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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 positive reappraisal in agriculture. It’s one of the core skills in the WeCOPE series. I’m your host, Ron Fruit. Our guest today include Paul Fricke Professor, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at UW Madison and Sue Sharp, the owner of Driftless Life Coaching. We all have stressful situations. Paul believes we have a choice.

Paul Fricke: We can either have a bad outcome to a bad situation, or we can turn it into a, a better outcome. And so I guess I would define it as that space that we have making a choice for the positive response rather than a negative response.

Ron Fruit: As an example, Paul remembers a time when his 26 year old daughter called home one winter day.

Paul Fricke: I could immediately tell there was a problem. she said, “Dad, something bad has happened.” And, uh, I, I said, “okay, what, what happened? “She goes, I got in an accident. She was, it was snowy, it was a snowstorm, came through, and she got in an accident. And, you know, being a dad, I I, I could have one of two responses. I could kind of say, “Well, how did this happen?” Or I could, I could kind of lead myself through in a positive way. And so, um, the first thing I asked her was, “Are you okay?” She says, “Yes, I’m okay.” I said, “Was anybody hurt?” Nobody was hurt. I said, “Okay, but just tell me what happened.” She said she was going to smash into the back end of a car. She hit a patch of ice on University Avenue, and she made the decision to take the snow bank.

Paul Fricke: And she hit a pole. My response was, “you know, Leah, you were under duress and you made a lot of really quick, really good decisions. You didn’t hit the person in front of you. You went to the snow bank, you hit a pole. Uh, there’s only damage to the car.” I said, “No one is hurt.” And so I just talked her through that and calmed her down. And again, my response could have been quite different. I could have gotten upset. I could have said, Well, you know, you know, I could have gone in a very different direction and I’m gonna be the first to admit I don’t respond the right way.yery often. I happened to respond the right way in this particular example. And so I’m not saying that I, I do this right or I do this really well. I felt that I handled that pretty well.

Paul Fricke: So I calmed her down. I told her that, uh, she made a lot of good decisions. I asked her where she was and she said, a couple guys were helping push the car off of the snow pile. I said, Is the pole hurt? She said, “Nope, pole’s not hurt.” So she didn’t really even have to call the police or anything. And insurance covered the car. And, and so I, it was just an example that I could think of where I, I think I did the right thing as far as the, the response that I had in that situation.

Ron Fruit: Sue Sharp believes Paul’s example included a very important concept. And that’s how I feel.

Sue Sharp: Often when we are reassessing something or we’re making a, a new appraisal of it, we have to step back for just a second and take our feelings out of it and say to ourself, What’s the facts? Like, what’s really happening here? And when we get a chance to like, look at the facts without our feelings involved, kind of like our lens changes, like how we see the situation changes. And then we can say, okay, this has happened. Now I’m gonna make a new plan. Often it’s just making that new plan based on the information that you have.

Paul Fricke: Sue

Ron Fruit: Is a beekeeper. She remembers a stressful moment that serves us. A great example of how I feel.

Sue Sharp: We often move bees either very late at night or very early in the morning, trailer loads, right? And we had just picked up bees and we were coming back and it was like five o’clock in the morning. We had gotten off main highway and we’re almost home. Everyone knows this story. We were almost home when a strap broke on the back of the trailer and out onto the roadway spilled about 10 boxes of bees. Now, I’m not saying that I didn’t say all the favorite words that we all say, and there were bees up in the air and everywhere. But as we came out, I just said, We actually are so lucky that didn’t happen on the highway, cuz that would’ve been disastrous. Luckily, we’re here where there, we’ll be lucky if another car drives by us by the time we get this all picked up. So very often it’s just like, whew, take your emotions out of it. Or like I did say them all out in the, you know, out to the clouds and then be like, Okay, what’s the real situation and what do we have to do? You can always look at it in a different view and not being Pollyanna like, it didn’t happen. I’m gonna cover it up with something else. It did happen. Now what’s the best way to work this situation?

Ron Fruit: We all face tough moments. Bad things happen every day. Positive reappraisal allows us to make the choice to grow, to learn and gain some power back.

Paul Fricke: Something bad happens and you have, you have a space, you have this space of time before you react. And if I don’t take that space to react in a positive way, I can react in a very negative way. And once my experience is, once I get into that negative mindset, it can really spiral outta control. I can get upset, I can get angry, I can say things that I might regret. All those kinds of things can happen. But I think the thing that you have to do and the thing you learn as you go through life, hopefully you learn that you can use that space in a positive way. And I think almost anything that happens, you can frame it in a positive way. And I, I think one thing that helps me think through that is once I’m removed, one from one of those situations, once some time has passed, maybe a day or a week, I can go back and I can say, How did I handle that? Did I use that space in a positive way or did I use it in a negative way? And you I have to learn from that. And I have to say, okay, I need to do better next time. It’s a continual process I think, of assessing, learning how to react in these, in these kinds of situations. Cuz believe me, bad things are gonna happen on a daily basis to all of us. And we have to make that conscious choice, uh, how we’re gonna respond.

Ron Fruit: Paul remembers an incredibly serious incident in his life. Growing up on the farm,

Paul Fricke: I was a very young, I was probably six or seven years old, riding on the fender of a John Deere 40/20 cabs tractor. My dad was driving, we were out spreading manure and I went to hop off the fender onto the foot plate and somehow missed the foot plate, fell and very quickly I was under the tractor and, and I was pinned under the tractor. And in that moment, my dad had to react. I mean, he had to react immediately. And he did. He reacted, he stopped the tractor, he jumped off to assess the situation, figured out where I was. And had he gone forward, it would’ve run over, you know, my shoulder and, and maybe crushed my head. He had to back back off of my arm. So, I mean, he’s doing all this in such a reactive way. I don’t think there was a lot of space. Okay? And, you know, it wasn’t until he figured out that he had to get, you know, back the tractor off of me, got me back home, and then, you know, then I could see his, his reaction to everything that happened. But, you know, there are times in, in our lives, in situations where you’re kind of in a, in a very serious situation where you have to react in order to, uh, to, to get the right outcome.

Ron Fruit: Sue believes that using positive reappraisal takes practice. Lots of practice.

Sue Sharp: I’m often a fly by the seat of the pants kind of person. No, I, I am always kind of a fly by the seat of the pants person, but I’m really bad about checking things like what’s the weather gonna be like? Like I’ll make a plan. We’re gonna do this without ever checking on the forecast. And you know, when farming you need like what case of denial was I in all those years that I thought that that would not be a priority of always checking. And so what I learned was I actually had to do it, like put it on a wall where I wrote, What’s weather gonna be like today? What are we gonna need? Like I had a list of the five things I needed to know before I headed out the door. But I actually had to make that list and look at it every time I left.

Sue Sharp: Keys, wallet, phone, got the keys wallet phone. Cuz if you’re leaving the house with the keys wallet phone, you’re gonna turn around. It was practicing and practicing until it became part of my routine and my second nature to do it. But also you change it’s weather, you become a little bit more flexible and you say, All right, so today we’re not gonna do that. We stored up the inside projects; opportunity. I’ll look at it as an opportunity, opportunity to do inside project. Having those tools, like these are tools, right? Having those tools to switch how you’re thinking about something and not thinking it just blew up your day. It just gave you an opportunity to work on a different project. Actually that’s maybe of all things beekeeping taught me day to day, it’s gonna be different. You constantly have to look for your opportunities.

Paul Fricke: That’s really great, Sue. The thing I would add is that there are resources for people to learn these skills. Um, I went through a seven Habits of Highly Effective People, uh, class. And you know, those are, those are times, uh, where they teach you these kinds of responses. And that’s kind of where I came, you know, that that idea that there’s a space between something that happens and your reaction to it, realizing that, I mean, these are things that have to be learned and have to be taught, and there’s skills that can be developed and, and you need to think about those. So there are tools that people can turn to, to help develop these kinds of skills. They don’t come naturally. Uh, we all have our own dispositions. Some of us are more reactive. Some of us, you know, have more tempers than other people do. Believe me, you know, I am at fault for all these things. But, but those are skills that I think we need to learn. And, and there’s resources by which we can, we can learn how to do these things.

Sue Sharp: Yeah, it’s definitely not something we learned in high school. It is, it is not. However, I, I love the fact that once, like we are now have the opportunity to tap into anything we want. Pick a subject, hit YouTube. You will find many people presenting on that. Even how to be mindful of just getting your ducks in a row, being mindful of them. when you’re in a conversation with someone, when you talk and when you hold back, Do I need to offer you a solution or are you just venting? Like, that’s all a, a life skill thing. But we learn life skill on the job. But there are many great teachers out there, and I always encourage everybody to seek out good teachers and find one that resonates with you.

Ron Fruit: Thanks to our guest, Paul Fricke and Sue Sharp for sharing their knowledge and experiences with us. If you are interested in more information on positive emotional skills, please check out all the 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).