could you be acting defensively and it's making you a less effective communicator
would you like to be able to change this I've studied negotiation persuasion and
influence for years and I've made every single mistake you could possibly
imagine if you want to be able to read people
better and transform your defensive behavior into powerful communication
keep watching hey this is Damon Cart from life mastery gym empowering people
all over the world to learn to improve in to take charge of your destiny so if
that sounds good please click subscribe to this YouTube channel so you can get
these videos on a regular basis if you watched my last video you notice that I
was in Bucharest that's Bucharest Romania and now I'm in Budapest Budapest
Hungary you may be thinking I don't act defensively so I don't need this video
or if I if you do act defensively you know it but I think you might be
surprised and then there are some of you who you know that defensive behavior
that acting defensively is disabling your persuasion and influence skills by
the end of this video you will be able to read people's defensive behavior and
you'll be able to recognize when you're behaving defensively and helps you
change it so the important thing to know is that defensive behavior attracts
aggression to you a lot of people think that it works the other way around that
when somebody actually aggressively toward them that they naturally respond
defensively and of course that happens too but you may not be aware that you're
giving off or you're acting defensively or your your body posture and your
behavior is defensive or it looks defensive to other people and it's
you're not conscious of this and so when that happens you actually are inviting
aggression and you may not even be realizing defensive behavior puts you in
the victim role and that's a place you definitely do not want to be some people
purposefully go there some people go there accidentally
right now decide that you are not going to be a victim anymore and that you're
going to take charge of your behavior you're going to take charge and control
over what's within your control and that is your behavior that is a one thing you
definitely control you may not be able control other people
in fact you definitely cannot control other people but you do have control
over your own behavior so commit to that right now there's three things I'm going
to show you in this video and I've already told you the first one and that
is defensiveness invites aggression so that's number one number two is you want
to be responsive not reactive so you don't want to be reactive in situations
you want to be responsive and I'm going to explain what this what I mean by that
and how to do it the third thing is to pre frame situations before you get into
them and I'm course I'm going to explain more about that as well and how to do
that the best way I can describe the first one which is defensiveness invites
aggression is by telling you a story and actually two stories and the first one
is I remember one time I was watching a woman going after her dog she had a
little dog and I guess had gotten off its leash and she was chasing after it
and there happen to be another dog around that wanted to play with that
little dog and that other dog was about twice the size of the little dog but it
wasn't a big dog it was probably I don't know a little taller than my knee and
the woman goes and gets her little dog and then the other dog starts jumping up
because it wanted to play with the smaller dog and the woman just freaked
out and started running and that that other dog was being playful it was not
being aggressive but when she started to run the other dog started to chase her
and then she started to panic and she started to scream and I'm watching this
whole situation I'm thinking this is not a vicious dog but she invited the
aggression of that dog by being defensive and animals do this all the
time if you see it you can see this in nature this is not a something that is
an intellectual type thing where watching other people and they're
looking for weaknesses no this happens in nature and so this dog naturally
started getting aggressive because she started acting fearful and defensive and
she starts running she starts screaming the dog really starts chasing and at a
certain point she kind of realized that she was really overreacting here and she
just stopped and then the dog just stopped this thought the dog wasn't
being aggressive at that point when she finally just stopped and interrupted
this pattern of behavior and this is kind of a Zen thing in Buddhism I think
they actually teach this that there are patterns nature is in physics is always
looking or seeking to balance systems and balance nature and balance patterns
and balance processes so if you're in some sort of negotiation or you're in a
sales position or a sales situation or anything where you're interacting with
other people if you go into defensive mode in order to balance the the system
it invites the other person to become more aggressive another example of this
was I was when I was flying here I flew into Zurich Switzerland and I had to
catch another flight over to Budapest and I had to go through the Swiss
customs and there was a woman before me she was also American she was traveling
with her son who was probably 11 maybe 12 years old and she was not in any way
a suspicious-looking character she looked very innocent she and she was she
was basically a house mom it looked like to me so she gets up to the window she's
right before me she gets to the customs officer she hands over the passports of
her and her son the customs official immediately started to get a little bit
aggressive with her and started asking these kind of aggressive questions about
where she was traveling where she was going where she was staying that you
have a return flight and on and on and on and immediately she got very
defensive like she had done something wrong
I think it was clear to both him and to anyone who was watching this that this
woman was not a was not up to anything suspicious or up to anything wrong but
her posture was very defensive she moves back and she started shifting to the
side like she was looking for some sort of support and she also started offering
to show her son's birth certificate and start offering all these other
things but she was obviously in a place where she looked defensive her boy stone
had shifted and more she did this in a more frantic she became the more this
customs officer questioned her even harder and got really aggressive with
her to the point where I started to get a little triggered here because she
looks so innocent to me and this guy was being very aggressive with her and
really what it turned he became a bully and it was like he was pushing harder
and harder and this woman was giving him everything that he was asking for and
she and of course she beat the more frantic she became though the more he
pursued this finally he lets her go and this took far longer than what it should
have usually when you're going through customs you get a few questions and then
they move you on most of the time they just look at your passport and let you
go so what I had done and this is going to bring us to the next thing about
reframing what I had done when I saw this is that memorized his questions and
I was ready with my answers so when I got up to the front and he starts asking
me the same questions well first of all I did a few if you did something else
differently instead of leaning back like she did and instead of doing like this
and like this referring to my bags or to other people or trying to look for
support or closing my eyes more when people close their eyes more they're
it's like they're trying to block out the situation they don't like it I
leaned into the window and as if to say go ahead ask me the same questions and
that's what I was thinking I was a little angry with this guy because the
way he treated that woman and so I leaned into the window and he asked his
first question where are you going I said Budapest and he stopped and he
paused and he could tell that this one was a different completely different
person so it changed his state he started to ask me a few of the other
questions that I had and I just rattled the answers off really fast I didn't
take my eyes off of him I looked him right in the eyes I wasn't trying to be
aggressive and I wasn't being pushy I wasn't being mean even my voice tone was
in neutral but he could tell that I had my answers ready and I was not going to
back down and the worst thing in his situation that could happen and this is
the worst thing you can do to a bully is to humiliate them and so what
he realized that if he tried that line of questioning with me he was going to
seem rather pitiful he was going to seem rather ignorant if he tried to pursue
that with me he backed off I think he only asked me three questions and then
he pushed me right through he wasn't going to take the chance of looking
stupid by ask by repeatedly hitting me with questions that were completely
useless and absurd and didn't matter I did exactly the opposite of what the
woman had done before me and it put him on the defensive in a sense even though
I mean he's really in charge he's the officer but I also have hadn't done
anything wrong and so if I hadn't do anything wrong and I wasn't being mean I
wasn't being aggressive he had nothing to charge me with you nothing to put to
detain me for and the same was true for that woman but she acted as if she did
she came from a place of being very defensive even though there was nothing
to be defensive about she wasn't breaking the law she wasn't doing
anything wrong but she acted that way so it invited his bullying and his
aggression let's move on to responsiveness instead of reaction
reaction really is about hesitating reaction is about seeing something
happen and waiting and not doing anything about it
so for example when I saw what was happening with this lady and the
situation with the customs official and Zurich I could have done nothing and
just waited to intercept his questions at the moment but no instead I took
responsibility here and I memorized his questions and got my answers ready so
when you see something happening people often hesitate to take action it's like
they're waiting for more and more information before they do something and
if you become reactive it means you're already too late Bruce Lee the martial
artist and movie star was also a philosopher and he used to talk about
this in fighting if you were fighting someone and you were reacting to the
punches and the kicks coming at you then you were already too late but if you
were responding to it then you would be faster than the other person and here's
a good example of how you can see this happening a lot when two people are
dancing when they're when you see a couple who are dancing and they're doing
really well we're there they're in sync with each other it almost looks like
they know what each other's going to do before they do it because they're
responding to each other they're not reacting to each other so they become
more of a unity they become more of a whole and they're they're moving
together and so that's what you want to do in situations where you need to
communicate effectively is you want to respond rather than react and so this
will require that you develop communication skills and NLP is a great
model to learn communication skills and so these should become second nature
it's when they're not second nature it's when you're practicing them that they're
more reactive the woman in the custom situation was being reactive I on the
other hand was being I was being a responsive he was asking a question I
wasn't stopping to think about it I wasn't hesitating I wasn't panicking I
was just saying the answers because I knew the answers and I wasn't afraid of
what my answers were a lot of times you'll see when somebody is being
reactive in a communication situation it's because they're listening to
themselves speak their answer and checking in with it is this okay to say
this and you'll see a lot of people do this they'll hesitate in their
communication or they want to say something but they hold back and then
they bounce this back and forth in their head over and over and over again and so
that by the time they finally say it if they even do say it it it sounds like
they've thought it through for so long and it doesn't really fit the situation
it's a good idea to go back into your past memories and think about times when
you reacted rather than you responded and think about how you would want it
how you would treat that situation differently so any situation where you
waited to take an action and that by the time you took it it was too late that's
a reaction how would you have responded in those
situations and you can actually do this you can actually think about how you
would have responded in those situations so that in the future if you're in a
situation like that you can respond to it rather than react to it the third and
final step is to pre frame the situations going back to the example
that I gave about and being in Zurich with the customs officer I knew what I
wanted I wanted to get to my flight I had enough time to get there but if I
was to be detained I could have missed my flight so it was very clear that I
wanted to get on the other side as fast as I could I was also very clear that I
didn't like this guy I didn't like the way he that he behaves and I was very
clear that I was not going to let him treat me that way and that I was going
to do the opposite of what that woman did so that I could put him on the
defensive and get through that line very quickly think about situations that
you're about to go in whether it's a sales situation a negotiation any time
where you need to communicate effectively and think about what is it
that I really want in that situation and reframe it think it through it would say
okay here's this is what I want this is the outcome that I want this is a target
that I want how do you want that other person to respond to you so the pre
framing in that situation for me was I knew what I wanted I wanted to get past
the customs official as fast as possible so I could make my flight I knew what
his questions were so my strategy was to have the answers ready so that I could I
could rattle them off as quickly as possible and to shift my posture and
look him in the eye directly so that he could see that I was
not going to back down I was not afraid of these questions let's recap so number
one defensive behavior attracts aggression should be very careful very
conscious of your behavior if you're doing this if you're if you go to answer
somebody and you're kind of looking at the side or you're shutting your eyes or
you're pulling back from the situation that will invite aggression so check in
with your posture breathe deeply move a little bit forward look people
directly in the eye and don't try to divert in either direction
move forward that keep thinking that you're going forward in this situation
not backwards you're not defending you're in an offensive position which is
moving forward number two be responsive rather than reactive trust your gut
practice good communication skills and just be able to do them as second nature
don't hesitate number three before you get into a situation pre frame it think
about what it is that you want and have at least three strategies of how you're
going to get there and even think it through of how you want that other
person to respond to you a lot of times people will actually use the strategy of
trying to put you into a defensive mode into a defensive position so that now
you have to defend yourself that's not where you want to be anytime you're in a
position of having to defend yourself you're going to look bad no matter if
you're telling the truth no matter if you you have nothing to hide this is a
strategy people will try to use so if you know that ahead of time if you have
pre framed the situation if you've thought it through and realized okay
this person might try to put me on the defensive they might accuse me of
something just to make me defend myself and deny it which makes me look bad so
how am I going to overcome this how am I going to sidestep this ahead of time
this only works if you commit to using it it's not going to work at all if you
don't take action here so commit to doing the things that I'm teaching you
in this video and one way you can start that commitment is by taking a small
action so right yes in the comments below if you're going to commit to this
process and by taking that action it will tell you to take the action of
actually applying this and implementing it in your communication to become more
of that if you like this video you're going to
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Hungary take care