Integrity by Dr. Henry Cloud

Yesterday after we celebrated Christmas together as a family, I had the opportunity to finish reading Integrity by Dr. Henry Cloud. It was a different genre of book for me, but I enjoyed it. I learned some stuff about myself and other leaders I’ve come in contact with through the years. Here are some of the highlights:

• "Who a person is will ultimately determine if their brains, talents, competencies, energy, effort, deal-making abilities, and opportunities will succeed."
• "Sometimes the things we say off the top of our head are the most true, as they come out of our experience more than out of our head."
• "We can tell a lot about that person from the nature of the wake."
• "Character = the ability to meet the demands of reality."
• "When we are talking about integrity we are talking about being a whole person, an integrated person, with all of our different parts working well and delivering the functions that they were designed to deliver."
• "We trust people who we think hear us, understand us, and are able to empathize with our realities as well as their own."
• "If you gain people’s trust, their heart, then you also have their desire and passion."
• "People who try to help others by talking them out of what they feel are usually no help at all."
• "The human heart will seek to be known, understood, and connected with above all else. If you do not connect, the ones you care about will find someone who will."
• "Incredible things happen when two parties ‘let down their guard’ with each other. They get open, creative, take risks, learn from each other, and deliver fruit in whatever their endeavor to a much more leveraged degree than if they were in the protected mode."
• "For trust to work in human relationships of any kind, whether leadership, marriage, parenting, or business, we have to be able to see some kind of crack in the armor so we feel that the other person is real."
• "It is a paradox of life that the less we look at our shortcomings, the more others do."
• "To find who one truly is usually requires experimenting and risk taking, and if people are afraid of failure, for example, they stay in their comfort zone and never step out and try anything new."
• "Virtually nothing erodes respect in a person more than his or her inability to make the hard call. In contrast, the ones who can, gain and keep the respect of those they lead."
• "High achievers do not derive their sense of who they are, or how they feel, from the outcomes of their performance."
• "Nonconfronters leave a lot of success on the table. Problems overcome them and stop them, for their political tendency for ‘people pleasing’ can only get them so far."
• "Without the security that confrontation provides, people and relationships languish. Both intimacy and performance get sick and die."
• "Whatever has value is going to require hurt in order to possess."
• "Growth requires taking steps into unchartered territory. For people to integrate new capacities or internalize new skills from the outside, they have to try new things."
• "Risk taking is an important dynamic to growth. It means that someone is putting himself in a position of exposure, where he can be hurt. But, that is really just a synonym for being alive."
• "Hoarders, and people who wish to always harvest and never relinquish some of the harvest for a future harvest, never grow."
• "His need to feel good about himself overshadowed his drive to grow. As a result, he just gravitated toward people who stroked him."
• "The greatest people are the ones who have not sought greatness, but served greatly the causes, values, and missions that were much bigger than them. And by joining and serving those, we see greatness emerge."
• "A person with integrated character is a person who possesses the awareness that it is not all about him or her, and the ability and willingness to make the necessary adjustments to the things that transcend him or her at any given juncture."