This week I’m thrilled to have Dr. Veronica Ruelas and Denise Gaffney as my guests to chat Forgiveness. Veronica and Denise are the co-founders of Forgivity, an app designed to foster a habit of forgiveness.

To be fair, when I first heard about turning forgiveness into a habit, I was a bit hesitant. Forgiveness as a habit was nowhere near anything I would have considered. Throw on top of it a neuroscientific and psychological angle, and all of a sudden I’m becoming a big fan.

I love the concept, especially in the context of the workplace. We touch on it in the podcast, but ultimately it should lead to a broader conversation of those “soft” words and terms (think vulnerability, psychological safety) that are vital to a functioning and more productive workplace culture. Ironically, these words we attribute as “soft” are embraced by the strongest and bravest leaders we know. They work.

Beyond the workplace, there is an accountability aspect to forgiveness that I never gave much thought. It’s a personal power to be able to forgive, and is one more notch on the belt of what we ultimately have control over. In fact, it’s the lack of forgiveness that often prevents us from getting to where we need to go.

Lots more to come on forgiveness – and one topic I encourage you to explore for yourself and your teams. Listen to the interview – they are fantastic – and learn how forgiveness just may be the buzzword that makes a significant difference for you this year.

The Forgivity app is now available for download on iOS. For more information on the app, please visit www.forgivity.com.

For more on Veronica and Denise, please hit up their channels:

https://www.instagram.com/forgivity/

https://www.facebook.com/Forgivity

https://www.tiktok.com/@forgivity

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I’m Jim Frawley and this is bellwether. Welcome to bellwether. Thank you for being here this week. We have guests, multiple guests for the first time we’re doing, you know, we’ve got a trio going here and it’s gonna be very, very good. The topic is forgiveness, and I know it’s, you know, it’s forgiveness. We, we can all talk about forgive for some reason. It’s one of the hottest words in corporate right now. I’ve gotten multiple phone calls about it right now. Everybody wants to know about how do you bring forgiveness into the workplace and what does that actually mean? Uh, which took me a little by surprise and, and very fortunately, almost, you know, as the world and universe can kind of work at the same time, I was introduced to these two wonderful individuals who have a solution for forgiveness in the workplace, and they have the app. Everything is an app, and this is, uh, this is going to be a very, very cool app. So I wanna talk to you about forgiveness. I’m gonna talk about the forgive app and let me introduce our wonderful guest this week. I’m gonna start with, we have Denise and Vero Vero. Please introduce yourself.Hi, I’m I’m Dr. Veronica OS and I’m the co-founder and co CEO of forg.And I’m Denise Kaney, I’m the other co-founder and co CEO of forg. Um, I have 20 years on wall street. I’m a certified, uh, energy leadership coach, and now I’m an entrepreneur,Which is a wonderful journey to be on. And when I think about wall street, I don’t typically think of forgiveness unless you think about it in, you know, kind of government handouts, but we’ll, we’ll talk about, um, at, in a difficult corporate environment. Talk to me, we’ll get it right out of the way. Yeah. Talk to me about the forgiving app, what it does and why you created it.So, um, it’s, it’s an, we use, uh, clinical neuroscience methods to, um, make forgiveness a more intuitive behavior because it’s, it’s not something we’re, we’re all taught that forgiveness is important and it’s universal, but, uh, the, how is really missing from the equation. And so, um, yeah, so we, we infuse, uh, humor. It’s a multisensory program. There’s audio learning, there’s engaging digestible, uh, nuggets throughout and, and, uh, yeah, and it’s a, it’s a beautiful, uh, fresh clean platform.Yeah. And you got a lot of us on there. We, uh, Vero mentioned the audio. We had a great time bringing a different type of learning to the app. So you’ll hear our voices. We, we recorded these little snippets called pod drops, and we’ll introduce each of the steps of the program with, uh, a little warm invite from the two of us. And then you’ll hear us throughout the program, uh, either with a bit of information or a quote or, um, some personal experience because like, who wouldn’t wanna hear us, Jim? Right.Everybody wants to hear you cause why you’re here. It’s why I have everyone on the, the show. My goodness,Hear this. They’re gonna be like, let me at the app. and you’ve, you’ll be in that too. You’re everywhere. Um, so forgiveness and science would never have paired the two together. Mm-hmm um, you hear that you’re supposed to forgive people. It’s very much, um, you know, when we teach people how to forgive, uh, how does that even work? Right. When I think of forgiveness, I think of it externally, right? You had some wrong come to you and how do you let them, that person know that it’s okay. And, and talking to you, it’s not necessarily letting them know that what they did was okay. It’s about letting them know that you won’t let it bother you. Is that how do you define forgiveness and, and how do we really start that?So we, uh, um, we were a lot, all of us were taught the importance of forgiveness and, um, and it was either through culture, through our family, through our religious practice that we were born into. And so, uh, we are actually empowering the user to have forgiveness come from within them. Um, people can still use the ways that they learned, uh, how to forgive, but we F that a lot of, a lot of times we say we forgive, and then yet a little time further down the road, we think of the person that has quote, wronged us. Um, and we still have a physical reaction to it. So when you say the science, there’s, there’s a deep biological, chemical reaction that is happening when we live in this kind of quote unforgiveness. And so, uh, our heart rate can increase. We, um, uh, lose sleep. Uh, there’s a lot of different ways that it is affecting us. And so when we teach forgiveness, it’s really about how do we get to that fully, that full process of letting go and releasing it and knowing that it is that have the power within us to do that.So it’s, it’s not just, when you think about forgiveness, it’s not just a mental health thing, there’s physical attributes to it as well. And, and we talk about how the physical and the mental always, they go hand in hand, right? You know, what you eat can affect the way you think in all of those types of things, forgiveness is actually has a, a physical response. Is that what you’re saying?A hundred percent? What if, what if we broke it down to, um, what if we took the word forgiveness out and spoke about stress, everybody’s familiar with the effects that stress has on the body? Right. Well, the link between forgiveness and stress is unforgiveness and resentment and anger and irritation and grudge holding. So all of those things, right, that all of us do, um, contribute to the increased stress in our bodies. So does that feel like more of a linear type of, of thing to understand? Sure.And, and the resentment of, as we sit there, you know, we, when you think about coaching and what, and what everybody teaches people to do is focus on what you can’t control, right? You can’t control when somebody treats you like garbage, you can’t control when something wrong happens to you, you can’t, but you can’t control how you react much easier said than done. Mm-hmm . So when we think about, it’s almost meditative, the way you’re doing it, it’s, it’s a stress relief of, you know, parasympathetic, nervous system, all of those types of things. And how do you turn off? But this is something that’s got to become habitual, I would imagine, right? Because this will constantly come back. Resentment will constantly come back. When other stressors come in, you can always fall back on the resentment that you had and, and you’re ultimately blaming other people. How does, you know, how do habits cut into this? How does accountability, uh, set into this? Because ultimately this is your responsibility for forgiveness, not necessarily, regardless of what somebody else does to you. Talk to me a little bit about that,Jim. I mean, um, you’re hired, do you want a board position? I mean, you nailed, let’s do it. Yes. Seriously.You, I mean, you’re good. It’s Jim’s sandwich.It’s it’s um, that’s exactly right. When we see it’s a neuroscience program, we’re talking about, uh, the neuroplasticity, uh, we re...