Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

Patti Cotton

Overcoming Biases and Resistance to Forgiveness

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What stories about others are you carrying that no longer serve you?

We all carry stories about how others have treated us—moments of disappointment, betrayal, or misunderstanding that we tuck away as lessons or warnings. These stories shape how we lead, collaborate, and decide. But not all of them serve us—or the people we lead.
When biases harden and forgiveness feels out of reach, they become invisible barriers that bind our energy to the past instead of freeing it for the future.

The truth is, holding onto bias and old grudges doesn’t punish anyone but ourselves. It’s like dragging a heavy anchor while trying to steer forward.

The Invisible Blocks to Letting Go

Think back to Raj, the department head from our last article. He replayed a missed deadline again and again, reinforcing his belief that “once trust is broken, it can’t be rebuilt.” It sounded like prudence, but it was really self-protection. That belief quietly consumed his focus, narrowing his leadership bandwidth and keeping him reactive.

Most leaders resist forgiveness for a few familiar reasons:

  • Misunderstanding forgiveness as weakness: “If I forgive, I’m letting them off the hook.”
  • Fear of vulnerability: “If I show empathy, I might be taken advantage of.”
  • Belief in permanence: “People don’t change, so why bother?”

Each of these stories has a cost. They trap us in cycles of guardedness and tension—moments when we lead from fear rather than trust, and when our teams mirror that same energy back to us.

The Cost of Resistance

Unresolved tension doesn’t stay contained. It spills into how teams communicate, innovate, and perform.

  • Leaders lose clarity and waste hours mentally replaying past conflicts.
  • Teams disengage, hesitate to share ideas, and protect themselves instead of collaborating.
  • Organizations slow down—execution suffers, turnover rises, and innovation stalls.

Research confirms that teams grounded in trust, accountability, and forgiveness are up to 12 times more likely to outperform their peers. The ROI of reducing resistance isn’t abstract—it’s tangible in engagement, productivity, and cohesion.

A Story: Lena’s Team

Lena, a senior director in healthcare, noticed growing tension after a tough project review. Two top performers began avoiding each other; sarcasm slipped into emails. She felt the discomfort but hesitated—“If I bring it up,” she thought, “I’ll make it worse.”

Instead, Lena chose courage over comfort. She:

  1. Named the tension—gently, without blame.
  2. Helped her team separate facts from feelings—what happened vs. what it meant.
  3. Facilitated open dialogue so each person could be heard.
  4. Co-created clear agreements on communication and follow-through.

Within weeks, the team found its rhythm again. Meetings regained their spark, projects moved faster, and Lena noticed a 15% improvement in delivery times—and a 100% lift in morale.

Action Steps: Shifting Bias into Energy

  1. Reflect on your stories. Identify the judgments or “permanent beliefs” that quietly drain your energy.
  2. Question your assumptions. Ask, “Is this fact—or a story I’ve created?”
  3. Model vulnerability. Show that releasing resentment is a mark of strength, not weakness.
  4. Create safe dialogue. Invite honest conversations where feedback and forgiveness can coexist.
  5. Anchor accountability. Track commitments and celebrate progress. Energy flows where trust grows.

The ROI of Letting Go

When leaders release resistance and reframe bias:

  • They reclaim hours of mental bandwidth once lost to replaying old conflicts.
  • Teams become more creative, connected, and invested in shared outcomes.
  • Organizations regain momentum and alignment that drives innovation.

Letting go isn’t simply an emotional exercise—it’s a strategic act of leadership.
Forgiveness is not about excusing the past; it’s about reclaiming your energy for what’s next.

Looking Ahead

Noticing tension is the beginning. Questioning our biases is the bridge. But practicing forgiveness—moment to moment, in real relationships—is where transformation takes root.

Where do you need to practice more forgiveness?

In the next article, we’ll explore how to put forgiveness into action—through practical frameworks that help leaders turn awareness into energy and energy into impact.

 

Recognizing Grudges and Hidden Tensions: Spotting Energy Drains Before They Take Root

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Article Image 2- Recognizing Grudges and Hidden Tensions: Spotting Energy Drains Before They Take Root

How much hidden tension are you carrying from unresolved conflict?

We rarely notice the quiet ways tension seeps into our work—both individually and across teams. It doesn’t always show up as a heated argument or dramatic confrontation. Often, it slips in subtly: a glance avoided in a hallway, a colleague who stops contributing ideas, or a whispered comment in the break room. These small signals are the footprints of grudges and hidden tension—and their cost is far greater than a few awkward moments.

Take Carla, the VP from my last article. Her choice to withdraw from one colleague after a tense meeting wasn’t dramatic—it was quiet, almost invisible. Yet, her avoidance rippled across her team. Meetings became less dynamic. Ideas went unspoken. The team’s energy—the very currency of creativity and productivity—was quietly leaking.

What is hidden tension costing you?

Workplace conflict costs organizations an estimated $359 billion annually in lost productivity – and unresolved tension is a large and silent contributor. But the true return on recognizing these energy drains isn’t measured only in dollars. It’s in mental bandwidth reclaimed, focus restored, and creativity unlocked. Leaders who notice tension early don’t just protect productivity—they safeguard the energy of themselves and their teams.

How can you tell if you are affected?

Grudges rarely declare themselves. Instead, they show up as patterns of behavior that quietly siphon energy. Are you or one of your colleagues experiencing any of these?

  • Avoidance: You seek to skip meetings, sidestep colleagues, or disengage from projects.
  • Gossip: Your conversations can shift from work to subtle judgments or resentment.
  • Passive-aggression: Your responses may be delayed, you find it easy to make backhanded comments, or small snubs that leave a mark.
  • Disengagement: You are contributing less, you withdraw from discussions, or you have diminished initiative.

Individually, these behaviors drain a leader’s focus and emotional energy. Systemically, they ripple across the team, slowing progress, eroding trust, and stalling alignment.

If you are experiencing any of what I have just described, then the biggest obstacle to moving your organization is you.

Indeed, the biggest obstacles aren’t what’s happening around us—they’re the stories we tell ourselves when we hold onto conflict:

  • “If I let go, I’m weak.”
  • “That person will never change.”
  • “Conflict is permanent.”

These assumptions act like invisible chains, locking energy into past events. I once worked with Raj, a department head whose team member missed a critical deadline. Raj never raised his voice, never punished—but every day, he replayed the incident in his mind. His stress became chronic, his decision-making reactive, and his team sensed the tension. Once we identified and reshaped the stories he was telling himself – those faulty assumptions – Raj unlocked hours of energy and saw his team re-engage with focus and creativity.

Your energy affects the entire business.

Your unaddressed grudges and tension have tangible consequences:

  • You as leader: you experience fatigue, clouded judgment, and reduced effectiveness.
  • Teams: your compromised energy and focus causes your team to disengage, with creativity and collaboration declining.
  • Organizations: this energy cascades throughout the organization, meaning that it faces slower execution, lower alignment, higher turnover, and wasted talent investment.

But when tension is noticed and addressed early, the ROI is immediate and measurable.

  • You as leader reclaim your mental bandwidth and make clearer, faster decisions.
  • Your team contributes more freely, delivering higher-quality work more efficiently.
  • Organizations strengthen culture, align around purpose, and reduce risk of burnout.

Here are some action steps you can take now to spot and release energy drains early:

  1. Observe Patterns: Notice subtle signs of withdrawal, gossip, or avoidance in yourself and your team.
  2. Examine Beliefs: Identify the assumptions you hold that maintain tension or block forgiveness.
  3. Separate Intent from Impact: Clarify what happened versus how it affected you.
  4. Engage Early: Have one-on-one conversations to clear the air, facilitate team dialogues, or clarify expectations.
  5. Establish Shared Agreements: Create explicit norms for feedback, communication, and conflict resolution to prevent recurring friction.

The ROI of early recognition

Recognizing tension before it festers is an investment in energy—for you as leader, your team, and the organization. Energy once trapped in resentment is freed for focus, collaboration, and strategic work. The sooner leaders spot these hidden drains, the sooner they can redirect energy to what truly matters: innovation, alignment, and high-impact execution.

Looking Ahead

Noticing tension is only the first step. The real work—and the real ROI—comes when leaders challenge biases, take action, and create the conditions for forgiveness and energy restoration.

Start by observing one subtle tension in your team this week. What energy could you reclaim if you addressed it early?

In my next article, we’ll explore how to overcome resistance and biases that block forgiveness, both personally and within your team, so energy can flow where it creates the greatest impact.

 

Letting Go to Lead: Forgiveness as the First Step Toward Energy and Organizational Transformation

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We don’t often think of leadership as a practice of forgiveness. We think of strategy, clarity, perhaps courage. Yet, if you look closely, you’ll see how much of leadership is shaped by what we’re holding onto, and what we’re willing to let go.

The Invisible Weight Leaders Carry

In today’s environment, leaders are not simply tired; they’re carrying exhaustion in layers, physical, mental, emotional. The constant pressure to deliver, the speed of change, the ambiguity of complexity, it’s heavy enough. Add in unspoken hurts, past mistakes, or the sharp edges of unresolved conflict, and the weight multiplies.

What happens when you carry this weight? For most leaders, it shows up as a subtle drain: energy leaks you can’t quite explain, difficulty focusing, a shorter fuse, less joy. It seems small in the moment, but over time, those leaks change how you see your colleagues, your choices, even yourself.

A Story: Carla

Carla, a VP in a tech firm, once shared with me how her energy shifted after a peer criticized her in a public meeting. She didn’t explode. She didn’t even respond in the moment. But afterwards, she found herself avoiding that colleague, questioning her own instincts, and leaving meetings utterly drained. Her team felt her distraction and responded with less creativity, less initiative.

When we dug deeper, the “problem” wasn’t only the critical comment. It was the grudge she carried, quiet, invisible, but shaping everything. It colored how she saw her colleague, how she interpreted feedback, and how she expended her energy. What began as one painful interaction had widened into an energy-sapping lens through which she led her team.

Forgiveness, once she was ready for it, changed everything. With some repair work, she could recapture her energy and reconnect her team.

The Cost of Holding On

Grudges are never neutral. Research estimates that workplace conflict costs organizations $359 billion a year in lost productivity. But beyond the dollars, the true cost is human: the creativity not sparked, the focus not sustained, the relationships not repaired.

Take Raj, a department head who struggled to forgive a team member for missing a crucial deadline. He didn’t shout or punish, but he replayed the mistake in his mind, again and again. His decisions became reactive, his stress chronic, and his team, sensing the tension – pulled away.

When we looked together at what was really going on, Raj realized that most of his leadership energy was spent managing his emotions about that one incident. Once he chose forgiveness, his energy returned. His team felt the shift and leaned back in.

Forgiveness as Clarity in Action

Here’s the paradox: forgiveness is often misunderstood as weakness. But in reality, it is clarity. When you forgive, you aren’t excusing mistakes or erasing consequences. You’re refusing to let the past dictate your present or your future. You’re reclaiming your energy for what matters most.

What if forgiveness is not just a personal virtue but a leadership strategy? A deliberate act to sharpen focus, create space for innovation, and model resilience for your team?

Creating the Conditions: Shared Agreements

Of course, forgiveness doesn’t flourish in isolation. It grows in relationships, and it needs structures to support it. One simple but powerful structure is shared agreements.

I once watched a small marketing team rebuild after a tough project by agreeing that all feedback would be given in a structured, solution-oriented format within 24 hours, and that every piece of feedback would be acknowledged before moving forward. The result? Within weeks, tension softened, collaboration increased, and the team’s creativity exploded.

Shared agreements anchor trust and accountability. They signal: “We are committed to moving forward together.” And in that space, forgiveness finds a foothold.

Letting Go as a Leadership Strategy

Imagine if forgiveness were woven into the fabric of how we lead. Leaders who practice it signal to their teams: yes, mistakes and conflicts happen, but they don’t have to define us. That modeling alone creates psychological safety, which research links to higher engagement and greater productivity.

Forgiveness becomes a lever: it restores energy, builds resilience, and allows organizations to shift from conflict-driven depletion to purpose-driven execution.

Where to Begin: A Practice for Leaders

If you’re wondering how to start, try this:

  1. Notice the weight. Where do you feel drained, distracted, or defensive?
  2. Get curious. Is there a grudge—or an unspoken story—you’re carrying?
  3. Separate intent from impact. What happened, and how did it affect you?
  4. Choose the next step. Sometimes that means a direct conversation. Sometimes it means setting a new agreement. Sometimes it means simply letting go.
  5. Redirect your energy. Ask: “Where could this freed-up energy serve best right now?”

Forgiveness isn’t a one-time decision. It’s a practice. A choice to lead from clarity instead of carrying the weight of the past.

The Beginning of Transformation

Letting go is not the end of something; it’s the beginning. The beginning of leadership that is lighter, clearer, and more focused. The beginning of teams that can put their energy where it belongs: into the work that matters, into the future they’re building together.

So the question is not whether you’ve been hurt, criticized, or let down, because you have, and you will. The real question is:

What weight are you carrying, and what might become possible if you let it go?

The Influence of Connection: Why Relationships Are the True Drivers of Change

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We often hear that change begins with strategy—and while that may be partially true, it’s not the whole story.

In my years working with high – performing leaders, I’ve come to believe that real transformation—whether in business, communities, or within ourselves—doesn’t start with a spreadsheet or a whiteboard session. It starts with connection.

Connection is the spark that ignites movement. It’s the currency of trust, the basis for buy – in, and the foundation for momentum that lasts.

In fact, research shows that employees who feel connected at work are five times more likely to perform at their best (O.C. Tanner Institute, 2023).

I once worked with a senior executive of a software development company who was struggling to gain traction with her new strategic plan. Her team was technically capable and well – compensated, yet disengaged. Her frustration mounted—why weren’t they responding to what clearly needed to be done?

During our sessions, we uncovered something simple but powerful: Her team didn’t feel included in the process. The plan was sound, but it was hers, not theirs. Together, we crafted a new approach. It involve more one – on – one conversations, open forums, and invitations for honest feedback.

Something shifted.

Her team began to speak up, offer ideas, and—most importantly—take ownership.

What changed? Not the strategy, but the connection.

This is what I mean when I say “people move when they’re moved.” And what moves people most is being part of something bigger than themselves, with people they trust.

We forget this in the noise of leadership. Caught in metrics and meetings, we sometimes default to what feels tangible and controllable—strategy. But no matter how brilliant the plan, it won’t stick unless the people behind it feel seen, heard, and connected.

Another client, a CEO of a privately held services company, came to me when his leadership team was fractured. Decision – making had stalled, and communication felt like walking on eggshells.

“We don’t have time for group therapy,” he told me.

But they didn’t need therapy. They needed connection.

Through facilitated sessions, we created space for real conversation. No titles, no agendas—just honest dialogue. They shared frustrations, hopes, and even some laughter. Over time, the tone shifted. Decisions came faster. Meetings became places of engagement rather than endurance.

What changed? Not the strategy, but the relationships.

As a leader, you are the convener. The connector. The culture – setter.

You create the conditions where others can show up fully—not just to perform, but to belong. And when people feel that, they bring their best, every time.

So how do you lead with connection?

  • Start by showing up as human first.
  • Be curious, not just efficient.
  • Make space for dialogue, not just discussion.
  • Be willing to ask questions you don’t have answers to.
  • Listen with the intent to understand—not to fix or respond.

Look around your organization or your community. Where is there untapped potential simply waiting to be unlocked by a conversation? Who needs to be invited to the table—not just to contribute, but to belong?

You don’t need a new role, new project, or new program to drive change. You just need to reach across the aisle—sometimes literally—and invite someone into purposeful connection.

The truth is, it’s relationships—not just results—that build legacies.

When we prioritize connection, we don’t just grow our organizations. We grow people. And those people, in turn, become the change agents our world so desperately needs.

Lead with connection. Watch what happens.

Cultivating a Growth Mindset: Encouraging Development and Trust

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One of the most powerful ways a leader can transform their team isn’t by adding new processes.

It’s by shaping the mindset underneath them.

A true growth mindset — the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort, learning, and feedback — changes everything.

It encourages resilience. It fosters creativity. And perhaps most importantly, it builds trust: trust that mistakes are not fatal, that feedback is not punishment, and that everyone, at every level, can grow.

I recently worked with a CEO of a technology services firm who faced a familiar challenge: her team was smart and capable, but they had become risk-averse. Innovation stalled, collaboration suffered, and people hesitated to speak up unless they were absolutely sure they were right.

As she described it to me: “They’re capable of so much more, but it’s like they’re afraid to even try.”

It wasn’t a capability problem. It was a mindset problem!

Growth Mindset: The Foundation for Learning and Trust

When people operate in a fixed mindset — the belief that abilities are static — trust erodes quickly.

In a fixed mindset environment, mistakes become evidence of failure. People protect themselves. They avoid challenges. They hide weaknesses rather than seek help.

But when leaders cultivate a growth mindset, the atmosphere changes. Mistakes are reframed as part of the learning process, challenges are embraced as opportunities to develop, and feedback is seen as a gift, not a threat.

In my client’s case, we started with her, because mindset shifts begin at the top.

We worked together to identify where she might be unintentionally reinforcing a fixed mindset. Examples include praising only outcomes instead of effort, rewarding perfection over progress, and hesitating to share her own lessons learned.

She quickly realized that by only celebrating success stories, she had unintentionally created a culture where people were afraid to fail.

We made a plan:

  • She would begin modeling growth mindset behaviors in visible ways.
  • She would share not just wins, but also the messy process it took to get there.
  • She would openly acknowledge when she was learning something new, and celebrate when others stretched themselves, regardless of immediate results.

Modeling Growth Creates Permission for Others

Change didn’t happen overnight, of course. But small, steady shifts began to take root.

She started team meetings by asking questions like, “What did you try this week that didn’t go as planned, and what did you learn?”

When someone shared a mistake and the lesson it offered, she praised the learning, not just the fix.

Over time, the team’s energy changed. People began to speak up more freely. Brainstorming sessions became more creative, and even fun! Feedback was not only more easily given, it was more easily received.

Trust grew, not because mistakes disappeared, but because mistakes were no longer feared.

The team understood: “We are trusted to learn. We are trusted to grow.”

The Payoff: Resilience, Innovation, and Trust

Today, that same team is leading bold new initiatives that would have once felt too risky to attempt. They are more resilient in the face of setbacks. They collaborate more openly. And they move faster — because they aren’t stuck in cycles of second-guessing or blame.

A growth mindset isn’t just about positive thinking. It’s about creating an environment where people are free to develop. By doing so, they can contribute at their highest level.

Leadership isn’t about expecting perfection. It’s about creating the conditions where people can become even better than they believed possible.

Where could you invite more learning — and strengthen more trust — by cultivating a growth mindset on your team?