Matt Abrahams: commitment

Transcript context

…Awesome. Okay. And maybe one last quick one, apologizing. What's a couple tips for getting better at apologizing on the spot? First and foremost, we need to take the time to apologize. Many of us don't. And when we apologize, we need to make sure that we apologize for the transgression and not for how we made people feel. So often people will simply say, "I'm sorry that you feel bad." Well, that's not an apology. You're not assuming responsibility. So we need to first start by talking about the issue that we are addressing or the problem that we caused somebody. So we need to think about apologies in that way. So an apology to me, I have a AAA, like roadside repair service here in the United States, AAA. It's three steps, acknowledge, appreciate, and amends. So I have to acknowledge what I did. So imagine we're in a meeting and I interrupted you. You were in the midst of speaking and I interrupted you. So I might say, "I'm very sorry for interrupting what you were saying. I over-spoke when you were talking." I'm acknowledging what I did. Then I appreciate. "I can imagine my doing that made you feel bad and you feel that you didn't get your fair share of sharing your point of view." So that's the appreciation. The amends part is, "I will work not to do this. In fact, I will wait till you're done, and I will actually paraphrase what you said before I contribute my point." So I'm signaling I understand it, and here's the very specific thing I'm going to do to try to remedy it, which of course you can comment on. You can say, no, I don't think that's enough. I think you whatever, or thank you, I think that's even more than is needed, whatever. So you acknowledge the actual behavior and offense, not how you made the person feel right away. You then express appreciation for the difficulty you might've caused, and then you make amends. And the AAA approach, I think can really be helpful to people to be better at in-the-moment apologies. Amazing. Matt, I think we've packed this episode with so many tactical golden nuggets to help people become better communicators, especially on the spot. Is there anything else you want to share or leave listeners with before I ask you how they can find you online and things like that?…

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