Anger Management: How To Calm An Angry Person In 90 Seconds with Doug Noll

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Allison: Welcome back to the Deliberate Leaders podcast, I am your host and Executive Business Coach Allison Dunn. Our guest today is Doug Noll, our topic is de escalate how to calm an angry person in 90 seconds or less. Doug is an award-winning author, teacher, trainer, and highly experienced mediator. He is the co-founder of prison of peace and creator of deescalate emotional people, which acronym is deep skills. Doug, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Doug: Thanks! Great to be here and share some of my wisdom with your audience.

Allison: I’m excited, we just had a fantastic conversation about all of the things that you like to do for extracurricular activities, that I’m actually still a little bit blown away, we’re going to go into a deep conversation deescalate and all the things you do are, were a little disconnected for me. So I’m eager to dive into this. So de escalate. How do you de escalate in anger situation in 90 seconds or less?

Doug: Three steps. Step number one, ignore the words. We’ve heard those angry words over and over again, there is no new news here. Right?

Ignore the angry words. And when we ignore what they’re saying, we don’t ignore the person, but we ignore the words, we’re less likely to get triggered ourselves.

And we free up bandwidth for the next few steps. So we learned to make those angry, insulting words.

White Noise next step is to read the emotional data fields. And what that means is that you empty your mind. And you just sit and your brain will within a second or two, begin to process, the emotional experience that this angry person is having and emotions will start to flow into your head. Now I have a way of teaching when I teach this, there’s a way of structuring that data so you can make faster sense of it. But even if you don’t know how to do that, our brains are highly attuned to the emotions of others because of evolutionary biology. Most people don’t know that we humans only developed the ability to talk speech vocabulary 230,000 years ago, I mean, like an eye blink. And how did hominids communicate for the four or $5,000,000.04 or 5 million years we’ve been on the planet before then they did it through emotions and emotional expression.

So our brain is has evolved to read other people’s emotions with very fast very efficiently and, and effortlessly. So we’re going to read the emotions, emotions start coming up, you start seeing what this person is starting sorry, I started obviously with angry.

And then the third step, which is the secret sauce. And the part that’s really counterintuitive and counter normative. And that is to tell them what they’re dealing with a use statement. So I would say something like this, let’s suppose Allison, that you were really angry. Allison, you are really angry, you’re really frustrated, you’re pissed off, you feel completely disrespected and ignored. Nobody’s listening to you. You feel completely unappreciated and unsupported. And you’re worried and concerned and a little anxious, and feeling a little embarrassed about this whole thing. And you’re sad and distressed and upset. And you feel completely abandoned, and all alone and unloved, and rejected and betrayed.

Allison: I’m not even feeling any of those things in you just totally, like, emotionally made me feel like there’s something in there I could relate to and that I felt validated. And I don’t even I’m not angry.

Doug: I know. It’s amazing how it works, isn’t it? Yeah. And now to the outsider. It looks weird, because here I am telling you what you’re feeling. And the quick answer is no, you don’t see when people are very angry. They don’t know what they’re feeling. They become thematic. It’s a condition where they can’t even name their own emotions. If you’ve ever noticed, or you’ve seen this where, gee, Allison, how are you feeling right now? And you’ll just flare up in anger. Because in frustration because you don’t know what you’re feeling. You’re I’m asking you a question you can’t answer. What happens if the level of the brain is that when we become emotional. The emotional centers of our brain are commanding immediate action and attention because sense of some kind of danger. Maybe it’s a physical danger or maybe it’s a social danger. And that shuts down the prefrontal cortex, executive function of our brain and we’re cut off from the part of our brain that can analyze our physical experiences our feelings and be able to monitor what we’re experiencing emotionally.

And now we just revert back to five-year-olds, whatever we learned as a five year old is where we go back to, because we haven’t developed the skills to manage our own emotions. And when I effect label, this is called effect labeling.

When I effect label your emotions, I tell you what you’re feeling. It has a profound effect on every single human right, number one, it calms the emotional centers, so the emotional centers of the brain come down, they’re inhibited. At the same time, a part of the brain called the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex is activated. And all of a sudden, you’re calm, and it takes less than 90 seconds, it actually takes less than 30 seconds. And no brain is immune to this. Because we’re all hardwired the same way it does not based on culture, or gender, or anything else, based on our bio physiology. And it’s absolutely incredible how it works.

Allison: So I’ve captured all three steps. I guess my clarification question on step number three is view. You said several layers of things.

Doug: Right. That’s how you structure the data. Okay. Let me go through that with you. Yeah. So I teach. There are two kinds of data, structured data and unstructured data. Our brains do not do well with unstructured data. So I can tell you to read the emotions. But if I don’t give you a way to put that emotions into a structure, you’re going to flail and flounder.

The structure that I give you is based on emotional layering, there are six layers. The top layer is anger. The second layer is disrespect. The third layer is fear, the fear emotions. The fourth layer is shame emotions. The fifth layer the sadness, emotions, and the last layer is betrayal, betrayal or abandonment meant emotions.

And each of the each of these layers has different words and different gradations.

So for example, with an anger you get an anger, frustration, annoyance, irritation, rage, hatred, in disrespect, emotions, you could have disrespect not being heard, being ignored, not being appreciated, not being supported feeling like you were treated unfairly or unjustly. And the fear emotions fear, anxiety, concern worry. In the shame, emotion, shame, guilt, humiliation and embarrassment. Sadness would be sadness, grief, upset, distressed, depressed. And then we get to the last layer, which is the deepest layer, abandonment, unloved, rejected, and feeling unlovable, and completely all alone. So you don’t need to have any words to this. It’s probably a total of 18 words, 20 words. And when you layer it that way, and then what when the way you do this is you start with the with the emotion that’s presenting.

So in the case of anger, with anger, but maybe somebody’s just feeling, they feel like they’re really they’re sad, or they feel or they’re anxious or worried. Or maybe they feel like they’ve been ignored, and they’re feeling disrespected. You start wherever they’re at, and you just keep living. And notice that I didn’t use any I statements. I didn’t ask any questions. All I did was labeled. And the way you start off, either somebody’s really mad, or maybe somebody’s just emotionally, this works really well on children. What’s going on? That’s all you need. So tell me what’s going on, the person starts to tell a story. And you immediately start labeling their emotions, you don’t wait you the moment you send an emotion you label it, you’re literally going to interrupt them. But here’s the thing, because we’re listening and not in conversation.

A separate set of rules applies to listening that we’ve never been taught before. And that is you can as long as you’re using a statement, you can interrupt and tell people what they’re feeling and they will never feel interrupted ever.

And it’s totally counterintuitive to everything we think we know about listening. And the idea of using a use statement telling you what you’re feeling is counter normative, because we were taught as children not to be pretentious or to be manipulative or to be rude and all this stuff flies in the face of all that childhood programming. Okay, back to that childhood program has nothing to do with listening, which is one of the reasons why people are such poor listeners is because they’re applying the wrong rules that were never taught in the first place. But they’re applying the wrong conventions to the listening process.

Allison: In the use statements that you are making a kind of wish I’d like made paid more attention because you listed so many things. So was it your you’re angry or is it or not with I started out with you’re angry, you’re frustrated you’re pissed off? Okay, got it.

Doug: It’s going to happen every single and the other thing on this point, we humans have a very limited repertoire of emotions and behaviors. It looks like chaos until you’re trained to once you’re trained you see it you say, oh my god, this is so obvious what’s going on here. So just and you can see that I can just repeat it because there’s so there’s not that much there. You’re angry, frustrated, pissed off you feel disrespected, ignored, not heard unappreciated, unsupported and only went to and you’re a little worried and anxious that I went to and you feeling a little embarrassed. And then I went to you sad, and I’m certainly distressed. And then I went to and you feel completely abandoned, all alone unlovable and completely rejected. Just went right through the interests of your children? I think they do. Yeah. How old? Are they? If you don’t mind?

Allison: How? What ages? Are they? 23, 25, 20?

Doug: You look too young to have.

Allison: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. But I really do.

Doug: Do they have any children of their own yet?

Allison: Yes. So we’ve got two one year olds.

Doug: Okay. Not quite old enough yet. But when they turn to when they start verbalizing, you start telling them how they feel. And what the research that with the research shows is that parents and grandparents who APPIC label their children starting at between two and four years old, by the time that children reach 12, or two grade levels ahead of their peers academically

Allison: Interesting, just that same thing. They have the emotional maturity of a 21 year old, they’re extremely well liked. They have huge amount of resilience. And they have really high levels of emotional intelligence for their age.

Allison: I love what you’re talking about. I am someone who often uses the positive side of things. So I would be very maybe more uncomfortable and saying, uh, you’re angry or distraught. You’re even going down that line. But I go like, you’re so excited. You’re on fire. You look so happy. You are anything that feels natural to me.

Doug: Yeah, that would you do that with children? And would you want to stop a tantrum? I’ve gotten emails from parents saying once they learn how to epically blue children, to your two year old tantrums, one away and four months, never to return. You’ve got a child having a meltdown, meltdowns, or meltdowns are important for children. It’s the brain’s way of protecting the child. So we see these meltdowns as being horrific and embarrassing, and the little monster and the terrible twos, ah, they’re essential to brain development. But the way you manage it, is to tell the child you’re really upset you really angry, you’re tired, you’re frustrated, in age appropriate language. And with literally within 30 seconds, it’s over with. And every time you do it, you’re helping that child build emotional vocabulary, which is a really powerful skill that very few children get to experience.

Allison: So the gift I gave to all of my, my girls this year was Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown, which talks about definitions and understanding of emotions, which I feel like even at my age that I’m at, there’s words that I go, like, I’m misusing that word, or I’m misunderstanding that word. And it’s been very eye opening, to give new words, to realize words, for emotions that I have, that maybe I have not been pinpointing correctly.

Doug: It’s just a simple amount of associating your own experience your own emotional experience with that word.

It’s called building an emotional database. So we get we can have an abstract idea of these words of emotion. But unless we associate it with the effect of experience that we’re having in our body, that really doesn’t mean anything. And we can’t use it in epic labeling.

And that’s the job of the two year old. Because it right around 18 months or two years old, the emotional centers of the brain start to come online. We’re not born with emotions, I shouldn’t say that. Right, we are not born with emotions, we have to construct emotions as Coggan constructs and that starts at 18 months.

And so we have to start associating words with various feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness that we have, which is called an effect. We are born with an effect. And that’s the that’s the maturation process, and that process get started. Then, we have children who are going to be emotionally immature as adults, and that’s the way many many people are because they unfortunately live in families. where emotions are invalidated, emotions are considered evil or wrong or bad, or irrational, which is a funny word because there’s no such thing as rationality, which is correct.

To me, I teach I teach a graduate course in decision making. And I make that very clear to my students right away. But there’s another area where this is really powerful. And this is in your, we’ll have some leadership. I teach these skills as a way of teaching people how to use leadership, empathy. What do you do when you want, you’re a leader, and you walk into a room full of people, maybe it’s a team, maybe it’s a board meeting, maybe it’s a customer, team or whatever. And you immediately sense there’s something wrong. You can actually effect label the group. In exactly the same way, you could say you guys are really frustrated, you’re really angry, you’re upset, you don’t feel heard or listened to you don’t feel appreciated. You really worried and concerned. And they’ll start nodding their heads. And then at that point in time, they’re ready to listen.

If you just march in and start talking, and don’t listen, first, they’re going to just shut you down. Whether they’re your direct reports, your board, your customers, whoever they are. When I teach this to salespeople, for the first five minutes of your call, just listen, and listen to and reflect the emotions. Don’t sell anything. Don’t talk, just don’t even ask any questions. Just listen. And they get amazing results. Because to your point, as you saw that, at the top of the, of the show, the customer feels deeply validated, you really get me you really understand me, and they’re willing to do anything for you.

Allison: It’s almost like a way to create a common connection of really just putting out there what it is that you can see that they’re thinking and feeling.

Doug: That’s great. You create instant trust. Yeah, instant rapport, instant intimacy, and personal relationships. Of course, it’s powerful. I mean, my promise to anybody who wants to learn this is you will never have another fight or argument again, in your life, ever. Ever. My wife and I both use these skills. We never have fights.

Allison: I’d love to be in your household, just you know, like, watching that. That’ll happen between the two of you. I’m a lover, not a fighter. So I will admit that I’m not one to engage in anything like nothing. I’m not combustive, I guess in I, I probably repel that a little bit, and anyone that I see that in. But it is great to have some tools to get to. What’s the word you use to de escalate? It’s a, what a great, amazing tip.

Doug: And, you know, it’s great to be a lover rather than a fighter. But there’s some times when you can’t run, you know, the boys. What do you do? You’re, in my view, you were expressing the deepest kind of love and compassion for this other person, by listing them into existence. And when you listen to them into existence, they feel deeply validated, deeply heard. They feel like you really get them, they calm down. And you’ve strengthened the relationship, rather than weaken the relationship, which could happen by avoidance or running away or biting back. Yes, I would agree with that.

Allison: I am just curious, what are some of the attributes of what you would consider to be an emotionally competent person.

Doug: Three skills. The ability to recognize and name your own emotions, the ability to regulate your emotions, that doesn’t mean suppress or repress. But it does mean that you can act against an emotional impulse to do something different. Like if you’re really angry and frustrated, you can resist that impulse and stay calm. And third, the ability to demonstrate and utilize cognitive and affective empathy, which is, which is nothing more than APNIC labeling. cognitive empathy is nothing more than the ability to read, assimilate, interpret, understand and reflect back the emotional experience of another person, effect labeling.

The beauty of effect labeling, is that as you start to practice it, you learn how to recognize your own emotions, and you learn emotional regulation, and it all happens automatically, without effort.

Don’t go out and spend $10,000 on an emotional intelligence course it won’t teach you anything. Just simply learn how to ask label and within two months of constant practice, you will be emotionally competent and your life will change forever.

Allison: So I love the fact because this kind of leads into my next question when we talk about leadership, right? We talk about people who are emotionally intelligent and we’re distinguishing There’s a difference between emotional intelligence and emotional competence. Correct.

Doug: The distinction is this emotional intelligence is a test. And it was devised by Mayor and Salome back in 1983. And University of New Hampshire and I think So Louis is now the UNH, my hometown. Yeah, there you go. I went to Dartmouth. And they were looking at different kinds of social intelligence. So they defined emotional intelligence as a form of social intelligence that can be measured on a scale and their mayor Salovey Caruso emotional intelligence test is sort of the gold standard lodestone for testing this stuff. Well, Goldman, pick this up, Daniel Goleman, picked this up in his book 1995 Book. EQ is more important than IQ and commercialized emotional intelligence. But what he probably realized, because he’s a PhD, too, he’s not he’s not stupid. But what he touted emotional intelligence.

What people don’t understand is you can’t learn emotional intelligence, just like you can’t learn IQ, right? Right. But you can learn emotional competency, which are the skills that have properly developed will allow you to score well on an on emotional intelligence assessment.

So that’s why talk about emotional competency and the skills of emotional competence rather than emotional intelligence. And people that talk about you see this in the business literature with Anke and bass company in Forbes, and they’re all writing about emotional intelligence, I read these articles. And I just laugh because these journalists don’t know what they’re talking about. They just did some research on the internet and reforming it into the style of the magazine. But there’s no information. There are they’re telling you what it is, but not how to do it. And they’re not talking at all about the skills that you need to have, that you need to develop to have good emotional intelligence. And the other thing is, people make it too hard. It’s not hard. You don’t have to go off to an ashram for five years and meditate.

You can do this, simply by listening to and reflecting somebody else’s emotions, you will build your own emotional competency, you will build that muscle automatically and effortlessly.

Allison: That is often the question of whether someone can gain the skills to be more emotionally intelligent, because face it, we all know people who clearly don’t appear to have the natural skills around it. But you’ve just said, If you practice it, you can actually build that intelligence.

Doug: Let me tell you, let me tell you about the acid test. Okay, can you turn a murderer into a peacemaker? And the answer is yes, I’ve been doing it for 12 years in the prison of Peace project with my colleague world coffer. We started in 2010, in the largest, most violent women’s prison in the world with 15 women. And we taught them how to be mediators. The very first skill we taught them was how to effect and that’s sort of the foundational skill of our upper course now we’re in 15 prisons in California, prison in Connecticut, 14 or 15. prisons in Greece, a prison in Italy. We’ve got startups in Nairobi and Denmark. I mean, it’s starting to go international. In California, we’ve had 6000, approximately 6000 of our students have been released on parole. Not one of those reoffending.

Allison: That is a staggering results. Congratulations.

Doug: Thank you. If I can teach a murderer to be these Metro, what do you think I can do for you? Right? Right.

Allison: Yeah. Congratulations, that actually that truly is a staggering statistic. That’s, that is phenomenal.

Doug: It’s not it’s not us. It’s the men and women that we’ve trained, who have decided to change their lives, take these skills, work with them, learn them and become powerful peacemakers in their communities.

Allison: Wonderful. You say that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational and you brought up rational and irrational before and I just want to dive a little bit more into why you say that.

Doug: So we’ve been living under a false assumption of human nature for over 4000 years. And that assumption is that what separates us from other animal species is rationality and reasoning. Plato talked about this. Aristotle wrote about it. Every philosopher, every theologian, talks about the human as rational being, the neurosciences the last 20 years say,

We’re not rational at all. We’re totally emotion. You can’t even be rational. If there is such a thing as rationality, which I question. You can’t even be rational purist unless you’re emotional first.

Why? Because how would you know that you had a problem that you had to apply the tools of rationality unless you had an emotional experience that caused you to react to your environment, okay?

And if you go even deeper down to the microscopic level in the brain, when you get when the neuron neuronal clusters that are going to be firing to make a decision, that decision is based on, is this going to give me more pain? I mean, is this going to give me more pleasure? Or am I going to avoid more pain? In other words, they are fundamentally emotional decisions at the neuronal level, has nothing to do with rationality. It has to do with hedonic responses, avoidance of pain, and attraction to pleasure. And that’s how our brains are hardwired. And we built this whole edifice of rationality and reasoning and all this stuff. I asked my graduate students give me a definition of rationality, and they can’t do it. Because there is no definition of rationality that holds up. And even economists use the term bounded rationality to say under a very narrow guardrails in very controlled circumstances, that human beings can be rational, but other than that, no, no rationality at all. That’s awesome.

And so once we make this paradigm shift, of seeing ourselves as emotional beings, it’s not a bad thing. It’s a great thing. Because now all of our behaviors are understandable and explicable, and they become predictable. And the interventions become useful. You see people who are angry or upset or very emotional, so if they’re just angry, emotional and upset, and I know exactly what to do, I know how to say it, when to say it. And to calm them down. I know exactly what to do. Not a big deal. But as long as we give privilege to rationality over emotions, then anytime anybody gets emotions are first knee jerk responses to be judgmental. They’re irrational. But that doesn’t solve the problem.

Allison: That does not and saying it out loud actually makes it worse.

Doug: That’s right. You’re being irrational. Oh, that’s invalidating. It’s very invalidating people really angry. And emotional and 2% rational. If you can make that mind shift your whole life changes for the better.

Allison: Yeah. Just like a post it note for everyone who’s listening. Never say You are being irrational to anyone. It does not help. And it makes it worse. Yeah. Doug, what is emotional invalidation? And why do you call it a deadly sin?

Doug: Deadly Sin? All right. So Allison, you remember when you were two or three years old? And your New York, New Hampshire, Durham, right. And you were running around outside, you fell down and you skinned your knee and started bleeding and you started to cry? What were you told your okay. Big girls don’t cry.

Allison: Don’t cry. Yeah. Brush it off.

Doug: They should offer up dirt in it. It doesn’t hurt. Yep, every single one of those statements is emotionally invalidating. You’re being told to deny your hurt your fear, you’re upset. Your embarrassment, and your sadness, and your feeling of abandonment. In that moment that you’re experiencing, you’re being told all of those emotions are bad, you’re not allowed to experience that. And I would guess that almost every child was I know I was subjected to it. And the effect of emotional invalidation is to stop the emotional maturation process be at a usually between six and eight years old. Many, many people do not mature emotionally beyond six to eight years old. And it’s at that point, it’s about six years old, when children start to feel agency, they can tie their shoes and take care of themselves. And they can start to think for themselves a little bit.

They have some will, sometimes stubbornly. And all of a sudden, parents start getting frustrated, because it’s called cuddly little beautiful baby is no longer a cuddly little baby. It’s a stinky, little six-year-old who’s gets into all kinds of trouble, right? So they start to emotionally invalidate the child to sue their own anxiety. The child gets hurt, the child cries, the child has an emotional experience that creates anxiety in the parent, the parents has stopped doing that. Because if you stop doing that, I’m going to feel better about myself. That’s the real conversation that’s going on. And we’re programming of children to be emotionally incompetent. So by the time they’re fed this all their lives by the time they’re 15 and 16. Starting to get into dating relationships, it’s a train wreck waiting to happen.

There’s a lot of literature out there today, a lot of writing about how young men are not dating and they’re withdrawing. I’m going to suggest to you that the reason is that they don’t feel emotionally safe. They don’t have emotional tools. They were emotionally invalidated all their lives as children and they and they have no desire and no interest in engaging in an intimate relationship because It’s too scary, too much work.

Because we have emotionally invalidated them. It’s pervasive, it’s insidious. And it’s the worst thing you can do to a child in terms of brain development. But everybody loves it. Because they don’t know any better.

Allison: Is your book de escalates? I want to make sure I get it correct. deescalate how to calm an angry person in 90 seconds or less? Would you consider that parenting book as well? Is it a leadership book?

Doug: That book the first three chapters talk about theory, the skills of science, and then the rest of the chapter, the rest of the book takes you through the arc of life, starting with dating, relationships, and then and then marriage, and then parenting as a chapter on pre adolescence and a chapter on teens, how to de escalate teens, and then it takes you through divorce, and into schools and into the workplace. So I cover the whole arc of life and get very detailed, conversational examples of this is what it usually looks like. This is what it looks like, if you use these tools and skills.

Allison: I so appreciate the arc of life here. I mean, in every stage, I think I understand the example and how to apply in an adult level, even in a leadership level or business level. And in a relationship level, do teens get to do teams need to be handled differently, your white kids or teams, teenagers, actually, a little bit.

Doug: First of all, you want to be really soft gloves, when you do this, you don’t want to be, you want to be very careful, because it seems you know, they their BS detectors are on full alert, most teams feel emotionally unsafe. And so you start approaching them with some intimacy, and they’re gonna freak out, because they’re afraid of it. So you just got to be very soft and gentle. But what I tell people, particularly when I’m teaching middle school teachers, is that if you’ve got a solid 14 year old head down, and all you’re getting a grunts, pretty typical, you can start athletic labeling that that young person, and as long as he or she doesn’t walk away, they’re getting it and they want it, they just don’t know how to respond.

You may not get all the response that you want, but know that they are standing there because they feel emotionally safe, and they feel it.

And just like you felt it at the beginning of the show, they feel it, it feels good, and they want more of it. And if you continue to effect label appropriately, pretty soon that the team is going to open up and transform and become a completely different human being. I’ve had plenty of reports from parents saying once they started doing this properly, teens put down their phones, they got away from the game consoles, they left the television or the Netflix and everything they wanted to be with mom and dad. Because that’s where we need the nurturing. And that’s the human desire.

When we provide that emotionally safe, nurturing environment, for a child with them, they want to be there. Because that’s where that’s the safest place in the world for them to be. But if we don’t provide that if we emotionally invalidate, we ridicule we insult we disrespect, then they’re going to dry into themselves, because that’s the safest place for them to be.

Allison: Doug, I’ve deeply appreciated this conversation. And I just want to make sure that our listeners know the best way to find you follow you and what a beautiful web page for you. I said I built a web page for everybody this I will be sharing that webpage. Yes. 

Doug: The people listen to this show. It is Doug noll.co. This is a shortened link. So it’s no My website is Doug no.com. But this link is dugald.co/deliberate-directions. Awesome.

Allison: I will make sure that that is shared in our show notes. And I so appreciate you creating that page and content for us very much free ebook.

Doug:  To order my book de escalate and my online courses are available on that page.

Allison: Wonderful, thank you so much for your insights today on how to de escalate any one in 90 seconds or less what a magical tool that will be for people who have listened to all the way through. 

Doug: You’re welcome.