Tool 83 · Develop yourself
Two requests, side by side, before anybody compromises.
A guided 15 to 19 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.
Same direction, different speed, is not a conflict.
What have you never actually asked for?
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
A lot of conflict is two people describing positions rather than requests.
A position is what you say you want. A request is what would actually have to happen. They're rarely the same size.
When you write both requests on one page, the overlap is usually bigger than either person thought, and the real conflict is smaller and clearer.
Occasionally the requests genuinely point in opposite directions. That's worth knowing early rather than late.
What you'll get
01
Two requests
02
The overlap
03
The real conflict
04
What to ask for
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
Your request, clearly.
02 · Test it
Write both requests on one piece of paper.
What I would do
Write both requests down, one line each.
Strip out the history and the justification.
Mark the overlap first.
Be honest about what is not negotiable for you.
Make the one request you have only ever implied.
Test it
What are you asking for, in one sentence?
Where do the two overlap?
What have you never actually asked for?
The alternative
The usual reading is that two people want incompatible lives. Often they want the same thing at different speeds, and the disagreement is about sequence rather than direction. The reverse also happens. Two people describe a shared plan and the requests underneath it point in opposite directions, and pretending otherwise costs years.
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.
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Finished the exercise?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Further thinking
Difficult Conversations
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen
Perceived Partner Responsiveness
Harry Reis
The All-or-Nothing Marriage
Eli Finkel
Book
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen
The central idea is that every difficult conversation is three conversations at once: what happened, how everybody feels, and what it says about who we are. Most conversations go wrong because people prepare for the first and are ambushed by the third. Reading it before you say anything will change your opening sentence.
Article
Harry Reis
Reis argues that closeness rests on whether somebody feels understood, valued and cared for by the way you respond to them. It gives you a behavioural test for a quality usually described in feelings.
Book
Eli Finkel
Finkel shows how much modern couples ask of one partner, and why relationships can feel like failures when they are simply carrying more than any single relationship once had to.
Book
Henry Cloud and John Townsend
The book that put the word into general use, and it carries a strong prescriptive tone that will not suit everybody. Take the part that lasts: the distinction between what is genuinely yours to carry and what you have taken on because nobody else would. That question does more work than any amount of language about limits.
Book
John Gottman
Relevant when the exercise identifies a partner relationship as an area you want to work on.