The Power of Forgiveness

Welcome to LegalBiz Cafe! Digitally remastered with AI, in this podcast series, Attorney Shaune B. Arnold gives to frustrated professionals like YOU the tools and resources you need to make the LEAP to entrepreneurship so you can start, build or fix a business you will absolutely LOVE. 

In this deeply healing episode of LegalBiz Café, Attorney Shaune Arnold reveals the transformative power of forgiveness—not for others, but for you. Learn how lingering anger poisons your mindset, blocks your business growth, and sabotages your peace. Let go, lighten your load, and unlock new success through compassion and emotional clarity. 

Transcript

Hello, friends! …Welcome …once again …to legal biz cafe. I am your host attorney Shaune B Arnold, and we are talking about forgiveness today. But before we go turning the other cheek, let's chat for just a moment about what we're doing here on legal biz cafe.

I am your business strategist. I am also your California business attorney. I have been a business strategist for 40 years, and I have been a business attorney for 30 of those 40 years, and I have found, over and over again, that when I'm working with my clients, too often, we're dealing with mindset issues that have absolutely nothing to do with building their business. We have to deal with these issues first, however, because without dealing with these issues, they can’t move forward.

I have another show I want to pull your coattail about. It’s called Your Business, Accelerated! On that show I deal with the hardcore business issues that can tank your business overnight. You get the perspective on sticky business issues FOR FREE by listening to that show. So with LegalBiz Café and Your Business, Accelerated! you’ll have everything you need to build your business.

So, that's what we are doing here overall. In particular tonight, I want to talk to you about the power of forgiveness.

We all know we're supposed to forgive, but CAN WE do so, when those people transgressed against us? You remember that business partner that ran off with the money, or that spouse that ran off with the best friend, the boss that pushed you out of the business, right before it took off and you would have had founder’s stock.

All of these people need to be forgiven, but not for them. We forgive them for us. Forgiveness actually relieves our churning gut. It's absolutely necessary because, believe it or not, the object of your anger, that business partner, that unfaithful spouse, that jerk of a boss, they don't even know about what's going on in your gut. It's YOUR gut churning, not theirs. It’s like you drank poison and you expect them to die. That’s not going to happen. You need to avoid the poison.

Tonight, I want to give you some tips to make forgiveness happen in your life, today, right now so that you can actually release the negative emotions that are stunting your progress in your business. Tonight, we're talking about the actual how of forgiveness.

How do you forgive? It's not easy for any of us. We want to know how to go from wanting to choke somebody out to at least a neutral space when we think of them. I'm not asking you to make them your best friend or to make them your spouse or business partner again. However, for your sake, you need to find a neutral space when you're thinking about this person and dealing with this person and the energy around them. Again, I'm not asking you to fall in love with them. I am being realistic, but what I AM asking you to do is to fall in love with YOU. When you can do that, you can find forgiveness in your heart.

You know, someone once said to forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you. I heard an energy healer speaking about a patient, and it became crystal clear to me just how important it is to forgive. The energy healer had a patient that was actually a little boy of about six years old. He had fourth stage colon cancer, …colon cancer ...in such a tiny, young body. That was just wild to me.

In talking to this child, this healer realized that the child hated his father. They worked together to release that energy and believe it or not, the cancer disappeared. The child healed. So, what is possible for YOU if you forgive?

Psychology Today tells us that forgiveness is hard. We really didn't need a psychologist to tell us that, right? Why is it hard?

Well, it's hard because we don't want to let go of our anger. We feel justified in the anger. We want justice. We do not want to let that person off the hook without them being punished. But check it out. That's not our purview. In other cases, we want revenge. We want to get back at them for what they did to us. Why? Because they're not sorry, and if they're not sorry, why should we forgive them?

We're thinking to ourselves, this is a person that must be purely evil for what they did to us. So, why should we forgive them? Well, I'll tell you why you should forgive them. It's not for them. Forgiveness is for you.

Forgiveness requires you to have compassion for the person that offended you, …that cheater, …that liar, …that abuser. I did that many, many years ago. A lot of you know that I was a foster kid, and it was because there was a lot of violence in our household as I was growing up, and I actually had occasion to confront my abusive father when I was a grown woman. He said, “You girls were going to be successful. I didn't care what I had to do to make it happen.”

My response to him, a Harvard Law School graduate himself, was, “I'm your kid. I was going to be successful. You didn't have to beat it into me. The tears, the screaming, the crying, the ugliness, was absolutely unnecessary.”

Now, the important part of this conversation that I want you to take away was the fact that saying this to him made me feel very powerful, and with that power came the power to forgive. I thought that I would never be able to forgive the people that, frankly, caused me to be on my own at the age of 14.

I felt there was no reason to forgive them. But it was so necessary because anger literally kills. Unforgiveness absolutely kills.

A girlfriend of mine died recently. This was a woman who was physically strong, slim, great shape, a vegetarian, a yoga enthusiast, but she had a lot of anger. She had a lot of stress in her life, and a lot of unforgiveness. This woman had a massive stroke, and she died. It left everyone feeling completely unsettled. We were all spinning in space because she was not the person that we would have expected to have a stroke. She was so slim and physically strong. She watched every morsel that she put into her mouth, but she did not watch the thoughts she put into her brain and heart.

Do you deserve to be forgiven? We all know the adage, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” That's extremely powerful.

My question for you, then is, who among us is not judgeable? Now, beyond that, you want to be the kind of person that can forgive. This is transformative in your life. It's transformative in the life of the person that you’re angry at.

And if you can do this thing, you are actually contributing to something of even greater importance in the world, ...and that is peace, ...peace in your heart, ...peace in their heart, and peace for all the world.

it's extremely important for you to find that space of forgiveness, because without it, you're going to find yourself rolling around that same mulberry bush again. These things are going to come back to visit you again. You know they tell us that the things that we don't deal with early in our lives, say, as teenagers or even in our 20s, if we have that residual anger and unforgiveness, for example, toward a parent that didn't treat us correctly, that is going to come back. It is going to come back, and you're going to deal with it again, maybe in your 40s, maybe in your 50s, or maybe with your own children. These things can actually reverberate down through generations. So, the best way for you to ensure your relationship with your children is to employ forgiveness with your parent. And now I know you're wondering, why is she talking about forgiveness in our personal lives?

It's because we are only as good as business owners and managers as we are as people. I have had some managers in my day where they were dealing with some serious anger issues. They were dealing with issues that had absolutely nothing to do with the job, and yet they were bringing those issues right onto the job.

The inability or unwillingness to forgive someone in your personal life can have some very real reverberations in your business life. You can, for example, find yourself choosing a business partner who is just like that individual that you did not forgive. This energy is running just below the surface, and it's bubbling back up again and that’s why you chose them. Again.

If you're wondering why these anger issues keep coming back to you with different faces, with the face of a partner, with the face of a boss, with the face of a spouse, or a girlfriend or boyfriend. It's because you haven't forgiven. It's because you have not gotten rid of that old negative energy.

I encourage you to spend some time in meditation on the issue of forgiveness. Find a way to build that peace into your system. Because again, it is for you. The forgiveness will live in your heart. The compassion will live in your heart. You will find that things around you will get lighter. Things around you will get easier to handle, and you will be able to focus on building a business that you are absolutely going to love.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for forgiving me and for joining me on this week's episode of legal biz cafe. I invite you to follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter X. In all of those places, my moniker is Shaune dot Arnold.

I’ll see you next week right here on LegalBiz Café. In the meantime, and in between time, I am your host, Attorney Shaune B Arnold, reminding you as always, to MAXIMIZE your COMPETENCE to get the CONFIDENCE YOU NEED to succeed. Bye-bye, friends!