Forgiveness is a choice we make to live in peace with ourselves and evolve as human beings.
What is forgiveness?
It is an emotional voluntary response, it is an internal process of letting go of feelings and thoughts of resentment, bitterness, anger, and need for vengeance to someone who has betrayed or wrongs us, including ourselves
Forgiveness has a huge part to play in our lives and we must process and reflect this feeling. In extreme situations forgiveness can be very difficult and would take time to process and resolve within ourselves which is understandable. However today i speak about forgiveness within family and friends and at work
While forgiveness plays an important role in my life, I have been able to work on this in my personal life for a long time now because my evolution taught me that without forgiveness, gratitude is powerless. I have also learnt and experienced that our greatest challenge/betrayer is our greatest teacher. When we are hurt/disappointed or betrayed by someone they are teaching us a lesson we need to learn in our life. The lesson may be on the path to discovering our purpose of existence.
We must also evaluate what have they hurt in us, our ego, our respect or our pride? What are we feeling deep inside us? This question has greatly helped me in my journey, because we are full of expectations and when we do not receive what we expect we are disappointed and feel hurt and even betrayed. But, is this who we are or is it their inability to understand us because they don’t understand themselves. When we become aware of this, we evolve.
When you forgive into love you don’t live with the fear that the person who betrayed you will not repeat the mistake but you forgive into faith and do it for yourself and for who you want to be. It’s not driven by ego but love. Love for yourself, trust in yourself to understand the greater perspective of the pain.
While I am aware of this concept on a personal front, and I coach my clients and friends to practice forgiveness daily, recently I have been practicing forgiveness at work..
I am still weighing the pros and cons of forgiveness at work, I am sharing with you what i have learnt up until now
For instance, If a team member has stolen money from us,
What are the arguments involved
- Inability to trust again
- Setting wrong precedent and culture
- Unaligned to the values, as he breached them
The questions in my mind,
- Is the inability to trust a betrayer due to the fact that we don’t trust ourselves?
- Is the fear of setting the wrong precedent, enabling us from being a trailblazer to forgiveness at work, giving them a second chance and evolution of ourselves and our company culture and values.
- One of our company’s values is integrity, does this conflict with forgiveness? especially if the offender has asked for forgiveness? Or does it actually make us a better leader and human?
The reasons we forgive are
- To release any resentment we may hold, to free ourselves from pain
- It teaches us a lesson
To me the above two reasons are in service of ourselves and our journey, and I believe as leaders we must address this at work boldly.
Even if the betrayer has been let go off, the objective is not to feel a negative charge or ill feeling towards him/her. Forgive into love!
At the end of the journey, what matters is our evolution. Hence, forgiveness is a choice we make to live in peace with ourselves and evolve as human beings.
