This issue continues to illustrate my leadership model:
Self-awareness -> Self-leadership -> Public Relationship -> Public Leadership


Healthy public relationships begin with healthy relationship with yourself. Imagine in your self, there exist lively characters named honesty, respect and self-esteem, etc., each waiting to be understood by and to form a healthy relationship with you.

Relationship with Self

Forgiveness, Empathy and Humility
Xiaoping Li

I feel the late morning sun on me while I lie in my bed slowly waking up and gaining conscious. In the past a few nights I have been searching online for wisdoms on forgiveness, going in and out of sleep with a laptop by my pillow, till the wee hours in the morning.

My best friend and I had a very close relationship until three years ago when she forfeited a very important promise to me… in a callous way as I saw it. I felt hurt. Last year, despite my objection, she used my name secretly in an endeavour until I found out. I felt betrayed.

I distanced myself from her to avoid further disappointments. I felt guilty for not fully accepting her apology and her initiatives to repair our relationship through phone calls and visits. My negative opinions and feelings about her condensed into a tight knot in my left chest. It made me feel uneasy every time I spoke to or see her.

What is forgiveness about? – I wondered. Forgiveness, this character inside me, had been ignored for too long. I decided to get to know it better. As I read psychologist Everett Worthington’s five steps to REACH forgiveness, I felt the knot in my chest loosening.

Step 1: Recall the Hurt. Here I acknowledged that my feeling being hurt was valid.

Step 2: Empathize. Here I developed understanding that the reasons my best friend had in forfeiting her promise to me were valid for her, and the vulnerable situation she was in when she resorted to ignore my objection in her endeavour.

Step 3: Altruistic Gift of Forgiveness. Here I was humbled to realize that I wasn’t any better a person than my best friend. In my first years in Canada I selfishly focused on securing my foothold in Canada and did little to help her to come to Canada to study. I also realized that I had joined a group of classmates back in my primary school to bully a new student from the countryside: we circled him, pushed him and pinched him on a summer day until his body was covered with red marks, which turned to purple the next day. He eventually forgave me years later and talked with me friendly. It was a huge relief for me when he no longer looked at me with hostile eyes. As a receiver of forgiveness I felt naturally that I could also offer forgiveness to my best friend. It would be altruistic – not to make me feel a better person than her or to lessen my pain, but to allow her to feel a similar relief I had felt before.

Step 4: Commit Publicly to Forgive. Here I wrote my journey to reaching forgiveness to share with her and my readers.

Step 5: Hold on to Forgiveness. Here I let go all my resentment to my best friend and I would refrain from ruminating such resentment in future. (I drifted into sleep…)

Waking up slowly, I try to remember what I have been trying to forgive, in vain. No knot in my chest to remind me of my resentment. This is incredulous! I open my eyes and finally remember the process I have gone through last night.

Forgiving is not forgetting. I’ll likely always remember these two incidents. I recognize that these incidents have lessened my trust to my best friend. Our future relationship is dependent on whether we will reconcile and nourish the trust between us further.

The Ping Way provides team building and related tranining and coaching services to help realize personal, team, and organizational potential.

Special thanks to my best friend for her approval of sharing the content in this issue publicly.

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