Tool 29 · Develop yourself
This exercise does not assume the conversation should happen, does not label the other person, and will not hand you a script.
A guided 15 to 20 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.
An outcome, an understanding, or simply to have said it. Those are three different conversations and people prepare for the wrong one.
Some conversations are correctly avoided. That is a real answer here.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
The conversation people rehearse is almost never the conversation they need to have. They rehearse the version with the good ending, where the other person understands immediately and says the right thing. That version is not available and preparing for it is why the real one goes badly.
The most useful question I know here is what you want from it. If you want an outcome, you are negotiating and you should prepare accordingly. If you want to be understood, you are asking for something they may not be able to give. If you simply want to have said it, the conversation is much shorter than the one you have been dreading, and you can have it this week.
I would also take seriously the possibility that you should not have it. Not every unsaid thing needs saying. Avoidance is sometimes judgement, and I would rather you decided that deliberately than kept rehearsing.
If you do have it, say the hard part early. Long preambles do not soften anything. They just give the other person time to work out that something is coming.
What you'll get
01
The real subject
02
What you want from it
03
Whether to have it
04
Your first sentence
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
What now?
01 · Save it
What the conversation is actually about.
02 · Test it
Say the hardest sentence within the first thirty seconds. Preamble makes it worse, not gentler.
If safety is part of this
If you are afraid of the person, or if there has been control or violence, this is not a conversation to prepare. Your safety comes first and specialist support will do more than any preparation.
What I would do
Find the real subject before drafting anything. It is rarely the rota.
Decide what you want from it. Wanting an outcome and wanting to have said it are different conversations.
Test whether it should happen. Some avoided conversations are correctly avoided.
Write one sentence, not a script. Scripts fail in the first thirty seconds.
Say the hardest thing in the first two sentences, because the longer preamble runs the worse it lands.
Test it
Ask what you would do if they agreed immediately. If you do not want the thing you would get, the subject is wrong.
Ask what the avoidance is protecting. There is usually something worth naming.
Say the first sentence out loud once. If you cannot, it is not yours yet.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that you are avoiding a difficult conversation and should be braver. Often the evidence says something else. Sometimes the conversation is not the instrument: you need to make a decision and having the conversation first is a way of asking somebody else to make it for you. Sometimes what you want is not the outcome you have rehearsed but simply to have said it out loud, which is a smaller and much more achievable conversation. And sometimes the avoidance is correct, because the person cannot hear it and the cost is real.
Think about this
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →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
The Dance of Anger
Harriet Lerner
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
John Gottman
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.
Book
Harriet Lerner
Lerner writes about families as systems, where one person steadily doing more quietly arranges for somebody else to do less. It explains the pattern most people notice late: you become competent, then indispensable, then angry with people for depending on you in exactly the way you taught them to.
Book
John Gottman
Relevant when the exercise identifies a partner relationship as an area you want to work on.