How to be a Likeable Badass in Close Relationships

A Q&A with the author of Likeable Badass, Alison Fragale

Let’s all agree that Likeable Badass is one of the best titles like, ever. I mean, who doesn’t want to be a likeable badass? And the content is truly powerful—a host of science-backed tips to succeed in the workplace. But I was curious about whether the skills explored in the book could be adapted to personal, non-work relationships. So I asked author, psychologist, and award winning speaker, Alison Fragale, to chat about this with me. Like a total likeable badass, she said yes.

I tried to condense down our conversation, but… it’s still a wee bit lengthy.¹ Alison digs into a number of content areas, sharing personal stories and science-backed strategies to employ in marriage, friendships, and parenting relationships. And she explains the nuts and bolts of how we each can build respect, show up in likeable ways, stay authentic to ourselves, and still manage to get our own needs met.

You’ll learn a lot through this conversation, and, if you’re like me, you’ll be left wanting to learn more, in which case you should check out Alison’s Substack, go to her website, or pick up a copy of the book for yourself. [Paid subscribers, you can go to the bottom of this newsletter to enter the October giveaway to win a copy of Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserver at the bottom of this newsletter. (And congratulations to Meggan, who won a copy of the September book giveaway!)]

[This conversation is condensed and edited for ease of reading.]

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Let’s get the likeable badass party started.

Yael: Alison, you write that “the key to managing status and reaping all the benefits that come with it is showing up as a likable badass, getting others to see you as both assertive and warm.” But we are often taught that warmth and assertiveness exist in opposition to one another. Why should we attempt to embody both of these qualities?

Alison: Combining assertiveness and warmth is your most surefire path to being highly respected. But that combination is going to be important in for some close relationships and less important in others. Everyone, I think, wants to be in relationships with people who respect them. But, for example, I have a lot of really good friends and they're a tremendous amount of fun, and I love to be around them. Do I think of them on that assertive, competent dimension, as really excelling? Would I trust them with some of my most important tasks and be like, I'm going give it to you and you're going to crush it. Probably not. But I love them and I want to hang out with them and they add something to my life. So, respect in that regard, may not be as essential for having a relationship that you really enjoy.

But there are other parts of relationships where respect really comes into play.

I think about parenting: What will my kids listen to me about and what will they listen to my husband about and what will they listen to neither of us about? That is really about whether they respect your judgment. Do they think you have their best interest at heart? And do I actually think you have the wisdom, the capability to give me an answer? Even kids are figuring out in a close relationship, “do I respect you?”

The second part is, “Do I think you care about me?” Like, you're just worried about if I'm going to get into college and you're not worried about whether I am going to be happy today.² I’ll discount your advice if I don't think it's coming from a place of concern for my wellbeing.

Those dimensions come into play in a lot of our personal relationships, even though I think we can have personal relationships where one of those isn't always being met.

Yael: Maybe what sets apart relationships that really benefit from that combination of assertiveness and warmth is whether you’re seeking to have influence. Parenting is a great example of a relationship in which you want some influence. Partnership, too. But in friendship, we might be okay not having influence.

How Do We Show Up As Assertive But Not Intimidating?

Yael: But here’s a challenge: How do we show up as assertive without being overly intimidating?

Alison: Speaking from my own personal reflections, a guy I dated before I met my husband told me that he had always thought he wanted a very accomplished partner. But he thought that I was actually more successful than he was. And I was like, “Now that you point out like that, yeah. And why would I want to be with someone less successful than me?”

Here's my point: if someone says you're too much for them, they're right.

In the context of marriage, I'd be very concerned about people trying to downplay their success in order to fit in or be liked. Because at some point, this person will get to know the real you, and you want to be respected for who you really are, not who you’re pretending to be.

Being respected and having status is a fundamental human need, and not being respected feels bad. Now, does it feel bad in every relationship equally? No. But just like being lonely and not having companionship or friendship feels bad, so does not being valued in relationships.

One idea I discuss in the book is the idea of dominance complementarity. This is a concept I’ve done research on that shows that warmth begets warmth, but dominance begets submissiveness. What’s important to know is that dominance complementarity is something that people naturally do and that we like those relationships more.

We studied this in the context of task relationships, but I see this anecdotally in personal relationships. The relationships of my friends where the marriages are rocky, are often ones characterized by mutual assertiveness. Like, “I want my way;” and then “No, I want my way.” And it creates a lot of conflict. The ones that are, if not across the board, at least in domains, have partners who embody more of this dominance complementarity.

Yael: What you're saying makes so much sense in that there are some areas, and maybe even just across the board, where there's one person that's more dominant and one person that's more submissive. But, I wondered: if it gets too far apart, can that get problematic? Because another fundamental human drive is for agency. So, if you feel like somebody is controlling you, your drive to sort of regain some autonomy kind of kicks in.

Alison: I think the one that is always going create conflict is the mutual dominance contest. But, one of the things that I was doing with a long-time mentor and co-author of mine involves data on static complementarity versus dynamic complementarity. The idea of static complementarity is like there's an alpha dog and it's just consistent. And to your point, one person is always submissive and the other always dominant. But then we looked at dynamic complementarity, which is across tasks or roles we switch. So, I'm the more assertive one in this domain or this role, and you're the more assertive one in this domain or this role. And people like that even better than static complementarity because it felt more equal.

It's equal in the sense that we're each getting our domains or turns to be assertive, but with, but within each domain it's unequal. Someone's leading and someone's following. And that was a way to get the best of both worlds we were talking about.

Yael: This research may even be helpful because it can allow people to reframe what it means when somebody takes charge. Often, the interpretation within close relationships can be, oh, “That person is taking charge, they're trying to control me.” But if you reframe that as this person is taking charge on this domain and that it makes sense for me to kind of let that one go and decide to take charge on something else, it may feel better and allow more for a more dynamic way of things unfolding.

Alison: Yeah, and in the context of personal situation, it's also important to remember there are domains that people don't want to be in charge of, and that mutual submission can be problematic, as well. My husband read an article that was very transformational for him published on CNN, titled, “No, you can't just ask your wife to make a list.” The idea is that oftentimes women end up being in charge of everything and they run everything and then, and they don't actually want to be in that role. Sometimes my husband says, “What are we having for dinner?” And I'm like, “I don't want to be the one who's always in charge with you submitting to me.”

Relying on one person to actually be the more assertive, dominant, competent person in a lot of these domains can be an issue, as well.

How can we be authentic while strategizing to be likeable badasses?

Alison: Another thing I talked about in the book is about how authenticity and strategy can coexist—it’s one of the things I get asked about most frequently.

You have to be true to yourself. That authenticity piece cannot be abandoned. Where personal relationships often struggle is that, at least in the honeymoon period, people often suppress their authenticity. Like when you're in a new work role, you try so hard to fit in that you suppress you are. We can only do that for so long.

When I think about this, I think about my dad. My parents are divorced, which is why I end up with my dad living with me. And my mom told me something when I was a kid that I absolutely did not believe because my parents, my mom is super irresponsible. She’s fun loving, drinks, gambles. She's out there. And my dad is just as straitlaced and laser focused as you can be. And I was like, “how'd you guys even marry each other? I can see why you don't get along. I cannot see the world in which you decided you were going to get married.”

And my mom says to me, “He was a totally different person. We were sailing, we were going on these vacations. He was wining and dining me.”

I didn’t believe her. He had never gotten in the water even to teach me to swim as a kid, like he was not on a sailboat with you and all this stuff.

Well, lo and behold, time goes by, and now I'm an adult and I get to see my dad dating and I was like, “Damnit, she was right.” My dad, who normally falls asleep at 6:00 PM on the couch was making dinner reservations, dancing, and going to Europe.

Some people he dated for multiple years, but they all ended, and for the same reason: he could only hold that up for so long; it wasn't his authentic self. Eventually, when he showed up as his Fox-News-watching-5-PM-fall-asleep-on-the-couch-self, these people were like, “Who is this?”

When you're not authentic because you're trying to be what your boss wants you to be or to be what your spouse wants you to be, at some point you're going to be exhausted doing it and you're going to stop.

So, embrace authenticity, but also be strategic.

Yael: So, when you're building relationships with people, what are ways that you can show enough of your true self while trying to be strategic about building the relationship in the directions you want them to be going?

Alison: What I ask people is, “How many cups of coffee did you have yesterday? “If I ask you that, what's the answer?

Yael: One.³

Alison: Okay. Most people will be able to answer that within a cup, right? Depending on how much they drink. But if I ask you, “How many times did you [fill in the blank] with some type of behavior that might diminish your status, like diminish your warmth, diminish your credibility, rejected a compliment, or said something negative about yourself when you didn't have to apologize for something that wasn't your fault?” Anything like that, most people would not have an accurate count of how many times. That means a lot of the ways we're putting ourselves down are on complete autopilot.

Whether it's in a personal relationship or professional relationship, you have to have some awareness of how you show up because that's going be your first step of connecting the dots between how you show up and the reactions you're getting from your audience. But once you have some awareness, I don't think tweaking it or managing it needs to be that consuming.

It takes a little bit of effort to turn your attention toward it, but you can start to develop rules about things that fit in with your authentic and strategic self.

What are ways to build our likeability?

Yael: So this is maybe too broad a question, but since it’s something you dig into in the book, what would you say is the essence of what makes somebody likeable?

Alison: So, “Likeable Badass” is a catchy title, but the dimensions of being warm and assertive are multifaceted. There are multiple descriptors that roll up into those two terms. And they all come down to being respected and being other-oriented.

When it comes to being other-oriented, what you're trying to hit on is this feeling of “I care about you.” So, one, knowing your audience and giving them what they want. And second, recognizing it doesn’t always have to be the same. You don't have to give the same kind of gift as the person next to you. You don't have to be warm or likable in the same way. So the other-orientation is “I have to give you something that shows you that I care about you,” and more importantly, demonstrate that I care about people other than me. And there's a variety of ways to do that.

And, importantly, find the place where it feels authentic. You can go in so many directions. Under warmth, there's helpful, there's charitable, there's agreeable, there's likable, there's friendly, there's sincere, there's honest. There's a lot of qualities that say “I value you.”

If people see you as really caring, they generally want to be around you. And when you think about the people you like to be around, they're not all the jokesters and they're not all the great storytellers, and they're not all the great complimenters. But they are people that you think like these people care about other people. I can sense that in the way that they show up. And that makes me want to be in their presence.

How do we build respect in close relationships?

Yael: I think that's such a good description of what likability is and the flexibility you can have in fostering it. On the other dimension, how can we build respect inside of our close relationships?

Alison: One, don't go diminishing your own value. For example, remember that people can't appreciate what they can't see. Think about how much invisible work happens in a relationship—it’s just like doing invisible work at the office. If people don't know you're doing it and you're not telling your story, then how would people respect it? Some of my favorite moments I hand my husband something and he sees how many steps there are and I'm like, “Exactly.” And you know what? Shame on me for doing that for 20 years and never telling him how many steps there were.

You have to tell your story in a romantic relationship or friendship, just like you have to tell it in the workplace. You're doing work to make that relationship survive. And if you spend all the time doing all the trip research so that you guys can go somewhere together but it's completely unknown and the person just shows up, you don't get credit that builds respect. Telling your story has to happen.

And then, figuring out how to solve other people's problems is the best way to show up as assertive and warm. When I think about what have been moments where my husband like looks at me and really respects me, it would be situations where I'm doing something unique that he can't do. So as an example, like I get paid to speak and I'm good at speaking and he doesn't get paid to speak, but has to go give a lot of talks. So sometimes they'll stress him out and he'll be like, “What am I supposed to do?” And I'll say, “How many minutes you got? Tell me about this audience.”

The moments that build respect are when you watch your partner do something of service to you or of service to others.⁴ They see you doing it in a way that feels like unique and something different than their skillset.

Yael: Sometimes it might even just be having your partner really listen to you in a way that you can't get listened to in other parts of your life or in other relationships.

Alison: Right, listen in a way that’s special. You know, I have had people tell me they’ve read every word of their books to their partners and then fed it back to them. And I’m just like, “Damn.” That's a better spouse than I am.”

But the point is to use your unique skills to offer value to somebody else. That's where respect comes from.

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Drop mic. What tips did Alison provide that struck you, either in changing your mind about becoming a likeable badass, or in the strategies to implement?

[Paid subscribers, don’t forget to scroll down to enter to win a copy of the book, which you can also link to buy on your own here.]

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