A Guide to Character Building
This blog is the second of four covering the Four Pillars
People generally want others to be supportive, understanding, and to provide them with a degree of comfort and safety. In relationships, people need to know you are capable of this and that you have the character to meet the needs of the relationship. How you respond to the other person’s emotions, distress, and/or criticism is a direct reflection of your character. There are subtle skills with which people continually assess your character and gauge your worth and credibility as it pertains to your relationship with them. These assessments are a way of understanding facets of your character while providing opportunities for building character.
The better your character and the more positively you can respond to others, the more highly they will perceive your value. Character building opportunities are often concealed within particular statements or behaviors of other people. Someone may tell you something, yet what they say might also be intended to elicit a response from you. That person, over time, will infer critical information about your character based on your responses. Understanding the differences of quality responses and poor responses will equip you with pertinent information to become the best version of yourself. Quality responses are comprised of assertiveness and confidence; poor responses reveal aggressive, passive, and/or defensive character traits, which contribute to conflict, not the resolution of it.
If you respond poorly to character building opportunities, people will gradually interpret such responses as negative traits of your character. If you develop pervasive patterns of negative responses to people, you will appear more and more low value to them, becoming unappealing to them and be unable to cultivate harmonious connections with them. Although people will occasionally overlook many of your shortcomings, it is inevitable that they will see consistent patterns of poor responses. When these patterns exist, it is more difficult for people to notice your positive traits. If you take for granted someone's willingness to overlook some of your mistakes and flaws, they will also see this as a negative trait.
If you respond thoughtfully, yet confidently to character building opportunities, people will gradually infer positive information about your character. By continually developing clear patterns of positive responses to people, they will find you more and more appealing, creating more room for harmony and stronger trust in your leadership. As you replace poor responses with quality responses, more space will be created for you to display high self-worth.
The more you engage with people, the more opportunities for character building you will encounter. The world is well aware of your shortcomings and defects. It knows where you stop giving effort and stop being creative. It knows what you will settle for as well as what you are fully capable of. Responding confidently and assertively to your relationships displays high value. Indifference and intolerance of other’s needs in relationships will prove detrimental to the harmony of that relationship. When you consistently respond to character building opportunities in an unflappable, yet empathic manner, people will see your courage and leadership, which will gradually diminish their skepticism of your commitment to the relationship.
Poor Responses
Poor responses are responses that come across as aggressive, passive, or defensive. Responding poorly to character building opportunities gives people reasons to find you emotionally unreliable and incapable of contributing to a healthy relationship. As a result, people will take it upon themselves to have their needs met without you. When this happens, people become more critical of you and slowly become resentful of the fact that you are seemingly unable to consistently respond in a positive manner. When these negative responses develop into pervasive patterns, they will diminish other valuable aspects of your character, making it difficult to implement other strategies of self-improvement and to cultivate harmonious connections with others.
People’s emotions, distress, and criticism of you can induce stress in you. This type of action and reaction are a phenomenon which occurs in infancy. In infancy, one infant’s emotional distress can have an effect on another infant’s responses, even in the absence of understanding the other infants emotional state or understanding how to intervene. As you grew out of infancy, you began to develop prosocial skills which allowed you to behave positively in the context of gaining social acceptance and forming friendships. These skills continued to improve as you grew and became interested in new and different types of relationships. By early adulthood, you had your own unique set of prosocial skills. These skills likely fell in the normal range of your peers. If you were somewhat of an outlier, whether below or above average, you still managed to develop relationships. Nonetheless, your prosocial skills were eventually put to the test in ways that would greatly challenge you, which often caused you to question or doubt your skills.
Relationships have a way of challenging people. One of the most difficult of these challenging ways is recognizing the prosocial skills that served you well up to this point may no longer be sufficient enough to help you positively respond to other people’s emotional distress. Being able to respond positively to distress entails developing a complex set of skills, including understanding other’s emotional conditions, managing your own induced distress, and implementing particular strategies or developing new ones for addressing the distress.
Responding to Conflict
Recognizing character building opportunities requires you to look beyond people’s criticizing demands, underhanded compliments, and emotionally driven accusations. Imagine your spouse comes home from a stressful day at work and starts cleaning a few dishes that were in the kitchen sink, all while venting to you about her stressful day of work. Her venting might also turn into indirectly making an emotional accusation about you, saying, “I do most of the household chores around here!”. Perhaps, she somehow relates this to another stressor of hers and says, “You never help with planning our trips and vacations either. You just take me for granted”. This is indicative of emotional distress in your partner. More specifically, this could have been construed as an indirect accusation that you never help with household chores and that you take advantage of her. This could also be an indirect attack on your character, implying that you don’t care about your partner enough to help her with household chores or planning trips.
There are few different ways in which you could respond poorly in a situation such as this. You could defend yourself by explaining to your partner that you do in fact help with the household chores; or you could act aggressively by becoming accusatory and assassinating your partner’s character; or you can act passively by cowering down and becoming overly apologetic. None of these responses are indicative of a quality response and they are a barrier to harmony. No workable compromise will be possible if these types of responses are used. The fact that these responses cost you your self-respect can be most detrimental to your goal of becoming the best version of yourself.
Quality Responses
Quality responses to character building opportunities requires you to respond assertively and confidently, while maintaining self-respect and displaying a degree of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is having the capacity to understand and control your emotions and manage the other person’s emotions, as well as your reactions to them. It is also being able to manage relationship conflict judiciously and empathically. When you respond in this way, people’s criticisms, accusations, and character assassinations of you will have far less of a negative impact on your behavior. Furthermore, the information they give you during these opportunities will illuminate aspects of the conflict that prevent harmony. Once you are aware of this, you can begin to take responsible actions, improving the likelihood of cultivating harmonious relationships.
Assertively advocating for your needs and desires, setting boundaries and calmly enforcing them, and reaching workable compromises with people without losing your self-respect must take place before you can master any other relationship skills. Assertiveness skills allow you to begin to see people for more than just their criticizing demands, underhanded comments, and emotionally driven accusations. You will see these as distractions to resolutions and you will manage such distractions without losing sight of the outcome you desire. As you strive to become the best version of yourself, your behaviors will become quite impressive and amazing.
Responding to Conflict
Consider the scenario discussed earlier in which your partner comes home from a stressful day at work and starts cleaning a few dishes while venting to you, saying, “I do most of the household chores around here” and “You never help with planning our trips and vacations either. You just take me for granted”. You can begin responding more positively by practicing assertive communication skills discussed in A Guide to Assertiveness. When you are changing how you typically respond to people, it is often helpful to say as little as possible without sacrificing your self-respect.
Although, in this scenario, your partner is indirectly making an emotional accusation about you and attacking your character by implying that you don’t care enough about her, you might begin your response by using assertive body language. Perhaps, you hold your hands in a low, non-threatening position and quietly nod your head in an attentive manner. Then you might begin using affirming interjections, such as “mm hmm”, “oh”, or “okay”, to show that you can be calm and stoic. Concerning any character assassination from her, you could respond by saying, “Hmm. I can see how you feel that way”.
Intense Conflict
At times, you may have to practice establishing and calmly reinforcing boundaries if the other person is displaying a particular behavior you find unacceptable. For instance, if someone becomes verbally aggressive with you, you could say, “I want to hear what you are saying, but I am not going to engage with you if you are yelling”. This is establishing a boundary. If they do not stop being aggressive, you calmly reinforce that boundary using assertive communication skills, such as fogging and broken record, saying, “I understand you are upset, but I am not having this discussion if you are yelling”. This typically works well to diffuse such behavior while keeping everyone’s self-respect. However, in more extreme cases, it might be best to disengage with them and walk away. It can very helpful to work with a professional to develop these skills.
Successful Implementation
When quality responses develop into consistent patterns, they will magnify other valuable aspects of your character, making it easier to implement other strategies of self-improvement and cultivate harmonious connections with people. Instead of people becoming overly critical of you, and resentful of your inability to respond well to the relationship, the trust in your commitment to the relationship grows and the relationship will begin to thrive.
The specifics of what your body language conveys, and what you say to your partner, may be a little different from the examples given in this scenario. You have to use words and terms the other person will be most receptive to. Although you have a particular outcome in mind as you assert yourself, keep in mind that people will not automatically understand and agree with your vision. If you are aiming to get what you want and achieve harmonious connections with people, then you must get them to buy into your vision on their own accord.
Wrongful Implementation
Connections are much more sustainable when people willingly engage in meeting each other’s needs. Using negative, self-seeking tactics to manipulate people into getting what you want in a particular relationship results in other people acting out of obligation. If people feel obligated to meet your needs due to your forceful coercion, they will do so with no sense of self-respect and will likely resent you in the long run. Do not force other people’s behavior; instead, encourage the behavior from them that is most conducive to the relationship. Care about the relationship enough to reinforce behavior you find desirable and leads to harmony.
Corrective Actions
Times in which you fall short in your efforts to display good character, simply owning your shortcomings is always a good place to start correcting your actions. Naturally, it is imperative that you follow through with your commitment to correct your behavior. This is done by evaluating where you went wrong and begin to display good character from there. It is also important to not undo the good work you have done. This is why simply owning your mistakes is a good start. You do not want to apologize for all of your behavior if only some aspects of your behavior need to be corrected.
Keys to Improvement
Growing out of your infantile responses to people’s emotional distress, and the distress it induces in you, requires that you develop prosocial skills. These prosocial skills include understanding people’s emotional condition, managing your own induced distress, implementing particular strategies or developing new ones for addressing their distress. The first and foremost skill anyone must improve is assertive communication and empathy. Just as our most basic needs in life are physiological (air, food, water, health, etc.), the most basic need in the context of relationships is assertiveness. Without assertiveness, no one will know what your needs are or where your boundaries are, which will often lead to conflict. Conflict is a substantial barrier to harmony. Because relationships come with conflict, having the skillset to resolve the conflict, and allowing room for harmony, is a fundamental need.
Up next, A Guide to Frame Control, which covers the third of the Four Pillars.
