If you were to Google de-escalation tips, you would get horrible advice.
“Stay calm and slowly back away.
When someone is angry, they want to feel like they matter. They want to feel met and understood.
They want to know that they have an impact on you.
While many courses focus on the “right thing” to say, the other person won’t be able to hear you if the ENERGY you bring doesn’t meet them where they are.
One of the skills I teach in Untriggered is Mirroring.
This may not be the kind of mirroring you are used it.
It’s not about matching the other person’s emotion or body language, it’s about matching their level of intensity.
In theory it’s simple, but it’s more more challenging to actually implement.
Too much intensity and it can feel scary, too little intensity and it can come off as condescending.
To accurately match their energy requires practice again and again. . .and again.
That’s why I created Untriggered – an interactive learning lab where you get to practice embodying these skills in the scenarios that challenge you most.
Through this embodied practice you’ll learn:
1) How to re-train your nervous system to feel safe in these intense moments
2) The tools to de-escalate anyone (no matter HOW triggered they are)
3) The 5 core principles of “untriggering” yourself and building a bridge back to your empathy – transforming conflict into deeper connection.
Join us for Untriggered here: https://theconnectioninstitute.net/untriggered-2
I like it! Match intensity (but not anger or other emotional content) but just a notch lower. You nicely illustrated the options in the “road rage” example.
Congratulations on bringing your brainchild to fruition. I can feel your excitement. (My partner and I are in the last half (“the other 80%”) of developing a different kind of teaching application for the Argentine tango. We, too, feel excited.
Is your material available in a written form? Even a transcript of the video? Do the lesson videos have captions/subtitles? (I am hard-of-hearing, and, frankly, have little patience for videos, preferring instead to read at my own pace.)