I often get this as a compliment. But sometimes it also backfires on me.

I accidentally hurt someone’s feelings. I asked for someone else to help with something, and the person who usually handles it interpreted my request as “not thinking they were up for the job”, when really it was because one person was based in NY, and the other person was based in the place we were going.

When you find out you hurt someone else’s feelings, it’s easy to get defensive and rationalize what you did. But what I reminded myself was that it didn’t matter what my intent was, it mattered how the other person felt.

So I owned that. I was going to be out of the office, so I sent an email apologizing and explaining why I did what I did and that it didn’t have anything to do with the individual’s competency. And hopefully everything’s ok. But I could go to sleep knowing I did everything that I thought I needed to do.

It’s easy to ignore and rationalize when you find out you hurt someone else’s feelings. But if you can fix it, why wouldn’t you?

Why the picture? If you found out you had hurt a child’s feelings, you wouldn’t hesitate for a second to fix it. Why is it so hard when we’re adults?