Sorry has amazing power.
I’m no stranger to confrontation. I’m not one to walk away from a fight or an argument usually.
There have been two instances in my life these past few weeks where I decided instead of being confrontational, recalcitrant or stubborn…really stuck in my position… I would decide that I would switch it up turn on my empathy and apologize.
And this has had an amazing effect on each of the situations. In both of the situations I turned an enemy into a friend.
My sister used to want to say that I should never be sorry or she never be the one to apologize first. My sister is still like that. But I never found that that worked for me, it never sounded right to me and never sounded aligned with my own Spirit or my own values.
The latest example of the power of sorry for me is when I ordered some food from a take-out shawarma place and they forgot to add a few items to the food order.
When I got home 20 minutes later I opened up the food order and discovered that there were missing items. So I went off, cursing up a storm.
My partner was standing beside me. She saw what I was going through and was offering some helpful suggestions and trying to help me calm down…but I was angry…and I was hungry…certainly I wasn’t listening to any reasoning.
So I called up the shawarma place and I asked to talk to the manager…and I had let her have it. Full on dick-head mode on.
She was offering to give me a free drink and the missing items when I came back again. But like I said, I wasn’t listening to any reason and I was being very aggressive and rude.
I didn’t say anything overly bad to her, just to be clear. But I was definitely coming across as an asshole.
So naturally she hung up on me.
This enraged me even more. I call back and the conversation escalated to the point where she was threatening to call the police on me, telling me that she was recording the conversation and whatnot.
I thought that was absolutely hilarious and ridiculous…and so I taunted her even further. It went nowhere in this fashion, back and forth yelling over at each other, trying to win the conversation. And then I had a crazy lucid moment of clarity. A moment of realization.
“What am I doing??”, I asked myself.
A sliver of reasoning entered my brain and I just started to say sorry to her. A few times over. It stopped her in her tracks.
And then she broke down crying.
I could hear her sobbing over the phone…and I felt like absolute garbage.
For the next 15 minutes we sat there together on the phone. I listened. She told me about how much of a terrible day she really has had working at that job, taking all the sideways shit that customers had been dishing her for whatever reason.
And then she said something that truly hit home for me. She said I was the first one in the day that actually apologized to her and listen to her.
At the end of the conversation we will we were both wishing each other a happy night and a promise that when next we saw each other it would be under happier circumstances, or at the very least I’m much easier and anger-free transaction at the shawarma place.
And you know what?
The next time I went to that shawarma place, I sheepishly entered the place and ordered my food quietly. After receiving the food, I was about to leave and thought, “I’m going to seek out the manager and ask how her day is.”
I walked back to the counter and asked for the manager. The person at the counter looked at me apprehensively and called for the manager.
As the manager rounded the counter and came to ask me what the matter was, I told her who I was. She was so happy to see me!
She shared that it was amazing how the energy changed after that conversation with me for her. She brought that energy to work now everyday and it had brought a certain resilience to her psychology and how she handled irate people.
So at the end of the day, it wasn’t just me that benefited from a clear conscience and extending empathy towards somebody who I had thought had done me wrong.
It also changed the other person, for the good.
The power of sorry.
