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Jim Dethmer: The Pillars of Integrity

Mar 7, 2023 1h 57m 10 insights
Get ready to upgrade your life with executive and leadership coach Jim Dethmer's powerful Four Pillars of Integrity. From owning your mistakes to boosting your emotional intelligence, Dethmer shares essential strategies to improve your relationships and live more purposefully. As a coach to over 150 CEOs and founding partner at The Conscious Leadership Group, Dethmer brings experience and results. And if you want more from Jim Dethmer, don't miss his first appearance on The Knowledge Project. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Our
Actionable Insights

1. Embrace Four Pillars of Integrity

Live by radical responsibility, feeling your feelings, speaking candidly, and being impeccable with agreements to achieve energetic wholeness and feel fully alive. This framework is a cornerstone for vitality and prevents life force diminishment.

2. Cultivate Radical Responsibility

Choose to move out of blaming and criticizing, claiming agency for your experience rather than being at the effect of the world. This practice brings a surge of energy and ends victimhood.

3. Process Feelings for Wholeness

Regularly ask if there’s a feeling that wants to be felt, bringing full, non-judgmental attention to body sensations until they release. This prevents energy repression, allows life to appear in technicolor, and restores life force.

4. Practice Candor for Connection

Avoid accumulating withholds (unsaid thoughts, wants, judgments) as they dampen aliveness and lead to withdrawal and projection in relationships. Instead, reveal authentically, connect, and own your projections to foster intimacy and aliveness.

5. Be Impeccable with Agreements

Make clear agreements with a ‘whole body yes,’ keep them (aim for 90%), renegotiate proactively if needed, and clean up broken agreements without excuses. This dramatically increases aliveness and deepens trust in all relationships.

6. Recognize Core Wants & Internalize Approval

Understand the four core human wants (approval, control, security, oneness) and stop outsourcing them to external people or circumstances. Cultivate a profound internal sense of okayness to reduce vulnerability to external triggers and reactivity.

7. Disidentify from Ego Identity

Engage in daily practices like meditation or inquiry (‘Who am I?’) to understand the truth of what you are beyond your roles and reputation. This helps you disidentify from ego identity when it’s threatened, preventing reactive states and fostering deeper truth.

8. Differentiate Practices from Rituals

Understand that a practice is for a desired outcome (discipline), while a ritual is a physical act pointing to something transcendent (devotion). Engage in rituals with full attention and offering to experience something bigger than yourself and create awe.

9. Interrupt Conflict Patterns with Intentional Shifts

Pre-decide with partners to ‘call the game’ during conflict and use immediate shift moves like conscious breathing, recommitting to conscious listening, using the drama triangle for exaggeration, or differentiating facts from stories. This helps break reactive cycles and promotes learning.

10. Value Ordinary Moments as Decisive

Recognize that how you handle a million small, ordinary moments (slights, minor conflicts) accumulates over time, determining the trajectory of your relationships and life. These moments are decision points that either move you closer to or further from your desired self and outcomes.