In 2006, Dr. Henry Cloud published what I believe to be his best book entitled Integrity. 

His objective is to connect the dots for how integrity and character work day to day. To do that, he outlines six character traits that enable talents and abilities to get their desired results:

1. Creating and maintaining trust
2. Seeing and facing reality
3. Working in a way that brings results
4. Embracing negative realities and solving them
5. Causing growth and increase
6. Achieving transcendence and meaning in life

It’s rich. I finished re-reading it last night. Yes, it’s one of those books. Here’s proof:

Underdevelopment leaves a gap between where we are at any given moment and where we need to be. That gap is our need and opportunity for growth.

Dysfunction is when an effort toward making something better makes it worse. That is when we are in trouble. And both a lack of integration and a lack of development can do that.

We trust people who we think hear us, understand us, and are able to empathize with our realities as well as their own.

Research has for decades proven that you can help desperate people immensely by giving them no answers at all, and only giving them empathy.

If you want to leave the best wake possible, leave behind a trail of people who have experienced your being “for them.”

Wise people are “cautious in friendship,” as the proverb says. They seek to get to know a person clearly, as a person truly is, before they hire him, marry him, become partners with him, or divorce him, fire him, or not go forward with him.

It behooves all of us to be working on whatever unresolved pain we are walking around with, lest some issue in “reality” tap into it and overcome our ability to make good decisions.

Secure identity is about who a person is, not what he does or what his results are.

People oriented toward growth want others to grow as well as themselves.

The immature character asks life to meet his demands. But the mature character meets the demands of life.

The one question that hovers above all others in importance for a person’s functioning in life is “Are you God, or not?”