Reframing with Strengths: A Practice for When People do Annoying Things

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: [00:00:00] Welcome to Practicing Connection. I’m Erin, and today we’re talking about how to interpret someone’s worst moments without writing them off, a skill that can matter just as much in a team meeting as it does with the families that you serve.

The story you tell yourself about someone’s behavior in the first 10 seconds can decide whether you end up collaborating with them or just getting through the conversation with them.

We know that people don’t need to be perfect in order to be worth collaborating with. So what can we do to help ourselves stay open to working with people who are still in process?

Jessica is with me today, and we’re going to dive into this topic together and then share a practice that you can use. Hi, Jessica.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Hi, Erin. I’m really excited about today’s practice because, well, last time, and during our last episode, you walked us through Positive Rants, which really gets at, like, listening to understand, finding the value underneath someone’s agitation, and reframing the story. And [00:01:00] one of the things that I’m excited about for today is that today’s practice builds on that skill.

So this is about positively reframing someone’s actions versus their words, which is more covered in our Positive Rants episode, right? You’re listening to someone who is speaking negatively about something and you’re reframing what they’re saying. And so now this is about someone’s actions.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Mm-hmm.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I’ve kind of in my head been referring to it as, “Strength spotting, part two,” because we’ve talked about strength spotting before, and strength spotting is basically noticing and naming what someone brings to the table.

I typically use the Via Character Strengths, and we’ll have a couple of links in the show notes to that so that you can kind of see the full list of strengths.

But what we’ve done in the past when we cover strength spotting is we’ve usually covered this related to noticing when you see something positive in someone: when you see a positive action or you hear [00:02:00] that someone did something in a positive way.

So today’s angle is about spotting strengths when someone is showing up with negative energy or they’re doing maybe negative behaviors, or when you’re anticipating that they might have negative reactions to something, right?

Before you’ve even gone into a meeting or gone into a situation, you’re anticipating there might be negative reactions. So another way to put this is that we’re going to work on how to find strengths that might be misfiring, or as I like to say in the strengths world, “strengths that are being overused or underused.”

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I just gave you a lot to chew on. I’m sorry.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: You gave me so much to chew on, but that’s okay. I’m excited about this topic.

I think I don’t often get to the part of the conversation about strengths where you talk about what do you do when strengths show up negatively? How do you think about it? How do you engage with it?

So this feels like a really exciting next step in kind of [00:03:00] this general conversation about strengths and leading with strengths.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Mm-hmm.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay. I’m very excited. And I’m curious about where this comes from. Like who, how did this idea develop?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. So this comes from positive psychology researcher Ryan Nemick’s work on what he calls the, “Golden mean of character strengths.”

So this golden mean is the idea that most strengths have an optimal dose, like to use a medical term, I guess. And problems can show up when a strength is overused or underused in the situation, right?

So when you have an overdose of a strength or you are underdosed on a particular strength. But more simply, a strength isn’t just present or absent, right? You don’t just have a strength or don’t have a strength. We all can access all 24 of the character strengths that have been researched.

But a strength can show up too [00:04:00] much, too little, or it can just be pointed the wrong way for the moment. Please don’t ask me to explain that, because I’m not sure that the point of the wrong way really, I guess, would be more about how your strength is being overused. Or underused is, I guess what I would say, whether it’s going.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: That is such an interesting thing. It’s making me think about cooking with salt and how if you under salt, all of the other flavors are bland. And if you over salt, all you taste is salt. But there’s that like sweet spot in the middle where you don’t taste the salt, but all of the flavors kind of sing.

And I feel like I’m excited that that’s also something that can happen with strengths where there’s a sweet spot. And can you kind of maybe share examples of what overuse and underuse, what does that look like?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. Yeah. Of course. So let’s take one of my, not to be too over-revealing [00:05:00] here, but prudence is a strength that’s lower in my Via Character Strengths profile.

And so prudence is often referred to also as carefulness. So apparently I’m not very careful. In the right dose, prudence is really thoughtful, but when it’s overused, it can look like overcaution or indecision. And by the way, I have overused prudence even though it comes lower in my strengths profile.

And I think that is just proof that we all can access all 24 of those strengths and we can overuse or underuse any one of them. And so I have been guilty. It’s maybe not the right word to use, but I’ve been guilty of overusing prudence myself. Another example would be honesty. Honesty in the right dose is really great for trust building.

But overused, it can really land as blunt or tactless [00:06:00] or even mean sometimes, right?

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Have you seen that?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I have perhaps been a person who is too honest.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Who has overused honesty?

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: I have overused honesty. When my family moved to the Midwest, there was a big transition because we moved from New York City where honesty is, culturally, it’s a little more towards the blunt end.

And in the Midwest, it’s a lot farther away from that. So we had to really recalibrate what honesty looked like and what that kind of frankness went like. So I hear what you’re thinking about there.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: And I just want to say that like, I guess maybe, I don’t know, you could consider this too much of an overly positive – by the way, positivity is a –

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: – strength of yours.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. It’s a strength in the list, but I’m trying to remember if it’s a strength in the Via character list or if that’s in StrengthsFinder.

But anyway, [00:07:00] positivity, it might be too much of a positive thing to say that I actually don’t see that there are tons of, like a lot of people like to say, “I want to fix my weaknesses.”

I think it’s much more productive to say, “Which strengths can I lean into, and which strengths can I learn what overuse and underuse looks like so that I can avoid overusing and underusing them?” So that’s maybe too positive of a way of looking at things.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: So maybe we could say that the aim is to calibrate rather than purge.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right? Just because you overuse or underuse strength, like, it’s not a character flaw, right? Someone that is overusing or underusing it is not a character flaw. It’s just that you’re a little offline, because your attention and energy are probably being placed somewhere else with another strength, or with another, in another place.

And [00:08:00] so just because you might be overusing prudence doesn’t mean that you should be less careful necessarily, right?

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah. Okay.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: And I, what I like about this is that it replaces the idea of like, “What’s wrong with this person?” with, “Okay, what strength is showing up in maybe the wrong dose right now?”

So you’re not looking at the person and being like, “What is wrong with you? Oh my gosh, like I can’t even with you…” But you’re maybe looking at it and being like, “Okay, what could be going on here?”

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yes. Oh, I think this is gonna be so helpful for me. Yeah. I can see this. Okay. So I can imagine that I could get to a place where I could kind of start to identify, “Oh, that person’s a visionary and they can imagine these beautiful futures, and they forget about maybe we need some steps to build up to that place. We can’t get there immediately.”

And then I’m diagnosing other [00:09:00] people, and then I have like the most unhelpful conversation with them about this. So I’m curious about, how do you then like use this in a practice? How do you use this in community? Tell me more about how I could then use this. Like once I’ve identified this, what do I do then? Either in myself or others.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I think the easiest way to do something with this is to notice when you are frustrated by someone’s actions. Like that’s the first trigger, right? And that’s actually something that I haven’t brought up yet in this episode, but that’s probably the first trigger for you to start using this is that you notice that you’re getting irritated by someone’s actions, what they’re doing, their lack of something, their lack of doing something that you are expecting from them.

So what I think this practice helps with is that instead of you, again, being like, “I can’t even with you. [00:10:00] What’s wrong with you?” You know, you’re, you know, a jerk, whatever it is, is that if you commit to practices like this, they keep you curious instead of judgmental in the moment, right? You’re not excusing the behavior that’s happening, but you’re giving yourself a more useful story about it.

This practice is also especially useful for anticipating the negative energy, right? So walking into a hard conversation. You can walk into that conversation already looking for the strength, instead of bracing for like, “Okay, they always act this way. I know they’re going to do this. It’s so annoying.” Don’t brace for that flaw.

Instead, go into it looking for a strength. Think back to the last time you had that inter- interaction with somebody, what are some of the possible strengths that could be overused and underused? And just come into the conversation with a little understanding.

Again, this is not excusing behavior that is maybe poor, but it’s [00:11:00] giving you the ability to stay in conversation with somebody, without yourself going into the kind of frustration spiral.

This kind of stuff is evidence-based work. It’s just applied to the moments where strengths are hardest to see. So it’s almost like it’s maybe a little bit advanced than, you know, being able to notice someone’s strengths when everything’s all positive and like, “Oh, hey, I really appreciate how honest you were about, you know, the report, or I’m…”

Whatever that is, it’s so easy to see a strength in those moments. I have to say though, it’s easy to see them, but we don’t often say it to each other. So let’s tell each other a little more often how much we appreciate our strengths. Okay. PSA aside, let’s get into what this practice is. What do you think?

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah, I would love to look. How do I do this? Tell me more.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Okay. So sometimes again, like we talked about in the Positive Rants episode that we recorded, [00:12:00] sometimes the best places to practice are with our own pet peeves. So I’m going to bring my pet peeve back into this again because, you know, I’m going to pick on myself first.

So imagine you’re in the grocery store, you need one thing from the middle of the aisle, and there’s a person or two just kinda camped out, taking up the whole aisle, not moving, no awareness that anyone else exists, much less someone’s trying to get down that aisle.

What’s your first reaction, honestly? If this is something that annoys you. I guess I didn’t even ask.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Oh, this annoys me so much.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Okay.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Especially there are some grocery stores where they have the aisles and then they have special little things in the aisle. So you can only pass one cart at a time. And someone inevitably always parks their cart right next to it.

So not, you can’t even just a person get between them, right. So like honestly, my first reaction is like, [00:13:00] “Gosh, I guess you really don’t care about anybody else. You really aren’t thinking about anybody else right now.”

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yep.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Which is not generous at all. And then I try to like positively reframe it as, “Wow, the grocery store is really overstimulating and there’s a lot of decisions and like -”

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Right.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah, I try to be nicer about it, but honestly, it’s like,”Oh, come on. Will you move already?”

Sometimes I really can’t handle it. I’ll just be like,” Oh, can I sneak past you?” Oh, can I sneak past you in a true Wisconsin way. And then they’ll get all fussed.

We’re off track. Okay. So that’s my initial response is, come on, move already.

What do I do after my initial response?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Which may or may not be front-loaded with an ope, which is a very regional dialect here.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: In the upper Midwest. All right. Well, good news, Erin, is that that is completely normal human reaction. It’s totally fine. It’s totally real. And yes, I recognize, I have to call this out, I recognize that I could just say excuse me in those situations.

But to be honest, that is a [00:14:00] whole separate conversation about why we don’t always speak up, and maybe we’ll cover that in the future.

So here’s the practice. Instead of stopping and thinking that this person is oblivious or thinking something worse than that, instead of doing that, ask, “Okay, what strength might be running the show here?”

But maybe it’s being overused or, you know, pointed the wrong direction, which I really think is just about this idea of maybe it’s not being overused, but they’re oblivious to other things happening because they are just focused, right?

So think about what’s actually there, what, what is actually present.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay. Okay. Sure. I can see that. But walk me through, where do you land when you’re actually still in that grocery store aisle? Like are you doing all of this in the moment?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, you are. And just like we say with a lot of things, like [00:15:00] the more you allow yourself to like interrupt your normal patterns of thinking and being, the faster you get at it and then it ends up, you know, it ends up not taking as long as we’re making it sound like it’s going to take.

So anyway, there’s a few options. So in this situation, in every situation, there’s going to be more than one option. And I think that’s kind of the point, right? There isn’t one right answer. One read is that they’re being really deliberate. They’re reading labels, comparing prices, thinking hard about a decision.

That could be prudence or carefulness, just maybe overused a little bit, or in this case, maybe they’re not overusing it, but they’re pointing it in a very particular direction which is making them oblivious to anything else that’s happening around them. And so in this case, it’s not about the fact that they’re being careful, and I certainly am not asking them to be less careful.

It’s just that they’re hyper-focused on their prudence and they’re oblivious to [00:16:00] everything else happening.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay. Or like what if it’s two or more people, not just one person reading labels?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. That’s kind of scenario number two or read number two in this case. If it’s maybe a couple, or I very frequently see like a group of people together, maybe friends, or maybe a parent and kid or kids shopping together fully in conversation, that could be an overuse of love or togetherness.

Like they’re genuinely connecting with each other, but it’s kind of, it’s being expressed in a spot that has less physical room for it, right? So they’re overusing it, because they are oblivious to everything else happening around them and to the people around them that also have needs.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay. Yeah, I can see that.

Is there a read that involves underuse in this situation?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. So a third read. And by the way, there’s probably more than three ways to read this situation. [00:17:00]

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: What? People have nuance? Who knew?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Right. Yeah. I mean, we could sit here all day. No, the third way to read this situation is taking the strength of social awareness, which is about being socially aware, right?

And that part of it involves noticing the people around you, that maybe that’s just not switched on right now, right? Their attention is fully somewhere else. This is not, again, a character flaw. It’s a strength that’s just offline.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay. So the move isn’t picking the correct explanation.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: No, it’s noticing that you have more than one plausible strengths-based story available, instead of defaulting to the judgment story.

We love the judgment story. And that’s really the whole practice. You don’t need to know which one of those stories is true, which one of those strengths-based stories is true. You just need one that’s believable enough to replace your judgment and frustration that the person is a thoughtless, [00:18:00] inconsiderate jerk.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay. All right. I could see this being really helpful and potentially changing how long irritation lasts for me, and also potentially making me think differently about how I’m showing up in spaces.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. I really appreciate that you said that. And in a collaborative situation or on a team, it would also help you to work with the person instead of allowing your frustration to work against them.

Look, again, I’m not saying that they’re not going to annoy you and that their actions might still be frustrating to you, but thinking of it in this way helps you remain in the space with them and work with them.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Sure. I can see that being super helpful, especially if you’re working with other people, which almost everybody works with another person at some point, so…

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay. A lot of us listening, including the hosts, maybe [00:19:00] don’t have tons of time. Or we’re doing lots of things, so we have limited brain capacity. What is the simplest way to start using this practice?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Okay. So the next time that you experience a version of the blocked grocery aisle, whatever yours is, right, that may not bother you at all, the blocked grocery aisle, maybe it’s whenever you try to pass someone on the highway, they speed up so that you can’t pass them, right? That’s another one of mine.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Uh-huh.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: But whatever that pet peeve is of yours, see if you can generate two possible strengths behind it before you land on judgment. You don’t have to believe either one of them, just see if you can find them.

Eventually, you’ll start to see what’s plausible, and you’ll realize, “Oh, you know what? That’s actually possible and I can let them do them. You do you,” right?

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: For sure.

Well, thank you for sharing that with us, [00:20:00] Jessica. I’m excited to get started.

That’s it for this episode. Thanks for joining us. If you liked this conversation, please consider sharing this episode with a friend or a coworker.

We’ll be back next week. Until then, keep practicing.

CREDITS: The Practicing Connection Podcast is a production of One-Op and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under award number 2 0 2 3 4 8 7 74 3 3.