Karl Edwards presents Working Matters

Tag: forgiveness

  • Loving Monday: Forgiving Yourself Creates a Way Forward

    loving_mondayWe are often our own biggest barrier to getting off to a good start each week.

    I am not referring to our foibles, mistakes, flaws, errors, shortcomings, or crimes.

    I am referring to our unwillingness to forgive ourselves for those foibles, mistakes, flaws, errors, shortcomings, and crimes.

    Sure, mistakes are costly. No doubt about it.

    But mistakes can be corrected and serve as a learning opportunity. In other words, there is a future worth pursuing on the other side of most problems we cause.

    If we beat up on ourselves for being less than perfect, feel we need to punish ourselves, or—worst of all—attribute negative or derogatory judgments about our characters, then we make it almost impossible to move forward, get going again, or jump back into the game with energy, determination and poise.

    The key is to notice whether we focus on the error and its solution, or we focus on ourselves and our deficiencies.

    In one case we participate powerfully in the creation of a constructive learning opportunity out of which we can adjust, experiment, and grow. In the other case we spin helplessly in a self-imposed quagmire of self-condemnation, perpetual second-guessing, and plummeting self-esteem.

    If you have messed up recently, even if in a big way, the way forward will not be found in beating up on yourself.

    The way forward lies in forgiving yourself. Only then will you be free enough inside to shift your focus constructively to the learning, adjusting and changes that will result in a new way forward.

    On your side.

    – Karl Edwards

    Loving Monday is a weekly column designed to encourage us to step into our weeks with an intention to show up authentically, engage fully, and choose to make it a good week for ourselves. Explore past columns here.

  • Quote to Consider: Hit Me Again

    quote-to-consider“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive, but do not forget.”

    Thomas Szasz

  • Thought Leaders Unpacked -> The Soul of a Leader #7: Breaking the Cycle of Violence

    thought-leaders“The question for leaders is not whether they will encounter violence but how they will encounter it.” (p. 119)

    I was initially caught off-guard that violence would figure so prominently in a leadership book about work, spirituality and “finding your path to success and fulfillment.”

    Unlike most penners of management manifestos, Benefiel courageously addresses a reality that takes many forms in every workplace. I myself am still a stranger to the experience of physical violence in the workplace, so I will let Benefiel’s insights stand on their own.

    But when it comes to other forms of violence: over-working people, under-paying people, belittling people, making people look bad, casting character aspersions, undermining authority, back-stabbing, doing as little as possible, spreading a bad attitude, etc. I have plenty to say.

    Benefiel’s three ways forward raise three challenging conundrums.

    In order to see compassionately, a leader has to understand, value and organize in light of the human factor in the workplace. And yet our culture’s myopic focus on the profitable bottom line divorced from all other factors and measures of success leads many to consider compassion a luxury to be indulged when convenient. In fact, though, we learn that compassion is crucial in order to reframe complex situations, issues and dynamics in more healthy and constructive ways.

    In order to interrupt the cycle, a leader has to be willing to put him or herself in (more…)