How To Stop Yelling

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. I wanna talk about a subject that's a little embarrassing, maybe even shameful, and that is when you lose your temper. I know that for many years I always thought of myself as a person that never lost his temper until I had children. And very quickly as a parent, you discover that if your children are misbehaving and you come into a room and you try and talk with them politely and nicely and respectfully, and they don't listen, that if you raise your voice, if you start to increase the volume, really increase the tension. All of a sudden, kids, no matter what they're doing, are gonna snap to attention and they're gonna pay attention to you. They're gonna do what you said. You have added energy and really ultimately emotion into the discussion. And at first, as a dad, you're like, well, I didn't want to do that. I didn't wanna have to yell. But man, did it feel good to have them pay attention to have them react to what I was saying? And I think that this is the first place to start. If you realize I don't want to be a yeller now, I didn't want to be a yeller even before I had children, I kind of always thought of myself as this very even keel. We can always use rationality. We can find a way to negotiate, right? That's my personality. But then you have these kids, you end up yelling once at them. You realize, Hey, that really makes them work. Then it's easier the second, third, fourth time to be the person that yells and you start realizing you're doing it pretty easily.

Vance Crowe [00:01:31] But even for me, that's not the point when I realized something was wrong, when I realized something was wrong, was when I heard my 6-year-old yelling at my 4-year-old and my 4-year-old yelling at my 1-year-old. And I'm sitting there being like, where did you kids learn this? And had the horrifying and shocking realization that all parents have, which is they learned that terrible habit by watching me. And so a few weeks, maybe months ago, I had to take a really honest look at how I was communicating with my children, really communicating with everybody around me when something frustrating was happening. I discovered that there were a lot of times when even the children weren't misbehaving, but let's say the handle broke off of a cabinet or something happened that I couldn't find a book bag that I needed, or a piece of computer equipment. And I find myself getting really angry and starting to say things out loud or to swear out loud, I'm not proud of any of this. I'm saying it as clearly as I can. Because maybe you see these habits in yourself, and maybe like you, you all of a sudden are like, well, I don't wanna be this person anymore. What is it that I can do to stop losing my temper? And I think there are a couple of things that you can do that will immediately help you get better. But once you've given your mind the opportunity to let go of your passions and and run wild and be really extreme, it's very hard to get it back in.

Vance Crowe [00:03:05] So first I wanna talk about why is it that we yell? You know, one of the things I talk about in my class for interest-based communicating where I'm teaching people how to have better conversations is, the reason that we yell is because we know people aren't paying attention to us. And even if you are in a conversation with a person, the other person is responding to the things that you're saying, but they're not saying the things that you want. We have to ask yourself, why do I raise my voice? Why do I add anger to it? Now, psychologists have taken a look at it, and they think that somewhere down deep in your brain, when you are articulating an argument and another person doesn't agree with it, your brain says, it's not that my argument isn't great or clear, I'm not describing this perfect. It must be that you are not paying attention, you are not prioritizing this. So I'm going to add in emphasis and energy to tell you how serious I am. I'm gonna yell, right? I'm gonna raise my voice. But this never does anything to improve the quality of the conversation. And in fact, all you're doing is triggering. And the other person, Hey, this person is becoming really emotional about this, and if I wanna slow down the emotion, maybe I should give in. But you're not winning the argument. You are just dominating the other person. So when you start to realize like, wait a second, when I am adding emotion, I'm adding frustration. I'm adding swear words in whether it's when you're in a room all by yourself and you want everyone to know that you're angry when you're sitting across from a spouse that's completely capable of understanding what you're talking about, but you're just not getting along.

Vance Crowe [00:04:39] Or when you're with children that want you to, that you wanna just cooperate, you have to say, wait a second, I am injecting emotion so that my needs go to the top of the list so that my needs become prioritized above everyone else's. And that's not the right space to be in. Sometimes you need your needs prioritized above other people. Of course, there's an emergency situation, somebody might get hurt. You wanna use that emotion to get priority. But every time you jump the line, now you make it so everyone around you has to also use emotion to jump the line. So you notice that your children, maybe they aren't yelling at each other. Maybe what they're doing is they're quick to cry, or they're quick to get really upset and angry. It's because they have watched that when your emotions trigger off and they go into this conversation and they all of a sudden vaunt you to the top, they, they see very clearly, I should do that too. So once you've established, okay, what's going on? When I'm angry, when I'm injecting this emotion, it's that I'm trying to prioritize things. Now you can first recognize that, okay, I'm feeling a bunch of emotion. What is it that I am trying to prioritize? And usually what it is that you're trying to prioritize is the resolution of a fear. Now, this may seem off to you. You may be like, no, I'm not afraid. I'm, I saw these employees make this giant mess. They've done it 10 times, and I'm not afraid, I'm just getting frustrated at this.

Vance Crowe [00:06:11] But that's not actually what I think is going on. I think when I say, what is the emotion underneath it? What are you afraid of? What else is going on? Is we show emotion as a way of saying, pay attention, prioritize this. But then the rational person says, what is the thing that is going to happen as a result of this? Because whatever it is that's underlying that, I'm afraid that this is gonna take me longer. I'm afraid that I'm too tired to accomplish this goal. I'm afraid that I'm going to have to keep re trying to resolve this, and it's never gonna get better, and I'm feeling like I'm not important. Now, you may be saying like, okay, yeah, I, I've gotta dig under and find what's the emotion, what's the thing that I'm afraid of or what's underneath it? But really I need to deal with the problem. And that's where I think it's hardest actually dealing with the problem is first getting past the emotion of anger. And it's getting down to what is the thing underneath it? What are my actual interests here? And one of the things that I've noticed is that by naming the thing that I am afraid of, all of a sudden I don't feel the anger anymore. I go into problem solving mode. I can be like, I am afraid that I'm gonna have to clean this up by myself. Okay, well I don't wanna have to clean this up by myself. So how am I going to engage my child in cleaning this up without yelling? Right? And when you start taking that presence of moment and you are able to acknowledge the the emotion, now you start getting to the logical part.

Vance Crowe [00:07:49] And this goes perfectly in line. You've probably heard this phrase, which I think is really powerful. An emotion observed cannot be experienced. Meaning that if you are just outraged and then you say, I am outraged. Why am I outraged? And you dig it down, now you are no longer allowing that emotion to inhabit you. You are allowing that emotion to guide you to the thing that you really need to solve, but you are not being held captive of it. You are not being inhabited by that crazy emotion that takes away from your logical thinking. And so then from there, if I find I am still angry, I remove myself from the situation as best I can. You know, sometimes older sisters are putting, you know, markers inside little brother's mouth and you can't leave it even though you're angry. But when I can I try and step away for a moment because one of the things that I've learned over time is that you cannot be angry for more than about 30 seconds unless you decide you wanna loop on it. You just keep finding new reasons to return to that anger. And so what I found is if I go to a new place, I go out onto my porch, I go to my room, I go down to the basement even for about 30 seconds, and I make the choice, Hey, I am not going to find more reasons to be upset. I am going to just solve the problem that's in front of me and then figure out where I need to go. Then it enables me to bring my emotional state down.

Vance Crowe [00:09:21] Now, I bring this up because if I'm experiencing this, and I was talking with some friends over the weekend that said, yeah, as they have become parents, they have found themselves yelling a lot more and then watching that yelling be something where they lose their temper in other areas as well. So if it's happening with me and my friends, it might be happening with you. And I thought I would just sit down and share this. If you have ideas on how you control your temper, how if you have any stories about what you did over time to change from being a person that allowed your temper to boil over and then you worked your way out, I'd love to know more about it. If you're interested in learning more about communication, how to handle your emotions, how to be able to express yourself, and how to get other people to wanna ex to express themselves to you, then you should consider coming to my interest base communications class. You can learn more at Articulate Ventures slash IBC. All right, we'll be back next week, maybe with another person or maybe with just some thoughts on communications and negotiations. Hope you're doing great and we'll see you next week.

Guest [00:10:43] Good negotiation is one where both parties walk away slightly disappointed. That was probably my default world model BV before Vance. Well, Vance had a lot of these models that he created. I ingrained a lot of these models so deeply from working with Vance for a long time that I started to recommunicate them to my friends and my friends' eyes had the same sort of light up of understanding of like, this is a thing that could help me be more effective in life. Whenever Vance let me know that he was working on sort of putting this into more of a workshop form, I was like, yeah, man, I want that for my team. Like now, if my first two employees go through this so that we have this shared set of context on a shared set of language that's gonna create value for my team going forward. I wanted to get better at communication myself. I knew I had good ideas in my head that I wanted to be able to communicate to potential investors, and I was not super confident in being able to do that before. I thought that negotiation was basically for people in a boardroom, like CEOs, words like shareholder are involved. So I thought that you had to have a lot of resources at your disposal to even care about negotiations. Those people had to lose, or both people weren't happy in the end. I found that what you both want is achievable by understanding the needs of the other person more. A negotiation is really a way to solve a problem that you have. You can rearrange the world in such a way where all parties get something that they're happy with. So you don't need to possess great resources to be involved in a negotiation or to really benefit from knowing how to negotiate.

Guest [00:12:19] RJ and I initially were two different businesses. It became clear to us over the long term that we would be much more bullish on our shared future if we like found a way to like actually be one entity, one whole working together that required us to have what to many would be very hard conversations because we are both CEOs of our own independently funded businesses. But we were able to have conversations and get to the root of what our actual interests and what our actual skill sets were. Having both people understand this pattern of communication was useful to pull out those tools when we needed them the most in like difficult conversations. It's very helpful to have that quick language to do something more productive than continue to like misunderstand or whatever, whatever else you're doing. Building relationships isn't just you communicating to the other person. It's also figuring out how to let the other person communicate to you so that they trust you. Getting into a real conversation and and diffusing tensions before you, you know, get to business. A lot of people have a default model where they're like, I wanna raise my own money. I wanna start my own business. I wanna do my own thing. We find that they have specific interests that could help us. We become allies instead of competitors. I guess the course gives you tools to know that you can say the right words to like extract those things out of the ether and put them in your life. Learning interest-based communications from Vance might actually be the single highest leverage skillset that I ever developed before starting this company. I'm by default an introvert. I think that I've developed the ability to interact with people in such a way that it's energizing and it's fun, and I look forward to interacting with strangers on a regular basis.

Guest [00:13:57] You should just take it Stuart, already. Yeah. I feel like you should just do it like, no, I don't know. I feel like it's life content. It's like definitely fun life content. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing with my life. Interspace communications did that for me more than anything else that I've learned.