In my last post, we explored the subtle, yet tremendously important difference, between saying, “I apologize,” and “I’m sorry.” I would encourage you to read it here, but if you are kind of lazy, the main takeaways are these:

• When you apologize, you’re offering vulnerability in exchange for forgiveness, and
• You can apologize without being actually sorry (that is, you can apologize without actually being emotionally changed), and
• The fact that the recipient knows all of this at a visceral level becomes a real problem if your goal is to deliver a successful apology (e.g. one that lands some real forgiveness).

Continue reading →

Okay, maybe 2 degrees short of a crash – but I did something (no idea what…perhaps I was sleep-computing) and somehow wiped out several pages of writing that included the next several days of my blog posts.  I’ve spent 2 nights now trying to salvage them from the cockles and sub-cockles of my computer, and that just ain’t working.

So…I will be re-writing the posts and getting them posted as soon as I can, likely tomorrow night.

In the meantime, please enjoy this outstanding article from the Washington Post on being “busy” and how you can and should reframe it.

Your professor today will be me, Rickey Dobbs. I have a Ph.D.¹ in doing and saying things that cause me to need to seek the forgiveness of others…and as such, I have learned a ton along the way about the effective attainment of others’ forgiveness.

We all screw up. We all say things that hurt others’ feelings. We all look back at things we’ve said or done (or not said, or not done) with a tinge of regret. Continue reading →