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Ron Fruit: Welcome to the podcast, Coping Better, Connecting Our Positive Emotions, where we talk about positive emotion skills in relation to farm stress. Today we’ll be discussing an awareness of our personal strengths and agriculture, One of the core skills of the WeCOPE Series. I’m Ron Fruit. Our guests are Gene Schriefer, Wisconsin State Executive Director of the Farm Service Agency, and Dorothy Harms, who is a farmer, active community volunteer, and a member of the Farmer Angel Network. Gene says, when you’re speaking of personal strengths, it begs the question, does it charge your batteries or wear you down?

Gene Schriefer: We all need to better understand what it is that we’re, we’re good at. Do we need to be good at something that’s our job, or something that we work with? And if we have those skills, we can practice and refine those skills and, and we become very comfortable at it. It becomes, uh, very second nature. And some people, I would say in my experience, are, are more aware of what their skills are. Uh, I think of them as assets that they bring to, uh, a business or in, in our case, they bring to a farm. I don’t know whether, um, we get good at things that we love or do we love the things that we’re good at. I think about skills in, in relationship to a farm. A farm is a, a very complex business, uh, enterprise and, and it requires a large set of very different skills.

Gene Schriefer: The difficulty is we have a lot of many, uh, sole proprietors, uh, where, uh, one person is running, uh, running the farm by themselves, and it becomes quite hard to become good at everything, all the skills that are, you know, uh, uh, needed, uh, to operate a modern farm. And I’m not implying that a large farm is a better model, but they do bring with them, uh, a different set of skills to, uh, that operation. And by knowing our own strengths, uh, we can look at, uh, our own weaknesses and play to our strengths. And then if we’ve got, uh, employees or if it’s a larger family operation, we build a team, uh, that can cover your weak areas and we capitalize on their strengths and it makes the entire business more viable. You know, Jack Welsh, CEO of, of General Electric retired said, If, if you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t try and compete. And one of the goals that I think is very critical from a farm management standpoint is, is figuring out what each of those, uh, skills are, uh, are strengths. And that becomes your competitive advantage.

Ron Fruit: Dorothy Harms believes it’s important to look at your personal strengths.

Dorothy Harms: Gene really kind of, um, outlined for us, really the different assets, the different strengths that oftentimes that are needed in running a farm. Just looking at our own farm, we kind of joke. My husband is a production manager and I’m the business manager because he’s a guy that’s all about the details and making sure the cattle are all well taken care of. I’m the person that’s pushing the pencil and running the numbers. And though oftentimes when we’re trying to cope through, uh, stressful situations, too many times folks get kind of focused in on their weaknesses. And I think the ability to kinda look at your personal strengths and be able to say, Okay, this is something I know I can do, even if it’s in a difficult situation, I know I can figure out how I’m going to best take care of that sick cow or how I’m gonna best fix that tractor based on previous experiences. We, again, continue to utilize those strengths. And then again, recognizing that many hats that farmers need to wear and operate in a farm, we don’t know how to do all of it. And being able to rely on others’, uh, strengths as well. So not really, again, focusing on what we can’t do, but knowing what we can do and knowing, you know, when we need to rely on others to help us out.

Ron Fruit: The next key question is, how do you identify your strengths?

Gene Schriefer: We never really take the time when we’re farming. We, we always have, you know, 101 tasks to get done, right? And so the time to reflect, to think it was a good thing to do when you were raking hay, right? Until you started to drift off the row. But, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s time to reflect, right? Time to think about just because of my, my, my positions and, and roles in the past. And, and, and I’d say personality. I, I’ve always enjoyed, uh, these personality assessments, whether it’s [Real] Colors, Myers Briggs, not just to say, you know, does that really describe me and think about me? But when you look at your kids, you look at your wife, you look at your neighbors, you try to say, Okay, where do they fit? And when you understand that, then you might choose to communicate with them maybe a little bit different and, and that, that fits into their, their personality type.

Gene Schriefer: And, and, and, you know, not everybody is gonna be interested in taking the time to really, you know, think about, reflect on themselves. I mean, that’s just, you know, there’s, there’s work to do that’s not important, but it, it, it, it does help you again, think about what it is, uh, that that’s, uh, meaningful for you. You know, just personally, I, I’m a numbers guy, right? I, I love digging into numbers and financials, and doing, uh, analysis. And when my tractor breaks, it’s a stressful event. It’s not, that is not my asset base. I mean, I just dread it when something breaks mechanical cause I know I can’t fix it and, and I’m no longer in control. It’s up to somebody else to help me out. And, and as farmers, we, we pride ourselves on being kind of independent and be able to get it all done. And, and, and we can’t always. And certainly acknowledging what you can do and what you can’t do and not try to do it all is, I think a great first step.

Ron Fruit: Dorothy says The answer may come from someone else.

Dorothy Harms: Typically farmers surround themselves with, um, several different types of advisors, whether it’s their veterinarian, whether it’s their nutritionist, whether it’s their lender, sometimes it’s even the milkman, but it’s the people that are around them that sometimes that they can maybe look to, to say, “What is it that I’m, I’m good at? What is it that to really kind of help them bring out those personal strengths” Because they can kind of step back and have that perspective. And oftentimes those are the people who know you best. They see you day in and day out, and they kind of have a metric to compare as well. They get on a lot of farms, visit with a lot of other farmers so they can, can maybe perhaps provide that kind of feedback that somebody would be looking for. When, like, like Gene said, it’s, it’s hard ourselves as farmers to kind of just step back and take a, a personal reflection, but reaching out to some of those folks that are, are around us and know us best, our family, our loved ones, our good friends. Sometimes maybe just stepping out and talking to them about it can kind of help you really be able to look at and be able to build on the strengths that you have.

Gene Schriefer: When you ask a neighbor or a veterinarian, what do you think about you’re, you’re opening yourself up to vulnerability, right? That you might get some, not the message that you wanted to hear. You also might get a message that you didn’t ex expect to hear, that you’re really a good listener, you’re really thoughtful. Often we’re afraid of the answer we might get, so we never ask the question. I’m looking at my neighbor any direction. I can see all the things my neighbor’s doing wrong. But if he got the binoculars and looked at the neighbor’s house, he’s pointing back at my place and looking at all the things that I’m doing wrong. That’s why you have that community that, that Dorothy, he was talking about, uh, a collection of other people. They’re outside. They, they’re interested in you and your business, but it’s not their business, right? So they’re a little bit more unbiased. They’re gonna be a little bit more objective. And we, we need to be willing to, again, this is this vulnerability portion except what they tell us as an unbiased opinion about our, ourselves, our business, our skills, or maybe our, our weaknesses as well.

Ron Fruit: Dorothy believes that personal strength should also be a discussion point with the next generation on the farm.

Dorothy Harms: Some of the conversations that I have with my daughter and her husband, – are my daughter, she’s the cow person, she’s not the numbers person. And really having conversations to be able to help coach her in using my experience and my abilities, and just to be able to kind of help her become more aware of the things that she needs to look at in running the farm business in the future. And I think being able to do that in a way, again, it’s not telling them what to do do, It’s not saying you’re doing it wrong. It’s like, these are things that I see. These are ways that have worked for us. And being able to kind of be that coach is being, you know, using that strength and being able to kind of pass that on to the next generation.

Ron Fruit: Gene Schriefer’s advice is it’s never too soon to seek help

Gene Schriefer: Finding something hopeful. Not unrealistically hopeful, but something that you can latch onto that says, I can take back this control and do something positive. This might be a path out. Now. The, the sooner we get to that point, the more options that we have. I have never had somebody having a financial issue causing stress that came in too soon. Quite the contrary; farmers are really optimist saying it’s always gonna get better. If we were asking those questions earlier on, we got so many more options. If we wait until we’re, we’re 10 foot from the cliff, maybe we can stop in time, but we still want to try and find what’s a potential good outcome here.

Ron Fruit: Dorothy Harm’s final words of advice are stop and reflect.

Dorothy Harms: When people find themselves in a situation that seems difficult, seems almost hopeless, is just stop, take a moment and think about the times in the past that something was hard to do and how they got through it. And I think oftentimes if we can just stop and, and look back, like, you know, there was a time when I just, I didn’t know how I was gonna get all that work done. And somehow I got it. I did, I got it all done. I got got the kids to band practice, I got the cows milked and I made it to the 4-H senior leaders meeting. And sometimes we just have to take a moment and be mindful and just maybe encourage people as it’s, like I said, when they come through times that seem like are overwhelming and like too much is just to, to take a moment and think back about the times you’ve made it through.

Ron Fruit: Thanks to our guests, Gene Schriefer and Dorothy Harms for sharing their knowledge and experiences with us. If you are interested in more information on positive emotional skills, please check out all seven episodes in Coping Better, Connecting our Positive Emotions.

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Credits:  Coping Better; Connecting with Our Positive Emotions is a product of a generous grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) through a partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) and is adapted from the original WeCOPE curriculum, a ROTA grant funded program through the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).