The Real Energy of Integrity

Integrity is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot, especially in the corporate world. You see it on value statements and in shiny leadership presentations, tucked neatly between buzzwords like authenticity and accountability. But for all the space it takes up in professional language, it rarely shows up in the actual experience of leadership. Most of the time, it stays surface level, a word that sounds impressive, but feels flat. Something to aim for, maybe, but never really something people embody.

But the longer I’ve sat with this word, the more I’ve come to understand it in a completely different way. For me, integrity isn’t just a value or a quality. It’s energy. You can’t always capture it in a sentence or tick a box to prove you’ve got it, but you can feel it. You feel it when someone walks into a room and something in their presence makes you lean in, not because they’re loud or charismatic, but because they’re real. You feel it when someone speaks from their truth, even if it’s messy or uncertain, and you feel it even more sharply when they don’t. You feel it in those moments when someone’s words and actions are pointing in the same direction, and in the equally powerful moments when they’re not.

We’ve all been in conversations where everything looked perfect from the outside, the tone was professional, the delivery was polished, but something didn’t sit right. Something in your body was picking up on a disconnect, even if you couldn’t put it into words. That’s what it feels like when someone isn’t in integrity. Their energy might be flat, overly rehearsed, or strangely blank, like they’ve pressed themselves into a version that’s technically acceptable but completely disconnected from who they really are. It’s not always obvious, but the energy never lies. Even if they say all the right things, your nervous system knows when something’s off.

And the opposite is just as true. When someone is in integrity, you feel a sense of steadiness in their presence. There’s no performance, no pretence. Just a kind of quiet coherence between who they are, what they say, and how they show up. And in that energy, there’s trust. Not just trust in their role or title, but trust in the person. Because you’re not having to decode anything or read between the lines, what they’re giving you is real. And that’s really rare.

That’s why integrity and authenticity can’t really be separated. Authenticity is knowing who you are. Integrity is what happens when you live it. And when someone does that consistently, especially in leadership, it changes everything. Not just in terms of how they’re perceived, but in how they move through the world because when you’re leading with integrity, you don’t have to spend energy managing a version of yourself. 

It’s important to say that leading with integrity doesn’t mean being perfect. It’s not about getting everything right or being some moral gold standard. It’s about coherence. It’s about being able to look at your decisions, your boundaries, your interactions and know, “Yes, this is me. This is honest. This is clean.” It means being willing to say, “I don’t know” instead of pretending. It means admitting when you’ve got something wrong, instead of waiting until it blows up. It means holding space for others without giving yourself away. It means giving credit freely, owning your voice without apology, and protecting your energy like your life depends on it, because in a way, it does. And perhaps most of all, it means being the same version of yourself across all the spaces you move through. Not shifting your core just to fit the room, not shrinking or inflating depending on who’s watching but showing up with consistency, clarity, and care, for yourself, and for the people around you.

When you do that, something shifts internally. There’s a kind of quiet self-respect that takes root. You stop second-guessing every interaction and you stop over-explaining. You stop needing to convince people to understand you. You already know your energy is in tune with your words and that gives you a calm sort of confidence that no title or recognition can touch.

And once you’ve felt that, even once, it becomes very hard to accept anything less. You start to feel the weight of all the times you diluted yourself. You start to notice the cost of saying yes when you meant no and you realise how much energy went into performing, and how much freedom comes from simply being yourself.

One of the clearest signs that you’re evolving as a leader, or even just as a human, is when you look back at old versions of yourself and realise you no longer move like that. You no longer tolerate the version. Maybe there was a time when you held your tongue to avoid friction or when you played the role others expected because it felt safer. When you let your intuition be overridden by logic because that’s what the job required?

Now things have changed though. Now you pause, you listen, you speak up, even when your voice shakes. You trust your gut, even when it doesn’t come with a five-point strategy. 

From that place, integrity stops being something you have to strive for and becomes the way you are. The way you move, the way you hold yourself, even in the quiet moments when no one else is watching.

So if you’re standing at the edge of this, wondering where to begin, I’ll say this. Start with awareness. Start by paying attention to those moments when someone’s words sound right but don’t land. Start by noticing the moments when your energy feels tight, forced, or flat. Start by asking yourself: “Would I still be proud of how I showed up today, even if no one else saw it?”

Because that’s integrity. 

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