There was a time when my relationship with my father was pretty good. But during my teenage years I pretty much avoided him. During that period he gave me a lot of advice I didn’t want nor listen to. One of the things he told me was that I needed to ‘Walk the Talk’.
The essence of this advice is that we need to live a life of integrity. After living half my life on this planet I see the wisdom in his words. Humans truly need to align their values with their actions. This alignment, or integrity, leads toward the good things in life and away from the bad.
I get it now.
But as a teenager this advice just made me angry.
Who wants to worry about the agreement between what we do and what we say, or believe in? Seems like a waste of time, right?
But NOT making an effort to live in integrity, where your values match your actions is a huge disagreement. And disagreements can lead to conflict. This can easily become a sense of cognitive dissonance.
In music, dissonance is when something doesn’t feel right. Notes and tones of music occur that cause aural and even bodily discomfort. We don’t like it. It is harmful.
Sometimes dissonance works and is useful, but the execution requires mastery.
I find this to be similar in life.
Making the music of our lives sound and feel ‘right’ requires awareness, attention, and observation. It takes work.
Walking is work. It requires effort to move in a direction we want to move in.
Talking is also work, because it requires a knowing.
There is no more humbling nor important task than to identify and understand one’s motivations, beliefs, and values.
This is your talk.
The rest is simply filtering your actions through these lenses.
This is your walk.
Alignment of the two is integrity.