How Executive Leaders De-Escalate High-Stakes Conflict in 90 Seconds | Douglas Noll | Episode 230

In this episode of The Uncommon Leader Podcast, John Gallagher welcomes Douglas Noll—a former 22-year trial lawyer who walked away from a $10 million practice to dedicate his life to peacemaking, conflict resolution, and neuroscience-based leadership.

Doug outlines how leaders can use "affect labeling" to disarm high-stakes board dispute tension in 90 seconds, why traditional management views on empathy are fundamentally flawed, and how "Nervous System Leadership" drives bottom-line execution.

🚀 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐘𝐨𝐮’𝐥𝐥 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧:

• Overcoming Adversity to High-Stakes Litigation: Doug’s journey from severe childhood physical disabilities to becoming a trial lawyer.
• The Pivot to Peacemaking: Leaving a $10M trial career to build restorative justice frameworks and found the Prison of Peace Project.
• The Science of De-Escalation: How simple affect labeling regulates a dysregulated brain in 90 to 120 seconds.
• The Early Problem-Solving Trap: Why jumping straight to answers is actually an executive self-soothing mechanism that damages trust.
• Empathy Leadership: Shifting from soft-skill clichés to hard neuroscience for team retention, performance, and operational freedom.

 📌 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 Douglas Noll👇
➡️ LinkedIn (primary):  https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougnoll/
➡️ Website: https://dougnoll.com/
➡️ YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/@DouglasNollPeacemaker
➡️ Book: https://dougnoll.com/books

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Transcript

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Flip Strategy Toward People

SPEAKER_01 0:00

But most leaders are intentional about gravity and they're accidental about people. I want you to flip that. I want you to think that the next time somebody is on your team is upset or frustrated or angry, be deliberate. Name what they're feeling. But it's important to feel. Before you try to solve anything, you feel dismissed. You don't feel hurried. You feel like this decision got made without it. That's it. That's all you have to do. And you just did more for that person than a raise than giving them a raise or promotion to this than it. And I believe, and you'll find out yourself if you have empathy is the highest leverage skill.

Meet Doug Noll And The Stakes

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Hey Uncommon Leaders, welcome back. This is the Uncommon Leader Podcast. I'm your host, John Gallagher. So what if everything you've been taught about dealing with difficult people is backward? Today we're talking about a superpower that most leaders frankly just mess up and misunderstand: emotional control under intense pressure. Imagine walking into a windowless concrete room inside a maximum security prison. In front of you are 15 cages, each holding a shackled member of the jail. Your job is to teach them how to stop fights and reduce violence. That's exactly what my guest today did. I can't wait to learn. This is going to be really cool because I find this fascinating. Doug Knoll is a highly accomplished trial lawyer-turned peacemaker, and he's mediated more than 1,500 intense disputes and co-founded the Prison of Peace Project, where he literally trained maximum security inmates to become certified mediators. Wow. He's the author of the best-selling book, Deescalate, How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds, and the highly anticipated new release, Empathy Leadership. So let's welcome Doug to the Uncommon Leader Podcast. Doug Noll, welcome to the Uncommon Leader Podcast. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_01 1:50

I am I'm better than excellent, John. And thanks for having me on. Really looking for that.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

It's kind of fun. I think this can be a great conversation. And you know, my intro, you didn't get to hear it beforehand, but it's gonna talk you up well, also just the topic we're getting ready to jump into.

A Childhood Shaped By Disability

SPEAKER_00 2:09

But before we get into that topic, I'm gonna ask you the same question that I always ask my first-time guests, and that's to tell me a story from your childhood that still impacts who you are today as a person and as a leader.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Yeah, that's a heavy question for me. I was born with severe disabilities, partially blind, partially deaf, two club feet, left-handed, bad teeth, and super smart. And in those days, nobody knew what to do with a kid like me who was cognitively functional, but physically severely disabled. I had I couldn't walk until I was about three and a half or four years old through multiple surgeries to correct my club feet. And uh my vision wasn't people could not understand why I was not doing well in school, even though I tested high until a nurse in the fourth grade figured out that finally did my vision testing. They don't do that anymore. They test vision right away. My vision was 2400. And so I got fitted out with glasses that were Coke bottle lenses, super thick, black, nerdy glasses. And in the 1950s, that was just death. And I I couldn't run very well, became a swimmer. But I really had a tough even though I grew up in affluence and privilege, it was really tough. My parents didn't know how to emotionally support me. I needed a lot of emotional support that I didn't get. And I built up a lot of really maladaptive attitudes and behaviors to cope with the pain. That actually stood me in good stead because I went to Dartmouth, came back from Dartmouth, went to law school, became a trial lawyer, and tried cases for 22 years. And being an aloof, arrogant asshole is really a prerequisite to being a successful trial lawyer. Not being a successful human being. Being a successful trial lawyer. And I was very successful until I decided to leave and do something else. And there's a story behind that too.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Yeah, so I love that story starting out. You you mentioned kind of these deep stories, and it it really does frame kind of who we are with regards to those stories. And that's you know, some of the most uh profound and connecting part of the uh journey. So, you know, you took us through, you took us through that childhood challenge, but ultimately able to turn that into the what might be the layman's term of success and being very good at what you were doing. But yeah, 22 years, and then sounds like there's some moment that tells you there's a script to be flipped and did something different. So yeah, let's let's jump away from that one.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

Sure.

Tai Chi Paradoxes And Leaving Law

SPEAKER_01 4:20

So I graduated from law school in 77 and I spent a year as a law clerk for an appellate judge, and then went into private practice in 78. And the partners in the firm wanted me to be a hardcore trial lawyer, and so I tried my first civil jury trial four four weeks after joining the firm in late October of 78. My second trial was co-chairing the defense of a of a very large securities fraud case in federal court in San Diego for seven months. So, I mean, right out of the bat, I was in the courtroom. And I got good at it. And then uh in the mid-80s, I was constantly trying to work on all these disabilities, you know, just always trying to catch up and I overcompensated grossly. But I took up the martial arts and when I was finally awarded my second degree black belt in the in 1990, and my teacher told me to start studying Tai Chi as a martial art. And I did. And Tai Chi turns out to be a really deadly martial art, and it has two paradoxes. The first is the softer you are, the stronger you are. And the second paradox is the more vulnerable you are, the more powerful you are. Soft to be strong, vulnerable to be powerful. Did not compute. Arrogant, aloof, asshole lawyer, trial lawyer, successful by any measure. Until it did compute. And a couple of years later I was in a courtroom cross-examining somebody, and the thought came to me, what the heck am I doing in here? So after that trip, uh I had a vac I mean, after that trial, I had a vacation plan. A bunch of buddies and I had a permit to run the main salmon in Idaho. It's a 10-day whitewater trip. So I spent the trip thinking about how many people I'd really served as a trial lawyer and could only count five people over 20 plus years that I felt that I had really helped. And I thought, I'm just not gonna do this anymore. I'm not here to go another 20 or 30 years and only help 20 or 30 people. That's just not who I am. So I had no clue what I wanted to do. I just knew that my trial career was gonna be coming to an end pretty soon. So when I got back to town, I live in Central California, I drove down out of the mountains to my office and heard a public service announcement for a new master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies. So I enrolled. And for three years, I was a graduate student, a three-quarters-time law professor, and a full-time trial lawyer. And the master's degree program completely changed my life. Uh those guys just taught me so much. They were my professors were the founders of the International Restorative Justice Movement, which is a whole philosophy about dealing with crime. And I mean, it was just everything that I was what was missing in the law I found in this in these studies. So ultimately, my partners and I couldn't come to an agreement, so I gave one week's notice, walked away from $10 million, and opened my own peacemaking and mediation practice on November 1st, 2000, and never looked back. So that's how that started. And there were a couple of epical events that occurred after that. The first is I did not have a good way of calming people down. I'd done all the every kind of training you would imagine, nonviolent communication, active listening, you know, you name it. I had tried it. None of it worked. It was all garbage. Never worked in high stakes, high conflict situations, which is I was getting paid big bucks to walk in and calm people down. Until 2005.

The Moment Listening Finally Worked

SPEAKER_01 7:15

And I talked I tell this story in my TEDx talk that just got released a few months ago. And what basically, to make a long story very short, it was a divorced couple, they hated each other, it was an $18,000 dispute, they spent $50,000 each trying to destroy each other, and they were screaming at each other. And I was sitting there thinking, what the heck am I gonna do with this? And the thought came to me, listen to the emotions. And three hours later, the husband ex-husband John looked across the table at his wife with tears streaming down his face, saying, That's the first time you've listened to me in 25 years. And they settled the case and walked out holding hands. And that sh that moment changed my life. Uh two years later, the science caught up. A study out of Matthew Lieberman's lab at UCLA showed, it basically provided the evidence, brain scanning evidence of what I had been observing in those two years as a peacemaker when I name emotions. And the science, very simply, is that when you name what somebody feels, you're helping them move from a dysregulated nervous system state to a regulated state. And the centers of the brain associated with negative emotion calm down, and a part of the brain associated with emotional self-regulation activates, and people literally calm down in 90 seconds. And it works on every single human brain on the planet. Even brains that are not working well. If as long as people have emotions, naming their emotions literally calms them down. It was amazing.

Training Lifers To Mediate Conflict

SPEAKER_01 8:33

And that led to co-founding the Prison of Peace project in 2009 with my colleague Laurel Coffer. And in 2010, we found ourselves in front of 15 women serving life and long-term sentences in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world. And we start the very first skill we taught them was how to listen to and name emotions. And then from there we built up all the skills that it took for them to become meat eaters and peacemakers. And Prison of Peace took off, and today it's international. And I spent 10 years teaching peacemaking skills, primarily how to listen to and name emotions, in California and Connecticut prisons. And it was just phenomenal. We ended up at towards the end before the pandemic hit and shut us down, uh, working in Corcoran State Prison with men coming out of gangs. And the first time I met them, there were 15 men in cages shackled at the ankle, shackled the wrists. Violent men had the same exact effect on them as it had on everybody else. Completely transformed their lives. And most of those men have been released. And are and here in California, we've had over 800 lifers who have been released who graduated from our program, and not one of them has re-offended. Pretty powerful stuff. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

No, the so the so the science caught up. The results, the outcomes were there. They're undeniable. I'm a step like you left me a lot. You you left me a lot in the U.S.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

That's a long, that's a 15-year project.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

No, no, but yes. I could go, but I I'm curious, almost at the very start. Where you said you, you know, you went on the fishing trip, you decided, you came back, one week notice, you're out, you get that just like $10 million thing just flew by like it was nothing. We can talk about that decision later on.

From Lawsuits To Business Peacemaking

SPEAKER_00 10:08

How does one start a peacemaking practice?

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Well, in in the confines of the law, there was a process known as mediation, where people like me were called neutrals, and we're called in and litigated disputes to try to help people settle lawsuits. And that that had been that started in the 19 basically in the 1970s, nineteen eighties here in California. And by the time we got into the 2000s, it was pretty mainstream and really becoming mainstream more and more across the country. And today it's mainstream everywhere. Not only in the U.S., but in most developed countries. Mediation is a pretty well-known process. But it's really a form of facilitated negotiation. I got really interested in working in disputes that were not in litigation, family business conflicts, founder-led corporate disputes, investor founder disputes, private equity post-acquisition disputes, private company disputes where the stakeholders no longer trusted each other and where the human dynamics were getting in the way of decision making and strategic implementation. Because the people involved did not have the skills to understand the dynamics that were causing the problems. And that's what really attracted me, because they could those people can't afford to litigate because litigation will destroy their wealth. But they still have this conflict. So how can I help them work through all of this, rebuild trust, rebuild safety, rebuild their human dynamics so they can all get what they want, which is to have a profitable growing business and have something that's going to be a legacy that they either exit and sell or they grow it and make a lot of money on it. And that really motivated me. And that and so that's the vast majority of things. And that's a pretty crazy cases.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

You're talking to me. I got things going through my mind right now in terms of saying, man, I gotta have Doug talk to a couple people that I know about that after we stop hitting the record button, because I'll get myself in trouble. The concept, so this leads into the the book.

Why Deescalate Was Written

SPEAKER_00 11:57

And let's talk about the book. The book, the first book, or a book, is called De Escalate. Your fourth book. Okay, it wasn't gonna be your first. How to calm an angry person in 90 seconds or less. And you you use the term name what they feel. My guess is that's kind of the the uh thesis of the book. But tell me about how that book came about and who you wrote it for.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Well, at the time, well when we started the Prison Project, actively started teaching the Prison Project in April of 2010. Prison people know can find out everything there is to know about you. And it wasn't long before our students knew that I was an author and at that time working on my third book called Illusive Peace, which came out in 2013. And as we were teaching, especially when we started teaching men, they started asking me to write a book that they could that their families could access because they were the families were saying, What's happened to you? You've completely changed. You're a whole different human being. You're not who you used to be. And they could they had a hard time explaining what we were they knew what they were learning, but they you know they couldn't explain it. So would you please write a book? And so I said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Finally, in 2016, I said, Okay, I'll do it. And so I wrote the book, Deescalate, basically as kind of a how-to ethic label. Aphic label is the technical term. And as you read the book, you'll see there are a ton of stories that come out of the Prism Project. And basically in that book, what I do is I take the first three or four chapters and I go through the science. This is what it is, how it works, how we developed it, and then the rest of the book goes through the arc of life, starting with dating relationships, and then small children, preteens, teenagers, marriage, breakup, dating relationships, and then we get into business leadership, teaching in the classroom, and then finally at the end there's a small chapter on the spirituality of all of this. Because it is when you practice it correctly, it is a spiritual practice. And so the book came out, Simon and Schuster Beyond Words, Simon and Schuster picked it up. There's a little funny story about behind that. And and it hit the Amazon bestseller list in its category for about two weeks, so I could call it an Amazon bestseller, but I've since learned that everybody's an Amazon bestseller, who so who really cares? But the book has done really well. I mean, it sold over 50,000 copies since 2017. I get nice royalty checks every every six months, and now it's in five languages. It's going to come out in the French of all languages this summer. So it'll be the fifth language. And I get emails from all over the world thanking me for the insights that the book has provided people. And so that's basically the Bible, I would say, that's where the starting point for people to get into this, learning how this all works. And of course, I've taught and coached and trained and done I teach graduate courses and at Pepperdine, and and so my whole basic professional work is based on this book.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Unfair question, but I'll ask it anyway. You can protect the uh confidentiality of it. Do you have like a favorite story of of those notes that have come to you in terms of the impact that it's had? Because again, so let's go back to I only ha I felt like I had an impact on five people and I wanted to have an impact on more. My guess is letters.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

I can give you stories from this year. I you know, I'll keep it confidential. But so I know that you're working in Stockton, California. Well, just south of Stockton, there's a the town of Rapond, which is between Modesto and Stockton off in 99. And I got called into a very large billion-dollar agricultural company where the stakeholders no longer trusted each other. And I went to one of their board meetings, and it was one of the most dysfunctional meetings I'd ever seen. And they all felt that board meeting was pretty civil because I was sitting there as the kindergarten cop, right? Keeping everything. So they called me in for a we did a three-day off-site and we spent three days working. I have a process I worked through. And by the end, they were all crying, literally crying. Hard. These are hard-nosed business people and very wealthy. And they worked it out and built some new plans, some new strategic plans about their leadership structure and succession planning. They were going to call me back to come in and do more work, but obviously they didn't, which suggests to me that I was successful because I'm a one-shot pony. If I come in and do my work, you'll never hear from me again. So that was so that happened earlier this year. And the other another story that I I'd love to tell, again, I'm I work with I'm every now and then I get these power couples that come to me. These are men and women who are extremely successful, they each have their own careers, but they've devoted so much effort to their careers they grow apart. And they come to me saying, We need to rebuild our intimacy. Now I'm not a couples therapist, I'm a peacemaker. But I teach them how to listen in as I describe in de-escalate. And then this particular couple is the second week into the coaching where the husband was really resistant to the idea of listening to emotions, he told a story. He's he's got his own company, very wealthy man, big company, and he said, I've got a I've got a vice president who's very, very reactive, and we had a meeting and he blew up in the meeting. And this is something that happens every now

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SPEAKER_01 16:31

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SPEAKER_00 16:34

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The 90-Second De-Escalation Script

SPEAKER_01 17:05

He came into my office after the meeting, and instead of me and him arguing and yelling and screaming, I just listened to what he said, and I named his emotions. He had the cheat sheet up. And he said, I just said, You're really angry, you're frustrated, you feel disrespected, and nobody's listening to you. In five minutes, he calmed down, nodded his head, and said, Thanks, thanks for listening, got up and walked up. It would have taken us six months before to overcome the problems. And we did it, I did it in less than five minutes. And then five five weeks later, I was working with him, and the wife said, I've never been closer to my husband than I have been in the last two weeks. That's the kind of work I do on a daily basis. And that those are very, very common, common reactions to my work. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

And it reminds me, we talked about this before we hit the record button of a two and a half minute video or so that I've used in some other training before.

unknown 17:49

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

That it's it's not about the nail.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

Yeah, Jason Headlane and Monica.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

You use that in video training as well. But what I hear, and and I'm not trying to overly simplify, although it sounds to you as you bring it across, is that it's a simple de-escalation process, is that we name what they feel. So for the person who needs that two-minute exercise to de-escalate and get an angry person to calm down in 90 seconds or less, what are the what are the steps they gotta do?

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Take one simple thing. Just say you feel. John, you feel really angry. You're pissed off and frustrated, you feel really disrespected and unheard and unappreciated and unsupported. And you're really worried and concerned. That's it. Shut up and watch for the body's yes. Nodding of the head. Watch for it to attention to leave the shoulders. That's right, you're gonna see shoulders drop, sigh of relief, and some usually a verbal response like yeah, or exactly, followed by usually thanks for listening to me. And they'll be immediately calm down. Ninety seconds, 90 to 120 seconds. Because the brain, when when the brain gets activated, there's a lot, a ton of neuroscience behind this, and I won't go into it all, but but just know this. When when the threat response goes on in the brain, chem brain chemicals are introduced that cause us to have this emotional reaction. That only lasts for 90 seconds. If we can get in and start calming them down by naming their emotions and lending our prefrontal cortex to them within that 90 second to 120 second period, we can stop the escalation. Because the escalation occurs because we keep replaying the anger and we just and or we're not being heard, we get more and more frustrated, and then the argument just gets bigger and bigger. If we can get in and simply name what they're feeling in that first 90 to 120 seconds, we can stop that cycle. And the brain immediately calms down and peace

Why Fixing Things Backfires

SPEAKER_01 19:28

is restored. Now you go back to It's Not About the Nail, which anybody just put in It's Not About the Nail on YouTube and you'll have to Monica Barbera. It's a great little video. I use that video to show how that one of the most common methods we try to use in difficult situations is to go to early problem solving. And I we won't describe the video because it's so cute. It's really fun to watch. But when you watch the video, think about this. Think about when we jump into early problem solving. Somebody's emotional, they're upset, and we say, look, if you would just do this, right, we're offering unsolicited advice. What we're doing, we're not offering unsolicited advice. What we're doing is unconsciously soothing our own anxiety over the other person's upset. And what our brain is actually doing is saying, look, if you would just stop feeling the way you feel and fix the problem, I wouldn't feel anxious. And I'll just feel anxious. So please stop that. That's what's really going on in the brain. And so we all tend to go to early problem solving to soothe our own anxiety when all we really need to do is listen and label what they're feeling. And we get the same result, and actually we get calmed down a lot faster.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

Yeah, and it's not like you've got to remember a list of a hundred, right? Listen, there's not a hundred emotions. You talked about this.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

No, no, no. Well, there might be, you know, there might be thousands of emotional words in the English language, but we only need to know 20 or 30 that to

Emotions As Data And Layers

SPEAKER_01 20:45

really work. And I teach that emotion, uh I teach emotions or data. Emotions are data just like numbers on a spreadsheet. And we've never been taught how to structure that data. So one of the things I teach is how do we structure it? Well, the first thing to understand is that emotions come in layers. They don't if you're angry, you're not just angry. You're angry with a whole bunch of other stuff behind it. And so the layers are are anger, disrespect, fear, disgust, shame, sadness, and abandonment. And each of those layers have other types of emotions that are in that category of various intensities and durations. And so we learn what those words are. And then we start learning how to say the words because it's hard to say you feel angry. If you've never done that before, it's hard because we're conditioned against it. We're conditioned against telling people what they feel. It's a part of our cultural conditioning, but it's the only thing that works.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

You know, I I've used the term before, how do you show emotion without being emotional? There's there's a lot to that, I believe, in terms of saying, I want folks to know if I'm angry or not. And I'm probably displaying that. And to your point, our natural response as humans is to make ourselves feel better in the in light of their emotions that they're showing. I'm not really paying attention like that before.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

Not really focused. No, I mean now if if I'm emotional myself, I can I can regulate myself.

Naming Your Own Emotions

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Saying I'm angry right now. I'm angry. I'm frustrated. I feel completely disrespected. I just by naming my own emotions using an I statement, I can calm it has the same effect. I can calm myself down.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

So good. So if someone, quote, makes you angry, you can calm yourself down through the same technique. That's right. Great point. Great point. Okay. I can't

How Courtrooms Run On Feelings

SPEAKER_00 22:20

help but kind of walk back to 22 years of success in other side of maybe unknowingly, but you were really good at manipulating that emotion world. We use to not let them not let them say it in a way that was good or healthy.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Yeah. I mean, trials are probably not. Trials are all about stories.

SPEAKER_00 22:40

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

Stories are all about emotions. So even from the first moment when you're when you're given permission to void dire a jury panel, void air is the process of choosing a jury. I know what that is now. I watched my cousin Vinny for so long and never knew what that word meant. I couldn't even decide it. It's a French word. The English adopted it as a French word, and it's basically questioning a panel of people to exclude jury selection is an exclusion process, not an inclusion process. But I had a I had a void eye process and I and I didn't know it at the time, but I was my process was really giving me emotional information about a juror. I mean, and I was trying to decide, is this an emotional thinker? Is the person more cognitive? How do they process information? You know, so the the typical questions I would ask was how many of you when you go to the how many of you use lists? Okay, I I'll ask it this way. How many, how many people here on the in the jury box, before you go to the market, you write down a list of everything you're gonna get? I want to know who whose that is. The people that hold up their hands are gonna be the people who tend to be more disciplined, right? Okay. How many people when you get to the market you realize you forgot your list and you just gotta go ad hoc? More hands go up. That tells me something. How many people just you use your list religiously? And all of a sudden now I've divided the jury into boxes and I can tell people who are disciplined and think and kind of work their way through a process, and people who are just ad hoc, and they're probably pretty emotional in the way they process information. And that gives you great insight as to who, how, how the the jury, the jury the ultimate 12-person jury in a California state jury, how they're going to be processing information. And then that guides you in how you give your opening statement, present the evidence, and then close the case. So it's pretty interesting. You've got I didn't even know any of the stuff that I noticed. Right, that's what I mean.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

You've got the ability now to inject the the sickness, the virus, and you've got the cure. I mean, that's dangerous. That's really dangerous.

SPEAKER_01 24:29

Well that's a good thing, I guess I'm not trying cases anymore, huh?

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Yeah, that's right. Exactly. They'd figure you out pretty fast. Or maybe they wouldn't. That's again, that's a really good thing. The uh Okay, so folks, you gotta get the book. I'm going out and buying another copy of myself, DS. I'm going to figure it out because I need to I need to learn this myself as I listen more and more to Doug. This is so good.

Empathy Leadership And The Myths

SPEAKER_00 24:47

And I'm glad you've been on here. The latest book coming out, Empathy Leadership. What's different and or the same about that book uh and where you where your journey is right now? So the book the book came about.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

Well, I'll back up. From a 50,000-foot level level, my goal in life now is to teach as many people about how to listen to emotions. I call it listening someone into existence. That's the name of my TED Talk. My goal is to teach as many millions of people as possible these skills because I have seen firsthand the transformational effect this very simple counterintuitive idea has. So I think to myself, all right, I'm in the leverage. Where's the greatest leverage? And to me it's in leadership, because leaders influence people. I mean, I could for example, I could take a healthcare system in a community and teach the leadership how to listen others into existence and have that filtered down through the organization. And by the time it gets to the patient level, you know they're seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of patients a week. And soon the whole community is being exposed to these ideas. What a massive transformation that would be. I've watched twenty-five people on a thousand-person prison yard change the culture of that yard in less than eight months with the skills that we teach, going from violence to peace. And if we can do it in a prison yard, we can do it in communities. So that's what got what got me motivated. So the empathy part came because I heard an interview between Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, neither of whom are people that I admire very much. And Musk said empathy will be the destruction of Western civilization. And that really pissed me off. So then I started doing some research and finding, well, what's going on in the business? So you felt angry. I was very angry. And I was worried because the th Rogan has a huge platform, and Musk has a huge platform, and they're teaching young people that empathy is evil. So that's when I dove into it. And I looked at all the books that have been published on leadership empathy, there are a ton of them out there, and said that nobody's getting this right. Because I know what empathy is. You define it, we define I define empathy. Empathy is the learned skill. It's a learnable skill. It's the learned skill of reading and reflecting or naming somebody's emotions or their emotional experience from their own frame of reference. That's cognitive empathy. And it's a it's a teachable, learnable, replicable, measurable skill. It is not a soft skill. It's based on hard neuroscience, the mechanics of our biology. So I'm a crazy guy. I see a problem or a gap or a misunderstanding, and I write a book about it. And so that's what I did. And I decided that I decided to go deep into it, knowing that I was writing to a leadership audience, I needed to blow apart a whole bunch of myths, which I do, and all backed by empirical science. The way we think we are is not the way we are. Neuroscience shows us that as human beings, the beliefs we hold, the understandings we have hold about self and who we are and how we make decisions and all that totally not what happens at all. It's a subjective experience that we have. So so an empathy, as it turns out, is something that has been innate in humans or in hominids for over millions of years. So dove into the evolutionary biology of empathy and discovered this. We've only been had language for 30,000 years. Hominids have been on the planet for almost two million years. How did we communicate without language? Empathy. Emotions, facial expression, vocalization, body language. Our brains are acutely hardwired to read another person's emotions. And yet for 3,000 years we've been told that emotions are bad, emotions are evil, emotions make us weak, emotions are sinful, emotions are irrational, all wrong. So that got me going. And I wrote the book, and basically what I do is I talk about nervous system leadership. And what I'm what I tell people is what I'm teaching leaders is the idea that you can work at the cognitive level where there's deliberate thinking, and all of your analysis and decision making and so-called rational thinking, whatever that is, occurs. And you want people to be thinking machines when in reality they're nervous systems that are for the most part dysregulated. And if you want to understand all of the hot terms we've been hearing over since the pandemic, like uh what is it, the quiet quitting, toxic, toxic people, all of the retention problems, turnover, loss of productivity, loss of everything going on, everything that leaders don't want to be happening in the workforce, it all comes back to nervous systems. What's going on in those nervous systems that cause people to behave the way they do? And when you understand that you can engage in nervous system leadership, you can regulate nervous systems by affect labeling, that's the key skill. Then you start to see the difference in in organizational performance. So that's what empathy leadership is all about. It's teaching the science and the skill of nervous system leadership through the process of this technical term ethic labeling or naming somebody else's emotions with tons of examples. Crazy.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

That'll be coming out, folks, shortly. Coming September, Simon Inshu, September, September 8th of this year. Yeah, we want folks to go to uh learn more about that book, Doug.

Book Packages And Team Training

SPEAKER_01 29:26

Uh right now I'm really interested in getting bulk orders. So if you if this is landing with you as a person who's listening to the show and this is something you want to get for your organization, uh really interested in doing I have book order packages. We're all coming and do training for you and all that. You can go to dugnoll.com, D-O-U-G-N-O-L-L dot com slash empathy-leadership-launch. The book description is in there, the book order packages are in there, and then your inquiry will just be an email to me saying, Hey, I'd like to talk more about it. And then we'll we'll set up a Zoom call and talk about it and and find it's a good fit for you. And you can put the show notes for people. Empathy dashes.

SPEAKER_00 29:59

They will be in the show notes for sure. Yep. With uh with the link, uh, an active link that'll be able to get them to their get them there to that. So

Rapid-Fire Personal Questions

SPEAKER_00 30:06

good. Couple fun questions, Doug. I think we're coming up on our time commitment. I know I have it. I've really enjoyed this conversation. It's challenged me in a good way, and I didn't get to everything, but we won't be able to. We never do. Your favorite so let yeah, I mean, let's your favorite trial lawyer movie. And are they really real?

SPEAKER_01 30:24

You know something? I hated watching trial lawyer movies. I hated reading trial lawyer books. I just lived it 24 hours, 7, 365. I just couldn't bring myself to keep immerse myself in that stuff when I was just living it all the time. People don't realize how hard trial lawyering is. It is it's 60 seven when you're in trial, it's 60, 70, 80 hours of work a week. And you know, all the pressure is on you. Nobody cares about anything other than whether you win or lose. And you're a chump if you lose, and you're a hero if you win. And it's not about it's never about the facts of the case. That well, the facts are pretty weak, or I've got weak witnesses, or you know, the other side has a stronger case than I do. It's never about that. It's always about how good you are. So I the pressure was too just too much, and I just I just couldn't do that. Those John John Grisham novels, I think I read one or two of them, and I said I can't do this anymore.

SPEAKER_00 31:15

I won't ask you to judge any of them then, to if I even if I mention them, because I have ones that are fun. I'm like, I just I wish you know I could I had the ability to I mean there that's a s there's no doubt it's a skill. There's trial lawyer and to be really good is a tremendous skill that folks have to be successful.

SPEAKER_01 31:32

Are you a music fan at all? I am. I actually I'm a musician. I play jazz and blew the violin.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_01 31:38

Baseball fan? Nope. Don't I don't follow professional sports.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

I've always been kind of an individual guy. So I was gonna kind of combine something into your walk-up, but do you have a karaoke song that you like to sing? No, I don't. But I clip I'll play violin and improv against karaoke. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, improv absolutely. That'd be really good too. I would imagine that can be uh somewhat therapeutic for you.

SPEAKER_01 32:00

It's a different way of yeah, it is, and it's a different way of using my brain. So that's why I really like it. And I'm blessed with a great teacher, Julie Wyan Lieberman, and so over the years she's really

Closing Charge: Be Deliberate

SPEAKER_01 32:10

helped me a lot.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

Doug, it's so good. This conversation's been great. I appreciate you adding value to the listeners of the Uncommon Leader Podcast. I know we could talk for another hour and not get all the questions answered that I have, but I wish you the best in the book. I'm gonna give you the last word, though, as every good trial lawyer gets the chance to this is my closing statement. Yeah, your closing statement.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

You know, I mean, this is the whole point of your show, that that leadership is intentional, and nobody drifts into leadership. But most leaders are intentional about strategy and they're accidental about people. I want you to flip that. I want you to think that the next time somebody is on your team is upset or frustrated or angry, be deliberate. Name what they're feeling with a simple you feel before you try to solve anything else. You feel dismissed. You don't feel hurt, you feel like this decision got made without you. That's it. That's all you have to say. And you just did more for that person than raise than giving them a raise or promotion or anything else. You listened them into existence. And I believe, and you'll find out yourself if you practice this, that intentional empathy is the highest leverage skill that you're not yet practicing. Intentional empathy.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

Doug, this has been fun. I hope you've been able to do that. Thank you, John. Been a great conversation. Really has. I wish you the best going forward, okay? Thanks so much.

Share And Leave A Review

SPEAKER_00 33:19

Thank you. Well, that was a masterclass in behavior and ultimately understanding how to de-escalate anger. Some simple recognition and understanding of the other individual. Hey, I know folks uh found value in that episode. If you did and you know someone who needs to hear it, please share it. Send it along and get it at the hand of those leaders who need to de-escalate and help others reduce their anger. It's something that uh I hear and deal with on a regular basis, myself included. If you get a chance, drop a five-star on this episode. I know that this has been a really good one, and it's how we get it in the hands of many other leaders. Until next time, folks, go and grow champions.