I’d like to be the kind of person who doesn’t hedge.
The kind who can ask for what she needs in one sentence. Who doesn’t apologize for sending the email she had every right to send, or preface her question by announcing it might be a stupid one.
I am not yet that person. I’m someone who is still capable of writing sorry to bother you to a coworker I have known for nine years.
It’s an approval-seeking habit, and I’ve been curious for a while about how people get to the other side of it. I assumed it was internal—a confidence, a self-trust, something psychological that arrives one day and rearranges everything. What I’ve slowly noticed, watching the people who seem to have made it, is that the shift isn’t really internal first. It’s a language thing.
A specific small vocabulary drops out of your speech when you stop running on other people’s approval. The phrases just stop showing up. Below are six of them. Most people will catch themselves still using at least three.
1. “Sorry to bother you.”
The pre-apology for the ask itself.
The email starts with it. The text starts with it. The Slack message starts with it. Often the ask is genuinely small—a question, a quick favor, a heads-up about something the recipient probably needs to know anyway—and the apology still arrives first, in front of the ask, before anyone has indicated they’re being bothered at all.
What the phrase is doing isn’t expressing regret. It’s preemptively diminishing your right to take up space in another person’s day. A piece on how unnecessary qualifiers like “just” and “sorry” undermine the speaker before she’s said anything names this directly—the language itself shapes how the message is received, and softening the doorway in advance makes everything after it feel smaller.
People who have stopped seeking approval don’t open this way. The ask comes in plain. Hey, do you have ten minutes this afternoon for a quick question about the report? That’s a whole sentence. There’s no doorway to apologize for. The recipient reads it, takes it as a normal ask, and either says yes or says I’m slammed today, can we do tomorrow. Nothing is bothered. Nothing was bothering.
2. “This is probably a stupid question, but…”
Most of the time, the question isn’t stupid. Most of the time it’s a reasonable question, asked by a competent adult, in a setting where questions are normal and expected. Someone in a meeting raises her hand, and before the question comes out of her mouth, the qualifier arrives first, doing the apologizing in advance.
The disclaimer isn’t really about the question. It’s about the asker—about lowering the stakes of asking by lowering the value of the contribution before anyone else can lower it for her. If the question turns out to be embarrassing, she has already labeled it that way. If it turns out to be good, she gets to be pleasantly surprised.
People who have done this work just ask the question. They have figured out that the cost of asking a real question that turns out to be obvious is much smaller than the cost of pre-discounting every contribution they make. They take the small risk. The room moves on.
More Bolde Stories
3. “I just thought…”
The most invisible one. The “just” is doing the entire job.
Watch any sentence in which “just” appears and you’ll find a softener. I just wanted to check. I just thought I’d mention. I just wonder if maybe. The word is functioning as a small linguistic shrug—a pre-emptive reduction of the importance of whatever follows it.
Without the “just,” the sentences underneath are direct. I wanted to check. I thought I’d mention. I wonder if maybe. Same meaning, different volume. The “just” is the audio knob being turned down before anybody at the table has indicated the volume was too loud.
People who have stopped softening don’t notice the difference at first. The “just” stopped showing up at some point without their permission, and the sentences came out the size they actually were. They didn’t get less polite. They just got smaller.
4. “Does that make sense?”
Asked at the end of an explanation that made perfect sense.
Sometimes the question is a real one—a genuine check-in to confirm clarity. Often it isn’t. Often it’s a reflex, a verbal tic that has attached itself to the end of nearly every confident sentence, asking the listener to confirm that what they just heard was permissible.
The deeper work the phrase is doing is outsourcing the verdict. The speaker has just communicated something clearly, and instead of trusting that she communicated it clearly, she’s asking the other person to weigh in on whether she succeeded. The question is doing the work of a small bow at the end of a sentence.
The people who have stopped doing this don’t need to. They said the thing. They trust the thing landed. If it didn’t, the other person would say so. The silence that follows a clear explanation is not, it turns out, a sign that the explanation failed. It’s often just the silence of someone thinking.
5. “No worries if not!”
This phrase is appended to almost every ask, releasing the recipient from any obligation before they’ve had a chance to even consider the ask.
The exclamation point is part of the giveaway. It’s emotional pre-cleanup—making sure that if the answer is no, neither party has to feel anything about it. The asker has already absorbed the rejection in advance. The recipient is being given an easy escape route they didn’t ask for.
The cost of this is that the ask itself gets watered down. A real request from one adult to another doesn’t need a built-in escape hatch. Research on the practice of more direct communication describes this as one of the small habits that erodes both self-respect and the credibility of the request, by signaling that the asker doesn’t fully expect or feel entitled to a yes.
People who have stopped approval-seeking ask plainly. They trust the other person to say no if no is the answer. They don’t pre-soothe the rejection that hasn’t happened.
More Bolde Stories
6. “I could be totally wrong, but…”
The take-back is built into the take.
A clear thought is about to be expressed. Before it can be expressed, the speaker first disclaims it—signaling, in advance, that she has no investment in being correct, that she will retreat at the first sign of pushback, that the opinion she’s about to offer is offered on permanent loan.
The phrase looks like humility. It isn’t, quite. Humility is the willingness to be wrong after considering the evidence. This is a surrender, offered before any disagreement has even arrived. It’s a way of saying the opinion before claiming the right to hold it.
The harder version is to say what you think and let it sit there. To not announce, in advance, that you’ll abandon it if challenged. That isn’t arrogance. It’s a different posture, and the people who have settled into it are the ones whose meetings actually move forward, because their contributions arrive whole instead of pre-shrunk.
The phrases above are easy to say. They feel like politeness. They feel like consideration for the other person.
What’s harder to feel, until you’ve gone without them for a while, is that they were never really doing the work you thought they were doing. They were doing a different job—a smaller, more private one, about keeping yourself safe inside other people’s reactions.
The first few times you don’t use them, you’ll feel rude. You won’t be. You’ll just be standing the size you always were, and the room will adjust faster than you expected.
