You are not too sensitive. You are running a fast, invisible piece of machinery that turns ambiguous events into statements about your worth - and it can be interrupted. Somebody replies to everyone in the thread except you. Somebody uses a full stop where you expected an exclamation mark. Nothing has actually happened, and by the time you notice, you are four sentences into a story about what it means about you. Most books on this tell you to stop caring what people think. That advice is not achievable and it is not even desirable - caring what people think is how you learn to be a decent colleague and friend. This book does something different. It shows you the actual mechanism, and then gives you four questions, in a fixed order, that stop it. THE FOUR QUESTIONS 1. What actually happened? Only what a camera would have recorded. 2. What am I adding? The difference between your account and the footage. 3. What else would explain it? Three alternatives, written down, at least one boring. 4. What would I do if the boring explanation were true? And then do that. Ninety seconds in writing. Twenty in your head, once it is familiar. The order is the active ingredient, and starting at question three - which is where everybody starts - is why this usually fails. WHAT'S INSIDE - The three-dimension model of attribution that explains why the same event ruins one person's week and not another's - Why one criticism outweighs nine compliments, and what to do about the accounting - Why written messages are worse, and the rule: never read a short message twice - Sixty-five short chapters on the specific situations - feedback, silence, being left out, rejection, tone, being talked over, public criticism, a friend gone quiet, family, a partner's mood, being passed over, group chats, clients, bureaucracies, reviews, being teased, and the thing from nine years ago you still think about - A one-week experiment and a two-month practice, both with dates - Twenty sentences worth having ready, and a one-page card to copy out AND THE PART MOST BOOKS LEAVE OUT Sometimes it is about you. There is a whole section on how to tell - five indicators, a test for distinguishing a pattern from an incident, what to do when "don't take it personally" is being used against you by the person who just did the thing, and how to state a legitimate grievance in one sentence so it cannot be dismissed. A book that teaches you to reframe every negative signal is teaching you to override a working alarm. This one keeps the alarm. It also says plainly, at the end, when this is not the right book and what to do instead. Not therapy. Not a promise that you will stop feeling it. What changes, in this order, is duration, then latency, then frequency - and a very large number of evenings you get back.
