Why Facing Your "Unowneds" Is The Key to Your Integrity
My life changed meaningfully about 25 years ago while having lunch with three friends in Ojai, CA. I was complaining about my daughter and her behavior. I was deep into my stories about her, her mother, and me when one of my friends interrupted me and said, “Jim, you’re in victimhood, blaming your daughter and her mother. When are you going to realize that what’s happening for you has nothing to do with them? You’re responsible for your own experience, not them. They are not the cause of your upset.”
My first reaction was to want to throw my chopped salad in my friend’s face. Instead, I just got defensive (e.g. “You don’t know my situation. In fact, you don’t even have children.”) Then, I got quiet and withdrew to sulk in the pain of being misunderstood.
I spent the next several months sincerely exploring whether it was true that my experience was caused by me, not by my daughter or anyone else. Believe me, I came up with every conceivable reason why my experience was the result of her behavior. After I exhausted all my excuses, I made the choice—and it was a choice—to take responsibility for myself and my experience and to stop blaming anyone or anything else. It changed my life, including my relationship with my daughter and my relationship with everyone and everything else.
The Essence of Integrity
This was the beginning of my journey into a new experience of integrity. Integrity has always been important to me. Up to that point I viewed integrity as doing the right thing. When I did the right thing I was in integrity, and when I didn’t I was out of integrity. That lunch began to deepen my understanding of integrity. I started seeing that integrity was not only about doing the right thing; it was about energy.
Integrity, I have come to experience, is energetic wholeness. This simply means that you have all your energy fully available at this moment to respond to what is in front of you. When you’re in integrity you can dance improvisationally with life as it shows up for you. Another way of saying this is that you are as fully alive as possible. Full aliveness is the payoff of being in integrity.
The four pillars of integrity, according to Katie Hendricks, are:
- Healthy Responsibility
- Emotional Literacy (feeling feelings)
- Conscious Communication (revealing authentically and listening appreciatively)
- Impeccable Agreements
Integrity breaches or leaks come from the 4 “uns”:
- Unowneds
- Unfelts
- Unsaids
- Unkepts
Understanding Unowneds
Unowneds are any place in your life where you’re still at the effect of someone or something else. In other words, you haven’t yet OWNED that you are the cause of your experience. You still believe that someone or something out there is the reason you are the way you are. You’re either owning or out-there-ing.
Some examples of out-there-ing (unowneds) include:
- You're angry because someone stole your idea and acted like it was theirs.
- You’re sad because your team lost in the playoffs.
- You’re upset because you didn’t get the bonus you wanted.
- You don’t trust because your partner betrayed you.
- You’re disappointed because it rained on the day of the picnic.
The key is that you think the cause of your experience is what comes after the “because.” This is what we mean by at the effect of. The cause is out there.
The Costs of Not Owning
The energetic costs of not owning, of “out-there-ing,” of being at the effect of are:
- You invest your energy in blaming. When you don’t take radical responsibility your energy goes to playing the blame game, playing pin the tail on the problem. Your focus of attention is on who or what you believe is the reason your life is the way it is.
- Your creativity goes toward changing others or circumstances; the ones who are causing your problems. This is a complete waste of energy because you’ll soon learn that people are not that interested in being changed, corrected, or improved by you. They’ll almost always resist your desire to change them and then you’ll get locked into the endless cycle of applying more creative energy because you believe if you just do it more or differently they’ll change. This is one of the hallmarks of drama and it’s exhausting.
- You invest energy protecting yourself from what’s out there that is going to affect you. You spend your life force bracing yourself, armoring up, defending, anticipating, preparing, and planning. You’re reacting to life and not playing with life. Reacting is de-energizing and playing is energizing.
- You experience yourself as less than fully empowered. Something or someone is always “over” you. It has the power and you are under its power.
- Over time, unowneds calcify into entitlement and resentment. Your posture becomes “I deserve” and you’re pissed when you don’t get what you deserve.
- The final result of living a life of unowning is often giving up and collapsing. The motto of victim consciousness, “Poor me,” takes over your life until you can’t go on any longer.
Out-there-ing is hard. Owning is easy. Just as hating is hard—it takes energy—and loving is easy. It’s easy because it’s your natural state.
Shift from Out-there-ing to Owning
I invite you to take a radical inventory of your life and look for any place where you’re still blaming and criticizing others, yourself, circumstances (e.g. the weather), or conditions (e.g. diabetes).
If you don’t relate to blaming and criticizing, try this on: Where in your life do you still see problems? Something or someone that needs to be different than they are? Likely this is a place where you are out-there-ing; believing someone or something is why you’re the way you are.
The shift move for moving from out-there-ing to owning is simply to ask yourself:
- How am I creating my experience?
- What am I believing or not believing that is creating my experience?
- What am I doing or not doing that is keeping this situation going?
- What is it that I want to create?
- How can I create what it is that I most want without needing anyone or anything out there to be different than they are?
In my experience, just asking these questions from a genuine place of curiosity brings me more aliveness and energy. It gives my natural creativity something to do that is life-giving.
Further Practice
“Unowneds” are one of the blocks to integrity we help leaders overcome. Use our Integrity Inventory to help scan through your life and discover where you may be out of integrity.
One of our favorite ways to see how we’re out-thereing is to Teach the Drama Class about the issue. Try this playful, eye-opening exercise with an issue you’re struggling with.
Both our Taste of Conscious Leadership and Intro to Conscious Leadership events will give you more practice in seeing where you’re not owning your experience. Here’s how to decide which one’s for you.
For an advanced immersion in Integrity and owning your experience, register to join out Integrity Boot Camps (for coaches and leaders), happening in October 2024.
