I am constantly surprised of the most unlikely places and situations where you hear great stories.

Last weekend the family and I were over in South Melbourne doing some shopping. I was standing in the queue to pay for an item (see, I know my place in the shopping process!) and was reading a handwritten sign behind the counter which read; “Every 3rd Hawker will be shot. FYI, we’ve already had 2 today”. The lady standing in front of me saw me reading the sign, we made eye contact and smiled at each other, and then just started telling me this story:

My son got offered one of those door to door sales job but he turned it down to do a telesales job instead.

Me: “Sounds like a rock and a hard place! How did he get on?”

He’s just left school and was very excited to have a job. It was all about trying to get people to swap electricity suppliers and he was impressed he got a whole week of training.

On his first day of actual selling he was taken into the Supervisors office just before lunch and told that he wasn’t selling enough and they told him a few ‘pointers’ that he was very unhappy with, didn’t think were legit. and just didn’t seem above board. He didn’t go back after his lunch break.

When he came home and told his Dad and me what happened, we couldn’t have been prouder. Maybe we did bring him up right!

What a fantastic ‘values in action’ story. When you talk about integrity as a value, this for me is a story that brings it to life – it takes the abstract concept of integrity and makes it concrete and ‘real’ through a story.

This very brief encounter was yet another reminder to me that stories are all around us, all we need to do is be open and conscious to hear them.