You remember that you’re not an ordinary person in this relationship. You are the therapist or a friend in a good position to help. It won’t hurt the relationship to wonder about her sincerity or honesty. As a therapist, you can expect a client to be dishonest. That’s material. It’s part of the complex you’re helping with. If your client is perfect, what is there to talk about? Therapy does not require full honesty. It would be better to hear the story with all its protective shields and misdirections than a tale cleaned up for therapeutic use. As a therapist you cannot be naïve. You have to expect shadow, expect to be manipulated. It’s all right. This is a basic human effort to risk telling a story by getting to the real facts slowly, one at a time. You can’t do it perfectly or purely. Only a moralistic therapist would expect unalloyed truth. A soulful therapist does not ask for purity but only a valiant effort to be present.

True integrity—a sense of knowing who you are and being guided by your own clear sense of right and wrong—is a kind of secret leadership weapon. If you trust your own instincts and treat people with respect, the company will come to represent the values you live by.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.”

“This brings into focus one of the basic flaws of the Personality Ethic. To try to change outward attitudes and behaviors does very little good in the long run if we fail to examine the basic paradigms from which those attitudes and behaviors flow. This perception demonstration also shows how powerfully our paradigms affect the way we interact with other people. As clearly and objectively as we think we see things, we begin to realize that others see them differently from their own apparently equally clear and objective point of view. “Where we stand depends on where we sit.

The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity.

Respectful communication works in independent situations and even in interdependent situations, but the creative possibilities are not opened up. In interdependent situations compromise is the position usually taken. Compromise means that 1 + 1 = 1 1/2. Both give and take. The communication isn’t defensive or protective or angry or manipulative; it is honest and genuine and respectful. But it isn’t creative or synergistic. It produces a low form of Win/Win.