Author and Speaker Douglas Noll

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show, where we celebrate top performers producing better results than less Time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. This is going to be a fantastic segment. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast, author, teacher, speaker and award winning lawyer mediator. Mr. Doug Noll. How are you, man?

Doug Noll: [00:00:38] Hey, Stone. I am great. How are you today? You’re in Georgia? I’m in California.

Stone Payton: [00:00:42] I am enjoying every little bit of today. And I have so been looking forward to visiting with you. I’ve got a ton of questions. We won’t get to them all, but maybe a good place to start would be mission purpose. What are you out there really trying to do for folks?

Doug Noll: [00:01:03] I am a lawyer turned Peacemaker Stone, and I left the practice of law 22 years ago to devote myself to serving humanity. And the way that I do that today is by teaching people how to de-escalate angry people. In less than 90 seconds. Imagine if somebody were just screaming at you and you could calm them down, utterly calm them down in 90 seconds or less. What would that be worth to you?

Stone Payton: [00:01:27] A ton. What a fabulous.

Doug Noll: [00:01:29] That’s what I do. Wow. So I’ve got the I’ve got the I’ve got the hack to do it.

Stone Payton: [00:01:35] So was there a catalytic moment that compelled you to go in this direction or did it sort of evolve over time? Exiting the practice and going into this.

Doug Noll: [00:01:46] It evolved over about a ten year period from the mid 1980s when I took up the martial arts to when I finally had the realization that being a trial lawyer was not my calling. I was a really good trial lawyer, but through a whole variety of circumstances, I realized that. I wasn’t serving people as a trial lawyer. And so I went back to school at mid-career and earned my master’s degree in peacemaking and conflict studies. And that’s when I started thinking about leaving the practice of law. And then finally, my partners pushed me out. And in November of 2000, I opened up my own mediation and peacemaking practice.

Stone Payton: [00:02:27] Wow, what a fantastic story. So are you finding that that people are sometimes more emotional than rational, or is it very case specific? What’s your experience on that?

Doug Noll: [00:02:41] This is my this is my one of my major teaching points is that we’ve been alive for 4000 years, that we’re rational beings. The truth is from neuroscience is that we’re 98% emotional and only 2% rational, and all conflict is emotional. All fights and arguments are emotional. And as I tell my students, you cannot solve an emotional problem with logic. It doesn’t work. You’ve got to use emotional tools to solve emotional problems. And that when you get that insight, everything shifts what looked like chaos before. Now it makes perfect sense because you can just see, hey, they’re not they’re just being emotional. I know how to deal with that.

Stone Payton: [00:03:23] So what kind of folks are attending these classes and trying to to tap into your work?

Doug Noll: [00:03:28] I have taught these skills to inmates serving life sentences in maximum security prisons, and I have taught senior analysts at the Congressional Budget Office how to de-escalate members of Congress and staff. Wow. Pretty broad range.

Stone Payton: [00:03:46] That is a range. And is the the methodology. The the strategy is can you really do it in 90 seconds?

Doug Noll: [00:03:55] Is that you actually you actually can. I discovered this technique and I can even describe the technique for you. It’s no secret. I discovered it in 2005 when my back was up against the wall and a really difficult mediation. And then two years later, a brain scanning study came out of UCLA that showed what happens in the brain when you do this thing. It’s called the technical term. It’s called affect labeling. And then there was the science that supported what I discovered. And then I recognized how foundational and profound this was and just started teaching it. And then I’ve spent the last 13 years, as I said, acid testing it in maximum security prisons, training inmates, how to be peacemakers and mediators in prisons around the world. And and it works like a charm. I mean, it it’s because it’s biology, it’s bio physiologically based. It cannot fail. And here’s how you do it. Really simple. Ignore the words. Read the emotions. And reflect back the emotions with the statement. So I would say something like, Oh, stone, man, you are really pissed off, you’re really angry, you’re frustrated, you don’t feel respected, you feel insulted. You’re completely ignored. And you’re a little embarrassed and sad and you’re worried and anxious and you’re sad, distressed and upset by all of this. You know, at the bottom you feel completely abandoned by everybody that you trusted. And just doing that, just saying words like that inhibits the emotional circuits of the brain and that activates a part of the brain called the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, which is our executive function. So you’re literally lending your prefrontal cortex to this angry person for the 90 seconds. It takes for that person’s brain to calm down and get back online. It works like a charm every single time.

Stone Payton: [00:05:48] Well, I’m sure that would be incredibly powerful. I mean, I wasn’t even angry and you sort of disarmed me. That’s right. And believe me.

Doug Noll: [00:05:57] Exactly.

Stone Payton: [00:05:58] But I mean, how. Yeah. So. So there is exercising this strategy and applying it in concert with just the way the universe and people are wired. Do you also find patterns that you see over and over that that make the situation worse, that maybe some sometimes we just we engage in unconsciously that just exacerbate the situation?

Doug Noll: [00:06:25] You know, we humans have a very limited repertoire of responses to conflict and to emotions. I mean, to the untrained eye, it looks like it’s all chaos and confusion and craziness. But once you’ve learned this stuff, you can now see that the patterns keep repeating themselves. And there are there are three patterns that that we see over and over again. The first is emotional invalidation. So you remember when you were two years old and you’re out running around, you fell down and skinned your knee. What were you told? Suck it up, he cried. Put on your big boy pants, You know, don’t be a girly girl. Don’t be a sissy. Same thing for the girls. And that’s called emotional invalidation. It’s the most invasive, insidious and pervasive form of abuse that exists. And it happens in every single family, even by the most loving parents. They don’t even know they’re doing it. And it literally rots out the brain. I mean, the brain scanning studies are pretty amazing to show how emotional invalidation devastates a child’s brain, but it happens everywhere. And that’s the first one. The second problem is that we go to problem solving. So maybe you’re with an angry, emotional person and you said, well, if you would just do it this way. And problem solving is a form of emotional invalidation, basically what happens in problem solving and emotional invalidation is the listener is trying to soothe his or her own anxiety around the upset that the other person has.

Doug Noll: [00:07:45] And they’re doing it unconsciously. And it’s like the brain is saying, If you would just stop being being emotional, I’ll feel better about myself. I won’t have this anxiety. So you’ve got emotional invalidation, you’ve got problem solving, jumping and trying to solve a problem way, way too early. And then you have defensiveness so you can appease or you can justify or rationalize or excuse or apologize, or any number of other types of defensive mechanisms that we use unconsciously with angry people. And the problem with those is that just makes the angry person angrier. And there’s a whole bio physiological reason why that happens that we don’t need to get into. But but the way we’re set up is when we’re really angry, we don’t need to be we don’t want to be appeased. We don’t want somebody to apologize. We don’t want somebody to try to rationalize, justify our excuse. And what we really need is to be deeply listened to. And and those are the three things that the three common patterns that perpetuate and escalate conflict and fights and arguments.

Stone Payton: [00:08:48] So I’ve been grinning the whole time You describe that because in my own marriage and I think we have a strong one, I at least I’m self-aware enough at this point to recognize that that is my go to move right to fix the problem. And that is not the right answer.

Doug Noll: [00:09:05] It will not work. Ignore the words, read the emotions, reflect back the emotions with the statement. After that 90 seconds, you’ll get a nod of the head. The speaker will say something like, Yeah, or Exactly. And then you’ll see a dropping of the shoulders in the sigh of relief. These are the for involuntary physiological responses. When you de-escalate somebody, that’s when you can problem solve. And then you go into it by saying, well, what do you think we should do about this? You don’t offer to solve a problem. You open up a conversation about really a negotiation about how to go about solving the problem. But you never offer your own opinion.

Stone Payton: [00:09:39] Wow. So that takes some practice or it would for.

Doug Noll: [00:09:43] Me, you know, it’s just different. It’s like riding a bike. It takes most of my students about 4 to 6 weeks of consistent practice to make this a habit. And once that makes it a habit, their life changes forever. It literally changes them forever. It’s a foundational skill of life.

Stone Payton: [00:09:59] So if you would help us get our arms around some terms like emotional intelligence, emotional competence or the same, do they complement each other or are they wildly different?

Doug Noll: [00:10:11] So. So. Emotional intelligence really defines two different things. There’s a whole corporate side of people who claim that they can teach you emotional intelligence. And if you believe that, then I can sell you a bridge that I’ve got stashed here in central California. You cannot learn emotional intelligence because emotional intelligence is a test. It’s like an IQ test. It’s a social intelligence test. And you can’t learn tests. What you can learn are the skills that the test assesses. And those are called that’s called emotional competency. And emotional competency consists of emotional self-awareness, emotional self regulation and cognitive empathy. Now, what I’ve learned over all the years working in maximum security prisons, training tens of thousands of inmates, these skills and tens of thousands of people on the outside, too, is that when you learn cognitive empathy, which is basically, you know, ignore the words, read the emotions, reflect back the emotions. But the you statement, that is the definition of cognitive empathy. You actually automatically, without effort, develop emotional self-awareness and emotional self regulation. Your brain just reprograms itself. It’s phenomenal to watch. And what’s really you know, it’s I know this is all hard to believe, but think about this. We’ve we’ve had over 6000 of our students in California are incarcerated. Students have been released on parole. We don’t have one report of recidivism. Not one of our students has re-offended coming out of prison. That’s how powerful this stuff is.

Stone Payton: [00:11:51] Now is that the the Prison of Peace project that I read about in my notes? Is that what you’re referring to?

Doug Noll: [00:11:57] That’s prison a peace?

Stone Payton: [00:11:58] Yeah, exactly. That is impressive. That’s got to be incredibly rewarding.

Doug Noll: [00:12:04] Well, it is. And it’s all based on the skills that we teach our incarcerated students. And they completely change as human beings. They literally change and fight. Or we see the change at about week five, they completely shift. Completely shipped as human beings. Now, there’s not. There’s not one of my students, including the worst gangbangers I’ve taught in Corcoran State Prison, which is one of the supermax, is in California, where I was teaching for three years, 100 feet from Charles Manson’s cell. There’s not one student that I’ve taught in prison that I wouldn’t have at my dinner table.

Stone Payton: [00:12:37] Man. That says a lot. This this most recent book de-escalate? Is this some of what you cover in there? Tell us about that book, the structure of it, how to get the most out of it.

Doug Noll: [00:12:49] Yeah, the book the book came about as at the request of all my students in prison. They said they knew I was an author because I’d published my third book. And, you know, about three years into the project. And we’ve taken some of the material from my third book and put it into our curriculum. And they asked me, Could you please write a book that describes all of this, that we can share it with our families because they we need something for our families to learn. They can’t understand why we’re changing. So I wrote the book, and the book basically takes you through at a very high level. It takes you through the science, which the brain science that supports all of this. And then the rest of the book sort of follows the arc of life. And we start with working with. Children, small children, then pre adolescence and then teenagers. And how do you de-escalate a teenager, for example. And I just have a millions and millions but dozens of examples of the actual conversations that you could be having with somebody else. So so it covers it covers child raising, it covers relationships from dating to divorce, it covers the workplace, it covers schools, every aspect of life. I just take the common problems that we see and show you how to de-escalate the anger and the upset that occurs on a daily basis in those in those situations.

Doug Noll: [00:14:14] It’s a it’s an easy read. I wrote it non technically non scholarly, so it’s a very easy read and it is a great place to start. Some people can learn from a book, which is great if you’re if you’re really good at reading a book and picking up ideas and implementing them, then that’s all you need. But the other thing I’ve done is I’ve learned that I do, of course, virtual and in-person workshops for six. Usually the workshops are 6 to 8 hours and we follow up for one week weekly sessions, one hour each, because it’s the follow up where you really get the skills. And I have I also put on online courses so people can go online. So there are a whole bunch of different ways that people can access this, this material and learning these skills and through all these different modalities. This is how my my whole life is devoted to pushing this stuff out there. Because as you’ve observed, it’s just absolutely amazing how it can change families and communities and prisons. We’ve we teach 100 men in a prison how to do this within a year. The prison is completely a completely different place.

Stone Payton: [00:15:22] Well, I mean, I can see immediately, just from the brief exercise you walked me through right on air. I mean, I felt heard. I felt. I felt validated, like. Like you’re not you’re not discounting me. And that’s got to be worth a ton.

Doug Noll: [00:15:36] Exactly. And and what you just described, Stone, is the experience that every single person describes when they’ve been listened to. They feel validated, they feel heard, and they say, Wow, you really get me. You really understand me? And that that builds loyalty. Not only does it de-escalate people, but it builds loyalty, trust and intimacy. And if you want, if you’re a leader, if you’re a business leader and you want to be a leader that everyone wants to follow, this is this is your go to skill. You develop this skill and use it appropriately and everybody will want to follow you. They’ll be intensely loyal toward you in any organization.

Stone Payton: [00:16:15] Yeah. I mean, I’m sensing that the use cases, if that’s the right term for for this, are virtually infinite. I mean, could we teach it in schools? Could we, could we teach them in business schools?

Doug Noll: [00:16:25] I just can’t. Yeah, I’m, I’m really working hard on trying to get this into schools. I just two weeks ago, I was in Indianapolis training 30 school principals in the Indiana Principal Leadership Institute. And now I think I’m going to be working with the university with the Indiana State University by School of Education. They’re very interested in what I was teaching to those principals. And I’ve got a page on my website devoted to showing school district, charter schools, schools and school districts how what they can do to implement this at all levels from this school board. School board people are having really tough times with angry parents coming in, disrupting meetings, superintendents. To principals, to teachers and even how do you roll this out to parents? And I’ve got a whole program set up for for any and all different levels depending upon the size of the project for people to do this, it gets rid of discipline problems, period. You don’t have any more discipline problems in your classroom when you start implementing these these these skills. If you’re a teacher, they just go away. And the kids become intensely loyal toward you.

Stone Payton: [00:17:34] It sounds to me like the work is probably just snowballing, but I’m going to ask anyway. Almost always do. How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a guy like you? Like how do you get to have a conversation to entertain? I don’t know, like the the board of superintendents or the leaders in companies?

Doug Noll: [00:17:55] Well, you know, I face the same problem that every sole proprietor solopreneur faces. You know, how do you how do you cut through the noise in the world to get people to pay attention to you? And it’s a slow slog. You do it one person at a time. So the Indiana work came as a result of a podcast interview I did with a guy by the name of Nate Roger, who does a wonderful podcast, and he’s a he’s a psychologist. And he finished the podcast and he called he called he he worked he does teaches at this institute, and he called the director of the institute and said, You’ve got to get Doug Noel out here. I mean, so it’s all word of mouth. And the reason I do these podcasts, I do I probably do 20 podcasts a month. The reason I do these podcasts is is because I’m trying to get the word out there that we have a better way of being with each other That works. It absolutely works. And the more people adhere hear this and go to my website and learn what I’m doing. The the faster we can change our communities and change our world, we don’t have to deal with a huge amount of anger right now, politically, socially, a huge amount of anger out there. And we we don’t have to live that way. We can get rid of that anger in ourselves and with all the people around us, we can have calm conversations with the politically polarized. We don’t have to fight. We don’t have to demonize. We just have to be willing to listen.

Stone Payton: [00:19:19] Well, you’re so right. I know there’s a tremendous amount of I would describe it as divisive energy here in the Southeast. You know, during this political season, there’s got to be some hope with some of what you’re talking about.

Doug Noll: [00:19:34] Yeah, well, there is I think there is hope. I mean, there is a clear path to finding to be to be able to be at peace with people, even even though you may have strong disagreements on values or political beliefs or whatever, you still can be civil with each other. And the frankly, the problem we have politically is that it doesn’t matter what your political beliefs are. We’ve got people who’ve political people who now understand that the only way they can protect their power, position and privilege is by by fearmongering and by getting people angry and by dividing people up. And that’s that. So that’s all we hear from these people is divisive language because that’s what gets the base riled up. They get all emotional, they get angry and they they donate money and they vote. But that’s a horrible way to run a country, especially a country that’s supposed to be based on democratic values and civil discourse.

Stone Payton: [00:20:30] Yeah.

Doug Noll: [00:20:32] All right.

Stone Payton: [00:20:33] Country, where can our listeners get their hands on the on this book, the other books? What’s a good way for them to connect with you? I want to leave them with some coordinates. Whatever you feel like is appropriate. I just want to make it really easy for them to have a conversation with you or someone on your team or whatever you feel like is appropriate.

Doug Noll: [00:20:49] Stone I made a web page for everybody that’s listing only for only for the listeners of this podcast.

Stone Payton: [00:20:53] Okay.

Doug Noll: [00:20:54] And the link is Doug Knoll Dog and Elko Slash Cherokee. And if you go to that Doug Nolasco dot com co slash Cherokee, if you go to that page, you can get a free book that describes everything that we’ve been talking about. You can buy a copy of my book De-escalate. You can buy the deescalate video course. And if you want to go further, you can buy the basic emotional competency course, which teaches you emotional competency. And these these are the ways to get into it. And then, of course, if people want to reach out to me, my email address is Doug. Doug at Doug. Nola.com. Com. Doug at Doug NOLA.com. I’m a sole practitioner. I don’t have a staff. I don’t have an entourage. I answer all my own phone calls, all my own e-mails. You know, I’m one of those guys. So and I’m happy to talk to anybody that’s interested in learning more about this, you know, and I’m not I don’t sell this stuff. It sells itself. You either resonate with it or you don’t. And I’m perfectly happy either way.

Stone Payton: [00:21:58] Well, Doug, it has been an absolute delight having you on the show this afternoon. Man, You’re doing fantastic work. We sincerely appreciate you. And I can’t thank you enough for investing the time and energy to share your learnings and your insights with us.

Doug Noll: [00:22:13] Man Well, Stone, thank you for having me. And I hope for everybody that’s listening that you found that my idea is to be of interest and check it out because it will change your life foundationally forever. It’s amazing.

Stone Payton: [00:22:26] All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Doug Noel and everyone here at the business Radio X family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.