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Life Skills: Integrity – Your Support System is a Valuable Aid

Teaching character and life skills to students

When we are growing into adulthood, finding our way, one of the most important things that we have is our friends.  All of us have those special people in our lives that we love to talk to and hang out with.  There is a saying that goes with that that says;  “You are who you hang out with.”  Choosing our friends has a great affect on our ability to maintaining our integrity to our morals, values and ethics as well as reaching our goals.

Surrounding ourselves with those that will “expect more from us that we do ourselves”, they will always be an inspiration for being our best and in fact even ‘master’ our life.  Who are the people that can do that for us and with us?  It is going to include those around us that love us and have our best interest at heart, like our parents, friends and other trusted adults who may be an inspiration to you.  Those other adults like teachers, coaches, religious mentor, musicians can help us look at things from different viewpoints and keep us on a good track.

But how can we be sure our friends have our best interest at heart?

  • If at anytime your ‘friends’ ask you to change yourself like your clothes, language, values or morals, or to do other things to fit in with them you may need a new group of friends.
  • If at anytime your ‘friends’ ask you to do drugs with them, steal, fight, treat others mean, you may need to find a new group of friends.
  • If at any time you feel like you are being used, manipulated or changed from who you are, you may need to find a new group of friends.
  • If you feel like your life is out of control, boxed in, not allowed to have other friends or you are not reaching the goals that you have written down, you may need a new group of friends.

Surround yourself with a support system that you can rely on and that shares your morals, values and ethics and you will be much more likely to keep your integrity to yourself.

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Life Skills: Integrity – Start With Goals and Mission Statement

Teaching character and life skills to students

If someone were to ask you what your personal goals are would you be able to tell them?  Even more than that, have you written your goals down so that you can review them regularly?  Doing so will have an impact on your ability to stay true to yourself, your values, morals and ethics.

We all know that a goal is only a goal if you have written it down and hopefully told others that you are working to accomplish your goals.  Otherwise it is just a dream, something in your head that you think about from time to time.  But when you write it down, carry it with you, read and think about it in the morning when you start the day and reflect on them at the end of the day –  then they are real goals.

If you know your goal is to have a certain GPA, to be on a particular sports team, to reach certain education level, it will be much easier to resist negative peer pressure and keep your eye on your study habits and physical habits of eating and exercise.  Steven Covey called it “begin with the end in mind”.

Take the time to write down your long term goals, and take it one step further and write out a mission statement for yourself.  A mission statement is simply a bit of writing stating the values you want to live by, what you believe in and your goals for living your life.  Here is one link I found that will give you some steps to writing your own personal mission statement.  

How to Write a Personal Mission Statement

Your writing of goals and a mission statement does not have to be long or real wordy.  It can be as long or short as you feel like making it.  It may change as you grow and that is OK, just be sure it reflects who you are in your quest to live your life with integrity.

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Using distraction as a way to cope with stress

In our last report on stress we talked about the 3 different ways that some of us cope with stress in our lives.  They were distraction, avoidance and escapism.  Each of them get progressively more harmful to the person practicing them.  However to some degree the use of distraction can offer short term relaxation and can prove to be helpful, as long as it does not get out of control.

Distraction might be a short break to take a walk, bike ride, physical exercise, reading or other short term activity that gets our mind off the pressure at hand.  The only problem with it is that the breaks can get longer or too many of them and that only leads to not getting the work done and more stress.  Unless we control the distraction as a coping tool it could lead to avoiding the problems all together.

We have to be careful that we are not just using distraction as a means of procrastination.  In the end we still have the same work to do, the same reports to write, and the same problems to deal with, except now we have a little less time.  The signs of avoidance in my next report.

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Life Skills: Integrity – Be Prepared to Make Good Decisions

Teaching character and life skills to students

If we are going to stand up to our friends, that is resist peer pressure to do things that are against our own morals, values and ethics, we must be prepared.  This type of preparation is no different than being prepared for a physical attack on ourselves.  As a martial arts student and practitioner we know what we would do if someone were to try to push us, or if someone called us a name, we know how we would react – because we have practiced those things.

The same is true with peer pressure.  We must prepare to defend who we are and what we stand for, so if we are asked to do something we are not comfortable with, we will have the strength to say NO.

So what would you do if you were put in a high pressure situation?  Preparing ahead, knowing what we would say and practicing that answer is part of the key to having the courage to actually do it when that time comes – and it will come.  What type of questions should you be prepared for?

What would you do if you were pressured to cheat or lie for one of your friends?
What would you do if you were being pressured to smoke, drink, or take drugs?
What would you do if your friends were bullying someone in your class or school?
What would you do if someone asked you to text you a picture of yourself?

Knowing the answer ahead of time, practicing it in your head, discussing it with your parents are all ways of being prepared to keep your integrity to yourself.

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Dealing With Stress; How are You Coping?

Trying to stay on top of everything that we have going on in our lives can bring that stress that we have up to a level that feels more than just challenging.  We can start to lose our physical energy, our sharpness for thinking and very generally lose our edge.  Many of the illnesses and diseases that are prevalent today are said to be furthered and worsened by stress.  How do we deal with our stress?

There are many coping strategies that are used and usually we find one that fits our personality or one that we can be comfortable with and we use it to the max.  These are short term ways of dealing with the real issues and while they can help short term, may actually make things worse long term.

Distraction – Or, I’ll deal with it later
Distractions are about taking breaks and doing something else for a little while.  This can help you be more focused when you return, but the danger is the more you put it off with other activities, the more stressed you may become as your time to completion gets shorter.

Avoidance – Or, I might deal with it …sometime
Avoidance is like distractions on steroids.  There can be so much avoidance that each act of avoidance takes up more and more time and this leads to a vicious circle of behavior.  But there are all sorts of ways that we may be avoiding dealing with our feelings of stress, from illness and sleep to over-achievement or procrastination.  We will discuss in more detail later.

Escape – Or, I don’t want to deal with it…ever.
Escaping is the most dangerous of the ways we may try to cope and many times this will come after dealing with it with distraction and avoidance.  Some may try to escape with the use of drugs, dropping out, lying to others, even to the point of injuring themselves of attempting suicide.  Escapism only compounds the problems and we still have not looked at solving the underlying issues of our stress.

No matter our age, in elementary or high school, in college or on the job, what we really need is some stress management techniques.  I hope to share some with you in the coming weeks, as I study this subject both for myself and all of our students.

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Life Skills: Integrity To Our Personal Values

Teaching character and life skills to students

Being true ourselves is part of having integrity.  When we think about integrity we also think about honesty.  In fact if a person is honest they are spoken of as having integrity.  We can count on them to be true to their word and we have a trust factor that is very high.

Just as important as honesty with others is, so is honesty with ourselves.  Are we honest about who we are, what we like, how we act both with others and with ourselves?  Are we honest to our values, morals and ethics?  Especially in the tween and teen years we are very worried about fitting in and having friends.  In times like that we may be afraid that others may not like us or laugh at us if we do not like, act, dress, talk the same way that they do.  Yet being ourselves is part of feeling good about yourself.  Lets look at an example.

Lets say you are in school and your group of ‘friends’ start talking about someone else not in the group. They may be a new person at the school.  They decide that it would be ‘funny’ to play a prank on them or to say something mean to them, and you are chosen in some manner to be the one that plays the prank.  Now you may not feel comfortable to do that, in fact it goes against everything you are as a person, but you are feeling the pressure of the group.  What will you do?

Here is a what Professor Dumbledore told Harry Potter:

“It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies, but a great deal more to stand up to your friends.”

Being willing to stand up for what you believe in and who you are, takes courage and is what integrity to yourself is all about.