Why You Can’t Say “I’m Sorry You Were Offended”

[Music] I got into a really frustrating conversation with someone recently and I I want to share what happened it started out harmlessly enough I was sharing some information and um we were actually communicating via text uh we went back and forth a little bit and before I knew it before I had any clue that I had offended this person he told me that I insulted him and I was really kind of taken aback and thankfully I didn’t text a response terribly quickly I kind of hesitated a little bit and asked about what was going on and the good news is we were able to unravel the offense and resolve things and what I recognized after the fact was there were a lot of emotions on both sides of this conversation if you read this text exchange you may not have sensed the emotions on both sides but I know for me I was feeling really defensive and really hurt because I had been accused of insulting this person when I totally didn’t intend to because in my world you can’t accidentally insult someone the definition of insult is intentionality in my world I accidentally offended him which meant that was his fault it was his responsibility for inferring what I was saying I wasn’t intentionally implying anything he was inferring offense now what I realized pretty darn quickly is if I tried to make that as an argument in this text it just would have cascaded it would have snowballed it would have gotten much worse so instead I kind of took a breath and I apologized for insulting him even though by my definition I did not insult him I created a fence but it was important for me to use his language us the language that made sense to him and I apologized for insulting and then after he accepted my apology he and I got to kind of dissecting exactly what had happened who had done what who had interpreted what and we kind of resolved the emotion for both of us the really simple powerful lesson that I want to share with you is is it really doesn’t matter if there is a difference of opinion in terms of what happened and it really doesn’t matter if your terms are different if the language that you use is different it also doesn’t matter if the dictionary backs you up on certain things you can say look there see that’s the definition of insult that’s the definition of offense I was right you were wrong you had no reason to be offended you can’t have a conversation like that that’s going to go anywhere meaningfully what you need to do is when there is an upset if you want to resolve it you need to kind of take ownership of it you need to take responsibility of it and this is a bounce back to my most recent vlog about responsibility and blame if you blame the other person it isn’t going to go anywhere it’s or at least it’s not going to go anywhere good if you take responsibility for what’s going on in the conversation then you have some power you can do something with it you can improve the situation for both you and the person that you’re talking to so even though there might be some emotion that gets in your way some frustration something that makes it hard for you to apologize I recommend that you do that maybe I should say especially if there’s some emotion that gets in your way maybe you should do that I say this because emotion really really can get in your way and if you let it get in your way the situation can faster it can get worse and you can be farther and farther from resolution take ownership for whatever went wrong apologize acknowledge that there was a mistake own the mistake and see if you can dissolve that negative emotion enough to be able to dissolve the other person’s emotion and if it doesn’t happen quickly enough it’s okay it it really is see if you can just take whatever time that you need to take maybe give the other person Grace give the other person as much time as they need to cool down see if you can get to a point where the two of you can talk it through if you own what happened between the two of you if you 100% take responsibility of it then you are maximizing your chances of resolving the difficulty