What Is Your Intention?

Your intention behind your actions is an important place to begin to understand your level of authenticity. Integrity based communication not only matches your spoken words to your intended message, but it also matches your intentions to moral principles of integrity, empathy, fairness, compassion.

Truthfulness should be filtered through the skill of making choices on "how you choose to say it."  Trivial matters that have no benefits to your "honesty"(benefits:  i.e. making the situation better in some way), it's what's left unsaid that is the integrity-based choice.

Through years of training and consulting, I've come across many individuals who proudly announce, "I have no trouble being honest!  I tell it like it is!"  I instantly know they are the aggressors who take pride in bullying others and who have no more self-awareness than someone who never owned a mirror.  Their effectiveness is minimal and they take a sadistic pride in their "directness" and veiled "honesty."

Telling your elderly aunt that her hair is thinning...or to mention to your uncle that he has bad breath...serves no purpose to the greater good outcome of relationship building in communications.


Truthfulness without the skill of tact and diplomacy leads to brashness and rudeness. It takes developed wisdom to discern situations and realize that it's most important to keep your own integrity in check by keeping the integrity of the other person a priority.