'I made a lot of mistakes; I didn't have the ability to stop,' is an Admission That Won't Help

People are not going to believe we lack the ability to stop poor behavior

Owning up to errors is admirable even if one is not offered forgiveness or restoration of trust, relationships or all that was once enjoyed because of that connection.

What is less impressive is communicating that, “I didn’t have the ability to stop” the behavior that damaged trust and harmed people and relationships.

The problem with that type of admission is it will almost always be viewed as an excuse, lie and an offensive one. It will result in additional distrust and anger and even less credibility, preventing whatever good we hope to inspire.

Choose not to block healing by communicating some form of, “I didn’t have the ability to stop…” because it’s received as, “I didn’t want to stop but here we are so I guess I’m, I don’t know, sorry maybe? We cool?”

People expect fellow human beings to have a maturely developed level of self control, especially when it comes to actions that cause harm to them or others. It doesn’t matter whether or not we believe we didn’t cause offense or harm or that their reaction is overblown.

When we communicate like this we’re going to remain in negative judgment in their minds because we’re the ones who acted in what is perceived or factually was lesser character or poor character.

Communicating that we didn’t have the ability to stop ourselves from unethical or immoral actions is going to sound like rationalization, a cop out, selfishness and deceit in form a lie to cover it up.

We will be judged as not taking responsibility.

We don’t like it when others react or respond to us in that manner. We can’t or shouldn’t expect other people to receive it favorably when we do it either.

Compassion, regret, honesty, courage and working harder and smarter on our self control can move us from bad habits and problematic discontent with others to increased trust and better human interactions.

Michael Toebe writes “Reputation Notes” and is the founder at Reputation Quality, a practice that serves and assists successful people and organizations in further building reputation as an asset and responsibly, ethically protecting, restoring or reconstructing it.

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