How to Deal with Aggressive People

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1:36Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself because if you can improve yourself, you can improve your life. So if that's what you want to do, hit that subscribe button and follow along. Today, I'm going to be talking about how to deal with aggressive people because aggressive people exist in this world. There's nothing that you and I can do to change that. But what you can do is arm yourself with the best tools and techniques and knowledge about what is actually going on in the situation so that you can better protect yourself.

2:19And so when you find yourself in an argument or in a verbal attack, you know exactly what to do to remove yourself from it and be able to protect your own mental health. So let's dive in, okay? Let's start with the heat. Let's start with the fire. Let's start with the full-on confrontation moment. We can both think of one of those moments that's happened in our life, right? You know the feeling when you're in that situation and it's heightened. It might be an argument. It might be a disagreement. it might be. Somebody's got road rage on the road, whatever it might be. Your heart is racing. You're not breathing very well.

2:58You're short, tight breathing. Your body's kind of tight. You feel like you're either about to snap or just completely shut down. You don't really know what to do. And in those situations, that's not you being dramatic in any way. That's actually your nervous system doing its job. It's deciding without your permission at all, whether it is going to fight, flight, or freeze. Fight, that means that I'm going to argue, I'm going to yell, I'm going to escalate the situation. Flight means that I'm going to leave or I'm going to avoid or I'm going to fully shut down. Or freeze, which means I go numb, I go blank, I don't know what to do, I lose my words.

3:38That's what our nervous system does in those moments. Aggressive energy actually activates primal instincts inside of you. But you're not just like a brainstem. You're a human. You have a choice. Once you really understand what is happening in these situations, you can figure out the best way to move through them. And that's really the key here is that you're in the situation physically, like you're really there in the present moment, like you're standing there, but you need to kind of see it from an outsider's perspective and remove yourself from the situation to give yourself some space and some distance.

4:15As I always say, if you're in the jar, you can't read the label. Meaning when you're inside of the jar, you're inside of your own life, inside of your own head, you're not really fully seeing what's going on. So if you wanna read the label on the jar, you've gotta take yourself out of the jar and kind of look at everything from a third person's perspective. Here's the thing that's really important about this situation, okay? Aggressive people are a problem, yes, but in this situation, the aggressive people are not the problem. Your nervous system thinks that they're the problem. Here's where I want to go deeper with you so you can actually understand the psychology of what's going on inside of you, but the psychology of what's going on inside of them as well.

4:53Most people try to handle aggressive people by trying to change the other person, by trying to yell at them or to avoid them or to argue better or to try to be more aggressive than they are so that they scare them or they try to disconnect in hopes that if they disconnect, that other person is just going to give up. But in this situation, what we're actually doing is we're skipping a crucial piece. And that crucial piece is in the situation, what's actually going on inside of you. And so what you want to figure out, whether once again, it's in that moment or after that moment, is what does your nervous system associate with their aggression?

5:34Okay, The way you react to the situation when you're in a situation like this with someone isn't actually based off of right now. It's mostly based off your past. And I can give you an example. Maybe you grew up in a really aggressive household. And so whenever somebody gets really aggressive, you've learned to shut down. And that's just what you learned to do. Maybe you grew up in an aggressive household and you learned when it gets aggressive, you have to get even more aggressive and fight. So the way you react in the situation today isn't based off of just the situation right now. It's based off of what has happened to you in your past.

6:11And so you have to understand that your nervous system is programmed from everything that's happened to you in your entire life. And your nervous system doesn't distinguish between the past and the present. So, you know, if I give you a few examples, right? If your dad yelled at you as a kid, then you might still feel like you're five years old every time somebody raises their voice. Now, you're not sitting there when someone's yelling at you and being like, oh my God, I'm a five-year-old. But I mean, you're emotionally and intellectually stuck as that version of you in that moment, right? If confrontation in your family meant danger because you lived in a chaotic household, even a calm disagreement today can feel really unsafe to you.

6:53If you grew up with a parent whose moods changed without warning at all, then you might have learned just to stay small so that you can stay safe. You know, if in your home as a child, like love depended on you staying quiet and you staying agreeable, then you might still freeze today anytime somebody has intense emotions around you. And so I want you to understand, it's interesting because we're looking at the situation, we're talking about there's an aggressive person in front of me, they're yelling, we're in an argument. This is also, as crazy as it sounds, besides a situation that we need to deal with in the present moment, which we're going to talk about in a second, it's also one of your biggest learning lessons.

7:40Because you have some sort of response in that moment that is different than somebody else's response could be. So that means that your response comes from your past. And your response, whether it's fight or flight or freeze, isn't weak. It's wired. And that's why when we're in a situation where there is an aggressive person, aggressive people can kind of throw us, not because they're powerful or because they're intense, but because they're actually activating old patterns within us. And so it's really, really important for me to say this before we go any further. Even though we think that this situation is happening outside of us, everything is actually happening inside of us.

8:22Like we think the situation is making us feel a certain way. It's not the situation that's making you feel a certain way. It is how we react to the situation that makes us feel a certain way. It's really hard to distinguish when you're in those moments, but that's why I'm talking to you right now outside of the moment, is you're actually learning. like this moment can be a huge classroom for you where you can learn about yourself, you can heal yourself and you can grow yourself, not just in the moment, but also outside of the moment when the moment has passed. Okay? It's also really important to understand this.

8:56You're not seeing, like we're talking about an aggressive person. You're not seeing an adult being aggressive. What you're seeing is an unhealed child that's in an adult's body throwing a temper tantrum. Just think about that for a second. because you might see a 35-year-old man who's being an asshole, right? But really what you're seeing, if you take yourself out of that moment and see it for what it is, you're seeing a seven-year-old boy who is in a 35-year-old man's body who's throwing a temper tantrum because that's whatever happened to him when he was in his household. That's how he got the attention that he wanted, whatever it might've been.

9:33And so just knowing that can remove you from wanting to engage in battle because you're looking at it and you're like, yeah, I'm just kind of talking with a child. And you can be in these situations and you can be like, man, that thing that that person just did was really childish. And so two things that's really important to understand. Number one, it's not happening outside of you. It's happening inside of you, even more than it's happening outside of you. And the second thing is you're just dealing with a little kid in an adult's body. Okay, so let's talk about what you actually do when you're in the situation of being in an environment with an aggressive person.

10:06And we will be right back.

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13:19what would it look like for me to stay calm in my body? What would it look like to breathe and relax instead of tensing up my muscles? What would it look like to respond from a place of clarity versus self-defense? And let me give you a rule of thumb in these situations. The more intense their energy is, the slower and calmer yours needs to be. I'll give you a really great example from my own life that I can remember where shit was hitting the fan. And I realized in that moment, I had to be extremely calm. So when my wife and I, girlfriend at the time, were traveling in 2017, we were out of the country for six months, we were in Bali.

14:02And in Bali, they have a kind of like mafia of taxi cabs. And Uber was just starting to come in. And the taxi cab people hated the Ubers. and the Ubers had to literally like meet us behind a building to pick us up so that the taxi cab people wouldn't get set off and people wouldn't know that there was an Uber that was happening. So we use the Ubers a few times, no big deal. And then one day we get picked up at the beach at night. We get picked up after, you know, we had, uh, we were watching the sunset, everything we get picked up and out of nowhere, we're driving in our Uber. This car cuts in front of our Uber and all of these guys jump out with bats.

14:46And I'm like, holy what's going on? This is like something I would have never expected, especially because Bali, everyone's so sweet and so nice over there. Right. And one of the guys takes a bat and hits the front of the Uber's car that we're in. So that guy gets out and he's real nice. Oh my gosh, don't do this. Whatever it might be. They're talking. My wife hops out. She's terrified. And I hop out and I'm like, okay, what's going on here? Like, do I need to run? Do I need to fight? Do I need to protect my girlfriend at the time? So all of this stuff is running through my head. And I'm aware that if I get like more heightened, then everything's going to get worse.

15:26So I had this feeling of like, Hey, I just need to be the, I need to need to be ice on this flame. Like I just need to just calm the entire situation. And I don't know if I'd make the decision today. That's the same as I did back then. But what I actually did was I actually stepped in front of the Uber driver with these four guys that were had bats in front of me. I just put my hands up and I was like, Hey guys, can we just talk? Like, there's no reason to be yelling. Is there, and they're just, yeah, fuck you. They're all yelling and all this stuff. I'm like, Hey guys, it's okay. Can we just talk about the situation?

15:56And so it took probably 45 seconds of just getting screamed at. And they weren't, they weren't really screaming at me. They were screaming at my Uber driver. I was worried about him as well because he seemed like he was terrified. And eventually it got to the point where they just kind of calmed down. And that's the way that I think about this is like the more intense their energy, the calmer yours needs to be because your calmness kind of short circuits the escalation loop, which tends to be really disarming because their nervous system is also in fight or flight. So I'm trying to deescalate their nervous system as well as deescalate my own nervous system.

16:34So let's talk about like tools for dealing with this in real time. Like let's get tactical in the situation, right? You're in it. You feel triggered. What do you do? The first thing you need to do more than anything else is you need to ground yourself before saying any word. How do you ground yourself? If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know, the first thing is your breath. The first thing that changes whenever a circumstance changes, whether you get happy, sad, mad, angry is your breath. You want to control your breath before you do anything else. Breathe in for four seconds through your nose, exhale for six seconds through your mouth.

17:08Physiologically, the person who breathes slowest in a conversation usually controls a conversation. It's like this weird physiological, psychological thing. So I want to calm myself as much as possible. And eventually when I ground myself, the other person hopefully will become grounded at some point as well. So breathe slow for about a minute. Just observe what's going on. see what's happening. Don't get caught up in it. You're focusing on your body now. Drop your shoulders. Try to feel less tense in all of your muscles. Put both of your feet on the ground. Feel your butt in the chair. Then you want to name what's happening inside of you.

17:45You don't say it out loud. It could be in your head, I'm triggered. My heart's racing. I feel really afraid. My stomach is tight. I want to scream. All of this kind of gets your body back online. in your out of your head, you're back into your body. When you're triggered, you're usually not in the present moment. You're off in all of your past triggers and thinking about other things. You're really in your head more than anything else. When you anchor yourself back into your body, you bring yourself back into the present moment, which is the first thing we need to do before anything else. So that's step number one.

18:17Step number two, after you've kind of just anchored yourself, pause for a while. Continue to just keep observing. Just give some space to the situation. You're removing, like you can still physically be there and the person can still be yelling, but you're removing yourself from the action, right? Pause. Pausing gives your nervous system a chance to regulate before you react. Because usually when you react from a triggered nervous system, you're not reacting from a good place. So you want to just allow your nervous system just to regulate before it reacts because that's everything. When someone's being aggressive, your instinct is to defend or to fight back or to explain or to match their intensity in some sort of way.

19:01All of those just add fuel to the fire. You just want to pause. Space interrupts this emotional chain reaction that happens whenever we're in an aggressive situation or fight an argument with somebody. It gives you access to yourself, your clarity, your own self-control. And when you pause, you're actually not just calming yourself, you're interrupting their momentum as well. Aggressive people often feed off of emotional escalation. And so your stillness kind of creates a mirror that they can't control and it disarms them without confrontation. And so sometimes, believe it or not, it even helps them hear their own behavior because they're only hearing themselves in the situation.

19:45And now they're listening to themselves and they're like, oh, hold on. I'm now hearing myself more clear. I don't know if I want to continue doing this. And so like, it's weird, but your calm actually starts to become contagious. So it kind of invites their nervous system to settle too, even if they're resistant at first. And then what you want to do is just set simple boundaries in those situations. Like you want to use calm, neutral language that protects your space without fueling the fire. And it could be some phrases like, hey, I'm happy to talk when our voices are calm again. Or like, hey, let's just pause for right now.

20:20I'm not okay with the tone that we're both using. Or I hear you, I just need a moment to, you know, to myself before I respond. Or I'm not gonna make myself available for this type of conversation. Now, that's not saying that they're not going to get more mad when you do that. But with a boundary, the thing that's important about a boundary is a boundary is something that you're supposed to hold firm to. And once people learn, it's a boundary because you teach people how to talk to you. You teach people how to treat you after they realize, Hey, you know, this person keeps saying the exact same thing.

20:54They kind of calm down a little bit. Okay. And so the key is you're not trying to win anything in this situation. What you're trying to do is you're trying to stay in your own energy. Okay. And so the simple pattern is this number one, you're going to pause. You're going to get into your body. You're not just going to be in your head. Number two, you're going to name what's going on, what you're feeling. I'm triggered and that's okay. I want to scream. I want to yell. So you pause, you name. Number three is you're going to regulate. You're going to breathe. You're going to ground yourself. You're going to become more aware of the situation.

21:27Number four, you're going to choose what the best thing is to do, like choose the boundaries and communicate them with clarity. And then number five, after the situation is over and you've removed yourself from it, you've got to ask yourself like, what got activated in me? And you start to learn more about yourself. If you yell at somebody and you blow up, no big deal. That's what happened. Well, let's reflect after the situation. Let's learn more about you in this situation. And you just keep doing this over and over again. Pause, name, regulate, choose, and reflect. And over time, you start to retrain your nervous system to feel safe in the moments where you used to actually spiral.

22:07Because it's really, really important. Obviously, with me being somebody who's obsessed with mindset and psychology and all of this. Every triggering moment is a window into ourselves. How you react when somebody gets aggressive doesn't just show you them. It shows you you. Like, do you shrink? Do you get louder? Do you go numb? Do you get aggressive? Do you get terrified? Do you run? All of those are not random. They're patterns. It's your nervous system playing out old scripts. and the person that's in front of you becomes a mirror for you, reflecting back to you where you still feel unsafe or unseen or unworthy in some way.

22:46And so it's not about blaming them or any of that type of stuff or blaming yourself for that situation. It's about collecting information. That heat that you feel, the shutdown that you feel, the urge to fix or flee or to fight, that's your body revealing a wound. It's a belief. It's a pattern. It's something that needs to be healed within you. And every time you choose to observe the situation instead of react, you reclaim just a little bit more of your power. And for those of you that are willing to put in the work, the conflict becomes a classroom and not a battlefield. And that's where you really start to get into self-mastery.

23:27So that's what I got for you for today's lesson. if you're out there and you want to master your 2026 goals, I have a free 30-minute workshop video that will help you figure out your goals, get very clear on what they are, and plan them out. If you go to GoalsMastery2026.com, you can download it for free. All you have to do is get out a pen and paper, push play, and at the end of the 30 minutes, you'll have all of your goals for next year planned out with a plan of what you need to do each day to hit those goals. So once again, if you want to download it for free, it is goalsmastery2026.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode.

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