Transcription
What if you could take someone who started a conversation like this: "So, you're a, you're a therapist?" "Yes." "Okay, well, I'm a psychiatrist. Um, I don't believe in therapy, and I think it's a scam, and I don't think it's necessary, and I don't think that even if there is anything wrong with my brain, that this is going to be helpful whatsoever." And in that conversation with them, saying this: "Thank you. Thank you, man. Thank you. This was a good, good conversation. Thanks, man. I appreciate you. I can see that you actually, uh, appreciate your attention and focus on this."
That's what we're covering today: the simple steps to make a rude person take back what they said, show you respect, and wish they hadn't even begun with the rudeness in the first place.
Now, to begin, one way to deal with rude people is simply by drawing a boundary and exiting. "Interview adjourned. Love you." "Okay, that's the end of the interview." And to be clear, walking away from rudeness is totally fine. So is letting people know how you want them to act around you, like Tom Cruise does here when he's repeatedly questioned about his relationship. "Here's the thing, Peter, you're stepping over a line now. You're stepping over a line. You know you are." "I suppose the questions are, want to know. Peter, you want to know. Take responsibility for what you want to know. Don't say what other people." "This is a conversation that I'm having with you right now. Put your manners back in."
But while that kind of boundary can work without a tremendous amount of power, either with your tone, physicality, or your social capital, it might actually make rudeness worse. That is because Tom is telling the interviewer what he needs to do, which always creates a power struggle. But there is a way to draw a strong boundary that doesn't do this. You state what you are going to do or not do in a conversation. You don't demand anything of the other person. And that means instead of saying, "Don't say what other people are asking," you'd say, "If you're going to speak from the perspective of other people, I'm going to leave the conversation."
You notice here how Dr. K doesn't tell Sneo to do or not do anything. He speaks only about what he is going to do. "Let me just make a couple things clear. So, I am a psychiatrist, but I'm not your psychiatrist, okay? Is that clear? So, I'm not doing therapy with you, right? You're not my patient. I'm not going to be diagnosing you or treating you for anything, okay?"
Now, sometimes it's not practical to explicitly draw boundaries like this. So, there is a more subtle way to get the same effect, and that is by practicing non-engagement with the unwanted behavior. One way to do that is with a magic word. You can watch Dr. K nail it here. "If I go to a therapist, your job is to take my money from my mental health problems. Why would you want me to get better? You don't. You want me to keep coming back and paying you. So you're going to tell me, 'Oh, come back next week, and we'll unpack this, and we'll unpack that.' I don't need to unpack all this from childhood. 25. I'm going to shove it down and keep going. Why do I want to unpack this stuff?"
"Okay," said with a friendly tone, can completely deflate someone who is bringing aggressive energy to you. It works because prolonged rudeness is usually looking for a reaction from you, and if you don't give it any, it falls apart quickly.
Another way to implement the same principle of non-engagement is by responding to rudeness slowly and with sincerity. You can watch here how the slowness of Dr. K's response causes Sneo to be more polite immediately. "How long have you been doing this?" "What, what do you mean by this? Talking to people, crying on a couch?" "Oh, psychotherapy or psychiatry?"
Going slow gives the other person time to feel regret for their tone. It's a non-aggressive way of inviting them to try again. And responding with sincerity does the same thing because maintaining a rude tone with someone who is kind to you feels uncomfortable for most people. You can watch in this next clip how the sincerity from Dr. K causes Sneo to adjust his approach just as quickly. "Is that what you want to talk about?" "No, I want to talk about what I want to talk about." "Whatever you want to talk about. Can I cry?" "Sure." "Okay. I don't know how this works. What are we, like, what are we supposed to do?" "That's a great question. So, was there something in particular that you had in mind?" "Okay. What do you specialize in? I've seen you talk to some of my friends. You talked to Aiden for a couple hours, and you were able to dissect and figure some stuff out." "I, I don't know. I think this could be an interesting conversation. I, I don't really, I don't really know." "Completely agree. I think this is going to be a very interesting conversation."
Okay, now everything covered up until now can happen in just a few seconds, and it will make people drop being rude. Mission accomplished if that's all that you want. But you can still flip the interaction to become one where they respect and value you more afterwards by implementing the next piece, and that is to ask open questions about the worldview underneath their rudeness.
Now, here it is critical to understand the key difference between open and closed questioning. With open questions, your agenda is to see and understand the other person. With closed questions, your agenda is for the other person to see and understand you, usually by backing them into a corner to make your point. For an example, listen here how this question's word choice and tone indicate that Dr. K isn't setting traps, but is genuinely curious about Sneo's perspective. "So, when you say that you think therapy is a waste of time, yeah, why do you think that?"
Closed questioning, on the other hand, is often a veiled attempt to prove the other person wrong, and this will come through in your word choice and tone as well. "You point to medicine. You claim that DEI programs are putting people at risk. Do you really believe this to be true, and what evidence do you have to support it?" This is why you can feel like you're being backed in a corner in certain conversations. It's probably because the other person is asking closed questions. The hidden goal of those questions is not to explore an alternate perspective, but to assert the question asker's worldview. And in this case, Don literally pairs his statement that Elon is wrong right next to the question he just asked. "What evidence do you have, though, that they're lowering the standards?" "I, there's no evidence of that, which I believe there is. What, what is the evidence?" "I, I believe they have literally lowered the standards at at Duke University, and that is what the article was referring to." "There's no, say they have not lowered the standards. No evidence about, uh, lowering standards, and I think that there is, um, leave that as a false statement."
But you're voicing, and of course, this derails the conversation, and we end the interaction with more rudeness and disrespect than when we started it, thanks to this closed stance. Yeah, choose your questions. We'll get into the deeper reason that open questions work so well in the last point, but for now, just know that you want to ask open questions until you can fully articulate the other person's perspective back to them in a way that they feel good about. And that looks like this. "Okay, so, um, let me just make sure I heard you. So, when you pray, so it sounds like you feel a lot of positive emotions. You also think about actions that you want to take and places that you want to go. So you have goals that you think of, right?"
This should be easy to do if you've maintained that open approach, but it can get derailed by the very normal tendency to assert our perspective when we hear something that we disagree with. So, I want to give you two tricks to keep this easy. First, use the phrase, "I don't want to debate," throughout the conversation. It's obviously important that you mean it, too. "Not debating. Honestly, I'm not trying to, like, debate you. I swear to God, I'm not trying to convince you of [ __ ]." Okay? Second, if you ever are trying to assert your opinion, own it. That means do not hide statements inside of questions. That's what we saw Don do in that interview. Instead, just turn your closed question into a statement of how you feel. "Let's say, I don't really have faith," or "I'm afraid," or "I'm angry." Actually, forget about that. I, I realized I was slipping into a debating kind of mode, so I'll just say what I'm going to say. "Okay. Okay."
So, by this point, you've disarmed the other person's rudeness and used open questions to invite them to share themselves, and they're likely in a receptive enough state to actually hear your perspective, given the trust that you've built. But before you share your perspective, there is one more thing, which may seem silly, and that is to ask them if it's okay with them that you share your perspective. "If you want an impression of fixing what I think is incomplete about your understanding, we can start that. Okay? You have other questions, or can I dive in?" "You can dive in now."
I get that this may seem overly sensitive, but when someone is being rude or aggressive, it's because they are ego-identified with whatever's happening in that conversation. So, just hearing a worldview that's different than theirs can actually be received as a threat, and that will make them be even more rude. So, asking them if it's okay to share can help that ego feel a sense of respect and safety, which will diminish the odds of getting a backlash.
For a similar reason, you'll usually want to share the areas that you agree with them first, and share the areas you would disagree with them second, like this. "Here's where I think there's an advantage to therapy. So, I, I completely agree with everything that you've said. Okay? I think the challenge, though, is that what you're sort of talking about is like difficulties within you. So, let's just take faith, for example." This ordering subtly signals that you're not listening simply to poke holes. That again relaxes the ego as it realizes you aren't here to fight with it or change it.
And that takes us to the most counterintuitive and most important point. If you want people to change from rude to respectful with you, the best way to get there is to completely drop trying to change them. Instead, make your aim to deeply understand them. Because when you give people your attention and curiosity without trying to change them, many times the rude part of them will naturally calm down. They actually become open to hearing your experience of them in an unguarded way. And you can see it, for instance, here.
This next exchange occurs after Dr. K has gone through all the steps we already covered, and you can imagine how different Sneo's reaction would have been if he just said this piece right off the bat. "So, you say things in ways that are very polemic, so like polar. So you say things in a way that invites me to argue with you and try to prove you wrong, like, just the the statements that you make, and I can see why people are like inflamed by that. And if I don't try really hard to catch myself, then I will start arguing with you." "Right." "Why are you smiling right now?" "Because you're right. Because you're, you're completely right. That's just my way. People, people tell me that quite a bit."
Dropping the goal of changing anyone will also help you to stay collected in the face of rude people. Because if you're thrown off by them, it's often because you think they need to change in order to defend your manhood, or your honor, or your reputation. In reality, the best way to defend those things is to withdraw any control you may have given them over those things, which naturally makes insults slide off you, and maybe even gives you the chance to turn a rude beginning into a valuable exchange. "We're connecting." "Yeah." "Feels good to connect." "Yeah." "Yeah." "Does it make us weak to connect?" "No."
So now, hopefully, you'll be able to flip rudeness with charisma. But charisma isn't just useful for dealing with difficult people. It's the key to making great first impressions, building strong relationships, and feeling confident in any social situation. So, if you want to take this further and develop a charisma that makes people naturally tend to value and respect you, I highly recommend checking out Charisma University. It's our step-by-step program that's designed to help you master the skills of confidence and charisma in just a few minutes a day.
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