Duty, Trustworthiness, Reliability, Dependability and Faithfulness

Menanteau Serfontein – 29 December 2020

Duty is a responsibility or a moral or legal obligation that one has.

Trustworthiness is the ability to be relied on as honest or truthful.

Reliability is the quality of being trustworthy or of performing consistently well.

Dependability is the quality of being trustworthy and reliable.

Faithfulness is being true to one’s word, promises, vows, steady in allegiance or affection; loyal; reliable, trusted, or believed.

A trustworthy, reliable, dependable and faithful person (hereafter referred to as “faithful”)  is worthy of trust and can be depended upon to do his duty diligently; his “word is his bond”; a person whose “yes is yes” and his “no is no”. The faithful person does not lie or steal and he delivers on what he has promised. Faithful people are those who are honest and can be trusted and relied upon. When a faithful person promises to do something, you can rely on the fact that he will keep his word and deliver on his promise. These are the types of people that you will want by your side in the toughest situations, knowing that they will be by your side through thick and thin.  Such people often perform better in their jobs than the rest doing the same type of work and would even out-perform those who are inherently more talented, but lacking a solid work ethic. They are more likely to be promoted and to receive better pay increases than their peers.

People who are unfaithful, can generally not be relied upon and trusted, because you never know whether such an individual will follow through on what he has undertaken/promised. When they undertake to do something, they might sometimes deliver, but will often let you down, sometimes at the worst possible times, to your utmost disappointment and inconvenience. When such people do not deliver, they will typically provide all sorts of excuses about the reasons why they didn’t deliver, normally blaming “others” or “circumstances” outside of their control, rather than looking at themselves and taking ownership and personal responsibility. People who are this way inclined often underperform at work, lose out on promotional opportunities and receive lower pay increases than their colleagues. Ultimately, they develop a reputation for being untrustworthy and unreliable, resulting in them suffering the inconvenience of being “micro managed” by their supervisors.

It is recognised that even faithful people will sometimes fail to deliver on commitments and undertakings given, and when that happens, they tend to take personal responsibility and be utterly embarrassed and remorseful about what happened. They also tend to carry out honest introspection to assess why there was a failure and their role in it. They would invariably learn from the experience and go out of their way to ensure that it does not happen again.

The person who has a tendency to be unfaithful, would typically either shrug his shoulders, thinking that what happened was “not that bad” and can usually not be trusted to ensure that the same thing won’t happen again. It appears that individuals with tendencies towards unfaithfulness, don’t care much about the consequences of their failures and they don’t seem to show much remorse; I guess that this is so because they believe that it was not their “fault” and would tend to blame “circumstances” and “other people”.

Most people I know have a desire to experience peace, contentment and tranquility. There are various factors playing a role in attaining this. One of the factors is the need for a clear conscience.

People with a clear conscience are often those with high levels of integrity, uprightness, honesty and faithfulness as well as a high degree of alignment between the “real self” and the “mask” (which was dealt with under the Topic entitled The Real Self vs The “Mask”). Such people know in their hearts that they are not guilty of things such as lying, theft, having been dishonest about something, having deliberately supplied inaccurate/false information to someone, etc. They also know deep down inside that they have delivered on what they have committed themselves to and that they have generally done the best they could. People like that tend to feel better about themselves and will have a better chance of sleeping well at night.

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