Empty apologies

“Hey, I apologised. If you don’t accept my apology, that’s your problem, not mine.”

Did someone say this to you after offending you or treating you badly?

Maybe you felt you had reason to say it to someone else that rejected your apology?

The moment we demand that our apology must be enough, we’re not interested in the hurt or offence that we caused, nor the trust that we may have damaged. We’re only interested in preventing the other person from having reason to be displeased with us.

As we know, apologies mean nothing without sincere remorse, or a change in behaviour.

And if we have sincere remorse about what we did, we won’t expect others to be OK with what happened just because we think they should be OK.

We’ll focus on sincerely understanding why it affected, or continues to affect them, and we’ll put in the effort to reestablish the trust that we broke or tainted.

If we don’t, it means that we’re stuck in self-pity rather than appreciating the impact that we have in the lives of those around us.

This is yet another way in which self-pity prevents us from realising our significance to others, and vice versa, because we’re so fixated on how bad we have it, or how we feel unappreciated, that we lose sight of how much we take them for granted.

It always starts with you.

#hope #expectation #sincerity #selfworth #selfawareness #ownyourlife #selfmastery #mindfulness #personalpower #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #lifecoaching #zaidismail #loveyourself