Self-Application
What we can do to get out of resentment and into forgiveness
- Consider the value of forgiveness and its importance in your life.
- Reflect on the facts of the situation, how you’ve reacted, and how this combination has affected your life, health and well-being.
- Stop focusing on the meaning because the meaning is only your meaning and no one else’s.
- When you’re ready, actively choose to forgive the person who’s offended you.
- Move away from your role as victim, release the control, and release the power you allowed the other person to have over you.
- Try to remember them as a child and the struggles they must have gone through.
- Remind yourself they are not separate from you, we are all one.
- Shift the focus by removing negative thinking and replace them with positive ones.
- Try to understand the person you are trying to forgive and know their actions have nothing to do with you. Their actions are a reflection of how they feel about themselves.
- Ask yourself “What strengths must I develop further from this?” and “what have I learned about myself in all of this”?
- Write a brutally honest, emotionally raw letter telling them how much they have hurt and angered you, then tear it up and burn it.
- Just look to the future instead of focusing on what’s past…think of creating new memories to wipe away old ones.
- Just surrender to what is, accept that it happened, let it go and move forward!
Coaching Application
How can we help our clients release the resentment they feel and shift towards forgiveness?
1) Talk about their resentment and where it comes from. Allow them to talk about it, listen carefully for any underlying beliefs.
Ask:
2) Focus on their strengths and achievements.
3) Talk about their goals, dreams, aspirations, beliefs, values, and their life’s purpose.
4) Help them become aware of their actions and feelings. Identify where these feelings come from and why they feel this way.
5) Help the client replace negative self-talk with positive self-talk.
6) Celebrate their success, big or small.
7) Help the clients stretch themselves further to imagine more possibilities.
8)Move away from the role of victim and release the control and power the offending person and situation have had in their lives
9) Use visualization techniques with the client. Allowing them to feel the release and peace of letting go.
10) Instruct the client to write a letter to the person they want to forgive. After the letter has been written the client then burns the letter releasing all resentment and anger.
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Mahatma Gandhi
References
In quotationspage.com. Retrieved Oct. 17, 2012, from http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/2188.html