What it costs them

The people around you are paying too, and I'd like to spend a chapter on them, because the scan makes it hard to see them at all.

Start with what it's like to live under commentary. Every day, the things you do that go right produce nothing, and the things that go wrong produce a remark. After a while you learn what you are to this person. You're a source of faults. It doesn't matter that they'd deny it. What they say is faults, and you're a reasonable person drawing a reasonable conclusion from the evidence. Some people fight this. Most go quiet, and do a little less, and keep their good work for people who see it.

A child learns something specific. Your daughter, with her two crosses, learns that eighteen right answers are nothing and two wrong ones are what her parent looks at. She also learns how attention works, because she's watching you, and she may take the scan into her own house one day. I said in chapter 14 that it runs in families because it's the only kind of attention that gets demonstrated. This is where the demonstrating happens. She's ten and she's learning it now.

A partner learns that the table doesn't count. I'd go further. A partner learns that they don't count, in the ordinary daily way that people need to, and the "you're welcome" was a request to count, made in the only tone left. Kumar and Epley's recipients were surprised by what they were thanked for because they'd had no idea it had been noticed. Your partner has no idea either. They've been laying that table into silence for years.

A colleague learns to send work late and to defend it, because sending it early only ever produced faults sooner. Then you notice that they're defensive, and that goes on the list.

There's one more person under the scan, and it's you. I said in the preface that the scan turned inwards has its own book, and it does, but it's worth a paragraph here because the two habits are usually the same habit. If your attention goes to faults, it goes to your own too, and most readers of this book will recognise a running list of what they got wrong today, with nothing on the other side. The same correction applies. Your own fine goes unrecorded by the same method, and the day you spent doing several hundred things right ends with the two you didn't. I'm not going to develop that here, but if it's the larger part of the problem for you, the book in the notes is the one to read next.

All of this is the cost of one thing, which is that half the record never gets spoken. Nobody set out to make a child brace before showing her homework. It's what happens when the only remarks are the ones that ring.