#143 - The Power of Naming Emotions with Doug Noll

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Workplace Communication Podcast, a, uh, podcast dedicated to leaders who want to elevate team performance by refining leadership communication skills. And now let's dive right in with your host, Lindsay La Paquette.

Speaker A: Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Workplace Communication Podcast. I'm your host, Lindsay La Paquette. Today we're speaking with Doug Knoll about the power of naming emotions. What if what most of us call communication problems at work aren't actually communication problems at all? We tend to assume that if we just chose better words, set clearer expectations, or communicated things more directly, things will improve. But what if that assumption is missing the real driver underneath every difficult conversation? Today's guest challenges that idea in a pretty radical way. He argues that there's no such thing as purely rational behavior. That every decision, every reaction, every moment of conflict is rooted first in emotion and nervous system state and only later justified with logic. And if that's true, it completely changes leadership communication actually requires. Today we're joined by Doug Knoll, leader turned peacemaker whose work has carried him from training murderers to become peacemakers in maximum security prisons to the U.S. congressional Budget Office. This conversation is about what actually drives conflict, why most leaders unintentionally escalate tension without realizing it, and how something as simple as naming another person's emotional experience can fundamentally change what happens next. So thank you for joining us for such a fascinating topic, Doug.

Speaker C: Uh, boy, you hit all my hot points, Lindsay. Thank you.

Speaker A: Well, I said to you before we started recording that this is the core stuff that I was trained in and love also. So I'm really geeking out a little bit to get to talk to you here.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker A: So you have a really fascinating background and we'll get into that a little bit more, uh, in just a bit. But I want to start by building an understanding around the core premise of your work, which, as I said, is very similar to mine, that better communication actually isn't really about communication after all. So I think maybe we need to start with, uh, having you explain some of the concepts around your work. So maybe I'll let you just free flow around what you think really is the core. And just if I could ask you to make sure you define, I think some of these words you're using, nervous system and all that may be new to some of the list.

Speaker C: Sure. First of all, by way of background, I am a lawyer. I was a trial lawyer for 22 years and then I went back to school mid career and earned my master's degree in peacemaking and conflict. Studies because I wanted to become a peacemaker. And the one problem that I had when I began that work was I didn't have a good way to calm people down. I get called into very high end, high conflict problems where there's usually a lot of money at stake, relationships are at stake, and litigation is not a good option. So that's what I get called in to work with. I had one yesterday, just by way of example, and extremely emotional. Um, I didn't used to have a good way to calm people down. And I had studied neuroscience long before anybody knew what it was back in the 1990s. Um, I assembled on this in a mediation in 2005. And then two years later, the science caught up because a seminal study out of Matthew Lieberman's lab at ucla, which you might be familiar, came out talking about affect labeling and how the mere act of naming emotions quiets the part of the brain associated with negative emotion and at the same time activates the prefrontal regions in the brain that are responsible for emotional self regulation. So in other words, finding what you're feeling, Lindsay, you're angry, you're frustrated, you don't feel appreciated or supported. Just saying those words calms you down. It calms your brain down. It works on every single human brain on the planet because we're hardwired for this. Well, this was a radical discovery for me, and I started teaching it, writing about it as a mediator and a scholar, and was, uh, getting a lot of pushback in the past, as you can imagine.

Speaker A: I know what you're talking about.

Speaker C: Um, but that's when I received a call from my colleague, Laura Coffer, who read a letter to me written by a woman who was serving a life sentence without possibility of parole, role in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world. And she was asking if she and the other lifers could be trained to become peacemakers, mediators to stop prison violence.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker C: And Laurel said, what do you think? Uh, eight months later, there we were standing in front of 15 women, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, all of them serving life in long term sentences, many of them alike, without possibility of parole. They'd all killed somebody. And we were there to teach them how to become peacemakers and meat eaters. And we started with one skill, naming emotions, affect labeling. The transformations were absolutely unbelievable. And the success in that prison led us into men's prisons, uh, and eventually we were working with men coming out of violent gangs in corporate state prison in California and other really violent places. And in every prison it was transformational. We would teach 25 or 30 people on a yard of a thousand these skills. How to become mediators and peacemakers, how to listen people into existence, how to de escalate by naming emotions. And the whole yard completely changed. I believe you. Yeah. Then it came to me that maybe I should take these skills outside prison. I'm a slow learner. Right. So that led well.

Speaker A: Or you're very brave with where you started. Right. If it works there, then you have the proof. Yeah.

Speaker C: It works anywhere. Yeah. So that led to my fourth book, De Escalate, which came out in 2017 and now is in four languages and, uh, sold 40, 50,000 copies. And uh, I teach today. I teach, I do three things today in intervention work. I step in and mediate disputes like I did yesterday. I teach people these skills. Right now I'm working with high end couples who have never learned how to listen to each other and their relationship is struggling because they don't know how to listen. So I'm working with them. And I also have an interesting, um, portion of my work in post acquisition mergers and acquisitions with private equity where the leaders are coming in and the teams are collapsing because nobody knows how to listen.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: And it's led to my fifth book, which is coming out in September, called Empathy Leadership. I'm a Simon and Schuster author and Empathy Leadership lays out all the science. So now to lay out the science in a non scientific way. As a lawyer, of course, I was steeped in rationality.

Speaker A: I mean, right.

Speaker C: Education and. But I had to conclude after studying neuroscience for decades, that there's no such thing as rationality. Or if you absolutely insist that there's rationality, which I would dispute, but I'm willing to accept your belief, even though it's ungrounded in science, um, that at best rationality is conditional.

Speaker A: Yes, I would agree.

Speaker C: And it's conditional on a nervous system.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Being in a regulated state. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And as a mediator walking into thousands of conflicts and as a teacher walking into maximum security prisons where violence was the currency of the day, it became very clear to me, and it's become very clear to me that every human being is emotional, not rational. I don't even like the word. I prefer the term deliberative thinking. We have the capacity for deliberative thinking because there's no good definition of rationality. If you read any definition, it's just a bunch of gibberish circular reasoning. As somebody who likes precision, there is no precision in the word rationality.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: In deliberative thinking, we can define what that is, and we can show the brain regions where deliberative thinking actually occurs. Um, there's no rational part of the brain. Right. Because there's the rational nucleus. Right.

Speaker A: We used to talk about the left brain was the rational side. And that's all been.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's all B.S.

Speaker A: yeah.

Speaker C: Um, so what I'm teaching today, especially when I'm working with leaders, is teaching that you're not leading people, you're leading nervous systems.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: And the first thing you have to do is learn how to regulate your own nervous system. And then when you walk into a meeting or you're working with a team, you have to be particularly careful and make an assessment of where their nervous systems are right now. Are they regulated or dysregulated? Every single microsecond that we're awake, our, uh, brains are asking three questions. One, can I trust you? Two, am I safe? Three, do I matter to you? If the answer to any of those questions is no, you have a dysregulated nervous system, and 99, 9.9% of the time, it's going to be a no. Not necessarily not trusting you, but there's going to be no to these questions,

Speaker A: the nervous system is going to be flagging. Yeah.

Speaker C: The moment there's this threat status that gets activated, you know, technically. Okay, for you, technical geek eats, it's the amygdala fires off, and we get what's known as the HPA axis, the hypothalamus, uh, pituitary adrenal axis, which releases cortisol and adrenaline and all this stuff into our blood systems. Um, once it happens, the prefrontal cortex shuts down and the ability to engage in deliberative thinking becomes very, very, very difficult.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So my path to this is very different than yours. So I started working with children. I was a speech language pathologist, and I worked with a lot of dysregulated children. I was really specialized in autism and ADHD and fetal alcohol syndrome, and.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker A: I started recognizing that when I was struggling to get a child in a regulated state, they weren't learning language the same way. I started practicing with occupational therapists who are specialized in regulation as one of their areas of expertise. And they would work with the client, and I would notice their language. I could get them to progress massively more quickly. And then I started noticing that as we're trying to teach these strategies, the parents were struggling with them, and I was doing trainings to those who worked with the children in educations, and they were struggling. And I noticed myself, as a parent to two children, that I was struggling with it at home. And I noticed exactly what you said, that the impact of, uh, my ability to be present and listen was heavily impacted by my state of regulation. And that was kind of where I started realizing, wait a second, this isn't just a disability issue. It's very heightened, of course, neurodivergent children. It's still very challenging for the majority of the population. And I'm sure you understand this, but I know the nervous system isn't always supposed to be in a state of grounded calm. I know there's purposes for other. But, um, that, you know, it's interesting the paths we came at, because one of the things that I was learning about in my profession was what's called the school to prison pipeline. So my clients.

Speaker C: I saw the end of the pipeline

Speaker A: end up being your clients down the line. And that was terrifying to me that we were failing all of these people, because everywhere these children were going, we were escalating. They have preexisting significant weaknesses, but we were escalating it. Yeah.

Speaker C: The school system is bad, but the blame is on the parents. The blame is on the.

Speaker A: There's like a holistic. Like it's, you know, it's. I don't mean it's on the school system. I just mean that we don't have the skills.

Speaker C: Exactly. We have so much more knowledge today than we had even 20 years ago that it has not made it into policy circles.

Speaker A: Yeah, I would agree.

Speaker C: The policies that we have today were, for the most part, formulated in the 19th century. They haven't changed a lot. They're based on the rational model of human behavior and human nature, and that's just not true.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And when you start recognizing how we really are, then policy I hope someday will follow.

Speaker A: Right, right, right, right. And also there's the cultural norms, like, to your work and what I'm doing now around building this into leadership. There's the cultural norms around how it's appropriate to show up and what it means to be a leader. And I think those are also lagging quite significantly, as you're aware, because you said you discovered this, what, 35ish years ago, and you're still.

Speaker C: It's very well in business.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: So, um, but the good news is that the solution is really simple. Really simple. Two words. Oh, by the way, I forgot to say, everybody who's listening to this podcast, whether you're Spotify, Apple, Wherever. You've got to give Lindsay five stars right now. Stop. Don't do anything else. Give her five stars. Write a review. I've already done it. You'll see my review out there. Don't screw around. The only way that Lindsay gets out there and gets this important information to everybody is because of her reviews. So don't screw up.

Speaker A: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Speaker C: Anyway.

Speaker A: Yeah. Let's dig into affect labeling. Yeah.

Speaker C: Two words. I used to make it more complicated than it is. And I finally figured out you only have to know two words. You feel, and then you follow it with an emotion. You feel angry, you feel frustrated, you don't feel hurt, you don't feel disrespected, you're not appreciated. You're sad, you're worried, you're concerned, you're upset, you don't feel connected. And then if you get down to the bottom, you feel completely abandoned, betrayed, and rejected.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: And you're all alone. And you feel unloved and unlovable. Every single human being has the same emotions.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And what we learn is when we label these emotions, we have the same profound effect. It inhibits the emotional centers of the brain associated with negative emotion, while it activates the part of the brain associated with emotional self regulation. You feel all you have to say.

Speaker A: So I want to ask the question that I am guessing some of the listeners might be thinking, which is, how do I say that without sounding silly, without sounding like a therapist? It can feel very awkward when you're not at all comfortable with emotions. So how to get. How do people get over that?

Speaker C: Exactly right. It's awkward because as you pointed out, we live in a culture that says that emotions are weak, emotions are evil, emotions are irrational, emotions that make us weak. Emotions are too feminine, too soft, too tucky feely. All wrong. This Myth goes back 3,000 years to the Greeks. It's been propagated through philosophy and theology for at least 3,000 years. It's embedded in us, uh, mostly because we didn't have the knowledge that we have today.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: The ancient philosophers would look at bad behaviors and associate it with emotions. They, uh, see that behavior is bad. It's because of emotions. So emotions are bad. Don't be emotional. And then parents got, you know, parents get in. What do you. You're three years old and seeing you're out running around, you fall down, you skin your knee, you start to cry. What are you told?

Speaker A: Don't need to cry. You're fine.

Speaker C: Don't. You don't always.

Speaker A: Don't Cry, boys, don't cry.

Speaker C: Put on your big girl panties.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker C: We are emotionally invalidated as children.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker C: And emotional invalidation, in my opinion, is the most insidious, pervasive form of abuse that exists everywhere. And it's so pervasive that we don't even know we're doing it. But all you got to do is look at the work of Gordon Neufeld on the other side of your coast in British Columbia and look at his work and realize how bad this really is.

Speaker A: Yeah, he has some great videos on YouTube, by the way, for the listeners, if you want to check out some of Gordon Neufeld's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, me too.

Speaker C: Anyways, so the. The antidote is, instead of emotionally invalidating, emotionally validate, just flip it. You feel. Now, to your point, how do you get over the awkwardness of this? Because we've been socially conditioned not to do that. Practice. So the easiest thing to do is to walk into Starbucks or your local coffee place, right. Whatever you got there in Canada, and, um, hand them your debit card, your order, and say, hey, you look really happy today.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: And just say that. Label the emotion and watch what happens, and just start practicing in socially, really safe places. Use positive emotions. You've got a child, you're looking. Yeah, you're really happy. Label your child's emotions positively. And then slowly, as you begin to see the reaction that you get from people, which will blow your mind, you will build the confidence to edge into the deeper end of the pool. Until you're able to name emotions that are pretty rough. You know, you're angry, you're furious, you're feeling hatred right now. Um, and you'll do it, and you will not be reactive. You will not feel anxious. You will feel nothing but compassion as you experience this. Because as you're able to label people's feelings and watch how it changes them and how grateful they are to you to be seen, it builds up your compassion response automatically.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think because it's so rare, it makes me think, uh, when I used to be a speech path with little kids, they would attune to me so, well, just because I was giving them my full attention and everything they said, right. I'd blow bubbles and they'd pop them and I'd say. And they were so in sync with me. Because when do they get an hour of an adult just sitting down and giving them their undivided attention? And I think, similarly with what you're saying, right. The rarity of the experience of somebody doing that and saying, oh, you feel really happy, it is, uh, inevitably going to make somebody pause and attune to you and connect with you. And I'm hearing two things from what you said. So you said start with some of the easier emotions, some of the more, you know, what we qualify as positive emotions first. And you also suggested starting it at Starbucks or with your kids and starting it in less. Right. In less impactful. If it feels awkward or you feel like you've messed up, maybe it's not the same as doing it to your superior right off. And it's scaffolding, um, in two levels. And I think that allows the person doing this, it allows their nervous system to not be stretched so far in terms of discomfort that you're just gradually building that up. So I think that's a brilliant, brilliant way for people to approach us. And I would love to hear from people in, uh, the comments on the episode. What are you trying so that everyone can share ideas with one another of low risk ways in which they're practicing these skills.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean this is what I teach this. And from people serving life sentences without possibly parole all the way up to C, uh, level executives in massively large organizations, it's the same basic skill.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And I get the same resistance everywhere.

Speaker A: So why is that? That's the part I find so mind boggling a bit is that the knowledge has been out there for so long and I do find the progression. I do see there's change. I see, uh, like yourself, the words emotional regulation, attunement, nervous system. I've known them for 20 years. I'm starting to see them come up in everyday conversation. I'm very happy to see people not in those fields. And it has been a long time and the shift into practice has been a long time. So, you know, why is that? What are the factors you think that are?

Speaker C: Yeah, first of all, there aren't many people out there like you and me that are talking about this. So it takes a certain mass of people to be critical mass. Yeah. Malcolm Gabdell. Right.

Speaker A: Oh, you and I have the same. We'll have to exchange book lists later.

Speaker C: Yeah, it takes a certain mass of people doing this work before it enters into our public consciousness. I mean, I'm doing everything I can writing books and getting out and lecturing and talking and giving, speaking. And I just did a TEDx last week and you know, that'll be out in a couple of weeks where I talk about all this stuff. And so it's mostly. And um, coming on podcasts and talking about it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: It's critical mass so that people can start to hear it. The other thing is, it's basically teaching the concept you feel and then responding to the standard objections. Well, what if I'm wrong? What if I'm afraid I'm going to be rude or it's impertinent? What if somebody says, stop being my therapist, you know, all I hear the same thing over and over because I

Speaker A: know what they are because I hear them too.

Speaker C: Right. And while they are, all they are are just indications of internal fear. I'm afraid to try this.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker C: So I'm going to come up with an excuse why I'm not going to do it. I'm afraid because I'm going to get pushback. Somebody's going to say, oh, don't do that to me, don't do that. And will stuff on me. Don't do that ethically. Who do you think you are? My therapist. That's possibly. Or, oh, uh, I'm afraid I'm going to make a mistake and somebody's going to take my head off. No, it never happened. Not once in the hundred thousand people I've taught. Has anybody ever been upset because somebody made a mistake in the labeling?

Speaker A: No. I've had people correct me. Like, my son will say, no, I'm not angry. I'm really sad. While he's like, externally seems angry, but it's masking his sadness. But it at least opens the door to him being able to tell me, this is how I feel.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's right. So don't ever worry about being wrong. Just keep going. Uh, and here's the. A typical one, just like the one you were doing. Oh, uh, you're really angry. Man, you are really pissed off, Lizzie. No, I'm not pissed off. I'm frustrated. Oh, you feel really disrespected. Yeah. Nobody's listening to you. Yeah. You feel really invisible and you feel completely unappreciated and unsupported. Yeah. And you are really angry.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right, right.

Speaker C: That is the classic pattern.

Speaker A: I think it's. It's the path to. Because it's easy for me to do that to someone else. Sometimes it's hard for me to recognize it myself. Like, sometimes it's chatting it out with friends that helps me recognize what is going on underneath. Because when you're the one that's dysregulated, it can be harder to.

Speaker C: It's not harder, it's easier. Just say, I feel. Name your emotion. Right.

Speaker A: But to know what that Emotion is like, I find.

Speaker C: Okay, all right.

Speaker A: Personal level. It's harder for me at times to get to the deeper thing myself, but if someone else prompts me, it can help me.

Speaker C: Not a difficult problem to solve.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: If you're in a place right now, or anybody who's listening to this and wants to write down, I'm going to give you 10 emotions that will work 99 of the time. Anger, frustration, feeling disrespected, not feeling heard, feeling invisible, unappreciated, unsupported, worried, concerned and anxious. That's going to cover 98% of everything you are going to see are a whole bunch more that you can learn. But just learn those 10 words. That's all you need.

Speaker A: All right.

Speaker C: And when you're feeling upset, name your own emotions. You do it silently. I feel angry. I'm pissed off. I'm really frustrated. I had to do this a few times yesterday in the mediation.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I could tell those ones. It's like getting down to the real deep nuance.

Speaker C: That's where I come in as a coach and teacher to teach people these deeper layers, like the bottom layer. There's seven layers that I teach, and the bottom layer is abandoned, which is something that we all deathly fear because we're social animals and our physical existence used to be dependent upon being connected to a plan.

Speaker A: And that actually links me back when you were talking about, um, when we were saying about why it's hard for people, why it can be hard. And that fear of all the what ifs and the thought I had was it's kind of going against the stream. Right. To be the person who's doing this. Or it can feel like that, whether it truly is or not, but it kind of is because it's not the norm, especially in the workplace. And I think that takes a certain level of, um, willingness to be perceived in whatever way and be able to tolerate that discomfort.

Speaker C: Here's what's going to happen for those of you who are leaders in the workplace, and you start practicing this a little bit and naming the emotions of the people that report to you or people around you, even your superiors and your peers. Nobody's going to look at you weird.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: They're going to start looking at you as somebody who really understands, somebody who can be trusted, somebody who creates safety. You're safe to be around. Somebody who can get that decisional acceleration going where we're making fast decisions. We're not going in meetings and just chomping over the same thing. Over and over and over again. Toxicity disappears. People no longer gossip on your teams. People feel safe. You know those three questions that I talked about at the top of the show? Uh, do I trust you? Am I safe? Do I matter? They're constantly being answered. Yes. Around you. When that happens, people will go the extra mile for you. They'll produce, they'll be creative, they'll be collegial, they'll be cooperative and collaborative. Everything that a leader wants comes from this skill. And what's amazing, this is called empathy. Naming somebody's emotions is what true empathy am. Um, empathy is not feeling what somebody else is feeling. Empathy is not walking a mile in another person's shoes. Empathy is not understanding what another person says. That's all bullshit. Empathy is telling you what you feel.

Speaker A: Yeah. Brene Brown. Right?

Speaker C: Brene Brown. Telling you what you feel. So you understand from your frame of reference that I totally get you that you've been understood. And when you do that, everything changes.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Which is why I wrote a whole book about it.

Speaker A: I know it's, it can sound, um, simplistic, but I fully agree with everything you say. My, my experience has shown me the same. I think we're complexifying a lot of things that really do boil down to nervous system regulation. So I just want to validate what you're saying in case there's any listeners who are thinking, uh, it can't be that simple. And, you know, I understand it's a skill to develop, but the science behind

Speaker C: it is very complex. I don't want to minimize that at all. It's extremely complex to understand why this works. But the practice itself is simple. It's so simple that when I teach parents this skill, they're reporting back to me that within three or four weeks, their three and four year olds are saying, mommy, you're angry. Mommy, you're really upset. Yeah, that's how easy it is to learn. Four year olds can pick it up just by mimetics.

Speaker A: Yeah. That's been my experience as a parent because I had to learn to shift. Not the way I was raised, and I had to learn to shift. And, um, I also appreciate that my kids will call me on things because they've learned that there's a. You know, it's interesting to see. So to link that to the workplace, of course. Right. That's where you'll have your teams who will point out things that you need to know. They're not too afraid to tell you. They don't wait until it blows up because they're Afraid of your reaction. They, uh, feel safe enough telling you things in advance. Right?

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker A: Yeah. So is there anything else people need to know? I mean, I know again, as you said, the science is very complex. I don't want to, you know, complexify it too much, of course, but is there anything else you feel people need to know?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think that what people really need to know here is that we're talking about a foundational skill of life. And ah, it's not being taught in schools. Parents don't know it, so they're not teaching it to their kids yet. Uh, it's based on new science and it's rock solid. I mean I acid tested this for 10 years training thousands and thousands and thousands of people serving life and long term sentences in maximum security prisons and it worked there. It will work in your kitchen, it will work in your executive conference room, it will work on your board, it will work everywhere because the brain is hardwired for this stuff. And as unbelievable and as magical as it sounds, once you start doing it and you see the effects, you will never go back.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you'll be much less stressed yourself. Uh, yeah, it brings a whole different. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Imagine never having a fighter argument spiral out of control. Somebody gets a little snippy with you. Don't argue, don't defend. Just say you feel, oh, you're a little angry right now, you're a little frustrated and watch what happens and the magic happens and you'll just sit there.

Speaker A: Holy.

Speaker C: What did I just do? You just calmed somebody down. You gave somebody the greatest gift you can give to somebody. Validating them, listening them into existence.

Speaker A: M listening them into existence.

Speaker C: That's what I call it. You listen someone into existence and it costs you nothing to give. Nothing. And it's the most valuable gift you can give to another human being. I said you feel.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I was just going to say for the listeners, you know, pick one low pressure moment, decide on it right now. Where are you going to try this? You know, I know what it can be like. You listen to a podcast episode, you think, oh my gosh, this is going to change my life. You go about your busy day and you forget about it. No, no, no. Right now, pick your moment and start practicing this. I think this is a life changing skill and I'm confident that you're going to see that in your everyday practice. So anything else you want to add before we wrap up?

Speaker C: Now, if people want to find me, my website is dougnol. D O U G N O L L Dot com. Um, if you really got interested and you're kind of geeky, I have a, I have, I have a substack. And every week I'm publishing long form articles, usually around 2,000 words long, describing this work and the science behind it. So if you're really interested in doing that, you can go to my sub. It's free. You can subscribe if you want. It's free to subscribe. Um, and that's Doug Noel, D O U G N O l l@substack.com and finally, one other place to go for people who want resources. I have a school community. School is an educational community. I've got the uh, De Escalate Academy set up in school and it's free to join and tons of resources on how to learn these skills and to get there, go to school. S K-O-O-L.com- escalate de escalate. Just put in your email address and you're in. And among other things, every Saturday morning at 8am Pacific, I do a zoom call for anybody to drop in and ask questions. And I answer questions and that sort of thing. So lots of free resources. So that those are from the high end, the very academic to the, you know, come in and learn the practical practice.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: And my website, love it. Which got a ton of resources.

Speaker A: Okay, perfect. So we'll get that all into the show Notes. And I invite everyone to take a peek and choose the option that fits, uh, the level of learning you're looking. Thank you so much for being a guest and I'm excited to get this published and out into the world.

Speaker C: Thank you, Lindsay.

Speaker A: Thank you. So what's clear from this conversation is how much of workplace communication we've been trying to solve at the wrong level. We tend to focus on words, how to phrase things better, how to be more persuasive, how to structure messages more clearly. But what we heard today is that underneath every conversation is something faster and more fundamental happening. The nervous system responding before logic ever enters the picture. And when we start to see that leadership stops being about control or clarity alone, it becomes about awareness of what's actually happening in real time between human beings. A simple shift, like naming what someone else is feeling can sound almost too simple and too small to matter. But as we explored today, it may be one of the most powerful ways to interrupt escalation and change the trajectory of a conversation. So for all of the listeners, I hope that this episode has left you with a renewed commitment to yourself to knowing who you are. And standing tall in your values while also leaving space for those around you. To choosing growth, courage and empathy, even in your most difficult leadership moments. To becoming the leader everyone wants to follow. We'll see you back again next week. Bye for now.

Speaker B: You've been listening to the Workplace Communication Podcast with Lindsay La Paquette. If you've enjoyed this episode, please share and also leave a rating and review on itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you're listening. If your organization is looking to invest in elevating team performance by refining leadership communication skills, you can find more information about Lindsay's coaching, speaking and consulting by visiting lindsaylapaquette.com thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.