Apologize

I’m sure there’s been a point in your life where you’ve had to apologize to someone or for something. Maybe you were lead to do it because it was the right thing, or maybe you were young and your parents were making you, to teach you a lesson on how to humble yourself and ask forgiveness. This particular story comes to life about 25 years ago, and it’s not exactly something I’m proud of, but it taught me a valuable lesson. It was not one of my finer moments, but I was young and on my second manufacturing plant. I was given the opportunity to build it from the ground up, but we kept running into an issue of wide load permits to traverse I-35. We would spend hours on hold. I’d finally managed to get into a deal and I’d picked up the phone and was speaking with this young lady on the phone, the supervisor.

She cut me no slack and gave me no quarter. I was making no headway, getting more and more frustrated as the call went on. I can’t remember all of the details, but what I do remember was this Big Red that I was drinking, so to those who haven’t had the chance to live in Texas and try one, I apologize.  She continued to give me trouble. I finally reached a point where I’d had enough and, to my shame, threw my drink against the wall and hung up the phone. After a few minutes, I calmed down, and of course I had to clean up the mess. I thought about it for a little while and called them back. I asked for the supervisor, the young lady from before, and she answered the phone. I introduced myself, stating I was the man from before. I told her I was absolutely out of line, what I did was not appropriate, and I wanted to call and apologize—it would never happen again. She was so shocked and taken aback that she gave me her personal line and the permit I was looking for that day. From that point on, we always had a good working relationship. It was all because I made that effort to apologize.  

So often we can’t find the effort or humility to look a person in the eye and apologize to them. Whether we wronged them or made a mistake, it takes more humility to than many people have to admit that. If they beat you up for it, so be it, but you did what you needed to do in apologizing to them. I’ve said before, in another blog, that if we treat our friends like we treat our family, we’d have no friends. It takes courage and integrity to apologize to those we wrong. Apologizing to family can be some of the hardest apologizing some people may ever have to do. Don’t feel like you’re too good to apologize, don’t feel like someone doesn’t deserve an apology, because apologizing is about you just as much as it’s about the person you’re offering an apology.