Diffuse the Fuse: Emotional Tactics for Conflict De-escalation

Many years ago, working in an office of about twenty people, I experienced my very first confrontation with a borderline violent person whose anger was out of control. Our office managed hundreds of properties for private landlords. This fellow was extremely agitated at something he felt was not being fixed in his apartment.

It was a Monday morning and he had walked in and began hurling abuse at the admin and reception ladies at the front of the office.

I hadn’t heard anything as I was situated at the very back of this long building we occupied. Suddenly one of our team came running down in a panic to ask me to come out front right away.

I wasn’t sure what to do as I walked down the long hallway. With each step this angry man’s voice transformed from a mad garble to clear loud profanities. As I entered reception our eyes met…..

How would you handle this situation? How would you begin? 

Have you ever been in a room when someone throws an anger tantrum? Or perhaps in a meeting witnessing aggressive expressions of opinions? Have you ever been within ear shot of two people having a messy emotional argument? It is very difficult to train or ‘prepare’ for any of these scenarios.

Something we need to appreciate and become aware of in these situations is that, High emotions, means low intelligence.

This does not mean that emotional people lack intelligence. What this does mean is that when we become highly emotional, research has shown that our ‘logical’ brain dials down whilst our ‘emotional’ brain  dials up.

This means that when dealing with an angry person, their logical brain is not available to us. So how do we navigate this situation? Given the intensity of the energy we need to help move that energy so we can diffuse the emotional heat and allow the logical brain to be dialled up once more.

So, how do we dial down their emotional brain so we can have a logical intelligent conversation again?

This is what happened next with our extremely agitated client…. 

1. I waited for him to complete a sentence and as he took a breath in I said “I want to know more about what has happened”, as I gestured him with an open body language to follow me down the hallway. He began walking with me, and as he said more, I said ‘tell me more’. Two key points here to note. We began walking together in the same direction. Physical movement itself helps begin the diffusing process. Add in a genuine curiosity about what has happened and keep at it with ‘tell me more.’
2. As he shared more with me the second step was to appropriately validate what is being said. When we are validated, we feel seen, heard and understood.  Here are some examples of validations; “I cannot imagine how difficult that must have been”. “That must have really hurt you.” “Really sorry to hear this has happened.” “Most of us would feel the same way.” “Most people would have no idea how to handle that”, and “given the circumstances, you handled it best you could.”

   By now that we have listened with a demonstrated level of curiosity, they have shared everything they need to share, and we have appropriately validated what they have shared, the emotional brain begins to dial down as the logical brain comes back online.

3. The third step is to demonstrate that we have understood what they have said by repeating back to them what we have heard. Using language like, “what I am hearing so as to be sure we are on the same page …….is that right?” Once the problem has been defined, clarified and understood we can move toward a potential solution which is what is defining together what is within our control to change and accepting what is beyond our control.

The great result from this conversation is that we discovered gaps in our communication system, which contributed partly to the issue our client experienced. We also had a meeting to discuss how we contributed to this situation. We found this man had made several attempts to reach out to us showing gaps in our processes.

These situations are never easy to navigate, however by embracing a healthy sense of curiosity, empathy and understanding we can diffuse the fuse and de-escalate any if not most scenarios. Thank you for reading.

Written by Joe Pane.

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