Video Blog Summary: Acting According to Your Ethics

Ethics are the values and principles that govern your behavior. For this blog, I’m going to refer to ethics as the thing that your heart tells you is right for you.

My suggestion is to care about yourself enough to align your actions with your personal ethics. If something feels off to you, simply don’t do it.

Not out of fear or because it’s what you’re not supposed to do, but rather because you understand that when you act outside of your personal ethics, you create conflict with yourself. And worse, you might even lose respect for yourself.

Even if everyone at work or all of your friends are doing something that does not feel right, you can find a way to abstain. Simply because you choose to spare yourself the conflict and pain it would create in yourself.

And you can do this in a subtle way if you choose to. You do not have to confront the situation or people you're with unless you’re guided by your heart to do so.

About ten years ago I was eating lunch with some coworkers when I worked as a therapist in San Diego County. My coworkers began to make fun of one of our coworkers, and I felt like it was becoming mean-spirited. It was clear to me it was not a good thing for me to be involved with.

I said something like, “Come on you guys, this isn’t cool. Let’s talk about something else.” But they would not let it go.

So after briefly considering my options, I got and excused myself saying, “I’m going to head back and finish a few notes before my afternoon sessions. I’ll catch up to you later.” And I left. I suspect they didn’t even know that I left for the reasons I did.

I could have confronted them more strongly, but at that moment, my first responsibility was to remove myself from an experience that was clearly not right for me.

And thus I preserved my integrity. In this case, integrity could be viewed as acting in a way consistent with my ethics.

So I invite you to care about yourself enough to act in accordance with what feels right to you. And then you get to feel really good about yourself.

Check out the above video blog where I flesh this out in further detail.

Happy new year!