2. Ofman's core quadrant

What comes naturally to you and what others find irritating about you are often two sides of the same trait. Daniel Ofman captured that connection in a model of four positions. It explains in a single diagram why under pressure you often do exactly the wrong thing, and why some people can wind you up within two minutes.

Core quality: what was always there

A core quality is a trait that belongs to you and that you use without effort. You did not learn it on a training course; it was already there when you were eight. Think of carefulness, humour, perseverance, commitment or decisiveness.

Two things make a core quality recognisable. First, it costs you hardly any energy, and you are sometimes surprised that others find it difficult. Second, it cannot be switched off: even at moments when it is unhelpful, you do it anyway. That is what distinguishes it from a skill, which you have built up deliberately. Your core quality is more your keynote than your repertoire.

Pitfall: too much of a good thing

A pitfall is your core quality in overdrive. Not the opposite of your quality, but the same quality with the volume turned up too high. Carefulness becomes nit-picking. Involvement becomes meddling. Decisiveness becomes pushiness.

The tricky part is that you rarely feel your own pitfall. On the inside you are doing exactly what you always do and what usually works; from the outside, someone else sees you overshooting. Your pitfall therefore often sits in the blind spot from chapter 1.

There is one signal you can watch for yourself: under pressure you push harder on your quality. Someone who likes order makes even more lists when faced with chaos. Someone who likes pace talks even faster when things slow down. Someone who is involved asks how you are doing even more often when there is distance. More of the same is almost always the moment at which the quality tips over.

Challenge: the quality you lack

Every pitfall has a positive counterpart, and that is what makes the model useful: it shows the direction of your development without you having to give up your quality.

Your challenge is the positive counterpart of your pitfall: the behaviour you do not yet use automatically and that brings your pitfall into balance. It is emphatically not the opposite of your core quality. You do not have to unlearn your decisiveness in order to develop patience; you add something alongside it.

You find your challenge by asking one question about your pitfall: which quality would have helped here? For pushiness that is patience, or giving space. For meddling it is being able to give trust. For being chaotic it is creating structure. Your challenge is often something your colleagues are admired for and that you secretly feel does not suit you. A challenge rarely feels pleasant: it takes effort, it goes slowly and you feel as though you are giving something up. That is precisely why you usually leave it to others.

Allergy: what you cannot stand

If you take your challenge to the extreme, you end up at your allergy: the behaviour in others that you react to disproportionately strongly. Not mildly irritated, but with an intensity out of all proportion to what is happening.

Someone with the core quality decisiveness and the challenge patience often becomes allergic to passivity and endless deliberation. Someone who is careful and has courage as a challenge is allergic to people who can't be bothered to do things properly. Someone who is committed and has to learn to keep their distance gets stuck on colleagues who act cold and businesslike.

That sharpness is useful information. Your allergy always points back to your own challenge: you react so strongly because the other person's behaviour is the extreme version of what you still need to develop in yourself. What you keep at arm's length in someone else, you also keep at arm's length in yourself.

The diagonal with the most tension

There are two diagonals in the quadrant. One connects your pitfall with your challenge; that is your learning point. The other connects your core quality with your allergy, and that is where the most tension lies. If you meet someone who sits exactly in your allergy, you fall into your pitfall. In doing so you provoke in the other person precisely the behaviour you can't stand. Both people reinforce each other's pitfall, and neither understands why this conversation is so difficult.

Filling in your own quadrant

Filling in a quadrant is not a form-filling exercise but a process of searching. You can start at any of the four positions, and along the way it usually turns out that your first choice of words isn't quite right yet. This is how you work it out.

• Choose a way in. Start at the position where a word comes to you fastest, usually your core quality or your allergy. With an allergy you often have a face in mind straight away.
• Fill in the position next to it. From your core quality you move horizontally to the pitfall: what happens when you use this quality too much? From your allergy you move horizontally to the challenge: which healthy variant lies beneath that behaviour?
• Check the diagonals. Once all four words are in place, you check whether your core quality and your allergy really are opposites, and whether your pitfall and your challenge are too.
• Test it in a situation. Look for a concrete moment from the past month in which all four positions were visible. If the quadrant is right, that situation will fit into it smoothly.
• Put it to someone else. Ask a colleague whether they recognise the pitfall and which word they would choose. Their word often hits your blind spot exactly.

Three mistakes that make the quadrant useless

Quadrants go askew in a few standard ways. All of them can be put right by adjusting one word.

The first mistake is filling in the opposite of your core quality quality as your challenge. "Decisiveness" set against "passivity" tells you that you have to give up part of yourself. That is not right and it motivates no one. Your challenge is the opposite of your pitfall, not of your quality.

The second mistake is filling in an allergy with a name instead of with behaviour. "Nadia" is not an allergy. "Endlessly wanting to lay out every scenario side by side" is. As soon as you name the behaviour, you can look for the challenge underneath it.

The third mistake is choosing words that are too big. "Incompetence" and "arrogance" are judgements: they hurt and they achieve nothing. Words pitched a little lower, such as "deciding too early" or "talking too fast", give you something to practise with tomorrow.

Summary

• A core quality costs you no energy and cannot be switched off. That is what distinguishes it from a skill.
• Your pitfall is the same quality with the volume too high. Under pressure you push harder: that is your signal.
• Your challenge is the positive counterpart of your pitfall, not of your core quality.
• Your allergy is the extreme version of your challenge as seen in someone else, and therefore points back to yourself.
• The diagonal between core quality and allergy explains why certain people push you into your pitfall so quickly.
• Keep the words small and behavioural, and test your quadrant against a real situation and against someone else's word.