When you've said sorry twelve times before lunch

It'll happen. A tired morning, a difficult colleague, a meeting that went badly, and by lunch you'll have said sorry twelve times and counted them, and the counting will feel like failure.

Twelve isn't forty. Last month it was forty by lunch and you weren't counting. What's happened is that the threshold is old and the sort is new, and on a morning with pressure in it the old one gets a run. It doesn't mean the habit's back. It means it's a habit, and habits come round.

Sort them late. At lunch, put the twelve into columns. In my experience the fault column still has one or two in it and the rest are softeners and weather, and seeing that at lunch does what seeing it at bedtime did on the first day. The columns are the correction, and they work at any hour.

Work out which softener got through. Was it the email opener, because you were writing fast? Then a fortnight of deleting before sending. Was it the meeting, because the room was tense? Then the one-thing run-up on the card. Was it a particular person you always apologise to? Then that person gets "quick one" from tomorrow, and you'll notice it feels hardest with them, and that's information about the read you've built with them, and it moves.

And notice the size of it. Twelve reflex sorries is twelve small trades. Last month it was forty a day and you didn't know they were trades. The habit hasn't returned. It came round on a hard morning, found the old threshold, and used it, and the threshold moves back by lunch with the columns.

No streaks. Don't count sorry-free days. Count the fault column, and let a twelve-sorry morning be a morning with two real ones in it and ten that you noticed. Noticing ten is not what you were doing last month.