Telling it as someone else's story

Before the method, there's one technique that needs a chapter to itself, because the method depends on it.

You might fairly ask how a written account differs from a replay done on paper. If you sit down to write about the photocopier and end up back in the corridor with your face burning, you've only found a slower way to do the same thing.

What separates them is where you stand. Ethan Kross, Özlem Ayduk and Walter Mischel ran two experiments on this. They asked people to recall a time when someone had made them furious. Some were told to go back into the scene and see it through their own eyes again. Others were told to take a few steps back and watch it happen to themselves from a distance, as an observer might. Both groups were then asked to think about why they'd felt as they did. Those who went back in relived it, and their anger came up again. Those who stood back could think about their reasons without the feelings flooding in. The researchers saw this as the difference between working something through and brooding on it. Both groups had recalled the same event and asked themselves the same question. They had done it from different places.

Kross and a larger group of colleagues later found a simple way to get that distance, and it sounds too easy to work. Across seven studies with 585 people, they had some participants think about a stressful situation using "I" and others using their own name or "he" and "she". The studies involved making a good first impression and giving a speech at short notice. The people who used their own names were less distressed. Observers rated them as having performed better. They also did less going over it afterwards, the post-event processing from chapter 5. Referring to yourself as you would to another person moved them to the observer's position.

Those experiments were about anger and social stress in the short term, and I'm carrying them over to old mistakes, so treat what follows as my application. But I find it persuasive, partly because it matches something everybody knows. You are far more sensible about other people's mistakes than about your own. If a friend told you the photocopier story about herself, you wouldn't think her a monster. You'd see the whole thing at once. She was young and nervous and wanted to be kind, and she grabbed the nearest phrase. It was a bad phrase, the colleague was tired, and nobody died of it. You'd say so in about four sentences, and you'd be right.

A replay never gets to that judgment, because a replay is first-person and close up. You're back in your own shoes in the corridor, and from there all you can see is her face.

So here's the photocopier told the other way. I've used "she" for the person who made the remark. Use whatever fits you, or your own name.

"She was twenty-nine and had been at the firm a year. A colleague she liked but didn't know well came back to work after her father's death. She met her by surprise at the photocopier and felt she had to say something. She hadn't prepared anything, and she had very little experience of bereavement. She said the first consoling thing that came into her head, which was a cliché and the wrong one. The colleague said 'Yes' and left. She knew straight away it had been clumsy. She didn't follow it up because she was embarrassed. She has never done anything like it again."

All the facts are there, including the unflattering ones. She didn't follow it up, and she could have. But you can see the whole person, and the verdict comes easily. It was a clumsy moment from someone inexperienced who meant well, and it's long over.

Try it with one of yours, in your head, before you go on. Tell it in the third person, in the past tense, starting a little before the event so that the person's situation is in view. Give their age and say what they knew, what they wanted and what they did. Then ask what you'd say to that person if they were sitting across from you. Whatever that is, it's likely to be closer to the truth than anything you've arrived at on your own. It came from someone in a position to see.