Thanks for waiting

You're in the doorway at work, some months on, and someone comes through the other way and walks into you. There's half a second. "Sorry," they say, because they weren't looking. "No problem," you say, and go through. At your desk the first email of the day opens "Quick one, when's the north report due?" and the answer comes back in four minutes, because the question had no exits in it. In the meeting you say "I think there's a problem with the north figures", and the room looks at the figures, and there is.

At lunch the food's slow, and when it comes it's the wrong thing, and you say "this isn't what I ordered", pleasantly, and it's fixed, and you say thanks. You've got a cold and you cough and don't say anything about it, because it's a cold. Dev, at the next desk, says "quick one", and you notice that you've stopped noticing Dev.

There was a real one, in March. You forgot a thing that mattered to a friend and let her down, and you said "I forgot, that's on me, let me make it up to you on Saturday", once, and she said "thank you for saying that", which nobody had said to you after an apology in years, because your apologies had been about doorways, and this one wasn't.

The day's sorries are under five, most days, and the ones there are go in the fault column, and you've stopped keeping the list because there's nothing much to put in it. Your partner said last month that you'd stopped saying sorry all the time, and then said, after a pause, that it was nice not having to say it wasn't your fault, and you understood what they meant, and didn't say sorry for it.

A colleague who joined in the spring asked you last week how you'd got so comfortable speaking in meetings. You told her, more or less, what's in this book, and she looked doubtful, and the next morning her email opened "Quick one", and you noticed, and didn't say anything, which is a kind of thanks.

None of this is a transformation. You said sorry to a lamp post on Tuesday. You still open the odd email with it when you're tired and delete it before sending. The threshold is where it should be most of the time, and when it drops, the columns are there, and the card with three sentences on it is in your wallet, though you haven't looked at it in weeks.

If you take one thing from this book, take this. Tomorrow, before your first question at work, say "quick one" and then the question, and notice what comes back. That's the whole method. Everything else is detail.