How to Stay Calm When Someone Triggers You (90-Second Method)

There's this idea that to stay calm under pressure, you need to control your emotions or control your breathing. The problem is you're not managing your emotions well enough, or the problem is you're trying to manage your own emotions when what you really should be doing is focusing on the other person's emotions. You see, their emotions are overloading your system, and when that happens, you lose control. The good news is I can show you how to flip that in about 90 seconds. It's called affect labeling. Trying to control your emotions during conflict actually makes things worse. It's like trying to put out a fire by fanning yourself, and the fire is still burning because you're not aiming at the source. I spent 22 years as a trial lawyer, and I learned the hard way that winning arguments doesn't solve anything. Then I took neuroscience-backed techniques into maximum security prisons and trained lifers how to stop prison violence. It's a simple technique that calms another person's brain, which automatically calms your brain. If it works in prison yards, it can work in your kitchen or on your executive team. Now let's understand this in detail. Imagine this situation: a manager is giving a performance review to an employee, and the employee immediately employee gets defensive as the manager, who's thinking he's being constructive, is actually criticizing the employee. And the employee gets angry and starts saying, "Yeah, but..." The manager feels disrespected and says, "Hey, don't act that way towards me. This is just a performance for you. Get over it." And now all of a sudden they're in it. The meeting ends cold. The relationship is ruptured. So the manager comes home totally pissed off and wired and snaps at his spouse over something really small and trivial. And she snaps back. And now they're in it. And finally it ends in coldness and no one can sleep that night. And the cycle goes on and on and on and on, day after day after day. Basically what's happening here is we are dealing with nervous system hijacking. It's not about logic. It's not about persuasion. It's not about being right or being agreed with. It's about being heard. It's about being validated. It's about being listened to. So the conventional wisdom is that when you're in conflict or you're upset, you've gotta figure out a way to regulate your own emotions. Then you'll hear phrases like, go out on the balcony, take 10 deep breaths, go walk around the block, uh, laugh, giggle, distract yourself, get some exercise. Well, Well, that sort of works, but in the heat of the moment, you need something that's going to work right now, first time, every time, without failure. The problem is that a part of your brain called the amygdala is on fire. It's sending out dangerous signals, and through the amygdala-hypothalamus circuitry, cortisol is being released into your blood, and you are getting ready, of course, to fight or flight. Your prefrontal cortex is forced to fight or flight or think clearly. All you're doing is reacting in the moment to whatever is being done to you. There's no logic here, and your brain actually cannot process logic. So if you try to approach somebody who's really upset with calm rationality, they're going to feel dismissed because they can't process your logic. They can't process your persuasion. They're going to think that you're not listening to them and they're going to start yelling even louder. The paradigm shift is to calm them first, and by calming them, you'll calm yourself. It's called affect labeling and it's backed by the seminal study in 2007 out of Matthew Lieberman's lab at UCLA. In that study, when people were naming emotions that came up while watching distressed faces, the brain scanning showed that the centers of the brain associated with negative emotion were inhibited while prefrontal regions associated with self-regulation were activated. The brain literally calmed down when its emotions were named. Absolutely magical. I took this skill, developed it, perfected it, and from 2010 to 2020 worked in maximum security prisons training lifers how to stop prison violence using this skill, naming emotions. And they did. In fact, hundreds of those lifers have been released on parole in California, graduates of our program. Not one of them has reoffended. That's how powerful this stuff is. So let's see how this works. 3 steps. Number 1: Ignore the words. When somebody's yelling at you, don't defend. Don't try to justify, explain, rationalize, justify. All you have to do is ignore what they're saying. Don't pay any attention to the words, and that will protect you from getting triggered. They're just words. They mean nothing to you right now. Number 2, sit in silence and wait for your brain to process the emotions that the other person is feeling. It'll come to you. You'll feel it or you'll see it. And then number 3, name the emotions with 2 words you feel. You feel angry. You feel frustrated. You feel disrespected. You don't feel heard. You feel unappreciated and unsupported. Keep naming the emotions until the body nods yes. So you're going to get a nodding of the head. You're going to get a sigh of relief, and you're going —get a dropping of the shoulders. And a lot of times you'll get something like, "Yeah!" or "Exactly!" That's when you know you've succeeded. And you stop. And the de-escalations are worth it. You've calmed people down. And remarkably, you have not gotten upset yourself. So ignore the words. Read the emotions. Validate the emotions with a simple 2-word phrase: "You feel..." Wait until the body says yes, and then you're done. By the way, I put together a free resource called the "Affect Labeling Phrase Bank." It helps you deal with a whole bunch of different scenarios so you never have to guess at what to say when those emotions start running hot. The link's in the description. All right, so now that I've told you how to do it, let me show you how it works in some real-life situations. So imagine this: you've got a manager and an employee, and the employee says something like, "Wow, stop micromanaging me!" And the manager might say, "I'm not micromanaging, I'm just blah blah blah blah blah." So the better response would be, "Stop micromanaging me!" And you say, "Oh, you're feeling really controlled. You want more autonomy. You feel disrespected. You don't feel appreciated." You feel unsupported. And the employee will say, yeah, and actually, and that's when the real conversation will start. Notice the difference. All the manager did was label the emotions with a you feel. It's that simple. How about an angry spouse? Spouse says something like, you're always on your phone. You never pay attention to me. The old response might be, that's not true. I was just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right. The better response and the response that will always work is to say, you're feeling really disrespected. You don't feel listened to. You don't feel heard. You feel unsupported and you're lonely. Watch what happens. It will be magical. How about a hostile client? Client says, "This is just unacceptable. I cannot tolerate these deadlines being missed all the time." And the provider might say something like, "Yeah, but we ran into delays and we had this problem, we had that problem." And of course the client just gets even angrier and angrier. The better way, and the way that will work to calm the situation down every single time, is to say, "You're really frustrated and angry. You were counting on us to get this done so that your project could move forward." And the fact that we failed you made you look bad and cost your company money. It's really, really frustrating. And watch what the client does. Yeah, I am really frustrated. Thanks. Let's get this solved. So the key here is you're not agreeing, you're not fixing, you're not apologizing, you're not trying to problem solve anything. What you're doing is validating what they feel. When you validate what they feel, they calm down, they thank you, and they open up and become reachable again. That's the counterintuitive aspect of this that makes it so unique. And so powerful. People don't want to be right. They just want to be understood. Now, if you want to go deeper into this and want to master everything about emotions, I teach all of that in my Emotional Competency online course. The link's in the description. But let me give you a few more advanced techniques for tough situations. One technique is to slow down. So if you have an angry person who's talking fast, you might try slowing down a little bit. AFIC, Label, or Validate the emotions a little slower, a little quieter. Take bigger pauses, give their prefrontal cortex time to get back online again. Create space and give yourself some time to accurately name those emotions. Another thing you can do is postpone with grace. Sometimes, even if you affect label and try to de-escalate somebody, it's not going to work. That's fine. They're really in a rage. Say, "Let's postpone this discussion and come back in 10 minutes and talk about it some more," and be graceful about it. And then when you come back, the first thing you're going to say is, "You're really angry and upset. You're frustrated. You feel disrespected." and just affect label their emotions. That's how you start the conversation when you come back together again. That's not avoidance. That's emotional intelligence. Another technique, and this is important to remember, is that emotions never come one at a time. You notice that in all of my examples, I always label 4 or 5 or 6 emotions. That's because whenever we have one emotion, we always have more. And they come in various layers. So you want to learn how to layer your emotions. 6, 7 layers: anger, disrespect, fear, disgust, shame, sadness, and abandonment. Those are the 6 layers. And there'll always be emotions in those 6 layers so that you can have a huge variety of words to use when people are really upset. So layering would sound like this: "You're really frustrated and worried that this might affect your credibility." Or, "You feel really, really frustrated. You feel disrespected. You don't feel appreciated. And you're really offended by all of this. And you're feeling a little bit of embarrassment." So there I went through 3 layers or 4 layers. So you want to practice layering your emotions. As you practice this, you'll begin to gain a reputation as somebody who can handle strong emotions. You'll begin to create psychological safety on your team. You'll begin to create trust around you. And you'll be able to prove to yourself and prove to other people that you don't avoid conflict, you lead through it. You'll be able to come home stress-free. And when at home, if a conflict arises with your kids or your spouse or your partner, you don't get reactive, you don't get mad, you don't defend or justify. You simply validate them. Oh honey, you're really upset, you're frustrated, you're angry, you feel all alone in this. And they'll shift and it's over with just like that. You're never going to feel like, I just lost my cool and hurt my relationship. That will never happen to you again. You can be calm, confident, and compassionate no matter how intense the situation is by simply validating what the other people feel. So if you're ready to master this and never lose your cool again, here's where to start. First, grab my book De-Escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person In 90 seconds or less. That'll give you the full framework, and the link is in the description. If you want personal help applying this to your specific situation, book a free discovery call with me. It doesn't cost you anything. I love to chat with people. We'll talk about what's going on in your life and figure out what the best course of action is for you to learn how to name and validate emotions. The link for my schedule is also down below in the description, so feel free to give me a call. Thanks for watching. I'll see you on the next video.