Five Must-have Character Traits

What kind of person are you? Can it be rightly said that you are a person of integrity? Are you an honest person or a liar? Are you forthcoming, or deceiptful? Are you diligent or lazy? Humble or proud? Wise or foolish? Selfless or selfish?

Honesty, integrity, determination, patience, intelligence, knowledge, diligence, patriotism, chastity, modesty, honor, dignity, loyalty, hope, politeness, kindness, temperance, gratitude – all important virtues. Some, of course, are moral traits only under certain circumstances (Hitler was both determined and had firm integrity to his values. The only problem is the evil nature of the values to which he had integrity and resolve!).

Following are the 5 moral traits I believe to be most important in the development of one’s moral identity and some of the reasons why I think as much. Let me know what you think? Anyone believe there are even more important traits than the one’s I offer below?

1. Courage

Courage is an essential trait because anyone can be anything under favorable circumstances. To be loving to the lovable is easy. To be patient with those who do not try your patience is hardly a character trait firmly planted.

Courage is the essential virtue that drives a person who is charitable and compassionate to exercise those characteristics in defending the weak against the tyrannical. It’s what led Raoul Wallenberg to defy Adolph Eichmann and risk everything, ultimately giving his life, in saving 100,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

Courage gives a strong backbone to every other trait and virtue. An honest man who lies when he is scared of the consequences of telling the truth is not an honest man. You might look at courage as the glue that holds one’s character together during trying times.

It is what turns moments of moral behavior into integrity, making those behaviors deeper reflections of one’s inner being. And that, after all, is really what a virtue or a moral trait is – something acquired, something developed, something that has become reflective of an inner core, not merely a successful moment of moral decision-making.

All other moral traits, then, are in jeopardy of taking the back seat of expediency during moral challenges without the courage to express those traits in the heat of danger or some other difficulty, pushing courage to the front of the pack of the 5 most important virtues.

2. Charity

Let’s first define terms. What I mean here is not the $1.50 we drop in the Red Cross bucket at Christmas in front of Target (though the kind of charity I’m referring to very well could be the motivation behind it). I’m talking about the Biblical expression of the word: pure love (or as religious people might say, the pure love of Christ).

Charity defined in this manner, then, cares more about the person than the social or emotional benefits received from that person. It allows a friend to love the BFF herself more than the friendship they share. It is why she can call the mother of her BFF to tell her about her daughter’s drug use, knowing it will destroy the friendship they have, perhaps forever.

That requires a pure form of love that transcends emotional ties and trumps other competing values like loyalty and even trust and honesty. That kind of love says that even though I promised otherwise, I must break the promise of confidentiality to love you fully right now and stop you from destroying your life with cocaine.

Do you also see the role courage plays in such an expression of love? A technique one might employ to get a feel of the importance of a particular trait is to imagine the world peopled only with those who share that trait. Can you imagine a world so peopled? Not a bad place in which to live!

3. Humility

Don’t mistake humility for weakness or softness or wimpiness. To be humble is not to be a spineless doormat. It actually takes much more grit to be humble than not. This is because humility requires one to hold back pride (no simple task) and face the difficulty of staring into a mirror morally naked, willing to face all the moral acne, scabs, warts, moles and scars most of us have.

The humble are open to such scrutiny from self and others because he wants to know where he lacks to improve upon those areas. Humility is, after all, teachability. Someone who is humble is not full of himself, thinking he is God’s gift to those lucky enough to know him. He recognizes his dependence on higher purposes and a higher Being. He knows there are causes more important than he is, causes for which he is willing to give his life (Give me liberty or give me death!). Prideful people could never accept the notion of something outside himself more important than he is.

A humble person knows he has weaknesses and areas of needed growth. Again, he is therefore open to change. The humble can be challenged, instructed, schooled without animosity, without anger or fear of retaliation.

A weaker person is not emotionally stable or firm enough to withstand such threats to their psyche. Emotionally soft people are too scared to see what ticks inside, so they become defensive. They cannot open themselves to the vulnerability that humility requires and creates.

The humble have mastered themselves and have the emotional spine to be vulnerable. Weaker people are too fragile to risk such vulnerability. The truly humble even seek to be taught because their desire to learn and grow and become something better than they currently are is much stronger than the emotional trauma or pain of seeing clearly one’s own weaknesses and shortcomings.

But the real reason humility is an essential characteristic is because the trait is the precursor to developing all other traits not currently in full possession. Humble people look closely into moral mirrors, examining what’s there and what’s not.

The prideful never look. That, or when they look, they see only superficially because their hearts are too fragile to see what may lie beneath the moral surface of the skin. So humility allows the development of all other traits and therefore makes it to my list of essential character traits.

4. Empathy

Empathic people feel others’ pain. I’m not talking here about the superficial comments made by some politicians hoping to “connect” with an adoring electorate who yearn for a candidate who thinks like they think and feels what they feel. I’m talking about the real McCoy.

Empathy was a required collective trait in the abolition of slavery and in the Civil Rights Movement, in attempts to respond to poverty and horrific work conditions of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries.

To fully grasp empathy’s importance, just consider it’s opposite: Can anyone spell sociopath? The inability to feel what others feel leads to indifference and can lead to acts of brutality and torture. Suicide bombers of innocent children and those who manufacture explosives in schools are further reflections of the evil the failure of empathy can create.

Empathy is what demanded the brother of the Unabomber to turn him in. He could feel the hurt his brother was causing others.

Goodness is an extension of the ability to empathize with others and, therefore, lifts empathy to the level of a top-5 list of essential character traits.

5. Wisdom

Heart without wisdom, however, can lead to terrible, devastating and immoral outcomes. Feeling empathy for one group can lead to tyranny over the group perceived to be the favored group’s enemy.

Feelings void of wisdom lack the ability to know when to be courageous, fighting what battles in what sets of circumstances, in what ways.

It also betrays higher values when it is unclear to the unwise which value to honor when circumstances are such that values compete. Honesty without wisdom can become a weapon that hurts and injures. Who hasn’t heard the excuse for unkind words spoken by one who then shrugs and says, “What? I was just telling the truth!”?

Wisdom is the compass and the stage manager of our moral lives. It takes readings and determines what paths to travel, what words to say, how to say them, and when to keep quiet. Wisdom directs the moral traffic of our lives as we try to figure out what virtues are needed to what degree, expressed in what way to whom.

In other words, wisdom is the last of the 5 essential character traits of a good person because without wisdom, moral decisions will more often lead to immoral outcomes as bad ideas are implemented to bad effect and as individuals make wrong choices in a sometimes morally confused world.

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