Thank you

Two simple words.

We’re generally polite. We’re generally grateful. We use them all the time. Thank you to the clerk at Trader Joe’s. Thank you Donna the UPS woman who drops a package at our front door. Thank you for Charlie’s mom for bringing my daughter home from the soccer clinic.

In our Girls' Leadership workshop this week we talked about these two words in depth.

To set the scene: the most important thing to girls is relationships, their friendships. That's what they like best about school.

So then consider this: what do you say when someone offers you an apology? Most likely you say, “it’s okay” or “no big deal.” Something along those lines. We say this because we want to get past the conflict that brought about the apology in the first place. Really, though, most of the time it’s not okay at that very moment. We need time to digest it, to forgive and to move past it.

What we should be saying instead is “Thank You.”