Why Self‑Forgiveness May Be the Leadership Practice You Need Most.
Here’s an interesting question that emerged out of a recent roundtable on communication and leadership, that I participated in recently:
Am I addicted to feeling bad?
Not in a drama-queen way, but in a quiet, efficient way. The kind of “feeling bad” that lurks beneath a heavy cloak of feeling behind, and a reputation for always being the strong one in the room.
As a leadership coach, speaker, and spiritual guide, I recognize this in the leaders I work with, because I was intimately familiar with it in my own life. Outwardly strong, inwardly running on a harsh script that never really turned off.
On the surface, everything looks fine. People come to you for guidance. You deliver. You hold space. You get results. And yet, in the background, there’s a relentless hum:
You should have done more.
You should have known better.
You still haven’t caught up.
That inner climate quietly shapes everything.
It shapes how much energy you have.
It shapes how clearly you think under pressure.
It shapes the risks you’re willing to take, the conversations you avoid, and the moments you freeze when you most want to move.
In a nutshell, it shapes how willing and brave you are, to move beyond the pain, and honour the promise that it holds within it.
I see versions of this every week: brilliant leaders who can’t quite hit “publish” on the work that matters most; seasoned executives who second-guess every decision; gifted founders who keep over-giving, undercharging, or staying quiet in rooms where their voice is needed. From the outside, nothing appears to be wrong. Inside, they are tired from holding themselves and everyone else on trial.
From a neuroscience lens, this is not mysterious.
The brain is a prediction machine. It prefers what’s familiar over what’s healthy. If self-criticism, shame and knee-jerk attack or avoidance have been your default for a long time, your nervous system learns: this is how we stay safe. It wires around that pattern.
Every time you rehearse self-attack or self-diminishing you strengthen a loop:
trigger → harsh thought → body tightens → mood drops → you pull back or push harder.
Run that enough times and it stops feeling like “a pattern” and starts feeling like “the truth about who I am.” Over time, you don’t even question it because you’re not even aware of it.
That’s why I wrote this line and keep coming back to it:
Self-forgiveness is the moment I stop reliving old trauma and ask instead, how good could my life really be.
Trauma, chronic stress, and long-term over-responsibility all leave grooves in the nervous system. They teach us to expect pain, to brace for impact, to pre‑empt rejection by ignoring our own needs or criticizing ourselves first.
In my line of work, we’re not talking about self-forgiveness as something soft and sentimental. We’re talking about interrupting a well-rehearsed, brain-based loop that quietly undermines performance and drains leadership because it drains the joy of life.
That’s where the ABCs of Forgiveness came out of my own research and practice in the neuro-science of spiritual intelligence. I didn’t pull the ABCs out of a textbook. They grew out of the pain of overwhelm, of not knowing where to start, of no longer ignoring what I really needed. The days of pushing through evolved into the surprising relief that came when I started working with my nervous system instead of judging it. A whole new identity formed. It was like finding my way back to what truly mattered in life… to enjoy it, not just run from one obligation to another. That’s an exhausting way to live. It’s not fun. And it costs far too much.
A - Acknowledge
The first step is brutally simple: tell the truth about what is happening inside.
From a brain perspective, awareness is interruption. The moment you name, “I see that part of me that is punishing me right now,” you shift from being inside the pattern to observing it. Different circuits come online. The part of your brain that can regulate, reframe, and choose gets a chance to engage.
Once aware, I literally say to myself:
“I see the part of me that believes I have to suffer to move forward.”
Now there’s understanding; there’s connection and collaboration; there’s gratitude rather than immediate rejection.
B - Bless
This is where it gets counterintuitive.
Most of us try to fix the inner critic by arguing with it or shoving it away. Neurologically, that just adds more threat. The system hears, “Even my fear is not safe here,” and tightens further.
Blessing is different.
Blessing, in my language, means bringing understanding, safety, a new perspective, breath, and even a sense of a higher intelligence bringing comfort to the place that hurts. It’s turning toward the hurt part instead of turning on it.
Physiologically, this is how we begin to shift out of pure fight/flight and into some measure of safety. We’re telling the body: “This pain is real, but we don’t have to attack ourselves to handle it.”
In psychology and neuro-science, this is called parts integration, and can sound like:
“I feel how scared you are. I’m not going to abandon you or beat you up. You get to be held.”
You can almost feel the physiology change—a small softening, a bit more air in the lungs, a little more space around the heart. Those micro‑shifts matter. They are the start of rewiring.
C - Choose
Once there is even a little more space, new capacities are born, and we now have access to actually choose, where we had none before.
Choice is where reclaim our authority as leaders. It’s where we pattern interrupt unconscious patterns, and instead ask, “What do I want to practice believing right now? What do I want to create in this experience?”
This nails previous blind spots and spiritual bypassing. It’s about the courage to embrace something better than same-old. It’s the difference between letting the oldest, loudest circuit run the show and allowing a truer, more future‑aligned one to have a say. It’s the difference between feeling like we’re a victim or contributor to the quality of our lives.
For me, it often sounds like:
· “I choose to create a better future, not dwell on the past.”
· “I choose kindness over self‑attack.”
· “I choose to take one small step forward, even if I don’t feel ready.”
Every time you do this; Acknowledge, Bless, Choose, you send your nervous system new data:
Danger is not the only option.
Attack is not the only response.
There is another way to be with myself.
When you do it once, it’s a moment.
Daily, it’s a practice.
Even in a week, your communication and leadership style has changed.
Imagine what can happen in a month, a quarter, a year?!
I’ve watched leaders who engage this kind of work report very practical shifts: they sleep better, they make decisions faster, they recover more quickly from mistakes, they stop replaying every conversation in their heads at 2 a.m. They find they actually have energy left at the end of the day—for their partners, families, their creativity, and themselves. They get to live again.
This is not magic (although it can feel that way). It’s what happens when you stop burning fuel on an internal war.
Leaders often tell me they want more clarity, more confidence, more ease under pressure. Of course we work with tools, strategy, and neuroscience. But again and again, it comes back to this:
Can you stop ignoring the gold under the critical voice?
Can you stop ignoring your own needs and calling it “humility”?
Can you stop pretending self‑punishment is the same as integrity?
Can you let forgiveness be a form of leadership, not a reward you get after you’ve finally earned it?
I’ve committed to this as a daily practice. I can say with full integrity: when I forgive myself, my energy changes. I am willing to embrace change more confidently. My decisions get cleaner. Acceptance rather than the need to protect or prove feeds results, not rhetoric.
And people feel that, because that’s connection; it’s what most real, authentic and meaningful.
If any of this is tugging on you; if you recognize that “addiction to feeling bad” even while you’re doing good work in the world, this may be your next edge in leadership.
This isn’t about another productivity system, not another push or the need to grind it out. It’s a different way of relating to the person inside your skin.
Forgiveness in my experience, is the self‑leadership practice that leverages conflict into something beautiful and transformative, rather than something painful or damaging. If you are wanting to explore this in a more focused way, especially as it relates to your leadership, your nervous system, and your next chapter, I invite you to book a leadership conversation with me.
We’ll look at where your energy is leaking, where old patterns are still steering the ship, and what it would mean to lead from a less punished, more truthful version of you.
