How to be sorry and actually benefit the people around you
--
Let me be as frank with you as I possibly can. Let your soul be liberated and have a huge burden lifted off of your shoulders.
You can be sorry for something you’ve done wrong and admit it to other people.
We live in a culture that demands perfection, and the perceived pitfalls around imperfection have us backpedaling, shifting blame, denying and outright lying about mistakes that we have made. To be wrong is to be cursed with an indelible stain, to have a black “failure” affixed to our foreheads.
One of my favorite shows on television is CNBC’s The Profit. Marcus Lemonis is a millionaire that invests in troubled businesses. He puts his own money on the line becoming part owner. His only rule, “I am 100% in charge.”
Lemonis has a three part formula to identify the trouble with any business.
People, Product, Process
Every business that’s struggling has a problem either with the product they sell, the people that sell the product, or the process by which the people sell the product. Lemonis regularly tells us that the problem is rarely in the people or the product. Most of the time he happens upon good hard-working people with an intelligently designed and well-made product.
The real culprit behind the financial struggle is the process. These good people with a good product often have no clue what to do with it.
That is where Marcus shines. He is a guru. He knows how to package, market, organize, scale, spend, margin and communicate. He knows the perfect process. But it never fails, and I’ll be darned if every single episode, the stubborn owner doesn’t disagree with Lemonis every single step of the way.
The business is failing, right?
Yes.
You need me right?
Yes.
You trust me, right?
Yes.
You’re doing something wrong currently, right?
No.
These owners blame everything and everyone for the business failings. They blame the economy, the employees and sometimes even the customers. They are just too stupid to know that they should buy this product.
Here’s where those perceived pitfalls come in. We honestly believe that if I admit wrong:
- I am invalidated as a person
- The failure is permanent
- I’m unable to recover from the failure
- I can’t really succeed if I’m not completely self made
- I’ll be average
- I’ll look bad/I am bad
Why is Lemonis there in the first place? Something is wrong. What is his purpose? He wants to help. Unfortunately, our pride gets in the way.
We have to realize first of all that time and chance happen to all men. Bad things happen, people fail and stuff goes wrong. We do make mistakes whether we admit them or not. What we do next is all that matters. What we do with the mistake is what truly determines how successful we will be, and how we affect those around us. From the list above, only “I’ll look bad” actually has some potential. But so what? What’s a little pride getting hurt if we can build something great from it?
Coming forward and saying, “I’m sorry, and I was wrong,” has a much greater upside than the alternative.
Let’s be honest. Between you and me, we both know you screwed up. So does your teacher and so will your boss. And don’t forget that all your coworkers think you’re a real jerk even if they aren’t telling you. The first benefit of a sincere and simple…
I did it. I’m sorry. I want to fix it.
You laser blast the kidney stone of deceit in your pipe of self development. Keep lying to yourself, and you’ll keep screwing up the same crap time after time. You’ll get better at lying, but everyone will see through it. You’ll never get the reports in on time, finish the paper, heal that relationship or improve your communication skills with that blockage in your system. You’ll spend more time in pain curled up on the floor when you could be devoting yourself to eliminating the deficiency you had that caused the problem in the first place.
Second, you become more self aware. Admit you wronged something or someone and you slowly develop a sensitivity that proactively avoids doing that in the future. This builds a little thing called trust. Imagine the opportunities you’ll have when the people around you think of you first when they need someone to trust.
You heal yourself of guilt, stress and the burden of failure. We slowly build layer after layer of hidden guilt and self loathing. We deceive ourselves at first that our transgression was too small to be worthy of getting in trouble. Then later we condemn ourselves with a mountain of failures we never learned from. A failure can actually be a force multiplier; something that grows you and grows your relationships if you use them as stepping stones.
You also heal the person you hurt. When you deny and deflect, the wrong never goes away. The person you harmed carries that with them. They only remember how you saved face, blamed the customer or BSed your way out of trouble. A proper apology also has built into it the desire to make reparation, repent and reconcile.
Red-faced and embarrassed, you may just need to say, hey, you’re right. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I should fix that.
It’s better than sitting alone one day saying, They were right. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I should have fixed that.
