Giving difficult news: key phrases

I had to call my manager last week to tell her I'd missed an important deadline. " There's no easy way to say this ," I told her, and I explained what went wrong. I knew it's not what you want to hear , especially after all the pressure we'd had that month. I wanted to be upfront about the real reason rather than give a vague excuse. I tried to soften the blow by telling her I'd already started wo