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INTEGRITY

The Second Principle of Perseverance

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE GAME, I sit quietly, choosing not to put my hearing aids in as the coach storms back and forth, cussing and spewing rage following the team’s loss. I could make eye contact, but I choose not to because I can’t look the coach in the eye—not because I let him down, but because I do not respect him.

He is the coach who only shows his true and ugly self when the TV cameras are not around—behind closed doors in the locker room when nobody but the team is watching. He is never the same person in every room he walks into. In this space, he exudes fear—prevalent and palpable, reeking of insecurity, which lets us know he will throw any of us under the bus at any moment to save his own skin.

As with so many people in positions of power, fear has rotted away his integrity.

The coaches I enjoyed most weren’t necessarily the nice coaches, but the consistent ones—the coaches who never changed their personality, whether the cameras were on or if the owner was in the room. These were the coaches I knew would always have our backs. If they were firm with one player, they were firm with every player.

There were no double standards. Double standards are the quickest way to destroy your team. They are the result of absent integrity.

The coach who didn’t tolerate double standards and who treated everyone the same was the coach who valued his own integrity, and thus his players’ dignity. This was leadership. Say what you will about Bobby Knight, the legendary, albeit grumpy, coach most famously from the University of Indiana. But he was grumpy on camera and he was grumpy off camera. There is integrity in that.

Integrity is my favorite of the Seven Principles of Perseverance because theoretically it should be the easiest, but in fact it is one of the most difficult.

DEFINING INTEGRITY

Integrity is the daily choice to remain consistent in who you are, no matter who is watching, despite the never-ending temptations of immediate short-term gain. Merriam-Webster defines it as “the state of being whole and undivided,” and that’s how I see integrity—embodying all aspects of who you are.

The New Alpha is the same person in every room he enters.

Here’s a promise I’ll make to anyone: If you remain true to who you are, never compromising yourself for the short-term gain, you will get to where you need to go. Maybe not to where you want to go, but where you need to go.

Sometimes my integrity was all I had, especially on many dark and cold winter mornings during basketball season. Often I got out of bed unsure of where my path was taking me, but I always knew if I stayed true to who I was, I would get to where I needed to go, and that small glimmer was sometimes all I had to get me to lace up my shoes one more time and get back to work. When you function from a place of integrity, you cannot fail.

This is Alpha.

LIVING INTEGRITY

My mother and father were my first living example of integrity, when as Allreds, they treated everyone exactly the same in our polygamist commune. This made my parents an anomaly, for being Allreds, we were royalty within the polygamist group known as the “Allred group,” though technically called the AUB, or Apostolic United Brethren. You would think that within a theoretically socialist community, equality would be a given, but this was not the case. In fact, it was hierarchal and rife with nepotism. Even so, my parents made no distinction, and no matter what their last name was, treated everyone the same, and that is why they were loved by many and consequently a threat to other men in power in the commune.

Because of this dynamic, we ended up leaving Montana to move to Utah, into the main headquarters of the Allred group, as the Montana commune was just a hub. My father became the right-hand man to his uncle, Owen, who was our religious leader at the time. Eventually, when I was twelve years old, my father blew the whistle on child abuse and money laundering by the entire AUB group. His conscience would not allow himself to function in a world of double standards and hypocrisy that are so often prevalent when power is abused. His integrity and consistency of character were more important to him than personal gain.

Faced with a choice, my father chose truth and integrity, knowing it might well cost everything he had worked his entire life for. All the homes he had built for free in the communes, all the work he had put in as the scholar and theologian for the Allred group to continue his father’s legacy, were gone. At forty-two years of age, he and my mother were forced to cut their losses, leave everything behind, and go into hiding.

They lost all they had; that was the price of integrity.

I know they would pay that price again without batting an eye. My parents taught me through their actions how I define integrity as an adult, which is through a question I ask myself every night when I go to bed: Was I the same person in every room I walked into?

People follow leaders who act with integrity because they know what they are going to get every day in that consistency of character. Are you the same person to everyone, in every room you walk into? It’s not that hard: if you are behaving in a way that would be embarrassing if your mother saw it or if captured on video, then you probably shouldn’t behave that way. Pretty easy criteria to follow.

I am an introvert, compounded by my hearing loss, and at large gatherings I will stand in a corner and watch the room. I will notice many people change their body language and posture depending on who they are talking to, even outright changing their personalities. It never ceases to amaze me how many people do this, especially those in leadership positions, and more alarming is how they fail to process that other people might notice this behavior.

The lack of self-awareness is stunning.

If I watch someone change their personality depending on who is in the room, I know I cannot do business with that person. Their chameleon traits signal clearly they will throw me under the bus once they are able to make a move for their own immediate benefit. Outdated alpha males are chameleons. They will cheat or compromise themselves to get ahead. They will throw people under the bus to protect themselves and their own agenda and motives and climb the corporate ladders of their workplaces to receive validation. They will be who they have to be in any room, to serve their ultimate agenda: their own personal gain. And their superficial success will paint the illusion of happiness.

The old alpha will appear successful and happy to the world as he ascends to the top, but be clear in understanding that most of the people who cut corners and use others for their own gain will have burned so many bridges along the way that they will have no intimate relationships with whom to share their victory. And even more starkly, they don’t even know who they are anymore. In the absence of intimacy, the hole within their heart grows bigger, making them more restless in their search for a new goal, accomplishment, or trophy to temporarily validate them, believing that external validation will give them connection.

Ask Yourself

»Are you the same person no matter who is in the room, whether they have money or influence or power, or not? Do you treat everyone the same?

»Recall a time when an authority figure’s behavior (a parent, church leader/teacher, or a boss) was inconsistent. Did that seem acceptable? Did this experience affirm how the “game of life” had to be played? Or did you have the skill of personal reflection and realize you didn’t have to play by those rules?

»Think of a time when you were in a quandary and you gave in to peer pressure or acted selfishly versus keeping your integrity intact. Recall a time where you chose the immediate, easy, and superficial gain. (Don’t worry, we’ve all done it!) Then recall a time where despite immense temptation, you chose integrity. Write down a list of the feelings you felt in both instances. Be honest! There will be good and bad emotions on both lists—otherwise, we would always choose the high road.

GOOD GUY VERSUS NICE GUY

There is a difference between a nice guy and a good guy, which author Robert Glover so brilliantly pointed out. For a long time, I thought being a nice guy would get me where I wanted to be in life. It didn’t. In fact, it left me with little in both relationships and finances, a basement apartment, and overwhelming credit card debt. It wasn’t until I learned how to be a good guy that my life started to flow with more ease and abundance.

When I began playing basketball as a teen, I underwent a personality schism. Everyone loved seeing cutthroat “Dark” Lance on the basketball court, but that Lance was not allowed inside the family home. I had to be nice “Light” Lance when I was with my family. I began to live a compartmentalized life—Dark Lance on the court, Light Lance off the court. I deluded myself into thinking that was integrity, because I was still the same person in those respective paradigms. It wasn’t until after I retired from basketball that I realized how essential Dark Lance was to my well-being—this was my shadow side, the aspect of my personality that many would publicly shame but secretly admire. My shadow side carried me through a lot of hard times. It gave me the will to get back up time and again when I got blindsided by a screen I couldn’t hear coming, or when a coach threw me under the bus. My need to win or just even the score, which was shamed off the court for being too aggressive, carried me through so much. It was and still is a huge part of who I am.

The trick is learning to balance dark and light.

Being exclusively nice or aggressive is not natural. Earth is always half in daylight, half in darkness. Total darkness or light would mean the end for the inhabitants of our planet. The Earth needs a balance of both to keep its equilibrium. It’s the same for people—when we are shamed by religion or culture to be light all the time, it’s a power play to keep us off balance.

My culture taught me that being a nice guy leads to a reward from God. I was always trying to be the nice guy, in hopes people would give me what I wanted without communicating, which was usually just to not be abandoned. I was afraid of anyone being upset with me until I was on the basketball court; then I didn’t care. The mask was on. I went for blood. The dark came out. In the gladiator arena this was acceptable, for the mask provides us anonymity even from ourselves.

When I retired from basketball, I no longer had the familiar outlet of basketball to let my dark side come out. I was not in integrity, and I believe this contributed to my battles with depression and scrupulosity. Rage built, because I was not fully integrated into my personality, and thus, I was not truly functioning in integrity.

Integrity is the integration of all aspects of your personality.

It was during an issue with my son’s mother following our split that a point came when I was either going to let my boundaries be undermined or I was going to have to let Dark Lance, the Lance that everyone cheered on the basketball court, emerge and integrate with me in the real world. Dark Lance came out and began setting pretty strict boundaries, much to the chagrin of people who were used to Nice Lance.

How dare Dark Lance step beyond the basketball court!

Tough. They would have to deal with it.

My dark side is a huge part of me and what makes me, me. To keep it hidden only creates a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde dynamic of mental unwellness: anxiety, depression, and other afflictions. I’m not alone—your dark side will emerge, basketball court or not, and to deny it will only make things worse.

I am not saying it is okay to lash out and be an angry male, ranting and raving on social media, vomiting hate speech and misogyny, getting into bar fights, and kicking kittens. I am speaking the opposite: the men who behave that way are angry men who have not learned to integrate their dark and light sides. They are off-balance and are thus acting in extremes.

The more you integrate and honor your dark and your light, the less extreme your outbursts will be and the fewer soothing addictions and vices you’ll seek. When we hide parts of ourselves and they become shadowed, they grow stronger until they find an outlet, usually in reaction or defect. The skillful integration of both dark and light into your personality means speaking your feelings clearly without apologizing. It is stating your boundaries succinctly, and not needing to explain them. It is letting someone know if they breach those boundaries. It is treating others as you want to be treated, and if someone doesn’t honor you in kind, releasing them from the relationship.

Good guys integrate all aspects of their personality, dark and light, and aren’t apologetic about it. A nice guy hides aspects of his personality, hoping he can manipulate others into not judging him and thus give him what he wants. I perpetuated this pattern in professional and personal settings. Imagine my rage when the coaches always acquiesced to the difficult teammates, the “assholes.” This created a culture of double standards within our team, and we know there is no quicker way to kill a team than double standards. In secret, I always envied those teammates for having the courage and sense of self to not care if someone thought they were an asshole. But in my self-righteous public persona, I judged them for not being “team-first.” And while there was truth that they were not as team oriented as I, there is also truth that I was too scared of abandonment, of losing my job, and thus I always played the nice guy.

Nice guys are the most dishonest people. And I was one of them, as I was not functioning in honest integrity in my relationships—I never truly said what I wanted or what I was truly thinking and feeling. I kept quiet, hoping that my niceness would get me what I wanted, that I could somehow manipulate and hope others would read my mind and then magically give me what I wanted without me having to articulate it.

This is not integrity. It is manipulation and dishonesty, not to mention seeing the world through a childish lens. I am guilty of it. Sure, I was the same person in every room I walked into, except the basketball court. In all other rooms, I was the nice guy. Thus, my own dislike of the coaches who did not function in integrity was my own projected self-loathing and fear.

I was not integrated.

Even in my short-lived marriage, I was the nice guy. I was terrified to say no, for fear that my partner would be upset with me. What I evoked instead was her irritation that she could never connect. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to be married to me in that context? I never truly said how I felt: I would not say no even when it was appropriate. Without clear communication and boundaries, all we had was escalating frustration. If I had said my truth instead of holding it in for fear of abandonment, she and I both would have been happier. The more we are unable to say no, the more people lose respect for us. I didn’t understand for many years that what I truly wanted to be (and what the women I dated wanted) was a good guy, not a nice guy.

The New Alpha male is a good guy, not a nice guy. He speaks authentically and lives with integrity, knowing that even if his boss or partner is angry with him for saying no, he will still be respected for speaking his authentic feelings and drawing his boundaries. If people abandon him, not appreciating his authentic self and voice, the New Alpha male knows that as he integrates all aspects of who he is, the right people will integrate with him.

True integrity is the acknowledging, honoring, and integrating of all aspects of yourself.

THE GREEKS AND AVATAR DECODING

One day when I was in Greece, having a coffee before practice, I sat outside a shop in front of the Acropolis and began to have a conversation with a local. I asked him, “What does a boy growing up in Greece think about the pantheon and the gods of Olympus? Of Zeus and Hera, Poseidon and Demeter, Athena and Apollo, and the rest?”

His reply was so simple: “We are the same characters.”

In that one sentence, he spoke a thousand truths about the human psyche.

With my hearing loss, I have always been a keen observer of the human body and its communication patterns. I can answer questions without fully hearing them, because I know the third or fourth question a stranger is going to ask me. I count the syllables and know they are usually asking either “Where did you play basketball?” or “Where are you from?”

I have become so sensitive to patterns that when the Greek man answered “We are but the same characters,” you can imagine my elation. I knew I was in fact not crazy to feel I was in the movie The Truman Show—a simulation of characters and archetypes.

As I explored my own blind spots, wanting to improve my weaknesses and be harder to guard not just as a basketball player but as a human being, I was first drawn to Myers-Briggs and Enneagram testing, which are quite interesting as personality traits tests. Then I began to look at and decode my own astrological chart, learning the foundational language that I began blending with my own experiences and intuition into what I now call “avatar decoding.”

This is not to be confused with the kind of magical-thinking astrology where the superstitious blame Mercury retrograde from a lack of understanding, or nervously check horoscopes, believing their sun sign, which is merely one aspect of them, can predict an entire future identical to the other hundreds of millions of people who share that sign. Rather, astrology-based avatar decoding, as I tell my clients, is a mirror of self-awareness. It has dozens of different aspects other than sun signs that help us see where all the persona archetypes of this matrix, encapsulated in the Greek pantheon, have been encoded in you from the gravitational-powered cipher, or software coder, that is our solar system.

Here’s where some of you are probably saying, “Lance has lost his mind.”

Possibly, but think about the moon. We feel and acknowledge its cycles, affecting the oceans’ tides and likely women’s cycles. Furthermore, most doctors say that the ER is craziest during a full moon. As we all collectively agree to this truth of the gravitational pull of the moon and consider its effects on our subconscious, would it not stand to reason that Jupiter, which is eleven times the diameter of Earth and nearly eighty-eight times the diameter of the moon, would also have some gravitational pull and effect on our planet and, thus, our psyches? It may not be as immediate as Earth’s moon or as intense, but nevertheless, isn’t that gravity and the power of its orbit real? Well then, what about all the other planets?

When the ancient Greeks looked to the stars and began to tell the myths associated with them in the form of the Gods of their pantheon, it wasn’t that they believed those stories to be factual history but that they were metaphors of the human psyche. In short, astrology was an early form of Myers-Briggs personality classifications, where personalities were decoded to show their strengths and weaknesses.

Mapping and tracking the planets and stars, coinciding their angles with when people were born, the Greeks began to decipher human psychology, recognizing we all have archetypes or universal patterns within our collective unconscious. This connects to the theories of nineteenth-century Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who described the “unified self” as comprised of parent, child, a trickster archetype, and other elements. What Jung’s work introduced to the modern world was that we all wear many masks or personae that comprise our larger psyche, with different characters or personas having larger influence or sway. The Greeks were doing the same thing in interpreting people’s psyches according to their astrological charts.

Decoding the masks or avatars of my psyche on a chart, I began to see my patterns and blind spots. My time stamp, my code that is a birth chart, as I deciphered it, explained so much. This applies to all of us—our code is the avatar of how we are naturally programmed to react to the world in this vibrational dimension. That time stamp is part of our software, which integrates with our cultural upbringing.

Explore—allow reason to merge with wonder, integrating your mind with your heart.

Our task is to transcend that code and learn to respond to the world with clarity rather than reacting from the old stories and prejudices of our culture and natural temperament that are revealed in our code. There is always free will and choice—agency to make the decision to continue through life on autopilot, which is our astrological code, or the decision to transcend that code, which is Alpha.

Simply being aware of our coding, our strengths, and more importantly, our weaknesses and blind spots, is half the battle. Once we accept that, we see our ego—or what I see as our autopilot, our avatar: how we react to the world when we are not self-aware. Most of us go through life asleep, unaware of the machine and software code of our mind running on the predictable behaviors and dynamics of the planets and archetypes that were ciphered in our avatar when we were born into this matrix.

If you haven’t noticed it yet, the solar system looks a lot like an atom, right?

Which only begs the question of scale.

Is our solar system merely an atom within a molecule that is a synapse within the brain cell of another being of a different scale and dimension? If you have looked at images of galaxies clustering and connecting, they begin to take the shape and pattern of something that looks quite similar to the synapses firing within a human brain.

Everything is energy and frequency. And we as a species have fooled ourselves into thinking our vibrational frequency as humans is the only frequency other life-forms and consciousness can exist within, rather than maybe asking with humility, “Are we merely vibrating at a frequency that is this dimension, which is within the brain of another being? And are there other galaxies and worlds, vibrating at fractal frequencies at smaller scale, within our own hands?”

This is an exploration of the concept of scale.

There is nothing wrong with allowing your brain to go there, to marvel at how insignificant we might be. It is liberating. In that space of no boundaries, no absolute truths, we see how magical this universe is, knowing that a simple name for it, such as “universe,” can never truly explain it.

If you want to find magic again in this linear, left-brained, hypermasculine world of dry statistical logic, allow your mind to stay and play with the concept of scale and frequency. Allow your mind to understand that just because our human senses can only process certain frequencies doesn’t mean that there can’t be a million other frequencies vibrating from within this universe, let alone the parallel and perpendicular universes. Explore—allow reason to merge with wonder, integrating your mind with your heart.

AWARENESS OF LIMITATIONS AND DIS-INTEGRITY

Integrity is an act of accountability that is the full integration of all aspects of your psyche, masculine and feminine, or dark and light—seeing and decoding yourself, in full reflection and awareness. Disintegration is the opposite.

I do not care how you do it—astrology in the dark and light interpretations of your psyche, Enneagram testing or Myers-Briggs personality evaluations online, or workbooks like the CliftonStrengths Assessment—but find a healthy modality to map and expose your blind spots. Going through life without the self-awareness of seeing your own reactive patterns and blind spots is the equivalent of a basketball player never watching himself on film to see where he is weakest and can improve. If a basketball player does not take the time to see and acknowledge his limitations, that lack of self-awareness will leave him exposed to be exploited by his opponents, who no doubt found his weakness while scouting him.

The all-time greats developed new skills during every off-season, making themselves harder to guard in the upcoming season. I was by no means the most talented—if you had asked most professional scouts if Lance Allred was going to have a ten-year professional career, they would have laughed. Yet, my awareness of my own limitations and weaknesses as a basketball player became a strength because it gave me the drive to improve during each off-season as I developed and honed new skills, making me more cerebral and more difficult to guard. It allowed me to outlast so many other players.

Finding and acknowledging my weaknesses as a basketball player allowed me to hedge weak points and protect my flank by developing other skills to cope and adjust. The same thing is required of us as we play the game of life. If we do not take the time to develop the self-awareness of our strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots, we will continually be blindsided and incredibly easy to guard. So find a method to help acknowledge and honor all parts of your psyche, even the weak points that you have been taught to shame, even the dark parts. When this dark or shadow side is acknowledged and not repressed, a healthy balance of moderation will result, as well as an integration of your psyche, allowing you to no longer hide behind the avatar mask you were conditioned and coded to wear.

Integration is integrity.

This is Alpha.

THE COST OF INTEGRITY

In the summer of 1998, the year the University of Utah lost to Kentucky in the national championship game, I was offered a scholarship to the University of Utah by Coach Rick Majerus. I was seventeen years old. My dreams had come true, just like I had written them on my goal sheet.

At first, my relationship with Coach Majerus was a perfect fit. He was a brilliant “x and o” tactician and brutal taskmaster who demanded hard work. I was his archetypal player because my work ethic was intense for many reasons, but mostly fear. Fear that if I didn’t become the first deaf player in NBA history, I would be a failure. Even after my family broke away from polygamy, deeply embedded in my subconscious was the story that God was angry with me. I put tremendous pressure on myself as I lay in bed after every game and every practice perseverating over all the mistakes I made on the court. I truly believed that every made or missed shot had eternal ramifications.

I could never do enough, such was my fear, and for a coach like Majerus, it was a perfect fit. I adored him. At his basketball camps as a teenager, I watched him command such attention, knowledge, and detail. I watched him analyze basketball games on national television with such charisma. I hung on Coach Majerus’s every word and would have done anything for him. I couldn’t see how dangerous this was, as are all stories when there is an imbalance of power.

My freshman year, Coach Majerus took a leave of absence when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. When he returned, something had changed. He had been demanding before, but his criticism shifted from constructive to personal. I have great compassion for the situation—dealing with cancer in regard to a loved one is enough to make anyone break—yet even before then, I had begun to see that Coach Majerus was a different person in private in the team room than he was on camera. Are you the same person in every room that you walk into?

During my sophomore year it all came crashing down. It was a pregame shootaround, and Coach Majerus had us lined up on the baseline and began to cuss us out. Then he looked at me and said, “Lance, you are the worst of all. You use your hearing as an excuse to weasel your way through life and are a disgrace to cripples. If I was in a wheelchair and saw you play basketball, I would shoot myself.”

Are you the same person in every room that you walk into?

Now, as a thirty-eight-year-old man, if someone said that to me, I would nod my head and say, “Thank you for your feedback,” and then compassionately suggest they seek help for their anger. But when you are a twenty-year-old athlete with big dreams and a fragile sense of self, it breaks you. When you are trained to be a gladiator, people don’t care about your feelings. You aren’t supposed to have them.

I tried my best to swallow this remark and ignore it, but such abuse from a mentor turns one into a zombie. I was afraid to even play basketball anymore. I felt I had failed. Every further mistake was one more confirmation that I was a horrible person and that God and everyone else wanted nothing to do with me.

I transferred out of the University of Utah after that sophomore season was over, ready to quit basketball. I only got one scholarship offer—Weber State University.

The head coach, Joe Cravens, had at one point been an assistant under Majerus and knew what went on behind closed doors. When I transferred to Weber State, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which began to creep into my schoolwork and dating and inability to sleep. The PTSD was only made worse as I had to sit out that season as a “red shirt,” unable to play due to NCAA transfer rules and thus unable to channel my neuroses onto the court.

I was not easy to deal with, yet Coach Cravens offered me only patience and compassion. I will always love him for it. I remember the day I walked into Coach Cravens’s office and, with so much shame, told him I had been diagnosed with mental illness. He looked at me and said, “Lance, you needing to take medication for your PTSD is the same as your teammate Brad needing to take insulin for his diabetes.”

This compassion meant the world to me.

Where Majerus used intimidation, threats, and fear to motivate his players, Cravens relied more on loyalty and compassion. If Majerus had understood that loyalty and compassion were the greatest motivators, not fear and intimidation, he would have been one of the top five coaches in the history of basketball. He was that brilliant.

My junior year, Majerus and the Utes came up to Weber State. We lost, but I played well. Well enough that people were asking, “Lance Allred doesn’t suck. What is going on?”

Then the stories about what happened during my time at the University of Utah grew.

The Salt Lake Tribune interviewed me. And I finally told my story after two years of silence.

Why?

Two reasons—the first two of the Seven Principles of Perseverance:

»Accountability: It was time to own up for all the times I was a Ute and helped the coaches recruit other players by keeping silent.

»Integrity: Could I be the same person in every room I walked into?

I was now faced with a predicament similar to what my parents faced when they blew the whistle on child abuse in the Allred group. It took a moment like this, to see how brave and bold my parents were, knowing they would not only likely be losing their family and community and everything they had worked so hard for in the chasing of their dream of a utopian society, but they would be hated, loathed with fury.

Yet, if I was able to witness my parents do the right thing, with integrity, in the face of such potential loss, how could I claim to be their son and not do the right thing by telling the truth?

The price they paid would have been for nothing if I didn’t speak truth.

Furthermore, having been in speech therapy for sixteen years, learning how to speak and communicate is the thing I am most grateful for. If I didn’t speak truth, then it would have all been for naught.

I shared the truth with the newspaper. The account was confirmed by teammates. A week after it was published, Coach Majerus resigned.

This was 2004.

I knew the backlash would come.

I had broken the unspoken agreement that is the code of silence demanded in sports locker rooms, but codes of silence don’t mean much to me after having escaped polygamy. It means something is going on that people don’t want others to know about—which is an assault on integrity.

Upon being called up to the NBA four years later, I was sitting with a scout one day, and he said, “Majerus threw quite a cloud over you. Even without the hearing loss, it is a miracle you made it here.” To this day, I still get random hate messages from Utah fans. I have been called every name in the book. People will hold onto their stories about what they believe to be true. As Mark Twain said best, “How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work!”

Even when you calmly ask a screaming Majerus fan who is literally in your face, “If what I had said was untrue, why wasn’t I or the Salt Lake Tribune sued for slander?” They do not want to hear it. Over time I have been able to give them compassion and understanding. Life is hard. It is unfair. Yet, sport is one thing that takes away that anxiety and pain for a moment. A father can take his boy to a sporting event, spending their hard-earned money to share a moment. To ride with their underdog Runnin’ Utes—all the way to the national championship game—only to come so close.

That is a sacred memory. Rightfully so. And that memory should hold for them. No matter what happened with Majerus following that magical run, that memory is not cheapened. It was magic. I watched it from my TV—I was there, too.

Both truths can exist, without one negating the other. Coach Majerus was a brilliant coach who did love his players in his own way, and he unraveled after his mother got cancer. And with compassion, I understand that most of those fans, short for fanatics, have a fear that their magical memories of those Runnin’ Ute games will mean less if both truths exist. And for some, those memories are truly highlights of their lives. Life can be hard, so we hold onto the magical stories when we can.

Those magical memories do not become invalid or lessen in some way if both truths exist. We can allow the dark and light truths of life to hold the balance of this earthly experience. For it is the human condition.

If Coach Majerus were still alive today and I saw him again, I would give him a hug and tell him, “Thank you for showing me the path of integrity I needed to take.”

The old alpha would want revenge, whereas the New Alpha male understands that so many of us are operating from fear. How much fear must Coach Majerus have been in to live such a polarized life of charm and rage? Who would envy that? I wish him peace, wherever he may be, with gratitude for not only showing me the price we pay for our integrity, but also helping me understand the price my parents paid when they risked everything to stand up for truth and integrity.

This is compassion.

Do the Work

Integrity is assimilating and being accountable for all of the aspects of yourself.

»Find and take a Myers-Briggs or Enneagram personality test online or check out the CliftonStrengths Assessment books published by Gallup or Sacred Contracts by Caroline Myss and begin to analyze your reflection in the world and how it reflects back on you.

»Begin to study and honestly write down your strengths and weaknesses not only as a professional, but as a husband, son, brother, and father.

»For every weakness, write down a correlating strength. Compliment yourself for your strength, and do not judge yourself for your weakness.

»Once you have the list, put it someplace visible, so you can keep your strengths and weaknesses fresh and in the forefront of your mind. Look at it every day with self-awareness so you can check your default mechanisms, catching yourself when you want to wear a different mask out of fear someone will judge, punish, or abandon you.

»Every day will get easier, and you will become not only more confident and inclusive of all aspects of yourself but more appreciative as well. Your weaknesses will show you wonderful opportunities to grow and integrate, rather than keeping them shadowed.

»Find a small stone or some tiny object that can serve as a token or reminder that you keep in your pocket. Every time you touch it, remember to be the same person in every room you walk into, in full trust that the right people who will value you for you will appear and help you on your path in life. Understand that the people who would only help you if they thought you were somebody else are not your tribe.

In the Zone

»Sit erect on the ground, cross-legged or legs straight. After you have closed your eyes and taken a few deep breaths and allowed your thoughts to calm, begin heart drumming.

»When you feel the Theta state of relaxation and heart-centeredness, take seven deep breaths, counting inward to seven, holding it for seven seconds, and then exhaling slowly for seven seconds.

»During each set imagine one of the seven colors of the rainbow, starting from the bottom—holding red for seven seconds, then orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

»Once you have settled into a deep state, allow all seven colors to reflect a part of your personality. Does red represent your temper? What does orange represent? Your sexuality? How about yellow? What comes to mind? Your confidence, or is it your shyness? I won’t answer for you. This is you exploring all the many dimensions that make you, you.

»After you have worked with all seven colors, take one more breath and hold it for thirty seconds. In that time, imagine all of the colors merging into a blinding white. As you hold your breath, counting to thirty, the back of your eyelids will begin to flash white.

»Allow the white in the back of your eyelids to materialize the white in your mind, integrating all aspects of your personality.

»As you close, ask for the courage and support to remain in integrity, all aspects of you integrated throughout the rest of the day, with no colors splintering off.

RECAP

Integrity is consistency of character, full transparent ownership, and integration of all parts of your psyche—always being the same person in every room you walk into. It is not only reassuring for those around you when you are consistent, it is reassuring for yourself, knowing that you have never compromised who you are, and that staying true to yourself will take you where you need to be in life. As you integrate all aspects of who you are, the right people will integrate with you.