— Inner Mastery, Outer Impact —
Master Your Inner Core with our 9-day Reflection Journey
A pioneer in forgiveness research, Fred Luskin is a Stanford Professor, and Director and Co-founder of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, the largest interpersonal forgiveness training research project ever conducted. Fred has also been a practicing psychologist and therapist for over 30 years, helping others live happier and more fulfilled lives through the practice of forgiveness, gratitude, and meditation. An acclaimed speaker, Fred speaks to a variety of audiences including investors, corporate leaders, medical and mental health professionals, and has conducted stress management and emotional intelligence programs at leading organizations including Boston Consulting Group, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and Facebook. He is also the co-founder and curriculum creator for the executive consulting firm, Maximize Your Talent. Fred has authored several best-selling books, including Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness, Forgive for Love: The Missing Ingredient for a Healthy and Lasting Relationship, and Stress Free for Good: Ten Scientifically Proven Life Skills for Health and Happiness.
How can we learn to forgive those who have deeply hurt us? What does forgiveness truly mean—and what does it not? How can we become free from the bitterness we carry, and what unfolds when we hold on to our grievances for too long? Can we find peace even when there’s no apology, no justice, no closure? And where does true healing come from?
Find out from Dr. Fred Luskin, exclusively in conversation with Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa on Intersections Podcast.
This episode offers key insights on:
Warm welcome back to Intersections, friends! Our focus here is on dissolving boundaries, of expanding our frontiers, our understanding, the depth and breadth of what life can be and what truth is, through a quest to challenge some of the boxes that we create for ourselves and for others in the way we operate in humanity.
Today, we have as our guest someone who has sought to invite us to dissolve some of those boundaries in our relationships, and in particular in the inner relationships that we maintain with those that betray our trust, those that we feel have hurt us in some ways, caused some form of injustice, perhaps or just not showing up the right way in our lives. What would it take and what would it mean if we were to find a way to rather than put them aside and think of them only in terms of negativity and hatred and a sense of vindictiveness or victimhood? If we were to actually create a space where we were able to open ourselves up to the capacity to forgive.
It is a delight to have Dr. Fred Luskin with us today. Fred is a pioneer in forgiveness research. He's a professor at Stanford and the director and co-founder of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project, which is the largest interpersonal forgiveness training research project ever conducted. He's also a practicing psychologist and a therapist for over 30 years, helping people live happier and more fulfilling lives through the practice of gratitude and forgiveness and meditation. An acclaimed speaker, Fred speaks to a variety of audiences, including investors, corporate leaders, medical and mental health professionals, and he's conducted stress management and emotional intelligence programs at leading organizations including the Boston Consulting Group, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and Facebook. He's also had several bestselling books, including "Forgive for Good," it's a book that I've often prescribed to my students at Columbia Business School. "Forgive for Love," and "Stress Free for Good - 10 Scientifically Proven Life Skills for Health and Happiness".
Fred, it's a pleasure to have you with us. Welcome.
Thank you. I'm sure you've had the same experience of how weird it is to be introduced for your accomplishments and not necessarily who you are as a human being. But thank you and I appreciate the kind words.
Well, I mean, that's a very profound start to our conversation right here. You said, these are only our accomplishments, which you're so right. We get introduced on the basis of these biographical flourishes and not for who we are. How would you answer that question? Who are you, really?
I would have responded maybe if I could evaluate myself, it would be on my behaviors, how I treat people, how I treat myself, the thoughts that I have, are they generous or stingy? Whether I'm reliable, dependable, kind hearted. I don't know that there's a who I am, because, when you go inside, it's kind of shifty. But, I think it does make some impact, like how we act and react in this world, and I think that's probably more important. I don't know if it's the right words than just reading off accomplishments.
Right there is a beautiful lesson for all of us. Thank you for starting us off on that very thoughtful note. I've already introduced to our audience that the topic of today's podcast is, this powerful capacity and quality of forgiveness, which has been one of the centerpieces of luminous work in your life on that and other topics like stress, gratitude and beyond. But, let's focus our conversation today on forgiveness.
It's a provocative idea in the sense that if you think about what people are looking for in life today, they're looking for happiness, they're looking for success, they're looking for fame, or perhaps they're in pain and they're looking for how can I be more resilient? How can I manage my depression? How can I not be as lonely? These are the fashions of the day. Or I want to be a firebrand leader and I want to really fix this social injustice and want to be one of these social justice warriors. I don't really see forgiveness being given a lot of currency in our media or social media or the prevailing zeitgeist.
What got you to put so much care and thought into this practice and the principles of forgiveness?
I'm, I guess, like an old hippie. Growing up, I grew up in New York like many of the hippies, maybe that got trivialized into peace, love and granola. But I was interested in peace, love and granola. And, when you start investigating that, the questions come inside, what will really make me happy? What ways of being in the world and what pursuits will lead to some kind of sustainable happiness. And those are not easy to answer. But one of the things that did come to me, not quickly, was what I did in the world needed to have some positive value, just taking from the world was not sufficient. So making a lot of money, I mean, that's fine, but it was taking versus giving. I had a meditation practice from way back as a hippie and got certified as a yoga teacher, like a million years ago. But there was always this pull to try to, at least if I have this life here to make it of some use. It's not such an easy thing in a culture that is very materially oriented and consumer taking oriented. Anyway, I couldn't forgive. That was an obstacle towards my positive life. And I got very badly hurt by somebody. It wrecked my life for a couple of years. It just threw me. I was in a ditch.
In what way did it wreck your life?
What do you mean?
Was it something the person was doing that was wrecking your life? Or was it your incapacity to forgive that was wrecking your life? I'm just gonna try to understand.
Well, a very close friend abandoned and betrayed me. My response to it, my anger, my bitterness and my fear ruined my life. I mean, that's what I see now, but I was an emotional wreck and I was very volatile, because I had been wounded in a way that I couldn't process and I didn't anticipate. Anyway, my wife came to me one day and said, "Fred, I still love you. I just don't like you as much because I expected you to do better. Like I didn't expect you to take what life threw at you and crumble like this." That had quite an impact. The only thing that worked or even showed itself once she kicked me in the butt was, "Fred, you're going to have to move on and let this go." It just came clear to me, "I'm going to have to let this go." But that meant not just the thing, but my emotions and my thoughts about this thing, "I'm going to have to let those go, too, because I'm trapped."
And so out of that, the stuff that I did to dig myself out of this pit I experimented with for my dissertation. I took what had rescued me and made a very simplistic, very early forgiveness intervention that became my dissertation study at Stanford. That was successful. We got grants and I launched the Stanford Forgiveness Project, but it all came from my suffering.
Wow! Well, it's a beautiful thing to take something that has been a personal struggle, to grow from it, learn from it, and then to codify and systematize it, do research on it and make it available for the world as a growth journey. It's something that any of us could emulate for whatever struggle has been at the very core of our existence in times past.
Well, let me interrupt you for a second, because taking a life experience and paying it outward is not unusual. You know how many hurt people you meet, who pay their hurt forward. You know how many abandoned people you meet who are mistrustful. There's so many people who have been wounded in childhood who take that out on their spouses and kids. Many of us are paying it forward. But I tried to pay forward the part of my healing, not the part of my wounding.
That's a great way of framing it. So beautiful. Now I want to put the spotlight on one of those moments where you were paying forward your healing, not your wounding.
As part of that Stanford forgiveness project, you ended up serving communities of people who have been hurting and who need to go through their healing journey. One of those remarkably so was, a number of bereaved mothers, correct me if I'm wrong, from Northern Ireland, where in the midst of that very bloody and enduring Protestant, Catholic wars, they've lost their son, for example, to the battlefield there. You brought some of these mothers in from Northern Ireland, I understand. What was that project about? What journey did you take them on? Was it measurable? Was it tangible? What gains did it yield? I think that would be an incredibly powerful story for us to hear from you.
There was a minister on Stanford's campus who read about our forgiveness project. He had been doing back channel diplomacy for a while in Northern Ireland between the Catholic and the Protestant sides. He called me and said, "We can't create dialog between these two sides because they're bitter and they keep on throwing at each other all the wounds and all the murders and all this and that the other side did, and they can't get past that." So he asked me if I was willing to work with him to do a demonstration project, taking mothers from both sides of that conflict who had lost sons.
I see, they were from both sides?
Yeah. We brought Catholic and Protestant women together, each of whom had had a son murdered, and we tried to teach them to forgive, and he thought that that would be a really good demonstration project to show that, of course you're devastated. And of course your life has been ripped apart and you can open your heart back to life, which is the essential aspect of forgiveness. You can open your heart back up. So we worked for a week. We got grant money to bring these people to Stanford. They stayed a week and we sent them back to Northern Ireland. And individually, they became less depressed, less stressed, less anxious. They had individual gains that lasted six months. That's as far as we assess. But, we didn't understand the insidious, intractable nature of group conflict because when they got back to Ireland, both sides, like home groups, treated them as traitors if they wanted to release the grievance against the other side for harming their family member.
And so, while they might have healed, the conflict itself and the group were not open to change, and they recognized that they had to go underground with their own healing. And we did a second project, similar to that and the same thing happened. Then we recognize, "Wow, this is so much deeper and more difficult than we could ever have imagined." But we were able to show significant statistical changes in individuals, but we would have had to retool and create facilitators and create support networks and give people who went back home resources and support to hold on to that within a community. And we were not equipped for that.
Well, thanks for sharing that sobering second part of it. Sometimes I hear it from some of my executive participants as well that I buy into this, this is something that I'm getting less fully invested in. And yet, now when I show up, in my family or in my workplace or in my culture, the culture is not born into this, whatever that may be or this may be. It could be forgiveness. It could be resilience. It could be moving from a victim to an empowered mindset. It could be about how you build bridges with your opponents or create a fusion between high performance, but also from a loving, caring heart, whatever it might be, any of these things, there is the inner capacity that we want to cultivate. But then there's also the struggle with engaging in the messy milieu of life in muddy waters.
There's one reason we named our daughter Mrinalini. Mrinalini is the lotus flower, which blooms in muddy waters. The idea was like, look, I don't know what the world is going to be, it would probably be muddy at times. But what can we be? Can we be that lotus flower that can bloom? And so you're creating these lotus flowers and you're giving them the inner disciplines.
We want to come back to what the journey was like for that week that they were with you at Stanford, we want to come back and talk about that. What are some of the practices that you found most potent and helpful for people? But before we do that, just a quick question, as a follow up to what you just shared, have you tried to take your work into a form that is to help people become forgiveness advocates and changemakers in their community? What are the practices that will open up your team or your organization or your community to seeing the merits of a forgiving approach to life?
This the state of Hawaii for many years hired us to train forgiveness educators and facilitators to be available in the education world, in the social services world, in the rehab world. Hawaii has a very spiritual undercurrent to their culture. They believe in forgiveness, the Ho'oponopono practice of reconciliation. But they hired us because we're an entirely secular teaching. Our forgiveness work is entirely secular. So we got a small grant to go there and train trainers, to try to train people to have some skill and go out where they were and use it and so they would create lessons and give talks and maybe mediate disputes a little bit. We have trained trainers in the counseling world to do forgiveness. But forgiveness is not a popular sport. It is hard for people. It challenges egos, righteousness. It is not a popular sport. There is not that much money out there for it. And many people resisted because it's like, "Wait, I've been hurt. And you're telling me to release that? It can be a very hard sell.
You use this metaphor, which I really like, and I'm quoting you here. You say, grievances are formed when people are unable to deal successfully with not getting what they wanted, and then they rent too much space in their minds to the injustice? Can you lay that out a little bit more? What do you mean by renting too much space to injustice?
I can link this to the question that you asked just even a minute ago of how we worked with the people from Northern Ireland. I'm trying to make it a little broader because these were people who were desperately wounded and desperately hurt. So part of what we did is make them feel important. You can't minimize kindness and care. It's not like you just go in there and forgiveness is like two pills you take in the morning. But the essence of this whole work is you didn't get what you want. That something happened was so far in variance and even violence to what you wanted, the picture you had of your life, even the horror of you wanting your kid to live and they didn't. But the horror of you wanting to keep your job and they took it from you, there's so many ways that the world says no. And we conceptualize forgiveness as making peace with the word no.
The problem is that many people, when they're hurt, obsess about no. I didn't get it. It's wrong. It's terrible. How dare they? They create a whole life around no or feeling sorry for themselves because they didn't get yes. When you say, renting too much space in your mind that can take up people's minds, nobody loves me. It's not fair. This isn't good. That's obsessing about no. Or, they should have done this. I should have gotten that. It was my turn. But it wasn't fair. I should have gotten a yes. And that renting space in their mind can reduce their capacity to live a successful life because they're so overwhelmed by it. So just finishing this up, one of the things that we did when the people from Northern Ireland came, was we brought them to the window of the building on Stanford's campus where they were. And it was a fifth floor window with a nice view of the hills behind the campus. These people had just come from Belfast, where it was like 31 degrees and gray. And it was gorgeous at Stanford. So we opened the window and had them open their arms and feel the sun hit them. And we said, "The same universe that killed your kid provides the sun, and you have a choice every minute. You can open to let life's goodness in, like the sun, or you can argue with what happened and not make peace. And we're here to teach you to try to lower your argument and make you more available to the rays of your sun that exist." That was the theme of our week. And that's probably still the theme of our training.
Beautiful. I love that idea of letting the rays of the sun in. You mentioned in your book, "Forgive for Good." I found this very helpful. I actually use that idea a lot in my class in citing this beautiful work on forgiveness you've done, which is that, If forgiveness is a gift that you give yourself. Now, most of the time I think people are thinking, "Well, but if I forgive, I'm loosening the standards for this person. I'm sort of letting them off the hook for some terrible behavior they've engaged in, which is actually quite unforgivable. So, I need to hold on to that grudge and that bitterness, because they need to be punished. They need to be thought about in very villainous terms, because otherwise I'm letting them off too easily." But you're saying, no, forgiveness is not a gift that you give them. It's a gift that you give yourself. So talk about that.
There's that well known Nelson Mandela quote, "Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for it to kill your enemies." That's the crucial adage. If you work with people, they tend to act as if they're negativity, their resentment, their self-pity or bitterness that are organic and real. But forgiveness and compassion, those are somehow outside, that, that those belong to somebody else, but they can invite them in. I don't see it that way. I see it as it's all a choice, even though the negative is much easier to access. But anger, bitterness, self-pity, kindness, goodness and forgiveness, they're all wired into a nervous system. Through attention and practice, we can make the positive ones more available to us. So, much of teaching people is to remind them that they have more choices than they think. It's not inevitable that you're going to stay angry for two years, but it's useful to be angry at first as a part of the grief process. The gift that they give to themselves is to stop their mind and body from eating themselves up.
If you become bitter, which so many people have become, I mean we've also done work in Sierra Leone, I've gone to Colombia after their civil war. We did a forgiveness thing at the U.N. after the attack on 9/11. I mean. I've dealt with so many people who have had horrible losses. The essential teaching is that loss is going to impact you and it has to. But that's called grief. You struggle with it. You anguish over it. But grief is not meant to be permanent. It's a passage. And so the gift you give yourself is to allow yourself to move past that grief. One of the best ways to move past that grief is to just forgive what happened.
Getting to the point you made, people do struggle to say, "If I forgive them, I've made it okay, or I'm not punishing them" and the simple truth is, you can't punish them. I mean, you can sometimes do revenge things, but most people are not available for us to pay back. And so all the negativity just harms our mind and raises our blood pressure and disturbs our nervous system and gives us crappy days. The reality is we put ourselves on the hook, not someone else. That gift is taking us off the hook.
It reminds me of this moment where Bill Clinton had been taken by Mandela to Robben Island to have him just experience what Mandela had gone through, amongst other anti-apartheid sort of fighters being incarcerated in Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town. I don't know if you know this story, but Bill Clinton was so moved when he saw and experienced that little tiny prison cell and the life there, he asked Mandela, "How did you manage to forgive your captors?" He had a certain largeness of heart, which was so emblematic of his approach to leadership and how he showed South Africa, a passage and a path to reconciliation. So he asked him, "How did you manage to forgive your captors? Mandela supposedly had told him then, "I realized when I walked out of prison that if I did not forgive my captors, I would still be in prison."
So I hear that in what you're saying. There is an argument some might make though. This often comes up in some of my conversations with them in talking about the power of forgiveness. It's true that some of these individuals who perpetrated all kinds of injustice in us and etc. are not available or accessible to us anymore and might even have passed away, etc.. But there are some who are very much in our lives right now, like that colleague of mine who said that at the meeting or that business partner who shouldn't be doing this or that person in my family or community or this group within our society that clearly has been at the forefront of usurping power and colonizing us or, etc., whatever it might be. There's all kinds of these experiences that people have and they feel like, "Well, wait a second, I have to be fighting for justice. I have to be standing up for myself, I can't be a doormat." And this notion of forgiveness, rather than fighting the injustice and pushing back at it and speaking truth to power and any or all of those things.
So what is the role of forgiveness in the context of those who are on fire, but wanting to fix the system, fix people and fix relationships and not just be a doormat?
So one of the problems that is almost never discussed with that kind of approach is the disturbing effect that anger has on our ability to think. Anger is a very helpful thing to alert us to danger and orient us to try to find a solution quickly. But it's not meant for deep problem solving and it's not meant for figuring out long term solutions to anything. If you stay angry for a while, you actually lose some capacity to reason and be creative. The people who say you need to be angry, what they're saying is we're bringing only a piece of our brain to the fight. And that leads to bad decisions. It meets the interpersonal conflict, which makes everything worse and it exaggerates the crisis experience of it. So when you're angry, you're filled with adrenaline, and you're designed to be on edge and unhappy, so you have to find an immediate solution. Those are not good ways to find justice. In fact, those are terrible ways to find justice.
The qualities that do help are to admit you're angry, and to know that there's things that need to be changed, but not necessarily rely on anger for inspiration and to know how to change it. For that, you need a calm mind with a wide vista of opportunities and options that also have some compassion in there. It's a quality of mind that has us make enemies, but there's a lot of need in this world for change and improvement and better treatment. So they're not orthogonal.
I remember telling people, the more specific question around forgiveness is like, a 25-year-old young woman came to a class of mine decades ago and listened to me talk about forgiveness, practiced it, and said, she raised her hand really sweetly and said, this forgiveness stuff is wonderful. It's great, but I still don't want to go to my parents' house for Thanksgiving. It's not safe. And my immediate quip was, "That's great, but forgiveness is not the same as getting a lobotomy." You still have to think, and you still have to take action that keeps you safe. You're just not so aroused and riled up that you can make the wrong decisions. Some of the distinctions are that forgiveness doesn't force you to reconcile, to make things okay. It cleanses your heart of bitterness and of blame so that you can make the best plans for your own future. That's the key power of forgiveness.
I love the way you've phrased it and challenged us to think about it in a much more mature and more nuanced way. I sometimes talk about it as inner versus outer, what are you feeling from within versus what are you doing on the outside? Correct me if I'm wrong, but everything you've spoken to us about is the importance, the responsibility we owe ourselves to forgive from within and cleanse our heart. And then on the outside, in some cases, we may need to litigate, in some cases we need to break off that relationship because it's too toxic for us, in some cases, we may need to forgive and forget because there's just no point, this is our partner. We had a certain misstep, but there's no point, it is just going to keep on repeating that thought in our mind all the time because there's so much goodness in the relationship and good intent in the relationship etc. So everything from forgiving and forgetting about it to litigating about it to everything in between are all possibilities that may be available to us. And in some situations that may be more appropriate to do one and some do the other. And that's the outer choices we have to make. But that has nothing to do with the inner practice of forgiveness.
I think sometimes what happens is people hear the word forgiveness and they think that you're talking about holding somebody's hand and looking into their eyes and saying, I forgive you in the sense that from now on things are back to, so to say, square one and normal. And I'm not going to do anything to hold this against you. Let's just give each other a warm hug and forget about it. That's not what you're saying is forgiveness in the way you talk about it.
Let me respond also to one of the things you said about forgive and forget. One of the ways that we remind people of how powerful forgiveness is, it's that you forgive and remember differently. You don't want to forget. What you want to remember also is your power. When you forgive somebody that really hurts you or a group forgives, you don't ever want to forget what was done. What you want to remember is your emotional resilience at moving through it, at the power you have of creating a better future and the efficacy of things like, "Hey, we can deal with things." That's the other power of forgiveness. The people who don't forgive become very frightened because they know how much they can be caught and how trapped they can get in negativity. So you want to forgive and remember.
The other piece that I just want to add is, there's a huge difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness is inside. It's an opening and a soothing and a healing experience. Reconciliation is the reestablishment of a relationship. The easiest way to teach that is, you can have a marriage where one partner has the series of affairs and the other partner finds out about it and is horrified, and they go on for a while and one relationship they reconcile, but never forgive. So every day the person comes home and has biting words for the person who cheated, but they stay. That's reconciliation without forgiveness. You can also have forgiveness without reconciliation "Hey, I get it. You weren't happy in the marriage. You didn't know how to deal with it. You had a lot of affairs. I forgive that, but we're done."
So, forgiveness is a mind heart cleansing that, I believe, leads to better outcomes and better decisions.
So beautiful! I want to sort of end with another component of your repertoire of forgiveness interventions, which also really struck a strong chord with me as I was studying your approach. And I found it quite unique in the literature on forgiveness. That had to do with cultivating the practice of positivity and appreciation and a sense and a feeling that the universe is on your side, just as an antidote to the tendency to have our mind be pulled into some of those mental craters where we feel like, "Why did this," "Life shouldn't have that." "This was supposed to happen as opposed to that." And rather than addressing them directly, which has been a lot of what the forgiveness literature is focused on is, how do you directly lean into what you went through, perhaps make peace with it and then learn from it and grow from it, which is beautiful, that's important. But, you have this other approach, too, which says, "Hey, listen, cultivate some mindfulness, meditation, appreciation or affirmation or some practices like that which are just so joy giving to you that they just start to get more rental space in your home, and as they get more and more space, they crowd out all the other tendencies." Something like that. I don't know if I'm articulating that in the way that you've formulated it.
As you bring our conversation of forgiveness to closure, let's maybe celebrate and emphasize the power of positivity. And so what are those practices that you have designed, which have really been helpful to people to just turn their mind more into what's working for them?
Well, I know you know about our negativity bias. It is that we don't see the world clearly. We are over focused on the negative. We are over remembering the negative. And so we honestly do not have an accurate appraisal of our life or of life itself. When people get hurt and they start perseverating around it, they have a dramatically distorted view. So we recognized immediately that the simplest thing we could suggest they do is see things more clearly. That's called gratitude or appreciation. We might say, "Okay, I know this person lied to you." Well, let's talk for two minutes about your partner who's kind and gentle and devoted. They're there too. So let's help you get a better view of your life so you can speak more honestly about it. That's the crucial thing.
If you tell a grievance story, we don't say it's wrong. We just say it's unbalanced and incomplete. And so, so much is simple is yes, that's true, and, so let's look at the sun or let's remember that people have loved you or let's just give thanks for food, or let's notice that your body's working and then include that in how you talk about your life. So yes, "My neighbor is an idiot and my kids are wonderful." The minute you do that, your nervous system changes and your view of reality changes and you actually start seeing things more clearly. That's the first and most essential change of forgiveness. And if you give me 30 more seconds, I will tell you that that's how I changed.
I went into a supermarket at my lowest point after an argument with my wife. I went into the supermarket filled with self-pity and anger, and I was so frustrated that they didn't have an item that I wanted. And I'm sitting there in the middle of Safeway, like just furious, when for one moment I had an experience of grace, and all of a sudden the staggering abundance of the supermarket became available to me. I have the worst, crappiest experience to "Oh my God, all this produce. There's dog food, there's everything. The whole world is right here." All I have to do is pay for it. That transformed my experience. It changed my life and that was my entree to opening to forgive this person that had hurt me.
Oh wow! That's such a vivid and powerful story to share. Thank you for doing that. I have my own love-hate relationship with going grocery shopping. It's for completely different reasons, but, milder reasons, more to do with things like, "Oh my God, there's so much complexity. There's so many choices. Why don't they make life simple and just give me one brand of this or one flavor of that". But now there's a whole different way of framing it, which is like, "Wow, what a bounty, what a richness of heart the universe and nature has in putting all of this in front of me", which is that reframing that you said you went through in your own ways. How beautiful!
Fred, I'm going to invite you to have the last word as we bring this to closure. I'd love to hear from you where you're taking this very important, beautiful work. What's your big dream in what you're questing for and advancing this footprint of the power and practice of forgiveness in the world? As you maybe think about what you want to offer up to us as, as that dream from you in the year and years ahead, I want to just close out my part of the conversation.
I love your metaphors. You have this very elegant, simple, vivid, evocative way of making us see obvious things which we may never have seen so far. And so this is again, one of your metaphors. And I'm kind of quoting you, you talk about, "Picture the crowded screen in front of a harried air traffic controller. Picture the chaos in the room and the jumble of planes on the screen. Now imagine that your unresolved grievances are the planes on that screen that have been circling for days and weeks on end. Most of the other planes have landed, but your unresolved grievances continue to take up precious airspace, draining resources that may be needed in an emergency. Having them on the screen forces you to work harder. It increases the chances of accidents. And these grievance planes become a source of stress and burnout that's often as a result." What a powerful metaphor.
Thank you for all you're doing to very creatively and thoughtfully bring an enduring truth, a timeless truth, something that all the great faiths and traditions have talked about the power of forgiveness. You just talked about how it's so deeply coded in the traditions of Hawaii. Thank you for bringing that in this very modern, accessible, practical form and all the great work that you've done with the bereaved mothers of Ireland and beyond. So grateful. Let me turn it to you for final thoughts.
Thank you. I'll just say that many of those metaphors came because the people from Northern Ireland had like an eighth grade education, and we were, pointy headed Stanford people. And we recognized very quickly they had no idea what we were talking about. So I mostly had to create simple ways of describing what we were offering to them. I learned early on that's how you reach people, you make it simple.
Thank you for asking me to join you.
So Fred what's your what's your big dream now. Where are you seeking to direct your journey in life. You can make this as much personal as you can or as professional. It could be anything. But we just love to hear a little bit of what's pulling you in in the present moment forward.
Well, right this moment, I'm in the middle of a book tour because we just published another book on forgiveness called, "The Forgive for Good Workbook".
We've been doing research on helping people in recovery from addictions, self-forgive. And so we just completed work. I've never turned my work into a workbook, and I'm out promoting that. So, it's a little busy. In my personal life, I recently turned 70, and so I'm trying to figure out really what that means, and what life is asking of me at this age. It feels different. So that would be my answer to you.
Beautiful! Another season of life starting to open up for you. On behalf of all of us here, I want to cheer you on for all the goodness and all the power that you have brought in translating your own personal life journey and experience into a formal academic program and study and then manifesting it in such beautiful ways. That story you just shared about how these pointy headed Stanford folks, so here it is, a very rigorous academic program of study. I know there's a lot of brain science behind it, a lot of psychological measurements behind it and all of that, but then also having that attunement to your audience and sense of service and fullness for the audience to recognize that, "Okay, given where they are coming from, here is how we need to communicate in a way that really resonates with them". That's such an act of nobility and service and thoughtfulness that you brought. It's so precious and in so many ways invaluable.
Thank you for all you're doing, Fred, and looking forward to seeing what this next chapter unfolds. Good luck with the workbook. Godspeed. Wishing you well. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
.svg)
