What it teaches people about you

The subtitle of this book promises to say what the sorries teach people, and this is the chapter. Nobody sets out to learn these things about you. They learn them the way people learn anything about anyone, from what gets said most.

That you think you're in the way. Forty sorries a day for existing in doorways and asking questions tell everyone around you that you experience your own presence as an imposition, and people take you at your word about that.

That your time matters less than theirs. A person who apologises for asking a colleague to do their job has said that the colleague's minute is worth more than their own need, and the colleague, being human, files it.

That you'll take the blame. The trade in chapter 3 runs in one direction. Every sorry takes blame on. Over years, you become the person in the room who'll absorb whatever's going, and when something goes wrong and nobody knows whose it is, eyes go to the one who's been saying sorry all along.

That your requests are favours. The softener does this, and once a request is a favour it can be refused without cost, and yours are.

That they can lean. A person who apologises for other people's bad days has offered to carry them, and the offer is taken up, quietly, by people who'd never have asked.

That you'll go first. In any disagreement, the reflex apologiser concedes before the disagreement has been had, and the people around them learn that they don't have to make a case, because you'll have said sorry before they've finished the sentence.

There's a related habit worth a paragraph, which is saying yes to everything, and an earlier book in this series is about it. The reflex sorry and the unwilling yes come from the same threshold, and they teach the same lesson, which is that you can be relied on to put yourself last, and people do rely on it, and mostly not out of malice. They've just been told, forty times a day, that it's fine.

And the child. A child who watches a parent apologise for existing learns that this is what adults do when they occupy a room, and the child will say sorry in doorways at thirty, and won't know where it came from, and it came from watching you.

None of this is what you intend. You intend courtesy. What arrives is a daily lesson in how little you think you're owed, and people learn it, and act on it, and you experience the acting on it as further evidence that you'd better apologise.