281: How to Strengthen Your Relationships Using Active Constructive Response Style: Fan Favorite Replay

Hi there. You’re listening to the Leading Lady podcast. I’m your host, AliceAnne Loftus, and I’m a certified professional coach specializing in leadership and work-life balance. I work with clients to shift their limiting beliefs, insecurities, and self-doubt. This podcast will be filled with tools and strategies to help high-achieving women like you feel connected, empowered, and in the lead of your life, both personally and professionally. Let’s transform your life starting now. Lead yourself, the rest will follow.

Hi there, leading ladies. For today’s episode, I want to talk about how to nurture and really create healthy, flourishing relationships.

What do you think is a better indicator of a good relationship? Is it how a partner responds to good news or to bad news? During my studies of positive psychology, I learned about the research by Shelly Gable. This shows that really what identifies, or what distinguishes, a good or poor relationship is actually not how someone responds to another’s disappointments, but rather how they respond to your good news.

So as I’ve been working with clients, I’ve been having them identify what their default way is to respond to others’ good news, and also how supported they feel when they share good news with the people in their life.

The Four Ways to Respond to Good News

So we’re going to talk about something called active constructive response style. There’s actually four classifications of how you can respond to good news. You can respond either passive constructive or passive destructive, and passive being you’re not intentionally going out of your way to either support or quash good news. You’re just kind of, well, as it says, passive about it. And then there’s active destructive and active constructive, and the key word being active, in that you are putting intent and effort to either support or demean someone’s news.

Passive Constructive Response

So let’s go ahead and walk through this. Passive constructive response is positive in nature, but it can be very short or understated. It almost has kind of an air of apathy to it. It doesn’t match the enthusiasm of the person who is sharing the good news. So it can be kind of subdued or understated in its support.

An example here, and let’s go ahead and use this example through the duration of this exercise, would be a friend comes over or gives you a call and says, “Oh my gosh, I just bought a boat.” And the response to that good news would be, “Oh, that’s nice.”

So you can see that that person doesn’t really sound super duper excited about that. It’s really not matching the level of enthusiasm that the bearer of good news has. It’s just kind of lackluster. It’s not totally rude or demeaning in any way, but it’s certainly not encouraging or supportive or enthusiastic.

Passive Destructive Response

Passive destructive response, however, is very negative in nature, and it ultimately communicates a lack of interest in the other person or the news. So in passive destructive response, the person can either hijack the conversation or just outright ignore it.

So let’s go back to that example of the boat. So Person A says, “I just bought a boat,” and Person B says, “Ah, that’s just great. I really wanted to tell you about my good news today.” Or, “Well, let’s talk about that another time, because I have to share with you what’s going on in my life.” Or, “Great. Well, I have bought a jet ski, and a jet ski, it’s way better than a boat.”

Other examples of that might be totally just ignoring it. “Ah, what did you say? Oh, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just go to dinner.” It’s just totally dismissive. Or, “I don’t want to hear about your boat right now. Can we just talk about something else?” So yes, it is negative, but the person’s intent isn’t to necessarily quash or demean that person’s good news.

Active Destructive Response

However, the flip side of the passive destructive is active destructive, and this response is extremely demeaning, extremely deflating, and it can actually damage one’s self-validation and communicates a lack of understanding or care for the other person. So this is like an example of raining on someone’s parade, letting the air out of the balloon or the wind out of your sail, whatever analogy you want to use.

And sometimes we share concerns or warnings with people from the best of intentions, like we’re truly caring about that other person, but we’re almost playing devil’s advocate to their good news. So the example, “I just bought a boat.” “Oh my gosh, why on earth would you do that? Boats are so expensive. Haven’t you ever heard the acronym for boat? Bring on another thousand. Why would you go out and buy a boat? That was the silliest thing. Can you even afford a boat?”

I’m sure we’ve all had conversations like that in our lives, where we were really excited about something and we shared it with someone that we care about, or we just shared it with enthusiasm of this great news, and it’s immediately met with just a completely negative tone. And it doesn’t sound like that person’s happy for us at all.

Active Constructive Response: Stretching the Happy

So finally, what I really want us to focus on today is active constructive response. Active constructive response validates the excitement of a person, and it offers this person a chance to savor the good event for a little bit longer, while serving to also strengthen a sense of connection between both people. It’s enthusiastic, it’s supportive, it shows genuine interest and encouragement.

I have girlfriends that we say, “Can I share my happy?” Or, “Can I stretch my happy just a little bit longer with you?” And that’s a really, very direct way of saying, “I need you to be my cheerleader, my champion right now. And I’m wanting to share some really great news with you.”

And I would say that as I’ve really put this in practice in my life and become better at active constructive response, I do feel the vibration of happiness spread. With my friend, or one of my children, or my husband, or a colleague, as I’m encouraging her to really savor her happiness and experience this happiness, it raises the happiness level, the positivity level, in myself.

So back to the example, “I just bought a boat.” In active constructive response, the person would say, “Oh my gosh, I’m so excited for you. Tell me more. What was the best part about buying a boat? What’s the first thing that you’re going to do?” So you’re asking meaningful questions and really bringing that news to the surface and saying, “Hey, let’s take a moment and really savor this.” You’re inviting the person with good news to not just retell the good news, but to actually relive it, re-experience it, and share that happiness with you.

Why It’s Harder to Celebrate Someone Else’s Good News

I have found in my life that it’s easy when someone tells you bad news. I think it doesn’t matter how connected or how close the relationship is. When someone shares bad news with you, you feel an immediate sense of sympathy or empathy or sadness, compassion, caring. I think most good people can experience that. It’s much harder to celebrate or champion for someone else when perhaps your life isn’t reflecting those same successes, or that same good news and enthusiasm.

Especially if you’re going through a hard time. Maybe you’re having a hard time financially, and you’re just trying to make ends meet, and you’ve got this friend that just goes out and buys this fancy, shiny boat. And that was the dream of your life, to own a boat. And there might be some jealousy, or maybe you’re feeling like it’s not fair, or that they’re showing off, whatever it might be.

There are reasons why it’s harder to celebrate someone else’s good news. That doesn’t make you a bad person to have those feelings inside. But if the goal or the intention is to strengthen your relationships, you want to make sure that you are, as I said, sharing their happy and being genuine and inviting them to really savor that moment and share that experience with you.

Of course, we are human, and we’re going to have those twinges of uncomfortable emotions, like I said, of jealousy or maybe frustration or feeling an injustice. But when you’re truly committed to a relationship, whether personally, professionally, friends, family, colleagues, spouse, children, when you’re truly invested in the health and well-being and wanting a relationship to flourish, you have to nurture it with positivity. By inviting someone to share their happy, by stretching that moment longer and having them relive it without being dismissive or destructive or apathetic, it’s really going to overall increase the strength. You’re just nourishing that relationship and building a stronger bond between the two of you.

What the Research Shows and How to Practice It

Through my studies in positive psychology, they did a study of people who practiced active constructive response three times per day over the course of a week, and they found that they actually increased their happiness level overall and decreased their depressive symptoms. And also, the research found that people who are only silently supportive or uninterested, or even point out the downsides of good news, have relationships that are less close, less intimate, and less trusting.

So how can you demonstrate active constructive response in your life? How can you bring awareness to it? How can you catch yourself? I say that when you’re listening to the people around you, and when they’re sharing good news with you, be curious. I always go back to curiosity. Show people that you have an invested interest in who they are and what brings them happiness in their life. When you are truly a cheerleader and a champion for people and have a genuine interest in their well-being, we can’t help but develop a closeness and intimacy and a trust with one another.

And how can you take note of when people around you in your life are not champions for you, are not interested or genuinely invested in your well-being? It’s going to bring light to the people that really maybe aren’t there for the best of intentions with you. And it might make you reevaluate who you spend your time with and where you put your energy.

And so I invite you to practice active constructive response. Practice it with a friend, with your spouse, with a partner, and share something good that you’re celebrating and practice with each other being better active constructive responders. Listen to your partners. Listen and respond with active constructive response. Be enthusiastic in your support, draw out the speaker, invite them to savor it. When in doubt, use the phrase “Tell me more.” Tell me more. Show a genuine curiosity and true investment and interest in who they are and what’s going on in their life.

So I hope this podcast was helpful. I hope that it gives you some things to think about and reflect on, and brings a level of awareness not only to how you treat and respond to others, but also how people are receiving you.

So until next time, take the lead.

Thanks for tuning in for another episode of the Leading Lady podcast. You can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at www.leadinglady-coaching.com. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss any future episodes. While you’re there, it would mean the world to me if you would take a few seconds and leave me an honest review. This will allow me to be able to help other high-achieving women find inspiration, connection, and develop strategies to live and lead with purpose and intention. See you here next week.