A friend of mine had an arrangement with her mother to look after her child some days when my friend was working. At the start of the new school year, my friend fixed a new rota with her mother, who said she was happy with it. But she kept phoning up to query it – ‘What time did you say you needed me on Thursdays?’ and so on. It became clear to my friend that her mum wasn’t really happy at all, although she kept insisting it was all fine when my friend tried checking. The friend told me she just couldn’t work out what the problem was, because her mum denied there was one. ‘She wants me to be psychic,’ my friend told me, ‘but unfortunately I’m not’.

I was discussing this Rule with my editor a few weeks before writing this. She said, ‘Yes, you have to know the right questions to ask because they’re expecting you to, er … ’ At which point I unthinkingly added, ‘ … fill in the blanks’. Thus expertly falling into my own trap.

We were right, though. The trick to coping with this is twofold. Firstly you have to realise that there’s a subtext. Generally you’ll know this from a vague sense that you’re wading through treacle, that things aren’t as straightforward underneath as they appear on the surface.

Then you have to get out of the treacle lake. The way to do that is to ask the right questions. Sometimes this is easy. It can be as simple as saying, ‘There’s something else bothering you, isn’t there?’ But other times either it doesn’t feel right to ask, or it gets you nowhere because you can’t get a clear answer. Indeed, sometimes the other person hasn’t consciously acknowledged the subtext to themselves, in which case asking them straight out can’t possibly work.

So you need to be clever about the questions you ask. Think about what the likely reasons are that might make the other person resist, and ask questions around that. They might not want to give you the real reason because they’re embarrassed by it – they worry you’ll dismiss it as petty or neurotic or silly – so you can help by letting them know that you wouldn’t. ‘I can understand it would be difficult for you if you felt … ’ might enable them to say, ‘Well, yes, it is tricky’. Now you’re making headway.

My friend surmised that the new times didn’t really fit, but her mother was worried if she said so that my friend would find childcare elsewhere, leaving her mum less precious time with her grandchild. So she went back to her mum and asked some carefully chosen questions. Sure enough, her mother didn’t want to say no but actually the new rota was clashing with other stuff in her life. Easily sorted, and of course my friend wanted to make things easy for her mother. She just had to do a lot of work herself to find out how.