Tool 86 · Develop yourself
Separate what you have seen from what you are concluding.
A guided 14 to 18 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.
Asking directly does not make things worse.
Who else already knows?
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
When people are worried about somebody, they usually arrive with a conclusion and very little else.
So I ask what they've actually seen. Times, occasions, things that were said. The conclusion can wait.
Half the time the observations settle it. Either there's a pattern or there isn't.
And the thing people are most afraid of, asking directly, is almost always the right move. You cannot put an idea in somebody's head by asking how they are.
What you'll get
01
Observation
02
Inference
03
Urgency
04
One sentence
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
What you have seen.
02 · Test it
Say one plain sentence: I have noticed you have seemed different, how are you.
What I would do
Write the observations down without interpreting them.
Write the inferences underneath, separately.
Decide honestly how urgent this is.
Say one plain sentence to them rather than planning a conversation.
Tell somebody else if the concern is serious.
Test it
What have you actually seen?
What are you inferring?
How urgent is this, honestly?
The alternative
The usual reading is that something must be wrong. Sometimes the observations describe an ordinary difficult month and the worry belongs to the person carrying it rather than to the situation. The reverse also happens. Somebody has been talking themselves out of a clear pattern for half a year because they did not want to intrude.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →What helped you?
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Finished the exercise?
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If you are already helping
Further thinking
Difficult Conversations
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen
Relatives of the Impaired Elderly: Correlates of Feelings of Burden
Steven Zarit
Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis
Stephen Karpman
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
Steven Zarit
The work behind the caregiver burden scale. It makes the load measurable, which matters when one person is quietly carrying most of it.
Article
Stephen Karpman
The original seven page paper that introduced the drama triangle, free to read and much less confident than the workshop version of it that followed. The Rescuer position is the part worth your attention: help that solves a problem the other person could have solved, and so removes the occasion for them to learn.
Book
Adam Grant
Grant's finding that givers occupy both the top and the bottom of most performance distributions is the practical heart of this. What separates them is not generosity but whether the giving is bounded. If you have ever concluded that you should do more while quietly running out of road, read this before you add anything.
Book
Russ Harris
The plainest introduction to acceptance and commitment therapy, where values are treated as directions you keep moving in rather than rules you either obey or break. It also makes the case that rigid rule-following, even about admirable things, is one of the more reliable ways to make yourself miserable.