Since we live in a society that likes everything to have a response time measured in minutes, if not seconds, I thought it would be helpful to provide a user-friendly, ethical framework that could be applied to enhance our personal and professional relationships.
Those of us in business, or the professions, know how little time is actually devoted to the pursuit, understanding and practical application of ethical principles to our relationships and transactions. In fact, in the professions, mandatory continuing education allocates but the tiniest fraction of time in pursuit of educating members in sound ethical behavior. Yet it’s a strong ethical foundation that’s required in order to create, maintain and even repair healthy, successful, long-term relationships.
Ethics-To-Go® is based upon one sentence that helps you to easily recall and apply 7 Ethical Principles to everyday professional and personal interactions. The sentence is:
How True Service Lovingly Creates Real Vitality
The key, or mneumonic, is that the first letter of each of the 7 words stands for one of the underlying 7 principles. H for Honoring, T for Trusting…etc. So let’s see how it works.
1. Honoring means acknowledging and respecting both yourself and others.
2. Trusting means seeing the other in the most favorable light…allowing for the benefit of the doubt before we judge and, prematurely, react.
3. Suffering means understanding that it’s a “team sport” and that whenever harmony moves into disharmony, everyone suffers…even if they do it by different means.
4. Listening means being open to another’s spoken and unspoken words, actions, and needs.
5. Composting means taking the negative aspects of your experiences and providing them with adequate “light” or understanding in order to turn them into fertile soil, in which you can plant new seeds for the future of the relationship.
6. Releasing means knowing and accepting when growth (expansion) has ceased, and at that point being able to honor progress without perfection.
7. Valuing means recognizing the importance and benefits of the current relationship and realistically assessing what it will cost in economic and non-economic terms to replace it.
There’s one other benefit to becoming familiar with the one sentence Ethics-To-Go® approach. Besides the fact that it’s a simple way to remember the 7 Ethical Principles to apply to your relationships, it actually holds a deeper message about how to actually succeed at them.
True service, devoting your energies to the needs of something or someone outside of yourself, is the one certain and most expeditious path to achieving long-term satisfaction in your relationships.
