Welcome to another illuminating episode of "The Last 10%". Today, we have the pleasure of welcoming esteemed guest Doug Noll, an expert in conflict resolution and emotional intelligence. In this episode, Doug shares his unique insights and groundbreaking techniques that can help us navigate conflicts, validate emotions, and tap into our hidden genius.

Drawing from his years of experience, Doug emphasizes the importance of labeling emotions and empathizing with others in conflict situations. He explains how this approach has the power to de-escalate tensions and create emotional safety, ultimately leading to more harmonious resolutions. However, Doug's expertise extends beyond conflict resolution. He also sheds light on the commercial concept of emotional intelligence, offering a fresh perspective on how we can develop true emotional competency.

Prepare to be inspired as Doug takes us on a captivating journey through his own experiences. From his involvement in the Prison of Peace Project, where he teaches peacemaking and mediation skills to incarcerated individuals, to his profound insights on embracing emotions as a hidden superpower, Doug's story will leave you with a deeper understanding of the human psyche. Stay tuned as we dive into the world of emotional intelligence and discover the profound impact it can have on our lives.

Get ready to transform the way you perceive and navigate conflicts as we delve into the riveting conversation between our host, Dallas Burnett, and the remarkable Doug Noll. This episode of "The Last 10%" is sure to empower and enlighten you. Let's dive in!

Find more information on Doug and his books and training by visiting: www.dougnoll.com

Hey, everybody.

We're talking to Doug Knoll today.

What an amazing guy.

He is a former trial lawyer, has some incredible stories around teaching

leaders, how to use their emotions as part of their hidden genius.

He's a great new friend of mine.

You don't want to miss this incredible conversation.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I am Dallas Burnett in Thrive Studios sitting in my 1905 Coke Brothers

barber chair, but more importantly, we have a great guest today.

We are in the middle of the holiday season, and I can't think of a

better show than one that deals with conflict and listening.

Well, so we have an expert on the topic.

Welcome to the show, Doug.

Hey, Dallas.

Thanks for having me.

I am, I'm excited to have you on the show because like I

said, you're an expert in training leaders on listening and using emotions

and all these things that we're going to talk about, but I just thought.

As leaders, we like to stay in the last 10%, but you know what?

Everybody's going to be sitting around the kitchen table over the holidays.

And sometimes that can be a little stressful.

So I figured this would be a good

episode for everybody.

Yeah, it's really tough.

We've got the Middle East crisis in Israel.

We've got the war in Ukraine, tensions with China, the political

craziness going on in this country.

It's inevitable that when people gather around the dining room table with

Thanksgiving or Christmas, that they're going to be different opinions and

people are going to get a little hot, especially when they've been drinking a

Yeah, it's a bad, it's a bad cocktail of all those things for sure,

but we've got some great news for people.

You're going to have some tools that you can use to navigate that

a little bit better, as we go through the conversation today.

So Doug, I want to talk to you a little bit about your story because it's very

unique, your path to where you are today.

Did not start as this leadership communication expert.

You were a trial lawyer.

Tell us a little bit about your journey.

When my journey started in Southern California I was, grew up in

affluence and, but unfortunately, I was born with a lot of disabilities.

I was partially blind, partially deaf, bad teeth, left handed, two club feet.

Couldn't walk until I was four years old after multiple surgeries

Good gracious

in the 1950s, I was born in 1950, in the 1950s, I wasn't so disabled

that they would put me away somewhere.

But nobody had either the patience nor the knowledge of

how to deal with a kid like me.

The one thing I was I was smart, but people couldn't figure out why I was

not doing well in school until in the fourth grade, a school nurse got the

broad idea to test my eyesight and found out that my vision was 2400.

And so I had been struggling in school for six years and they got glasses on

me and that summer I advanced three grade levels in one summer in my

reading ability just because I see.

it Anyways, was a tough childhood, and I didn't get a lot of emotional support,

so I picked up a lot of really bad emotional habits, that, were adaptive

allow me to survive, but coming, going into adulthood became really maladaptive.

I was super smart, got accepted to Dartmouth, went to Dartmouth College,

Ivy League for four years, came back to California, went to law school, did

really well in law school, and didn't know if I wanted to be a lawyer or not, but.

In those days, if you didn't go to med school out of Ivy

League, you went to law school.

So that's what I did and decided to move to central California because

I love being in the mountains.

Clerked for an appellate judge for a year, and then went into private practice

as a young associate in a firm in Fresno, California in September of 1978.

And two months later I was trying my first jury trial,

Oh

that's how my career And for the next 22 years, I was, I

became a really hardcore trial lawyer.

The story gets interesting because in the 1980s, my mid thirties, I picked up the

martial arts and during my second degree black belt right around my 40th birthday.

In 1990.

And at that time, my teacher said, go learn Tai Chi.

right.

is you're doing this, but you were telling us

earlier about all these disabilities.

So you're doing this

it was a real struggle, but I

my

learned the one thing I've learned through all of

this, getting through all these disabilities is I know how I learn.

I know that I can learn anything.

I'm extremely patient with myself and I'm persistent and I'm really disciplined.

And I can do anything.

Anything I put my mind to doing, I can do.

There's nothing in the world that I couldn't do, at least if it's not

age dependent, that I cannot do.

I can do anything if I want to.

It's just a question of how much time and effort am I willing

to put into it to master it.

So, Tai Chi is very interesting.

It's the oldest of all martial arts.

It's also extremely deadly when practiced as a martial art.

Every move is a killing blow.

And in Tai Chi, there are two paradoxes.

The first paradox is the softer you are, the stronger you are.

The second paradox is the more vulnerable the more powerful you are.

Softly.

you are, the

Stronger you are, to be strong, soft to be strong, vulnerable to be

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

Did not compute.

Hardcore trailer, secondary black belt, 6'1 215 pounds, big man,

arrogant as you can possibly imagine.

But the paradoxes began to seep into me.

And so finally in the late 90s, I was in a courtroom trying a

case and the thought came to me, What the hell am I doing in here?

And after that trip, we had a, I went with a bunch of friends, amongst

many other things that I do, I've done whitewater for many years,

both as a kayaker and a rafter.

So we had a rafting trip planned up on the main salmon in Idaho.

And I spent 10 days up there running the canyons in the whitewater,

thinking about how many people I served as a trial lawyer.

And I came to the conclusion that I only served five people in 20

plus years as a trial lawyer.

And I said, I'm not gonna, that people who went into the system

better, that people went into the system and came out better off.

Then they went in.

what you mean when

you say served people, you mean that the people that you're interacting

with that you feel like came

That doesn't, I won a lot of trials.

I only lost two trials in my whole career.

But how many people had I really served?

And not many.

And so I decided I'm not going to do this anymore.

So I didn't know what I was going to do.

And I came back to central California, driving out of, down out of the

mountains to my office in town and heard, a public service announcement

for a new master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies being offered

at President Pacific University.

Now I got my attention.

Ultimately, I signed up, they accepted me I enrolled, and for three

years I was a full time graduate student, a three quarters time law

professor, and a full time trial And that was a pretty crazy time.

And then, my partners and I couldn't come to an agreement about what I wanted to do.

They saw me as the goose that was laying the golden eggs.

I was the second highest earner in the firm.

The last thing that they wanted me to do was stop trying cases and earning

right.

do Can't that anymore.

So I gave him a week's notice and walked out.

Left ten million dollars on the table and opened up my own peacemaking

mediation practice on November 1st, 2000 and never looked back.

And I'll tell you Dallas, that was the best decision I've ever made in my life.

I don't make nearly as much money as I made in those days, but I have helped tens

of thousands of people live better lives.

And that is so much more than having a big bank account to drive in a fancy car.

Right,

that's how it all started.

And the, the next big pivotal thing that happened to me is in 2005, I discovered in

a very difficult conflict I was mediating, the power of listening to emotions.

And I was able to get this divorce couple who would rather kill each

other than listen to each other.

I got them, when it was all over with.

They walked out holding hands and to go to lunch with each other

and four hours before they were screaming vile insults at each other.

And I

after you, you engage with them.

They come in for a session with you on mediating and they're

mediating their divorce.

know they're mediating a very money.

It's been each spent 50, 000 in attorney's fees on an 18, 000

problem and it is kind of classic.

Really, that's how much they hated each other.

And yet, in four hours, I completely turned it around.

And my jaw dropped.

I couldn't believe the results.

And it turns

You were

shocked at your own success.

It was amazing.

I knew what I'd done.

And I said, this is crazy.

This makes no sense whatsoever.

So,

And was this, you were adapted what you had learned in

your graduate studies and all that, or you had, was it an amalgamation

of all the

that's what I think it was.

I think it was, I studying neuroscience.

I started studying neuroscience in my graduate studies.

And back then, nobody knew what neuroscience was.

And I wrote the very first published academic article on the

neuropsychology of peace and conflict.

And, and I had studied all this stuff and here I was confronted with this

situation that I had no training to deal with because no one ever taught

me how to deal with intense conflict.

And I just had an epiphany, just that moment where all this knowledge

concatenates into one idea.

And listen to the listen to what they're feeling.

And ignore everything else.

That's what happened.

And that was the beginning of a whole new trajectory for me.

And that led to, five years later, the I'll say in 2007, a seminal

brain scanning study came out of UCLA, Matthew Lieberman's lab, and

that, that showed why this technique called Affect labeling worked.

It showed exactly what was happening in the brain.

And so now I had hard science to support the practice that was so

Ah, huh.

So you actually figured out what worked before it

was actually supported by, research.

And then it was like, Oh, now we've

got, we've caught up to

Exactly.

That's

ourselves now a

Now I could teach it, because it wasn't pop psychology,

and it wasn't just Doug Noll, espousing some Doug Noll BS.

Here's the practice, and here's why it works.

And this is what's going on in the brain when you engage in this practice.

Let's talk about that a little bit, because now you've

got, you've piqued my interest.

So we've talked about divorced couple coming in, meet for mediating a 50, 000

each on mediating an 18, 000 problem, leaving, going to lunch together.

And you used a term called

affect labeling there.

So I want to talk about maybe unpacking that term and also understanding when you

say this process that you're engaging in, tell the listeners a little bit about the

labeling of

Sure.

emotions.

okay.

This is a Okay.

move, thrive, can handle it.

These

are legit

all right.

All So, first of all, let me first talk about Lieberman study.

What he showed was that when we get into an intense emotional condition

in the brain, the emotional centers of the brain, which are dominate

this whole central part of the brain.

In the limbic system completely overwhelmed the prefrontal cortex

and caused a complete shutdown of the prefrontal cortex.

Daniel Goleman calls it the amygdolic hijack.

And we've all been there, we get super angry, we get that tunnel vision, we can't

think anymore, all we can do is just focus on lashing out energy going out of us.

Yes.

Anybody that is, anybody that has that, you just start feeling it

rising up through your neck and you're just

like, Oh, here we go.

you just,

flushed face, There that you're indicators getting

into this physiological condition.

what this there, there isn't any real science yet, there's some hints at this,

but what I hypothesize is that when the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed, it can

no longer access some cognitive structures that we have in our brain, we think of it

as an emotional database, and we no longer have access to that database, and so now

we can't process we can only react to it.

When we affect label Which, or call it emotional listening, affect

labeling, it's a technical term, but call it emotional listening.

When I'm telling you, Dallas, what you're experiencing, what you're

feeling, I'm literally lending you my prefrontal cortex for the 90 seconds

it takes for you to get back online and start processing stuff yourself.

And that's why using affect labeling, you can call me any

angry person in 90 seconds or less.

And it works on every single human brain on the planet.

You cannot help yourself.

I can't, you cannot remain angry at me when I start labeling your emotions.

So what you're saying is if I am, if we're engaging in this

conflict and I'm coming into the conflict and I say, Hey, I'm really upset and you

just stop and you start labeling what you,

Here's how it goes.

Here's how it goes.

You say, Dallas man, you're pissed off.

You're really frustrated.

really upset.

You feel completely disrespected.

Nobody's listening to you and you completely feel, you feel completely

unsupported and unappreciated and you're worried and anxious and nervous

And you're sad because you're looking for connection and

support and it's just not there.

And so you feel hopeless.

And down at the, beneath it all, you feel like you've been completely abandoned

and betrayed and rejected and it's making you feel just completely worthless.

And the whole thing is just really frustrating and making you angry.

Wow, that's, when you say it, you just,

you, felt it didn't you?

lands, yeah, you do, you really do

actually, and I'm not even mad, so

that's,

uh,

to

You have you

your brain, brain down automatically.

Automatically,

incredible.

So, so.

So when we do that, you're giving your, it's almost like you're

giving your brain time and space

to reset so that you can

Get back.

And I guess, that's interesting that you would put it that way because if

you're in this emotional state where you're reacting, it's almost like

fight or flight in a way, I'm in this mode and then to get out of it,

you have to get into this almost like safe, it's almost like you're putting

them at ease if they know that you're.

If you're speaking what they're feeling, then there's like this understanding.

Is that part

of

a

where you understand they feel safe?

validation of your

A validation.

It's a deep validation of your emotional that has a very

deep calming effect on people.

oh

Um,

can stop any of emotional upset in literally 90 seconds or less.

that's, that's incredible.

So the trick with that is, is like, when we get into a conflict is to be aware.

That we're in the conflict to begin with so that we can do that, because if

we react with our own emotions, then we've lost it.

We're done.

We're done.

thing that's really cool Dallas.

I teach and coach.

I teach people how to do this.

I coach people how to do this.

I teach everything from maximum security prisons all the way up to

the Congressional Budget Office, how to deescalate members of Congress.

The when you learn this skill, it becomes so habituated that you no longer look

at emotion as being something chaotic and difficult and anxiety producing.

Instead, it's more like you're looking at somebody, it's like holding a little

baby, an infant, and the baby poops in the diapers and you smell it and say, oh baby.

You just pooped in your diapers.

Let me clean you up.

A lot of compassion.

You get pissed off.

And I said, Oh, Dallas, you poor little baby.

You're just pissed off and angry.

You're just having an emotional moment.

And I know exactly what to say how to say it and when to say it.

In a way that calms you down almost instantly with pure compassion and

certitude that this problem is going to go is going to be solved very quickly.

What I love about that is you're not really taking away

anything from the person in terms of

you're not manipulating them.

Into believing what you believe or thinking what you think all you're doing

is really, like you said, labeling their emotion and showing, I would think what

that's exactly

uh,

towards the person.

And that just brings them to a place where you can

then communicate again on

A level playing

That's right.

So then you still may disagree, but you can disagree

with the logic and reason instead of just, fire and brimstone,

is This called cognitive empathy.

It's a form of cognitive empathy, and you're right when you calm people down.

Your emotional experiences is true and authentic and there and is and now the

reasons for the emotions might not be so legitimate, but the fact that you're

having an emotional experience itself is those are legitimate and we can validate

people's emotions without agreeing about the reasons for the emotions.

And then what we learn is I teach is you deescalate, then you problem solve.

And what people tend to do too much is they tend to jump to early problem

solving, which only pisses people off and makes the problem even worse.

So you've got to calm people down before actually engage them, as you said, in

some sort of problem solving process to figure out, okay, what's going on here?

Now, do you quantify that as that feels like what we would

call like emotional intelligence?

Would you quantify what you just said as having greater

emotional intelligence?

Yes, I actually don't like the word emotional intelligence.

Ooh, this is great.

Emotional intelligence was a term that was coined in the

late, early 1990s by John Meier and Peter Salovey, , Salovey, I think

now is the Dean of Yale University.

And they were looking at, they're psychologists and they were studying

different kinds of social intelligences.

And one of the intelligences they identified was emotional intelligence.

And they developed an assessment called the Meier Salovey Caruso

emotional intelligence test, the.

MSET, which is the.

Gold standard for this.

This new, this guy's got a PhD, but he was a New York Times science writer

by the name of Daniel Goleman stumbled on their research and wrote this book

called EQ, why it's more important than EQ that came out in I think 1995

was a fabulous runaway bestseller.

He's made millions, hundreds of millions of dollars on this.

But the problem is the commercial concept of emotional intelligence is

completely different than the academic.

The academics will tell you that the commercial site is mostly all bullshit.

And people make claims for which there's absolutely no supporting science.

So here are a couple of things to think about.

Number one, you cannot learn emotional intelligence.

You just simply can't learn it.

And the reason you can't learn it is because it's an intelligence.

It's like an IQ test.

Can I teach you iq?

Oh no.

you, you

Well, you, you can develop, Can skills that lead to

higher iq, but I can't teach you iq.

Yes.

you learn a formula, all of a sudden

you wake up and I'm,

That's right.

But what I can teach is emotional competency.

And there are three emotional competencies.

Emotional self awareness, emotional self regulation, and cognitive empathy.

And here's the thing that I've discovered that is so cool.

You learn cognitive empathy through ethic labeling.

And as you practice ethic labeling on yourself and other

people, you automatically...

Develop emotional self awareness and emotional self regulation.

You don't have to do anything.

It just happens.

You just, you reprogram your brain and your emotional intelligence

starts to go through the roof.

And guess what?

It takes less than eight weeks for it to happen.

Oh man, that's pretty, that's pretty incredible

It's amazing.

And the reason that I can say this with so much certainty is because

of the Prisoner of Peace Project.

Where for...

Okay.

Let's talk about that.

Cause this is, let's tell the listeners, prison of peace project.

You're a co founder of this work, this organization.

Tell us a little bit about the organization and then I want you to

share, cause we were talking before the show, I want you to share this.

Amazing story.

that you had this experience

very first story.

Yes.

The very first one.

I had developed these deep listening skills and I was teaching them

to lawyers and judges and mediators.

And then in, in August of 2010, I received a phone call from a dear friend

and colleague, Laurel Coffer, who is a, lawyer in mediator in Los Angeles.

And she called me to read me a letter from a woman by the name of Susan Russo.

And Ms.

Russo was serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in the largest,

most violent women's prison in the world.

Which at that time was Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, California, about

an hour and 20 minutes from where I live.

And Ms.

Russo had sent a letter to Laurel asking if Laurel would come in and train the,

what they call the networking group, which is a group of about 150 lifers and

long termers, women, serving life and long term sentences in the prison because

they were tired of the prison violence.

And Laurel read me the letter and said, what do you think?

And I thought for about a nanosecond.

I said, if this is legitimate, I think we should do this.

And so to make a long story short, it took us eight months to

finally get permission to begin.

And we started in April of 2010 with 15 women.

And this is you going

and

we went in once a week.

In those days, we went in once a week for eight hours for 16 weeks in a row.

And trained these women very rigorous curriculum on how to become peacemakers

and mediators to stop prison violence.

And the very first skill we taught them.

Was affidavit labeling because that's the foundation of everything

So you're, going into the prison, you're meeting with these

women and your goal is ultimately just to give them some tools and

reprogramming essentially to help them.

Lower the violence where they're living, like just stay alive,

So they don't kill each other, in

what they

know, and,

did.

and

to

And so they, they, left that and you had really

success with that program.

We're in 15 California prisons today.

A prison in Connecticut, 15 prisons in Greece and a prison in northern Italy.

Oh, wow.

That's incredible.

Oh, that's awesome.

It's so awesome.

And, you know, we've had 700 of our students

released in California on parole.

We have not had 1 of them reoffend 0 recidivism for our students.

really, Oh, that's an, that's incredible.

That's awesome.

Powerful life

so powerful.

Yes, absolutely.

It makes sense though.

It does make sense.

And the fact that it's something I love how you put that when you talk about

emotional intelligence as related to IQ, you, it, there's no, it's not a formula.

You can't just be like, read a book and Ooh, I've got higher IQ.

But what you're saying you can do.

With the cognitive empathy and, the affect labeling is if you can

participate in that, and it is a learn skill that you can learn.

It's almost it's almost like one of those like Keystone

habits.

Like it, there's a, it's, it trickles

out to everything else.

So if we can learn this, it

in my opinion, this is foundational skill of life.

It should be taught to every single child , starting at age four.

That would be an awesome

show?

it would probably make every elementary school

teacher would be so much happier.

the studies show that if you affect, start affecting children

at between three and four by the time they're 12, they're usually

two grade levels ahead of their peers, and they've got the emotional

maturity of a typical 21 year old.

That's, just, that's incredible, but that makes,

again, it makes sense because there's so much less friction in

your own, if you're just tamping

down the fires that's coming up and just, you just give them so much more space to.

To grow instead of, act out.

That's

and most children are emotionally invalidated.

So, and what happens is they shut down, their emotional growth

shuts down between years old.

It becomes stunted.

So they grow up with cognitively developed, but they don't

grow up emotionally developed.

they And so by the, when get into adulthood, they've got this

big veneer around them, right?

But when they get under stress or emotionality, they just revert

back to where they were at six years old because they've never

developed emotional maturity.

Yeah.

And, I suffered from that, and, but the beauty of it is it's

all reversible, if you just learn the

Uh,

Well, this is awesome.

I just, there's so many things that we could talk about with this.

I, and I appreciate you going in and really exposing a little bit about

some misconceptions about emotional intelligence, because you're right.

It's a big topic, but I could totally see how there's pieces of

it that are not really, that are more fluff and, or I don't know.

Maybe narratives

There are a lot of people, right, there are a lot people who claim

a lot about emotional intelligence, but first of all, where's their science?

Second, can they demonstrate the skills, can they demonstrate emotional self

regulation, emotional self awareness regulation, but can they demonstrate it?

And then, can they show you that it's a teachable skill?

And the answer is almost always no.

that'S true.

Tell us a little bit about the story of the young lady that

story, because I

A the lot of stories out of prison project, but the first story that

really struck me was we were five weeks into the training of these first 15 women.

And let me tell you something, the training in prisons is not like

anything you've ever done before.

There is no technology.

It's all, we take in flip pads and it's all old school because there's

no technology allowed in the prisons.

We are typically working in very dingy, dark rooms that are about as.

Aesthetically pleasing as well.

We won't go there.

Really dingy, dark and it's a very different, is not a corporate

learning environment at all.

we walk into this

chairs, PowerPoint

Yeah, we walk into this dingy room with half the

fluorescent lights aren't working and the others are flickering.

And it just, it's awful.

But that's where we're teaching, and we come in early, and one of

our students, Sarah, is sitting way out over in the corner, and she's

quietly sobbing, and we noticed that.

This is unusual behavior.

So we walk over to her, and Laurel knelt down next to her,

and said, Sarah, what's going on?

And Sarah told us this story.

We never ask our students why they're in prison that they want to volunteer,

that's fine, but we never ask.

But she volunteered, and she's told us this story.

I've been in prison for 18 years because...

As a drunk driver, I killed a family of four in an automobile accident, and I came

out of the accident completely unscathed.

I was sentenced to 25 to life, and when I had to go to prison, I had to give up

my 3 year old boy to my sister to raise.

And I have been writing him every week for the last 18 years.

He never talks to me on the phone.

He's never come for a visit.

The only way I know how he's doing is when I talk to his sister once a week.

And then she said, last week...

I decided to write a letter about him, not about me.

I decided, I thought about all the emotions he must feel about a mother

who's abandoned him, and who humiliated him, and hasn't been able to love him,

and how, and the hatred he must feel, and the loneliness, and abandonment, and

all these horrible emotions that he felt.

And I wrote him that letter.

And today, for the first time in 18 years, I received a letter back from him.

Now the letter was really, angry, and he was really angry, and he had

every right to And at the bottom of the letter it said, I love you mom,

I'm bringing my girlfriend, and I'm going to come visit you in three weeks.

Good

started crying And I heard that, I didn't say a

word, I was just, I was stunned.

And I said, holy crap, what do we have here?

that And was when I realized that we had something extremely powerful and precious

that we were doing in the prisons.

It's gotta be a rewarding.

It's very interesting that you're, Original kind of first career led you

to a place of financial success, but for you, the measurement in you, we

talk about living in the last 10%, you were obviously living in the

last 10%, but then you just radically transitioned to a different measurement

of what the last 10 percent was.

And I think that, I don't know if you realized it at the time,

but Did that moment have anything that feel or did it over time?

Have you looked at that and said, man, that was a real milestone moment in the

transition over to this new thing, because man, when you hear a story like that, and

you've made that much difference in this young lady's life and you're doing it now

in all these prisons all over the world, to me, that would be, that's winning the

national championship in, in, in terms

yeah, I didn't know in 2000 that any of this would come down.

I had no clue.

I had an intuition or a belief that I was a peacemaker and a

mediator and not a trial lawyer.

And so that's what I was going to follow.

And so I ended up getting into work shortly after that, gave

up my big car, my fancy car.

Four thousand square foot home and all trappings and I ended up where I am today,

which is on 10 acres and 1100 square foot home, mile and a half up a dirt road.

And I've never been happier.

It's been amazing.

And I help people in a week than I helped in 22 years as a trial lawyer.

Oh, wow.

That's awesome.

Well, I want to talk to you about, and turn this to, we have

a lot of leaders on the podcast.

That's listeners of the podcast.

We have a lot of coaches.

We have a lot of business owners and organizational leaders, whether that's,

for profit or not for profit and so , we've talked a little bit about kind

of the affect labeling, how does, how can leaders use this and, in leading

teams and organizations as developing them, the kind of understanding, because

I think that if I was listening to this, I may hear the stories that you

tell and just go, that's incredible.

But not really understand how to connect the dots in a lot of ways.

So

So I do teach a lot of leaders these skills and I

do teach leadership development.

I'm a senior.

Consultant with Mobius Executive leadership out of Massachusetts.

The what I have learned is counterintuitive and counter

normative to everything we think we know about human nature.

And that is that there, put one, number one, and you push back if

you want, but I'm ready for it.

Number one, there's no such thing as rationality.

There is no such thing as rationality.

This whole myth of rationality has been perpetrated on us.

By philosophers and theologians for 4000 years.

And they have made a fundamental assumption that what separates humans

from other species of animals is that we're reason we can reason and we have

rationality and neuroscience says.

Bullshit to that, there is no such thing as rationality.

Every single decision we make is an emotional decision.

Yes.

I had a neuro

strategist, the neuro strategist on the show before said, we're people want

to think that, humans are logical.

They're not logical.

They're psycho psychological.

we're emotional.

All of our are emotional.

We are emotional beings.

What separates humans from other species of animals is our emotions.

We're the only species that have emotions.

And what, the other, the second point that people don't realize is

that we are not born with emotion.

We have to, we literally create emotions at about 18 months of age.

We are born with something called affect, which is essentially The feeling of

pleasantness around pleasantness that we experienced about today, but what

we have to do as we begin to verbalize is take all these affective experiences

and categorize them into emotions.

So we have nine basic affect three pleasant one neutral and

six negative affect and we take.

It's like an artist palette.

We can take these affect and combine them in various different ways

and intensities and come up with an infinite number of emotions.

And so we have words that we create as cognitive constructs that describe

all of these affective experiences.

And these emotions vary from culture to culture.

The Finnish language, for example, has certain words, emotional words

that don't exist in North America.

So that's the second thing we have realize is that we are not born with emotion.

We have to create them.

The third thing we have to realize is that as a society, we, diminish emotions.

Emotions are weak.

They're irrational.

They make you vulnerable.

It's not manly to be emotional.

that's

Or you can only display anger, for example, in corporate America.

All, total All these myths are are created to protect, to soothe our

own anxiety around emotions because we don't, we've never been taught

how to be emotionally competent.

Do you think that, do you think this is a good question on that?

Do you feel like, cause I feel like there's a stigma too around masculinity

that, there's a lot, I think there's a lot of men that would struggle

with even the idea of approaching, like talking about emotions cause

they may feel so uncomfortable.

Because they don't even, they wouldn't even know how to express it to begin with.

Do you see that in a lot of

exactly.

your

Absolutely.

And I and you can't blame men for that because they've

never been trained properly.

How, what emotions are, how they function, how we use them, how they

are hidden, genius and superpower.

They were taught by their parents and their grandparents.

And emotions are bad.

Emotions make you weak.

If you, when you're a three year old and you're out running around and

you fall down and skin your knee.

You're told to suck it up, don't cry, rub dirt in it, it doesn't hurt.

You are absolutely told not to feel emotions.

Because when you're emotional as a little boy, you're creating anxiety

in your parents, because they don't know how to deal with you.

And so what their brains are saying is, shut this kid up so I don't feel

nervous about his emotions anymore.

Because that's the way they were raised.

Emotions are to be avoided at all costs, because we're uncomfortable

with And what we know now, in the last 20 years, is that there are skills.

That teach us how to be with our emotions, and when we learn those skills, we unleash

a hidden genius that makes us 50 times more powerful than anybody around us.

And we unlock that hidden genius by learning how to affect label.

So you, as a leader, once you have this skill, which you can learn

in eight weeks, it does not take long to, you have to practice it.

But it only takes eight weeks for the average person to master this skill.

You can walk into any room, any meeting, immediately assess what's

going on emotionally, know exactly what to say and how to say it, and

remain perfectly calm inside yourself no matter what somebody says.

I've been reading, I'm sure you've been following this whole Sam Altman

thing with OpenAI and how it screwed what a screwed up mess that was.

I can guarantee you...

That board of directors was, had to be incredibly dysfunctional

in the way they handled that.

That would never happen to one of my Either one of my, any of my boards that

I train or any of my CEOs, that would never happen, not in a million years.

and and that was just, that was a pure display of emotional incompetence.

it really is bizarre.

I think when you're,

It's emotionally incompetent.

It's We're going to see this kind of behavior over and over again

because leaders are not trained to be emotionally competent.

And that's the problem.

And it's sad because it's so easy to become emotionally competent.

And when you do, everything changes.

You never have a fighter argument again in your life.

Not at work, not with your peers, not with your colleagues, not with

your board, not with your investors.

And you do not have a fighter argument ever again at home.

With your partner, your kids ever fight.

Some arguments go away.

And that is simply because you understand how to.

Bring the level of emotions back down to where you can engage in a

conversation or a debate, but not an

You, you can calm people down to a point where now you can

engage in some kind of problem solving process and get things straightened out.

Yeah, And

that is that kind of what you mean?

You've used the term listening others into existence.

Is that concept in a nutshell or how would you, yeah.

the Fresno Unified School District training

teachers how to use these skills.

And I was doing some advanced training in a peace circle and in our talking circles.

You practice the skill of listening and validating.

And when we were all done, I was doing a debrief.

And one of the people in the circle, one of the participants, was an administrator,

superintendent, assistant superintendent.

And she started to cry.

And she says, That's the first time I've ever been heard before in my life.

I've always been invisible.

I've never been heard.

I felt like you people listened to me into existence for the first time in my life.

Put together, late thirties, early forties, professional woman, educated,

and was that her experience.

And she said, I felt listened into existence.

I said, Oh, okay.

That's exactly what's going on here.

That's incredible that was the way she framed her emotions in that.

That's a very vivid description.

I love that.

And I think it's true because this desire to be known, I think

To be heard, just to be heard.

have How many people really been heard in their lives?

Almost nobody.

there's so much

static and noise anyway, there's so much coming at us, even if it's not, you're

fighting with somebody, if it's just like you're driving down the road and there's

a billion billboards in the radio or the, the Spotify or whatever's going, you just,

there's so much static, thousand emails and then,

And, you just and you can, with these skills, you cut through all of that.

And the beauty of it is, it's a priceless gift to give, and it

costs you nothing to give it.

Nothing.

And you, and when you listen to somebody at this very deep

level, they are so grateful.

You get this immediate positive affirmation coming back to you, their

gratitude for you for taking the time to listen to them, that it becomes

a self fulfilling practice until you get to the point in eight weeks where

this is all you want to do is out that label because it feels so good to

do it and to get the gratitude back.

It's

interesting.

That's very interesting.

How does this relate to the idea of active listening,

Now, take away that word.

Get rid of that word.

Active listing.

The term was coined by Thomas Gordon, who was a psychologist.

got his PhD out of University of Wisconsin Madison.

He was a student of the great humanist psychologist, Carl Rogers.

And he was the one that coined the term, active listing in

Carl Rogers last book 1956.

Yes.

are in arguments, They do a lot of shaming and blaming by saying you,

and what he taught, which was correct, was that when you were talking about your

own emotions, rather than blame somebody else, assert your own emotional experience

and then request a change in behavior.

So, for example, when you leave your socks on the floor, I get really frustrated

because I feel like I'm your mother and I have to keep cleaning up after you.

Would you be willing to clean up after yourself every now and then so that.

So that I don't feel so frustrated.

That's the formulation.

Totally accurate.

And he went around teaching people how to do eye listening.

Then what happened was, the Human Potential Movement of the late 50s

and early 60s and then the Therapeutic Movement picked up this, picked this

thing up as active listening and they turned it into this perverse, ridiculous

formulation that goes something like this.

Dallas, what I think you're really feeling is anger.

Dallas, what I hear you is X.

Dallas what I hear you, what I see you feeling is anger.

It's all about the I statement again.

And the reason that people use the I statement is because It's self soothing

because when I say I, I am now withdrawing into a third person passive voice and

I'm pulling away from and I'm soothing my own anxiety around your emotion.

And how do you feel?

You don't feel heard.

You feel pissed off because now the whole process is about me, the listener.

It's I, I.

Forget active listening.

The right term, the correct term reflective listening

using a you statement.

You're angry.

You're frustrated.

You're pissed off.

You don't feel heard.

You're really scared and terrified.

Yeah, I think that's, yes.

I think I can totally agree with that.

And, reflective listening makes sense.

And that practice that, a good coach would be doing that, whether they

understand that they're doing active listening or reflective listening.

Hopefully they're practicing reflective listening where they say active or not.

But I love your, I love the way that you've broken down the history of that,

and you obviously have a great command of these terms and psychology behind them.

So, I think that's good and reflective listing is fantastic.

If you were going to offer advice to someone that's engaging in.

They're a leader, but they're also engaging in developing their team members.

So maybe I'm a project manager.

And I'm engaging in developing my people.

What advice would you give to a coach?

Cause we have a lot of coaches listening.

What advice would you give to a coach engaging in that process of

First of all, I think the number one duty of any leader

is to develop leaders in their direct reports, and actually they

should be working two levels down.

If you're not working on developing leaders below you,

you are failing as a leader.

That's your number one job.

You're trying to train people to take your job over.

And if you don't like that, if you got, if you're too ego involved to do that,

then you don't belong in leadership.

You belong doing something else.

Become a trial lawyer.

right.

Ego works as a trial lawyer.

does not work in leadership.

I can speak from personal experience on that.

do So how you develop leaders?

The first thing you do is you model leadership behaviors.

That means you've got to have Really strong emotional competency.

You've got to demonstrate emotional self regulation, emotional, emotional

self awareness, emotional self regulation, cognitive empathy.

You've got to be able to listen to people at a very deep level, using both type

1 and type 2 listening as appropriate.

You've got to, you've got to take the time to really understand your people.

And then you have to teach them how to understand the people below them.

What is it that makes them tick?

What motivates people?

What gets them excited?

What turns them off?

What do they really like about what they do?

What do they hate about what they do?

If they didn't have to work, what would they do?

All these questions, so that you can understand a little bit

better what makes them work.

Instead of telling people to park their emotions at the door,

say, bring in all your emotional, bring everything you've got.

I want everything here at the table.

I want you to bring your whole self onto my team.

And we're going to work with it.

Create, learn how to create emotional safety on the team by ethic labeling.

And getting rid of gossip and getting rid of judgment and getting rid of

criticism and learning different ways of coaching people for improvement rather

than criticizing and giving feedback.

Feedback is You've just got, you've got to give people coaching

instructions every single day.

You coach for incremental improvement.

You're not looking for gigantic

That's

And you just make this a practice.

high And that's how you're going to get a performing

I love it.

And I love how you've phrased that where you bring your whole self,

and we definitely preach that a lot in our one on one coaching system.

And I do think it's interesting because a lot of people feel very

uncomfortable with that idea.

They're like, look, I want to engage you as it relates to

your roles and responsibilities.

I need this report on Friday.

I need you to show up on Monday.

I need this and this, and it's

very transactional.

And I just find that people, Lose so much more of the value, and performance

when you operate in that space, because you're not, you're never going to get

the a hundred percent unless you take a

hundred percent of them, and, so I think That's really, I think it's really

exactly right.

That's exactly right.

You can take a couple of minutes and I, so, so, hey Dallas man, tell me

what's going on in your life right now.

And you start telling me what's going on in your life.

I ethically label you, you feel deeply heard and validated.

I say, cool, hey, the report's due on Monday.

You going to be able to get it in on time or do you need some help?

What do you think that person's going to

Oh, so they're going to

probably

That's right.

And they're going to bust their

saying

to get the report done.

And they can't get it done on Monday, they're going to be

honest with you and say, honestly.

I don't think I can.

I got too many.

I've got here all the other things that I've got going and maybe I need some

help from prioritize stuff so that I have I get some help so they feel safe.

They can ask for help rather than they just feel like they've all

themselves and be the macho guy and kill themselves from stress.

That's love that.

That's great.

That's,

that's leadership.

That's down the middle.

That is down the middle leadership

right there.

I love that.

And I love,

it.

yeah, but yeah.

There's so few, everybody that knows someone that is practicing that.

It's just like, oh my goodness, , but based on your techniques here

that you've been able to share.

If we can learn how to affect labor, it's not as much, it's

it's No, simple.

It just takes practice.

You just got to have the knowledge, you got to know how to do the skills, and

then you got to practice the skills.

It's like riding a

It'd be consistent.

be consistent

over eight weeks, and you can learn how to do this, and it changes everything.

That's awesome.

Let's talk about this.

You've got, you teach it at graduate level at college at Pepperdine, you're

an author, speaking, you offer courses, you do all these things.

Tell our listeners how they can find your material, your books, your

courses, and that, where can they

Go to my website, Doug Noll, O U G N O L dot com, and on the homepage,

there are a whole bunch of questions.

What brings you here?

And they're all hyperlinked, so just click on whatever question you answered.

I've got courses on deescalating people and on developing emotional

competency that are quite sophisticated in terms of how they work.

I've written four books, the last one, Deescalate, How to Call Me an Angry Person

in 90 Seconds or Less, came out Atria, Simon Schuster, Beyond Words in 2017,

and is doing very well commercially.

I'm quite pleased with that.

And

It's much much needed these days,

I can be engaged and train and coach individuals,

teams, and organizations in these skills, and that's what I do.

So the, I will not mention who it is, but I will say there is a religious

group in North Carolina that's engaging me to train their teams in these

skills for the work, the outreach they're doing in their ministry.

So I'll be working with them in next year.

So that's a typical engagement where can come in and teach teams and

groups of people how to do this.

Or individual leaders can come in and say, I want to learn these skills.

And so we do a very intense 8 to 12 weeks of training, depending on how

long you want to learn these skills.

And I, of course, I speak workshops and that sort of stuff too.

we can find, we can, the listeners can

find All that on your

All my website, you can find me on LinkedIn.

If you don't want to go to my website, you can find me on LinkedIn.

I'm a very prolific poster on LinkedIn.

So go there and I just, today I posted on a Thanksgiving dinner that almost

went sideways until one of the family members knew how to affect label and save

so if you want, some help for your Christmas dinner,

this is to check him out on LinkedIn cause he's posting on that already.

So this has been great.

Now we always in the show asking our guests who they would like to

hear be a guest on the last 10%.

So, Doug, who would you like to hear as a

guest on the last

I think you should have my wife.

As a complete contrast to who I am, my wife is a spiritual teacher and

counselor, but with deep wisdom.

And she works with she works with a lot of corporate.

People, a lot of corporate leaders, mostly women, teaching them deep, deep

inner skills to get rid of anxiety, get rid of imposter syndrome, and really

tuck into their divine self and see themselves as divine beings And from

that perspective, navigate the world.

So

Wow.

That sounds like a very,

very,

guest a

we are bonded together.

I've never been happier since being married to her and we

just have an amazing life.

Wonderful.

We'll have to reach out and, and see if we can have

a, get her on the show.

We appreciate your time and sharing your wisdom.

You had so many things to, to discuss and unpack around.

Affect labeling and validating emotions and how to manage conflict.

I know the listeners got a lot out of this today, so we just appreciate your time

and sharing your wisdom with us, Doug.

I appreciate you

being on the last 10%.

Thank you, Dallas.