I was taken with Rosie O’Donnell as she answered Pierce Morgan’s questions on CNN last Tuesday night. If honesty is a key leadership trait and leadership development programs are geared to help emerging leaders “talk truth”, this would be an excellent training video.

Rosie talked about the trauma of her mother’s death when she was ten years old and also about the difficulties she had with her father. She made some interesting statements about forgiveness.

It was not the superficial stuff of many “new age” gurus.

It was a real statement about the struggles that forgiveness entails and how finally, decades later after wrestling with the demon of anger, she finally was able to let go of her pain.

Click Here To Watch Rosie O’Donnell on Forgiveness

I always teach that forgiving “too soon” and “too easily” is not really forgiving, it is avoiding and denying.

You see, unless we look the pain right in the eye, explore it and begin to release it, the patterns of betrayal and mistrust will shoot up like weeds in other relationships.

Once we can experience the depth of our discomfort, and even despair, ah, then we become free.

That is what Rosie expressed in a clear and eloquent way.

Being able to forgive takes more than a magic wand, it takes true grit.

Think about who you want to forgive, or even who you think you have forgiven and then look again. In “Don’t Bring It to Work”, there is a model of how to look at the tough areas of our lives and how to do the Sankofa work to make forgiveness a real and healthy part of life

Sankofa is a word from Ghana that means “clear the past to free the present”. That is what Rosie expressed in her excellent interview.