Who Are You When No One’s Watching? Integrity Tested at Work & Away

What happens to your integrity when you're away from home — on a work trip, at a conference, or in a new city where no one knows your name? In this episode, we dive deep into what it means to live with integrity in our professions and occupations, even when no one is watching.

We define integrity through a biblical lens, examine major real-life failures and redemptions, and get honest about the temptations that arise in hidden places. I also share a very personal story — the moment I was tempted to get involved with a married man and how God’s grace kept me grounded.

If you’ve ever acted differently in private than in public, or struggled to stand firm when no one was looking, this episode is for you. We end with encouragement for those who’ve failed in the past and offer practical, faith-driven steps to walk in integrity every day — no matter where you are.

✨ What You’ll Hear:

• A biblical definition of integrity
• Real-life examples of public failures and redemption
• My personal testimony about temptation and conviction
• Why integrity matters more when you’re “hidden”
• Encouragement and action steps for a faithful, professional life

💼 This podcast is for you, proFAITHsional. Let’s grow in faith, not just in church — but in boardrooms, break rooms, and business trips.

🛑 Remember to like, share, and subscribe for more content that helps you honor God in your work life.

Transcript

[00:00:00]

Intro

Who are you when no one is looking? Are you the same person in public as you are on in private? And have you ever faced a situation where keeping your integrity caught you something important? And what did you choose and why? Or how about what areas in your professional life are most at risk of compromising your integrity? Is it money? Relationships, ethical Decisions. Well, hello everyone.

Welcome to today's episode. I'm so glad that you're here with me as we dive into a really important topic today, and that is integrity in our professions and our occupations. This is something that impacts all of us, whether we are business owners, employer, students, entrepreneurs, all walks of life.

So really we must set out to, to define what is integrity. And simply put, integrity is living in alignment with your values and principles, even when no one is watching. It's being the same person in private as you are in public. So Proverbs 11, three says the following, the integrity of the [00:01:00] upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treasures destroys them.

So today we're gonna talk about. What the Bible says about integrity, some major integrity failures in modern history, the hidden spaces where integrity is truly tested, like work trips or even being in just a new environment, a personal story of mine where I had to overcome the temptation of failing in some integrity areas. And then how to move forward if you've failed in the past. And finally, I'm gonna give you some practical steps to protect and strengthen your integrity. So let's jump right on in.

Dear proFAITHsional, this is a podcast to share God's favor over your work life while I offer you a professional favor. We know that faith with our works is dead. But let's just be honest. Sometimes we do our job and work without faith. My hope is to inspire, motivate, and encourage us to grow our faith in the midst of our jobs and work environments. So thanks for listening, and I pray that today's episode strengthens your faith as we walk in integrity together.[00:02:00]

The Nature of Integrity

So, okay. So the first thing that we need to talk about is the nature of integrity. Integrity is more than being just honest. It's, it's really more than honesty. It's about wholeness. It means that you don't compartmentalize your life. You don't act one way in church, another way at work in another another way at home.

So you're the same person. You are a whole, there's no divisions in you from public to private life or in whatever environment you may find yourself. The Bible has a lot to say about integrity. For example, Colossians 3:23 it really reminds us to work with excellence as if we're working for the Lord.

Proverbs 10:9 says that "whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but he who makes his ways crooked will be found out." And Luke 10 Jesus himself said whoever can be trusted with very little, he can also be trusted with very much. So if we can be honest about those small things in our life, things like expense reports, workplace [00:03:00] gossip, which let's, let's, let's be real, it happens everywhere.

Or how we use our time. You know, those times where you'd be clocking in, clocking out, or the times that you spend scrolling through the phone. If we are not really honest about those things, then how do we expect God to trust us with the bigger things? And so I believe that that is why integrity is so essential for our work lives and in everything that we do.

Epic Integrity Failures in Modern History 

So a couple of epic integrity failures in modern history. And this is not a history lesson by any means, so let's just give some major highlights. All right. So the first one that I want to bring to our mindset is the Enron scandal. Now, the Enron scandal, it involved executives at Enron. At Enron that were manipulating the financial statements.

They deceived investors and ultimately it cost the company, the whole company to collapse. I mean, like it was a big deal. Thousands of employees lost their jobs and their savings, so imagine that because of the failure and integrity of a a few or [00:04:00] some, or many. People really lost not only their jobs, but their, I mean, they lost, they lost their livelihood and their savings. Like that in itself is impactful.

Now, there's also a very famous, one word, one word that, you know, when we say it and everybody knows, oh. Lack of integrity, failure in integrity, and that's Watergate. So a US president's team, they covered up a break in and it led to one of the biggest political scandals in history because I'm not trying to give us a, a political or norm, a history lesson.

That's all I'm gonna say about that. Now if you google it, if you looked it up, then you're gonna see like all the de different details that come up about that. But it was a very big deal. I think it's. It was one of the major kind of failures in the presidency, in the institution of the presidency.

And so it rocked many lives and many things. Now in the, in the arena of sports, we have Lance Armstrong, like he was celebrated. He was [00:05:00] like one of the most celebrated athletes. And so he inspired millions of people just based on his athletic abilities. But he was later exposed for using performance enhancing drugs. So here he was. Winning all his races because he rides bike. And so he had everybody fooled to thinking that it was all his sportsmanship and it, and it was all his athletic athleticism. And really it turned out to be that it was performance enhancing drugs.

So there's a common thread in all of these and something that a lot of times we see that correlates with failures in integrity, and that is deception. There's always a root of a lying. Either a person lies to themselves or just flat out lies to a whole lot of people and deceives a lot of people, right? So there therein lies a little bit of a manipulation, right? So people might perceive you to be one way, but in reality, you or the person ends up being a completely different way.

Now the crazy part about all of these examples is that some of these individuals, they had like amazing [00:06:00] qualities. They were intelligent, hardworking, and they had real innate leadership abilities now, but a lack of integrity ruined everything for them. And that just reminds us that success without integrity is only temporary.

Like it, it won't be sustainable for you. So here's the good news, people can be redeemed. At least that's what I subscribe to in my faith. So some of these figures, they took responsibility, they apologized and they worked to make things right. Now, they made things right, although we can argue, we cannot kind of argue and say that things were not all, not necessarily the same, but they did their best. Right? And, and that's the, the hope that we have as believers. We can believe in God's grace to be bigger than our worst failures, and we can take refuge in that. However, that does not accept us from the responsibility that we must take in order to walk with integrity.

Integrity in Hidden Spaces

So integrity in hidden places. Now let's get real about something that happens all the time. People that act differently when they are in a [00:07:00] new environment.

So think about it. When people travel for work and they go to conferences or even move away for school, they often take that as an opportunity to live completely differently than the way they would if they were back home.

It this refers to the married executive who gets involved in an affair because he go on a business trip because hey, he's in a new environment, no one knows him. How about the students start studying abroad? Who throws away their values. The way that they were raised in the home and they're thinking, well, no one's here. No one's gonna know. And so they live a completely different life. They indulge in things that they wouldn't necessarily indulge in if they were in their normal environment. Now there's also the Christian professional who they just let loose at conferences, right? In ways that they would never act or behave in their church home.

So all of these things, I think about them as it's kind of like the the disguise effect, right? When, whenever we're kind of like in a costume, whenever we're, we believe that we're somewhat covered, then that [00:08:00] kind of gives us the boldness to act, to lash out, to do things that we wouldn't necessarily do, right?

So if you don't believe me on this, then I'm put it to the test, you know your, whatever next holiday, you just, you choose. Put on a mask, put on a costume, and just go out in the street and see if you wouldn't be tempted to act a little bit more foolish than you normally would. And that's the thing, when we are a lot of times removed from our normal environment when we are in a completely different environment, a lot of times that kind of like just stirs up different behaviors in us.

And that is really where our integrity is really tested. But here's the truth. Hiddenness does not mean God doesn't see. In Hebrews 4:13, we read the following: "nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him of to whom we must give account."

So. That's like wild. We must remember that we are to give account; we will be given an account of all of [00:09:00] our actions, of all of our deeds, of everything that we do here on earth, right? So there is nothing hidden that is from God's side. Like he's really truly sees all, I mean we know him to be omnipresent. We know him to be omniscient. So not only does he know all facts and figures, but he truly knows everything that, that we are up to.

So, and in talking about all of this and being a new place and how we're tempted and all those things, I'm not exempt from this either. So when I'm bringing the topic to the table, it is because, listen, it happens to the best of us.

So a couple years ago I was working in a city far away from home. I am not going to identify the city for the sake of not identifying the people around this story. But just to be fair. I've worked in places like Mexico. I've worked in Orlando, I've worked in Paris, I've worked in Houston, I've worked in Philadelphia. I've worked. I might be forgetting another one. But all that to say, I've worked in, in [00:10:00] Phoenix, well, I tried work in Phoenix, so anyways.

But all that to say that in one of these cities that I worked in with a team that I enjoyed working with, there was one particular individual who would just I'm gonna say handsome, very good looking. Very charismatic. I mean, like a person, the person was just attractive and not attractive because they looked good. I mean, they did, but attractive just because there was a magnetism about their personality. And like an attractive person, all that means is that they attract you. They like, they pull at you. It's like a magnet, right?

Now I'm working with this person and I'm on, on the, on the team. We're, we're in the same team. We're not playing opposite sides here. And so it was very easy for us to have, i'm gonna say to have like ex, not excuses, but to have reasons to have meetings and we off, we had team meetings.

However, there was one particular time I knew all too well that for me, I would've been happy if we would've had a discussion that was not centered around work. [00:11:00] And so. What ended up happening? When I started to kind of notice that, I was like, oh, hey, you know, like, I'm like, I kind of was getting a little tingling whenever the person would come around.

When I started to notice that, I was like, hold up, wait a minute. I didn't necessarily, it's not that I did not like it, but I knew that not to be normal because what I knew to be a fact was that this person was married and they were a family man. Even though at work, you know, they were very friendly.

I'm, I'm gonna say friendly, but because of kind of like the behavior, the enticing behavior that this person presented, I was like, oh, oh, snap. There could be a little sum sum here. However, I did not act on it. I think my immediate response, as soon as I noticed and I checked myself on those things, I am not kidding that I started to pray for his wife. For his children. I think I pray more for them than I did for myself in that season. I, like I, and not even for the man I was praying for, like the family. And you know, something interesting happens that when you start to do that that kind of starts to [00:12:00] shift the way you behave around people.

So all that to say that I checked myself, I was very well aware of the things that I was starting to imagine in my mind. And even if the person never acted on it or if the person didn't really like wasn't their intention. There was still a little bit of tension there. Now I'll say this too, that on one particular day we were planning to have a work meeting or like a, a working lunch and it was gonna be a small discussion, said person and myself.

And that's right around the time when I had like really started to pray. 'cause I'm like, Lord, please remove this, have this go away. And what ended up happening is that on the day that the meeting was set I didn't wanna necessarily say, no, you know, we can't do this. 'cause at the end of the day, you know, we could have been talking about work too.

But what I did and my prayer was, Lord, please don't let this happen. Like I do not wanna be like, I do not wanna be in a meeting. I do not wanna spend time alone with this person. If that is really like what's gonna be confusing for [00:13:00] everybody. And so surely enough that day, because the Lord is so faithful, the Lord is so faithful.

A crisis, an emergency, something happened with the project team and that all of our schedules had to be shifted. And so there was no meeting to be had. And then that was like the end of it. I still, after that, kept praying for the person's family. I pray hard for that wife and I pray hard for those children.

And my hope is that today they are living a blessed life as a family.

And so. All that to say that integrity is our commitment to not give in to the temptation. Are we gonna be tempted? Yes, we're gonna be tempted. The temptation itself is not the same. The temptation is not the problem. It is our response to the temptation that we really have to watch out.

So integrity isn't just about how others see me, it's also about how God sees me. It's how I perceive for that. Interaction to be happening. And so if you've ever been in a situation where you felt tempted to [00:14:00] compromise your values because no one was watching, you are not alone present company included, but you can choose integrity and I promise you that it's well worth it.

Like I sleep so peaceful at night knowing that nothing happened on those many occasions.

Encouragement for Those Who Have Failed

So let's move on now. I want to encourage those of you that maybe you have committed some sort of integrity failure, right? Maybe you're listening today and you realize like, oh, snap, I messed up. I acted on something that I should not have acted.

Maybe you compromise your integrity in a work situation, in a relationship, or just you had a moment of weakness. You know, I want to remind you. That failure is not final. Failure is not identity. Failure might have been an event, but it does not have to define you. Like if we look into the Bible, we see David committed like adultery and even he had someone killed in order to cover it up.

Talk about deception, but when he repented, God still continued to use him mightily. Like [00:15:00] that was not the end of David's ministry. That was not the end of David's story. If anything that was like. The climax maybe that, that was even the mid, that was the middle. That was not even like the final thing.

And what we know about David is that wherever we talk about him, we always say that he was the man after God's own heart. So for someone to have failed so miserably, so badly, and then to be referred to as having God's own heart, that tells me that there is room for redemption. There is room for us to be redeemed within our failures.

We can also think about Peter. We, you know Peter, we know him to have denied Jesus. Three times, even though Jesus warned him and told him, you are gonna deny me three times before the rooster crows. And so he was so convinced that he wasn't gonna do that. And you would think that when you are warned you might, you know, act a little bit different.

But then again, Jesus words are, are true. And surely enough he did. Now what we know about Peter is that he later became one of the strongest leaders. He was the rock upon which Jesus and God built his [00:16:00] church. So that was not the end of Peter's story. If anything, that might have been like a semicolon. And then we, we got a lot, a lot of couple more chapters after that.

And so we really see him. Acting in the fullness of the grace of Jesus after his epic failure. Both of those men did.

So if you failed, God's grace is bigger than your failure. If you only repent, that can make things right where you can and let God restore you. So repentance really I, we have to think about it. Repentance is, it's acknowledging, you know, that we have. Maybe failed or that we have not acted with integrity or that we just plainly sinned. But repentance really, it, it draws upon us so that we can turn, like, turn around, repent, and go a different direction. So if we were walking one way, when we repent, we start to walk a different way.

That is really what that means. So if you have failed, if you have had a lapse in integrity, [00:17:00] the rest assured that God's grace is sufficient. And if you repent God can restore you.

Practical Steps to Maintain Integrity

Now a couple practical steps to maintain your integrity. So how do we protect and strengthen our integrity? Like what are some of the practical things that we can do?

Number one, I wanna say that we have to stay in the word. Like we really have to. Study the scripture because the scripture, it has a lot of things to say about human behavior in general, but because it does, then it really, it allows us to shape our character.

You know, if it wasn't because of the strong convictions that I have drawn upon what the word says about different things that I should, and should and not do, I probably will be out here maybe acting a little bit more foolish than your normal person would.

Because of our commitment to the word is that we can kind of allow it to shape and to really build things in us that we probably didn't think that we had the strength enough to act upon. So the word is key, and reading God's word is really [00:18:00] us trying to pay attention to listen to his voice, to see how he will be guiding us.

You know, one great place to start will be Proverbs. Proverbs have so much things to say about character and work ethic, and how do we really live out with integrity in our professions and occupations.

Number two practical thing that you can do is accountability. You must plan for it. You need to have godly mentors and friends that can help keep you in check now.

When we think about mentors, a lot of times we think about mentors as someone that we wanna learn from. And yes, that is all great and that is all fine and dandy, but really a mentor. If you can find someone that you can confide in and that you can be completely transparent and say, look, I'm struggling with these things. Help me. To keep me accountable, help me, for me to be responsible, for me to respond well when these situations arise. A person could do that.

And then the other thing is friends, like build yourself a network of friends. Have friends at work, have friends just maybe a church. Have [00:19:00] friends in just different environments, different friends can satisfy different areas and different desires for, for you in, in different stages of life.

But making sure that you have this. What we can call checks and balances within your network of people that you know, it was, it's gonna help you tremendously because being accountable to someone, it's kind of like saying, you know what? I don't necessarily wanna fail because then I know that I'm gonna have to confess this to so and so, and so make sure that the people that you have around you are people that you can respect at that level, that you can be like, you can be honest with them. But number two, because of them holding you accountable, you don't necessarily wanna come up to, to them with, with these things. So be mindful of that.

The number three practical thing you can do is to set some boundaries. Now there's a lot of things to be said about boundaries, right?

Like. We like to set boundaries with the people that we relate with. You know, we have different things about how we interact with one another, but we need boundaries for ourselves. Like, you need [00:20:00] to be proactive, right? For example, if you travel for work, then you need to establish some personal rules.

Maybe that means no private dinners with the opposite sex. Maybe avoiding certain environments like. I remember a few years ago when vice President Pence came out with kind of some of the norms for behaviors for him while he was like on the road. And one of the things he said is he wouldn't necessarily have, if I remember correctly, he wouldn't necessarily have lunch with one of the opposite sex.

Now everybody went crazy and everybody went wild. Oh my gosh, this person, you know, how can they da? All that to say boundaries are gonna sound crazy to other people, and they don't necessarily have to make a whole lot of sense to them, but make sure that they make perfect sense to you and why you're doing it, and that your convictions are letting you to set those limits so that you can make sure to not have a lapse in judgment.

That is so, so important. And so. Tying it back to the accountability. Maybe a mentor, maybe some friends can help you kind of set those up or think through that. And, you know, nowadays use the [00:21:00] internet for good things, like look up some strategies on what are some of the boundaries that I, that I can set, for example, for me.

I don't plan a lot of conversations with people of the opposite, especially when I know that they're married. I am very careful not to be overly friendly or to be like any kind of friendly, that is not professional with someone of the opposite sex. I have friends that like, I can talk the ear off of their wife and I'll be like their bestest friends.

And then with their husbands, I'll cross words and I'll be friendly and I'll talk with them. But, really like, it is my intention not to be, you know, this whole, like, you're my best friend and all of that. No, we, we need to make sure that, that we know, that we, we can make, maintain some clear limits because stuff happens y'all, and we see too much of that already in media.

Now, number four thing that you can do is live with transparency. Don't lead a double life. Make sure that your private life matches your public [00:22:00] persona or. Make sure that you don't have multiple public personas. So a lot of times we've seen and I think this can also happen, like when we're younger, that we can be one person in school, one person at home. Maybe we are a little bit different when we are out with friends, right?

However, the more that you can combine and remember integrity is wholeness, the more that you can be one consistent person everywhere you go. When people can start. To almost like, almost, they could kind of almost like assume how you respond to a certain situation that's not necessarily a bad thing. That doesn't make you predictable. That means that you are someone who's whole. That means that you are someone that like is true to their convictions and people know that you are consistent in who you are, wherever you are, wherever you go. I think that is one of the highest compliments that we can be paid with people that maybe know us in our work and maybe outside of work.

So transparency, like if there's any area where you are kind of acting out of secrecy and there's something [00:23:00] hidden about it, I challenge you to expose it because that's really what's gonna prevent you from maybe having a failure in integrity. If we go back to the historical examples that we mentioned, every single one of them, remember, there was an element of deception. There was an element of something that was hidden of something that was maybe obscure or something that other people may not necessarily know. So the more that you can be transparent, the more that you're gonna be safeguarding yourself with integrity.

And lastly, but certainly not least. And one of the best things that you can do for yourself is to pray for strength. You know, a lot of these things we cannot do alone and we have to ask God to help us stand firm whenever temptation comes, whenever we're really tempted beyond our strength. Because surely when we're tempted, the Bible says that God gives us not only the temptation, but he can also provide the door, the exit for us.

So whatever that means to you. Bring your prayer request to God and say, God, you know, I'm struggling in this area. Help me.

If you need to figure out [00:24:00] who could be those people that you will be accountable to be like Lord, help me to identify who I can have around me that will hold me accountable. Help me to live a life that is transparent. Give me creative ways to uphold some boundaries that I must set, whatever the case may be. Remember that one of the things that I did in that momentary situation when I was getting a little infatuated with someone at work is that the thing that I did is I, I, I prayed it, I prayed it out of my system.

I prayed, I prayed that there was no lapse in judgment on, on the other person's behalf. And that the family wasn't affected either.

But prayer our conversations with God, they matter and they make a difference. So don't you ever disregard that or, or, you know, think of that lightly.

Call to Action 

Now, in closing, my call to action to you is the following.

I want to challenge you today to where is your integrity being tested. Like really sit with that question and really answer it truthfully, honestly.

You know, are you facing any temptations that work? [00:25:00] You know, it could be financial, it could be emotional, it could be in the way that you maybe manage your tasks, right? So are you being tempted at work? Have you been dishonest in any small little ways? Things that maybe you're like, oh, you know, that doesn't matter. You know, have you maybe said, I worked X amount of hours in this one. In reality, you worked this amount of hours. And then do you act differently when you travel or when you, you perceive that no one is watching?

You know, ask yourself these questions, and depending on how you answer, then make sure that you're setting up the safeguards for you to not have any sort of breaches in your integrity.

Remember, if integrity is about wholeness, then we have to make sure that there are no cracks in our character that are going to cause us the failure in, in any moral or ethical areas.

So this week take one step towards strengthening your integrity. Maybe it's confessing something to someone. Maybe it's setting up an accountability partner, or maybe it's a commitment to honor God in all the areas [00:26:00] of your life. And if you have failed, remember that God's grace is waiting for you and it is sufficient.

So with that, I really just wanna pray that you can live out your calling with integrity in any area of your life, that you can be a person who is whole, that there will be no division, that your life will not be compartmentalized.

So I thank you, God, and I thank you Jesus. I thank you for the desire of your sons and daughters to, to really honor you and to walk in integrity.

I ask that you reveal to them any areas of weaknesses and that you come to strengthen. Help them to identify who may be the people that they can be accountable to. Help them also to set the necessary boundaries in any areas of life where they may be tempted. And then help them to really find in your word, how their character can be strengthened. So that they can really walk this thing out in integrity. In Jesus' name, amen.

[00:27:00] So I wanna thank you for tuning in today. If this episode encourage you, make sure to share with a friend, and actually, let's continue to grow together in integrity.

Until next time, bye.