Rung 6 · Graded exposure
A genuine compliment, no follow-up
Give one genuine compliment and then leave. No follow-up question, no lingering, nothing collected.
Your attempts
Nothing is recorded against this rung. The dread you feel next time will be a guess, and you will have nothing to check it against.
Why this one
Praise usually arrives with an invoice attached — a question, a pause, a hope. Removing all three is the practice: you are learning to give something and want nothing back.
What it buys — The asking rungs are further up, and you will ask badly for as long as every kind thing you say is a down payment.
Craft. We have no study for it, and the popular claims in this area are weaker than they sound.
When to climb
Three logged attempts running at 2 or under, where you actually left. Staying to watch it land is the thing being trained out.
Those two numbers are ours, not a finding. Graded exposure is clinical; where the line sits is our judgement.
Rung 7 — Ask the second questionSource
No study behind this one. It is our reading, and we would rather say so than borrow authority from an unrelated study.
The full version of this rung, with the rest of its topic, is exercise 08 of that lesson.