De-escalate any argument in 90 seconds: Doug Noll

Show Transcript

Doug Noll on Your Intended Message

Doug Knoll helps you calm an angry person in 90 seconds

Doug Knoll: Because we're emotional beings and because everything is emotional, why shouldn't we take the time to become emotional Jedi Masters? And it's not that hard. Once you know the hack, there's a simple hack. And once you got changes everything.

George Torok: Welcome to the podcast about communication in business. Did you know that I'm known as the speech coach for executives? That's because I help business leaders deliver the intended message for greater success. And we do that through one on one coaching or group training for the team. When you listen to this podcast, you will hear advice and perspectives from communication experts from around the world. My guest today is Doug Knoll. Here's three facts that I think you should know about Doug. One, he was born with a set of difficult disabilities. Nearly visually blind, colorblind. Two, club feet, poor teeth, left handed and too smart for his own good. Two, he found his life's calling at age 50 when he left a successful civil trial practice to become a peacemaker, mediator, author and teacher. And three, he's living a blessed life on 10 acres in the central California Sierra Nevada foothills about 60 miles south of Yosemite National Park. And he shares this life, he with his amazing, his incredible wife, two border collies, two cats and six chickens who are taking the month of August off from laying eggs. Go figure. August, no Egg month. Doug Noel, welcome to your intended message.

Doug: The most important thing you can do for George is give him a review

Doug Knoll: Hey George. Well, first of all, I want to thank you so much for having me on your show. And you know, I've listened to a lot of your podcasts and what you're building here is really something very special. So I just want to acknowledge you for that and for everybody who's listening, the most important thing you can do for George is to give him a five star review on Apple or Spotify or whatever. I've given him a five star review and I urge you to go out and do exactly the same thing. Because the way great podcasters like George get recognized is by people like us who listen and vote with and vote and so go out and do it right now. Give them that five star review. Really important.

George Torok: And thank you for that, Doug. And yes, those are my thoughts. Exactly. That I'm not able always to say, but that's what I want.

Doug Knoll: I can say it and I will. Five star reviews everybody. Don't screw around.

George Torok: We want to spread the message. And Doug, glad to have you back again. And folks who might have, might remember you from a previous one, we talked about, your book, how to, how to, calm an angry person in 90 seconds or less. And that's not calming them in a violent way, but by speaking them and really calming them down. And it looks like magic when you do it. And it's amazing how quickly it works.

Doug Miller has developed a set of skills to deal with difficult conversations

And let's, let's carry on that theme and in particular, how people can deal better with, conflict and difficult conversation. Difficult communication, especially when emotion gets involved in. Isn't emotion the problem?

Doug Knoll: It is. It is. So, you coach for a lot of executives and you probably run into a lot of people, and I'm sure there are people who are listening today that they want to stay calm and cool and collected in these difficult conversations, but they keep getting thrown off by strong emotions or maybe they devolve into arguments, or maybe they're dealing with difficult personalities. And the thing is that people try all these different ways to manage that. They type deep breathing, meditation, maybe then there are a whole bunch of communication coaches that have all these ideas about stepping outside and, you know, doing all this stuff. But the problem is, in the heat of the moment, none of this stuff works. And so what I've developed is a set of skills that for executives that takes about six to eight weeks to master, that allows you to take any difficult conversation and make it transformative. It allows you to walk into any intense emotional situation, like a boardroom or a team meeting, executive

00:05:00

Doug Knoll: meeting, where emotions run high and have everybody calm within minutes. And where you are looked at as the leader who can take calm the troubled waters just by your presence. So it's really what I am now calling my 90 second reset protocol. And it is, it's all based on neuroscience and it is simple to describe, takes some practice to master, and it has been a life transforming skill for me and for the hundreds of thousands of people that I've taught. and my fourth book, which you mentioned, De Escalate, kind of outlined the basic principles, but that book came out in 2017 and since that time, so it's been, what, seven years? I've learned a whole bunch more since then about, about all of this and how it applies everywhere in life. So you're right, the biggest problem that we have is that emotions can get fired up and triggered really quickly. And that in and of itself is not bad. What the problem is that we live in a culture that tells us that emotions are bad, they're evil, they make us weak, they make us vulnerable, they're irrational. And that's just the wrong mindset. The first thing we have to learn is that emotions make us strong, we are emotional. Beings. Every single thing we do is emotional. All decisions are emotional. There's no such thing as rationality. We live in a culture that says that human beings are rational. Well, we're not rational. We're highly emotional. We are capable of critical thinking. We're capable of analysis. But those are tools. They don't define our essential nature. And our essential nature is to be emotional. And in fact, the research shows that if we didn't have emotions, we would not be able to make decisions, because emotions have valence. They tell us what's important and what's not important. 

They tell us what to approach for and what to defend or avoid. And they give us. And they help us prioritize by, weighing alternatives by their importance to us, both short term and long term. So because we're emotional beings, and because everything is emotional, why shouldn't we take the time to become emotional Jedi Masters? And it's not that hard. Once you know the hack, there's a simple hack. And once you got changes everything, and you become the leader that everyone wants to follow, because you cannot be thrown off center. You can walk into any intense situation with utter calm, confident composure, and respond to people without ever losing your temper, without ever losing your whole, without feeling any anxiety whatsoever. And just be. Just know you're going to master the situation, because you'll know that the human brain is hardwired in a certain way. And when you use that hard wiring, the way that I teach, every human being has to react to it in the same way every single time every human being on the planet. That's what's so incredible about this stuff.

George Torok: Doug, you're teasing us. how do we become this Jedi Master? Because I'd like to champion that three step process.

Doug Knoll: Number one, you have to learn how to ignore the words. And this is not quite as easy as it sounds, because we're trained from a very young age to pay attention to words and ignore everything else. But the truth of the matter is that only 7% of all human communication is communicated through words. Through verbal communication, 93% is all nonverbal. And it's all emotional. What's interesting is that our brains have the capacity to understand that. That's the second step I'll get to in a second. So what we want to do is make for 90 seconds or 120 seconds. The words just become white noise. Somebody's screaming at you, yelling at you, crying, upset. You just ignore what they're saying. You don't ignore them. You just ignore their words. Because we want to pay very close attention to the person. So that's step number one. Step number two, we're going to read their emotions. And everybody says it's not how to read emotions. How the heck do I do that? Right? Because we live in this culture that tells us that emotions are bad. Well, here's the other thing. Our brains are hardwired through millions of years of evolution to rapidly and accurately read the emotional state of another human being. And the evolutionary biology behind this is absolutely fascinating. suffice it to say that we are hardwired to be empathic. We're hardwired to read emotions. The reason that we don't do it or that we think we can't do it is again, because of cultural bias. So we learn how to read emotions. And the simple way I teach a whole process

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Doug Knoll: that allows this to happen very naturally and very quickly but without. We don't have time today to go into all of that. But the simple way to do it is to simply quiet your mind, just stop thinking. So you're not listening to the words. You're no longer reacting. You, you're just being. And your brain, your preconscious brain will process the emotional experience of the other person. And in a few seconds, it'll start flowing into your own consciousness. You're angry, you're frustrated, you're upset, you feel disrespected. You don't feel heard, you feel invisible. You feel unappreciated and unsubported. You're really anxious and worried and nervous. And that's the third step. As the emotions come up in your mind that this, speaker is having, you reflect back those feelings, emotions with a you statement. You are, you're angry, you're frustrated, you're upset, you feel disrespected, you feel anxious and concerned, and you feel a little embarrassed and shamed. You're sad and upset and distressed. We don't do active listening, which doesn't work. It never has worked. It never will work.

Active listening was coined by Thomas Gordon in 1956

It's a complete. The old. The formulation of what I hear you saying is, or what I think you're saying is, it has never worked. First of all, active listening was a word coined by Thomas Gordon in 1956. He was a psychology. He's a professor of psychology at, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was a student of the great humanist psychologist Carl Rogers, and Rogers was not. Rogers talked about the unconditional, taking patients unconditionally, taking them wherever they were at. But he really wasn't into technique he wasn't into. He was not an academic. He was a practitioner. Although he wrote a lot of really beautiful books. Gordon figured out that listening is really important, so he talked about this active listening stuff. But his formulations, which really are pretty good when they're used in their raw state, got perverted in the human potential movement. And then it got picked up by the therapists and counselors and eventually into my field, into mediation. Ah. And it got into this passive voice crap. And people still do it today. And all it does is piss off the speaker. As we all know, if somebody's ever used active listening on you, you're nodding your head. Yeah, it just pisses me off. It doesn't work. But what does work is to say you. 

So, George, you're really frustrated. You feel completely abandoned and betrayed and rejected, and you're all alone. by simply labeling your emotion. What the brain scanning studies show, starting in 2007, is that the emotional centers of the brain associated with negative emotions, primarily the amygdala and other limbic system regions associated with negative emotion, are inhibited. Well, at the same time, a part of the brain, our executive function called the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, is activated. So it goes like this in about 90 seconds. And you literally calm down that brain in a m. Minute and a half. And every human brain on the planet is hardwired for this. So you ignore the words, read the emotions, reflect back the emotions with the you statement. Don't ask questions. Are you angry? No. What I think you're feeling is X. No, it's a direct use statement. 

And that's it. And you go. You continue to affect label. It's called affect labeling. You continue to validate these emotions until four things happen. You're looking for four autonomic relaxation responses. One is a nodding of the head. Two, is that yeah. Or exactly. A verbal response. Three is a dropping of the shoulders, and four is a sigh of relief. So it'll go like this. Yeah. And every single human will do that to one degree or another. Sometimes it's a little subtle, so you have to watch for it. When you got that relaxation response, you're done. And now you can move on to whatever it is you need to move on. Maybe you do some problem solving, maybe you start, a negotiation. Maybe you do some counseling or coaching. But you don't do any of that stuff until you've got the person calmed down. And that's the secret. So when you're having a difficult conversation, you're walking into the conversation. And maybe there are two conditions. Condition number one is, you know it's going to be difficult, so ahead of time you want to be thinking about, all right, what am I going to feel and what's this other person going to feel? And you just identify what you think the emotional experience is going to be. So you're prepared to label your own emotions and the other person's emotions. You'll label your own emotions silently and you'll label the other person's emotions

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verbally out loud. The second condition is where somebody just springs a difficult conversation on you totally by surprise, you get bushwhacked. In that situation, if you have practiced and learned the skills, your automatic response is going to validate the emotions. You'll just learn. You're just going to go right into affect labeling. You don't even think about it, you just do it. And they talk and talk and talk and you validate their emotions. Finally they calm down. And now you're in a place where you can really have the real conversation, that's causing it in the first place. All fights, arguments, difficult conversations, intense situations are caused by people wanting to be heard and being ignored because the other person wants to be heard and is feeling ignored. And so with an argument, you can just watch how an argument becomes like two tectonic plates coming up, massive earthquake. Each side wants to be heard and yet they're not taking the time to really listen to and hear and validate the feelings of the other person. And that's why arguments could get out of control really quickly. Why is it that we raise our voices to be heard, to be heard? Because we're not being heard.

George Torok: Yeah, you can't hear me when I'm talking softly so I got to talk louder to you.

Doug Knoll: That's exactly right. But if I say you're really frustrated and pissed off, man, really frustrated, you're just so angry, you're beside yourself and you're really worried and anxious and even a little scared and you feel completely unappreciated and unsupported. Now all of a sudden you feel heard.

Doug Knoll: And you calm down. So that's how you do it.

George Torok: Now step one, you said, was to ignore the words and you did acknowledge that it would be difficult to do because I can imagine when the words are insults or attacks, you're a jerk, you're an asshole, you're a lazy bum, you're a piece of crap.

Doug Knoll: Yeah. You always do this to me.

George Torok: Yeah. How do we ignore those words and maintain our own dignity?

Doug Knoll: Yes. We're not agreeing with anybody when we validate their emotions. That's the first thing to understand when you're yelling at me and calling me names. I am not agreeing with you that I'm an asshole or that I did anything wrong. In fact, one of the big lessons I teach is never apologize until somebody's calmed down and you can find out whether or not you really were the cause of the problem.

For ten years, I worked in maximum security prisons in California

People jump to apology way, way too early. So the way you do it is to recognize. This is why we go back to mindset. If you have a mindset that people are rational, when somebody starts attacking you unfairly, you immediately think that's unfair, they're irrational, and boom, you're in it, you're triggered. But if you have the mindset, oh, they're just having an emotion. They're just having an emotional experience right now. It's perfectly normal and human, and I know how to deal with that. And now, all of a sudden, there's no judgment, there's no criticism, there's no reactivity. I'm just working with a human who's having a normal human emotional experience, even though it might be intense. And that drains all the reactivity out of me because it's no longer about me. It's about me listening to and validating that emotional experience until we get. Until karma is restored and you never, ever get triggered. Once you ignore the words and just recognize this is an emotional situation and you've been trained on how to handle it, there's no reason to get mad anymore. I'll tell a quick story. for ten years, I worked in maximum security prisons in the Prison of Peace Project, which I co founded with my colleague Laurel Coffer. and we were working in. And we started in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world here in California. And I'll never forget, we were in the summer of 2010, and we had a large group of women that we were training to become peacemakers to stop prison violence. And this skill is the first skill that we teach.

George Torok: You were training the guards?

Doug Knoll: No, training the inmates.

George Torok: Oh, the criminals. The prisoners.

Doug Knoll: The prisoners. They were teaching them how to stop the violence. And in fact, within two years, the violence had stopped inside that prison because of the women that we trained. It was amazing. and now we're all over the world. it's incredible. That's a whole other story. But so there we were, supervising the training of women. Both we were training some of them to be trainers, and they were training. And so we were supervising this. And this well dressed professional woman marches up to me and starts screaming vile obscenities at me. Turned out she was a prison psychologist and she was offended by the fact that I was a large white male, obviously Anglo Saxon, evil by definition person, and just started ripping into me. And I just sat there and I just hap. I labeled her an affect labeler and calmed down and it was like nothing ever

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Doug Knoll: happened. And she couldn't, she didn't understand what I'd done to her. But she walked away feeling like she'd been heard and recognize and it didn't before. In my trial lawyer days, I'm also a secondary black belt. I would have ripped her a new one, but I didn't, I didn't have to. I didn't feel defensive at all. And I was able to just be in the center of the calm and recognize she was having an emotional moment and let her go. Here's the analogy I like to use. So we've all had infants, our own infants and grandchildren. In fact, my niece and nephew are here with their seven week old daughter. And what a little seven week old babies do. They only do three things.

George Torok: They eat and they poop.

Doug Knoll: Yep. So what do you do with a baby who's pooped? You don't say baby, you little jerk, into the trash can. I'm done with you. No, you baby. Let me go change your diapers. So you change the diapers and clean them all up and put new diapers on them, warm, them up and get them back. And now the baby's happy and you feed the baby and baby is really good. That feeling that you have when you do that is called compassion. And we have a compassionate response to the infant. What you learn is to look at somebody who's yelling at you as if they're pooping in their diapers and you just have a compassionate response to them. They're just upset right now. No big deal. I can handle that. And so we want to have a compassionate response. And the only way we get there is by having the mastery of the tools. And that allows us to calm people down while remaining calm and confident ourselves. And that's the power of this stuff. And you said at the beginning of the show it's like magic. And in fact, it is like, it is magic. It's amazing how it works.

George Torok: And so there's a new, phrase and visual you've just given me. So when someone starts to attack, to me I just have to think they're just pooping. Their diapers right now.

Doug Knoll: That's right. There's the exactly right.

George Torok: I have to wait till they're done.

Doug Knoll: I know how to respond to it. I know how to clean their diapers, I know how to dry them off, I know how to take care of them and I'm going to do it. And it costs me nothing to do, really literally costs me nothing to calm you down. And it takes a lot less time and effort than if I were to try to counter argue and get defensive or counter aggressive with you. Because I can end the whole thing in mind you 120 seconds. If I started counter arguing and defending myself, then we have the explosion.

Doug says learning to listen to emotions can transform a person's life

George Torok: And Doug, I'm thinking that in order to do this, we need to be comfortable with ourselves in who we are. As imperfect as we are, we need to be comfortable with our own imperfection, even if they're pointing out imperfections that we know about and don't want to admit.

Doug Knoll: That's right. Well, here's the beauty of this. I've worked, I've probably trained over 10,000 people, incarcerated people around the world in these skills amongst the hundreds of thousands I've trained and what I observed in prison, these are in prison. They're in prison for a reason. And most of them have zero starting out, have zero self awareness, zero skills. I mean they're there because, primarily because of childhood abuse mostly, once we start teaching them how to listen to emotions and validate other people's emotions, their emotional intelligence starts to climb through the roof and they automatically become emotionally self aware and they automatically start to, emotionally self regulate. By way of example, here in California We've had over 800 of our students who are serving life sentences released on parole. Not one of them has reoffended. And that's because as they go through the curriculum, which as I said, we start off by teaching this deep listening skill called affect labeling, they become emotionally mature, intelligent, self aware human beings that now know how to respond distress and conflict in a very different way than they learned in childhood, which was basically violence. And every human being can make this change. So yes, self awareness is critical, but the beauty of it is you don't have to retreat to a cave for 40 years and meditate to develop that. You don't have to hire a therapist and pay $10,000 to become emotionally self aware. All you have to do is learn how to listen to emotions and reflect them and your brain will automatically reprogram itself. And this reprogramming takes 8 to 12 weeks and all of a Sudden you're a new and different human being. It's incredible. It's incredible. Wow.

George Torok: I'm thinking, there's a lot of people that could use this who couldn't use this. Yeah. Why isn't this mandatory

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George Torok: training for everyone?

Doug Knoll: I'm the only one out there teaching it. That's part of the problem. It didn't start out that way for me. I mean, look, as you said at the top of the show, I was born with a lot of disabilities. And the way I dealt with it was through arrogance because I was really insecure and I had a lot of problems. I didn't. I mean, I grew up in affluence, I was smart, I went to an Ivy League college. but underneath I was a mess. And it really wasn't until. And the practice of law didn't help for 22 years. that kind of profession when you're arrogant is not a good match. it is because you see a lot of lawyers who are really arrogant. But personally, it was not good for me. So I got out. and it wasn't really until 2005 when I discovered these skills that I really started to change and grow. And the growth was really dramatic and rapid, for me. And really that's when my life started, because I completely changed as a human being and it completely transformed me. And every single person I've ever trained, they've had exactly the same experience.

George Torok: For you to make this change when you did, when you didn't have someone who could explain all this to you.

Doug Knoll: Right.

George Torok: Did you hit, did you hit in your own emotional, maturity, did you hit a bottom?

Doug Knoll: Oh, yeah. I was at the end of a, 17 year long marriage, a woman that I loved but I couldn't live with. And we had, we were both emotionally both very successful people. She was successful in business as a business executive, I was successful as a trial lawyer. Both, both very successful, but emotionally very immature, both of us. And didn't know how to deal with conflict, didn't know how to listen, didn't know how to do any of this stuff. And so that was. This 2005 thing came a year after what was during the divorce. And yeah, I hit emotional rock bottom. And I had. I don't know if that was the impetus to this. I think what happened was I was in a mediation and, it was a very difficult mediation that I was mediating between a divorced couple. They would spend $50,000 on attorney's fees on an $18,000 problem, and they would rather have killed each other than come to an agreement. And the lawyers called me and said, please solve this problem. So they came in and they started screaming at each other, vile insults. I didn't. I just sat there and watched them. I said, what the heck am I going to do? And the thought came to me, listen to the emotions. It just came out of the blue. And so I did. And it completely transformed the conversation. It transformed them. Four hours later, case settled. 

They walked out to have lunch holding hands. Whereas at the beginning, if there'd been knives on the table, there would have been blood on the floor. It was incredible. And you're right, I didn't have any coaches. I knew what I'd done. I knew I couldn't believe that it happened. And so I started testing it. It scared the crap out of me, because listening, you know, emotions. we're lawyers. We don't deal with emotions. Right, Mediators, you don't deal with emotions. but I did. And I started seeing the same results in conflict after conflict after conflict. And then two years later, the first brain scanning study came out of Matthew Lieberman's lab at ucla, showing why this worked in the brain. Now I have the science. And so I started teaching it to my peers, to other mediators and judges and lawyers. And up until the Prison of Peace project started in 2007, I was just confining myself to teaching this as a mediation skill. Then the prison project started, and, it was an opportunity to really acid test these skills. And so that's what I did for the next 10 years. As we grew Prison of Peace, we worked on all these maximum security prisons, training men and women how to stop prison violence. And it was absolutely phenomenal to see the change. And it was the inmates, the incarcerated students that gave. That pushed me to write De Escalate, my fourth book. And then I finally got the bright idea that, hey, maybe I should be teaching this outside prison walls. And so I started doing that. And, I teach a graduate course at the Strauss Institute of Dispute Resolution, Winter, intensive. And of course, I do private workshops and speak on it and coach just like you. Same model you've got private coaching, group coaching, to help people learn these skills.

Take some practice, like learning how to ride a bicycle

And like I said, it's only if you work at it. If you do, just do what I tell you to do. About two hours, two or two or three hours of work a week, you can have mastery in eight weeks, typically. Eight weeks. Take some practice, like learning how to ride a bicycle.

George Torok: Okay. and I probably put. I certainly put more Time in each week riding my motorcycle.

Doug Knoll: There you go,

00:30:00

Doug Knoll: There you go. I mean, remember, remember when we learned how to ride bicycles? We started out three years old on a tricycle, right? And then, and then about four years old, we got a little bicycle, two wheeler with the training wheels. Did the training wheels for a couple of months, four or five months. And then at some point in time, dad or mom takes us out, they take the training wheels off and they run alongside us. We're kind of like this. And then boom, we got it right and now we're free. We have freedom. And, that's how this is. You start with training wheels and then take the training wheels off and you wobble a little bit until you see that it works. And once you see that it works, you're sold for life. You'll never go back, ever. But in the beginning, there's some wobbles and stumbles because it's so counterintuitive and counter normative to what we think we should be doing with angry people. And that's the fun part, helping people overcome that initial fear. And then once they get it, their eyes go like this. Well, how come I didn't have this 20 years ago?

Doug is giving away four free resources to podcast audience members

George Torok: Doug, you have a wonderful free gift for people. Tell us about that and who it's for.

Doug Knoll: So, this is for people who are putting out emotional fires. They have difficult conversations, they're dealing with anger or upset, or they just want to build more intimacy or more connection. And it can either be personal or it can be professional. And basically what you want to do is improve the quality of your life and stop the fights and arguments forever. So that's what you really need is a system. And that's what I put together, I call it my peace under pressure kit. And I'll tell you how to get it in a second. But you're going to get four things. 

Number one, you're going to get m my access to my de escalation advisor. This is a really cool little chatgpt agent that we put together where you can type in the situation and it will give you the prompts on what to say. and it's working pretty good. so you can play around with that and that will get you into the idea of how to label emotions. 

The second thing that I'm doing, which I have not done before, is, that I'm giving, you access to my Dealing with anger and aggression four week online course. That's a course I've been selling for $1,000. But I said the Heck with it. I'm just going to give this away for free to the podcast audience. So you're going to give an axe. You'll get access to that which will take you through how to do ethic labeling and all, and give you ways of looking at anger and aggression in ways you've never thought about before. 

And then the last thing I'm doing is I've just created a school community called Stop, Stop Arguments Cold. And this is a community where people can come in absolutely free. People can come in and engage and ask questions and learn and share stories. And I've got a whole bunch of free resources in the, educational section again to help people learn these skills. And so how do you get, how do you get this? Well, you got to reach out to me. I don't need your email, but what I do want you to do is go either to LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram and just DM me. 

And, type in the word your intended message 25 and I'll, I or my VA will catch that and we'll, we'll have a little bit of a chat eventually. Give me your email address and then I will send you. Send this all to you by email. If you want to just email me directly, you can do that@doug dougnol.com and bypass social media. Just email me, put in the subject line your intended message 25 so I know it came from George's audience and I'll, reply right back with, links to all the goodies and that'll get you started.

George Torok: Incredible offer. Too good to miss, that. Make sure you follow up and you can find those links in the description below.

Doug