Thank You for Waiting
What happens when you stop apologizing for your existence.
A client showed up 50-minutes late to a one-hour session.
I was a personal trainer. We had ten minutes left. And at the end of it, I apologized to them. For not having more time to give.
I had been waiting for 50-minutes. And I was the one saying sorry.
I didn’t do it out of fear. I didn’t strategize it.
It was completely automatic, the words were out of my mouth before I’d made any decision at all. Somewhere inside of me, my M.U.D. (misguided unconscious decisions) had an equation that compared me to others and automatically found me lacking.
Within that M.U.D. lived something I hadn’t consciously chosen to believe: this is my fault. I should have been able to fix it. If I were only more, I could still make a difference.
That’s not an apology. That’s a self-referential balance sheet.
The reflexive I’m sorry is one of the most common patterns I see in people-pleasers.
Not a real apology, the genuine one you offer when you’ve actually done something wrong. That’s the one that matters.
I mean the other one. The automatic one. The one that comes out when someone asks you to repeat yourself and you say sorry before you answer.
The one you say when you need to squeeze past someone on a sidewalk.
The one I said to a client who had wasted both our time and somehow, in my nervous system, that translated to: I am less than. I am last in line.
What’s underneath that reflex isn’t combativeness or weakness. It’s an identity that got built, slowly, in response to real experiences, around the belief that your presence, your needs, your time, your very existence requires constant justification.
Your value has to be earned.
You don’t just decide to stop being that person.
But you can start noticing the reports you’re filing.
For a long time I also couldn’t accept a compliment without immediately deflecting it.
If someone said something kind about my work, I’d offer a counter-argument. Oh, it wasn’t really that good. I could have done it better. Here is what I didn’t do well...
I thought accepting a compliment meant agreeing with it. And agreeing with it felt arrogant. Like I was placing myself above the person giving it which conflicts with the M.U.D. that says I am last in line, I am less than.
What I didn’t understand then: rejecting a compliment doesn’t make you humble. It makes you unavailable for appreciation. You build a wall so that nothing good can get in, including the experience of being seen.
The shift I eventually made was small. A linguistic change. But it changed something real.
Instead of I’m sorry I’m late, I started saying thank you for waiting.
Instead of deflecting a compliment, I started saying thank you and allowing myself to receive it.
Same situations. Completely different identity speaking.
I’m sorry embodies a worthiness report. Thank you owns the moment as something you were allowed to be part of.
When you say thank you for waiting, you’re not pretending the lateness didn’t happen. You’re acknowledging the other person’s generosity instead of prosecuting yourself for coming up short.
You go from I am the problem to I am worth waiting for. That’s not a semantic trick. That’s a different relationship to your own existence.
I run Story Circles inside The Permission Experiment. It’s a process built around three questions:
What’s the struggle?
What have you been making it mean?
What’s the gift, the opportunity inside that struggle?
This week, someone in the room named her pattern out loud for the first time: decades of automatic apologizing, traced back to its origins. And when she named it, we all recognized it. Not because it’s unusual, because it’s all too common. Because most of us who grew up learning to make ourselves small have some version of this running.
Recognizing that is the beginning.
You can’t change a pattern you haven’t seen. And you can’t see it clearly until you stop defending it, until you’re willing to ask what the I’m sorry is actually for.
What worthiness report it’s filing.
What it costs you every time you perpetuate the old pattern.
Here’s what I know from the other side of that pattern:
The version of me who apologized to the client who was 50-minutes late, she was doing the best she could with the identity she had. That pattern protected something, once. I’m not here to be hard on her.
But I’m also not interested in going back.
Thank you for waiting changed things. Not because the words are magic.
Because the words pointed at an identity that was already starting to form, one that didn’t require constant justification. One that could receive appreciation without arguing with it.
One that understood that the opposite of apologizing for your existence isn’t arrogance.
It’s just being here. Fully. Without the never-ending apologizing.
That’s available to you too. It takes work, real work, identity-level work, not just swapping phrases.
But it starts with noticing what you’ve been filing.
If this resonates and you want to do the deeper work, the kind that actually changes the identity underneath the pattern, not just the behavior on top of it, The Permission Experiment waitlist is open. It’s a 12-week small group program, and the next cohort forms later this year. You can get on the list [here] or just send me a message and I’ll tell you more.
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Great article! I really resonated with “Somewhere inside of me… an equation… automatically found me lacking.” This is GOLD. To notice our internal patterns is life-changing. Literally!!!! Thanks for the article. It has made me think about other patterns we hold etc.. such as low self esteem. I am now thinking about that equation. (also love the equation language) :)
Great issue you've addressed here, Nicola! The mindless, automatic "sorry" can indeed be ubiquitous - I hear it (and say it) often. Replacing it with gratitude is a brilliant shift. Being boldly and unapologetically myself feels infinitely better than sheepishly "sorrying" my way through the day. Shifting the pattern, one response at a time, restores proper self-valuation, I agree!