The Power of the Quiet Voice - Next Comes What

Summary

Podcast Summary: Next Comes What – Episode: The Power of the Quiet Voice

Podcast Information:

Title: Next Comes What
Host/Author: Andrea Pitzer
Description: Author Andrea Pitzer reveals what we can learn from the rise of strongmen around the world to thwart Trump and his allies.
Episode: The Power of the Quiet Voice
Release Date: December 24, 2024

Introduction

In the December 24, 2024 episode of Next Comes What, host Andrea Pitzer delves into effective communication strategies amidst rising authoritarianism and political polarization. Drawing from her diverse background in martial arts and self-defense, Pitzer offers insightful techniques to navigate and mitigate conflict, especially within family gatherings and community interactions.

Contextual Overview

Andrea Pitzer begins the episode by setting the stage for the discussion, briefly touching upon contemporary issues such as the largest mass clemency grant since President Lincoln, growing labor strikes among Starbucks workers and the Teamsters' union against Amazon, and allegations involving high-profile figures. However, she quickly shifts focus to the core topic: strategies to handle tense discussions in a politically charged environment.

Andrea Pitzer's Background

Pitzer shares her personal journey, emphasizing that she became a writer in her late 30s after various careers, including seven years teaching martial arts and self-defense. Her experience spans traditional martial arts like Taekwondo and Krav Maga, as well as designing self-defense programs for diverse groups, including children, women, LGBTQ+ individuals, survivors of assault, and refugees in the Washington D.C. area.

Key Insights from Martial Arts and Self-Defense

Drawing parallels between physical combat and verbal confrontations, Pitzer illustrates how principles from martial arts can be applied to everyday interactions. She recounts coaching students during sparring sessions and full-force self-defense scenarios, noting that both situations require calmness and strategic thinking to avoid escalation.

The Power of the Quiet Voice

Pitzer introduces the concept of the "quiet voice" as a powerful tool in heated discussions. She contrasts it with the instinctual reaction to either escalate (speak louder) or shut down during conflicts.

Higher Volume Approach: Raising one's voice to be heard can sometimes grab attention but is often ineffective in family settings where others may react negatively to perceived aggression.

"What would you think about shutting up? No, I ain't gonna shut up. I got a right to talk." [Various Timestamps]
Lower Volume Approach (Quiet Voice): Surprisingly, speaking more softly than the ambient noise can make your voice stand out. People are naturally drawn to sounds that differ from their environment, making the quiet voice an effective means to gain attention without aggression.

"Pitching your voice as a more quiet one than the room can be really effective. People often focus on the thing that sounds different or new." [Various Timestamps]

Application: The quiet voice fosters substantive discussions, especially with individuals entrenched in authoritarian ideologies, by maintaining calm and encouraging thoughtful dialogue rather than reactive shouting matches.

Strategies for Effective Communication

Pitzer outlines several strategies to enhance communication during conflicts:

Avoid Attributing Bad Motives:
- Do not accuse others of having malicious intentions, as this only fuels defensiveness.
Use Effective "I" Statements:
- Instead of general expressions of fear or disagreement, relate directly to specific experiences or observations.
"Instead of saying 'I think Trump is dangerous,' try 'I'm afraid of how certain policies might affect our community.'" [Various Timestamps]
Focus on Local and Specific Examples:
- Address issues that are immediate and relevant to the listener's experiences to make discussions more relatable and impactful.
"Pick a target that promotes actual thought, talk about who is being targeted and the ways that bad policies affect real people." [Various Timestamps]
Avoid Polarizing Figures:
- Steering the conversation away from figures like Trump helps in preventing automatic defensive responses and opens the door for more meaningful dialogue.

Personal Experiences and Analogies

Pitzer shares anecdotes from her martial arts training to emphasize the importance of conserving energy and being intentional in actions and words.

Martial Arts Analogy:

"By doing less, you'll be able to do so much more. I was moving so much more than he was that I wound up with fewer grounded places to effectively be able to kick or throw good punches." [Various Timestamps]

Application: Just as in combat, where unnecessary movements can lead to inefficiency, in conversations, conserving emotional energy and focusing on purposeful communication enhances effectiveness.

Final Advice and Conclusions

As the episode concludes, Pitzer reinforces the significance of the quiet voice and strategic communication in fostering unity and resilience against authoritarian tendencies. She urges listeners to:

Adopt the Quiet Voice: Utilize calm and measured speech to facilitate constructive conversations.
Conserve and Direct Energy: Focus emotional and mental resources on productive and meaningful interactions.
Emphasize Brotherhood and Cooperation: Strive to bridge divides and work together towards common goals.

"We've got to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. Think about conserving your energy for the useful and productive ways of being in the world, or fighting back." [Various Timestamps]

Closing Thoughts: Pitzer emphasizes that effective communication is essential for sustaining democracy and combating authoritarianism. By mastering the quiet voice, individuals can contribute to a more thoughtful and united society.

Conclusion

In "The Power of the Quiet Voice," Andrea Pitzer provides a nuanced approach to handling conflicts in a politically polarized landscape. Her insights, rooted in martial arts and self-defense, offer practical strategies for fostering meaningful dialogue and resisting the forces of authoritarianism through calm, intentional communication.

Notable Quotes:

"Pitching your voice as a more quiet one than the room can be really effective." [Various Timestamps]
"By doing less, you'll be able to do so much more." [Various Timestamps]
"We've got to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." [Various Timestamps]

For More Information: To explore further strategies and insights from Andrea Pitzer, subscribe to Next Comes What, available on all major podcast platforms. For additional resources and support, visit Andreapitzer.com.

Transcript

A (0:00)

You're listening to Next comes what from Degenerate Art. Each week we'll look at one aspect of authoritarianism to figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. This is Andrea Pitzer. In honor of all the holidays between now and New Year's, today's episode isn't directly about the history of authoritarianism or current politics. This is the largest mass clemency grant of death sentenced people by any US President since Lincoln, and the first in the modern death penalty era, although they're tangentially related as people spend more time with their birth or chosen families. Starbucks workers in three more major cities have joined a growing strike. This as the Teamsters union says its strike against Amazon is also expanding politics and our current swing toward a more authoritarian America. The new one is President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk can definitely affect conversations, though. The report lists payments totaling more than $90,000 to 12 different women between 2017 to 2020 and alleges the money was likely connected to sexual activity and drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy. I didn't become a writer for a living until I was almost 40 years old, but for more we're joined by Andrea Pitzer, journalist and author. Which means I had some other jobs before I got to write full time and one of them was teaching martial arts and self defense for seven years. And on the traditional martial arts side I trained in and taught taekwondo and Krav Maga. On the self defense side I taught and designed programming for kids and adults, women and men, gay, lesbian and trans populations, survivors of assault in the D.C. area and and refugees from around the world who had come to the nation's capital and today I want to talk about two things I learned from that period that I think might be useful to some of you at family gatherings and in the coming weeks and months and maybe years. They may be particularly helpful if you're someone who sees the trajectory of the country right now as dangerous, but you find yourself surrounded by people who seem thrilled by what's happening, isn't it nice to have smart people that we can rely on? Let me say first that I am not a therapist and you are the best judge of your own situation. If you're dealing with unresolved histories of violence or psychological abuse, or if you're at risk around family members, co workers or any other group, I encourage you to prioritize your well being. And I'm safe. You know why the suggestions that I'll make today are are not going to solve your biggest Picture challenges in terms of family relations. But if you want to be around your family and you want to be able to communicate over hard things, yet you find that one or more difficult relatives tend to hijack the conversation or ratchet it into a shouting match, or that things tend to escalate into the same unproductive, you know, just shouting. He wasn't born in this country. I may have some useful thoughts for you. There were times in teaching where I needed to coach students who were in the middle of an actual fight, not a street fight, but contact fighting of one kind or another. Sometimes it was when students were sparring with other students. Sometimes I was coaching a full force self defense fight where students defended themselves from a padded assailant that was attacking them. When I trained to teach these classes again and again, I heard similar ideas. If a situation gets out of control or overwhelming or people feel threatened, they tend to start to shut down and it can be hard for them to hear anyone at all. Ow. Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me. Typically, if you're trying to be heard, you have two choices in that setting. You can come in at a much higher or a much lower volume and energy than your everyday register or than the surrounding volume in the room. Who am I? Why am I here? Thinking of the first one, the louder one, you can think of that as sort of shouting to be heard. It doesn't have to be shouting, really, just louder than the ambient noise and your usual way of speaking. And at times this approach can be really useful for getting attention. But at a family gathering, it's likely to be less effective. What would you think about shutting up? No, I ain't gonna shut up. I got a right to talk. Just find everybody else. Even if the conversation starts to feel like it's getting toward fighting words, unlike my instructor scenario, you're not their teacher, which means they're going to be much less tolerant of being yelled at by you when you want to get their attention. So it's the second model, the quiet voice, that I'm thinking of today as the one that's more likely to be useful to you. It may sound odd, but even in a loud environment, as long as there's no actual hearing impairment in your listeners, pitching your voice as a more quiet one than the room can be really effective. People often focus on the thing that sounds different or new. People of Earth, how are you at first? At a dining room table, it might only be those seated close to you who will notice. But if they start paying attention, then others will too. And in terms of dealing with friends or family that have different views, the quiet voice invites substantive discussion for the many people dealing with family who have succumbed to the Trump fantasy world in which substantive discussion is no longer possible. Yes, exactly. It's the idea. Listen. Just listen to the liberals talk. If you, if you, if you're not convinced what will said is true about liberalism in essence being anti human, listen to the way they talk about people deplorable that you know the big smellies. The quiet voice preserves your ability to be heard by family members who may still live in reality, but who have mostly checked out of the political realm and may not realize how bad things could get. Coming in with the quiet voice may get listeners attention, but what you say is important too. It may be tempting to use the quiet voice for passive aggressive, under the breath insults. Adam Schreimer if your goal is just entertaining yourself and those seated near you, who am I to deny you your fun? But if your goal is not to win an argument, but to get people to think for themselves, then that will affect your language too. First and foremost, don't attribute bad motives to anybody at the table. The hypocrisy doesn't matter to them. Everything to them is about power and subjugating this human virus. Next, don't just own your feelings with I statements, which can be a good idea to start with, but something like I'm afraid that or I think that Trump is dangerous. It's very easy for the discussion to be shut down immediately. You're afraid, but the other person can say I'm not afraid. You think Trump is dangerous. The obvious answer is they think he's not. And the answer is to fight back. And the other answer is to love your family and have babies. There are ways to get into good discussions from there, but you're already kind of shutting doors at that point. Often the best thing to do is to replicate the dynamic of that teaching model I was talking about before. I was trying to get the student to focus on a third party and respond in a new way, a different way than they were. And people who support Trump are not going to respond to Trump is bad. That's why they love forcing chaos and fear on you, for you to walk into their ideological prison and leave your civil liberties at the door. It takes the discussion into an automatic mode and fallback positions for everybody involved. So don't make Trump the focal point of your comment or just the Republicans. Pick a target that promotes actual thought talk about who is being targeted and the ways that bad policies affect real people. They can't live without me, I can't live without them. He's been an electrician and has owned restaurants in the area. He claims he's applied for green cards and visas, but he says there have been complications along the way. Every time I try to get my legal paper right, I always got denied. I feel bad for the refugees here legally who are now in danger from their neighbors and from public figures alike. Moyce has watched her customers, employees, even daughter pack up and leave to other US cities where they hope they won't be targeted. When your daughter told you she wanted to leave, did you think about also leaving? Yes, I keep thinking about that. I don't know where I gonna go, but I keep thinking about it or I feel terrible for the tens of thousands of women in Texas who were sexually assaulted and then had to carry their attacker's child to term because of the anti abortion laws that have been put in place. Why force a rape or incest victim to carry a pregnancy to term? It doesn't require that at all because obviously it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion. No, six weeks is not much time at all. It seems wrong that trans kids and parents who've worked out treatments with their doctors are being told by more and more places, by people in government that they can't get medical care anymore and all of this comes back to people like our child. We thought that by leaving Missouri and coming to Maryland that we would be safe and now we're being threatened with anti trans legislation on a federal level. Just as I would give specific recommendations when coaching somebody, the more local you can make your statement, the more specific the better. Something in your own state, your own experience, or best of all in your listener's direct experience. The more powerful your example is going to be on the economy. Donald Trump declined to promise that his tariffs, which he plans to impose on many countries and many products being imported, would not end up raising prices on American consumers. The farther away in time or distance or familiarity, the harder it will be as an entry point to a real conversation. The other piece of advice, along with the quiet voice, is related to the general anxiety you may be feeling with the second Trump administration looming. A couple decades ago I was out in LA at a week long instructor training and it was almost all men. So I wound up partnering all week with one of two guys, each of whom had about 80 pounds and 3 or 4 inches of reach on me. One of them was a boxer who was Turning professional. And the first time we sparred, I of course had to spend a lot of time staying out of his sweet spot, the range in which he could hit me, but I couldn't hit him. And so I did absolutely need to be in motion and I had a ton of energy. But after a couple minutes, he told me something along the lines of, well, you're jackrabbiting all over the place. You know, you're moving so much more than you need to, so you've got a feint, so you've got a fake. Move out. That's phase one. You've got a jab. Move out. Phase two, and you've got a one, two. Yeah, you're drawing the opponent's lead. You need to slow down and be more intentional with your footwork. By doing less, you'll be able to do so much more. And particularly in a long fight, you want to save energy, of course, but even when that isn't the issue, I was moving so much more than he was that I wound up with fewer grounded places to effectively be able to kick or throw good punches. I was so keyed up to be ready to fight that my momentum and energy or just bleeding into open air instead of being directed in a useful way at my opponent. Offer me money, offer me power, I don't care. I know that it's easy to get freaked out about what might happen in the next four years, about some of the things that are already happening now. And I know that it's easy to feel like outrageous and other big emotions are themselves somehow a strategy. They're so good at burning up energy, but they're not. And if you move less and you move in a more focused direction, you are going to be more effective every time. So between now and the New Year, if any of this sounds like it might apply to you, try using the quiet voice. We've got to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. Think about conserving your energy for the useful and productive ways of being in the world, or fighting back. We're in this for the long haul and it's good to think about how to communicate even in trying times. We must either learn to live together as brothers. Are we all going to perish together as fools? As more attacks are launched against the best institutions and policies that America has managed to establish, it's critical that we find ways to continue to talk to others about the things that actually matter to all of us. Thanks for listening to Next comes what. Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving. Next comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts. All right.