Describe a person who gave you useful advice

The person who comes to mind is my first manager, a woman called Chi Ha, who I worked under for about two years straight out of university. The advice itself was fairly simple, almost disappointingly so when she first said it — she told me, after I'd apologised for the third time in one meeting for a mistake that honestly wasn't even that serious, that I should stop apologising for things before anyone had actually decided they needed an apology. She said it fairly bluntly, over coffee rather than in some formal review, which probably made it land harder than if it had been written in a performance document somewhere. At the time I remember feeling slightly stung by it, because I thought I was just being conscientious, but the more I sat with it, the more I realised she was right — I was pre-emptively apologising out of anxiety, not because the situations actually called for it, and it was making me sound less competent than I actually was. It's helped me in fairly concrete ways since then — I catch myself now, mid-sentence sometimes, and just state the fact instead of leading with an apology, and I noticed fairly quickly that people started taking my updates more seriously as a result. It's a small piece of advice, in the grand scheme of things, but it's the one that's actually changed how I communicate at work, more than any of the more formal training I've had.