Most of the people I see on a regular basis are either nice or at the very least pleasant/unassuming. It’s pretty rare in my work, my dancing, or anywhere else in my usual routines that I run across an ornery person. When I do meet someone like that, I’m unprepared for what they say and do, which makes it easy for them to walk all over me.
I started thinking about this stuff after a recent encounter with a customer at my job. He stopped me to talk about picking up an appliance he’d just bought, I asked a clarifying question, and that’s when everything went off the rails. He became very aggressive, wouldn’t let me finish a sentence, and didn’t listen to my attempts to explain what I meant. Once I realized that it would be a waste of time to continue trying to reason with him, I told him he could take it out himself if he wanted (which is what he asked to do initially) and then went back to the customer I was helping before he stopped me. The customer I was initially helping spoke up on my behalf during that ordeal, which I greatly appreciated; another customer who also witnessed it offered me some supportive words later on. Their efforts helped me get through that onslaught of negativity.
Of all the customers I’ve been around at each of my jobs, this guy was by far the rudest and least reasonable. I didn’t see this coming at all and I had no plan in mind for dealing with someone like him. My normal strategy of remaining calm and explaining myself in the hopes that doing so would defuse the situation failed, and for a long time after, I blamed myself for what happened. It took a lot of life hacks focused around breathing, relaxing, and reframing myself, as well as a good amount of time after the situation, to get me into a state of mind to think about this more clearly. When I got to that state of mind, I realized that he probably would have acted aggressively regardless of what I said, and that I gave him no cause to get upset; for whatever reason, he chose to react that way. That made it easier to avoid taking his reaction personally and helped me move onto formulating a plan in case something like this happens again.
Since I’m so used to being around nice people who share several of my interests, I’ve forgotten that we humans are irrational and respond poorly to reason and logic. This explains why my efforts to employ those in that situation failed. That lead me to this thought: if logic doesn’t work, why not try anti-logic? By that, I don’t mean reverse psychology wherein I ask someone to do the opposite of what I want them to do in the hopes that that will nudge them in my desired direction. I mean throw logic completely out the window and just be weird. This should be easy for me as a weird guy who grew up watching a lot of classic Looney Tunes shorts and who draws a lot of comedic inspiration from Bugs Bunny, the Marx Brothers, and Buster Keaton. Employing this strategy against an angry person trying to argue with me would probably throw them off and leave them unsure of what to do next. Instead of explaining myself or trying to reason with them, which they’ll probably be expecting, I’ll try changing the subject to something bizarre, making animal noises, singing a song, speaking in another language, lying down on the floor, etc. I won’t touch or do anything to scare or intimidate the other person, just give them a fun little show and see if that does the trick.
I got this idea from listening to Derren Brown tell Joe Rogan about his experience with this earlier in his life. Instead of trying to reason with or fight a drunk guy who got in his face, he changed the subject and started talking about the height of the wall around his house. This confused the guy sufficiently to drain away his aggressive energy and stop him from being a threat. This is also similar to the way Tony Robbins uses state breaks as explained in this video from Charisma on Command. Although I had heard of both of those ideas before the incident at my job, I hadn’t yet worked out a plan to use them. Now that I’ve worked through my feelings from that situation and thought a lot about what to do if it happens again, I feel much more confident that I’ll be able to reduce tensions and defuse an aggressive situation if necessary. If you’ve tried this sort of strategy in a tense situation, please let me know what you did and how it went. I’d love to hear about it. For now, though, That’s All, Folks!