I have been thinking a lot about forgiveness due to the frequent difficult conversations I have been a part of where employees have damaged each other through their words and behaviors.

As a first step in healing these broken relationships, the party who perpetuated the harm offers forgiveness. Often, those of us asking for forgiveness from those we have hurt perpetuate the damage we are trying to ameliorate.

I have found the following 3-part formula useful as I advise clients who are asking for forgiveness and consult with customers who are struggling with the notion of accepting forgiveness.

Confession
Any well-meaning offer of forgiveness begins with admittance of the behavior that has diminished a fellow human being. We must come clean with our wrongdoing in a truthful and authentic way. Acknowledgement of guilt cannot be half-baked or incomplete. It must represent a full measure of the damage the person doing the confessing as caused.
 
Repentance
Once confession has ensued the mantra “go and sin no more” does not immediately follow. As the Greeks would say, after confession the person seeking forgiveness must change their ways and seek “metanoia.” For the Greeks, metanoia means not only confessing your evil deed but turning yourself around much like a 360 degree turn to communicate to your victim that you are a new person. You must visibly act out these new behaviors in front of your injured party as evidence of your willingness to change.
 
Compensation
Once you have confessed and repented, the forgiveness seeker must compensate the individual they have diminished. Some would call this making the victim whole. This is a complicated gesture since compensation depends on the context of the situation that caused the offense in the first place and the subsequent destruction that was left behind.

We try to rush the forgiveness by thinking that by just apologizing for wrong doing wipes the slate clean. Most conflict resolution experts claim that basic brain science upends this argument since it takes 5 good interactions for every bad collaboration we have we each other just to get back to the start line.  This is due to negativity bias that allows undesirable thoughts to dominate our thinking particularly when we feel threatened and stressed during one of these fierce conversations.

If you think you can live a forgiving life by just confessing your sins, you are short changing yourself and those around you in search of a quick fix.

True forgiveness cannot be found in the bargain basement of the cheap discount bin. It is found in the high rent district of servanthood through sacrifice of one’s self for others.

Let’s begin practicing forgiveness in an authentic fashion. Let’s start by forgiving ourselves for being lousy at this thing call forgiveness.