Values

To me, values and morals are the single most important thing when determining your feelings towards someone else.  John Wooden, the legendary head coach of the UCLA bruins said it best. He said “the true test of a man's character is what he does when no one is watching." Its not necessarily about how you act when you are trying to impress or prove someone wrong. It about whether or not you do the right thing even when you know you could take a shortcut and no one would ever find out. Being the leader of an organization on campus, I find myself in this situation very frequently and a lot of times, its much easier to do the wrong thing than you may believe. I consider myself to be very honest and ethical, no matter the situation. Whether I am collecting dues and giving them to our treasurer or I am filing a report with our national office, I always tend to do the right thing, even if it isn't always the easiest. I look at facing moral dilemmas as a extremely slippery slope; it may seem like a good idea at first but disregarding your ethics is bound to catch up with you at some point. One example of a time where my actions didn't align with my values happened just a few days ago. Our national office has a series of accreditation submissions that must be made on a biannual basis. Our chairman in charge of the submissions set strict deadlines for when we needed to have things into him. Rather than planning ahead and getting my requirements done personally, I decided to enlist the help of a few of our newer members and basically told them I needed them to get my requirement taken care. Me being a senior member of my organization, they obliged and got it all done. I then proceeded to send my requirements to our chairman, taking full credit. Looking back on it, I felt terrible making them do my work and then taking full credit. Since then, I have even given them credit and taken each of them out to lunch as a thank you. It was definitely not how I tend to operate and have since remedied the situation. All in all, I tend to hold my values near and dear to my heart. No one is perfect and you are bound to have slip-ups in your values from time to time. The true test of morality is how to respond to those slip-ups.