Confrontation and meeting aggressive
behavior is
one of the most stressful things
professional people
can have to deal with. Now in this video
I want to share with you
some work I know you can do to beat
confrontation anxiety, and to become
peacefully masterful at this. Let's go!
Now point number one is to get out of
our head. This one comes up a lot in
my videos! You might recognize it if
you've been around a while,
but that's because when we're up in our
head, doing all this
nervous invoking thinking, that's when we
lose our center
and that's where we feel off balance.
That's more than just a metaphor!
Because when you want to get back into
your center one
of the best ways to do it is to get
out of your head,
to put your attention on the center of
your body, and imagine that you're
processing all
the sensory information of the world
from that point,
rather than up here, so it's like
everything that you see,
everything that you hear, everything that
you feel going on around you, it's like
you're processing that information
here, rather than up here.
This helps you create headspace. It
helps you
create heart space, and it contributes
to what I call "groundedness", which is
the opposite of
living and working from ego, fear
and insecurity. Point number two is
to not take it personally,
because although someone's aggression
might be aimed
at you, it's not 'about' you.
Aggression from any person is always
about them
and where they are, and what they're
feeling, and what they're going through.
It's never about you and where you
are so even
though they may be being verbally
confrontational towards
you, and they might be trying to
trigger you with
hurtful comments or high pressure
statements to get a reaction out of you,
it's not really 'about' you, it's about
them! It's about
something that is not well, or not at
peace within them.
It could be that they're afraid. It
could be that they
themselves are under stress. It could be
that they are being pressured
by somebody, so rather than protecting
my ego and
protecting my feelings by biting
back, by
becoming counter aggressive, which
will generally
only make things worse and inflame
things, I find
it's much more useful to look at
the other person and see what's going
on for them:
Where's their pressure coming from?
Where's their anxiety coming from?
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With that point three is to
get curious about
two things. Number one,
them, and what's going on for them.
And number two,
the circumstances, the situation in which
you are both in,
which presents the problem
to be solved.
Now this brings me to the idea
of perceptual
positions, which is something that's
learned a lot in the field
of NLP. The idea is is that in any kind
of interaction
between two people, there are always
three perceptual
positions you can take. In
other words, three
points of view. Point of view
number one is
your own point of view. That's your
experience of this
exchange. Position number two
is the other person's point of view.
Their experience
of this exchange. And position
number three is
the neutral observer, who is watching
the interaction from
the outside. One of the greatest and
most productive communication skills
that we can master
is the art of constantly reviewing
an interaction
from all three of those positions, so
that's to check in with
what's my experience of this, and what's
going on for me
in this exchange, what are my operational
beliefs, what's going on
in my world that's causing my reactions;
and to be able to switch to the second
position, which is to ask
what's going on for me as the other
person, what are my operational
beliefs here,
what is going on for me, what are my
values, what's showing up for me that's
guiding how i'm responding to this,
and then position number three is
to step outside
and watch both people interacting,
and make neutral observations about
what's going on.
By the way what kinds of confrontation
do you find you have to deal with
in your work? Please leave a comment. I'll
read every comment that's left
and i'll reply to as many as I can.
Point number four
is to acknowledge. I sometimes think
that when people
are exhibiting these kinds of
confrontational behaviors
and the confrontational behaviors are
tending upwards,
I often think it's because there's
something that is not getting
acknowledged in the other person, and
they're trying to get that acknowledged,
so when you figure out what it is that's
going on for the other person,
you know, what's causing them pressure
in this situation,
what matters to them, then show
that you've seen
that, that you've heard it, by
acknowledging it.
Acknowledging where people are coming
from and acknowledging what's important
to people is
often quite useful in getting
the level of
confrontation to start coming down.
People want to be seen and this
shows people that
they have been seen. Point
number five is to
become outcome oriented rather
than problem
oriented and to become a problem
solver. Now
what I mean by becoming outcome
oriented is to
recognize what is the problem
that we're being presented with, because
the problem isn't me,
the problem isn't the other person.
Anything that's going on in this
interaction including any emotion
is actually symptomatic of the fact that
there is some problem
to solve, so being outcome oriented
is to identify what is the problem that
we need to solve
and to become a collaborator with the
other person to
solve that problem, to metaphorically
put the problem on
the table and invite the other person
to sit with you and look at that problem
with you, and figure out
how do we create some solutions to this
problem. By the
way I also have a video on being
a problem solver
and that video is going to pop up here.
You might want to have a look at that
after this.
Something that will also assist you
in this is
learning the art of recovering
yourself when you do lose your center
when you do
get reactivated. Now for that I have a
free download to
a simple five-step process that you
can learn and
employ to manage your stress in the
moment, and the link to get that
is down in the pinned comment and in the
description below
this video. A good follow-on
video to this is
this one here, which is all about
projecting confidence and
presence as a professional person, or
if you've already watched that one
then watch this one here. And don't
forget to give this video the thumbs up
and don't forget to subscribe to the
channel and click the notifications bell
so that you'll know when more content
just like this arrives.