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How to Be True to Yourself My grandparents believed you were either honest or you weren’t. There was no in-between. They had a simple motto hanging on their living-room wall,“Life is like a field of newly fallen snow; where I choose to walk every step will show.” They didn’t have to talk about it — they demonstrated the motto by the way they lived. They understood instinctively that integrity means having a personal standard of morality and ethics that does not sell out to expediency and that is not relative to the situation at hand. Integrity is an inner standard for judging your behavior. Unfortunately, integrity is in short supply today — and getting scarcer. But it is the real bottom line in every area of society. And it is something we must demand of ourselves. A good test for this value is to look at what I call the Integrity Triad, which consists of three key principles: Stand firmly for your convictions in the face of personal pressure. There’s a story told about a surgical nurse’s first day on the medical team at a well-known hospital. She was responsible for ensuring that all instruments and materials were accounted for during an abdominal operation. The nurse said to the surgeon, “You’ve only removed 11 sponges, and we used 12. We need to find the last one.” “I removed them all,” the doctor declared. “We’ll close now.” “You can’t do that, sir,” objected the rookie nurse, “Think of the patient.” Smiling, the surgeon lifted his foot and showed the nurse the 12th sponge. “You’ll do just fine in this or any other hospital,” he told her. When you know you are right, you can’t back down. Always give others credit that is rightfully theirs. Don’t be afraid of those who might have a better idea or who might even be smarter than you are. David Ogilvy, founder of the advertising firm Ogilvy Mather, made this point clear to his newly-appointed office heads by sending each a Russian nesting doll with five progressively smalle