I Knocked A Man Out Of His Shoe
Last week I came off the subway late for an appointment and took the stairs with the confidence of someone who still thinks she's twenty-five, leaping two at a time. Halfway up, I clipped the back of a man's sneaker and his foot came clean out of the shoe. He wobbled, I wobbled, and for one long second I was certain I had toppled an elderly stranger on concrete stairs, in front of a full audience of commuters, with no visible safety net.
He stayed upright. I stopped, apologized more times than was necessary, and made sure he was really alright. Then I speed walked off, mortified and still late.
A minute later he caught up with me, proving he was the spry one in this story. I braced for a scolding, the kind of behavioral warning I hadn't received since a lifeguard blew his whistle at me for running by the pool when I was a kid. Instead, he thanked me for stopping. "At least you apologized," he said. "You'd be surprised how many people just don't say sorry anymore."
I was surprised, mostly that his surprise at a basic apology had outrun his annoyance at a stranger who had just de-shoed him on a staircase. He had every reason to chase me down about the collision, and he chased me down about the apology instead.
You know I talk a lot about the standing ovation, the moment you've prepared for when the lights come up and you deliver to an audience. I love that moment and I'll keep talking about it, but every show also has a backstage, where you're tired, rushing between cues, and assuming nobody is watching. People often decide who you really are there, since it's the one place nobody is performing.
Most of us prepare for the spotlight. We rehearse how we'll introduce ourselves, or what we'll say before the meeting, how we want to come across, the point we need to convey. Much of my work is helping people do exactly that, and it matters. What we rarely rehearse is the other consideration in these interactions, how we make someone else feel in those moments. The man on the stairs had no stake in my appointment and no reason to think well of me. He still walked away with a story (and thankfully he quite literally walked away to tell it) and in it I'm the woman who stopped to apologize.
There's research on how much a small acknowledgment carries. In 2014, Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School and Hengchen Dai and Maurice Schweitzer published studies on superfluous apologies, saying sorry for something that clearly isn't your fault. In one, an actor approached strangers at a rainy train station and asked to borrow their phone. When he opened with "I'm sorry about the rain," forty-seven percent handed it over. When he simply asked, only nine percent did. The researchers traced the effect to empathic concern. People trusted him more because, for a moment, he had considered them.
Consideration is what the man on the stairs responded to. For about thirty seconds, his foot and his dignity mattered more than my calendar. When I think about the people and places I keep returning to, that feeling is usually the reason. Someone noticed me when they had every excuse not to.
These moments are small enough to throw away, which is why they stand out when someone keeps them. The colleague who sees you walk into a room where you know no one and pulls you into the conversation, the person who brings up a point you made in a meeting a week later, so you know it landed. I'm as guilty as anyone of answering a thoughtful text with a thumbs-up, when "thank you for following up" takes about four more seconds and lands completely differently.
So this week, outside of the on stage moment I've prepared for, I'm choosing one person in the room I'll make more comfortable and one thing someone said that I'll name back to them later. Nobody applauds backstage, which is exactly why people remember how you behaved there.
For the record, I'm still taking the stairs too fast. I'm just watching other people's heels now. Apologies in advance!
From Your Biggest Champion,
Nicole
