The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

"Martha Beck accidentally became a life coach after doing, I think, a sociology PhD at Harvard. She was going down a very intellectual, academic route, but realised that she wanted to help people by putting all of that science-based knowledge into helping people. She was famously Oprah Winfrey’s life coach for a while. She’s amazing. I pre-ordered this book as soon as I heard about it, a year before it came out. It’s all about the meaning of integrity. This book isn’t about being a really good person who always gets things right. It’s more about being your whole self and not cutting yourself into pieces to please everyone. I think we all do that to some degree, because we are different with different people. But she encourages you to just be you, and not shapeshift all the time. “It’s an amazing feeling to look at my calendar and know deep down that I do want to do everything on it” At the beginning of the book, she says that this all came from this period where she decided not to tell a single lie for a whole year. Not even white lies. So if someone rang her up and asked her, ‘do you want to come to my birthday party,’ and she didn’t, she’d say, ‘no, I don’t want to.’ It’s quite amazing to see that in action. From there, she realised that her life got better. She left her family of origin, who were Mormon , came out as a lesbian, got married. Basically her life became amazing. But it was really scary. She had to throw away her old life. She calls it an ‘integrity cleanse’, when you don’t tell any lies. But she also says that you don’t have to be so extreme. Even by telling slightly fewer lies, it impacts your life and health. The science backs that up. The structure mirrors Dante’s Divine Comedy . So it’s really geeky, but also really accessible and really good. Definitely. There are lots of exercises in the book around that—asking yourself: are you are feeling what you really feel, and saying what you really mean? Are you doing what you really want? Because, yes, sometimes we get confused. But what I took from it was that whenever you are in intergrity, you feel relaxed. For example, I was organising a big party for next year. Every time I thought about it, I was stressed. It just didn’t feel right. So I sent an email to everyone that said ‘I’m really sorry, but I don’t want to do it any more.’ And everyone said, ‘oh my god, it’s fine.’ And my body just relaxed. I felt relief. There was just the feeling that, yes: that’s the truth. I don’t want to do it any more. That’s a really random example, but it’s real life. Yes. And once you realise what you actually want, you have a lot of clarity on what you need to have a really nice life. I think we’re often conditioned to want certain things like a big home, lots of money, and so on. But actually, when we think about it, a lot of us don’t actually care about that stuff so much. So you might be striving towards something you don’t even want in the first place. I think she’s a very, very happy person. Or not even happy, fulfilled. She lives in the woods with her non-traditional family set up, living her own life. It’s very infectious, that kind of peace. I think we can all aspire towards it, whatever shape that might take."