Hi everyone, trust you had a great weekend.
It’s time to come back and share of the most recent experiences my clients have had as they reflect on their direction, and what the decisions are that they need to take in order to reach their goals. Once again, response-ability is the underlying theme – the control of how we respond to what goes down out there…
It’s no secret that the observations I’ve made are true for me too – and I share them so you can take what you like. You may or may not find some things resonate. All comments, questions are welcome. Naturally the identities are protected and I’m sharing trends rather than specifics. If you recognise yourself in anything that is described, I can only reassure you that it means you’re anything but alone.
Over the past six months there’s been a real sea-change of people growing through some difficult and interesting times as a result of deciding to go and get the results they want for themselves. Dear Reader I am no exception.
I’m happy to level with you. I’ve become ashamedly aware of some shocking behaviour now that I look back and naturally I’ve held my hands up to those affected and admitted total remorse, culpability and am now doing what needs to be done to put things right.
Clients have recognised time and time again that forgiveness is something that they have a choice to seek and grant to those who might have caused them offence, heartache and so and so forth. There’s a whole other post on the other dynamic of whether forgiveness is granted to those who seek it!
There may be a link here into the notion of ‘letting go’ of the past, too.
The most important question (with respect to our own response-ability) remains about facing up to ourselves in our own mirror. That remains your decision at the end of the day. Is there an upside to being able to forgive yourself? and an upside to not? Of course there is…
I’ve been working with people on this aspect a lot lately. What does forgiveness actually mean? Especially when it comes to ourselves? Forgiveness of others is yours to choose according to your own values and philosophies – I’m not here to talk about dogma and whether you should or should not. What’s interesting is the stance we take with who we see in the mirror and whether that stance is ultimately liberating or restrictive in being who we are… and our growth and ultimate fulfilment and peace, confidence, honestly and transparency with ourselves and so on. And the only true judge of that is going to be ourselves. According to our own values. You choose. I’ll explore this idea in another post shortly.
A client let slip recently that he was unable to forgive himself as he felt that forgiveness meant that what he had done was going to be ‘alright’. Naturally we explored that according his own values, and he came to the conclusion that his behaviour was far from alright, he was ashamed of himself. (I can only empathise and hold my hands up too).
He never wanted to repeat that behaviour ever again (nor do I!). We explored this notion of forgiveness and it’s implications a little further then. To me, the observer, his reluctance to let go of the past and flog himself was based on the principle that forgiveness equals ‘the bad behaviour’ and the implications is/are going to be alright. But he had already understood and maintained upon probing, that things were not alright at all. Quite the contrary.
So I asked him if he would repeat the same mistake or behaviour? No, he most certainly would not. The next line of questioning sought to flush this idea out further: There are two aspects to this inquiry. What’s the upside of NOT forgiving ourselves? What does that give you? Does it help You be You? (however it is You want to be…).
Do we get good results from maintaining such a (value judgement on my part) hard-line and disciplinarian policy? Is it a liberating and enabling policy for you to get what we want? (assuming we accept response-ability)? Ultimately, he wanted to ensure he never repeated the same thing again as he felt it was ‘unforgivable’.
Why did he never want to repeat the same mistake? Because he believes he’s fundamentally a good sensitive and caring person and he recognises that nobody deserves to be treated the way he ended up treating them, reacting to their behaviour. (again I can totally relate to that)
So why – I had to ask – did such a good person with beautiful and empathetic and caring values want to haul themselves over the coals time and time again?. I sensed there was some up-side or benefit to such self-flagellation… there always is.
Dear reader, what does this mean to you?
You can see reader how this gentleman had trapped himself on a semantic definition of ‘forgiveness’. What we would call a ‘complex equivalence’ or the relationship of how we hold A to mean B, when actually the evidence and real life might suggest otherwise. By asking ‘how do you know?’ we get to better understand the assumptions being made.
But if we are not able to move on from our mistakes and are prone to ‘destructive’ behaviour it is perhaps time to consider (amongst other things) whether the definition of the Value of forgiveness is worth reviewing. Please remember – we’re all doing the best we can with what we’ve got and the information available to us.
We get to choose Ladies and Gentlemen, according to our own Values, beliefs and assumptions. And all we have is information upon which to base our decisions. How good and reliable is our information?
Can you forgive yourself? How much easier is it to forgive others when you are liberated by your own patience with yourself? Are we all so arrogant as to not accept that we make mistakes as part of our growth?
I’ve humiliated myself and am more than keenly aware of my own failings. Indeed I’ve made a committed decision for perfectly respectable values – and ‘lost’ – a universe more than I was prepared to lose, and yet the potential upside I hope is truly revolutionary for all concerned. Only time will tell. The immutable truth is that I had to make a change as my own self-esteem was suffering and indeed was grossly offending the people who mean the most to me.
And every morning I have to look myself in the eye and know deep down that I can admit freely to myself and all you lot out there – I could have done it a world better, but I made a decision based on what was true for me at the time. Science of hindsight, I now know what was really going on. And I just have to hold my hands up and vow to never repeat the same mistakes. And then make sure I do.
My clients and I all have made committed decisions to ourselves to actually achieve our dreams – because we’ve finally decided that we’re okay to receive it, in spite of our humanity, our mistakes, foolishness, failings. Sure as eggs are eggs, the work we have to do to get what we want is ‘hard work’ enough. Successful and entire completion of the necessities will warrant our progression towards and achievement our dreams and desires. And keeping going is pretty key in our endeavours. And indeed we will be deserving victors. At the core, Ladies and Gentlemen is the decision that we could begin our own journey towards those things, rather than not making a committed beginning.
Are you okay to get what you want? Can you be okay with receiving the rewards – are you believing yourself to be worthy of those rewards? If no, drop me a line in confidence as it’s a very straightforward clean and lean process to help you make the right decision for you. You get to choose.
If you knew you could not fail, what’s the upside of not beginning?
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