Develop Your Character

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

DEVELOP YOUR CHARACTER

What You Need To Know About Character And All It Entails

Character is a behavioral design of feelings and thoughts which are based on comprehensive principles, integrity and moral strength- not to mention the willpower to live by those principles daily. Character is demonstrated by your life’s integrity and is the thing you value most seeing as no one can take it from you ever.

Importance of Character

Character is what instills the people’s belief in you and is necessary for successful societal function and individual success. Everyone needs to do their part daily by living a life of integrity. Integrity in itself is observing a moral code of a courage, honesty, truthfulness and strength. Failing to exhibit these qualities could hurt others and even yourself. Cheating means your success is false, you are indicating that your word accounts for nothing when you break a promise and when you lie to others they lose respect towards you. All these examples can break people’s trust in you and demolish your reputation all of which can result in failed relationships.

Effects of Character on Our Lives

Relationships are the groundwork you lay to cement your success in life. A good example would be that if you eradicate your relationships with friends, they will distance themselves from you and you’ll end up alone and isolated. A student that cheats is unfairly taking the opportunity to undeservingly put themselves ahead of others. This could ruin their reputation, academic report and job chances for good. A businessman who promises something to his customers and does not deliver destroys customer relationships resulting in his customers looking for business elsewhere. Breaking your relationships breaks the foundation for your life’s success. Character guides your response to any circumstance or situation in life, seeing as your response to these situations is what determines your results to these situations. Character determines why we do the things we do and why we do them the way we do. The success you gain in any venture you take up will be determined by your character.

Good Character and Bad Character

Everyone thinks of character as something a person doesn’t have or has but this is not the case. Everyone has character; we just need to differentiate between good character and bad character. Character traits make up a person’s character and good character traits make up a good character while bad character traits make up a bad character. Good character is composed of traits such as:

–    Trustworthiness: You can achieve this trait by being honest, being reliable, not deceiving people, stealing or cheating, doing what you say you will do, developing a good reputation among others, having the courage to do the correct thing, and being loyal i.e. standing by your loved ones and your country.

–    Responsibility: Planning ahead, doing what you’re supposed to do, persevering, being diligent, using self-control, doing your very best, being self-disciplined, thinking before acting, being answerable for your actions, words and attitudes and setting a good example for others are ways you can incorporate this character trait into your life.

–    Caring: be kind and compassionate by showing you care, forgiving others, being more altruistic and charitable, expressing gratitude and helping others in need.

–    Respect: follow the golden rule -treat others with respect, using good manners and not bad language, do not threaten anyone, hit or hurt them, be receptive and accepting of people’s differences, be considerate of other people’s feelings and deal with anger, disagreements and insults peacefully.

–    Fairness: this entails playing by the rules, being open minded by listening to others, not carelessly blaming others, taking turns and sharing, not taking advantage of other people, and treating everyone equally.

–    Citizenship: basically comprises of playing your part to better your community or school, getting involved in community affairs, being a good neighbor, protecting the environment, cooperating with and respecting the  necessary authorities, staying informed by voting, obeying rules and laws and doing volunteer work.

Some negative character traits include:

–    Arrogance: being distastefully proud and acting as if you are more important than others, or acting as if you know more than others.

–    Dishonesty: the trait of constantly telling lies and being untrustworthy, this may cause people to lose trust in you and not value your opinion.

–    Unreliability:  this means people cannot depend on you or rely on you for anything. This trait can cause people to no trust you with menial tasks or responsibilities to avoid you letting them down.

–    Pessimism:  people with this trait tend to anticipate or only see negative outcomes, conditions, results or problems in everything. You’ll find that they are draining to be around because who wants to be around negative energy all the time.

–    Domineering people try to control others and are typically overbearing. It should be noted that this is a form of abuse and might be difficult to identify at times.

These are just a few of the major traits that make up a good character, others include enthusiasm and integrity, and many others can be included as well. These good character traits enable us to focus on particular qualities so as to develop good character in our lives. This breakdown of a character into its underlying elements so that we can work on building up specific qualities of a good character thereby improving our overall character. One major character could consist of other basic qualities which you can begin to work on to gain the overall trait.

In conclusion, good character is an asset and it can take your entire life to build but losing it can be as easy as a snap of the fingers. Once lost, getting it back will be difficult. Your character is who you are when no one is looking. What you do determines who you are and you should take this into consideration so as to avoid disastrous long-term consequences of your actions. Your character will guide you to do the right thing in life guaranteeing your success.