Rung 10 · Graded exposure
Say the less-charming true thing
Offer one unpolished opinion today and do not follow it with a recovery joke.
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
The joke afterwards is what lets you say a thing and disown it in the same breath. Leaving it off is the difference between having an opinion and performing one.
What it buys — This is the rehearsal for the top of the ladder, at a fraction of the price: the same move, with nothing riding on it.
People rated their own displays of vulnerability more negatively than they rated identical displays by others — which they read as courage rather than weakness.
What it cannot show — Largely described scenarios rather than lived ones. It measures a gap between how actors and observers rate the same act, not whether being vulnerable improves a relationship.
When to climb
Three logged attempts running at 2 or under, each with no joke afterwards. The joke 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 11 — Do it badly on purposeSource
Bruk, Scholl & Bless (2018). Beautiful Mess Effect: Self–Other Differences in Evaluation of Showing Vulnerability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(2).
The full version of this rung, with the rest of its topic, is exercise 05 of that lesson.