Saying you are honest is fast and easy, and you can shout it out to as many people as you want.  Being honest takes a lot longer for people to notice, but is far more believable.  The same is true for just about any other virtue we might want to advertise about ourselves.

Using words to impress can backfire.  It’s a shortcut, too often used by people in place of actually implementing the qualities that they want their words to imply.  And this can create doubt, the sort of doubt Shakespeare was talking about in the line from Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Walking the Talk is not good enough.  Skip the talk.  Just walk.