Today's guest blogger is Dr. David Gruder, author of
The New IQ: How Integrity Intelligence Serves You, Your Relationships and Our World.
From the White House, to the board room, to the privacy of our own bedrooms, and virtually everywhere in between, integrity deficits are destroying our personal lives, our businesses, our economy, our healthcare, our society, and our planet.
Creating sustainable integrity-centered solutions to today's vast array of major challenges requires us, as individuals and as a society, to take a fresh look at what creates life fulfillment. It requires us as citizens to develop a new integrity-centered vision of what we need to require from our leaders in government, business, advocacy groups, community organizations and the media.
The New IQ is the world's first road-tested guide to integrity-centered living, working, loving, and serving. Hailed as a "once-in-a-generation book," it provides the first step-by-step road map for restoring the vanishing virtue of integrity... for the sake of our loved ones, our communities, our businesses, our society, and our own personal well being.
Going far beyond being a self-help book, this critically acclaimed five-award-winning action plan offers a socially responsible way to attain personal, relationship, and career fulfillment during difficult times, without sacrificing ethics and integrity. Here at last is your complete guide to "personal development that serves us all."
Three Steps to Becoming a Freesponsible Citizen, by David Gruder, PhD
We all know that the United States has become ideologically divided, politically dysfunctional, and economically distressed. What few people yet recognize, though, is that a New Silent Majority now exists in the United States.
The New Silent Majority is quite different from the original one that Pat Buchanan named and helped mobilize into the religious right. The New Silent Majority is the tens of millions of people who are utterly fed up with the lack of integrity and ethics that exists today in politics, business, religion, communities, education, journalism, economics, relationships, and individual citizens.
The New Silent Majority includes people from all walks for life, cultural backgrounds, ideological orientations, faiths, and political orientations. It includes those who are pro-business and those who are pro-environment. It includes blue collar, white collar, and green collar workers. It includes leaders in all sectors of society.
The New Silent Majority is searching for effective strategies for restoring integrity into the fabric of all aspects of our society.
If you are part of the New Silent Majority, this post outlines three steps you can take to start making a real difference in your spheres of influence: embracing America’s Mission Statement, becoming a savvy citizen, and practicing synergy. (If you live in a democracy-centered republic other than the United States, simply replace your country's name wherever the United States is mentioned below.)
STEP 1: EMBRACE AMERICA’S MISSION STATEMENTThe United States, like all democracy-centered republics, has a Mission Statement. It is the Constitution’s preamble that mandated a servant government (of the people, by the people, and for the people) that functions at the intersection of individual freedom and the common good.
The heart of mature patriotism is Freesponsibilty: living at the intersection of freedom and responsibility. Freesponsible individual and corporate citizens put the constitution before their own ideologies. They do not indulge in entitlement, financial greed, ideological fanaticism or narcissism. They are mature enough to demand that government officials preserve and protect the constitution rather than cave in to special interests… including their own.
STEP 2: BE A SAVVY CITIZENMost citizens are on a political junk food diet dished up by self-serving special interests dedicated to manipulating citizens into believing whatever serves those interests. Most citizens spend far too much time consuming--and being coerced by--this steady diet of narcissistic lies, half-truths and convenient omissions. Fortunately, excellent nonpartisan fact-checking websites now exist, such as
www.FactCheck.org and
www.PolitiFact.com. Those sites are among the secret weapons the New Silent Majority in the United States uses to become savvy citizens.
Savvy citizens form their opinions, and make voting and advocacy decisions, by spending less time consuming political junk food and more time consuming political health food. They demand of leaders, especially those from their own political party, that they educate about all sides of an issue rather than feed citizens spin emphasizing only one side of it. And they demand of the media that they utilize far fewer spin-based pundits and far more fact checking-based reporting. In other words, savvy citizens become excellent spin-busters.
STEP 3: PRACTICE SYNERGYThere are three problem-solving strategies: coercion, compromise and collaboration (synergy). Coercion creates resentment and causes rebellion, rage, and ultimately terrorism. The best outcome compromise can create is that all parties feel equally ripped off by the “solution.” Compromise and coercion are incapable of creating sustainable solutions. The reason most bipartisan solutions in Congress fall far short of what is needed is because they are arrived at through compromise. Only synergy can end political polarization and create the solutions we need to the problems we have.
Synergy is based on three essential pieces of wisdom:
• Sustainable root cause solutions cannot emerge until the big picture is seen
• No one person or group can grasp the big picture by themselves
• The only way an accurate version of the big picture can emerge is by combining the wisdom of multiple perspectives.
Freesponsible Citizens master the art of synergy and demand that their leaders use synergy as their first-choice problem-solving strategy. The New Silent Majority doesn’t tolerate ideological coercion or any other type of coercion. To learn more about the fundamental mechanics of synergy creation, enroll in this free e-Course:
www.TheNewIQ.com/boundaries-intelligence-essentialsYou Have More Impact Than You Think!
Too much is at stake today for any of us, regardless of political orientation, to remain silent, uninformed or uninvolved. Freesponsible citizenship is more important today than it has been since perhaps the American Revolution.
Embracing America’s Mission Statement, becoming a savvy citizen, and practicing synergy are the three keys to the trickle-up leadership. The time has come for the New Silent Majority to lead the way back to Freesponsibility.
You truly have far more impact than you think. You have negative impact by remaining a Narcissistic Citizen. You have positive impact by becoming more of a Freesponsible Citizen. The time has come for all of us to embrace a more mature version of patriotism.
For more about Freesponsibility, the New Silent Majority, and how to reconnect life fulfillment and abundance with integrity and social responsibility, visit
www.IntegrityStimulusPlan.org.
About the author:David Gruder, PhD, DCEP, is perhaps the world’s only clinical-organizational psychologist specializing in integrity development. Known as "The Integritizer," he is the leader in transpartisan nondenominational strategies for solving the massive integrity deficits that have caused today's vast social, economic, and political challenges. Dr. Gruder founded the "Integritize America Campaign," an integrity stimulus plan for renewing personal, relationship and societal integrity so we can finally co-create sustainable solutions to today's most challenging issues. His latest book, "THE NEW IQ: How Integrity Intelligence Serves You, Your Relationships and our World," is the world's first step-by-step guide to attaining personal, relationship, and career fulfillment during difficult times without sacrificing ethics and integrity. It has won five book awards in the areas of "social change," (book of the year), "current events in politics and society" (honorable mention), "health & wellness" (book of the year), "self-help" (bronze medal) and "metapsychology" (book of the year). A professional speaker and trainer for almost three decades, Dr. Gruder speaks, trains, consults worldwide on how to "Integritize" citizens, government, communities, businesses, health care, education, religion, journalism, advocacy groups, and leadership. His clients have ranged from family-owned businesses to American Express work teams, from the Sanoviv Medical Institute to the San Diego Office of Education Management Academy, and from local politicians and executives to World Trade Organization ambassadors. His main website is
www.TheNewIQ.com.
