Are You A Person of Character?

Are you a person of character? Do you have integrity?

Before you instinctively answer YES, think about the following anecdote. I ask these exact same questions to audiences of adults and students across the country every month. The results are startling.

Assume I have 100 audience members. I ask individuals in the crowd to raise their hands if they believe they are a person of character. Immediately, 100 hands shoot up. Then I say, “Okay . . . okay, keep your hand up if you are comfortable defining character for me?” At this point, something amazing happens - 100 hands go down immediately. Awkward? . . . you bet. If I inquire instead about integrity, I get the same results.

It is startling to me that people just assume that they have integrity / character but have not thought deeply enough about the matter to define each term with confidence. This would never happen if someone asked us about our favorite professional sports team or vacation destination. We would be able to talk for hours about these things. If we care so much about trivial matters, why don’t we care more about serious matters?

For the record, I define character as: (1) how you act when no one is looking and (2) how you act when you are just around your friends. When you are all alone in a room, do you cheat on an exam, mislead a client in an e-mail, or fudge a number on your taxes? Each of these actions says something about your character. When you go out at night or on the weekends, are you with decent people, at decent places and doing decent things? Or, are you at bad places, doing morally questionable things with suspect people? The places you go, the things you do and the people you associate with also say something about your character.

Defining integrity is a bit tougher. Great philosophers spent lifetimes pondering the definition of integrity. Such respect highlighted the importance of the concept as it relates to all aspects of personal and professional life. Although my efforts in comparison are feeble, I think daily about how best to define integrity - especially when exploring character with my undergraduate students.

My definition leans towards Aristotle’s framework of Virtue Ethics. Aristotle would argue that a person needs to practice certain virtues such as compassion, courage, honesty, loyalty and patience in order to lead the good life, to be truly happy. More specifically, he describes the importance of seeking the golden mean - the area between the excess and deficiency - of these virtues. Therefore, a truly honest person is neither a liar nor too blunt; a compassionate person is neither hard-hearted nor a doormat. In this vein, I view integrity as the virtue of all virtues - a sort of macro-virtue - the attainment of which is produced automatically as a result of striving to live a virtuous life.

In other words, people achieve integrity when they habitually strive for the golden means of each of the micro-virtues. Therefore, people cannot seek to improve their integrity per se. Instead, to achieve integrity, we all must be more courageous, compassionate, honest, loyal, patient, etc. and do so more often - both at home with our families and at the workplace with our colleagues and customers. The good news is that achieving integrity is always within our grasp - only a few virtues away!

With all this in mind, I encourage you to take an introspective look at the way you incorporate virtues into your own life. If you are a jerk - make a concerted effort to eliminate this deficiency and become more compassionate. If you are impatient- cut back on this excess and strive to become more patient. Virtues are developed with practice - so get to work! Then, the next time I ask you if you are a person of character, you can confidently keep your hand up while others shy away.