Writers love to show their characters performing amazing feats or great acts of will. The problem is that it usually isn't real. Nobody does the hard thing if they can get away with doing the easy thing. Characters, like people, will follow the path of least resistance. They will do the thing that has the lowest stakes and requires the least amount of effort. Until it doesn't work. Then they might do the harder things.

Dialogue

In dialogue scenes, too often writers fill the characters mouths with words that make it clear exactly what the character wants. There is a progression that usually happens when you try to get things but these writers rush past it into the hardest thing. If you want somebody to pass the salt you won't ask "Julian, please pass me the salt over there by the potatoes." You will get their attention and point to the salt. If you can't get attention without words you will call their name. If once you have their attention they aren't sure what you want, you will say the word salt. This continues if you don't get the salt, adding more effort little by little until you get what you want or don't and give up.

Actions

Most people do whatever they can to avoid difficult physical action. Your average person doesn't want to get into physical confrontations and will do anything they can think of to deter a fight. Your character may indeed have to fight someone, but not before he tries everything else first. He can walk away, he can mesmerize his opponent with a magic trick, or he can call security. Stories are told in scenes where we see the steps character had to take that finally led them to a difficult action, not just five iterations of that action.

Never Express True Feelings

When you want to get something strongly, you do what it takes to get it. This will usually preclude expressing your feelings about things. If indeed expressing your feelings is what you really want then that should be what the story is about, not something else with feelings thrown in for fun. People rarely are aware of precisely what they are feeling, much less in a position where they can express it succinctly to others without consequences. We keep feelings inside for the most part. Soon we come to discover that they don't usually help us get things we want. We discover that saying things out loud to people no longer makes them come true as they once may have when we had parents caring for us.

Lack Of Info

Just as you don't get the important details about a friend at the beginning of the relationship, neither should a reader be bombarded with detail after detail that isn't necessary. Stories are a metaphor for life, they will have the essence of reality without being reality. One way to evoke the feel of reality is withholding important information. This isn't something characters do per se, but that the narrator/writer does. The storyteller is also character and it makes no sense for him or her to divulge extra info that isn't necessary to reach the goal of a good story well-told. If you find yourself doing otherwise maybe you don't have the reader's interest at heart, in which case they may not continue reading.

People don't want to just see the cool parts, they want to understand the importance of them. The line where she slaps and threatens the housekeeper with losing her job should be the height of the scene and we should understand why she had to do it. Unless you are writing melodrama you should be interested in real human motivation behind everything in your story. Don't have characters telling how they feel just because it's cool to hear, do it in service of what they want in the story.