FARMER FOUR - TENACITY

"Stay Positive" Is the Worst Thing You Can Say to This Person

Your optimism just told someone grinding through worse than you know that you haven't noticed.

A well-meaning colleague watched their teammate push through a brutal three-week sprint, understaffed, under-scoped, and dealing with a vendor meltdown that nobody else wanted to touch. When it finally shipped, they dropped a message in the team channel: "You've been through so much and it will be okay! Just stay positive and keep going. Everything will work out."

The teammate, a Farmer Four, read every word and felt their jaw tighten. "It will be okay" is what people say when they haven't looked at the actual situation. "Stay positive" is advice for someone who has the luxury of choosing their mood. "Everything will work out" is a prediction with zero evidence behind it. None of this acknowledged what actually happened: that they held the project together through sheer force of will while absorbing pain they never mentioned.

The message was meant as encouragement, but it landed as erasure. This person's entire survival strategy is built on enduring hard things without pretending they're easy, and the message asked them to pretend.

The problem with generic communication

Most advice about workplace communication treats people as interchangeable. Write clearly. Be concise. Lead with empathy. These are fine defaults, and they fail constantly with specific people for specific reasons.

Personality science has mapped this for decades. The Enneagram identifies 27 distinct subtypes, each with a different instinctual drive that shapes how they filter, prioritize, and react to incoming messages. These are hardwired filters, running beneath conscious awareness, that determine whether your message lands or gets discarded before it's finished.

The Farmer Four filters everything through one question: does this person respect what it actually costs to do this work? Their core drive is to endure pain through stoic effort and earn what's missing through discipline. They want you to see the real difficulty, name it plainly, and point at the next concrete step. Anything else feels like you're not paying attention.

Meet the Farmer Four: "Tenacity"

The Farmer Four is long-suffering. As the countertype of the Fours, Farmer Fours are stoic in the face of their inner pain and they don't share it with others as much as the other two Fours. This is a person who learns to tolerate pain and to do without as a way of earning love. Instead of dwelling in envy, Farmer Fours act out their envy by working hard to get what others have and they lack.

Stoic endurance. This is the countertype Four. Where other Fours might externalize their pain through drama or melancholy, this person swallows it. They carry difficulty internally and keep moving. When you pour sympathy on them, you're surfacing something they've deliberately contained. It destabilizes them. They need you to acknowledge the weight without trying to lift it for them.

Effort as the central lever. Their identity is built on earning through disciplined work. Where others might seek inspiration or emotional support, this person seeks the next task. Messages that honor effort and point toward action feel like respect. Messages that substitute feelings for forward motion feel like wasted time.

Realism over sentiment. They trust people who see things as they are. Sugarcoating, false optimism, and vague promises of better days register as naivety at best, dishonesty at worst. They're practitioners of hard truth. Match their realism and they'll trust you. Contradict it with platitudes and they'll write you off.

5 ways you're losing them before you start

1. Pity framing. "I feel so bad about what you're dealing with. That must be incredibly hard." This feels diminishing and patronizing. It positions them as someone to feel sorry for, which contradicts their self-image as someone strong enough to endure. Show respect for their strength and resolve instead. Name the difficulty, then point forward.

2. Melodramatic language. "This has been an absolute nightmare and I can't imagine how you're coping." Amplifying the emotional intensity only intensifies pain without producing progress. Use grounded language tied to action. Describe the situation factually and move toward what comes next.

3. Vague inspiration. "I believe in you! You've got this!" This doesn't help execution. It's a feeling dressed up as guidance. They need concrete tasks and thresholds, not cheerleading. Tell them specifically what to do next and by when.

4. Minimizing the struggle. "It's really not that bad when you think about it." This breaks trust in their lived reality. They know exactly how bad it is because they've been sitting in it. Dismissing the difficulty tells them you're either not paying attention or not willing to be honest. Name the hardship without romanticizing it, and they'll respect you for it.

5. Easy fix promises. "A few small changes and this whole thing turns around." This sounds naive and false to someone who has learned that nothing worth having comes without sustained cost. Set a realistic path and pace. Acknowledge that the road is hard and that they can walk it, step by step, not in one magic leap.

What they actually want to hear

For this subtype, the kindest thing you can say is "here's what to do next." Acknowledging the grind and giving them a concrete step is the only combination that registers as both honest and useful.

Try it out: FREE Communication Optimizer for Farmer Fours

Paste your draft message into your LLM, then paste the following prompt after it. The model will rewrite your message specifically for this subtype.

mode: communication_optimizer
target_subtype: FARMER_FOUR
subtype_name: Tenacity
instinct: self_preservation
core_drive: "endure pain through stoic effort and earn what is missing by disciplined work"
communication_stance: "respect-grit,grounded,effort-honoring,no-pity"
tone[4]:
  - sober over dramatic
  - honest over sugarcoated
  - steady over volatile
  - practical over abstract
message_rules[6]:
  - acknowledge endurance and effort directly
  - focus on practical progress rather than emotional spectacle
  - break goals into hard but achievable steps
  - name constraints openly and plan within them
  - reinforce agency and earned momentum
  - close with the next act of disciplined effort
anti_patterns[5]{id,pattern,why_it_fails,fix}:
  1,pity_framing,feels diminishing and patronizing,show respect for strength and resolve
  2,melodramatic_language,intensifies pain without progress,use grounded language tied to action
  3,vague_inspiration,does not help execution,provide concrete tasks and thresholds
  4,minimizing_struggle,breaks trust in lived reality,name hardship without romanticizing it
  5,easy_fix_promises,sounds naive and false,set realistic path and pace
few_shot[3]{id,generic,optimized}:
  1,"You have been through so much and it will be okay.","Your effort under pressure is real. Focus on these two steps this week."
  2,"Just stay positive and keep going.","Keep going with structure: finish task A then task B then review results."
  3,"Everything will work out.","This is hard and you can move it forward with one disciplined action today."
quality_gate[4]:
  - never trade realism for sentiment
  - pair empathy with an executable step
  - keep language dignified and unsentimental
  - preserve effort as the central lever
input_source: prior_thread_message

Twenty-seven subtypes. One message.

The Farmer Four needs realism and respect for effort before they'll trust your message. Compare that to the Teamer Four ("Shame"), who filters through painful self-comparison and needs you to see their suffering without judgment. Or the Farmer Two ("Privilege"), who wants warmth and belonging before anything else, the exact emotional tone that would feel patronizing to the Four. Same heart center, radically different entry points.

Personalization determines whether your message gets read or discarded.

The people who learn to distinguish between comforting someone and respecting someone will build deeper trust with the hardest-working people on their team. Everyone else will keep sending encouragement that gets quietly deleted by the person who needed it least.

Your toughest people are waiting for your honesty and a next step.

It's why we're building Rally, communications automatically optimized for each person's instinctual profile. See how we do it: AI Smells Remover.