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Home / Dispatched thoughts - Don’t be sorry if you don’t mean it

Dispatched thoughts - Don’t be sorry if you don’t mean it

2021-03-10  Olavi Popyeinawa

Dispatched thoughts - Don’t be sorry if you don’t mean it

It’s important to keep yourself grounded and constantly maintaining your mental wellbeing. 

One of the best ways to do this is to set healthy boundaries and to stop feeling sorry for yourself or over apologising to things that don’t need apologising. We should minimize our use of the word sorry; it should only be used when it’s necessary and when it is meant.

Over apologising looks bad and is manipulative, it’s just a surface scratcher to something deeper and to put it simply, a way to deflect. How many times has someone used that phrase ‘am sorry” and you actually felt better or you felt like it promoted a more positive tone to the environment? It conveys how uncomfortable you are and even your own distress, in turn, causing you to lose your power and cool.

When has a simple sorry fixed anything? When has a saying, “I’m sorry, I have a question” shown confidence?

There will always be a need and time to apologize and when that time comes, you have to own up to your shortcomings and make things right. There is nothing wrong with that; sometimes you have to be the bigger person.

The best apologies that change a situation are the ones that come from the heart and are followed with action while in turn, an aimless “I’m sorry” in email correspondence or for running late, is useless. It’s useless because you’ve probably said “I’m sorry” so many times before that it has lost all sincerity it could have once possessed.

We have developed a culture of over apologising with a weird history of the “I’m sorry” overuse. We should try training ourselves out of over apologizing. It seems to always come out unconsciously, especially in mundane activities like when writing up an email and we have to actively catch ourselves and rephrase. Not to mention during face-to-face interactions, whenever we find ourselves about to falsely apologise, we should bite our tongue to catch an “I’m sorry” and quickly rephrase what we had planned to say before it leaves our lips.

Deciding to change behaviour and actively implementing the change is an uphill battle, but it’s a gratifying one. While it might seem like an unnecessary habit to change, it’s important to remember that you matter and that your mental health and overall wellbeing comes first, stop apologising for it.

- Olavi Popyeinawa

Twitter: @olavipopyeinawa

Email: olavipopyeinawa@gmail.com           


2021-03-10  Olavi Popyeinawa

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