Use These Verbal Tricks to Make Aggressive People Sorry

Aggressive people exist in this world. There's nothing that you and I can do to change that. But what you can do is arm yourself with the best tools and techniques and knowledge about what is actually going on in the situation so that you can better protect yourself. And so when you find yourself in an argument or in a verbal attack, you know exactly what to do to remove yourself from it and, and be able to protect your own mental health. So let's dive in. Okay? Let's start with the heat, let's start with the fire. Let's start with the full on confrontation moment. We can both think of one of those moments that's happened in our life, right? You know the feeling when you're in that situation and it's, it's heightened. It might be an argument, it might be disagreement, it might be somebody's got road rage on the road, whatever it might be. Your heart is racing, you're not breathing very well. You're short, tight breathing, your body's kind of tight. You feel like you're either about to snap or just completely shut down. You don't really know what to do. And in those situations, that's not you being dramatic in any way. That's actually your nervous system doing its job. It's deciding without your permission at all whether it is going to fight, flight or freeze. Fight. That means that I'm going to argue, I'm going to yell, I'm going to escalate the situation. Flight means that I'm going to leave or I'm going to avoid, or I'm going to fully shut down or freeze, which means I go numb, I go blank. I don't know what to do, I lose my words. That's what our nervous system does in those moments. Aggressive energy actually activates primal instincts inside of you. But you're not just like a brain stem, you're a human. You have a choice. Once you really understand what is happening in these situations, you can figure out the best way to move through them. And that's really the key here, is that you're in the situation physically. Like you're really there in the present moment, like you're standing there. But you need to kind of see it from an outsider's perspective and remove yourself from the situation to give yourself some space and some distance. As I always say, if you're in the jar, you can't read the label. Make sure. Meaning when you're inside of the jar, you're inside of your own life, inside of your own head. You're not really fully seeing what's going on. So if you want to read the label on the jar, you've got to take yourself out of the jar and kind of look at everything from a third person's perspective. Here's the thing that's really important about this situation. Okay? And we will be right back. Hey, if you want to achieve your goals for next year, I made a free 30 minute workshop video for you where I take you through how to set and plan your goals. I all you have to do is just press play, follow the steps, and by the end of the video you will have a finalized plan of how to hit your goals. By the end of the year, all you have to do is go to goalslesson.com Once again, goals with an slash or click the link down below and download it for free. And now back to the show. Aggressive people are a problem, yes, but in this situation, the aggressive people are not the problem. Your nervous system thinks that they're the problem. Here's where I want to go deeper with you so you can actually understand the psychology of what's going on inside of you, but the psychology of what's going on inside of them as well. Most people try to handle aggressive people by trying to change the other person, by trying to yell at them or to avoid them, or to argue better or to try to be more aggressive than they are so that they scare them or they try to disconnect in hopes that if they disconnect, that other person's just going give up. But in this situation, what we're actually doing is we're skipping a crucial piece. And that crucial piece is in the situation, what's actually going on inside of you. And so what you want to figure out, whether once again it's in that moment or after that moment, is what does your nervous system associate with their aggression? Okay, the way you react to the situation when you're in a situation like this with someone isn't actually based off of right now. It's mostly based off your past. And I can give you an example. Maybe you grew up in a really aggressive household, and so whenever somebody gets really aggressive, you've learned to shut down and that's just what you learn to do. Maybe you grew up in an aggressive household and you learned when it gets aggressive, you have to get even more aggressive and fight. So the way you react in the situation today isn't based off of just the situation right now. It's based off of what has happened to you in your past. And so you have to understand that your nervous system is programmed from everything that's happened to you in your entire life. And your nervous system doesn't distinguish between the past and the present. So, you know, if I give you a few examples, right, if your dad yelled at you as a kid, then you might still feel like you're five years old. And every time somebody raises their voice. Now you're not sitting there when someone's yelling at you and being like, oh my God, I'm a five year old. But I mean, you're emotionally and intellectually stuck as that version of you in that moment, right? If confrontation in your family meant danger because you lived in a chaotic household, even a calm disagreement today can feel really unsafe to you. If you grew up with a parent whose moods change without warning at all, then you might have learned just to stay small so that you can stay safe. You know, if in your home as a child, like love depended on you staying quiet and you staying agreeable, then you might still freeze today, anytime somebody has intense emotions around you. And so I want you to understand, like, it's interesting because we're looking at the situation we're talking about. There's an aggressive person in front of me. They're yelling, we're in an argument. This is also as crazy as it sounds. Besides a situation that we need to deal with in the present moment, which we're going to talk about in a second, it's also one of your biggest learning lessons because you have some sort of response in that moment that is different than somebody else's response could be. So that means that your response comes from your past. And your response, whether it's fight or, or flight or freeze, isn't weak. It's wired. And that's why when we're in a situation where there is an aggressive person, aggressive people can kind of throw us. Not because they're powerful or because they're intense, but because they're actually activating old patterns within us. And so it's really, really important for me to say this before we go any further. Even though we think that this situation is happening outside of us, everything is actually happening inside of us. Like, we think the situation is making us feel a certain way. It's not the situations make you feel a certain way. It is how we react to the situation that makes us feel a certain way. It's really hard to distinguish when you're in those moments. But that's why I'm talking to you right now outside of the moment is you're actually learning. Like this moment can be a huge classroom for you where you can learn about yourself, you can heal yourself and you can grow yourself not just in the moment, but also outside of the moment when the moment has passed. Okay. It's also really important to understand this. You're not seeing like we're talking about an aggressive person. You're not seeing an adult being aggressive. What you're seeing is an unhealed child that's in an adult's body throwing a temper tantrum. Just think about that for a second because you might see a 35 year old man who's being an asshole, right? But really what you're seeing, if you take yourself out of that moment and see it for what it is. You're seeing a 7 year old boy who is in a 35 year old man's body who's throwing a temper tantrum because that's whatever happened to him when he was in his household. That's how he got the attention that he wanted, whatever it might have been. And so just knowing that can remove you from wanting to engage in battle. Because you're looking at it and you're like, yeah, I'm just kind of talking with a child. And you can be in these situations and you could be like, man, that thing that that person just did was really childish. And so two things that's really important to understand. Number one, it's not happening outside of you, it's happening inside of you even more than it's happening outside of you. And the second thing is you're just dealing with a little kid in an adult's body. Okay, so let's talk about what you actually do when you're in the situation of being in an environment with an aggressive person. 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 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 taxicabs. 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 taxi cab 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 that if I get, like, more heightened, then everything's gonna 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 had bats in front of me. And I just 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. Cause 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 de escalate their nervous system as well as de escalate 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 a 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. 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, you, 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 a 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, okay? And so the simple pattern is this. Number one, you're gonna pause, you're gonna get into your body, you're not just gonna be in your head. Number two, you're gonna name what's going on, what you're feeling. I'm triggered, and that's okay. I wanna scream, I wanna yell. So you pause you name. Number three is you're going to regulate. You're gonna breathe, you're gonna ground yourself, you're gonna become more aware of the situation. Number four, you're gonna choose what the best thing is to do. Like, choose the boundaries and communicate them with clarity. And then number five, after the situation is over and you've removed yourself from it, you've got to ask yourself, like, what got activated in me? And you start to learn more about yourself. If you yell at somebody and you blow up, no big deal, that's what happened. Well, let's reflect after the situation. Let's learn more about you in the situation. And you just keep doing this over and over again. Pause, name, regulate, choose and reflect. And over time, you start to retrain your nervous system to feel safe in the moments where you used to actually spiral, because it's really, really important. You know, obviously, with me being somebody who's obsessed with mindset and psychology and all of this, every triggering moment is a window into ourselves. How you react when somebody gets aggressive doesn't just show you them, it shows you you like, do you shrink? Do you get louder? Do you go numb? Do you get aggressive? Do you get terrified? Do you run? All of those are not random. They're patterns. It's your nervous system playing out old scripts. And the person that's in front of you becomes a mirror for you, reflecting back to you where you still feel unsafe or unseen or unworthy in some way. And so it's not about blaming them or any of that type of stuff or blaming yourself for that situation. It's about collecting information. That heat that you feel, the shutdown that you feel the urge to fix or flee or to fight, that's your body revealing a wound. It's a belief, it's a pattern, it's something that needs to be healed within you. And every time you choose to observe the situation instead of react, you reclaim just a little bit more of your power. And for those of you that are willing to put in the work, the conflict becomes a classroom and not a battlefield. And that's where you really start to get into self mastery. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. Based off of what you have been watching recently, YouTube thinks this video is the best one for you right now. And if you want to make sure to never miss another video, hit that subscribe button and I'll see you on the next video.