So recently I had an experience where I was finding myself late, and the lateness, when I asked myself and had someone help and ask me what the lateness was about, it seemed like it was about a time when my schedule was too busy and I feel resentful that someone’s putting more into my schedule. So initially I thought it was about a belligerence towards people trying to control what I wanted to control, which was my schedule. But then as I was late again, then I had another opportunity to look deeper. I was so curious why I would be late again. So as I dug into that, I remember feeling the humiliation of being late, because I’m a professional, and I just felt like I had forgotten something, and all of a sudden realized I was late for the meeting. When I got there, it was humiliating.

So where else did that happen before? So I went back further to five years old, some bed wetting that I was doing. I would wake up in the night completely startled by being punched by a sister, or being yelled at, or being woken up completely cold and wet from wetting my bed. And I thought, “Geez, why would I be reenacting that?” But there was a story around it and I felt humiliated. So during that humiliation, I discovered that I wasn’t asking for what I needed as an adult because of a humiliation for asking for what I needed when I was a child. And then I was late again, despite all this understanding, and that took me all the way back to two years old, getting dragged into the bathroom and getting some soap in the mouth, and kind of getting roughed up and having a fat lip.

I had blocked out the memory of that experience, where I would be saying something spontaneously as a two year old and then getting a violent reaction to what I said, for asking questions. And then I understood that the reason I wasn’t succinct in my calendar was I wasn’t asking for what I needed because of a story that I created all the way back when I was a child, to protect myself. That’s how mysterious some of the things that we do are. They’re hidden way back into something that we didn’t quite understand. We did our best with it, it’s hidden in there. It hurt. We masked it and we created a story that is probably not completely accurate, and we’re using it as a paradigm or a set of beliefs that’s actually determining the course of our lives and the way that we function.

Yes, I’m opening up to a vulnerable story and I’m going deeper than I need to to reveal to you that understanding and having coaches and the skill set to go back in there helped me to uncover something that I was able to shift, and I haven’t been late since. So integrity with self isn’t always us just choosing, or that we’re sloppy with our integrity, or that we’re choosing not to be as precise as we wish. Sometimes these things are deep, and that’s why we need to engage in a variety of activities that are bigger than a lot of us have in our arsenal. So I hope that share maybe opens up something for you. And certainly we don’t need to repeat our stories to go through pain again, but once we release those stories and we understand them and they’re not painful anymore, sometimes they’re of value to somebody else. So in our discussion on integrity this week, there’s a lot of different reasons why we’re out of integrity, but once we get that organized, it can shift our whole life. So with love to you, have a beautiful day, and certainly feel free to send me an email and connect with me.