One Difficult Person

There is one person. You could name them before you finished this sentence.

They are maybe two percent of your life. They take about forty percent of your attention.

You rehearse conversations with them in the shower. You have described them to your partner so many times that your partner has stopped responding. And they are not doing any of this back, which is the part that stings.

You have tried both available strategies. Confronting them, which you are not going to do. And avoiding them, which turns out to cost almost as much as the contact did.

There is a third option, and it does not involve them at all.

You decide in advance how much of you they get. Not how they behave, which was never available. How much contact, how fast a reply, how many minutes of replay. Then you spend to that figure instead of to whatever they did on Tuesday.

Inside you will discover:

• The four-column audit that shows what one person is costing you in a week
• The four budget lines, and why reply speed is the highest-leverage one
• The evening rule, for the message that arrives at ten past six
• The four things you have been trying to buy from them, three of which are not for sale
• How to contain replay instead of trying to stop it
• What to do when the contact cannot be reduced at all
• The person who is sometimes lovely, and why that is harder than consistent difficulty
• The four dial settings for distance, none of which is announced
• A twelve-week sequence, starting with one line

No confrontation. No boundary conversation. Nothing announced to anyone. They do not need to change and they will not know you are doing it.

This is a book about ordinary difficult people. It is not a book about abuse, and Chapter 13 says so plainly and tells you where to go instead.

Book Five of The Control Line Series. Reads perfectly well on its own.

Buy your copy and find out what one person is costing you.