Happy Sunday Everyone:
One of our great team members, Michelle H, sends out meme’s at least weekly, sometimes more often but at a minimum, weekly. With all the emails I get, I’ve never once missed reading her memes. How she finds them, I’ll never know but they’re incredible. The one that stood out last week showed up like this and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
I’m sure many of you have heard this, read this, seen this, but it’s worth sitting on. This stemmed originally from Benjamin Franklin; his exact words were “he that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else”.
I’ve heard it before, I’ve read it before, but I can promise you this, I’ve offered up 100’s of excuses with my apologies. Seeing it again just triggered me to think through my own life, personally and professionally, as well as our team, and how we engage with the world. Some reminders for me as I’ve marinated on these words this past week in the hopes that I’m forever changed.
- An apology is selfless; an excuse is selfish. An apology is an acknowledgement of something going wrong. An excuse is my effort to feel better about it.
- Definition of an apology: An apology is a voluntary expression of regret, remorse, or sorrow for having wronged, harmed, or offended another, aimed at reconciliation and restoring trust.
- Definition of excuse: An excuse is a reason, justification, or explanation, often weak or invented, given to defend a fault, avoid an obligation, or seek forgiveness for bad behavior.
- It would serve us well to count how many apologies we’ve offered on the same topic and hopefully stop at 1. Our apologies are diluted 10X every time we offer another one without resolution on why the apology was delivered in the first place.
- “I’m sorry I’m late” is a sentence. It doesn’t need to be “I’m sorry I’m late, I had another client that I couldn’t get off the phone with, etc….”. We need to train ourselves to stop talking, stop making excuses. If someone asks for your excuse, give it to them, if they don’t, lets remind ourselves we’re only speaking to make ourselves feel better while likely losing more and more credibility with each additional word used.
This is a universal message. I need reminders, I need alarm bells to go off when I’m out of alignment with how I want to show up in the world. I never want to be someone who is considered to have excuses vs. solutions. We’re all going to make mistakes, big and small, and if someone else is affected, it’s going to require an apology, and that’s good, but solving through it vs. offering excuses is where character is shown. I know I talk about my dad a lot, and I’ll never stop, but the one of the words I used to describe him at his funeral was “excuseless”. I never heard him offer one in my life, no exaggeration. One of the reasons he has the legacy he has is because he was excuseless.
We will all likely need to apologize for something done or undone this week. I believe our desire for resolution is heightened when we don’t give ourselves an excuse to go along with it.
Have a great week ahead!