Sorry for what?

It's happened to me more times than I can count: someone bumps into me, and I'm the one who says sorry.

I've apologized for other people's mistakes far more often than I can recall. For a long time, I barely noticed it. "Sorry" was simply the word that arrived first—polite, automatic, already out of my mouth before I'd decided whether an apology was necessary.

Why do we do that? Why apologize when nothing was ours to own?

Perhaps some of us learned early to be accommodating: to smooth things over, avoid taking up too much space, and make other people comfortable. Perhaps it's just habit. Whatever the reason, the consequence is worth noticing.

When "sorry" becomes our reflex, we can start treating ordinary needs as inconveniences and other people's mistakes as our responsibility. We make ourselves smaller before we've even begun.

I saw this clearly in a colleague early in her career—a young woman, genuinely talented, still learning as we all continue to do. Her work was excellent. Consistently. She came to the table with real ideas. And she apologized for everything.

One minute late to a meeting—a huge apology. Needing direction, or support, or a piece of content she was missing—"sorry, I need the input." And every time, I'd think: of course you need the input. You can't do the job without it. That's not something to apologize for. That's just the job.

The apology was never in proportion to the work. Her output was excellent. Her apologies suggested otherwise—and every time she apologized for something that needed no apology, it took a small amount of power away from everything she'd just done well.

I want to be clear about what I'm not saying. When you make a mistake, own it. Apologize—that's the right thing to do, every time. What I'm talking about is something different: apologizing as a reflex, for things that were never wrong in the first place. Needing information isn't a mistake. Asking a clarifying question isn't a mistake. Being one minute late to preface excellent work isn't a mistake worth a paragraph of sorry.

Looking back, I don't think she ever actually needed to apologize, not once, for any of it. What she needed was to know that asking for what she needed to do great work was itself part of doing great work—not a debt she owed the room first.