Instead.
by beanalreasa
I saw this post in my media feed this morning and it got me thinking that I have this issue:
How often I almost reflexively blurt out ‘I’m sorry’ when I mean to say ‘Thank you.’
I hadn’t really thought out the issue, except that I have been made aware of my habit of apologizing for everything – even for qualities, occurrences, and behavior that require no apology.
A friend of mine -who oddly enough, has a degree in psychology even though she now works as an insurance adjuster for a corporate law firm – was the most recent person in my life to make me aware of my ‘sorry habit.’ She was always pointing out how much it concerned her that I would say ‘I’m sorry’ for the most mundane reasons, and she would often challenge me to attempt to go a whole day without saying ‘I’m sorry.’
And as much as I tried, I couldn’t do it.
She encouraged me to be mindful of my responses to various situations, and even though she tried hard to convey all the reasons why I should do it, she never put it quite as powerfully or as succinctly as this simple set of comic strips does:
If you want to say ‘Thank you’, don’t say ‘I’m Sorry’ (From the folks at Mental Floss)
This is just what I needed, and I found this article quite helpful.
Thank you for reading!
Until Chronic Illness stopped me, I was a sword fighter in the Society for Creative Anachronism for several years. This is a pretty grueling sport where women fight against men just as much as they fight other women. To count, blows must be solid and have significant force. But the thing that surprised me the most was that one of the biggest things that most lady fighters had to get over was saying ‘I’m sorry’ after delivering a good blow to their opponent.
We have been conditioned so long to be always pleasant to others, to not complain and to not have our own sense of purpose or point of view that I think it’s still deep within our bones. So even if we have grown up with strong female figures in our life we still have some of that we have to get over, and thus ‘I’m sorry’ pops out A LOT. Good for you to recognize it and best wishes to overcome it!
Maybe you have a strong connection with Asian living! I know in Japanese and Korean one apologize when thanking… for example, you pay for your meal, you apologize. LOL!