Leveraging Forgiveness as a Strength

**Leveraging Forgiveness as a Strength**

Forgiveness is a powerful character strength and skill that can appear deceptively difficult to master.

When we feel hurt by someone, or upset at ourselves, how do we move past the emotions of the moment to understand what is really happening in that situation?

In this episode of *Practicing Connection*, Jessica Beckendorf shares with co-host Coral Owen and our listeners a process that helps build muscle memory for forgiveness, and understand why it's so important: to turn the negative into a positive for both you and the other person.

We’d love to hear what’s inspiring you! Share your thoughts using the “Send us a text message” feature or email us at practicingconnection@oneop.org.

Transcript

CORAL OWEN: [00:00:00] Hi! Thanks for listening to the Practice in Connection podcast. I'm Coral. My co host Jessica is here as well. Today we'll be talking about leveraging forgiveness as a strength. Jessica will be sharing a practice with us. Hey, Jessica, how are you? 

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I'm great. I've had a really busy week, and I've been inspired this week actually to kind of tune in to how I'm feeling physically, particularly as it relates to my energy reserves.

I was invited to facilitate a day-long session recently, and I thought I had it planned out really well, and I did have it planned out really well. I made time to arrive early so that I had some additional prep time. The day itself went really well. But as soon as I didn't have to be on anymore, my body let me know that it was not happy with me.

Like I tuned right in and I tuned in really quick. I had been talking all day long without drinking any water. And I ended up missing most of the next day of work because I wasn't feeling well just from being plain exhausted. I think I told you the other day that, "I didn't want to hear talking, and I didn't want to talk."

But I had to be present with other people, and I wasn't present for myself. And so I am not going to forget this. I have a day long session coming up in March, and I'm blocking off the next day. And I plan to set some reminders on my phone to remember to drink water and to also be a little present with myself and not just present for everyone in the room.

CORAL OWEN: That's challenging. And I'm really glad for you that, you know, you had that sort of check in with yourself and that you can pivot. It actually totally speaks to our practice from last week about checking in with yourself and just using it as a growth opportunity, right? 

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yes! 

CORAL OWEN: So that's great. 

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I didn't welcome that reset, but now I'm going to think of it as a welcoming, or the circus bow, like we talked about at the end of that episode.

So yeah, I love that. [00:02:00] What have I learned? 

CORAL OWEN: Awesome. Absolutely. Well, we'd also love to hear what's inspiring you all, our listeners. So please share what's inspiring you by clicking the "Send us a text message" button at the top of the description of this episode. When you click the link, your text messaging app will open, and you'll see a seven digit number and the words "Do not remove."

Type your message after that and click send. Don't remove that number or we won't see your message. To protect your privacy, we won't see your phone number and we can't text you back, but we'll be sure to share your feedback on a future episode. If you're listening on a computer, you can simply drop us an email at practicingconnection@oneop.org. So let us know what's inspiring you right now.

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CORAL OWEN: So Jessica, let's learn more about leveraging forgiveness as a strength. Can you tell us a little bit more about the practice you'll be sharing today and why you chose it? 

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, there's so many ways that forgiveness can be practiced. So I've chosen one that I found and have found to be a really easy way to help you build the strength over time.

And I think it can be practiced on small things, and it can also be practiced on larger things as well. So to start with, I have to have a caveat. Anyone who's been listening to this podcast for a while knows that I love talking about character strengths. So I'm going to dig in a little bit to forgiveness, before I share the practice, because it is a character strength.

So forgiveness as a character strength is associated with the virtue of temperance. Temperance is really more related to restraint than action. I think a lot of times when people think of strengths, they think of them as things that we use in action. But there are some strengths that are more about restraint, and forgiveness falls within the category of those.

So forgiveness is about letting go, and accepting the other person who may have hurt you in some way, accepting them as a [00:04:00] flawed human, even when resentment and anger feel justified. So that's where the restraint is, right? You're not giving in to that resentment and anger. So, put it another way, forgiveness is about being able to, as Drs. Ryan Niemiec and Robert McGrath describe in their book, "The power of character strengths." So, forgiveness is about being able to humanize those who have led us to feel dehumanized. So, forgiving someone doesn't mean you are disregarding what happened or that you're condoning it in any way. It means that you're letting go of some or all of the negative feelings associated with what happened.

It means accepting mistakes and flaws and giving new chances for change to emerge or occur. And again, I love the way that Niemiec and McGrath describe it, that forgiveness protects us from hate. So there's a lot of benefits then to, to forgiveness. So this particular strength is actually one of my top five in the VIA character strengths classification.

But I still had to learn to be intentional about using it. Because it comes so naturally to me, and to those who have forgiveness in their top strengths, it come so naturally to us that I was OVERusing it. And so that means I was like forgiving anything and everything. And frankly, even forgetting like, "forgive, forget, forgive, forget."

I'm still learning to be intentional about developing the strength. So even if this is an area of strength for you, intentional practice can be a great way to develop some guardrails to protect from overuse, which in the end overuse can lead to unhealthy outcomes for you and your relationships. And then on the flip side of that, underusing forgiveness can also lead to unhealthy outcomes for you and your relationships.

So whether you're already like me, willing to forgive anyone, or you are reticent to forgive those who have hurt you, learning to build forgiveness as a strength can have a [00:06:00] positive impact on our lives and in our work with others. And I also want to mention that learning to forgive yourself, right? So this practice that I'm going to be sharing in a minute, you can also turn that around and use that on yourself.

The research on forgiveness has supported the idea that people who practice forgiveness often experience fewer negative emotions, like anger and hostility, and they experience less anxiety and depression as well. 

CORAL OWEN: I am so excited to dig into this practice, Jessica, and really the holistic and multifaceted way that you're speaking about forgiveness in this character-strengths context.

I'm really excited to learn more. So can you share how to go about this and get started? 

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. Like I said earlier, there's a lot of different practices around forgiveness, but I'm just giving you one right now to get started with. And this practice is a great way to begin, because it can be done pretty frequently, maybe almost daily. It depends on how your days are. 

So when something minor occurs, so I would start out with very minor things. Maybe you felt a little slighted in a meeting, you know, maybe overlooked a little bit, or maybe someone cut you off in traffic. So think about things like that, that are small things that we might deal with on a day to day basis.

I would ask you then to, something small happens, so then practice letting go by taking a deep breath, and letting it out. Acknowledge how you're feeling. Practicing forgiveness is not about skating by the fact that you feel slighted or that you feel frustrated in some way. So acknowledge that. And then start to shift your thoughts away from what they did to upset you and toward their humanity.

So what reasons might they have had for their actions? Maybe they were running late for their first day on a job. Maybe they have some issues happening in their lives that are distracting them. [00:08:00] Start to think about who they might be as people, if you don't know them, or if you do know them. Assume the best, right?

Like Brene Brown likes to say, "Always assume the best." And so that's what we're going for here. Remember that these are human beings. Yes, they may have hurt you or frustrated you in some way, and they are human beings too. Just like you are. And so I'll quickly repeat: take a deep breath in, and let it out. Acknowledge how you're feeling, and then shift your thoughts away from what they did to upset you and toward their humanity. 

CORAL OWEN: I love how simple that is. Jessica, thanks so much for sharing that with us today. That's it for this episode. Thank you so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, click the share button in your podcast app to share it with a friend.

Be sure to join us next week for our next conversation. Until then. Keep practicing. 

CREDITS: The Practicing Connection podcast is a production of OneOp and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U. S. Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, U. S. Department of Defense, under award number 2023-48770-41333.