1:00 PM.
• Feeling confident about this heartfelt experience, I do something that I never would have dreamt of before today. I go to my boss’s office and ask to talk to her. I apologize for my emotional outburst and the mistake I made on the project. I am especially sorry for blaming someone else for it before the evidence showed the true source of the error. I think to myself how great it feels to admit my true position in all this—to not have to defend a false position. The virtue of humility has lifted this burden from my shoulders.
Here we see that our practitioner has found the courage to be honest with his boss. He expresses humility through his apology and regret for acting so egotistically. This humble and honest admission is powered by valor. In this case, even though he has brought the virtue of humility into his life experience he has not expressed it openly. Valor is the energetic power source for driving the virtues into expression. Expression can happen two ways, internally to ourselves and externally in our relationships to family, friends, and co-workers.
Of all the virtues, humility is probably the one that is most repugnant to the ego-personality because the ego must feel itself to be in a superior position in relation to others. Interestingly, of all the virtues, humility has this negative connotation attached to it and its cognates. For the ego, to be humble is humiliating. This virtue is interesting in this sense and warrants deeper thought for those who want to investigate it further.
