Speaker 1 (00:00.098)
Welcome to the PBL simplified podcast for administrators. Brought to you by Magnify Learning, your customized PBL partner. From over a decade of experience with you in the trenches, we are bringing you this top rated educational podcast designed for visionary school administrators seeking to transform their schools with project-based learning. Launch your vision, live your why, and lead inspired. Here's your host, Ryan Stoyer.
Welcome to PBL Simplified podcast for administrators. I'm your host Ryan Stoyer. Today is a leadership episode and we're talking about how do we deescalate situations with angry parents, students or your teachers. Today on the podcast, we have Doug Knoll, JDMA, who left a successful career as a trial lawyer to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity and he executes his calling at many levels.
He's an award-winning author, teacher, trainer, and highly experienced mediator. Doug's work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts to training life inmates to be peacemakers and mediators in maximum security prisons. His fourth book, Deescalate, How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less, was published by Beyond Word Publishing in September 2017. It's an Amazon bestseller. Deescalate is now in five languages and in its second.
printing. It's a great conversation. We're going to talk about how human behavior is driven by emotions and not rationality. You ever encountered an irrational person? Doug is going to use this term called affect labeling. It's his technique to deescalate anger and to create connection. He's going to address motions as being crucial to effective problem solving. He's going to tell us what order we need to put those in and
How does this all apply to angry parents and students? I'll keep bringing Doug back to that work. He does a great job of connecting with us. He works with hundreds of principals and teachers every year, but he's also out in other communities that maybe we wouldn't expect abroad or even here in the States where he's working in maximum security prisons. That's a little different take. And at the very end, we're going to role play a principal talking with a staff member who's not engaged in the faculty meeting. Does that sound familiar? So make sure you tune in to the very end.
Speaker 2 (02:27.98)
And if you do need to revamp your faculty meetings, we have a one page playbook for winning faculty meetings. If you go to the main homepage at magnifypbl.com, all the way at the bottom, there's a place that you can enter your info and get this free playbook right away, comes right to your email. Cause your student culture will never rise above adult culture. If you want your students to be empowered, then you have to empower your staff. And if you give your staff sit and get, they will be very comfortable delivering sit and get in the classroom.
With this winning playbook formula, it's gonna take you less than 15 minutes to upgrade your faculty meetings so that they're filled with voice and choice, collaboration, and energy. So go to magnifypbl.com, our homepage, all the way to the bottom, and you can see where you can get that free download right to your email. All right, today we've got Doug Knoll, who's trained hundreds of teachers, principals, and administrators how to manage angry parents and students with his unique and powerful de-escalation skills.
Doug, know why you're on the podcast. Thanks for being here.
Thank you, Brian. I'm really happy and excited to share with your audience what I
get all of our leaders, the antennas just went up, right? This is something that they get every day. They've got to train their teachers on how to do this. So I'm super excited to have you today. But everybody on the podcast gets the exact same first question. So I've got to ask you, what is your why for the work that you do?
Speaker 1 (03:57.794)
My why is that fights and arguments between human beings are completely unnecessary. And with the right skills, you can never have a fighter argument again with any human being on the planet. And my why is to teach the world how to do this.
All right, Doug, now I really know why you're on the podcast, because don't, half of us don't even believe you.
And that's very normal.
And then all of us want to believe that it's true. Right. So, um, so let's just jump in because, you know, I don't have to convince our audience that angry parents is, is a problem, right. In their world, they know it angry parent. They're part of the job. So how do we help principals deal with angry parents? Let's just jump right in.
Speaker 1 (04:41.39)
All right, the skill is called affect labeling. It is the skill of listening to and reflecting the emotions of another person as opposed to listening to the words or trying to use rationality or reasoning to try to calm an angry person down or problem solve. First, number one, human beings are not logical and not rational. There is no such thing as rationality. We are not rational beings. I teach, I'm a lawyer.
I was a trial lawyer for 22 years. I'm a law professor, and I teach graduate courses at Pepperdine University. The first thing I teach my graduate students is there is no such thing as rationality. There is no science to support the idea of rationality. And if you don't believe me, go out on Google, ask for the definition or go to Chatchie PT, ask for the definition of rationality. And what you will get is a circular definition that has no meaning.
What we have known for over 20, we neuroscientists have known for over 25 years is that every single decision, every behavior we engage in, every action we take as a human being, whether we're 18 months old or 90 years old is emotional. And yet we live in a culture that says that emotions are bad, they're evil, they make us weak, they're wrong, they're irrational. And that's because we've been fed lies for 4,000 years by philosophers and theologians who believe that
we were rational beings and the rationality was the highest form of human behavior. And our whole educational edifice is based on the proposition that human beings are rational. Four year olds are rational, six year olds are rational, eight year olds are rational. So that's the first thing we have to get is that we are not rational beings, we're emotional beings. And once you get that, everything changes.
parents are rational, right?
Speaker 1 (06:33.122)
Because all of this crazy behavior that you think is so crazy now makes perfect sense. Or they're not irrational, they're just having an emotional moment. Then the next step we have to learn is that rationality has no place in relationship of any kind. Business, personal, professional. There is no such thing as rationality in relationship. It's all emotional. Once you make that mindset shift, you're ready to learn how to affect label. Affect labeling, I'm not sure who invented it. I did not invent it. I discovered it.
And I'm, to my knowledge, one of the few people on the planet is actively teaching it. But ethic labeling is a skill of listening to emotions rather than to words. And so my rubric is ignore the words, listen to the emotions, reflect back the emotions with a you statement. So, so Ryan, man, you are really pissed off. You're frustrated. You're angry. You feel completely disrespected.
You don't feel heard and you feel invisible and you feel completely unappreciated and unsupported. And you're really anxious and worried and so forth and so on. are seven layers of emotions that I teach people to go through. Now I discovered this in 2004 as a pro I'm a pro among other things, a professional mediator in high conflict cases around the world. And
I discovered this by enlightenment, I guess, an enlightened moment in a difficult mediation I had in 2004. I saw what happened. I analyzed what I did and then started trying it at other mediations and it worked perfectly every single time. But I didn't know why it worked until 2007. In 2007, neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues at UCLA
published a brain scanning study called Putting Feelings Into Words. And what they did was they put people through brain scanning machines, FRMI, functional magnetic resonance imaging machines, and watched how the brain reacted when somebody told them or they told themselves what they were feeling. And they found something really counterintuitive and profound. What they found was that when we engage in affect labeling,
Speaker 1 (08:51.372)
The emotional centers of our brain are in the moment highly activated, become inhibited. While at the same time, a part of the brain called the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex becomes activated and people calm down. The process takes about 90 seconds. This year, we learned through other brain scanning studies that in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, emotions are created. And the emotional concept, the cognitive construct of emotions are created.
And that's where our emotional database is. So when we become reactive, oftentimes the emotional centers of the brain will override the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. We will lose control of our emotional database. We'll no longer be able to process our emotional experience. And now we become reactive. We've become dependent upon the childhood behaviors we had at three and four and five, six years old. That's why when we see 40 year olds going crazy, there are 40 year olds acting like six year olds.
because in that moment, that's what's going on. And Lieberman and his students over the years have published a number of studies around affect labeling, showing the profound effects it has on the human brain. I have used this technique in my professional practice for over 25 years now. I spent 10 years in maximum security prisons, incarcerated people, mostly serving life sentences for murder, how to stop prison violence. And today we're in...
15 prisons in California, the Connecticut prison system, 15 prisons in Greece and three prisons in Europe. And in every single one of those programs, we've seen exactly the same effect and both working in both men's and women's prisons. And as I said, as you mentioned, I've trained lots of school administrators, principals and teachers these skills, and it's just radically transformed their classrooms and their school campuses. I mean, it's just, this is the foundational skill of life. And I get really excited about it because it's so powerful. And so in fact,
the
Speaker 2 (10:46.134)
I heard you, we've got this affective labeling again. don't think it's a stretch. We go back to our example of a principal in front of an angry parent. It's not a stretch for them to say that angry parents not acting rationally. Let's check the box.
Not even a stretch. That's just the absolute truth of what the parent is acting emotionally.
Yeah, right. So I like that we're labeling that, right? For, cause I think it would be, I think our principles, they're the ones that have to be level headed, right? Like that's the part of their job, but I'm not sure they've labeled these things exactly the way that you have. So, So it might be, Hey, I've labeled this parent as an irrational parent. So now I just need to get through this meeting and move on to something different. But if we're really good, yeah, that's right. If you're listening and you're not watching you, Doug shaking his head, right? Like that's, that's not right. So what is the right way?
No, that's not the right way.
The right way, the mantra is deescalate, then problem solve. And so what we wanna do as professionals, we wanna get into the problem solving mode right away. Get this person out of here. I just wanna solve the problem, go away, no bother me. All that does is make things worse, as we all know. If you engage in early problem solving in any relationship, all you're gonna do is make people angry and more upset. Or if you have power over, you can kick them out. You can kick them out and control the situation.
Speaker 1 (12:00.472)
but you have not solved the problem and it will rise its ugly head again in some other way. There will be even more of a mess. So the secret, put on the head of the peacemaker and listen to the feelings that the parents experiencing in that moment. They will not express them. That parent will not express what's going on. You are trained. Once you're trained, you'll be able to read those emotions accurately, efficiently and effectively and fast and effortlessly.
And you'll know exactly what that parent is feeling. And all you do is say you are. And then you work through the seven layers of emotions, starting with whatever emotion presents. Typically, it's going to be anger or frustration. Mr. Jones, you are really angry and frustrated. You feel completely disrespected by the system. You don't feel heard. You feel invisible. You feel appreciated and unsupported. And you're really anxious and worried about your child. And you're really appalled.
and offended at the way you've been treated. And you're feeling a little embarrassment because you're so angry and you feel sad and upset and unhappy and depressed. And at the end of the day, you feel like the system is completely abandoned and betrayed you.
Speaker 1 (13:22.338)
Just saying those words in that order, that parent, Mr. Jones, will immediately calm down. He cannot help himself because it's the way our brains are hardwired. He will calm down. And then once he calms down, you'll look for a verbal response. Yeah, exactly. Something like that. Outing of the head, a dropping of the shoulders, and a sigh of relief. The four involuntary relaxation responses that show you that you've successfully deescalated. Then your next question is,
depending upon the circumstances, how do we make things right? How do we solve this problem? What do you suggest we do? Invite them into a negotiation about solving the problem. But you cannot ask those questions until you've got them deescalated. And that's essentially how, that's in a very short abbreviated form, that's how we do it.
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you. know that's the concise version for sure. I'm, I got pushed you in that direction, but, so I think our, I mean, in principle, obviously it takes some training, right? We're not all certified just now, but I think our principals can see probably a time where that's What about when they look at their staff and some teachers that are not handling their students, right? Cause if part of a student's job somewhere in there is to rattle their teacher, like every
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:39.918)
every student thinks it's funny, right? If the teacher gets rattled and if they take the bait and they do get angry and they lose it, if you will, they become emotional, then the student has won, right? And the teacher has lost. so how does the teacher...
I see that differently. I understand the problem. But I think students that act out in the classroom, either they're trying to bait the teacher or they're misbehaving.
There are a couple of things that are going on. The most important one is they're looking for connection. They don't have, and they're either looking for connections from their peers to be liked, to be popular. That's a form of connection, or they're even looking for connection from the teacher. And by provoking the teacher, they're getting some attention paid to them that although it's a negative kind of feeling, they still get that feeling of connection. That's number one. It's the need for connection. The number two problem is,
that these students unfortunately come from family environments where they're being emotionally abused. And I don't mean emotionally abused in the legal sense. I mean in the insidious pervasive sense that they're emotionally invalidated every single day. Hey, kids, stop crying. Hey, don't be angry. Hey, don't you give me lip like that. That's emotional abuse. And almost every child in every family faces it. And they bring this abuse so they never learn how to be emotionally intelligent.
and they bring this to the classroom. And so that's the second thing that's going on. They just don't have emotional control. They have no self-regulation control because they have not been taught how to do that at home because their parents don't know how to do it. Right. those are the two mental problems. so the way, and, and affect labeling solves both problems. One, it creates connection because it calms the child's brain down. And two, over a period of time, and by a period of time, I mean like in a couple of months,
Speaker 1 (16:31.436)
you're teaching the children in the classroom how to emotionally self-regulate themselves. I cannot tell you how many stories I get from teachers who have talked about how they started affect labeling and within weeks that the kids in the classroom are all affect labeling each other and they are all self-regulating. And there is no more upset in the classroom. There is no more craziness. And if somebody acts out, another student will say, hey, Sam, you're really angry right now. You're really frustrated. And Sam immediately calms down and
they get back to business. It happens every single time because that's the way our brains are hard.
So sounds amazing, doesn't it? It does. It is. It is truly miraculous. And what is unbelievable to me is how few people know about this, skills and how our brains actually work. We're so embedded into this idea of rationality, that the idea that we can literally listen to profound behavioral effect on a human being, especially a school aged child. And it's absolutely amazing to watch.
I've watched people who are murderers stop prison riots using these skills in maximum security violent prisons. I mean, it works every single time.
So what's the obstacle then Doug, for people accepting those? And let's stay with educators, like teachers, principals. If I just try to think of one, like our principals that are listening, if they label those things they think they might be taking advantage of, might be one. Does that sound right?
Speaker 1 (18:06.862)
That's a very, it's a common, here are the common objections. One, it'll never work for me. Two, yeah, if I reflect somebody else's emotions, it might make me weak. Three, I could never do that because it seems so rude, patronizing and manipulative to tell somebody what they're feeling. All of those are cultural programming that is inside ourselves that we have to overcome in order to do this.
because we've been taught that emotions are bad, emotions are evil, emotions make us weak, emotions allow us to be exploited, emotions are evil and irrational. We have to overcome all of that cultural programming in order to engage in affect labeling. And once we overcome that barrier, which only takes a week or two of practice to overcome it, and we start seeing the results, the practice becomes self-affirming. I've taught tens of thousands of people how to do this. And every single person, toy person has said,
my God, I can't believe how it's changing my life. Why didn't I know this 20 years ago? We just live in a culture that completely demeans the concept of emotion. And as I said before, our whole educational edifice is based on the assumption that human beings are rational. And so the idea of responding to emotion rather than this concept of rationality is alien because rationality says emotions are bad, emotions are evil, emotions have no place.
in the educational context. We're literally telling students, come to school, leave your emotions out on the front steps and bring your school books in and be good little rational boys and girls and learn. That's what we're effectively saying. And that is completely unrealistic and it's wrong and it's abusive.
There is so much more we can do. There is so much more we can do. And it's so much better in education if we just understand how human beings actually work. There.
Speaker 2 (20:03.342)
Yeah. A lot of kids that you are trying to even, even if it's not explicitly told, right. They're, trying to leave home life at home, right. So they can come to school and do school. Right. And I can, I can think of a moment I had in the classroom where I had a young learner and this young man just overwhelmed with the assignment that I had given. And, you know, he had, he'd kind of snapped. So he kind of cursed from across the, across the classroom, right. And right at me, said, ah, you know, Mr. Stoyer and
You can put the Mr. Stoyer in there. So I just say, you know, Alex, I really appreciate that you respected me by saying Mr. Stoyer, but I don't think we can use that language. You know, and I asked him to leave the classroom and then, so just give you my method and then you dissect it for me. Okay. And then, so he would go, he would leave the classroom. You know, we could kind of continue. And then when I got a moment, I would go out and I'd talk to Alex and say, Hey, what's going on? You know, what's the deal? This doesn't usually happen. I'd talk through that. Is there something else I should do in that situation?
Because it's public, right? Like he has put that out from 30 other students. He has put down the gauntlet, if you will, of I'm taking on Mr. Stoyer.
So Alex man, you're really right now you're really feeling pissed off and you're really angry and frustrated and you're feeling completely invisible and unheard and you feel like there's just no support around you whatsoever and it makes you really anxious and worried and concerned and you and underneath you're feeling humiliated and embarrassed and you're really sad and you want to help and you're not getting it.
And it's really, it's really, really upsetting to you. And you feel like you've been completely abandoned.
Speaker 1 (21:47.404)
and he will completely, he'll start to cry is what's gonna happen. Yeah, Mr. Stewart, that's the first time anybody listened to me and really heard me. Okay, how do you wanna solve the problem?
Good. I feel again, like you said, that's, that's less than 90 seconds, right? I think he went through the same subset of, right? is that every time you go through all of them or you just name a couple that are showing themselves? is
How long did that take?
Speaker 1 (22:18.542)
You name, you do what you have to do. There are seven layers of emotions. Each layer has four or five different types, or as many as 10 different emotions on each layer. The layers are anger, disrespect, fear, disgust, shame, sadness, and abandonment. And what you just noticed is that I say the same thing over and over again because we all share the same emotional experience.
and we all share, we all experience the same emotions. And yet we never recognize that we're sharing the same emotions all the time. All we do is focus on the words, not recognizing that we're all having the same basic emotional experience. And all we have to do is go under the words, focus on the emotional experience that we're all having. And it changes everything. And here's the other thing that's really cool. You've got a class of say 30 kids.
and acts there as acting out and you affect label him and get him calmed down. You just calm down everybody in the room because they all have the same emotions too. And you just literally settled every child in that room by affect labeling Alex.
Speaker 1 (23:35.308)
I mean, it's just amazing how this works. And it's so counterintuitive and so counter normative to everything that we've all been taught about education and teaching kids and working, you know, working in classroom management. It goes completely opposite of everything that we've been taught, but I will guarantee you that what you have been taught as administrators and teachers is not grounded on any kind of neuroscience. I will absolutely guarantee, because I have trained in schools and I have looked at the training that people offer. And I look at what these PhDs or EDDs come in and teach.
And I just want a gag. Where is the science to support what you're saying? And there is none. There is none.
So Doug, it makes me think through. So, and your work is when we have an angry parent, an angry child. So obviously at that point, we're implementing these tools because it's manifested itself in some way physically or verbally, we've seen that there's an angry person in front of us. What about the angry person that stews and maybe you don't know?
What does that look I love talking about the 14 year old male kid, right? And what do we see? We see numbing out. The kid drops his head, doesn't look at you, stands there, and the most you're gonna get out of that kid is a grunt. Sure. Right? Yeah. Happens all the time. If you're working in that age group, know, high middle school or low high school. You start affect labeling.
What if you don't even know what it is? So you just start at the top. Tom, you are really angry and frustrated and you're pissed off and you feel completely invisible and unheard. You just start going through the list and you feel unsupported and you're really worried and anxious and even scared. And you you just feel disgusted by everything because nobody gets you.
Speaker 1 (25:32.354)
And you're feeling shame and embarrassment because you don't know how to fit in. And you're sad and worried and upset and unhappy. And you're miserable and depressed. And really at the bottom, you feel completely abandoned and all alone and unloved and unlovable.
Now, what you're to see with that 14 year old is when you're connecting, that young person is not going to move a muscle. They're not going to, they're not going to run away. They're not going to give you feedback because they're too scared. They don't feel emotionally safe, but as long as you're labeling them, you're creating that safe space and they will eat it up because that's what they crave more than anything else is human connection and they are not getting it and they don't know where to get it. So what do do to protect themselves?
They numb out. And so when you see that numb child, but you're looking at a child who does not know what emotional safety is, and they're numbing out in order to protect themselves from the painful emotional universe that they live in, and all you have to do is affect label and you create safety, you create emotional safety. only for 30 or 40 or 90 seconds, but that's all it takes. But if you iterate this over a school year, let's say for example, over a term, a semester,
10 times maybe, there'll be a radical shift in that child. And that child will look at you and be so loyal and intensely loyal to you and wanna do anything the child can do to please you. You won't believe it. And the misbehavior is away.
that
Speaker 1 (27:12.886)
and
Speaker 1 (27:28.504)
Yeah, that's great. Two things can happen. Well, first of all, I don't know one instance where if you labeled the wrong emotion, the speaker got angry at you. first of all, most everybody, every speaker who's angry, every angry person or emotional purpose reports that they don't care whether you're right or wrong. What they care about is that you're trying to listen and understand them. So.
First of all, so the rule is you cannot make a mistake doing this. You will not make any mistakes. Trust your brain. Part of the training is learning how to listen to emotions. Our brains are hardwired for this. And there's a whole piece on evolutionary biology that I, as you can tell, I'm very science based on this. There's a whole piece on evolutionary biology that explains why we are hardwired to listen to and respond to somebody else's emotions. The second thing is that we might be wrong. I might say, hey, Ryan, man, you're really angry.
And you say, angry, man, man. Really frustrated. Yeah. You feel completely disrespected and unsupported and unappreciated. Yeah. You're really worried and concerned. Yeah. And all things just really pisses you off. You're really angry. Yeah. Why is it that I said, you're angry the first time? And he said, no, I had to drop through a few layers and say, yes, I'm helping him reconnect his right ventral.
ventral lateral prefrontal cortex with his emotional database. It wasn't connected. So when I said, you're angry, there's no way he could connect that. And he's going to say, no, fine. I'll just start working through some other emotions that he can relate to. I'll get those connected. He calms down. Everything gets reconnected. I'll come back and say, you're angry. He said, yeah. Happens all the time.
Yeah, think you learned you
Speaker 1 (29:15.01)
Don't you just don't you can't make mistakes here. If somebody gives you an emotion, no, I'm not angry and frustrated. You say you're frustrated. But if you really are angry, you drop it and then come back to it because they are angry, but they just can't process it yet.
Speaker 1 (29:32.59)
And just be patient, which is easy because the whole thing only takes 90 seconds, 120 seconds at the most.
Yeah, that's right. So if I'm a principal and I've got an adult who seems checked out, right? I'm doing a PD year. got a faculty meeting and everybody's involved. This person isn't, there's a reason they're checked out. Right. Right. So I, Hey, can you come see me afterwards or just come see me in my office? Do I lead with this? Say, Hey, it seems like, seems like you're angry or frustrated. And there's some portions.
I would start off with, I would start off a little bit differently. Okay. So I take this faculty member who was checked out in the meeting, something's distracting, there's something going on, they're bored, they're unhappy, they're angry, they're pissed off, whatever it might be. And you choose not to address it in the meeting, which is appropriate. You bring him in and say, so Ryan, you know, in the faculty meeting, you were looking a little checked out, what's going on?
And then you open up just to tell what's going on, describe to me what's going on.
Right, I'm real busy. didn't think I had time for this. I'd rather be grading papers.
Speaker 1 (30:38.254)
Oh, Ryan, man, you're feeling completely overwhelmed. You're feeling frustrated, frustrated that you're getting being asked to come to a meeting when you have so much other work to do. And you're really worried that you're not going to get your grades in on time. And you're really exhausted and worn out. And it's kind of pissing you off that have to do stuff that you don't see as productive. And, you know, it's just you're just really disgusted by the whole thing. Exactly. And tell me more. What else is going on?
I
Speaker 2 (31:06.402)
Yeah. So I mean, the kids were rough today. Kids weren't listening. I'm trying to help them out. It's like they don't even want to be helped. And now I've got this. So I'm getting farther.
Yeah, you got this crazy stuff going on with the kids. They're acting out. They're not listening. They're not behaving. You're feeling like you're failing as a teacher because you can't connect with them and get them engaged to learn. And you came into this work to do great work and the kids seem to be fighting you every inch of the way. it's just, you're just really frustrated. And you feel despair at times and hopeless and helpless. What can you do to help these kids? And today was just one of those days when I was just completely overwhelmed.
And so you came into the faculty meeting just in despair over what to do.
Yeah, for sure. And then, and then your next move is to switch and say what
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (31:56.374)
Almost, almost, almost. I'll say, okay, great Ryan, anything else?
Speaker 2 (32:03.33)
No, I think that's everything.
Okay, what kind of help do you need? How can we help together, help you work forward in this and start solving some of these problems? What do you need and how can we solve these problems? What do you need?
I need some help with third period. Like third periods one, they get, they're off to a bad start. They're in a rut. need, I need some help in third.
Okay, so we don't have time right now, but let's set up an appointment in the next year or two, and we'll just walk through some strategies on how to deal with your third period students. Does that sound good?
Yeah, that would be great.
Speaker 1 (32:38.414)
Okay, so would tomorrow at noon work or Wednesday at 1 p.m.?
tomorrow at noon, that's my prep, that'd be perfect.
Beautiful. Why don't you show up here at noon and we'll start working through the problem and we'll get this solved,
All right, thank you.
You're welcome. That's how you do it. All right. And then what you do is you start teaching them how to affect label. Because that's what they, if you haven't brought training into the school, that's what you do. Cause that's what his problem is. He doesn't know how to listen to the emotions.
Speaker 2 (33:10.914)
Right, because in my conversation with a student, right, if I'm a teacher that's learned that and gone through it and we label some things, see a student who's checked out, pretty similar process, right?
Exactly! The human brain is the human brain. Yeah. Doesn't matter.
That's great.
It's so simple. It's so simple and so effective.
Yeah, and for our principals that are listening, just want to say like, Doug and I did not plan the role play we just did, rather we just made that up. But it makes it so clear. I think I feel better.
Speaker 1 (33:45.062)
Right, even though you're role playing, it still has this profound effect on your brain that settles you and you feel settled and grounded and you feel like you've really been heard even though it's a role play. And this is the experience that all of my students get when we role play. They feel it, they can actually feel it even though they're not angry or upset.
Super good,
It's amazing.
Doug, how can our principles get more of this? We'll put URLs and your social handles in the show notes. And I'm going to give you one last question here to give us one last tip, but give us a few, where should they start if this is making sense to them?
Yeah. So my website is dougnoll.com. If you're interested in specific training, I've got a whole bunch of different ways to do that. And that's dougnoll.com slash school dash D dash escalation dash training. I think that's the URL, right? Yep. And then the other one, if you just want resources, then you go to dougnoll.com slash D dash escalation dash
Speaker 1 (34:50.988)
I think it's dash skills dash resources. Is that the URL I gave you?
Yep, yep, we'll put it all in the s***.
So it's de-escalation skills resources dashes all the way through and school de-escalation training, school dash D dash escalation dash training. Those are the two pages. The school de-escalation training is specifically for school administrators. I go from the very inexpensive to the massive project to train a whole school district practically. Obviously the prices are different depending upon the scope. then, then on the resources page,
You get access to some free eBooks. You can learn about my online courses. I've got my fourth book, Deescalate, is there available to purchase. just a bunch of stuff there to get you started in the work. I've also got a YouTube channel called The Power of Emotional Competency and Douglas Noll Peacemaker YouTube channels. And I've got a ton of videos on this stuff. And so there's just a huge amount of...
written hundreds and hundreds of blog articles. So if you Google me with specific like Doug Noll teachers, Doug Noll schools, stuff like that stuff will come up. A lot of free material.
Speaker 2 (36:05.186)
You're Googleable. I love it. So we'll for our audience, if you go to pblshare.com, pblshare.com and just put in there what it is that most resonated with you about this episode in particular of dealing with angry parents and angry students. Just put that in pblshare.com and we'll send you a copy of Doug's book. So the first five people to do that, we'll send you a copy of Doug's book. Just go to pblshare.com.
So Doug, let's say kind of last thing here. Imagine you're in front of a room full of teachers and principals and they're pouring their hearts and souls into work every day. They truly desire the best outcomes and opportunities for their learners. What's the, what parting advice do you have for them to help them on their journey?
Speaker 1 (36:50.762)
Learn how, number one, recognize that all of your students are emotional beings, not rational beings, and learn how to listen to and reflect those emotions. And that will change everything, almost overnight.
I love it. It's the most powerful skill a or administrator can have without doubt.
I love it, Doug. think you did a nice job. I appreciate you jumping in and we just jumped into a role play right there and you know, got to kind of see it. And, you know, I asked you to give you, uh, you know, your life's work here in. Well, I think I did it in the first three minutes, actually. I pushed you and you did a great job. we'll put all your, all your stuff in the show notes. make sure that you all, uh, grab that Doug. Thanks for being on the podcast today. Appreciate it.
It's what I do. That's right.
Speaker 1 (37:42.88)
I Ryan, thank you.
All right, PBL simplified listeners, this has been your crash course, 90 seconds to deal with those angry parents, angry students. We all know that you have them and it's probably really uncomfortable to deal with them because you've never been trained. So let's end that. It's time to be trained. Time to do this with confidence and to serve our kids well in this way. So thank you for tuning in today. Go lead inspired.
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