Wrap Up Forgiveness and Feel the Love!

By Karla Brandau

As you wrap 2010 and wrap up your gifts this holiday season, wrap up something that costs absolutely nothing but gives you high dividends in relationships: Wrap up forgiveness.

This simple gift will make your holiday season extraordinary as authentic love will saturate, permeate and pervade every moment of your celebrations. Giving the gift of forgiveness is a rare gift of genuine love based on your power as an individual.

It is easy to love people who offer no resistance to your actions and who support you in what you want to do but it is often a challenge to love and forgive those who do not follow your instructions, openly disagree with you, or take your ideas for their own. .

A forgiving attitude and mentality gives you the power to:

• Have patience with someone who has let you down
• Resist the impulse to be easily offended
• Open a dialog with someone who challenged your instructions
• Dig deeper and find out why a colleague scoffed at your ideas

Genuine and authentic love is:  

• Accepting people as they truly are -- complete with weaknesses
• Looking beyond physical appearances to attributes that will not dim through time
• Resisting the impulse to categorize others
• Deferring criticism and judgment

This depth of forgiveness and love is a higher order of being, of living, and is the highest level of practice whether you are Christian, Jewish or Muslim. This love is unconditional and is not motivated by personal wants or needs.

Forgiveness and love at this level causes you to be sympathetic, compassionate, and merciful, not only in times of sickness, affliction and distress but also in times of weakness or error on the part of others. Your humble gift of forgiveness and love will never be forgotten. .

This Christmas, wrap up forgiveness and feel the love that boomerangs back to you. You'll experience a warm assurance that the world is great place to live. Merry Christmas!

Karla Brandau, CSP, is an expert in change, leadership and team building in the flat world. She offers keynotes and workshops to move your organization forward.