Leading With Grace: Learning to Fall and Rise With Love

When we hear grace, we often picture elegance and poise—ballet dancers moving effortlessly across a stage, a friend who handles life’s storms with quiet strength, or someone who stumbles with dignity.

But true grace is far deeper than the surface. It’s not about falling—it’s about how we rise. Grace isn’t only about being refined in movement or speech—it’s about how we love without conditions, offer understanding instead of judgment, and choose compassion instead of anger.

Showing grace toward those who care for patients with cancer means recognizing and honoring the emotional weight they carry. These caregivers, whether nurses, doctors, or support staff, face heart-wrenching situations daily, requiring robust emotional resilience. Their dedication often leads to moments of profound fatigue and stress, and it’s in these moments that grace becomes essential.

Caring for caregivers involves recognizing their humanity and offering them the same compassion and patience they extend to their patients. It means acknowledging their victories and struggles and creating a supportive environment where they feel valued and understood. Small acts of kindness can make a significant difference, whether it’s a word of encouragement, a gesture of appreciation, or simply listening when they need to talk.

Grace also means allowing room for mistakes without judgment. In the high-pressure world of cancer care, unfortunately, mistakes can happen—often due to exhaustion or emotional strain. Exercising grace means responding to these mistakes not with anger or blame, but with empathy and support, ensuring that we create an environment to observe and learn. Helping caregivers learn from their missteps and offering them the chance to recover without fear of reproach is vital in nurturing their well-being.

I recently faced a season that tested everything I believed about myself. And out of all the people I needed forgiveness from, I realized the hardest one to face was…me. Self-forgiveness is a grace all its own. It is the tender but difficult work of looking at your own reflection with honest eyes, acknowledging the missteps, the words you wish you could either take back or say differently, and reflecting on any hurt you may have caused—and still saying at the end of it all, “You are worthy.” That kind of grace doesn’t come wrapped in ribbons. It comes with time and a heart that is willing to heal.

In leadership, we often extend grace to others, yet that same grace is rarely extended to us. Because of this, it is essential that we learn to be gracious with ourselves—even when it feels impossible.

When we forgive ourselves, we create a work environment where mistakes are seen as opportunities to learn rather than reasons to fear. This mindset encourages innovation and growth. Practicing grace not only strengthens our own emotional well-being but also builds a culture of trust, support, and reliability—enabling both leaders and their teams to thrive through challenges.

Grace is a practice. It’s in the quiet moment when you choose not to respond with anger. It’s in the way you hold space for someone who has hurt you or how you offer a second chance without keeping score. And it’s in how you give that same gift to yourself, even when every inner voice tries to tell you that you don’t deserve it.

The truth is, we’re all going to fall. Sometimes it will be ugly. Sometimes we’ll fail publicly and other times we’ll break in silence. But being graceful doesn’t mean we won’t fall. It means we allow ourselves the freedom to be human and extend that same freedom to others.

There’s a quiet power in grace. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t seek recognition. But it heals, builds, and allows us to begin again.

So, whether you’re forgiving or being forgiven, remember: Grace is strength wrapped in softness. It’s love when it’s hardest to give. And sometimes, the most graceful thing we can do is simply to be kind to ourselves.

Let that be enough. Let you be enough.

In her monthly leadership series, Barbara Schmidtman, PhD, vice president of cancer care operations at Corewell Health in West Michigan, offers her perspective on addressing workforce-related issues through effective leadership practices. Read her previous post in this series here.