Riding the bus into school to try to meet Tammy before the concert (which didn’t happen, but that’s ok) I read something that completely changed my thinking. It’s from a book called The Energy of Money by Maria Nemeth, Ph.D.
Your Standards of Integrity
Your heart recognizes and is drawn to people who possess qualities you admire. You cherish or delight in these attributes because you know what they are. They reflect your own potential. When you see these qualities in others, you experience joy, inspiration, and gratitude. That’s the signal that your heart is responding to them.
Take a moment and think about someone whom you admire. What qualities do you prize in them? Below the surface of physical attributes or possessions, which traits reflect their basic goodness? Do you admire their courage, loyalty, or creativity? Do you honor their love, compassion, or truthfulness? Even as you are thinking about the person, do you notice a certain warmth in your heart?
Your heart warms in response to these qualities because they are inside you. You can’t appreciate a trait unless you’ve experience it – whether or not you are currently experiencing it. In order to value loyalty, for example, you must know what loyalty is. You must sense what it means to be dependable, steady, faithful, and dedicated – and you must also know the pain of disloyalty. This is true for any other attribute to which your heart responds. To use a physiological metaphor, if you respond to the trait you must have a receptor site for it, a location in your heart that recognizes and reacts to the quality when you see it in others. To be moved by a trait in another person, you must have that quality inside yourself as a possibility.
Remember the old saying that you don’t like certain people because they have some traits that you dislike in yourself? What if the opposite were true as well, that you value traits in others that you also possess? It always interests me when we discuss this in the You and Money Course, because I see how quick we are to admit the first saying, and how reluctant we are to own up to the second.
You possess the possibility for a host of attributes or characteristics that you consider to be special and admirable. When you see them in others, your heart lights. When you, yourself, act in accordance with these qualities, you feel a sense of well-being, wholeness and completeness. You are actiing with integrity. The qualities that you are demonstrating are the standards that are most important to you; the standards that, finally, express who you are.
