Some of us out there have a bit of trouble sounding strong and sure in our communications. Myriad “umm”s and “well”s may pockmark your speech, or perhaps your emails are littered with phrases like, “I think” and “I’m sorry, but”. These communication dampeners may make you feel like you’re being careful, but all they do, in the best of scenarios, is make you sound weak-willed and unsure. Some people are even annoyed by them, wishing you’d just get to the point. Now, there exists a Chrome extension, known as Just Not Sorry, to help you do just that.
As you can see in the picture above, the extension searches for weak-sounding phrases in your message and highlights them as if they’ve been mistyped or they’re grammatical errors. When a phrase is hovered over, a quote is given to explain why it’s weak and should be removed. Further advice isn’t offered, leaving those who rely on this sort of communication to completely rewrite their emails with this advice in mind, but in most cases the phrases in question are only filler and can be removed without much fuss. Perhaps there are those out there who will download this extension, but not have the resolve to use it. With how clearly weak phrases are shown, these individuals could study their own communications and figure out how to eliminate these barriers and filler phrases without coming across any differently than they intend to.
The extension was created by Tami Reiss, CEO of Cyrus Innovations, a software company and consulting firm with a special focus on female entrepreneurs, visionaries and leaders. Tami’s experiences both at Cyrus and in prior ventures led her to create this extension after seeing too many weak email messages result in the sender not being heard out or getting what they wanted. Reiss believes this issue particularly impacts women in business, especially entrepreneurs. Reiss writes, “We had all inadvertently fallen prey to a cultural communication pattern that undermined our ideas…” Reiss also stated that this extension, in beta testing, caused most users to not only send stronger emails, but to begin rethinking their communication in general.