Leaders*,
What are your strategies for releasing pent-up anger? How do you ensure you communicate from a place of empathy? On a scale of 1 – 10 (10 = all-time hero), how good are you at accepting people for who they are (including yourself) with all their peculiarities, imperfections, and flaws?
The biggest barrier to growth, healing and progress is anger, both, on a personal and organizational level. Anger, revenge and blame are unproductive responses to trauma, harm and injustice that you or members of the organization may have experienced. They tie up energy in destroying rather than creating. Exceptional leaders constantly make a lot of mistakes, own them and learn from them. They practice, foster and enable forgiveness, though it often feels counterintuitive.
Forgiveness is a universal human virtue that occurs in collaboration with other virtues such as compassion, humility, gratitude, hope and love. Forgiveness involves acknowledging and reframing negative feelings and attitudes into something positive and constructive. Forgiveness is not tolerance of error. Forgiving mistakes does not mean excusing them and lowering expectations. Forgiveness facilitates excellence and improvement rather than inhibiting it.
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; your are the one who gets burned.”
Buddha
Holding onto grudges and past ills that can’t be changed is a waste of energy that could be better put to use moving ourselves and our ambitions forward. It’s time to forgive yourself, others and situations. Forgiveness is a remedy, an antidote for the stresses and strains that accompany bitterness and grudges. Otherwise, the painful past remains in our heads, taking up large space where positivity could be working to inspire and motivate.
In leadership, forgiveness allows us to forge a new course towards lasting success and creating a positive legacy. In life, it’s what sets us free and allows us to shake ourselves from the past, enabling us to fully embrace the time we have now to build towards greater things to come.
Inspired Executives help you grow and cultivate the leadership quality of forgiveness. The Energy Leadership Assessment™ will show you your current level of built-up anger, and through coaching we will explore ways to release it including forgiveness. Contact us.
Lead courageously, Annette.
*All of us are leaders in their own lives; this is whom the address first and foremost refers to. Some of us hold leadership roles in organizations in addition to their life leadership role. At Inspired Executives we welcome you if leadership is your way of being or if you hold a corporate leadership role.
