You’d think that journalists shouldn’t be concerned with forgiveness—after all, we’re supposed to be objective—what to we have to forgive? We’re not even involved—we’re just observers. But of course, even observing something means we are involved, if only in the way it affects us.

Still, I felt unwilling to accept that forgiveness was something I needed to work on.

So at the Dart Centre’s day on trauma and forgiveness in London on April 26, 2005, I found it helpful to define the word forgiveness. Our facilitators Robin Shohet and Ben Fuchs from the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, pointed out that resistance to the concept of forgiveness might come from misconceptions about what the word means.

Often it has religious connotations. If one is to forgive someone, perhaps even me, that implies they may have done something wrong.

Robin and Ben offered some creative definitions: Forgiveness is letting go of the past; it’s letting go of having a better past. It’s accepting that what was, was.

Just starting with those definitions made it easier to work on the day’s main exercise: looking at the world with a “forgiving mind.”

To get us connected in with what the trauma we report as journalists means at a personal level, we paired off, and explored stories from each others’ past, remembering a time when we were forgiving, and when we were forgiven.

Most importantly we looked forward to what life would be like a year from now if we lived with a forgiving mind.

Again, definitions were helpful, because everyone in the group had differing meanings to what their own forgiving mind would be like. One participant said it would be about tolerance, acceptance, seeing the other side of the story.

Another said it was about choosing not to be a victim, because victims can’t forgive. Another said it was about compassion.

Some of the stories that emerged from the sharing were extraordinary and inspiring. One person had been bullied at work and ultimately forced out of a job. She decided with determination at the time it was happening that she would not be angry, not be a victim.

That attitude clearly has made the experience a positive one for her. Instead of having bitterness, she has compassion for the person who ousted her, and later when the same thing happened to him, she said she just felt sorry for him.

She had a wonderful sense of inner calm about an incident that some people would have allowed to destroy their lives, or at least disrupt them.

For me much of the day was about being aware of how we see things, and what we do with what we see. One interesting process was this:

Discover ‡ Dream ‡ Design ‡ Deliver ‡ (then back to discover)

This process was drawn for us as a circle, illustrating the phases of what we do. First, discover what’s happening or what we want, then dream about how to make it what we want, design a plan to get there, then deliver the plan.

It’s deceptively simple, but so helpful to define what’s going on, to break it up into the different chunks. One participant observed she doesn’t spend enough time in discover and dream.

Instead she wants to go right to design.

I think that’s a common challenge for journalists. So often we’re living in reaction to a news event, or a tragedy, that we don’t have time to discover and dream. We live in design and deliver because we’re often on tight deadlines, especially in the era of 24-hour news.

For journalists, working on the discover and dream phases may seem an impossibility, but as I began to think about it, there’s no reason why we can’t at least strive for ideals in our work.

It wouldn’t hurt me to think a little more about what ideally I’d like to be as a journalist; to focus on what I’d like to achieve, so that when a story comes along, I’m already pointed in the right direction. So if I discover that I’m not satisfied with the quality of sound I’m getting from a particular place—then dream of getting better sound, then at least I have a chance to think of (or design) of more creative ways to get sound, and put it in my story.

That process seemed to stray from the forgiveness theme, but somehow the day all fitted together.

To keep us focused and constructive, Robin and Ben used process that’s quite well established now as an approach to problems, known as Appreciative Inquiry: asking positive questions to elicit a story then trying to find the most positive elements of that story.

Focusing on positive elements isn’t something a lot of we journalists do, largely because many stories are about what’s wrong with a government, or about conflict.

Approaching stories with a forgiving mind is a good exercise in objectivity. A forgiving mind accepts that this is how it is, without imposing judgments, or at least helping us be more aware of our judgments and prejudices.

That’s something I’ve been working on since I became a journalist—making sure I’m reflecting as best I can the whole of the story from as many angles as possible. I never connected the word forgiveness with it, until it was called acceptance.