Don't Be Sorry, Be Accountable

There are few phrases that ring more hollow than the words, “I’m sorry.” Don’t agree? Imagine your friend borrows your car and returns it with a tremendous dent. He of course, looks sheepish and says, “I’m sorry.” Are you feeling any better? I don’t think so. Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. You just went out with a woman that you know your friend was pining for. Big time. It went well. Really well. You brag about it to everyone else but tell your buddy you are sorry. Are you really?
The phrase has become this universal get out of jail free card when in fact all it is in abdication of responsibility. Now don’t misunderstand where I am coming from. I am not telling you not to feel bad when you screw up. When you screw up, it should burn. In my mind, when you do or say something wrong and it hurts someone else, it is inexcusable and rightfully it should tear at your insides. So, shouldn’t you say you’re sorry? Only if you want to marginalize your relationship with the person you just wronged and cheapen the impact of your intentional action. The time for “I’m sorry” is when you inadvertently step on someone’s toe or bump into someone on line and spill coffee on them. But it should stop there. If you intended to do what you did, own it. If your actions were the result of your oversight and carelessness, clean it up.
Hurt happens in the moment. In real time, to real people. Cleaning it up is not an intellectual exercise that gets remedied by explaining either it or you away.
Revenge is visceral and the Sicilians had it right when they said it is a meal best served cold. My advice is to do everything in your power to avoid having to pay the bill for that meal.
So how do you do that? As much as I’d like to think of myself as enlightened, every now and then I succumb to dark thoughts. Tthere are times when my thoughts fall victim to stereotyping. If I am in Disneyworld or some supermarket and I see an obese person trolling around on one those motorized carts, my thought process will lapse into a less than flattering synopsis about how they got there. I can give lots of examples where I think things that I am not too proud of. Does that make me evil, a bad person? That is somebody else’s call. I do however believe what it does make me is human. I think we all are. We are all capable of acts of incredible stupidity or worse gross insensitivity. And in those moments, it has been my experience that merely saying, “I’m sorry.” is never enough. Nor is whipping out my resume of prior good deeds.
So what do I do? First, I try very hard not to say or do those stupid things again and I never try to justify or minimize them. Ever. What I do when I really screw up is to make a point of understanding how the lapse occurred and to try to figure my degree of accountability in the break down. I have found that understanding what happened and committing to take action to ensure the mistake does not happen again goes a lot further than a blanket apology. Even more powerful, especially in a relationship that really means something to me is having the balls to look the person I offended in the eye and I tell them that I am sorry for having let them down or hurting them. Not for the words or actions – because if I said it or did it some part of me meant to -- but for the result. You can’t take back the words or erase the deeds but you can embrace and be accountable for the result. Now, I will cop to the fact that this is not easy. It takes practice. Looking someone in the eye in and of itself is not easy, let alone when you know you did something wrong. But you can get there with some practice and resolve.
So is conceding that “I feel your pain” enough? No, it is just the start. The magic is in what comes after. It is in taking personal accountability for the results. It is in saying, “I want to make this right by you”. The most empowering statement you can make is to ask “what do you need me to do to make this right?” It is probably the scariest offer you can make. Because in that moment, you are giving away your trust, not your power but your trust.
I can think of no better scenario to highlight this than a scene from the movie Gandhi. In the midst of the riots between Muslims and Hindus that overtook India shortly after the British left, Gandhi declared that he would go on a hunger strike until the fighting stopped. As he lay feebly on his straw mat he gave his followers the opportunity to sit with him. One man came to him distraught. In the frenzy he had struck and killed a Muslim neighbor and burnt his house to the ground. The dead man had a small son who was now orphaned. The man beseeched Gandhi for forgiveness. He desperately wanted some way to regain his honor. Clearly, an apology was not going to be enough. Gandhi’s suggestion was simple. “You must raise the boy as our own,” he said. The Hindu man quickly agreed. But Gandhi did not stop there. He continued, “And you must raise him as a Muslim.” In a moment, the relinquishing of his trust was rewarded with an act that would allow him to regain his integrity and find inner peace.
The tightrope that you are about to traverse by seeking to do the right thing can’t be understated. Nor can the human dynamic at work here. Most people will feel really uneasy with being offered the opportunity to hold you accountable. When asked, “What can I do to make this right, “they will probably attempt to brush it off by saying, “no, I am fine. I don’t need anything.”
That is where you need to go back and get them to understand, that they just won the karmic lottery. They can ask for anything in that moment and you will do your best to make it happen. You need to get them to understand that the moment to get clean is right then and there. They don’t get to say, “I’m okay” and pass on their right to extract their pound of flesh only to raise the incident in a week, a month, or maybe two years. They need to get that this is it. Let them take some time to think about it. But this is it. And when they insist that, “no it really is okay” only to take out the short list somewhere down the road – and they will -- when they are trying to wiggle out of a moment just after they screwed something up and hurt you, you need to be firm and remind them of the conversation. They had their chance and it passed. They passed on it. It’s over.
The first time you try this dance it might get ugly. But if there is relationship there, a real relationship, they will get it. And the next time you screw up and you make an effort to clean up, they will get it. And they might test you and ask for something really outrageous. Do your best to give it to them. Be true to your word and make good on the offer. Of course if you don’t think you can deliver on the request be clear about that up front. If you agree to do something you know you can’t, you are only going to perpetuate this viscous circle of failures and attempts to make it all right.
So what is the point of all this? It is all about self respect. There is tremendous power in owning your mistakes. By standing front and center and being willing to take the hit you are making a statement. By rationalizing or minimizing what just happened you are only giving away your own power and opening yourself up to being spoon fed half hearted apologies and rationalizations when someone has done you wrong.

The Circle Game

I often get asked, “What exactly do you and your guys do when you get together?”
My answer is usually, you just need to be there to get it. Sometimes it is easier to explain what we are not. I cringe when we are referred to as a “group”. In my mind that connotes some sense of self help or a place for men to gripe about their day. That’s not us. We prefer to use the term team to capture the essence of our circles.
Teams tend to have a purpose. Ours is to ensure that men succeed at what ever it is they set out to do. It is not always the same for each man and we don’t get there by offering advice or how to’s necessarily. No one is touting a vision of what men or any one man should want, do or aspire to be. Rather we ask a man, what do you want? No what do you think you should want? For example, I have witnessed men come to understand that their job, relationship or even their lifestyle is just not working for them. So to some extent we are in the business of getting to the ugly truth.
Then we try to get the man to get a handle on why he wants what he wants. Oftentimes men, and women for that matter, find that they are chasing something that they are really not committed to, so it is no wonder that they eventually fail at attaining it. How many times do you need to declare that you want to lose weight before you realize that you are perfectly happy with your love handles? We work hard at getting to the “why” and sometimes it gets ugly because I have often found the answer I initially give to the why question is not really my core truth. It might be tempered by a sense of obligation, a desire to be liked, or colored by what I have been marketed to believe I want but it usually is not enough of a why for me to fight for it. My guys will see through that. For example, when I was in New York at a very large and powerful law firm, I got to appreciate that the power, prestige and money no matter how attractive it seemed on paper was not enough to keep me happy at the end of the day.
And when I discovered that it was not because my men had any clearer sense of things than I did but because through the diversity of opinion that came out of that circle some thing clicked for me. In part it was hearing what wasn’t or hadn’t worked for other men, or maybe it was hearing a man talk about the heartbreak and the joy of being a father, something was not even on my radar at the time. In retrospect, a lot came to me from someplace totally unexpected. I remember when I first joined my men’s team, as men introduced themselves and what they did for a living; there I was calculating in my head their net worth. At that first meeting I got this perverse satisfaction from the belief that collectively, the six of them maybe made what I did in a year. But over time I got to ask myself, so what? We butted heads often enough for me to start questioning my comfortable little world and all the assumptions I was making around happiness.
Which brings me to another thing we are not, we are not a circle of friends. As a matter of fact, I have had men on my team that I just don’t like and often times that at first I can’t understand. But I have come to respect them and to trust them implicitly when they proved to be men of their word. And of course not even man turned out to be men of integrity, and there were lessons in that discovery as well. There is a way of being amongst us that is just palpable to a stranger. It is bond built on trust and strengthened by consistency. Friends want to be liked; we just strive to be respected.
That brings us to the third prong of the game. A man states what he wants, comes to understand why he wants it and then we ask, “so what are you prepared to do to get there?” If we are anything, it is a circle of men who gain honor by keeping our word. Since keeping your word is so important to us, we strive to ensure that a man knows what he is committing to. The initial commitment may come easy for the man but the job of the men of the circle is to inspect that declaration to ensure that it is grounded in reality.
For example, a man says he wants to get in shape, understands it’s important because he wants to be able to have the stamina to run around with his kids and declares he is going to lose 20 pounds in the next six months. So we ask, “When is the last time you lost 20 pounds in six months”? Or ever? Usually the answer is never, so we engage the man in a reality check. What do you need to know and do to make this happen? Usually the honest answer is “I don’t know.” Which is another thing our circle is, a place where men can embrace their ignorance, not as a bad thing, not as something to be ashamed of but as an opportunity. In the not knowing lies the opportunity to create something out of whole cloth. And our circle offers a place to brain storm, to hear of other men’s struggles or successes and to pick the pieces that fit.
And then comes the game plan. And it is usually an aggressive game plan. Because we pride ourselves in being a place where men can fail and can do so brilliantly. If you think about it there is little to celebrate solely because you easily attained something you knew you could do. There is often little chance to learn from easy success. But failure? Oh boy!!! It means you are in the game and every time you stumble you learn a better way to take that missed step. The circle works because you not only have men who witness your travails and do so without judgment but men who are enthusiastic about getting you off the ground and brushing the dirt off and getting you back in the game. You don’t get docked pay for failing in the circle, you don’t necessarily face ridicule.
And when you win, there is no jealously and no one- upmanship. There is just a sense of a collective job well done. Enthusiasm is infectious and winning is a wonderful drug. So at the end of the day we are a circle of men who love the high of witnessing other men winning in their lives. The competitiveness is not the driver; rather it is the sense that every man in the circle had a hand in the success.