Getting the last word with apology | Jennifer Thomas | TEDxGreensboro

Ten years ago my husband and I had an argument.

That is never fun.

Being at fault, I said "sorry"

I noticed JT was unusually quiet during dinner.

there was tension in the air and a knot in my stomach

what my apology had lacked in elegance, i thought it made up in simplicity.

apparently, not.

Recognizing that my apology had failed miserably, I did what any well trained expert communicator would do.

I went inside and asked myself a question:

"What's the matter with him?"

(Laughter)

Actually, I asked him: What's the matter?"

He said: "I just wish you'd apologize."

I wanted to say: "Whatcha talkig about Willis?"

But I said something like: "I said I was sorry."

And then I got curious. "JT, what was I supposed to say?"

That's when I heard it.

"Honestly, Jen, I wanted you to say you were wrong."

Wow.

Looking back, I realized that instead of making me guess, he had given me a gift.

What happened next?

I said: "That's what I've meant to say. I made a mistake and I was wrong."

Soon the tension between us lifted like a fog rolling out to sea.

We went on to have a happy evening and I had my usually easygoing husband back.

This exprience between us was directly related to my work as a clynical psychologist and it sparked my research on apologies and forgiveness.

I realized JT is not alone. We all have scripts that come from our childhood for apologies but the trouble is, we have a glaring lack of awareness about effective apologies.

In my work as a business consultant I've seen my share of apologies. It's so easy to feeel overlooked, undervalued, and ignored.

I know the real cause of trouble in our offices today, it's that we work with people who don't know how right we are.

(Laughter)

Everytime we get offended, it creates an emotional block between us and them.

Thenext time it happens, another block, till we have a big wall and it's very hard to talk through a wall or around a wall, and it doesn't go away just with the passing of time.

Apologies require vulnerability and it feels too risky to some people.

TED speaker and researcher, Brene Brown, insists "Vulnerability does not mean weakness."

If I could talk to that person in your office, who hasn't given a decent apology since the Bush administration, that's 41 not 43, here's what I would say:

You are crushing your credibility and trashing your trust. This is stunting your career growth and causing untold frustration for the rest of us.

What we really need are baby steps for apologies.

My passion is to help people know what to say whenever sorry isn't enough.

To that end we had amassed what maybe the world's largest data set on apology preferences and we're just beginning.

The impact of our findings on relationships at home and at work could be truly transformative.

Who do I mean when I say we?

I realized that JT and I were speaking different languages and I thought there might be a lot of people in the same boat.

I reached out to Gary Chapman, New Your Times bestselling author of the relationship book The Five Love Languages.

He was kind enough to sit down with me and we began with revealing his five love languages.

Those are: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.

What he says is if you really want someone to feel loved and appreciated you should not speak your own love language but you should speak theirs.

Otherwise you're just gonna be wasting your effort.

When we sat down and talked, I shared with him just what I've shared with you here, and I added when it comes to apologies the key word is sincerity.

We wanna know, "did they really mean this or are they just trying to get this behind us?"

And I told him that I was struck by the similarity between this need to match our apologies with what they expect, and the need to match our love languages with what they expect.

Then I waited for his reaction.

To my relief, he really resonated with the idea.

He said, "Yes, for any relationship to last beyond the initial infatuation stage people have to be able to apologize."

And about few months later he gave me this endorsement.

He said, "Jennifer, what you have brought to my attention along with the love languages, I would call the other essential for happy, healthy relationships."

So we teamed up for some research that became our book When Sorry Isn't Enough.

Today we've asked 45 000 people, "What do you most wanna hear when people apologize?"

And the second question, "When people apologize to you, what do you expect them to say or do?"

You might wanna take a mental note of these questions because they're good ones for you to use in your own life.

Their answers fell into five categories.

I promise we weren't looking for five, although we know he really likes that number.

(Laughter)

We coined the term apology languages for these five different ways of saying "my bad."

Each one is a separate key.

If you have a key and it unlocks the door, you might be tempted to use that n every door but that would be foolish, and would only end up with frustration.

It's the same way with our apology languages.

I'm gonna share with you percentages on how popular each of our five apology languages are.

This data is hot of the press for our event today.

The first apology language is expressing regret.

40 people most wanna hear us say I'm sorry but that's not a complete sentence.

It's important that we give detail about their feelings.

How we've made them sad, angry, frustrated, worried. They need to know that we really get it.

If it's just a small offence, that may be enough but if it's something that's either serious or repeated, they're really gonna want to hear their apology language.

It might be something like our second language.

Accepting responsibility.

37 people most want to hear us say "I was wrong."

See, I've been practicing.

(Laughter)

This is really hard for some people to say.

We find especially people who come from a family of origin or we call it FOO in psychology speak.

The kind of put the fun back in disfunction.

(Laughter)

They may have been told all the time not just wht they did wrong but that they were bad, and they learnt to cover up their mistakes.

The fact is, we all make mistakes.

ur third language of apology is making restitution or making amends.

10% of people really want us to ask them "what can I do to make this right?"

For them, talk is cheap. They wanna see action.

Our fourth one is revising the plan.

10% of people also wanna hear us say what's gonna be different going forward.

They wanna know that we've put some time and effort into making a better plan.

This didn't work so we should tell them "Ok, this is a new insight I have about when I went off track or how much I disliked this situation."

We can't promise won't make a mistake but here's my best plan for preventing us from ending up in this bad spot again.

Our final language of apology is the request for forgiveness.

3% of people most want to be asked that question.

"Will you please forgive me?"

You may be saying, "Jennifer, I've never asked that question, it would never even pop into my head."

The fact is, for people who as children were expected to ask that question, they're gonna expect that of us.

If we don't ask them, they may feel like we're holding out on them or we're just getting warmed up for a great apology, why did we stop?

Those are our five languages of apology.

As you can see, you simply can't guess what's gonna speak to a person.

If you're talking to someone you don't know what their apology language is or if you're giving an apology to a group we recommend that you use all five.

I do blogging about apologies in the media and I find that public figures use all five of these only 1% of the time.

(Laughter)

Lots of bad language of apology

"Mistakes were wade to the extent that you were offended. We apologize."

I had such a good time analyzing the apologies by Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, and any number of baseball players.

You also might notice, as you look at these numbers, that there's a huge imbalance.

Someone might be askig themself, "Ok, do we really need to focus on the meger 3% who want the request for forgiveness?"

If you're a smart manager, you will.

I worked with a company. Employee name is Sarah, I'm making up that name.

She paid such close attention to every single detail that she was driving her work team crazy.

One day, a guy who I'll call John, blew up on her again.

he actually did come to her the next day and started to give her a quasi apology.

Said something like, "Sarah, I shouldn't have said that."

But you see, Sarah is in the 3% and John was way out of the ballpark with what she wanted to hear.

She was left thinking, "And? Gimme some more here."

But John wouldn't budge.

After a little bit, when she wouldn't let up, he began to lob stink bombs at her.

Give me a nod if you've ever been hit by one of these phrases:

"We can't do anything about it now," "You're too sensitive," "It's time to move on," "Why can't you just drop it?"

This one's really popular: "Let's let the past stay in the past."

Hopefully, we can all do better than John did

Let me share few tips with you that we've learned along the way.

First, we want our body language to match up with our words.

Everyone has that BS meter and it'll go off if we seem very closed.

I also want you to not apologize by text.

Don't you all hate that?

Friends don't let friends text apologies.

None of your body language is gonna come through that way and it's just too simple and doesn't show your sincerity because it's too easy.

If it's a serious apology, I want you to consider writing it out and taking it and reading it to them.

The time you took to write it will show them your sincerity.

Don't let yourself get distracted so leave that cellpfone behind.

And then, I narrowed it down to threedefensive apology mistakes that people often make.

Let's not blame, excuse or deny.

Those happen to spell BED.

Blaming, that's seems to come naturally to kids and I know a few adults, who haven't utgrown that yet.

When my younger son had a Lego creation that turned p broken parts and pieces, he honed it one me s the culprit.

He said repeatedly that I was at fault and finally I went to him and I said, "Russel, I'm tired of you blaming me for having busted your Legos. I'm sorry about it but I didn't do it."

He leveled his gaze on me and with his 5-year-old logic he said, "I'm not blaming you, I'm saying you're the one who casued it."

We also need to be careful not to make excuses.

Benjamin Franklin said this, "Never ruin an apology with an excuse."

And a red flag that an excuse is coming is when we hear the word "but."

Especially, "but you."

Then we know, they've stopped apologizing and they're now blaming me for their poor actions.

We don't want to deny what we've done.

We should never try to bluff our way around an apology.

When people a mistake, we admire those, who admit their missteps.

It is the quality of our relationships that drive our happiness in life.

When we return to those imperfect people in our world, let's commit to doing our part to make things right with others.

Let's put ourselves into their shoes and give them what they really want and need.

What's the pay off?

Your team members will trust yo, your customers will be loyal to you.

You'll be replacing dicord with harmony, your relationships will be more peacefull and productive.

You will feel glorious freedom.

As I talk today, someone has come to your mind.

How do I know?

The hundreds of people with whom I talked have told me so.

Here's what you can do, when you feel like you've already tried everything to make things right with someone.

Demonstrate leadership, make the next move.

To make sure you aren't jut missing it like I did with JT, use all five apologies in your keyring.

When you look back, you'll never regret it.

(Applause)