Be Your Own Cheerleader Video Tip: Practice Forgiveness

In this quick clip from Neelu’s LinkedIn Live with Kelly from Equipt Women, Neelu discusses one of the most important ways to move forward and unlock self advocacy skills in the workplace; forgiveness.

Transcript

Kelly: The last chapter in the book says it's about the F word, but it's not the F word that maybe some of us might be thinking. Can you tell us what you're referring to and why it is essential?

Neelu: Yes. It's forgiveness. I think women specifically, we are our worst critic, and so when we make mistakes, it's like forgiving ourselves. Also, from an immigrant perspective, you know, our parents did the best they could, so it’s being forgiving of the things that we've inherited. I know for me, one of the things that I struggle with on a regular basis is I've inherited a lot of my parents' definitions around money, because we were immigrants so we were struggling. So it’s constantly being aware of what you've inherited, but forgiving. They did the best they could. They wanted to give their children a better life, right?

Also, for many immigrants, it's about not just forgiving your parents it’s about forgiving your culture. There's aspects of our culture, there's aspects of Asian culture that's very patriarchal. There's nothing that we can do about it. It is just what it is. So the aspect of forgiveness, isn’t just forgiving yourself, but the system that you've come from.

Kelly: And how do you deal with that then? If you're forgiving the patriarchal system, but you actually are, you personally, Neelu, are building a life and driving a life that is right for you? What you need is not necessarily bowing down to the patriarchy. So how do you, how do you deal with that?

Neelu: It is a constant dance. It's a constant dance. But it's also, again, that self-awareness of ‘do you’. It's okay if you wanna be part of the system. What parts do you wanna take on? What parts do you wanna let go of? And again, it goes back to know thy self.

The older we get, the more experience we get in the workplace, the more experience we get under our belt. We know, like, this is the good part of the culture or these are the good parts of the culture that I'm going to take on and these are the things that I'm gonna leave behind.

And for each one of us, it's very different. Or like I'm sure for you coming from such a large family, there's some great learnings that you had as a child, but you probably (maybe) don't wanna be a part of a 10 family home ever again because you came from, or 10 members. I don't know how many. Yeah. Maybe 12. I don't know. But there's things that you can take the good from and then you can also say, yeah, maybe I wanna leave that behind.

Kelly: So you're not necessarily fighting it per se in your case, you're picking from what you want to inhabit and and you're disregarding what you don't, is that essentially what you're saying?

Neelu: I would say so, yes. I'm a big proponent in a lot of this in connecting to your center. It comes from Ayurveda, which is a holistic healing system based in India. I think the culture I've come from, there's some very beautiful aspects that I would like to take forward and pass on to future generations through my teachings, through books.

And there's things that I don't agree with, like the patriarchal society, right? So there's things that I think I can take on and and own, and there's other parts that I'm ready to just let go of. And I think, mm-hmm , that the onus is on all of us to do that with the families we've come from, the cultures we’ve come from, the workplaces.

There's certain aspects of workplaces that you might really like, and there's certain things that you just don't like and it's okay. It's just having that awareness.