Forgiveness in Business

High-Performance Executive Newsletter: Achieve more beyond your current success.

New challenges bring satisfaction and impact. Your current skills and methods might not be enough for your next advancement, or they can be costly in time, energy, and relationships. Upgrade with our newsletter, with tools and insights based on extensive research in business performance, neuroscience, psychology, and more, to enhance and sustain your high performance.

The three essentials for high performance are neuro-regulation (to get and stay calm), clear the negative self-talk and the beliefs that create them (including imposter syndrome), and create new success habits.

This week we're looking at forgiveness in business.

……………………………………

Forgiveness in Business

When discussing forgiveness in business, most people assume I mean debt forgiveness and letting people off the hook when they owe you money.

Indeed, the word forgiveness conjures images of allowing people to take advantage of you, walk all over you, and make you a victim. In a resource-scarce, competitive, dog-eat-dog business world, forgiveness does not sound like a winning move.

But there’s gold here if we look closely.

Research has shown that forgiveness leads to increased wellbeing, higher productivity and improved teamwork. So let’s explore.

Getting Hurt

The starting point for forgiving someone is that they have done something to hurt you. This can be any type of hurt – physical, mental or emotional. Hurt can be an attack, betrayal, sabotage, blackmail, undermining you, socially embarrassing you, or bullying you. It can be cheating you financially, stealing or unfair contract manipulations. Hurt can also be abandoning you when you need or expect support. And so many more.

Whichever way we are hurt, the same area of the brain gets activated because the brain processes it all as physical danger, that is, a threat to survival. This is where it starts to get interesting.

Self-defence

As soon as your brain perceives danger, it flips your nervous system into a fight, flight, or freeze state, preparing you to survive the threat.

However, your brain does something else at the same time.

The significance of the event, its surprise, or the strong emotions it evokes make the brain release a neurochemical called acetylcholine. This neurochemical causes the fear centre of the brain (the amygdala) to store the event and associated emotions as a new ‘known threat’.

The amygdala stores these memories together with the stressful emotions they created at the time. These ‘emotion-memories’ comprise a ‘list’ of known threats. Just like an email spam checker will scan your emails for threats, your brain is always alert for a repeat of these threats.

The hurt lives on in your memory in this way, and whenever something in the environment looks similar, it triggers your nervous system into defence mode.

The problem with the body’s defence mode is it changes your physiology, putting you on high alert.

It redirects blood to large muscle groups (to prepare for running or fighting) and away from the prefrontal cortex, the strategic thinking and planning part of the brain—and the emotional regulator, too.

As a result, you don’t make good decisions and become emotionally reactive and distracted. This state also reduces your IQ temporarily by 13 points! Your brain literally does not have the resources (oxygen and nutrients) to operate at peak capacity. Your creativity also drops by 50%.

Simply put, a triggered nervous system trashes your ability to perform at peak levels.

The consequence of having an active emotion-memory stored as a danger in your amygdala, is that you get triggered by events around you – even when those events are not hurtful or dangerous. You react to the ghosts of the past, and are trapped by past hurts.

Forgiveness

The best reason to forgive, then, is for you.

You can free yourself from these past-triggering events by flushing that emotion-memory from your amygdala. This is done systematically, by using how the brain makes automatic changes. It is an exciting new development in psychology called memory reconsolidation.

Once let go, the factual memory of the event still exists, but the emotional charge around it does not. Memory reconsolidation is usually used in therapy sessions to help people with traumas and PTSD.

But it can be used for the everyday ‘slings and arrows’ of hurt we’ve accumulated over the years, too.

This systematic clearing process is at the heart of my Inner Success programme. We let go of old hurts at the amygdala level, forgiving others and then ourselves. The result is a sense of calm and peace, deep self-acceptance, and, as a bonus, elimination of imposter syndrome.

Forgiveness (the non-financial kind) is not about pretending the hurt never happened. It is not about condoning other people’s actions, making them right, taking their side, reconciling or letting them off the hook.

It is not about the other person at all.

Instead, it is an emotional liberation from the past that allows you to operate at your very best with calm, ease and confidence. A hugely powerful tool for peak performance.

……………………………………

What I've loved this week:

Forgiveness process

Am I allowed to love my own book? :) Actually, what I love is the forgiveness (letting go) process using memory reconsolidation described in my book, Outsmart Imposter Syndrome.

The book includes step-by-step how to achieve a profound letting go that liberates your thoughts and your unconscious brain from toxic resentment.

It’s a process that I refined and developed over 30 years by standing on the shoulders of giants. It creates a profound shift, and the positive changes need a whole chapter to describe!

……………………………………

An action step you can do this week …

Notice when you get that automatic triggering.

It feels like a rush of emotion when remembering something hurtful. Not the big traumas (but do get some help if you have those), but the little niggling ones. The ones that make you start to fight, run or hide from, blame others for. Or launch into a rant about. Or feel miserable about.

The first step in making any changes is becoming aware of the problem.

……………………………………

We'll cover more on letting go in future issues.

Do subscribe and share!

I'm Dr Tara Halliday, specialist Imposter Syndrome Coach and best-selling author. I run the 5-star Inner Success programme for executives that eliminates imposter syndrome for good. Message or email me for details.

If you think you may have imposter syndrome, take this free quiz:

https://bit.ly/ImpostorQuiz

If you get over 62%, then it’s causing enough stress that it’s worth addressing. You’re worth it!

Have an excellent, refreshing and recharging weekend!

Tara

P.S. Thank you for reading to the end of the newsletter, I appreciate your interest and attention!

?

?

?

?

?

?