© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete 2005 revised text of Building Yourself, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's guide to living the successful life.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Building Yourself Table of Contents
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• Almost all our sorrows spring out of relations with other people. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)

You'll often find you have unreasonable expectations of people. These may be based on your own needs, not on what the other person is actually capable of giving. But you do get pleasant surprises.

Take the sales clerk who really goes out of his or her way to help you. A lot of sales clerks couldn't care less. Here the person has a fairly low level job—yet they put in their all anyhow. That's excellence. That's integrity. It rubs off on you, even if you have to find it in the nooks and crannies of life.

You come across integrity at every level of personal interaction. You get to know it well because you have so much experience with its opposite: people who really don't care, people who only go half way. When you see someone really listening to someone else—that's integrity. When you see a person making a hard decision when no one would think less of them if they avoided it—that's integrity. When you see someone quietly working to improve the level of excellence in the world without blowing their own horn all the time—that's integrity.

A person with integrity will look you straight in the eye and tell you, “No, we can't hire you,” without telling you a story. A person with integrity will make adjustments when hard economic times come instead of whining and making excuses. A person with integrity will applaud the success of others. Integrity always looks to the best, the most noble. There's never a quick fix, never an excuse, never a half truth.

I like to look for a certain calm confidence in the people I deal with, but I realize that people with nervous mannerisms and even with significant personality problems can still come through for me when the chips are down. It's truly not easy to tell if a person really has integrity until you know them for a while. That's one important reason to approach alliances carefully. You've got to see a person in action to really see what they have inside.

When you do find an honest soul, hold on tight, even if that person seems to have little in common with you. This is the kind of person to gravitate toward. This is the kind of person to listen to. Analyze their best points and learn from them. The person might come in what you could call “a strange package,” but we've already covered the importance of opening up to the strange. You'll find integrity in all types of people if you learn where to look.