Rob Dial (12:55)
The shift that you want to have is this. You don't want to dance with their fire. You want to, you want to be the water, not the gasoline. Like their, their fire only grows when you feed it. And so instead of matching their energy, what it could look like is this. You know, what would it look like for me to pause? What would it look like for me to stay calm in my body? What would it look like to breathe and relax instead of tensing up my muscles? What would it look like to respond from a place of clarity versus self defense? And you know, let me give you a rule of thumb. In these situations, the more intense their energy is, the slower and calmer yours needs to be. I'll give you a really great example from my own life that I can remember where shit was hitting the fan. And I realized in that moment I had to be extremely calm. So when my wife and I, girlfriend at the time, were traveling in 2017, we were out of the country for six months. We were in Bali. And in Bali, they have a kind of like mafia of taxi cabs. And Uber was just starting to come in and the taxicab people hated the Ubers. And the Ubers had to literally like meet us behind a building to pick us up so that the taxicab people wouldn't get set off and people would know that there was an Uber that was happening. So we use the Ubers a few times, no big deal. And then one day we get picked up at the beach at night. We get picked up after, you know, we had, we were watching the sunset, everything, we get picked up and out of nowhere, we're driving in our Uber. This car cuts in front of our Uber and all of these guys jump out with bats. And I'm like, holy, what's going on? This is, like, something I would have never expected, especially because Bali, everyone's so sweet and so nice over there, right? And one of the guys takes a bat and hits the front of the Uber's car that we're in. So that guy gets out and he's real nice. Oh, my gosh, don't do this, whatever it might be. They're talking. My wife hops out, she's terrified. And I hop out and I'm like, okay, what's going on here? Like, do I need to run? Do I need to fight? Do I need to protect my girlfriend at the time? So all of this stuff is running through my head, and I'm aware of that. If I get, like, more heightened, then everything's going to get worse. So I had this feeling of like, hey, I just need to be. I just need to be ice on this flame. Like, I just need to just calm the entire situation. And I don't know if I'd make the decision today. That's the same as I did back then. But what I actually did was I actually stepped in front of the Uber driver with these four guys that were had bats in front of me. I put my hands up and I was like, hey, guys, can we just talk? Like, there's no reason to be yelling, is there? And they're just, yeah, you. Da, da, da, da. They're all yelling and all this stuff. I'm like, hey, guys, it's okay. Can we just talk about the situation? And so it took probably 45 seconds of just getting screamed at. And they weren't. They weren't really screaming at me. They were screaming at my Uber driver. I was worried about him as well, because he seemed like he was terrified. And eventually it got to the point where they just kind of calmed down. And that's the way that I think about this, is, like, the more intense their energy, the calmer yours needs to be, because your calmness kind of short circuits the escalation loop, which tends to be really disarming because their nervous system is also in fight or flight. So I'm trying to deescalate their nervous system as well as deescalate my own nervous system. So let's talk about, like, tools for dealing with this in real time. Like, let's get tactical in the situation, right? You're in it, you feel triggered. What do you do? The first thing you need to do more than anything else is you need to ground yourself. Before saying any word. How do you ground yourself? If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know the first thing is your breath. The first thing that changes whenever a circumstance changes, whether you get happy, sad, mad, angry, is your breath. You want to control your breath before you do anything else. Breathe in for four seconds through your nose. Exhale for six seconds through your mouth. Physiologically, the person who breathes slowest in a conversation usually controls the conversation. It's like this weird physiological psychological thing. So I want to calm myself as much as possible, and eventually when I ground myself, the other person hopefully will become ground at some point as well. So breathe slow for about a minute. Just observe what's going on, see what's happening. Don't get caught up in it. You're focusing on your body now. Drop your shoulders. Try to feel less tense in all of your muscles. Put both of your feet on the ground. Feel your butt in the chair. Then you want to name what's happening inside of you. You know, you don't say it out loud. It could be in your head. I'm triggered. My heart's racing. I feel really afraid. My stomach is tight. I want to scream. All of this kind of gets your body back online in you're out of your head, you're back into your body. When you're triggered, you're usually not in the present moment. You're often all of your past triggers and thinking about other thing. You're really in your head more than anything else. When you anchor yourself back into your body, you bring yourself back into the present moment, which is the first thing we need to do before anything else. So that's step number one. Step number two, after you've kind of just anchored yourself, pause for a while. Continue to just keep observing. Just give some space to the situation you're removing. Like, you can still physically be there and the person can still be yelling, but you're removing yourself from the action. Right? Pause. Pausing gives your nervous system a chance to regulate before you react. Because usually when you react from a triggered nervous system, you're not reacting from a good place. So you want to just allow your nervous system just to regulate before it reacts, because that's everything. When someone's being aggressive, your instinct is to defend or to fight back or to explain or to match their intensity in some sort of way. All of those just add fuel to the fire. You just want to pause. Like space interrupts this emotional chain reaction that happens whenever we're in an aggressive situation or fight an argument. With somebody and it gives you access to, like, yourself, like your clarity, your own self control. And when you pause, you're actually not just calming yourself, you're interrupting their momentum as well. Aggressive people often, like, feed off of emotional escalation. And so your stillness kind of creates a mirror that they can't control, and it disarms them without confrontation. And so sometimes, believe it or not, it even helps them hear their own behavior because they're only hearing themselves in the situation. And now they're listening to themselves and they're like, oh, hold on, I'm now hearing myself more clear. I don't know if I want to continue doing this. And so, like, it's, it's weird. But your calm actually starts to become contagious. So it kind of invites their nervous system to settle too, even if they're resistant at first. And then what you want to do is just set simple boundaries in those situations. Like you want to use calm, neutral language that protects your space without fueling the fire. And it could be some phrases like, hey, I'm happy to talk when our voices are calm again, or like, hey, let's just pause for right now. I'm not okay with the tone that we're both using, or I hear you, I just need a moment to, you know, to myself before I respond. Or I'm. I'm not going to make myself available for this type of conversation. Now, that's not saying that they're not going to get more mad when you do that. But with a boundary, the thing that's important about a boundary is a boundary is something that you're supposed to hold firm to. And once people learn it's a boundary because you teach people how to talk to you, you teach people how to treat you after they realize, hey, you know, this person keeps saying the exact same thing, they kind of calm down a little bit. Okay? And so the key is you're not trying to win anything in this situation. What you're trying to do is you're trying to stay in your own energy.
