APOLOGIES State of sorry: Don't delay in showing contrition

By MARGO HARAKAS
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
You know how to apologize, don't you? Just part your lips and heave a sigh and say the words, "I'm sorry."
Should be easy. But getting the words out means swallowing your pride and admitting a mistake. So you dither, you dather and you delay. Sometimes until a relationship has been irreparably broken.
"An apology," says Peter Post, director of the Emily Post Institute and author of "Essential Manners for Men: What To Do, When To Do It and WHY" (HarperResource, $19.95), "is a conscious willingness to acknowledge that something has happened that you need to take responsibility for."
Doing it right, says Post, is a two-step process. First comes the acknowledgement that you've made a mistake. Second is "providing a solution to the problem you've caused. In other words, what are you going to do about it?"
Why is it so hard?
What is it that makes apologies so difficult to deliver?
"An apology," says Kenneth Goodman, co-director of the University of Miami ethics programs, "is simultaneously an admission of weakness, of failure, of not measuring up. And as human beings we're not good at that."
Also, from a strategy standpoint, he notes, "As soon as you've apologized, you've lost deniability."
Norman Wise, senior pastor of First Church West, Plantation, Fla., says, "It takes humility to get us to the place where we can look in the mirror and say we didn't do the best we could have done and that we should have done better."
Fear that the apology will be rejected further complicates the matter. Those of whom we ask forgiveness, says Wise, often feel "a just right to be angry." Why forgive, they assert, when the offender admits wrongdoing?
"What we would say," Wise argues, "is justice does demand that a price be paid. But we demand something more than justice. We must have mercy and mercy transcends justice." Mercy profoundly recognizes the wound, "but provides pardon to the one who wounded us."
So how best do we go about this business of apologizing?
Step by step
First off, advises Post, the great-grandson of Emily Post, the sooner the apology is issued the better. "Think about it. You've done something that someone else is festering over. The longer you wait, the less sincere it seems."
Timing is essential, agrees etiquette queen Letitia Baldridge, author of "New Manners for New Times" (Scribner, $35). When it comes to personal relationships, she advises, "An apology should be made in front of the right person at the right time." And preferably in private. You don't bear down on somebody at lunch or burst into a boardroom to say you're sorry.
Also, don't stint on contrition, Baldridge says. "I believe in being effusive and dramatic. I have managed to keep many a job because of that," she says.
She has been known to apologize so abjectly that "the person I've wronged has patted me on the shoulder and said, 'That's all right, that's all right.""