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Book Excerpt from “The New IQ: How Integrity Intelligence Serves You, Your Relationships and Our World”

From Chapter 23: The Grand Upshift in Humanity and Your Role In Helping It Emerge

The Top Five Messages This Book Contains
1. We all have three core drives.
2. Aligning your three core drives is the essence of integrity.
3. Personal, relationship, leadership and integrity development share the same building blocks.
4. Humanity must leap forward in integrity if we are to thrive collectively.
5. Whatever the problem, look to integrity for the remedy.

1. We All Have Three Core Drives
You have learned about your three core drives throughout this book. They are your drives for:

1) Authenticity – personal wellbeing, self-expression and freedom
2) Connection – nourishing and productive co-creation with others
3) Impact – making a positive difference in your world

Rather than becoming the 3D Self we are designed to be, most of us define ourselves one-dimensionally, as self-improvers, connectors or do-gooders. A one- or two-dimensional sense of self sabotages our quest for inner fulfillment. Imbalance among our three core drives is also what causes so many relationships to be a mess. And it is the hidden key to why the world is facing the most perilous time in the history of humanity.

The way we thrive is through all three core drives.

2. Aligning Your Three Core Drives is the Essence of Integrity
The dictionary definition of integrity includes honesty, wholeness, completeness, unbrokenness and moral soundness. The only antonym to “integrity” that Roget’s Thesaurus offers is “dishonesty.” Lack of integrity takes many more forms than ‘only’ being dishonest. This fact helps explain why so few of us recognize when we are out of integrity.

The most basic form of honesty is telling truths and taking actions that are simultaneously good for you, those around you, and the collective. The heart of self-honesty is realizing that you have three core drives and that neglecting any one of them prevents wholeness and completeness. The key to unbrokenness is properly digesting your life experiences through harvesting gifts of great value from them all. A particularly practical way to restore or upgrade your moral soundness is to integrate and coordinate among all three of your core drives.

Integrity is thus three-dimensional:

• Being authentic is about being in integrity with yourself.
• Connection occurs through being in integrity with others.
• Impact that is worthwhile comes from being in integrity with collective highest good.

3. Personal, Relationship, Leadership and Integrity Development Share the Same Building Blocks
The split among personal, relationship and leadership development helped create our current age of lack of integrity. This rampant lack of integrity calls upon us to revisit our understanding of how we develop as adults.

Natural developers have shown us that personal, relationship, leadership and integrity development all require the same sets of skills: the Seven WisePassions of 3D Living. Here is a rhyming summary of each WisePassion described in detail in this book:

1. Teachability: Being Teachable makes you reachable.
2. Self-Care: Beware of neglecting your Self-Care.
3. Discernment: The secret to learning is great Discerning.
4. Harvesting: To reduce your strife Harvest gifts from your life.
5. Power: Embrace your Power and your life will flower.
6. Synergy: Synergize don’t compromise.
7. Stewardship: Your most important trip is toward Stewardship.

Always remember: The Seven WisePassions are always in fashion; they are the backbone of Integrity Intelligence and 3D Living.

4. Humanity Must Leap Forward in Integrity If We are to Thrive Collectively
Far more of us know that we are in the midst of an era of global lack of integrity than are speaking publicly about it. Four sources have significantly fueled this epidemic:

• The self-improvement and self-esteem movements. These movements have tended to focus in a one-sided way on personal freedom and self-expression. This has unintentionally helped spawn a culture of entitlement and narcissism.
• The general attitude among far too many leaders. Many leaders still resist the idea that there is a crucial connection between lack of personal and relationship development, and leadership incompetence and corruption.
• Special interest groups. Over the past few decades the focus of these groups has shifted from advocating for themselves to imposing their ideologies on others with little regard for the broader collective.
• The mass media. Despite daily reporting of an endless barrage of stories that are actually about lack of integrity, the mass media rarely digs deeply enough into those stories to expose the lack of integrity that caused those stories to erupt in the first place.

All of these problems are symptoms of our three core drives competing against, rather than supporting each other. The conflict among our three core drives plays out within individuals, couples, families, groups, communities, businesses, cultures, religions, and humanity as a collective.

Even though lack of integrity is nothing new, what is new is our level of interconnectedness and our level of technological development. In the absence of sufficient integrity, interconnectedness and technology have combined to provide individuals and groups with unprecedented power to damage one another and the planet.

Imagine the kind of world that is created when communities, businesses and countries are populated by unfulfilled people who are out of integrity with themselves, their relationships or collective highest good. The picture you will see is the world in which we live today.

The time has come for the next leap forward in humanity’s evolution. This will not occur through a new invention or technology. Rather, integrity-focused adult development provides a powerful answer to the call to action Albert Einstein made back in 1946: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

As Einstein understood all too well, the next leap forward in humanity’s evolution is in our thinking not our technology. He understood that the more power we have to impact others, the more responsibility we have to upgrade our integrity. Einstein understood that integrity is enlightened self-interest.

Even though personal, relationship, leadership and integrity development all use the same building blocks, these core life skills are not taught in school or in houses of worship. They are not taught in families. They are not taught in business. They are not utilized in government.

It seems to me that an implicit awareness of our three core drives was built into the profoundly noble and high-minded debates that birthed the United States’ Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In grappling with the tensions between personal liberty and responsibility to the collective, the framers of these documents were dedicated to creating a new form of government. Democracy was built around three fundamental pulls that live at the heart of the human experience: the first was personal liberty; the second was the right to decide how to conduct the private relationships in one’s life; and the third was the need to create a collective that was stable, ordered, and attentive to its citizens.

These visionaries had a profound appreciation of the deeply rich and complex interplay between individual freedom and collective good. In the last chapter I referred to this as “freesponsibility.” This awareness was perhaps more fully developed than had ever previously occurred when new countries were birthed. Their understanding of the vital importance of accessing collective wisdom that transcends personal egos and ideologies enabled them to co-create a vision that served collective highest good. This, I believe, is a significant part of what makes these documents such remarkable developments in the evolution of humanity.

I believe the United States has unwittingly moved away from the core intentions that birthed these documents. I believe this has unintentionally contributed to the widening split among our three core drives within the United States as well as in how the United States conducts its foreign policy. It is time for the United States to move back into integrity with the wisdom of its founders about the importance of attending to our three core drives in an equal and coordinated way, not only domestically but with the rest of the world.

If you do not live in the United States, I urge you to look at how your own country deals with these issues. Self-responsibility is a national issue not just a personal one. If you see that your country would benefit from some upgrading in this regard, do your part to help this occur rather than criticizing other countries for falling short in these ways.

5. Whatever the Problem, Look to Integrity for the Remedy!
Integrity is the key to your own wellbeing and fulfillment. Integrity makes creating great relationships possible. Integrity makes it possible to truly serve collective highest good. This integration among your three core drives of authenticity, connection and impact is what 3D Integrity and 3D Living are all about.

Integrity - and the lack of it - affects every aspect of life. You have learned in this book what causes a lack of integrity and you have learned specifically and precisely how to upgrade your integrity. Doing this improves every aspect of life. Upgrading your integrity is your most important contribution to helping the upshift in humanity occur.

This is why Integrity Intelligence needs to become “The New IQ.” This is why personal, relationship and leadership development need to be placed in service of upgrading Integrity Intelligence in all of us. This is how we can individually and collectively contribute to the evolutionary shift humanity so desperately needs at this time.

This book has proposed a new vision of what “having it all” means. It means that your personal freedom and self-expression don’t conflict with your need for connection with others. It means that your desire to make a difference in the world doesn’t sabotage your self-care or your relationships. This is what 3D Living is all about.