Doug Noll argues that rude behavior masks four emotions: frustration, feeling disrespected, fear, or abandonment. Instead of staying calm or using Active Listening, identify which emotion is driving the insult, then respond to that pain rather than the rudeness itself. This shift moves you from target to observer.
Chapters
The idea of staying calm doesn't give you a script to work with. If you use I statements like in Active Listening or Nonviolent Communication, it makes it all about you, and that doesn't help either. Active Listening is too slow, and it doesn't address what's driving the attack. None of these techniques or skills that have been promoted for over 60 years and don't work address the underlying problem. They fail to address the emotions that are driving the argument or insult or disrespect. So what is driving disrespect? When someone speaks to you with contempt, the words are the surface. Underneath, they're almost always in one of 4 emotional states: frustration, where they're blocked and they're directing outward; disrespect, they feel unseen or dismiss themselves and are projecting; fear, they're worried about something that you have over them, maybe power, or they're afraid of a decision you're going to make, or they're afraid of some action that you can take, or maybe perhaps a status that you have over them; and abandonment, they feel left out of the loop, they don't feel heard, they feel invisible, they feel excluded and irrelevant. Your job isn't to argue back. Is to identify which of these emotions is driving the insult in the first place. So what are some common statements? Something like, "This is the kind of thinking that holds us back." Well, that's frustration or fear about outcomes. "I expected better from you." That's disrespect or the feeling of being let down. "If someone had done their job, we wouldn't be here," which is a feeling of being abandoned, betrayed, rejected, left behind. When you can read which layer is activated, you know exactly what to say. You stop being the target and become the person who sees what's actually happening. And that's a completely different dynamic to be in. And by the way,
