Why is it so hard for people to take accountability? Are the words —

• I'm sorry
• My bad
• or I apologise.

-really that hard to utter. Life would be a million times simpler if people stopped getting hung up over two words: I'm sorry. And I know, I know — I'm one to talk. I used to pride myself over the fact that I never said sorry — thinking that my lack of usage meant that I was never wrong. I spent so much of my childhood and young adult years believing that I was a master manipulator because I never allowed myself to be held accountable for shitty behaviour. That my amazing ability to weather the cold shoulder and to outlast the silent treatment — absolved me from any lingering guilt or deserved apologies.

Until I became a supervisor and realised that those two words don't cost me a damn thing to utter.

I'm sorry is the difference between hurt feelings for a day and lingering mal à l'aise. People are so much easier to work with when they aren't carrying the baggage of your supposed emotional crimes on their back.

So when I tell a staff that the email that they sent was unclear. That their email led to a problem at work. That their lack of communication and the subsequent result of said miscommunication caused a rupture in their relationship — and therefore the relationship needs to be repaired between said coworker.....know that I'm not being a dick to be a dick, but I'm coming from a place where I know it's shitty to admit to wrong doing, but sometimes we must put on our big girl panties and fucking do it anyways.

And I know there are nuances to "sorry" — I know the word is easier to say when you have a good relationship with the harmed individual and harder to say when you, yourself, hold lingering pain that the harmed individual has caused before.....

I know this — and I still expect you to be a decent individual and make amends when you fuck up. I do it. It wasn't easy for me — my first year as a supervisor. I look back now and I realise that many of the problems that I had my first year were due to posturing and believing that saying sorry was admitting weakness. That each sorry that I uttered seeped away spoonfuls of my power. It really didn't.

I guess my goal for this blog would be to post regularly, honestly, and freely about my life. Talk about the topics I'm afraid to mention to my best friend, that I'm afraid to think about when I'm alone.

An ex-girlfriend of mine tried to teach me this lesson several years before I became supervisor and I couldn't hear it. Not every conflict is worth burning bridges over to avoid accountability. Sometimes you're faced with conflict that you must push back on and fight — but most of the time the conflict are just situations that need a tidy resolution.

If you tell your coworker that you're going to do something and then fail to inform them that you can't anymore, and this causes a problem the day of the event because this item wasn't picked up — then it's on you to make amends. That's it.

Olivia