The Four Common Responses To Emotional People

And this is my ongoing Thursday series, live streaming series. And today we'll be talking about the 4 common responses to anger, which we learn habitually and why they create problems. And then we'll be talking a little bit about the antidote. What are the better ways to respond to anger? We'll be starting in about 2 minutes. In the meantime, if you are watching on Facebook or LinkedIn, I'm not sure about LinkedIn, but on Facebook I know that you can type in your comments. So why don't you type in where you are from? I will say Doug is from the central California, Sierra Nevada, south of Yosemite. Fires up in Kings Sequoia National Park to the east, a little bit to the east and south of us, aren't bothering us, but it is smoky. I guess that's just part of living in California until the forests all burn up. In which case we won't have any more forest fires. We'll just have 100 years of regrowing our forests if we can get enough water in the wintertime. All right, it's 11 o'clock, let's get started. The, hi Paige, thanks for coming. All right, let's get started on this. And I think you'll find this to be really interesting. First of all, for those of you that don't know who I am, my name is Doug Noll. I am a lawyer turned peacemaker. I left a 22-year trial practice back in 2000 to become a peacemaker, mediator, arbitrator, and problem solver. I have spent the better part of 3 decades studying human conflict. I also, in addition to my law degree, have a master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies. And probably my signature project so far in my life has been the Prisoner Peace Project, where my colleague Loyal Crawford and I since 2010 have worked in maximum security prisons training long-term and life inmates how to become peacemakers and mediators. And the project has taken off beyond our expectations. We, pre-pandemic, we were operating in 15 California prisons and a prison in Connecticut. And our colleague, Dimitri Gavial, a Greek lawyer, has established Prison of Peace in 12 Greek prisons, and just last week I had my first conversation with 4 new colleagues who will be starting Prison of Peace in, uh, northern Italy around Milan, Italy, uh, as soon as the pandemic lifts. And we have people in Barcelona, people in Nairobi, Kenya, uh, and other places around the world that will be starting Prison of Peace. So we are going international. The idea of turning a life inmate into a peacemaker is a challenge and also very intriguing. So that's a little bit about me, and my website for those who want to find out more about my work is dougnoll.com, D-O-U-G-N-O-L-L dot com. So let's get started. The way I like to start this talk is to consider— actually, what I'm going to do is flip myself so you can see the slides better. I want to consider the fact that generally speaking, as human beings, we are really good at solving problems. And I'm going to dive into this a little bit because this is something that we don't talk about and we don't think about, but I think it's really critical. And the other thing to me that is very interesting is that we are not good at relationships. We're okay at relationships, but we're not great at them. And it's— and the evidence of that is just everywhere we look, whether we've got political polarization or pandemic-induced stress, you know, relationships are difficult. And there's a reason for this, and it's grounded in science and it's grounded in philosophy. So what brain science is telling us is that we have two neural systems in our brain that bear on this issue of call it problem-solving versus social relationship. Or maybe we could talk about task-focused systems versus social systems. And that's exactly what we have in the brain. We have a part of our brain that is called the task-focused system. And we have another part of our brain that I call the social system. But, uh, if you were to read the literature in the neuroscience, it would be called the default mode system. So if you went to Google Scholar, for example, and Google, uh, put in your search term default mode system, you get all the articles that are studying this part of the brain, which is the social system. So let me talk about these two systems because it really bears on the typical responses that we give in anger. So education, formal education from the time of preschool forward, essentially trains the task-focused system. There is a little bit of training that goes into the default mode system or the social system, but very, very, very little. The task-focused system is all about knowledge acquisition. It's about learning rules and procedures and algorithms. It's about critical thinking processes and learning how to think using critical thinking processes. It's about learning how to reason. It's about learning logic, inductive and deductive logic, and the rules around logic. As we get more sophisticated, it's learning about probability analysis and quantitative and qualitative analysis and learning about the scientific method and mathematics and physics and all the different disciplines of science. And—