Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 25: The lollipop

The lollipop is a metaphor we use to explain the nature of expectations, attachment, and disappointment.¹ We’ll illustrate it by comparing and contrasting three stories.

Claire’s Example: A Baseline

Claire has a lollipop. It’s about two hundred licks of tasty lollipop. So she’s standing around, licking on this lollipop, and eventually it’s gone. She’s eaten the whole lollipop, so now all she has left is a stick. She feels pretty happy; she enjoys lollipops, and she’s finished a good one. She feels content.

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…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 25: The lollipop (web page)
• Listen to The Usual Error audiobook, Chapter 25: The lollipop (MP3)

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 24: The William James zone

All the clear communication you’ve been learning can be completely muddied if you don’t communicate clearly with yourself. Part of self-communication is paying attention to your emotions and your body when you get angry. This helps stop your anger from getting out of control and muddying everything up.

When you get angry, your brain sends out signals to your body. Your adrenaline pumps and your body releases hormones. Anger prods your body, saying, “Get ready to act!” Anger is an emotion, but it’s also a physical state. Once that adrenaline starts pumping, your body becomes angry. Even if the cause of the emotional anger goes away, the physical anger is still there, and it starts a feedback loop. Your brain asks your body, “How are we doing?” Your body replies, “We’re really angry!” Your brain reacts by becoming emotionally angry in response to the physical anger, causing your brain to send out anger signals to your body again, and the feedback loop continues.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 24: The William James zone (web page)
• Listen to The Usual Error audiobook, Chapter 24: The William James zone (MP3)

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 23: The only way out is through

Communication is rewarding, but difficult. It takes effort to figure out your own communication style and to figure out how it differs from the communication styles of those around you. It takes work to identify and hold your boundaries and to respect others’. We feel at odds with those closest to us, even when they’re on our side. We feel trapped in the messes we create.

Sometimes, we get overwhelmed with all this and we want to stop. We want to stop talking, stop having problems, stop everything! Can’t we take a break? Can’t we just go a few days without communicating about anything important?

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 23: The only way out is through (web page)
• Listen to The Usual Error audiobook, Chapter 23: The only way out is through (MP3)

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 22: Giving permission to disappoint

The myth of the perfect romantic relationship has inflicted a lot of damage. We see it primarily in its most common manifestation: the myth of “one true love.” It tells us to spend our early lives looking and waiting for “the one.” We hear it in movies all the time: “Could she be the one?” or “I’ve finally found Mr. Right!” The myth says that “the one” will drop into your life and be perfect for you. The two of you will fit together like puzzle pieces and live happily ever after. All your problems will be solved now that you and your soul mate have finally found each other, because you’re perfect for each other.

This is utter nonsense! People are not anything like puzzle pieces. We each have rough, irregular edges, and even the most compatible friends or partners in the world won’t fit seamlessly. There will be conflict, difficulty, and friction throughout the entire duration of even the healthiest relationships.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 22: Giving permission to disappoint (web page)
• Listen to The Usual Error audiobook, Chapter 22: Giving permission to disappoint (MP3)

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 21: Trust your future self

People worry about a wide variety of things, some silly, some serious. We worry about our job security, we worry about our health, we worry about our reputations. Most of the things we worry about are at least partially out of our control. This chapter is about the other cases: cases when the problem is completely within our control!

The most obvious case of worrying about something entirely within our control is worrying about our own feelings or desires. We worry that our feelings will change and that we won’t want the same things we do now. The weight of these worries can paralyze us, stunning us into indecision and stagnation. If this happens to you, you can trust your future self.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 21: Trust your future self (web page)
• Listen to The Usual Error audiobook, Chapter 21: Trust your future self (MP3)

A friend of mine was having a conversation with a woman he’s dating, and he said to her, “I believe our relationship is as intimate as it can be.”

Stop for a moment and think about how you would interpret that sentence.

What he meant was:

“Our relationship is as intimate as it’s gonna get. It’s not going any further than what it is now.”

What she heard was:

“Our relationship is as intimate as it’s possible for a relationship to be! Our intimacy is totally maxed out! It’s at the max! It’s totally at the max!”

Can you see how you could get both interpretations? Intepretation #1 is “Our relationship is as intimate as our relationship can be for us” and interpretation #2 is “Our relationship is as intimate as any relationship can be for anyone.”

Much later, she said to him, “Remember when you said that our relationship is as intimate as it’s possible to be?” He replied, “I never said that!”

Mayhem ensued.

Since our memories store concepts, not the exact words that were spoken, each person remembered their own interpretation of the conversation.

It was difficult to reconstruct what had happened, but it boiled down to a miscommunication of that one sentence.

What would you do differently to avoid the same miscommunication?

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 20: Memory

We like to think that we have a single memory, an autobiographical history of ourselves stretching backwards into our past, from the present back to when we were very young. We understand that there are gaps and that it gets more vague the further back we go, but we still have the impression of a single fairly consistent record of time. We rarely question its accuracy. If we say, “He was there. I remember seeing him,” others will likely believe us. We believe that our eyes and ears are like video cameras, relaying sights and sounds to our brain, which records everything for later use like a mental VCR.

Memory isn’t like that at all. In truth, we have a collection of fragments and familiarities. We process only a fraction of the information our senses take in, and far less makes it into our long-term memory. Our long-term memory fades over time, leaving islands of memory in a sea of haze. What’s more, even those islands may be difficult to recall. Many of our memories lie dormant, requiring specific reminders to “jog our memories” and bring them to the surface.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 20: Memory (web page)
• Listen to The Usual Error audiobook, Chapter 20: Memory (MP3)

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 19: Meta-communication

Meta-communication is communication about communication. When communication isn’t working, you can use meta-communication to help you figure out why and to make things better in the future. Many of the techniques we talk about are meta-communication in a broad sense, but in this chapter we’ll talk about a particular kind of meta-communication: conversations you can have once to make lots of future conversations better.

What if someone often uses a particular word or phrase that sparks an unhelpfully defensive reaction in you? Meta-communication can help: bring it up a single time so you don’t continue tripping over it again and again. What if a particular kind of misunderstanding arises over and over again? Meta-communication can help: bring it up once to talk about how to avoid the misunderstanding in the future or how to deal with it more gracefully when it does happen.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 19: Meta-communication (web page)
• Listen to The Usual Error audiobook, Chapter 19: Meta-communication (MP3)

I often have stomach problems when I eat certain types of food, and I’ve finally started paying more attention to exactly which foods cause the problems. (Yes, this is actually a post about communication, not poop.)

Last night I ate pizza and didn’t have any stomach problems afterward, so I said to Kyeli, “Pizza doesn’t cause it.” “Some kinds of pizza,” she clarified. I boggled for a moment, realized that we must have miscommunicated, figured out the miscommunication, and then launched into an impassioned tirade about quantifier scoping as Kyeli’s eyes completely glazed over.

I’ll spare you the gory first-order logic details, but I do want to talk about the miscommunication.

When I said “Pizza doesn’t cause it”, what I meant was that I have a list of potential causes in my head, like this:

• Spicy food
• Chips & Salsa
• Indian food
• Cheese
• Pizza
• Domino’s Pizza
• Tony’s frozen pizzas

and I’ve been putting mental checkmarks or X’s next to each one as I figure out whether it causes tummy badness. When I said “Pizza doesn’t cause it”, I meant that I was putting an X next to “Pizza” on my list. I wasn’t putting an X next to “Domino’s Pizza” or “Tony’s frozen pizzas” (which, in fact, have a checkmark next to them), I was only X-ing out “Pizza”. On my list, “Pizza” means “ALL pizza”, so I can now X out “Pizza” because I now have a counterexample to the “all pizza makes me sick” theory.

When Kyeli heard “Pizza doesn’t cause it”, she heard “No type of pizza causes it”, and she felt the need to clarify, because she thought I had overgeneralized.

This miscommunication happened to be about something random and not very important, and it was easy to fix. However, I can easily see something similar happening and causing an argument.

Example 1: Sue is thinking about why she’s unhappy in her life. Sue says out loud, “It’s not because of my friends.” She might mean that her friends in general aren’t making her unhappy, but maybe one or two of her friends in particular still are. Or Sue might mean that none of her friends contribute to the problem in any way.

Example 2: Devi says, “I don’t like fish.” Her friend Maartje is later surprised to see Devi eating salmon. Devi clarifies, “Oh, I meant that I don’t like most kinds of fish. Salmon is an exception.” Maartje says, “But you said you don’t like fish. I thought you meant that you don’t like fish. At all. Any kind of fish. If I had known you meant most fish, I wouldn’t have thrown away that HUGE-ASS SALMON I bought for your birthday!”

Example 3: Kyeli says, “I’m not attracted to men.” I’ll stop there before I get in trouble. (;

Which type are you, a Most-enator or an All-ifier? If you heard “I don’t like fish”, how would you interpret it?

• The Most-enator hears: “I don’t generally like fish. (But maybe there are exceptions.)”
• The All-ifier hears: “I don’t like any kind of fish. (Not in the rain, not on a train.)”

Are you a Most-enator or an All-ifier? Let us know in the comments!

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 18: Coming to terms

Mary and Kathi’s Example: A Few Sandwiches

Mary: “I’m hungry. What is there to eat?”

Kathi: “There were a few sandwiches left over from dinner last night. I put them in the fridge.”

Mary: “I can’t find them. I only ate three this afternoon. Where are the rest?”

Kathi: “Oh, I think that’s about all there were, three or so.”

Mary: “I thought you said there were a few!”

Kathi: “Yeah, you know, a few, three or so.”

Mary: “What?! Everyone knows ‘a few’ means at least five or six. Now what am I supposed to eat?”

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 18: Coming to terms (web page)
• Listen to The Usual Error audiobook, Chapter 18: Coming to terms (MP3)

Today’s guest stars are Amanda Braman-Ray as Mary and Heather The Great as Kathi. Don’t they make a cute couple? (;