6Your Identity: Naming, Claiming, and Aiming
When board member Clifton Sutcliffe asked me to unethically hire his relative, I revealed my true core values—my negative and defensive operating principles.
What did I defend first? Was it something essential, grand, and beautiful, true, necessary, and kind, something from stunning post‐Homeric Greek literature or Du Fu and Li Bai's Golden Age poetry, an eternal value of great consequence that would inspire others, serve our marriage and family, raise principled children of courage, heal the nation, and usher in world peace?
Not quite. I had instead instantly protected my pride and ego, the discounted values on the clearance shelves of every failed ethics store that can't win friends and influence people, the stuff in the aisle of unwanted habits, and the exact opposite of the heart of heroes. Worse, my ego quickly donned the off‐putting cloak and elevated chin of arrogance, a low form of Tier 2 sporting a vanity mirror.
My core values hadn't gone missing. I had them. I just didn't know what they were. Nor did I know how low they could go.
But Clifton and nearby diners recoiled as my values made their entrance with the subtlety of a 30‐ton humpback whale breaching in a placid sea. It was as if I'd unwittingly recorded my true and uninspiring core values on a placard and pinned them to my back so all could know who I really was. In the grip of my inferior functions, I was blind to my actions and couldn't read my own writing.
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