What Will You Do?

You are driving down the highway and the speed limit is 65mph, but you are doing 75mph and one of your children asks if it is ok to go that fast.  What do you say?  You are preparing your income tax return and your spouse notices a deduction for twice the correct amount.  What do you say?

Francois de La Rochefoucauld said ‘Perfect virtue is to do unwitnessed that which we should be capable of doing before all the world’.  I have also heard it put this way:  ‘You can tell a lot about a mans character by what he does when no one is looking’.  What will you do when no one is looking?  Most of us probably exceed the speed limit at times and justify it by thinking (or even saying to our kids) that its safe, there is no one around (Police!) and I am capable of handling my car at high speeds.

What you will do when know one is looking is the basis for your entire value system. Do you know and understand your value system?  Do you do things because they are convenient, or do you think about doing the right thing?  Walter Lippman says ‘A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so’.

Perhaps it’s time to do some soul searching to understand your values.  What do you value?  What is important to you?  Maybe it’s honesty, money, praise, integrity, sincerity, admiration, etc.  Only you know what is important to you.  You could start by ‘brain-storming’ a list of values that come to mind.  Then review the list and select the ones that you are sure apply to you. 

Maybe you have never given your value system much thought, believing that it just comes to you naturally.  It does come to you naturally, but the values you have developed were influenced by the actions of the people of authority around you, just as you are influencing your children’s values.  

What ARE you going to say when your child asks if it is ok to go faster than the speed limit?

- Joe Freeman