I spent much of my life thinking I was creating agreements with people:
“I’ll see you on Wednesday night…”
“I’ll get this book back to you next week…”
“I’ll be at the meeting…”
But it wasn’t true. I didn’t really understand what it meant to be in integrity and it was easy for me to not follow through on what I said I’d do.
We used to say, “I give you my word…” but that phrase had lost much of its power these days because we don’t know how to BE our word.
A few years back, I’d begun saying the phrase, I COACH KINGS as a metaphor to describe my powerful coaching clients.
I’d say the phrase to clients and they loved to hear it but I hadn’t noticed how fearful I’d been to say it out in the world.
“What if people laugh at me? What if people don’t believe me? What if it isn’t true?”
And then one day I traveled to Arizona for a coaching session with my coach, Steve Hardison.
Steve had invited me to join him at the funeral of a close friend that was being held just before our session.
As he introduced me to people, he’d say, “I’d like you to meet Rich Litvin. He coaches Kings.”
And he said it with such BELIEF in me and what I do that the impact on people was visceral and they each wanted to know more.
And it hit me between the eyes – the impact of BEING our word and the impact of having our word being a place to come FROM, not a place to get to.
As Mahatma Ghandi used to say:
Integrity is when what you DO is the same as what you SAY; and when what you SAY is the same as what you THINK.
One of the most important things Steve Hardison taught me in our time coaching together was that I’d been living life inside-out.
I had things the wrong way around.
Life didn’t happen TO me.
Life was created BY me.
And a Created Life begins with the WORDS that we speak it into existence.
Pay attention to your words, because they create your world.
Love. Rich
P.S. For more on the impact of being your word, listen to this short but powerful interview I did with Christine Laperriere on Blog Talk Radio.