Our Story
PURPOSE
It had been two crazy years. Bad actors were everywhere I turned. No matter how hard I tried to hold onto the belief that people are inherently good, I was perpetually confronted with experiences that demonstrated otherwise. No stranger to difficult people, I have spent more than three decades counseling, coaching, and consoling people from all walks of life. From working in prisons with inmates, to working in community with constituents, to working in corporate America with CEOs, my experience with people runs the gamut. Yet, somehow, the force behind the level of meanness, and workplace bullying, and foul language, and erasure of people, and corrosive disrespect felt recklessly unfamiliar. To make bad matters worse, there was the piercing dynamic of the bad actors themselves. These were people I loved. People I thought I knew. People I thought I could trust--until I could not.
​ Before long, the string of bad experiences with bad actors took its toll. There were no more excuses to make. No more acceptable explanations to create. Overlooking, dismissing, and undervaluing the implications of being mistreated snowballed into a recognition of emotional abuse that snowballed into anger that snowballed into depression. How? Because like so many others, I kept telling myself, "Oh, it's no big deal. I can handle her. I can handle them. It's just people being people." All the while the strength of my spirit was quietly crumbling. Joy was being replaced with fatigue. Hope was being replaced with doubt. And a love for people was being replaced with a loathing of people.
Having missed the cues that I had breached my own integrity boundaries, I eventually found myself in a dark hole of depression, reeking of sadness, holding on by a thread, desperately fighting for a
pathway back to the light. Thankfully, a cocktail of therapy, healing modalities, an abundance of love, and the preciousness of time restored me. During the restoration process, however, I had this epiphany. "Clearly, people are not well. Clearly, people are not the same. Clearly, there's been an erosion of decency that we are not talking enough about. And if, as loving as I am, I am undeservingly going through this kind of hell with bad actors, thousands of other loving beings probably are as well. And if others are, I wonder if they recognize the dangers associated with letting people be obnoxiously bad at their expense?"
Next came an inflection point: "I can heal, be grateful for my healing, mind my business, and limit my interactions with people. OR, I can heal, tap into my three decades of business acumen/exceptional leadership, roll up my sleeves, and get in the trenches to bring integrity back as a personal, societal, and organizational main stay." In that moment I was reminded of civil rights activist Ella Baker who organized the founding conference for SNCC after watching college students relentlessly protest. I was reminded of activist William Kellibrew who founded the Kellibrew Survivors Network after witnessing his mother gunned down by her boyfriend. I was reminded of financial expert Dave Ramsey who started Ramsey Solutions after being enraged by the harassment of a bill collector when he lost everything. And then there was ME TOO founder Tarana J. Burke who began advocating for sexual assault survivors after meeting a teen girl who was sexually assaulted and abused.
For leaders of projects and organizations the world over, purpose emerges out of the inconvenience of pain. Something menacing gives birth to something meaningful. Such is the case for The Integrity Institute, LLC, where disrupting meanness with joy is our cause.