The Upright Apology: Accountability Without Shame

When you make an apology that's upright, that's empowered, it feels freaking fantastic. It's an awesome feeling. It's like, oh, right? You feel strength in it. You feel responsible. You feel empowered.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. Good morning, Joe. How are you doing?

Oh man, it's been a heck of a day.

It's—

yeah, it's actually been like more like a heck of a week for me, frankly. It's the— you know, we just finished a week-long last week, one of the groundbreakers, and, and it's, you know, super intense. You go from 7:30 in the morning until 10 o'clock at night if you're helping facilitate that. You're doing it 7 days in a row. And so I'm just— when I get pretty tired and then coming back into work, it's like it's been full-on. There's been no shortage of things to do. And so I've just noticed that I'm a little— I don't want to say overwhelmed, but I feel a pressure that is definitely like not my standard feeling of pressure in life. And I can't say that I'm great at enjoying it. I'm getting better, but I'm not great at enjoying it. Yeah.

Yeah. I can resonate this week. There's just a sense of a lot of things occurring and then I just find myself having to curate it a little bit and be like, sorry, I don't have time for this, or I'm not prioritizing that. Or, hey, I know you really want my attention over here and I'd love to give it to you and I have this other priority.

Yeah.

And I can find myself going into this sort of a sort of like apologetic, not enough kind of energy. And yeah, which brings us to what we wanted to talk about today, which is apologies. And yeah, tell me a little bit about what brought this topic up for you today.

It came up a couple ways. First was that in Groundbreakers we have an exercise that's based in apologies, and you— I know you've done some of them as well, a couple of them that are based in apologies. And so that, that brought it up in my mind. And then I had, um had somebody in the business make a mistake and they were apologizing to me and we had this long conversation about apologies and I was like, "Oh, let's talk about this." It was really interesting. It was interesting to hear how she thought about it and how I thought about it. And so I thought, "Oh, this will be a great conversation." Yeah.

Well, let's get started with just a definition. What is an apology and is it always in the form of like, "I'm sorry," or "I apologize," or like— Can they be subtle, overt?

I think the form is there probably all the time, some version of "I'm sorry" or "I apologize," but I mean, it can mean such radically different things. So, there's the people who you've met who say like, "I'm sorry" 10 times, 20 times a day. And that seems to be a strategy of making sure people don't get upset at them. And of course, it actually, I would argue, increases the amount of times people get upset with them because I noticed that when people are scared of somebody else's anger, that the person who's likely to get angry is more likely to get angry when someone's scared of them because they feel alone in it. So I think that that's one reason people apologize. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." That kind of habitual thing. And then there is another form of apology, which is a way to shame someone or shame yourself. Yeah, I think kids get that a lot, unfortunately. And that one's more of, you know, feeling bad. It's like, it's a way to make somebody feel bad for something that they've done, extracting an apology out of them, or a way for you to get to feel bad. You know, a lot of people are addicted to shame, whether they know it or not. And so that's something that they get to do to themselves. Another way that I think people use apologies is it's a way to ease their own guilt. You know, they feel bad, they feel that shame, and it's like their way to relieve their guilt and to take away a bad feeling.

That could be in the example of people who are apologizing for something and then not actually shifting their behavior in any way.

Exactly, yeah. And then the way we use it and the way that it can be used in the, the way that I would advocate considering it is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for transformation. Meaning that if you can apologize to somebody and be in your power to be empowered in it, to take responsibility in it, to own that this is the way that I was and it's not the way that I want to be. I know very few tools that are as good at creating transformation inside me as to apologize in that way. If I apologize with shame, then I'm most likely going to— it's going to recur. The thing that I'm doing is going to recur. But if I apologize with empowerment and my own responsibility. And then there's a very unknown way to apologize. I don't know if it's unknown. It's a very strange— So I do this a lot. Someone's having a hard day. I'm like, "Hey, I'm sorry that you're having a hard day." And they're like, "Well, you're not responsible." I'm like, "Yeah, I know. I know I'm not responsible for your happiness. And I just want you to know that I feel like I'm seeing you, that you're seen, and that I don't want this for you." that I'm here with you. And I love using apologies that way. Like, it feels great. It's like, for me, it's a great way to just let somebody know that, hey, I see that this is not easy for you, and I'm not trying to fix it, and I'm just here with you. For me, that— that I use that. I think that's used very rarely.

Yeah, I think there's also ways that it can be used really— it's used really often in some, some forms, and that kind of points to how how there can even be like a different way of delivery of this particular apology. For example, at a funeral, people will just be like, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." And it can be, you know, if you're one of the bereaved, it can be really difficult to just have everybody be sorry for you. And then it becomes like a platitude and it doesn't feel like connection. It doesn't feel like being seen.

Correct.

And I think that's true for any of these apologies is that they can be platitudes they can be kind of oriented towards an outcome of making people feel better rather than for, as you said, a tool for self-transformation through responsibility or as a mode of genuine connection.

That's right. They can be automatic or they can be just the thing that you say or they can be a way to make somebody feel bad. Passive-aggressive apologies are pretty amazing. Too. And that's the amazing thing. And so the power has been taken out of them. And it's, you know, you get this kind of American story of like, "Oh, he can't say he's sorry." You know, like there's that, like, "That's not something that he would ever do." It's like that would be admitting weakness or something to that effect. And whenever I see somebody who has a hard time saying, "I'm sorry," it's always because somebody extracted an apology from them when they were younger. And it was a way to make the person small, to make the person feel bad, to exact control over them. Say you're sorry, you know, that kind of a thing. It's like you're supposed to admit that you're wrong. And that's when you're using the apology as a tool of self-transformation, as responsibility. It's not about wrong, it's just about that's not the way that I want to behave, and I'm acknowledging that, and I'm taking responsibility for that.

Yeah, say a little bit more on that, on It's not about anything being wrong. And you've also spoken to a shameless apology as well.

Yeah. So literally, the way you would do this in your body is you would feel that your back is upright, you're not tucked in shame. Oftentimes when people feel shame, their eyes are down or their back is hunched or their tail is tucked in, so to speak. And so it's literally having your body upright is a good cue about what it feels like to come from this this place. And to say, like, there is no shame in making mistakes. There's no shame in acting in a way that you don't want to act. There's no need for shame in any of that stuff. We all make mistakes multiple times a day. We all do things that we don't like. That makes us human. It doesn't make us something to be ashamed of. And so how do you acknowledge that in your own power? How do you stay empowered and say, I, you know, hey, this happened and I'm responsible for this part of it, and I, that's not how I want to be, and I apologize to you, instead of like, I'm so sorry that I hurt you, you know, like you can feel the difference in the, in the tone.

When a lot of us learned apologies as kids, as you, as you said, they were often extracted or they were often, you know, taught to us in such a way as to model some form of shame or guilt that we're supposed to feel in certain situations so that we don't do it because there's this there's this belief that shame is a tool for justice and transformation, which is quite prevalent.

But then there's also— Wait, let's just speak to that for a second. Let's speak to that. So here's the thing is that there's something that anybody who's listening to this podcast has been doing for a decade, maybe less because they're younger, that they haven't wanted to do, right? So there's something, there's some bad habit, there's some behavior, there's some way of being that they haven't wanted to do, but they've been doing it for 10 years. And the thing that I can tell you about all, any one of those, is that, um, that the person who's doing that behavior has shame around it. So what would make us think that shame stops us from doing something, right? Like Shame is absolutely an emotion that comes up that we don't want to feel, and so we try to avoid it. But at the same time, shame is the thing that locks bad habits in place. And so, you know, we teach shame, we shame our kids. You see it happen all the time. But usually the thing that you shame your kid about is something you're going to shame your kid about for 5 or 10 years because they're going to keep on repeating that pattern. It just doesn't work. And if you take a real look at it, If you say, oh, here's all the things that I kept on doing, I do feel shame around those things. I tell myself I shouldn't do them. I tell myself I have to change it. I, I beat myself up for doing it. That's all shame. Or if you look at the things that you have, like a child who keeps on doing something, you're shaming them for the thing that they keep on doing. You can guarantee it, or they just wouldn't keep on reiterating it. So, so shame just doesn't work.

Right, and as you extend that to apologies, it's the apologies that are delivered with shame that tend to be the kinds of apologies that get repeated because the actions get repeated.

That's right, that's exactly right. Yeah, that's why I say it needs to be empowered for it to be a real tool of transformation.

Right, so going back to how a lot of us were taught apologies, there must be some value in modeling apologies for children to learn, and what's the distinction that you would make between modeling an apology and like guiding a child through the process of apologizing and having that be done without shame. And I guess that also points to how we can be doing it, how we can apologize in a shameless, empowered way.

Yeah, so like with our kids, we've never asked them to say, "I'm sorry." It's just never happened. And yet, oddly, our children say they're sorry all the time and they say it in a very empowered way. And I think what happens is that for adults or for kids, when they get to see it, which is pretty rare, or more importantly, when they get to feel it, when you make an apology that's upright, that's empowered, it feels freaking fantastic. It's an awesome feeling. It's like, "Oh," right? You feel strength in it. You feel responsible. You feel empowered. It's the way that we like feeling. And so when you do that and you do that a couple times, you're like, "Oh yeah, this is great. Why would I not do this?" But when you've been told that you have to do apologies in a way that makes you feel small, that makes you feel like you're bad, that makes you feel like there's something wrong with you, then why the heck would you ever want to apologize except to get out of trouble, right? And then you're teaching your children or you're teaching yourself that the way that I can navigate danger in the world is by making myself small and by kowtowing to authority, you know, instead of being in myself and being in my truth, right?

Which is a, like, a form of self-attack as manipulation.

Yeah, or a form— in some people it turns into a form of self-attack to prevent other people from attacking them. A lot of people will attack themselves as a way to make it hurt less or to have less attack on them. It doesn't work, but they That's the thought process or the emotional explanation.

Yeah. And something interesting about this, uh, this idea of stopping the hurt is that one way that we've described shame is that it seems to be something that just prevents emotions from being felt. It's like when we have certain feelings that we don't allow, shame is the thing that holds them in place. And then by not letting those emotions move, we don't update our, you know, our body and our emotional system doesn't update to the actual reality of the situation, or in this case, of what we've done and how we really feel about it deeply. And so then that makes the thing persist. There's something here, there's almost a chicken and an egg kind of thing where it's like, if you're feeling the shame, it might feel really difficult to make an empowered apology because you're just feeling shame. But then there's also, if you make an empowered apology, the shame in you, this fear of being seen, the moment you apologize without shame or just apologize owning yourself, owning your part, you release a lot of that shame because you're seen. And then that shame moves. So sometimes making that kind of apology can suddenly just crack open the lid and a bunch of emotion moves. And it's no longer the emotion of, you know, shame and guilt and stuckness and anguish. It becomes just the emotion of grief, of whatever is underneath it that you need to feel to process what actually occurred and move forward from there.

Yeah, that's what happens. People, when the apologies are empowered, there might be grief that moves or fear that moves. And it feels like a cleansing. It feels like it's an emptying out of the holding. And yeah, and if you feel that moment, if you can close your eyes and you can think about a time when you felt shame, where it was just like, maybe like, where it's just this really powerful moment of shame. For a lot of people, it's like a punch in the gut kind of feeling. Like, oh, and you'll notice what it does is it's like, oh, and then it's like stops you. It's a punch in the gut. It's like, oh, and you just stop. It actually prevents the emotional fluidity that allows you to change the habits. And so apologizing without shame brings that emotional fluidity back and lets you feel empowered in it. So it's not, I'm grieving, it's I'm empowered and I'm grieving.

There's something else here as well. One of the things that I think makes it difficult or creates resistance to apologizing is that sometimes we, especially those of us who have this sort of a self-attack pattern, is that we might believe that if we apologize, we're then more likely to buy the other person's story wholesale and abandon ourselves.

Yeah, that's right. That again is making yourself small, and that's making, making yourself ashamed.

It's—

and it does do that. If you think about it this way, a lot of people use apologies as part of a power struggle, and the person who apologizes is the loser, and the person who's apologized to is the winner. And it's a, it's a really weak surrogate surrogate for being seen. It's a really weak surrogate for being acknowledged and being respected and being respected by somebody who respects themselves. So if you think about this in terms of a relationship, so you have husbands and wives and they get into fights. Those fights are all about power struggle. If both people felt like, "Oh, I'm being seen and I'm being respected and I'm being acknowledged," there's no fight. The fight is when somebody doesn't feel seen, doesn't feel acknowledged, doesn't feel respected. So the apologies is this surrogate for what's really wanted. And it's not a bad surrogate, meaning that it makes you feel good for a little while. It's like a sugar high or something like that. Okay, I feel like I won that or I'm in control for a moment. But it feels a shit ton better to be with somebody that they respect themselves and they respect you. They see themselves and they see you, and it just feels great. Whereas if somebody's respecting you but they're cowering, it doesn't feel great. It's not as good of a feeling, but it's better than feeling like a loser. So people go for it.

Yeah, that's interesting to bring the— to bring this notion of power struggles into apologies. And it almost seems like if you bring that into awareness, you can even apologize for the power struggle itself, which is something we've used when we've talked about fear triangle stuff. Like, hey, I'm I'm sorry for playing the victim with you. I'm sorry for playing the role of savior. You know, I'm sorry for projecting onto you that you are this way when in reality I'm actually this way. I've been exhibiting this behavior. There's this way that apologizing can be something that just drops you out of your own role, out of your own— yeah, whatever, whatever it is that you're stuck in.

Yeah, if I'm in a fight with somebody, I will stop and look for any way that I can apologize that's in integrity, that's empowered. I'll be like, okay, what can I— I'm in the fight, it means I'm responsible somehow. Okay, what is it that I need to— what is it, not that I need to, that I can apologize for that feels empowered? And I will apologize for it. So if I have that thought, man, immediately I'll do it, and it feels great, and it often just changes the entire conversation. I'm sorry, I don't want to be talking to you in this way. I'm sorry for being in a power struggle with you. That's not how I want to be with you. I'm sorry for raising my voice. That's not how I want to be with you. And I know you deserve better than that.

Yeah. And that can be one where there's various levels of self-recognition and shamelessness that you can discover because you could also be like, oh, okay, what Joe said was, when I'm in a fight with somebody, I'm going to look for an apology. What's an apology I can make? And it's like, oh, you know what? Yeah, I'm really sorry for putting up with all your victimy crap. For all these years.

Yeah. Or the opposite. I'm really sorry for being such a bad boyfriend. I'm gonna try harder. Yeah, that whole thing. Yeah. Right. Both of them don't work. Right.

Yeah. So there's like a buying of a story that can happen. It's like if your apology is buying some story, then you can go back to our episode on beliefs when the story falls apart and see what emotion might there really be underneath that. And if the apology brings that emotion, then you might actually be onto something.

And there's a quick hack, which is when you apologize, never use the word "you." Never make it about them. It's always about you.

Yeah.

You know, so when we do our exercises, we are always very clear, like, the word "you" is the— if you're using that, it's not a real apology.

Yeah, and that points to something else where if if it's for you and if it's about you. This reminds me of like of one way to see forgiveness where people talk about forgiveness being it's not for them. You don't forgive them. It's because, you know, you're letting them live rent-free in your head or whatever it is. The forgiveness is for you. It's for your own freedom, for your own purification. And I see that also just having a nice mirror here on the apology side. And what is it to just be apologizing for yourself and not to be trying to make anything happen in the other person.

I would say that there's a way of apologizing that you're not trying to make yourself or anybody else feel differently, which is one way. And then there's a way of apologizing which is doing it for yourself but not for them, not to make them feel differently. And then there's the apology of trying to make them feel differently. And if there's— the apology is just in the ownership of like, I, I want to acknowledge the truth of this situation. It's— it can be really powerful, and it can be really powerful to do it for you. What I've noticed, as I've like— the more and more the apology happens, it's not about me or them. The, the apology is— it's about freedom for both of us. It just creates freedom if you can do it empowered. It just creates far more freedom for everybody, and it's about freedom. It's not about it's not personal anymore, which seems weird, right? It's an apology. It feels like one of the most personal things, but it—

right, right. It's a very intimate thing.

It's a very intimate—

and then there's this way of doing it where it's absolutely not. It's actually just recognition, which is— this comes back to another thing we've talked about a lot, where there's this belief that a lot of us have that if you, if you see something that needs to change, there's something you have to do about it, something you have to do about it by tweaking your own consciousness by shifting the weights on which emotions are repressed or invited, and that there's something to do about it. Yeah, right. And really, like, the kind of apology that we're talking about here is just something that is shedding light on something, which reminds me of sort of the— there's this Hawaiian phrase, I'm gonna get it totally wrong, but it's ho'oponopono or something or other like that, which— okay, I'm getting that entirely wrong, but there's—

I think it's like, I love you, thank you, Um, yeah, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you. Yes.

And then there's another deeper version of that, which I don't know, I wish I could bring it up in the moment right now, but the translation to it is the light is brought to it, or something like that, where it's not that there's even a right or wrong, it's just that, oh, you know, uh, the light is brought to it, I now see.

Yes, that's right.

So I now see clearly what I did, I see clearly, more clearly what what the dynamic was here and my part in it. And there's no shame or wrong. Everything was just unfolding as it was going to because of the way that we are conditioned and the way that the situation played out with all of our history. And now I see more clearly, and that's it. Just seeing more clearly. Just the awareness.

Yeah, it's amazing, that question in self-transformation— what do I do next— how counterproductive it can be. Compared to just awareness and realization and, you know, just exploring and understanding. And, you know, you hear people oftentimes with that, they say, oh, I'm stuck in my head, you know, like, I'm stuck, or I get it, I get it, but I don't grok it, or my head gets it but my body doesn't, or I know I shouldn't smoke but yet I still do, some version of that thing. And so what do I do about it? And I'm always saying back, like, you don't fully understand it. If you fully understood it, you wouldn't do it. Like, there's just no way to if you fully understand it. So let's just work on the understanding of it instead of the doing, because you've been trying to do stuff over it for a decade. It hasn't worked. Let's just understand it more fully, right?

Yeah. And that smoking example, I've heard that a really good way to approach dropping the habit is just to mindfulness, just pay really close attention to what it feels like to smoke a cigarette and pay really close attention to what the sensations actually are and the taste and the flavor. And you just might find that it's actually not as, you know, that you'd actually been dissociating or suppressing some of the actual sensation to get something else and then shame locked that into place. And I think that could be true for any, any pattern that we tend to apologize for is what happens if you actually let yourself fully feel what it's like to be doing that thing. What does it really feel like to be arguing with your partner? What does it really feel like to be in trigger and abusing a coworker or an employee?

A couple things just that you brought up there. This goes way beyond apologies as well, and I'll give you an example in a second, but just on the smoking front or whatever bad habit, see what it's like if you're out there and you're like, I have a bad habit, I want to See what it's like to give yourself an upright apology for that thing on a daily basis. I'm sorry for hurting myself. I'm sorry for hurting you for smoking. This isn't how I want to be with you, or this isn't how I want to be with myself. Whatever feels good. Like, what is that like to really be in that empowered apology? See what it does to the habit. The other story recently that I had with a— it was with a young woman, and she was she was asking me about this feeling that she had. And she, you know, she was relatively young, so there wasn't like a whole bunch of pattern in place. And so she noticed that she was getting kind of power tripping by wrapping boys around her finger because she was very beautiful and she could wrap boys around. She was like, this doesn't, you know, I don't— this isn't how I want to be. And what was the, like, what's the solution? And I was like, just feel it. Next time you're doing it, just feel it. Feel it all the way through. Allow your, like, don't stop feeling any part of it. Have like the full and total experience of it. And 2 days later, I was talking to her again, and I was like, well, how'd it go? And she said, well, I saw myself doing it. I felt it all the way through. I was like, oh, and what happened? And she goes, well, I didn't figure anything out, but boy, I just stopped doing it. Didn't feel good. And that was it. Like, you know, and we think that we have to figure it out, and then we have to figure out an action plan and a strategy and And it's like, no, it's just about allowing yourself to feel it all the way through. And I think that really applies to apologies, is that if you're apologizing from an upright place, from an empowered position, it does require you to feel it.

Right. Which— and I could imagine somebody listening to this episode, or even maybe a lot of our episodes, where there's this theme of there's nothing to do, just feel it, just experience it. And then the part that wants to do something and really take action is frustrated, like, oh, like, well, I'm just supposed to— notice things. And, uh, it makes me think of something. I've been recently doing some morning pages where I just write for a couple pages every morning, whatever comes up. And I've been finding it to be really helpful for getting into, getting into what is underneath something. And I could— today, before we did this episode on apologies, I started kind of writing down various apologies for— apologies to myself, or just apologies to any, anything in my life, anybody in my life. And, uh, It sounds like you could, if you're so inclined to do something about this, you could do the introspection and write an apology or say an apology, say it into a mirror if you want to, and then feel what comes up. Do you feel shame? Well, then what is that shame? What's underneath the shame? Maybe write about that a little bit.

Yeah, it's kind of a weird thing because we're saying don't do stuff, but at the same time we've said, oh, here's an apology practice. Here's like the Page writing is something that we do during MasterClass every day, right? And MasterClass is full of action and feeling. Just to stop and feel is an action in some way. So it's the pointer of don't do anything is it's not that we're saying actually don't do anything. What we're saying is that trying to figure it out and getting an action plan and a strategy doesn't work as good as understanding and feeling. I think the more accurate way— it doesn't work as well, but also it can be useful. I mean, I wouldn't say don't do it at all, right?

Yeah. Or you could say that the action plan and the strategy will be effective to the extent that it is structured to bring you into yourself, into your feeling, into awareness.

That's even better said. Yeah, that's great.

A lot of our action plans are just ways to get out of the feeling.

Yeah, exactly. That's right.

Or to organize our life so that we don't have to hit that feeling again.

Yeah, that's right. Instead of learning to be free inside of the feeling.

So we've talked a lot about giving apologies and delivering them and sort of practicing and introspecting around them, and we haven't talked that much about receiving apologies.

No.

What it's like to receive the various kinds of apologies that we've talked about.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing. Some people are really good at receiving apologies. It's like, um, receiving compliments. A lot of people want apologies, but then they don't receive them, so they're constantly a hungry ghost. What I notice is that people who can receive them, which means that you're letting it— you're letting yourself feel it all the way through and bring up any emotion that it might come up. And when I say all the way through, it literally feels like I'm— I have armor up and I'm protecting myself, or I'm more like permeable and the thing can just move right through me. That's the experience that I have, and that when I make that pointer to people, they usually can get it. And if you can fully feel that apology all the way through, instead of saying, "Oh, don't feel bad," or, "Oh, you know, he doesn't mean it," or, you know, all the thousands of ways that people hold the apology back, then you can actually feel the relief and often some other emotions that come with it.

Right. It sounds like there's a distinction here as well between being permeable and letting the apology move through you and being somehow overtaken or bowled over by the apology or the energy of the apology. For example, if somebody delivers to you an apology with shame and you take on that shame and you feel that shame, and then that makes you feel like you've actually done something wrong, and then you find yourself in a, "No, I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry," kind of situation.

I would describe it slightly differently. I would describe it as if you feel the apology all the way through and let it permeate you, but don't buy the story.

Mm, yeah.

If you just feel it is like the only story that you have to buy into is here's this person acknowledging and trying to create connection, and you just feel that, feel that they're trying to take responsibility, or they're not, it's okay. Like they're trying to get you not to hit them, but whatever that is, you know, or hurt them. Whatever it is, to allow that full feeling to move through you is a remarkable thing. It's a great call out.

Yeah, I feel like sometimes it's a, it's a story that we might identify as a story, and sometimes there's just some emotional response. So if, if somebody apologizes to us in sort of a passive-aggressive way and they're like, yeah, I'm sorry, I've been sorry I let you do that, it was my fault that I let this happen, with a subtle implication that you're wrong or that you're bad And then there could be just energetically this feeling in you that you feel the feeling of the apology. You don't actually identify what it is in the words that is incorrect because you're in the story. You're not even seeing the story. But you can detect that somewhere in your body you're closing down and you're constricting. And then it's like, what is that constriction? What do I feel like I'm defending right now?

Yeah, I think that if you're constricting and defending, then that's when you know. That something's not. Meaning that if somebody does a passive-aggressive apology to me and they're like, "Yeah, I'm really sorry that I couldn't read your mind," let's be as an example, then if I feel that all the way through, if I allow that feeling all the way in my system and I don't take it personally, if I don't buy the story, then I easily can say something like, Oh wow, it feels like you still want me to be upset at something I've done. What are you feeling that I need to take responsibility for that I'm not taking responsibility for? It's when my constriction comes that I'm just like, okay, yeah, sure.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, thanks for that apology, you know, or whatever response that I would have.

Yeah, and I could even see the exact words of the response you had, if there's constriction, can still sound defensive.

Totally.

Like, yeah, okay, well, tell me what I'm doing wrong then.

Yeah, yeah. Or, yeah, okay, yeah, I see that I'm doing something wrong. What did I do? Like, yeah, it's the tone. It is the shame that you're saying it with, the uprightness that you're saying it with that matters, or the defensiveness. So yeah, I would say just to sum it up, to receive an apology, the way to do it is the same way that you give an apology, in your empowered state, allowing it to be felt all the way through.

Yeah, beautiful. That sounds like an episode.

A pleasure to be with you as always, Brett. I look forward to— we get to talk next week too.

Yeah, I'm excited.

Really excited as well. Have we done one on shame?

Oh no, there's been a coaching session on shame, but I don't think we've actually done— we could do— we've been— yeah, it's been in our list to do, to do one on shame for the emotion series.

Let's do that. So that we can leave that as a little bit of a teaser for people who want to learn more about shame.

All right, wonderful.

All right, talk to you soon.

All right, you too.

Bye.

Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us on your podcast app. We'd love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.