Sort the sorries

The next three chapters are the method. This one is a sorting exercise that takes an evening and does most of the work, because once you've seen the day's sorries in columns you can't unsee them.

Three columns. Take the day's list from chapter 1 and sort each sorry into one of three. Fault, meaning you did something wrong and someone was affected. Softener, meaning the sorry opened a question, a request or a contribution. Weather, meaning it was about something nobody caused, the doorway, the rain, the late food, the cold, someone else's bad day.

Most go in the last two. For most people who do this, the fault column has one or two entries, and the softener and weather columns have the rest. That's the finding. It's your own, from your own day, and it's more persuasive than anything in the research, because it shows you that the threshold is set so low that almost nothing you apologised for was a thing you did.

The fault column is the real sorry. Those are the ones to keep and to make better, and chapter 22 is about how. Don't lose them in the sorting. A person who stops all sorries has thrown out the two that mattered with the thirty-eight that didn't.

The softener column is chapter 21. Each entry there has a replacement sentence, and the replacement does the job of the sorry without the trade.

The weather column is silence. Or "that sounds rough", for other people's weather. Or "excuse me", for doorways. Weather needs no apology, and the sorry for it was the threshold at its lowest.

Sort for three days. Not one. The first day you'll be surprised. The second you'll start catching sorries before they're said, because you know which column they're heading for. The third the columns will have started sorting themselves in the moment, which is the whole aim.

Say the column out loud, once. For the first few days, when a sorry is caught, name where it would have gone. "Softener." "Weather." Not aloud in the meeting, but in your head, as a label. The naming is what turns the sorting from an evening exercise into a thing that happens in the half-second.

Keep the fault column honest. It's tempting, once the exercise is under way, to move things into fault to justify the sorry. Was standing in the doorway a fault? No. Was asking the question? No. Was being late by five minutes? Yes, that one goes in fault, and gets a real sorry, once, without a story, as an earlier book in this series says.