Sorry, Sorry, Sorry’s far more affordable paperback iteration is out today! It’s called Getting to Sorry, and it’s full of the same humor and helpfulness as its predecessor. Learn how to elicit better apologies from coworkers, friends, family, and strangers. Read about why the miraculous human brain makes good apologies so rare. Explore great and crappy apologies throughout history. Find out why so much conventional wisdom about corporate and medical apologies is FLAT-OUT WRONG. And join us in our quest to make the world a more humane place, one good apology at a time.

AND GUESS WHAT, SNARLY JUST LOOKED AND THE KINDLE VERSION IS $1.99 TODAY. That is a Ginsu-knife-level deal.

Your SorryWatchers are really proud of this book, and we hope you’ll consider buying it for yourself, your colleagues, and your loved ones. Bonus: We’ve begun doing lively, amusing, substantive presentations to businesses on how good apologies are a key part of creating a healthy office culture. Reach out via email to book us.

Instead of going with your basic, vanity-based ho-hum “New Year, New You” approach to 2024 resolutions, why not resolve to apologize better, or screw your courage to the sticking place and ask for an apology from someone who owes you one,  this year? We know you can do it. You’re brave.

They’re enumerated in a pop-up on our home page and expounded upon in our book (along with lots of entertaining examples, celebrity anecdotes, historical nuggets, and social science sprinkled hither and yon like environmentally friendly glitter!) but we thought we’d reiterate them for you here.

The six and a half steps are relevant whether you’re a spouse who has yet again failed to unload the dishwasher, a second grader who has chased a classmate with a booger; a friend who has been caught gossiping horribly about another friend; an athlete who finally confessed to doping after lying for years; or a government that perpetrated racist medical horrors upon unknowing citizens. Here they are:

1. Say you’re sorry.

2. For what you did.

3. Show you understand why it was bad.

4. Only explain if you need to; don’t make excuses.
5. Say why it won’t happen again.

6. Offer to make up for it.


Six and a half. Listen.

To elaborate:

#1: Use the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.” Not “I regret,” which is about YOUR feelings. Big whoop. A good apology is about the OTHER PERSON’S feelings, the feelings of the person you hurt. Don’t say “I’m apologetic,” or “I’d like to apologize” or “I feel terrible about what happened” or “I feel shame about the situation.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. YOU, YOU, YOU.

#2: What you did: Say it. Don’t apologize for “that thing last week,” or “about our argument.” A good apology takes ownership, and you can’t own a thing you don’t name.

#3: You’re apologizing for the hurt you caused — so why did what you did cause pain? Use your emotional intelligence. We know you have it. We believe in you! Say it aloud. Again, this is key to taking responsibility, which is a thing people really want in an apology.

#4: Explanations can all-too-easily become excuses: “I’m sorry I’m late; my train got held in the station” is an explanation for lateness; “I’m sorry I’m late; you scheduled this at a really bad time and rush-hour traffic is impossible and I had to stop to pick up the cupcakes you insisted I bring and I was under a ton of stress and there’s a lot going on in my life” is a litany of excuses. (And if you were supposed to get the cupcakes, you should have budgeted that into your travel plans, friend.) You might not want to offer an explanation at all, because are you sure it’s NOT an excuse? (This is why Snarly always test-drives her apologies to Sumac; Snarly tends to make excuses. She’s ashamed of this tendency…but that’s no excuse.)

#5: What steps are you taking to ensure this issue won’t recur? Maybe you resolve not to have more than one drink at lunch. Maybe you’ve now learned that “lame,” “Jew someone down,” or “gyp” is a slur, and you should have known, but you vow to eliminate that term from your speaking and writing vocabulary. Maybe you’re scheduling a training session for the entire staff (including the C-suite, and not just the lowest paid or customer-facing people) so the racially insensitive thing or misogynistic, illegal thing you did won’t ever be repeated.

#6. What’s an offer of repair? If you spilled coffee on their sleeve, offer to pay for the dry cleaning. If you ate their yogurt out of the office fridge, buy them a six-pack of their fave Fage. If you regularly created a hostile workplace for female employees, offer a hefty settlement (in tandem with making systemic changes so this doesn’t happen again, which falls under Step #5). On a much larger level, if you unjustly put an entire group of people in an internment camp during wartime, offer reparations (our book, for instance, compares the U.S. and Canadian responses to each country’s shameful history of rounding up its citizens of Japanese heritage).

#6.5. Let the other person have their say. Don’t protest. Don’t interrupt. Hear them out, even if it’s hard.

Look, real life is complicated and full of nuance, and that’s why we wrote a book and not just a list. To be clear, a good apology doesn’t erase terrible behavior. A bad, gaslighting apology can be a further insult. There are people who refuse to accept even good apologies, and people who use flawed-but-well-intentioned apologies as weapons rather than teachable moments.

Apologies are part of good-faith efforts to build a better world, and they require work.

I’m swivel-eyed, but I’m not slimy.

(This is basic. To keep it brief, I’m omitting countless variations and dodges. And the part about maybe making it up to them.)

APOLOGIZE – Say “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.” Take responsibility. Talk about what you did, not just “what happened.” Avoid “if,” “regret,” and “it’s unfortunate.” Try “I shouldn’t have done that,” “That was rude of me,” or “It was wrong.”

TO THEM – Not just to the twitmosphere, but to the person harmed.

FOR WHAT YOU DID – Be specific. Not “hurting you” but, for example, “calling you a slimy swivel-eyed creep.”

ACKNOWLEDGE THE EFFECT – If you know it. “I embarrassed you by calling you a slimy swivel-eyed creep in front of everybody at our dinner table, and at the nearby tables.”

EXPLAIN, BUT DON’T EXCUSE – “I called you a slimy swivel-eyed creep to try to make you be quiet because I didn’t want to be thrown out before dessert came. I was a jerk.”

I’m slimy, but I wouldn’t call myself swivel-eyed.

STOP TALKING AND LET THEM HAVE THEIR SAY – “I wasn’t upset that you called me a slimy swivel-eyed creep. I was upset that you interrupted my song. It made me feel like you don’t respect me as an artist.”

Got it?

Apologize

To them

For what you did

Acknowledge the effect

Explain but don’t excuse

Let them have their say

It’s not complicated. You can do this!

I am slimy AND swivel-eyed & the ladies love my tune: “Itz Just That EZ (don’t roll ur ize @ me).

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A good apology has several parts. Not every apology has all of them, and they might not be in this order. Aaron Lazare, author of On Apology, divides apologies into four parts. These are acknowledgement of the offense; explanation; “various attitudes and behaviors including remorse, shame, humility, and sincerity”; and reparations.

We agree, with a little elaboration. Here’s a simple checklist of our version.

First, the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.” If the other important parts of an apology are there, it can still be a good apology without these words. But the rest of it has to be really good, so we suggest playing it safe and including those words.

You should take “Fishface” as a compliment. I know I would.

Second, what you are sorry for. Say what you did, or what you said. Be specific. Not “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings” but “I’m sorry I called you Fishface after you asked me to stop.” It may feel painful to name what you did, but if you leave it out, it leaves open the possibility that you have mental reservations.

Third, acknowledgement of the effect. “I left you stranded. I should have realized that if I took your crutches for my dance number, you had no way to get back to the car.” Don’t go out on a limb here and act like a mind reader: “I realize this is part of a pattern of behavior on the part of red-headed people that makes you feel vulnerable.” Again, it’s no fun to describe this, but it’s how you show you understand the impact.

Fourth, explanation. Sometimes this is needed, and sometimes it’s not. If it’s mysterious to the injured party why you did what you did, you need to explain. “I thought you were putting alligators in my soup, and I lost my temper.” Explaining is not a time to defend yourself, because when you apologize, the focus should not be on you. “I was a sickly kid, and I had no way of stopping bullies from putting alligators in my soup, and when I complained to the grownups they just laughed, and told me to toughen up. I would hide under the stairs and cry…. So anyway, sorry I broke your tooth.” No.

To this day I won’t eat a thick soup. You know, an opaque soup? Where there could be something lurking in it?

Fifth, why it won’t happen again. Often it’s not necessary to say more than “I won’t do it again.” Other times you need to elaborate. “To make sure I never again fiddle absentmindedly with my flamethrower while driving, I have made a new policy to keep it in the trunk, and I have purchased a trunk rack to keep it in.”

Sixth, what you will do to make it up to them. Often this isn’t necessary, because the apology itself is the reparation. Other times, that’s not enough. “I called the DeLorean repair people and told them to send the bills to me.”

That’s all. You can do that.

I shouldn’t have borrowed the Delorean without asking, I shouldn’t have taken it out of the country, and I definitely shouldn’t have let the monkey drive.

Here’s how you do repentance, according to the 12th-century Jewish sage Maimonides (aka Rambam). You need the following elements: Humility, remorse, forbearance and reparation. Not so coincidentally, the same goes for apologies. Maimo (we’re tight) wrote in his Laws of Repentance: “What constitutes complete repentance? He who is confronted by the identical situation wherein he previously sinned and it lies within his power to commit the sin again, but he nevertheless does not succumb because he wishes to repent, and not because he is too fearful or weak [to repeat the sin].” With apologies, too, part of the deal is that they don’t give you a clean slate; you do not get to do the same thing again.

Furthermore, it’s not enough to be sorry in your heart. You gotta reach out to whomever you wronged. To paraphrase the big man, Teshuva (repentance) without viduy (confession) is half-assed at best.

Nor is viduy alone sufficient. “Whoever merely verbalizes his confession without consciously deciding to give up his sins is like a person who immerses in a ritual pool (mikveh) in order to cleanse himself, but is holding a dead reptile in his hand,” Maimo wrote. “His immersion will not cleanse him as long as the reptile remains in his hand.”

In other words, DROP THE REPTILE.

Neither are you off the hook if you try apologizing once and the person you wronged stays cranky at you. “If a person hurt someone’s feelings by what he said, he must placate him and approach him again and again until he forgives him,” Maimo wrote. “If he does not want to forgive him, he should approach him with a group of three friends, asking his forgiveness. If this is not enough to appease him, he should return a second and a third time. If he still does not want to forgive him, he is not required to beg forgiveness any more, and the person who refused to forgive him is now the sinner.”

Now, if you’re on the opposite end (the wronged, receiving end), think hard about blowing off a sincere apology, no matter how hurt you were. “A person is forbidden to stubbornly refuse to forgive a repentant person who seeks forgiveness for his sins,” Maimo wrote. “One should be easy to appease and hard to anger. When the person who wronged him asks forgiveness, he should forgive him wholeheartedly and willingly. Even if he was grievously wronged, he should neither seek revenge nor bear a grudge against the offender. Forgiveness is the way of the Jewish people. By contrast, idol worshipers are insensitive, and do not posses this quality.” (Sorry, idol-worshippers. We Jews are a tribal people.)