Welcome to the first of our Two Minute Mentor sessions. If you missed this on our social media, read on. (Or you can watch over on our IGTV.
In this session we're focused on sorry not sorry. So what am I talking about.?
Have you ever found yourself in conversation, or in email, wanting to respond with an "I'm sorry"? Many of the people that I work with that say they feel the need to apologise for being busy, for having priorities that don't always align with other people's and for setting expectations and boundaries with others in terms of their workload and capacity.
I myself know this is an easy trap to fall into because, as a people pleaser, and someone who is conflict avoidant, I've often felt the need to apologise when I'm saying something. I think another person won't like. As communications professionals, we're so solution focused that we often feel that we should apologise if we have to say no.
However, this can have a negative impact in terms of confidence, not only your own confidence in yourself, but the confidence of others in you, and it can feel undermining. So why not try to reframe that apology and try a different approach next time you have too much workload, or you're too busy to take on someone else's priority.
It's just about the use of language, take out that apology. When you're emailing somebody back who you haven't responded to immediately, why not try saying "thank you for your patience". And if somebody asks you to do something when you don't have capacity, why not respond by saying "I appreciate this is a really important deliverable for you and I'd love to help you with that, let me get back to you with a timescale because currently that doesn't fit with my priorities".
And I know you can get lots of pressure put on your own teams to deliver, and it's quite okay, without apology, to say, "my team doesn't have the capacity to deliver that right now".
Please just try taking that apology out, You'll be surprised at people's responses, and you'll also be surprised by how empowered you feel. Hopefully that was a useful tip, and join us next time for the Two Minute Mentor.