What can you manage? Can you manage time? No. Scarcely have we dominion over how we spend our time, but never can we arrest the flow of time. Can you manage results? Never. Can you manage another's actions, another's attitudes or behavior? We cannot control another's actions or behavior and no one can ever control ours.
If we cannot manage these things, what then can we manage? We can manage our own actions and behavior. Even under the most awful conditions -- the Nazi concentration camps, for example -- survivors report they were able to hold on to their last inalienable freedom -- their capability to choose their attitudes toward things, to look out of the window and to see the mountains. When we focus on our own actions and behavior -- particularly when they support our mission -- instantly we strengthen integrity.
All great martial artists and persons of action pay special attention to the timing of three elements -- the action, the response, the reaction to the response. A negotiator will initiate an action, simply to see what the other side will do. Great fighters sometimes allow themselves to be hit, for it is then that their opponents reveal their vulnerability.
As integrity increases, your reactive capacity will become instantaneous and precise. The waiting warrior admires the flower. The enemy's spies appear. A sword comes out. The spies fall.
Integrity
is all.© Copyright 1999, Logos Networks Corporation, All Rights Reserved