mindful Minutes. Today, I want to talk about living in integrity. Being in integrity typically means being true to your word. In other words, doing what you say you're going to do. Being in integrity also means being true to yourself. It means honoring what is true and right for you, instead of denying or abandoning yourself and your own needs. It means ensuring that your outer behavior is in alignment with your inner thoughts and feelings. Now, I don't mean that that means you should act on every impulse, like when you feel like screaming during your eleventh Zoom meeting of the day.

1:19 But I do mean that your outward choices, Your actions, your behaviors should be in alignment with your values, the things that you consider to be most important. When there's a disconnect between what we think and what we do, it creates dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is an internal tension that feels uncomfortable. So, for example, if one of my values is being present with my family and I'm distracted by work until all hours every night, that creates discomfort for me. There's tension there. If I talk a lot about the benefits of meditation, which I do, but I haven't found time to practice meditation for six months, there's a misalignment there.

2:02 And perhaps if you're a person in charge of hiring staff and you believe in diversity and you think there should be more minority groups represented in the workforce, but the last six people you've employed have been straight white men, there's a misalignment there. And I'm sure you can think of many, many other examples. So typically, when we experience this kind of dissonance, this tension, this conflict, it is much easier to justify our behavior than it is to change it. In other words, if I feel I can't do something different or it would be uncomfortable, a challenging for me to do something different, to do what's actually true for me. Then I adjust my thinking. Instead, I come up with a convenient excuse or a justification for my behavior. I might minimize the significance of my actions.

2:56 I explain it away somehow. The way to live in integra is to take responsibility for this misalignment, to stop justifying, and start taking steps to ensure that your outward behavior truly is a reflection of your inner thoughts and feelings and values. It might not be able to happen overnight, but taking those steps to bring yourself back into integrity will go a long way to boosting your self esteem and your self respect, because you will know that you're a person who walks their talk. To live with more integrity, spend some time noticing areas in your life where there is this misalignment and consider what steps you might take to change your behavior rather than continuing to justify or deny it. Keep your agreements both with yourself and with other people, and spend time regularly connecting with what's most important to you, and ask yourself every day if your actions and your choices truly are a reflection of who you are, what matters to you, and what you want your life to be about.

4:05 Thanks for listening to today's three Mindful Minutes. To hear more of these, just search Crappy to Happy three Mindful Minutes wherever you listen to podcasts. Of course, to find out more about me, cast Done, head to my website castdone dot com