EP 181: Operating in the Space Between Panic and Hope: Dr Matt Todd, Hostage and Crisis Negotiator

Podcast Summary – EP 181 | The Return of Dr Matt Todd

Some conversations stay with you long after the microphones switch off. Others quietly change the trajectory of an entire podcast.

When Dr Matt Todd first joined The Security Circle Podcast back in Episode 113, listeners around the world connected with something extraordinary. It wasn't just the stories from a former hostage and crisis negotiator who had stood on bridges in the middle of the night, worked alongside governments during international kidnappings, and helped people navigate their darkest moments. It was the humanity behind them.

To this day, Matt's first appearance remains the single most downloaded episode in the history of The Security Circle Podcast – a remarkable achievement in a catalogue filled with some of the security industry's greatest minds. Yet, if you know Matt, you will know that success sits lightly on his shoulders. Few people combine such profound expertise with such genuine humility.

In this deeply thoughtful return to the podcast, Matt shares the lessons that years of crisis negotiation, global deployments, academic research, and human connection have taught him. From the surprising power of a simple cup of tea to the importance of truly listening, he explores why behaviour matters more than words, how emotion shapes decision-making, and what leaders can learn from those standing at the edge of despair.

Together, we discuss the reality of negotiating in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, managing families through unimaginable crises, navigating the challenges of social media in a connected world, and the four behavioural drivers that underpin so much of human behaviour: control, identity, respect, and capacity.

But perhaps most importantly, this episode reminds us that beneath every title, every role, and every crisis, there is simply another human being trying to be heard.

Warm, insightful, and profoundly moving, Dr Matt Todd returns to The Security Circle Podcast not only as our most popular guest, but as one of its most cherished. Whether you joined us for Episode 113 or are discovering Matt's wisdom for the very first time, this is a conversation that will change the way you listen, lead, and connect with others.

Because sometimes, the most powerful thing we can offer another person isn't an answer.

It's our attention. Our presence.

And perhaps... a cup of tea. ☕

Welcome back, Dr Matt Todd. The Security Circle wouldn't quite be the same without you.

Security Circle ⭕️  is an IFPOD production for IFPO the International Foundation of Protection Officers

Transcript

Speaker 0:01

If you enjoy the security circle podcast, please like share and comment or even better. Leave us a fab review We can be found on all podcast platforms. Be sure to subscribe. The security circle every Thursday. We love Thursdays.

Speaker 2 0:36

Hi, I'm Yolanda And welcome to the Security Circle Podcast, produced in association with IFPO, the International Foundation for Protection Officers. This podcast is all about connection, bringing you closer to the greatest minds, boldest thinkers, trailblazers, and change makers across the security industry. Whether you are here to grow your network, spark new ideas, or simply feel more connected to the world of protection and risk, you are in the right place wherever you are listening from. Thank you for being a part of the Security Circle journey..

Yoyo 1:15

It always gives me great pleasure to bring somebody back to the Security Circle podcast. But actually, I'm bringing back the man who has the largest, highest amount of podcast downloads since the very beginning of the Security Circle podcast, Matt Todd, former hostage negotiator. Welcome back to the Security Circle podcast. How are you doing?

Matt Todd 1:39

Oh, it's lovely to be back. It's lovely to be with you. Former hostage negotiator, I don't know if that saddens me or makes me happy, or... Part of me feels I'm more of a hostage negotiator now, away from all that, than I was when I was dealing with the actual crisis themselves. I spend more time negotiating with my family, with my kids with everybody else. But yeah, I loved talking to you last time.

Yoyo 2:01

Something tells me that once you're a negotiator, a hostage negotiator, you're always one, Matt. You don't stop kind of being one, do you?

Matt Todd 2:09

So I like the fact that you've said that, because I see a lot of people who I know have been hostage negotiators in their past that talk about ex or retired. But for me, certainly in my profile and when I'm talking to people, that's my career still. I'm still a hostage and crisis negotiator. I might not respond to police incidents, but after the years that I've done this, uh, I still feel, you know, as you just said, it's a life skill, it's part of me, it's, it's the way that I think, it's the way that I speak, it's the way that I listen. And so yeah, I'm always will be that person, I think.

Yoyo 2:42

You are actually one of the most humble people I've met, and I'm not sure if that's why your podcast was so widely downloaded. Honestly, it set us on a whole different trajectory, Matt. Do you have any idea, like, why your podcast was so popular?

Matt Todd 3:01

No, I don't. And it's really interesting that you ask that and that it was because I think some people call it imposter syndrome. I'm not sure if that's what it is, but I have a huge anxiousness sometimes that I'm very passionate about this. I believe in this stuff. I've used it a lot In really, really deep crisis situations, which I can talk to you about and I can talk to other people about, but when you're stood on that bridge with an individual, you, you talk about things that nobody else will probably ever hear. And so when you've done that dozens and dozens of times, it does make you very humble. Many times people come down, and I have no idea really why they have come down or why they've given themselves up in a siege, you know, whatever the incident is. But then when I talk about it to people, I know that I'm very passionate, and I have to... I feel sometimes I have to wind it in because I think people will be bored listening to me or not really interested in what I've got to say, and then you tell me this was our most downloaded podcast, and I find it really crazy 'cause we're just talking. Most of the time if I'm talking with friends, I'm almost consciously thinking, "Stop talking now, Matt. That's enough. People have heard enough from you." But also, we've had this conversation before, Yolo, where I also feel like that 20 years of work is, is in my head in, like, a cabinet, and sometimes it needs to come out and I like to just talk through these things with people. I like to try and explain to people what I've learnt from this. There's a lot of models out there. There's a lot of different ways that people practice this stuff. But for me, in the middle of the night when you're in that crisis, and now I look at it from a leadership role, when you're, when you're in that meeting or you're delivering at that conference, when the pressure's on, none, none of those things work. My PhD looking at how we negotiate in broad in- attacks with terrorists l- you know, proved this for me that most of those models and concepts that you've relied on in academia or learning aren't gonna help you in that situation because y- your body's already in a little bit of crisis itself, therefore you're somewhat emotional, and those emotions are absolutely gonna affect your behavior. And so the last thing that you need is to, at that moment in that time right then, is to suddenly start thinking around, "Ah, what did Freud tell me about this?" Or, "What was the model that helped me with this?" You just need something that your brain practically can rely on, something that you've done before that you know is gonna get you through this. And so I think over the years that's why it's taken me so long to get to this point, Yolo. You know, people have said, "Why haven't you talked about this earlier?" And, "Why, why, why only now have you gone on your own with this as a business?" Because now I feel after 17 years in a, in a very sort of high-risk operational environment and eight years studying in the academic environment, and then I've just finished four years in the commercial world now teaching sort of kidnap negotiations, family management. I suppose for myself now I feel I can stand and I- Like I love talking with you here 'cause I kind of know I want my voice to be heard now. I feel ready and confident. There's a lot of, there's a lot of very confident people out there at the moment talking about communication skills from a hostage negotiation background. I'm gonna leave it at that. I don't wanna go any, any more personal than that with people. But sometimes, you know, I, I look at people and I just think, "Okay, so how much do you really know about this? How much have you read this in a book, and how much have you stood in that situation where you can feel the hairs on the back of your neck?" You know, you can feel every part of the behavior in front of you and the risk w- attached to that and, and then that, what can I do to help here? What can I possibly do to help this individual? And you know, we could, as we have done, we could talk about case after case after case where I've stood there and thought, "I genuinely don't know what to do to help this person." But for me, it comes down to that behavior. That's what I was talking about, is over the years I've worked in, you know, places like Afghanistan or the Philippines and Africa on terrorist negotiations, that kind of high-level government response to risk to life, as well as just individuals in the middle of the night on a bridge in Manchester. But actually, while they're all chaotic environments and they're all very different environments, I think what I've learnt over the years is that the behavior rarely changes. You can very often bring the behavior of those individuals, whether it's a, a kidnapper or a, an, you know, a 15-year-old child in crisis because they're struggling with authority and control, the behaviors are very, very similar. And so what I need is a framework, a process that people can understand when I talk to them about it, that it clicks, that they think, "Do you know what? I get, I get what you're saying. That feels like me." It's no good if I have to teach you something that's too complicated, that's too difficult because when you go away and you're back under pressure, you'll resort to norm. You'll resort to, to what works for you.

Yoyo 8:05

Let me tap into the power of a cup of tea. Uh- it, it's like the power of hello. And, uh, you know, I guess everyone's forgiven if they think, "Oh, God, yeah, yeah, you've mentioned this before." But there's a huge thing about the power of a cup- I mean, I'm a sucker for a good cup of tea. And for those- Yeah overseas listeners, uh, it's not just a British thing. A cup of tea is, is more than a cup of tea. And I remember when I was in the police, there was a, a siege in a neighborhood. They ca- you call it a siege, you know, where basically man is holding his family hostage. You know, you've got- Mm-hmm every single type of riot police there. You've got wider cordons. I was part of the wider cordon. Uh, lots of people coming in, very few people leaving. And afterwards, I was able to establish that when contact was made with this individual, um, the first thing they offered was a cup of tea. They just said, "Can, can we have a cup of tea?" And, uh, and it was just- Mm-hmm so incredibly moving. And then I remembered I was, you know, literally peeling down the phone to my boss 'cause something had upset me, and dribbling everywhere, and tears going everywhere. And my boss said to me, "Look, come off the phone. Go and have a cup of tea." But he's a, he was a Scouser, so he went, "Go and have a cup of tea," like this. And, um, you know, "Sort yourself out, and then we'll have a chat afterwards." And, you know, and, uh, and I just remember that voice saying, "Just go and have a cup of tea." And I literally did as I was told, put the kettle on, sat and had a cup of tea, and it just changed the world for me.

Matt Todd 9:32

Yeah

Yoyo 9:32

tell me in your world why a cup of tea won't always work, but also why it will.

Matt Todd 9:40

So it's funny that you say it. I can remember when I was operational as a hostage negotiator, used to have a huge kit bag in my boot with all sorts of bits of equipment that I'd, you know, learnt over the years from different cases to think, "All right, I'll keep one of those, I'll keep one of those." And one of the, one of the things that I kept was a flask. And, and when I would turn out in the middle of the night, you know, in the, in the creeping round the house trying not to wake everybody up, I would quite often remember making a cup of tea in this flask because I know at some point on that bridge when it's cold, once, once behavior starts to shift and we start to create other opportunities for people to think of alternative options rather than taking their life, once I get that relationship and I get to that point, the, the trigger for them to just come that, that step that I need them to come might be, "Why don't you come over and have a cup of tea with me? I've got a flask here. Come and sit in the car. We'll have a cup of tea. We'll talk through this." I think there's a, there's a huge number of reasons why a cup of tea is, is so, uh, ex- an, an excuse, a reason, uh, for people to, to bridge that, "Okay, I'm gonna take that final move now and come to you," to come out, to come down, to surrender. It's like a good smile, a cup of tea. It says, "I'm your friend. I'm no threat to you. I'm not here to harm," you know. "I'm trying to give some, uh, empathy here." And I think a cup of tea almost sums all that up for you. It really does, and the whole sort of concept that I had with this behavioral listening is, is kind of based on this really. It's based on not, not the models that we've learnt over the years in hostage negotiation, but behavioral listening is much more about going beyond simply hearing words and instead of sort of, uh, focusing on the underlying behavior, emotion, the drivers behind that, what somebody's saying, especially underneath the pressure that they're feeling at the moment. It means actively observing their tone, their pitch, their language, the pace, all those sort of things, and then we use the skills that we get taught in hostage negotiation like active listening, you know, the minimal encouragers, the echoing, stating the impressions, all those sort of things. We use those absolutely without judgment. But the aim of the behavioral listening for me is not to solve the problem immediately, it's to fully understand how that person's experiencing that reality. So, uh, D- Dawn Archer was my professor for my PhD and, you know, we worked very hard on the, her concept of trying to look at this through different lenses. So when, when I'm dealing with somebody in crisis, and in the... even now in the leadership world, in the business world, in corporations I try to say to people, you w- rather than deal with that behavior, try and understand how is this person seeing this right now, this situation? So this could be a phone call from a kidnapper. This could be any situation. Even if this is one of your children who's having a bit of a tantrum or is complaining to you about something, how do they see the world at the moment? And so think of it as like a pair of glasses. What lens are they looking this through to see this situation the way that it is? And then once I can start to see the way that you're seeing it, what I wanna use then is all the skills I've learnt as a hostage negotiator around listening to, to identify the things that are causing you to see it that way. So what's causing you to see the world the way that you see it now? And do you know what? There's a lot of different things that I used to think complicated this, people's fears, their needs, their wants, their desires, and I used to get het up thinking, "How can I understand all those in a moment of crisis when this is... your brain's got seconds to, to compute this?" But the reality for me is it comes back to four, one of four key areas, and your crisis as an individual, whether you're a business leader, whether you're a family member who's had, uh, you know, a loved one who's going through a crisis or been kidnapped even, I always look for these four sort of driving behaviors, and the first one of those is, for me, is always control. So this is about people thinking, "Do I feel safe? Do I feel in control of what's happening to me right now?" And again, you can relate this back to a disciplinary meeting at work. This might be a kidnapper or a hostage. This could be arguments in a relationship with husband and wife maybe. You know, do I feel in control? Am I, am I safe? Have I still got control of this, or am I at risk of losing this? And then the second one, probably as big as that for me, is about identity So identity for me is kind of that asking, do people still see me as competent? Do they value me? You know, do they still see me as equal? When you think about, uh, work-related meetings, not necessarily disciplinary, but performance meetings, HR meetings, leaders talking to their teams, you know, people need to know that they want that identity protected, because if it's threatened, if suddenly I don't feel valued or I don't think that people see me as capable, then we become defensive. Then we start to overexplain, we start to overcompensate. I'll interrupt you, I'll shut you down. And you'll start to see that behavioral leakage, as I like to call it, coming from me. And then look, the third one is, is common for all of us. It's about respect. But I don't think it's necessarily-- people say, "Well, is that... Does that mean that, you know, people have to be respected?" It's not about, does this person respect me? When I think about respect, I think, do I feel heard? Do I feel understood here? You know, am I being treated fairly? That's what I look for as a behavioral breakdown when I'm dealing with, with crisis, that psychological significance of respect, I suppose, rather than the physical, do they respect me? And then the last one, which last week I was teaching nurses. So a group of nurses who are ward nurses that work in high dependency units, intensive care units, pediatrics. And when you listen to these nurses, they're amazing. They deal with sadness, grief, loss on a daily basis, l-literally. Families trying to go through that, patients trying to go through that. And as we all know, you know, it's the NHS. There's not enough of them. There's not enough staff, there's not enough budget, there's not enough beds, and yet despite that, they still have to get on with all this. But when I speak to them, and you start to feel them get emotional about this, and you start to see that behavioral leakage, capacity becomes the fourth area. Capacity for all of us is huge. So capacity is about, do I believe that I can cope with this? It's like stress tolerance. You know, how much I've got on my plate right now, and your boss comes in and says, "Hi. I know you've got a lot on, Yolo, but I need you to just sort this out for me." Where's your capacity? Because if it's getting too heavy, then again, we start to see that emotional leakage. You start to go into that-- emotions start to rise, your listening goes out the window all of a sudden, and once that happens, your decision-making process narrows. And so as everybody keeps talking about, and I know everyone in communication talks about this because it's true, but as pressure rises, so do our emotions, and therefore, so does our rational ability to make those decisions

Yoyo 16:56

So capacity would include the no more options, dead end, uh, I don't see a way out of this, uh, scenario, wouldn't it? That's what we see in movies, isn't it? Mm-hmm. When we see somebody, you know, jumping off the roof of a building or on a bridge, so to speak, or by a railway track, it's that whole, "I can't come back from this."

Matt Todd 17:19

Yeah.

Yoyo 17:19

Yeah.

Matt Todd 17:21

Yeah, very much so. And I think now that I've been away from that police operation environment, I've looked for this, for that clarity for me that it's exactly the same in, in business. And do you know what? It is, it really is. That identifying that that stress changes our behavior, emotion changes our decision-making. People will leak information sort of so emotionally before they do verbally. And if, and if we understand that and we can start to look for that, we're able to intercept it before the behavior does. So rather than waiting for the behavior to happen and then I hear your language changing or your tone changes, and therefore that upsets me because now it's starting to affect my areas of respect or my control or even my identity, so now my emotions are going up and very quickly we're now rising into that standoff, kind of I'm trying to defend myself because I've seen that leakage from you, which has upset me. So, you know, I think most people think communication is about speaking. We hear this all the time, don't we, is that good communication is judged on the way we speak, the way that I'm talking on this podcast, the way that I'm presenting in a conference later this week, the way that I'm teaching at the front of a class. Everybody judge our communication by the way that we speak. That's the way that we've been brought up. But actually, I think some of the highest performers that I've worked with over the last couple of years, people that have really switched onto this, they realize that that communication is about observation first. It's about what do I see before you even start to speak? What do I feel from your body language, the way that you're moving, you know, the first impressions that you're creating? And I think most organizations miss this because we're, we're... In organizations, we're about process, not people. You know, I've, I've... Over the last few years, I've worked with companies, some of the biggest companies in the world managing crisis response plans for, you know, they operate in hostile environments, so things like kidnap is a huge risk for them. And I think that managing that human consequence once that operational security plan collides with reality is really difficult. You can have the best security plan in the world, but the reality is that they're people. You can't write a plan for that behavior. You know, people will respond it- behaviorally in, in different ways under different circumstances. And whilst as negotiators we train to support families through kidnap, well, one family will behave completely different to another family. Some families will need you to wrap them in cotton wool, put your arms around them and help them and manage their emotions going through this. Other people might say, "I don't need all that, Matt. What I need is you to just tell me what I need to do, you know, to, to get through this." And therefore you can't go in with the whole trying to wrap you in cotton wool if people, if people need that. But I think, you know- If I've learned anything over the last four years, it's that everybody has a good security plan until that phone rings. When that phone rings, things are gonna change, you know, dramatically for you because those first few hours, there's gonna be confusion, misinformation, there's gonna be panic, competing agendas, lots of emotions, politics, media. You know, we, we talked about media before, I know we have. You know, social media's turned the private battles into public theater now, you know, without a doubt, so we have to be able to manage that. But for me, crisis management, it's all about that control, uh, you know, that reality as it starts, that containing the fear. It's, it's not about... Good leadership for me isn't about projecting confidence, it's about how do we absorb the panic here? I think I've mentioned this to you previously, Yola, company that I work with probably, you know, a huge international company, got fantastic security response. You know, they, they know it, they practice it, they train it, they're great with it. Touch wood, you know, they've operated safely to this time, and then tragically we saw, you know, the Hamas attack on the 7th of October in 2023, and I'd, I'd just done a training course that week with this company in London, uh, like a kidnap refresh training course for them for two days. They're all over it, great security team, globally, you know, operating around the world, and they rang me. The, the... One of the, uh, global security leader rang me to say, "Matt, we've just had, uh, somebody kidnapped during the attack, the Hamas attack." And, uh, and he... What, what, through him was is, "It's chaos. We're all over the place."

Yoyo 21:51

Mm.

Matt Todd 21:52

And, and we've only just done our refresher training with you last week, and yet we're absolutely all over the place with this."

Yoyo 21:58

Let's, let's, let's explore then why is it chaotic after they... we're talking about an organization that's invested in a degree of preparedness, and there are lots of organizations that haven't. But what is the chaos?

Matt Todd 22:11

So I think the chaos is, you know, well, a lot of it is those things, those obvious things that I think I probably just mentioned before. There's confusion. There's always gonna be that confusion, and no matter how much you've trained for it, confusion's gonna play that key element for you, that misinformation. So that drives everybody mad. We, as people, as managers, as leaders, and as people in general, even if you think it back to your own personal life, we, we want information, don't we? I need to know what's happening to help me deal with this, and we can feel ourselves getting frustrated with it. "Well, I can't do that if you don't tell me. You know, I need to know. I need that information." If I think of another sort of, you know, big sort of global example, when the attack from, uh, the terrorist group led by the, the, the terrorist Mokhtar Belmokhtar attacked the In Amenas oil field in Algeria many years ago, and they went in, they took loads of international hostages and, in the UK, it was a, a very difficult time for us. We had neg- police negotiators supporting families all around the country. But it was live on Sky News, you know? And so you had families watching what was happening on the news, and we're kinda trying to say to families, "Why don't you turn the television off, you know? 'Cause we, we wanna provide you with the information." But it's too slow. People need that information, and by the time we're getting it from the country, it's coming into the UK, it's going through our classified government agencies to, to confirm that information's accurate and it's right before it comes to us to share with the families, it's too late 'cause they've seen it on Sky News And so that just creates more confusion

Yoyo 23:37

And even Sky News has a certain degree of, um, benchmark in terms of what they can and can't publish publicly.

Matt Todd 23:45

Yeah.

Yoyo 23:46

But Twitter, for example, X, doesn't. So that's- Yeah a completely different... H- how do you manage that kind of-

Matt Todd 23:52

And,

Yoyo 23:53

and- social media in today's kind of hostage-taking world?

Matt Todd 23:56

And, and social media's really difficult, isn't it? I think, you know, I like that phrase that it's turned sort of private battles into that public theater, which, which is really what it's done. We've seen a lot of cases, even just recently, you know, tragically, the lady, uh, who was kidnapped in America, you know, the elderly lady, and all of a sudden it's all over our, our news feeds. It only takes one person to put this out, and then it kind of does like a spider diagram, doesn't it? I tell one person, they tell 10, I tell the... all those 10 people tell somebody else, and it... before you know it, there's millions of people have a- access to what we wanted to be sensitive information. And I can remember the FBI, or people that have worked with the FBI, commenting on that kidnap case really, and thinking to myself, I really feel for the team here, because one of the key elements of kidnap management is containment. It's about how do we keep this tight? How do we just keep this without anybody knowing? And that's really difficult nowadays when you're working with families who've got kids. You know, 20 years ago, if I was working with you in crisis and I said, "Yolo, you need to keep this contained. We need to not tell anyone. I know you probably wanna tell your sister or your, you know, your husband, but we wanna keep this really tight for now," now it, things have changed.

Yoyo 25:09

Yeah.

Matt Todd 25:09

And if I'm dealing with a family in a kidnap now, and they've got, you know, a son and a daughter and people like that, in their teens maybe, the temptation to need to tell my mate or put it on Facebook or put it on, you know, TikTok, something like that, because I wanna... and, and then it's out there, and all of a sudden it's too late now. It's, it's gone. That information's already out there. It's no longer a private agenda. It's, it is that public theater.

Yoyo 25:32

Let me pose to you that why w- I- in today's world, it's changed. Social media now means we're playing in a completely different ballpark than we were 20 years ago. So, so one can't help but think, okay, we can't expect to have that containment anymore. And then why is that containment really important to the hostage negotiating team? Why is that control important, when ultimately social media could also be used to your advantage as well?

Matt Todd 26:00

Yeah, and I, and, and I think that's really important to remember that. I think, you know, in, in a lot of different fields with social media, we see fantastic breakthroughs and we see social media being, uh, you know, wonderful for us. In a, in a kidnap- You know, it may well be that we're trying to keep the identity of the family, of the people that, you know, involved in the kidnap, we're trying to contain that. We're trying to keep that quiet. If it suddenly comes out in social media and everybody's talking about this person that's been kidnapped, you know, a couple of things happen. First off, the kidnappers will be maybe thinking this person's important. They're all over the news. I've seen it all over social media.

Yoyo 26:36

Yeah.

Matt Todd 26:36

If they're important and the last 10 people that I've kidnapped weren't all over social media, then this person's probably worth more money to us. And so there's the risk there that if it's out in the media, it might encourage the kidnappers to think, "Well, we'll ask for more money because this person's obviously important because they're out there." So we don't want that to happen for starters, because that's just gonna delay the whole negotiation process. Because if they want more money, they're gonna ask for that, which is gonna delay the process of the negotiation, which goes against, you know, our objective of getting people back quickly. There's also that risk that if you've kidnapped someone or you've done something wrong and it's all over the media, that maybe the authorities are gonna find you You know, if I can kidnap somebody two or three times a month, then I can make a little business out of that, and that's my criminal network, and that's what I do, and nobody really pays any attention, and we don't, we don't, you know, take that much money from the families, then I stay under that kind of level of high-level authorities coming to, to find me. But if all of a sudden it's all over the news, well, then governments are putting pressure on the authorities to, you know, to resolve this, to find those people. So as a kidnapper or a criminal, that might mean that the pressure is on for people to come and find me, and so I don't, I really don't want that. So we wanna, again, keep that out of the social media and keep that as quiet as we possibly can. And I think it's, uh, I don't know, most companies kind of underestimate the, the family, uh, dimension in, in this sort of crime. It, it always surprises me with companies that I've worked with have great, uh, response plans for these crisis, but when it comes to the family, it's probably the greatest weakness I think in kidnap management. T- two big ones, I always say to companies, the two areas that I think that you struggle with will be your family management, how do you keep a family online and support them at the same time, and also your communication. So again, you can be the biggest company in the world and have the greatest assets around you, but if you can't get on the phone and speak to the kidnapper, then that's gonna present very difficult for you.

Yoyo 28:32

do you remember that case where the poor woman went missing by the river, and her dog was found, and her mobile phone was on the bench- Yeah by the river's edge?

Matt Todd 28:43

Mm-hmm.

Yoyo 28:44

And it turned, social media turned into, like, millions of just gen- general people trying to be detectives. Mm-hmm. And speculating without any basis of, educational training around this area on, on what's happened and who was at fault, and I can imagine that being hell for a, a hostage negotiator to try and navigate as well, where you've got a million, wannabe detectives online.

Matt Todd 29:11

And, and we're all a detective online now, aren't we? And as much as we know, and everybody talks about the haters, and everybody knows when I post something that there's gonna be people, you know, that are sat there in the dark where nobody can identify them, it gives everybody a voice, doesn't it? You can come on and say whatever you want without any fear of anybody finding you or telling you this or telling you that. So, you know, I've got friends with their own businesses, and I sort of say, you know, "Do you post on TikTok and places like that?" And they'll say, you know, "No, I don't 'cause I can't be dealing with the haters." You know, and, and it makes you laugh, doesn't it? 'Cause you think, "Well, why let them bother you? Why?" But it does, it does bother us. We see comments from people, and we can't help but feel like, "I need to respond to that. I need to fight back on that," because why? It's attacking my identity.

Yoyo 29:58

Yeah.

Matt Todd 29:58

It's attacking that whole, you know- Values people will not see me as competent, you know, they won't see me as capable, as valuable because of the things that they've said about me. It attacks the respect. You know, I'm not being heard properly here. I'm not being listened to. So again, all of this, like I said before, you can drag it back to these four key concept of control, identity, and respect, and capacity every time. But I think, yeah, I, I would be the same. People have said to me, "You don't post stuff on social media like that." And I know I'm too emotional, you know? I'd end up sat there with a box of tissues crying my eyes out 'cause 30 people had said, "Oh, well, I don't agree with this, and I think you're an idiot, Matt." And so that would upset me because I want people to hear my voice, and I want people to believe what I'm saying to them because I've learned, you know, over the years through very difficult sort of scenarios.

Yoyo 30:47

You mentioned Hamas earlier, and the very, very public global, uh, hostage situation there, which is- Mm agreeably regrettable.

Matt Todd 30:57

Mm-hmm.

Yoyo 30:57

But have you, you... It made me think there, were there a number of different hostage negotiators at play in this? And was it a far more dynamic piece, or do you literally singularly cut everything else out, focus on your own client? What happens when the situation becomes very dynamic, and have you got an example you can talk to where you've had to work with other hostage negotiators?

Matt Todd 31:19

Yeah, so, so I'll be careful where I go with this, uh, because there's still an awful lot of sensitivities in relation to the hostages being held over there. But when we're dealing with an international incident like that, it's very much government driven and very much government led, uh, you know, as it should be. And the families are very much supported by the government, just as they would be on an incident like that in this country. You know, the British government would support the families. You know, they have fantastic teams within their Foreign Commonwealth Development Office that, that are trained to do this, alongside us, and we would support in that. So we would be there much more as tacticians, I suppose, to think about the strategy to give to government around how could we negotiate this. But it happens all the time, and I think one of the great things about this is that hostage and crisis negotiators around the world are trained the same. And this is quite unique, particularly in things like law enforcement, I think, because as with everything else, we all tend to do it our own way. You know, and then we meet other people and say, "Well, we don't do it like that." "Oh, I'm sorry, but we do it this way." Well, actually, in hostage and crisis negotiation, we all train the same. Now, that's a great ambassador for the skills that we use. That says we all do the same because the skills work, we don't need to change them. There aren't alternatives. This works, and we all do it the same, and hence why, you know, the FBI train people all around the world, or from Scotland Yard, the national course would train people all over the world. And yeah, I can, you know, I can absolutely relate this. The last case that I worked with before I left law enforcement was a lady in Afghanistan. So she was a dual Brit/Australian national. And so she was working in Afghanistan, she was kidnapped in Afghanistan, and so both governments, the British and the Australian governments, respond to that because we believe it's a terrorist kidnap. And straight away, myself and a colleague from the UK hostage negotiation team deploy to Afghanistan to support our government, and likewise, two Australian trained law enforcement negotiators deploy as well, because she's obviously Australian as well as British, and we don't know which one she's gonna present, you know, going forwards to the, to the kidnappers. And so we land in country, and it's fantastic. You know, the minute we land We're sat building a strategy for communicating with the kidnappers this afternoon, you know, and we've literally just landed in Afghanistan this morning. Because we don't need to debate how should we do it or what works for you, what have you done in the past? What we know is that this is what we do in this kind of situation. These are the skills, this is the strategy. It's all about that primary objective, that safe, timely release of the hostage. Everything else becomes superseded underneath that because that now is all we're focused on, is all we're driving. So in a lot of cr- a lot of sort of criminal investigations, we'd have other priorities like forensic evidence, you know. You know all this from your background. You know, the w- witness statements, all that kind of stuff. But in a kidnap, all that becomes secondary to that primary objective of that quick, safe, timely release of the hostage. Everything is about saving the life of that individual. And we work with the Australian team, it's like we've known them years, you know? And we've literally just met, because they've done the same training as us, the same courses as us. Why? Because it works, you know? The skills are good. It's got a proven track record of saving life, and so why would we, why would we struggle in how we're gonna achieve that?

Yoyo 34:44

I mean, that's a, a heck of a life to live, Matt, when you know you don't know where the next phone call's gonna take you, and then before you know it, by the end of the day, you're in Afghanistan, which is not a country that most people would say, "Yay, it's on my hit list of going to see for fun." Uh, shits and giggles and all that. And, and, and that's probably part of your job, isn't it? Your, you, your, you never know which country. Are there a number of countries that you just think, "Oh, God, I never wanna go back there again"?

Matt Todd 35:11

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Let's not

Yoyo 35:14

name them.

Matt Todd 35:15

Yeah. And, and so when I was, when I was operational with the police, so I, I didn't do this, I didn't, uh, deploy t- too often, you know. Some of my colleagues on the, on the team would deploy a lot to these kind of things, you know. It's, it's a... It was a lot busier- Than what, probably what the public would imagine. You know, there's a lot of things going on in the world that don't always make the news, that, that we would respond to as a government, and, and the, you know, my colleagues in the, in the negotiation team in London would support on that. I was very lucky that I was part of that team and got to go to some of these places as well. And it, you know, it's absolutely a huge team effort, these things. It never comes down to the negotiations. It's never gonna be me negotiating with a terrorist group. That's not how it works at all. It's a bit like, you know, terrorist sieges and things when we, you know, the Bataclan theater, places like that where, you know, the police negotiators turn up to negotiate it. People kind of laugh at me and say, "Well, do you think you're naive enough, Matt, to think that you could negotiate them out of that?" Well, it's not always about trying to negotiate them out of that. That's not always our job as a negotiator. It might be my job as a negotiator just to keep everybody safe, just to stop the killing. If I can keep the person on the phone long enough to, to stop anybody else being killed while the government get their tactical resources in place to go in and do what they need to do to neutralize that threat, then, then my job's worked anyway. Now, so it may well be, you know, part of my research looked at what are we deploying negotiators for. Am I deploying them because I want a negotiated surrender, in which case I'm thinking about all the skills that I've got as a trained hostage negotiator, or actually, like the Bataclan theater or those kind of high-level marauding attacks, actually am I deploying a negotiator to just buy me time, to keep everybody safe, to keep everybody alive while we get, you know, the tactical element of this in place to deal with this, because we know it's gonna be very, very unlikely to, to achieve a negotiated surrender. And so I think it's really important, you know, as commanders, we think about what's our, what's the objective, you know, what's the decision-making around why we're deploying negotiators. But even if I'm there as a negotiator in the capacity just to keep everybody safe, to stop anybody else getting hurt, to keep the person on the phone, my skills might be much more conversational rather than negotiate skills. But even so, as a trained negotiators, you know, I know from people, and I've worked with a lot of negotiators around the world, you're still always looking for that opportunity, maybe a release, you know, maybe a hostage out, you know, anything that you might be able to do just as an additive towards that, keeping everything, you know, in, in that safe environment.

Yoyo 37:58

So I have to ask you then, 'cause I think a lot of people won't know that. When does the objective become clear in the situation? When you talked about the Bataclan and the objective may be just stopping more people getting killed. When does the objective get made clear, or is it fluid?

Matt Todd 38:14

I think it's really fluid, Yolo. I think it would be easy for me to sit here And, I try to be really careful what I say here 'cause I've, you know, I've not been a commander, so I haven't been in that position of being a commander, and I wouldn't want people to think that I have, whilst I've worked closely with a lot of commanders as the negotiator or the coordinator of the re- the negotiation response. I think, you know, no matter how well-trained you are, similar to what we were talking about at the start, it's a nightmare, isn't it? Those kind of incidents for you are a nightmare, and I think a lot of the time for the negotiator a- perspective, it's a question of just get a negotiator there. Just try and establish contact. Let's make, let's get some sort of engagement, A, because it drives intelligence. So as a commander, by having a negotiator there, it helps me understand what's going on, how many people have we got inside, what weaponry have they got, how many hostages are held in there, what... Do we know what the attackers' objectives are? You know, do we know what they want? Have they made any demands? So by having a negotiator involved as early as possible, we start to, we start to get that information, that intelligence. But for me, it's about g- the minute you get a negotiator involved, you create some degree of stability. You know, so at the Bataclan theater, at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, for example, you know, similar kind of places, Omar Mateen in a, in a busy nightclub, you know, a lot of youngsters having a great time, at, under the influence of al- and all of a sudden you get this guy comes in and starts attacking like that, and then you've got the poor negotiator's gotta pick up the phone, you know, uh, from their dinner table, from their wherever they are at work. You've suddenly gotta pick up the phone and, and go on the phone to that person at the end of the line And so I don't think always our objective is clear. Part of my research, that was one of the conclusions that came out of it was, you know, commanders should think about what's the objective of deploying the negotiator? What do you want me to achieve when I pick up the phone to the terrorist inside that nightclub right now? Do you want me to just hold him? Just keep him talking? Listen to their story? So that's what I would be looking to do. Remember what I said to you at the start, even in an extreme situation like that, I'm looking at, how do they see the world right now?

Yoyo 40:27

Mm.

Matt Todd 40:27

In that nightclub, having killed a number of people with, uh, you know, uh, explosive devices strapped to them, you know, wondering what their outcome is here, that whole how do they see the world right now? And then I'm thinking, "Okay, and what is it that's causing that?" So what are the drivers behind them that are causing them to see that? Once I can start to understand that and see what it is that's driving them to see the world the way it is, now I can start thinking about shifting that perspective. So a lot of negotiation talks about influence. We talk about hostage negotiators being able to influence behavior, and I, I get that. It is about inf- influence, but it's also about perspective change for me. A lot of negotiations that I've done, whether that be somebody on a bridge in a, in a, you know, in a desperate situation where they wanna take their own life or, you know, a siege where you've got hostages held in an address, it's, it's very much about that changing their perspective and, and trying to get them to find a solution themselves. If I find the solution to your problem, it's still your problem, and you're probably gonna be back here next week doing the same thing again because all I've done is temporarily solve that for you. When I'm up on a bridge, for example, I need to create space for you to find the solution to why you shouldn't do this, and so I wanna understand why you see the world the way that you do now, what's driving that, and then try and work with you together by reducing your emotions and bringing back some rational thought to allow you to think, "Okay, there's an alternative way to deal with this." And what I wanna do is create that space for you to shift that perspective, and that's a, that's a lot around what negotiation is. And so, yes, you could interpret that as me influencing your behavior, but actually for me, I want you to influence your own behavior. I'm not sure if I told you this last time we met, Yolo, but I, I'm gonna say it again because I love it. I dealt with a, a, a gentleman on a bridge, and when he came down, we sat in the back of the ambulance as I quite often would do and, and just have a cup of tea in the back of the ambulance, bizarrely enough, have a cup of tea and, and just talk through so what worked for them? Why did they decide to, you know, not do this? And he said to me Matt, when I was up there, I felt like it was a tumble dryer with all these problems going round in my head, and then you turned up, and everything just stopped. And for a while it was just quiet, and then as we started to engage with each other, I felt like we took everything out of the tumble dryer. And, and after two hours, which is how long we were up there, I had a pile of all my clothes. I had my trousers, my shirts, my underwear, my jackets. The reality is, Matt, I still got all the same problems. We haven't got rid of any of them, but they're now in a manageable way for me to work through them, rather than just that chaotic mess going around in my head, and I loved that. And for me, that was a great analogy is, what am I trying to achieve as a negotiator? I'm trying to reduce your emotions, bring back some rationality, and create an environment for you where you can work your way through this and find an alternative solution. Now, don't get me wrong, that's not always as easy as that. It can be very, very challenging, and sometimes it's really hard even when you get to that point to see an alternative. I've done negotiations, Jonah, I won't lie to you, when I've stood with that lump in my throat that we've all had at times and, and it's a lonely place up on that bridge. There's nobody with you and you, and you've thought Do you know what? I don't know what to do here. I don't know what to say to you. I don't know what I can do to help you because your situation is so desperate. And it's awful to say this, but I'm even thinking to myself, "If that was me in your shoes, I, I think I might be here too."

Yoyo 44:24

Yeah.

Matt Todd 44:24

And, and if you're feeling that, it's very difficult then to think, "Well, how can I... What can I do to help you?" And so again, this is about me creating space for you to help you. And all I wanna do is kind of almost hold your hand and walk you through that space and say, "Look, what alternatives have we got here?" And I can't do that when your emotions are up, because when your emotions are up, you can't see, you can't think rationally. So it's always that deal with the emotion before we deal with the behavior.

Yoyo 44:52

Your analogy around the tumble dryer is phenomenal. Uh, and I think- Mm-hmm a lot of people really, really understand you when you say things like that. Um, but that, that person on the bridge, they have so much insulation around them, don't they? Mm-hmm. That's, that's, that you've got to penetrate. That insulation, they've forgotten the meaning of life. They've forgotten the beautiful, uh... They've forgotten to let nature in. All the simplest things- Yeah of our humanity that remind us every day, that humbleness, that we're in this little blue dot in the middle of an expanse of blackness. They've lost the perspective massively because their internalization of their pain is so big that that's providing insulation, and that, that's hard to get through, isn't it?

Matt Todd 45:40

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it is literally that, you know. It's wading through it. And you know what? That can be exhausting.

Yoyo 45:47

Mm.

Matt Todd 45:48

And sometimes it's a little bit like a game of snakes and ladders. You can say something or you can interact, you can have that, that rapport with someone, that verbal connection, which is like being at the bottom of that ladder, and it takes you straight to the top. And you're in a position now where they're looking for you to help them find that perspective change. They're looking for an alternative option, because now all of a sudden it's not as appealing to take their own life maybe. But just as easy as that, like the snakes and ladders game, you can be right at the top there and you think that this is gonna end. And I think, you know, I've got a post that I've just done on LinkedIn about just when you think you're winning can be the most dangerous time Because literally just when you think that person's there, you say something or something comes into their mind, and you're right back at the start. And that cladding that you've just talked about, you're back on the outside again, and you've gotta start pulling it apart, wading your way through it. And I've had many a times, and I know any negotiators listening to this will feel that, where we talk about that conversation exhaustion, communication exhaustion, where you've worked really hard for a couple of hours to get to that point, and then you are back on the outside again. And you have to... And I've always said this when I used to train negotiators, that good negotiators for me are the people that when that happens, how quickly you can get back to where you were without having to start all over again. So how quickly can I get back to that close relationship that we had where we were close to finding, you know, an alternative option rather than having to start all over again? But sometimes it can be one word, you know? You only need to say something. I laughed with the nurses this week when we were training because we talked about using the phrase calm down. Y- you know, when I say to people, "What happens when..." You can see everybody in the room laugh because everybody knows that when you're angry, when you're up here and you're feeling it, the last thing that you need is someone in front of you to go, "All right, Matt, calm down." You just- Yeah.

Yoyo 47:43

Don't say it to a woman.

Matt Todd 47:44

No. It just makes you explode, doesn't it? You know, there are certain phrases that I've learnt as a negotiator. You know, people will say things like, "I understand." Oh, my God. Yeah. You know? Yeah. You'll probably never hear a hostage crisis negotiator when they're working say that phrase, you know? Yeah. Why? Because we've been burned. I've had people will say it to me, "Oh, you understand, do you? You know what it's like, do you? You've been here?" And you, you know, and you just... When it, as it's coming out your mouth, you want the words to come back- Yeah 'cause you're thinking, "Oh, my God, did I just say that? Please tell me that I didn't just say that," 'cause you know it's gonna be the h- the snakes and ladders, it's gonna take you right back to the start, just that one phrase that you've said

Yoyo 48:27

I saw your post about this, and it was compelling, Matt, and I would urge everybody to look up your recent digital posts because you talked about better techniques. You know, instead of saying- Mm-hmm "I understand what you're going through." In fact, the other thing is to say to somebody on a bridge, "Oh, I, I had a chat with a guy on a bridge recently who had a similar problem to you," but that's c- you just can't say that. But you, you s- No you said something like, you know, "I can't im- begin to imagine how you feel right now." Yeah. Um, even as a parent, and you reverted to being a parent saying to a child the words I l- this is so impactful, and I remember it from the la- weeks ago when I, when we last spoke. It, y- you know, parents should never say to a child, "Yeah, I was your age once. I know what it's like," you know? And, and how, how difficult that is to hear as a young person. Young people... And, and I relate to this. I don't think my mother listened to me, right? And it's- Yeah it becomes more relevant as you get older. She never listened. She never really- No got to know me, and I think that's a great parenting technique to sort of say, "Look, I..." Look, even if you say, "Look, I was your age once, but I can't imagine what you're going through right now," it's that relatability. We're always looking to, to connect, aren't we? And-

Matt Todd 49:46

Yeah, it's huge. And, and why? Again, you know, as we've said all the way through this, because for the parent it comes back to that control, that identity, you know? And, and it's very difficult for us as parents to almost give in that control to our children because we're, you know, we see ourselves there to be in control of them, and we have control of the home and the environment that they operate in, and that identity. You know, do my kids still see me as worthy? Do they still see me as valuable? And, and, and it... People will find that difficult to say to their kids, "I can't imagine what you're going through right now," you know? "Tell me how you feel."

Yoyo 50:17

Yeah.

Matt Todd 50:18

Instead, it's always about, you know... It's the alternative, isn't it? It's, "Look, I was your age once," you know, "Stop moaning. I've been through this." And, you know, my grandad used to say, "When we were young," you know, "You had to join the army. You had to do this. You had to do that." And it's like, I don't wanna hear that right now. Even my friend, uh, you know, that I'm gonna go and work with this week, you know, we, we met in Prague not long ago, and we were chatting through and, you know, sh- both talking about the chaotic lives that we were leading. And I remember interrupting him and probably trying to give him solutions around managing himself 'cause he had so much on the go. And even he said, even he stopped me and said, "Matt, I don't need you to solve this. I just need you to listen to me." And I remember thinking, that's two people who've been around negotiation for a long time, but you have to actively turn this stuff on. There's many a times when I've said things and, you know, my partner or my kids will even say, "Oh, that's interesting, Matt, coming from a negotiator." And you think- oh my God. Yeah. Did I just say that, really? Did I really just say that? Because you have to turn this on, you know? And that whole, "I can't imagine what you're going through right now," has to be genuine. It has to be sincere. It has to be meant. It's not just a phrase, and I hear people use it wrong. I even hear people say things like, "I can only imagine what you're going through." Well, look, that sounds a little bit better, but if I'm on that bridge and I'm gonna die, no, you can't even imagine. So don't tell me I can only imagine how difficult this is for you because you can't even imagine it. The line is that powerful because it's what it says it is. You know, I have no idea what this is like for you right now. And the, and the point of it is, is then to invite the person. So tell me about it. You know, let me walk alongside you. Let me hold your hand, and let me listen to how difficult this is for you. And I think that's, you know, that's... When we talk about empathy, that's, that's empathy for me. I know we probably talked about this last time because it's such a significant part of, you know, behavior and relationships. But I think sometimes people misinterpret empathy. They think it's about walking in my shoes or walking in your shoes, well, you can't do that. You can't ever walk in my shoes because you're not me. And I kind of feel like if I'm dealing with somebody in crisis, if I'm dealing with somebody who's- At a point where they're prepared to end their own life, so it's that severe. You know, they've tried everything else. I think, you know, it's almost why would I even have the audacity to think I can walk in your shoes? You know, it's, it's wrong. I, it literally for me, I like that line because it is authentic. It's the right time for me to say, "I can't imagine what, what your world is like right now," you know? "So you have to tell me, you have to talk to me, you have to let me see it through your lens, and then I can start to visualize those drivers." So it sounds like you're not in control of this or, you know, I feel like your identity is being challenged or attacked here or, you know, your workload. You... How can you possibly do this? You've got c- you know, when we're back to capacity. It all comes back to that, without a doubt. And I think, you know, people don't... We, we don't break pattern by accident. People don't break pattern by accident. You know, if you watch for it, that tone, that pace, that certainty, that avoidance that people will make in conversation with you, that silence that people will go into, the, the indicators are there. If we'd just... I wish that we taught this stuff at school.

Yoyo 53:36

Mm.

Matt Todd 53:37

You know, people say to me, they come on my courses or we do some coaching or whatever it's gonna be, and people say, "Oh my God, this is great. I wish that my kids could do..." And I think, yeah, if this stuff's so good, why didn't we teach this in school to kids? You know, we did everything else. We did religious studies, we did physical education, we learned to play instruments But nobody really taught us how to listen. And my old, you know, one of my old mentors used to say that to me is, "Think about it, when you grew up, who taught you how to listen?" Nobody.

Yoyo 54:07

Well, this, this is interesting 'cause when you're in school and you're in class and you're disruptive, you are told to shut up and listen. You're told to listen a lot, right?

Matt Todd 54:15

Yeah.

Yoyo 54:16

But no one really talks about the real value of listening.

Matt Todd 54:19

No. And- Or how, or what we're listening for.

Yoyo 54:22

Mm-hmm. What, yeah, and I've actually got a little yellow Post-It note s- uh, that I have out all the time, and it says, "Yoyo, what are you listening for?" Question mark.

Matt Todd 54:30

That's great.

Yoyo 54:31

I'm wondering if that was from you the last time I spoke to you. Uh, what was it? Episode 113, listener, if you wanna go back- Yeah to Matt's, you know, uh, Still Leading From The Top podcast. Um, I wanna go to corporate again before we finish up because I think this And, and I also wanna come onto the point of talking about your PhD because that's, that's, that's, you know, that's huge. Um, but corporate, even though your job is to manage the relationships with corporate and you're providing them with the preparedness as much as you can, because we all know that preparedness, uh, helps people to be better equipped for a crisis, managing a crisis, what is it I can imagine you're kinda like a paracetamol tablet, um- when, when you turn up, it's like, you know, they're having a raging headache right now, and you're providing the dark, comfortable room for them to just go, "Okay. We're okay now Matt's here. We have a plan."

Matt Todd 55:30

So I love that. Yeah. I've, I've been described some things in my life, that's probably one of the better things, a paracetamol tablet. Uh, but, but, but just like a paracetamol tablet, if you've got a little headache, that might... I might just be able to calm that down for you, but if you've got something more severe, you probably need something stronger

Yoyo 55:51

A heart surgeon

Matt Todd 55:52

Than a- yeah, than a Paramatod. Yeah. That's probably not gonna help you. I think... So look, one... This is really interesting, and when I, when I kind of wanted to engineer this behavioral listening concept, one of the first parts of this for me is about self-regulation. So before I look at how you see the world, and before I start trying to use my active listening skills to identify those drivers, what's really important first is how do I see the situation and how do I self-regulate myself? And so with that self-regulation comes a lot of things. And look, it's not nice I suppose to have to say it, but it's realistic. The reality is that things like ego, pride, they get in the way of our decision-making, of our response, of our rational approach to this problem-solving. We used to say on hostage negotiator courses when people arrived at the start of the course, in those very first introductions we used to say to people, knowing what cops are like "Leave your ego and your pride in the car," 'cause there's no room for it when you're face-to-face with somebody in crisis. They'll see straight through you.

Yoyo 56:58

Mm.

Matt Todd 56:59

And I think as a leader, as a manager, certainly when I've seen leaders operate in the police, there's quite a lot of that. There's a lot of ego-driven leaders, and so they don't like that ego to be attacked or damaged or their pride to be knocked. And so if you wanna manage a crisis well, and I've worked with a lot of leaders who are fantastic in, in really fast-moving dynamic criminal cases like criminal kidnaps, you know, that are going at 100 miles an hour with a lot of critical decisions that need making, and I've worked with many of them who are absolutely fantastic at this, and they don't have that ego, they don't have that pride, and they do have that self-regulation. And I asked the nurses this last week, how do they self-regulate? You know, and I, I always encourage people to say, l- literally if you've just listened to this podcast, you know, when it finishes just ask yourself before you go and get a cup of tea, "What do I do to calm myself down before this happens? And if it's too late and I'm in that situation when I can feel it..." You know, I can already feel myself starting to get a little bit riled or a little bit worked up. What do I do to manage it? And it was really interesting because I got a lot of different answers. One person said, "I go into the bathroom and I stand in front of the mirror and I talk myself through what's happening." Another person said, uh, "I have to go and I'll sing or I'll hum to myself." And if you look at the research behind this and you look at the sort of psychology around lowering our emotions, and people will often in psychology talk about the 90-second rule. The 90-second rule being is that generally all we need is a 90-second period of time to self-regulate our emotions- Right and bring back that rational.

Yoyo 58:37

Mm.

Matt Todd 58:38

So I, I, I... Box breathing is another one I get told a lot of people use, and I've met guys in the military who, who talk about, you know, going into sort of really high-pressure environments that use this box breathing. So four out, hold, four in, hold. I've... It doesn't work for me. I've tried it. I feel like I'm just drowning. Yeah. Doesn't help. You know, it's, it's about each individual finding what works for them. But, uh, for me it's more important about recognizing it in yourself. Am I at that point when I can feel myself starting to... my emotions starting to go up? And just accept the fact that if it's playing with your emotions, it's going to affect your behavior. So manage those emotions, you know. What is it that's causing you to feel that way, and can you take yourself out of that environment? If it's a business meeting, a high-value, you know, or a high-intensity business meeting and you can feel yourself at that point, people in, in business will call up and say to me, "How do I then do the 90-second?" Well, engineer a break. People say, "Well, we can't in the middle of that." We go back to how we started this conversation, Yolo. Why don't we take five and have a cup of tea? Yeah, let's take... let's... You can engineer a tea break, a coffee break. You can engineer, "Okay, so look, let's have a toilet break. Let's just go..." And engineer to create your spa- yourself that space for 90 seconds if that's all we need, that 90 seconds to think it through, talk to yourself, tell yourself what's going on. If you have to go and stand in the toilets and look in the mirror and talk to yourself about what's happening and why you're feeling, yes, there's gonna be some people come into that toilet that think, "What the hell's going on with this person stood in front of the mirror?" Yeah, but if you've left your pride and your ego in the car, then you don't need to worry about that. This is about managing yourself. And so that behavioral listening is absolutely about manage yourself, understand where you are. Where am I right now with this, and what's causing me to see it like this? W- where am I with my own control, my own identity, my own respect? Once I've grasped that, now we can go into this. Now I can start looking at you and how you see this

Yoyo 1:00:45

I was imagining, as I'm sure many people were, h- how I would resolve my own anger, and we all, we all know that DEFCON 1 is to make a cup of tea. Uh, but then I started thinking about my pets that are around me, and I started really- realizing that they are an amazing calming influence. How do pets figure in, in, in your world in the sense of we, we can't be selfish as humans when we're responsible for other things, right?

Matt Todd 1:01:17

Oh my God, Yolo, I've got two Springer Spaniels. Now I'm thinking of doing that you see on the movies, you know where you go I can't hear you, Yoke. Y- yeah, no. Put the com- the- We'll come back. Bye. Now I'm thinking of doing that and ending the call because, you know, my, my two Springer Spaniels will be sat in the other room here now thinking, "What's Dad doing? Where are we?" A- and only yesterday I was thinking, if I had to come back into this world in a different way, how would that be? And I thought, I'd be one of Matt Todd's Springer Spaniels. 'Cause what a life. I get up in the morning, the only two things that I have to worry about in life is eat and walk. You know, I don't have any others. But I do look at my younger one and think, it has some pretty poor emotional management, and actually it behaves a lot better when I control its emotions. When its emotions are high, it's hard work. When I manage its emotions, its behavior's a lot calmer. And so then I look at that and I look at my daughter, and I think there's some serious similarities here. And I hope she never listens to this, 'cause I'm not saying she's like a Springer Spaniel, but...

Yoyo 1:02:18

Yeah. I'm just thinking in terms of emotions and the control of emotions, I had an ex-boyfriend once who got... literally threw his mobile phone across my house, and my pet ran up the stairs. And I said to him, "That's the last time you ever do that." Because I think our- Yeah when we have pets, and we love pets, and they weren't his pets, they were mine, I think that we control our emotions because we don't want that transfer of emotion to them. We don't want to elevate their stresses, you know, even if we've had a shitty day. So I think if anything, for me, the regulation comes from them being a sanctuary, that if I'm having a stressful day, I'll just- Yeah I'll just go and sit down, and they'll all just sit around me, and all of a sudden- Yeah we're like, "It's a shitty stressful day, but this is what life is all about." But then I don't have to deal with some of the heinous other things that other people are having to deal with,

Matt Todd 1:03:06

But they're always smiling for you when you come home, aren't they? You know- Absolutely I've always been a dog person, and we've always said that, is you can have the worst day at work- but when you walk in that front door, it's lovely to see that reassuring tail wagging that just, you know-

Yoyo 1:03:18

No

Matt Todd 1:03:18

wants to say to you, "There is no stress in life, Dad. Just take me out for a walk and I'll make everything feel good."

Yoyo 1:03:23

But cats are different. Cats stare at you from the top of the stairs and say, "Where the fuck have you been?"

Matt Todd 1:03:28

Yeah, yeah. I... So I had two cats once. Many years ago, after a divorce, I got two cats 'cause someone said I'd find it really helpful. And I kept them for about two weeks and then gave them back, 'cause they did exactly that. I'd walk in and they'd just be staring at me like, "Don't be coming home with that look on your face."

Yoyo 1:03:44

Bring me the love.

Matt Todd 1:03:45

You can turn round and walk straight back out the door, Matt. Think about your attitude.

Yoyo 1:03:49

I mean, lastly, look, you've... You- PhD, question mark. What the hell? I mean, Matt, that's not for everybody. Tell me about that.

Matt Todd 1:03:57

Yeah, it was probably one of the worst mistakes of my life.

Yoyo 1:04:00

No.

Matt Todd 1:04:00

I shouldn't say that. If my supervisor's listening to this, she'll be laughing her head off. She asked me to go back and speak to the master's degree students and, uh, and I think, you know, I probably went in and convinced them never to do a PhD- which is not the objective of going in, so I've never been asked to go back and talk about it again. And I had some great laughs with my, my supervisor, Dawn, over this. I never... I still talk of people now and I say, "Look, I'm not an academic." And people go, "Mate, you've got a doctorate." But I still don't see myself as an academic. I went to comprehensive school. I think I got three GCSEs. You know, school was never good for me. I never went to university. I just did distance learning program and it was just... I don't know. I think I was at a conference or at a training center where we were trying to build this whole how do we negotiate with terrorists, you know? And we came up... We had- we were on a course in the UK and there were a number of very experienced negotiators and psychologists from around the world all on this course, and it was basically trying to get our heads together after things like the Bataclan theater that we'd seen, these marauding attacks, to say, "What can we do to help from a negotiator pers- perspective, and what happens if we end up as negotiators in that?" And so we built a course. You know, they, they, they designed and built a counter-terrorism hostage negotiators course for hostage negotiators. And I, I think while I was listening to it, one of the conversations that came up was around the academic sort of, uh- relevance or the academic sort of backing on this. So, you know, if we're gonna come up with something and say, "You should use this," where's the, where's the research behind this to say that this works or that this is a good idea? Now, look, I'm gonna, I'm gonna absolutely hand on heart to you, Yolo, because I can't tell a lie, I think I'd had far too much red wine in the bar that evening, and I remember just putting my hand up and saying, "Oh, I'd love to do a PhD on this. It'd be great." And that was it. That was the start of it, you know. And eight years down the line, I finally finished it after many tears, and, you know, my supervisors, Dawn and Adam, who were amazing people that I would never have got through this without my... Dawn at, at Manchester University, she was just a legend for me and is a great friend now. But it's, I... So look, why, why, it's about that passion again. I, it's the passion for me around this was, is this stuff good enough to work in the most extremist environments, which those sort of incidents are. They're incidents where death has already occurred. Normally, we're trying to stop death, you know, or prevent that threat to life to people. These are cases where people have probably already died, and a, and a m- and a large number of other lives are at significant risk now. And so, uh, almost that kind of imposter syndrome again is, are we really the right people? Are we good enough with the skills that we've got? You know, can I really go in here and help those people? Is, is this what you want, Matt Todd, from just, you know, nowhere to come and save your life? It didn't really feel right. And so the research for me wanted to look at, as a PhD does, every single bit of research out there. You know, so I'm looking at bookcases now, like a library that I've built over eight years, where there isn't much that I haven't read about hostage and crisis negotiation over the years And, and sadly I can't... I'm still working on publicly releasing it. It's embargoed at the moment 'cause it was part of French and British government's, uh, decisions that the, the findings couldn't be released publicly because there's a lot of sensitive interviews in there with police officers, negotiators, hostages. I spent... It was really interesting talking to hostages. So if you look at things like the Bataclan theater, which was one of my case studies, a number of people, after the initial killing on the dance floor, which was horrific, Yolo. I can't even start to comprehend for anybody what that must have been like, but significant loss of life and horrific injuries and, and at the conclusion of that immediately, they then hold a small number of hostages in a corridor above the, the dance floor, the theater, the stage. And so I had the, and I call it a privilege because it was, to sit for long periods of time with a few of them, like hours and hours, interviewing them around what it was like. And people sort of said to me, "Well, from a negotiator re- uh, PhD, why did you wanna speak to the hostages?" Well, I've worked in negotiation cells where we come out of the negotiation, we put the phone down, and we kind of high-five each other, and it's like, "Well done. That was a good call. We achieved this. We got our objective. If the call comes in, what are we gonna do?" And we're thinking that we've had a really good call. What I wanted to know was, for those hostages who absolutely believed that they were going to die, n- no doubt about that, they didn't have any expectation to survive this, which is a incredible thing to th- to think and feel anyway. When they saw the terrorist go on the phone to the negotiator, what was he like when he came off that phone? Because if the terrorist came off the phone and was angry because of the negotiator, what the hostages would say to me is, "We could see them go on the phone. They'd calm down. They'd go on the phone to the negotiator, and then all of a sudden they'd be all worked up again. And so we would think one of us is gonna get hurt because of the phone call with the negotiator." So whilst on the outside we might think it's been a really good call, on the inside it might not have been interpreted as a good call at all. And so that was the perspective that I wanted to look at from inside the siege, inside the, you know, the trauma as well as us dealing with it on the outside. other things that I learned was whilst we can have great models and psychological concepts for dealing with this, the reality is when that incident happens and we're sat here like we are now having a chat for a podcast, my phone goes 'cause I'm on call, and I get told, "This is the incident we're dealing with. We're gonna patch you through to that terrorist inside that." What my research found was most of those models that you've learned on your course y- are gonna be irrelevant to you Because A, your emotions are gonna go up. Doesn't matter how trained you are, this is gonna affect your emotions, which is gonna affect your rational capability to, to manage this at a normal level anyway. And from the cases that I reviewed with the negotiators that dealt with them, really what got them through it was just a good, strong, basic understanding of the hostage crisis negotiation skills that they've learnt over the years. There's no capacity mentally. It's okay if you've got a team wrapped round you, and it's a long-running incident, then these models, you know, are great, and we can use them, and we can achieve what we wanna achieve going forwards. But at that moment, on that phone call, in that crisis, what I need is just something straightforward that is almost natural for me to do. Maybe just elevate it from a subconscious level to a conscious level to get me through this. And really, that ability to listen. So what am I hearing from the in- individual? If you look at the Pulse nightclub, for example, the way Omar Mateen would introduce himself basically as a soldier, you know, of the caliphate, that that's what he was. So think about what I said before is what's the lens that he's looking through at the moment, and what are the drivers that are causing him to, to see the world in the way that he sees it? You know, he would talk about the coalition bombings killing all these innocent people out there. So, you know, what are the drivers for him that's causing him to behave in the way that he's behaving, and then what can I do to start thinking about using what's important to him, yeah, to change, for him to change his perspective? And that was very much sort of wh- where it went with that. Don't get me going on that, because we'll be here for hours if I start talking about that.

Yoyo 1:11:35

Well, I mean, look, I genuinely, genuinely have to wrap up, but I wanted to end on a positive 'cause Matt, again, you'll have to come back. We won't leave it quite so long. But in a career where you've been the listening man- Mm um, I'd listen to you any day, I have to tell you, and I'm sure everybody listening would say the same thing. In a world where tech and social media are desensitizing us from feeling part of humanity, tell me what makes you more human?

Matt Todd 1:12:08

Blimey. That's a way to end, isn't it?

Yoyo 1:12:12

Yes. I'm gonna tell you, the reason I ask this question, and to give you a bit of space to think, is because I just watched Project Hail Mary, the movie. And I found that that got me in touch with my humanity so much. It was so moving. I mean, like Ryan Gosling, he's easy on the eye anyway, for boys and girls, but the story was phenomenal. Have you seen it?

Matt Todd 1:12:37

No.

Yoyo 1:12:38

Okay, watch it-

Matt Todd 1:12:38

I haven't, but I'm going to

Yoyo 1:12:39

watch it, watch it this bank holiday weekend.

Matt Todd 1:12:41

I'm thinking at the airport now, this is- Oh gonna be something to watch.

Yoyo 1:12:44

It's just, it's, it's, it's ticking so many boxes for me, and it's not preachy, it's not trying to ram a message down your throat. It's a thinker's movie. It's all about communication- Mm-hmm which I think you're gonna love. And, and, and I think, I, I mean, when it first came out, I was like, "What the heck is that? What..." I couldn't relate to it. And then for some reason, it just came out on, on, on TV here, and I just thought, "Okay, I'm gonna give this a go." Best thing I did that weekend. So I think, that was, that got me in touch with my hu- humanity. And if you watch the whole movie, don't pick up your phone, just focus on the movie, you'll get the message.

Matt Todd 1:13:23

So I, so look, for me, so I don't wanna, I don't wanna end on a, a anything depressing here, but it's not- this isn't depressing for me. This is, since being away from that operational police environment, I think you just push on in that environment. It was probably after 17 years when a good clinical forensic psychologist friend of mine, w- we had a chat, and he said to me, "Maybe that's enough. Maybe it's time to, to walk away from this now." Four years down the line, it's only now, I think, I probably look back, Yolo, and realize- Not the damage, that's the wrong word to say, but the effect that some of this has had on me. So I, you know, I get emotional far too easy. Things happen and I can feel my emotions being stirred far too easy. And I kind of feel that I'm much more visible around how easily we hurt people. So look, I've done things in my past that have hurt people, and it's not nice. And as I've got older now, I look back a little bit and think, how much more rewarding is it when you make someone feel good rather than make someone feel hurt or bad? And how much easier is it to make someone feel good? Mm. So if it feels good to make someone feel good, and it's easier to do it, then why don't we just do it? And so of all the people that I've brought out of life at-risk situations, whether this be hardened criminals in sieges or teenagers off bridges, I would ask people all the time, "Why did you do that? Why did you give yourself up? Why did you come down? Why did you come out?" And people will tell you a lot of different things, obviously, 'cause everybody's individual, but the one common denominator that I heard all the time was sometimes people would just look at me for a moment, but then they'd just go, "Do you know what, Matt? Nobody's ever listened to me like that Not my doctor, not my parents, not my best friend, not my wife, not my husband. You know, nobody's ever... And that's when you suddenly sit there and realize how powerful this stuff is. And actually, if it has that effect and it's that easy to do, why don't we just all do a little bit more of it? And, that's me really now. I think... I look back at a lot of these cases and I think, yeah, people just needed to be heard. People just need to be... I'm not saying we can understand it for people, but people wanna feel that they've been understood- That I've been listened to. I think controlled chaos, which we all feel in our lives, whether it be domestics, kids, work, controlled chaos held together by good communication and emotional management is what happens behind the scenes that people don't see. Look, I won't shut up if I don't stop, so I'll stop there.

Yoyo 1:16:23

I won't shut up if I don't stop.

Matt Todd 1:16:27

That's me. Before... I, I'll end up getting emotional at this rate. You're, you're

Yoyo 1:16:30

all right, so- Oh, Matt, listen. You... Dude, you can come back any time. And I have to say, 'cause this is a really cool way to end, uh, the amount of feedback that I had from men telling me how soothing they found your voice, and, uh I know that that came as a bit of a shock to you, but, uh, true. True, there you go. Um-

Matt Todd 1:16:48

Well, it's lovely to hear.

Yoyo 1:16:50

Yeah, there you go. It's lovely to hear.

Matt Todd 1:16:55

Let's go and get a cup of tea.

Yoyo 1:16:57

Matt, thank you very much for joining us again on the Security Circle podcast.

Matt Todd 1:17:00

Oh, it's lovely to... It's lovely. I love the fact that you're prepared to sit and hear me drone on about this YOLO. It's great, so thank you very much for having me.