Tool 87 · Develop yourself
No verdict, and no view on staying or leaving. What was broken, and what you need now.
A guided 18 to 22 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
You do not have to decide this week.
What do you need, as distinct from what you are being asked for?
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
When trust goes, everybody around you has an opinion within about a day, and most of them are answering a different question.
The question they ask is whether you are staying. That is rarely the question you are actually able to answer yet.
What helps first is much duller. What happened, what it broke, what it has cost you, and what you need this week.
Being deceived is not evidence that your judgement is poor. People who are good at deceiving are good at it.
You are allowed to decide nothing for a while. Very few of these decisions get better for being made in the first fortnight.
What you'll get
01
What broke
02
The cost
03
What you need
04
What can wait
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Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
What was broken.
02 · Test it
Tell one person you trust, in ordinary words, without asking them what to do.
What I would do
Say what happened once, without rehearsing the whole history.
Name what was actually broken.
Work out what you need this week rather than what you should feel.
Separate the decision from the pressure to make one.
Take one step that does not depend on the other person.
Test it
What was actually broken?
What do you need this week?
What does not have to be decided today?
The alternative
The usual reading is that the question is whether to stay or go, and that it has to be answered soon. Often the real question is what somebody needs in order to think at all, and the decision improves enormously for being left alone for a few weeks. The reverse also happens. Somebody spends two years deciding, and the deciding is the thing doing the damage.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.
Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Further thinking
On Apology
Aaron Lazare
An exploration of the structure of effective apologies
Roy Lewicki, Beth Polin and Robert Lount
Forgiveness and Health
Loren Toussaint, Everett Worthington and David Williams
Book
Aaron Lazare
Lazare, a psychiatrist who studied apology for decades, is precise about what an apology has to contain and about how often it is offered to relieve the person giving it. The distinction between acknowledging the harm and explaining yourself runs through the whole book and it is the distinction most people get wrong.
Article
Roy Lewicki, Beth Polin and Robert Lount
The study tests apology components separately and finds that acknowledgement of responsibility does most of the work, while the expression of regret that people tend to lead with does the least. If you are drafting something difficult, it tells you what to put first.
Book
Loren Toussaint, Everett Worthington and David Williams
A serious survey of what forgiveness does and does not do, which includes the critique that forgiveness interventions can push people towards premature reconciliation. Worth reading precisely because it refuses to sell the idea. Whether to forgive anybody is your decision and this helps you make it with the evidence in front of you.
Book
John Gottman
Relevant when the exercise identifies a partner relationship as an area you want to work on.
Article
Kristina Scharp
Scharp's work shows estrangement as an ongoing process of distancing rather than a single break, which is why contact can resume without anything being resolved.