2511: Have Mercy?

Who deserves mercy, and who doesn’t? George G talks about what mercy truly is, when it should be applied, and how to think about and answer that question! Find the Mercy and Self-Enforcing Audit here:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A6rgs4TRL6pWsZlW4mPlXYKWPfI1PLMB7fZC7v0YBO8/edit?usp=drive_link Feeling busy but unfulfilled? The Meaningful Few helps you identify what truly matters, eliminate distractions, and live with intention and clarity. Learn more here: MyMeaningfulFew.comYou can learn more about us at LifeBlood. Live, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook or you’d like to be a guest on the show, contact us at contact@LifeBlood. Live. Stay up to date by getting our monthly updates. Want to say “Thanks!” You can buy us a cup of coffee.https://www.buymeacoffee.com/lifebloodGet your copy of The Purpose Book here:https://amzn.to/47Y2u98 You can get a free digital download of The Purpose Book here:https://moneyalignmentacademy.thinkific.com/enroll/2554435?price_id=3360279 Get our monthly updates here:https://george-grombacher.aweb.page/Thanks, as always for listening! If you got some value and enjoyed the show, please leave us a review here:​​https://ratethispodcast.com/lifebloodpodcastYou can learn more about us at LifeBlood. Live, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook or you’d like to be a guest on the show, contact us at contact@LifeBlood. Live. Stay up to date by getting our monthly updates. Want to say “Thanks!” You can buy us a cup of coffeehttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/lifebloodCopyright LifeBlood 2025.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Speaker 01

  Most people are remarkably merciful with their own bad habits. We want to give, extend, receive mercy when we ourselves are doing things that we know we don't really want to be doing, but we reserve mercy or don't necessarily, we're not so ready to give it out to other people. And we're certainly not interested in being merciful to people that we don't have a relationship with. So that's an interesting thing. The farther we get away from ourselves, the less merciful we potentially become. And that's very human of us. We are kind to our procrastination. We forgive our temper. We extend endless grace to our excuses, which is pretty impressive. And, you know, we will say today,

• 1:30Speaker 01

  you know, "I'm just tired." And that is in itself a justification to be giving ourselves mercy. But if you were to look back through eternity, through the ages, you would see that earlier civilizations, instead of saying, "I'm just tired," they would say, "The gods demanded it," or some version of that. And then we just kind of put to rest whatever it is we were talking about. And obviously, we're going to have mercy because, you know, "I'm tired," or "The gods wanted it to happen," whatever. So mercy absolutely has its place. I think that we should extend and give mercy to kids and give and extend mercy to elderly people, so people with lower personal agency,

• 2:15Speaker 01

  because they are... Just experiencing lower versions of personal agency than than than regular adults, regular grownups. I think that you ought to give mercy to your spouse because marriage is an awful long conversation conducted by people that aren't the best translators. And we probably should give mercy to our friends too, because a lot of friendships, if you were to actually look at the body of a friendship, it probably wouldn't stand up to a to a court case or survive in any kind of a courtroom. So those are great opportunities and times that we should be extending mercy to other people. But we all know that many

• 2:57Speaker 01

  people give mercy not where it is most needed, but where it is most comfortable. Comfort, man, comfort is a killer, isn't it? It is a killer and often leads to misplaced mercy. People are merciful in our avoidance of things. We're merciful to avoidance. We're merciful to dishonesty. So long as it is mild, we're merciful to habits that keep life pleasantly small. So those stupid things that we do over and over again that keep us stuck right where we are, for some reason, we're merciful to that. And then just shocked

• 3:40Speaker 01

  that years later, we discovered that our lives haven't really changed that much. So that's, that's not wise mercy there, is it at all? But common and something that I know that I'm certainly guilty of. And it's understandable because mercy feels warm and discipline feels cold. Mercy sits down with you, discipline asks you to stand up, get moving. And so when we offer mercy to the very things that require resistance and resistance to the very people who deserve mercy, we're doing it wrong. So think about how strict a parent can be with their kids and how generous they can be with their own laziness. Again, this is something that I'm perfectly capable of doing. I can yell at my nine-year-old

• 4:25Speaker 01

  or my six-year-old about tidying up their room or cleaning up after themselves, but I can go ahead and give myself that grace, that mercy for not doing the things that I said I was going to do today. So that's not mercy. That is a different form of favoritism.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Now, mercy is not blind. Mercy keeps excellent records. It says, "I see that you're human," and then it adds, "and therefore capable of better." False mercy says only the first half and calls it wisdom. There are plenty of things that don't deserve our mercy at all. Lying should not, we should not extend mercy to lying to ourselves or to others. We should not extend mercy to the habit of postponing that hard thing. Because all that happens when we postpone that hard thing is that thing gets bigger and stronger and scarier and all of it. And it just becomes a permanent resident with us. So, do not give mercy to that. Do not give mercy to procrastination.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Do not give mercy to whatever it is that we're brushing under the rug. So, it's not going to soften anything. It's not going to make it better. It will consistently make it worse. I can almost guarantee you that. So, the purpose of mercy is not to make life easier. It's to make it livable. When mercy strengthens our character, it is a virtue. When it anesthetizes our responsibility, we are sabotaging ourselves. So, I think it's really important to be generous, but not indiscriminate. Because being kind is a lot different than being gullible. And if you must be merciless, be so with the habits that are keeping you stuck. Be merciless with those habits. Not with your nine-year-old.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Give them a little bit more mercy. So, but what is it really? What is mercy really? It is the deliberate restraint of deserved judgment in service of restoration rather than punishment. So, that's a beautiful thing right there. Potentially, a really beautiful thing. It's deliberate restraint of deserved judgment. So, if somebody did something wrong and the judgment they received, they earned it. But we're going to hold off on that judgment in service of restoring and learning as opposed to punishment. So that is a really beautiful thing. It should be extended appropriately. Key elements, it's deliberate.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  It's not some emotional softness. The deserved judgment piece, mercy only exists where consequences are justified. Restraint, mercy is something you can hold back. And then restoration, the aim is strengthening. It's not comforting. That's a really important distinction. So mercy is not the absence of standards. It is standards applied with wisdom. If you looked across religion, if you looked across psychology, if you looked across philosophy, I think that these are, there's four through lines. The first is that mercy is intentional, not reactive. The second is that mercy assumes that standards exist because they have to.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  The third is that mercy aims at growth and not comfort. And the fourth is that mercy without accountability will be corruptive. It will corrupt. So here's a simple test. Ask yourself this. Does this mercy increase strength, clarity, and responsibility over time? So if I was to extend mercy to myself or someone else, will it increase strength, clarity, and responsibility over time? If the answer is yes, then I think that that's, then that's mercy. If the answer is no, then it's just avoidance, masquerading as mercy. So as with most things that I do, I want to provide a framework or steps for helping

• 8:25Speaker 01

  you to actually apply this. So I want to take you through a mercy audit. And the idea just is what deserves mercy and what doesn't. Okay? So we already talked about that mercy is not softness. It is wisdom applied to fallible human beings, which we all are. So step number one, where mercy is usually warranted, and there are plenty of domains where relationships are...

• 8:52Speaker 01

  You were well-served by factoring in efficiency, growth, and then looking at that in relation to what punishment should or should not be applied. So with your spouse, your partner, give mercy for emotional misfires. Give mercy to imperfect communication. Give mercy to stress-induced responses. Give mercy to human inconsistency, because these are all features of what it is to be a human being. Do not give mercy for repeated contempt, chronic avoidance of responsibility, weaponized helplessness. Mercy here looks like patience plus truth, not silence.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  I think we should give mercy to children. Give abundant mercy for immaturity, poor judgment, emotional regulation failures, because children are, in fact, in training. They are not standing in front of a jury of their peers. Do not give mercy to kids for dangerous behavior. Do not give mercy for dishonesty. Do not give mercy for that creates fragility, because that's not serving anybody. You want to raise strong, merciful, responsible, young people who are self-managers. So helping them understand and put these to work in their life

• 10:19Speaker 01

  as a young person will help them to deploy it appropriately as a grown-up. And what about you and I? Do you deserve mercy? Do you think that you deserve mercy? Do you already give yourself mercy? How much mercy? Because this is where most people get it wrong. We should give ourselves mercy for making honest mistakes. If we're learning something new, give ourselves mercy as we are going through that learning curve, which exists in all and every human endeavor. Give mercy to yourself when you are falling or when you do fall short while you are trying and doing your best. Do not give yourself mercy for self-deception. Do not give yourself mercy for excuses that are dressed up as compassion.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Do not give yourself mercy when you abandon your standards.

• 11:05Speaker 02

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• 12:06Speaker 01

  Self-mercy should restore strength, not excuse weakness. What about your friends? What about your colleagues? Let's give mercy for occasional acts of selfishness, which take place all the time because these are human beings. Let's give mercy when people have blind spots that they're unaware of. Let's give mercy to people when they have a bad day. Let's not extend mercy when it's just a clear pattern that they're constantly doing. Let's not give mercy when the apology never turns into actually changing behavior. Because repeated mercy without accountability trains people how to treat you.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  You're training them to walk all over you, to not respect boundaries, to not respect you. Let's keep pushing it up further from ourselves to strangers. I think a default posture towards people that you don't know should be mercy, because we don't know anything about them. You know, there's that beautiful quote that I'm not going to know or be able to pull out right now, that everybody's fighting a war that we can't necessarily see. So when we default to stranger, I have no idea what you've been going through over the past 50 years or five minutes, I don't know. So I'm going to, on default, provide mercy, show mercy. But mercy is not equivalent to an obligation.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  And kindness does not require self-sacrifice on my part. I'm going to be merciful, but not obligated, not obligated to treat you in a way that would be better simply because you're a stranger. So kindness not require self-sacrifice. So step number two, what gets zero mercy? This is uncomfortable, but highly necessary, because some things must be starved. You're going to put out a fire, a lot of different ways to do that. One of the ways is depriving oxygen. So if you try to put a fire out, do not give it any oxygen, do not soothe it.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  So, number one are lies, especially lies to yourself, lies that protect comfort, lies that delay responsibility. Truth is the prerequisite for mercy. Second, repeated patterns without effort. Mistakes deserve mercy, patterns deserve consequences. See, you had a misstep, mercy. You keep doing the same dumb stuff over and over again, you need a consequence, because that is a pattern that must be broken. The third is victimhood as identity. This is not serving anyone, and in a lot of ways, this is a portion or a part of why

• 14:57Speaker 01

  our society is struggling the way that it is right now. Suffering absolutely deserves compassion, staying stuck by choice does not. If you identify yourself as the worst thing that ever happened to you, and that's the whole framework for your life, shame on you. No mercy.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Be a survivor. Don't be a victim. Don't allow a bad thing to be defining you 10, 5, 50 years later. It's a choice. You get to choose. Choose to be a survivor. Do not make victimhood your identity. Number four is contempt. Contempt poisons relationships. Does not improve with patience. It grows with tolerance. So, give no mercy to contempt. Give no mercy to avoiding the difficult things. Procrastination, numbing yourself, engaging in distracted behaviors. Do not give mercy to that. Giving mercy here is how people wake up 10 years later confused and resentful.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Step number three, where you're probably giving mercy when you shouldn't. This is a big opportunity right here. This is the opportunity to really dig in. Take a hard look in the mirror, however you like to think about that. Ask yourself this. What behavior, behaviors am I protecting? What behaviors am I protecting? What standard or standards am I quietly lowering? And who benefits? Who's benefiting from your mercy in that area? Are you benefiting? Are they? Or is your fear benefiting? Because you're just soothing.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  If you, you can't fall victim to giving mercy to your laziness. You can't give mercy to if you're emotionally volatile all the time. You can't give mercy to, "I'm just tired. I'm just busy. I'm overwhelmed." These are not, these are not good reasons. These are not good recipients of your mercy. When we're giving mercy to fear, it becomes a betrayal of your future self. You're mortgaging your future by being merciful to bad behavior. If it's over and over and over and over and over again, not just one little thing. Step number four is we have to reframe it. Mercy is not the absence of consequence.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  It's the presence of hope. So the right question isn't, have I been nice? It's, is this mercy helping this person or myself become stronger? If the answer is yes, if being merciful is helping the person receiving the mercy to grow stronger because of it, move forward, great. If it's not, if it's enabling, knock it off.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  No mercy, no quarter.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  So.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  It is a interesting thing. It popped into my head this weekend, this idea of mercy. And I hope you've enjoyed a brief, um, a brief investigation, exploration into it. Invite you to keep going. In the notes of the show here, there will be a link to the worksheet that I just went through. And I think it's a really, really positive thing to figure out, okay, where am I enabling that behavior? And where and who deserves mercy? Who deserves a little bit more? And am I applying this correctly? Cause life is all about trade offs. When you say yes to one thing, you're saying no to everything else.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  When you say no, you're still leaving everything, you know, available to you. And we get to choose all the time. Am I going to extend mercy to this person? Am I not? And we'll get better at doing that. The more we do it, the more thoughtful we are. And having a framework for doing that, I think is a really, really helpful thing. So you'll find that.

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• 19:33Speaker 01

  We make these mistakes, it's not because we're lazy. Yes, we're tired, but it's not because we're lazy. And it's not because we're not motivated, it's certainly not because we're broken. It's just that we're so overwhelmed. We are trying to give our best to too many things at once. And when we try to do that, and we try to spread, we just spread ourselves too thin. We have a prioritization and a choosing problem. Because while we make choices all the time, I don't know that we've ever really learned or been taught how to make choices. And simply saying yes or no, that is just super basic.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  But when we're able to recognize what really does matter to me, what must be done in service of what matters, and then how do I go about doing that? That's the framework that I think too often, we just neglect. So, the Meaningful Few, it's a framework for helping you to choose. It helps you to get clear on what really matters, what doesn't matter, and then how to align your time, energy, attention, and money around those things that are really deserving of them. So it's not about doing more, it's about doing less, and doing less on purpose. So, I would invite you to check it out. I'm proud of the work that, that my team and I have done on this.

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  And you can go to mymeaningfulfew.com and check out everything that I've been working on over the past couple of years, because it's been quite a project. And again, the idea is to help you do your part by doing your best.

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