You work with an aggressive colleague. They make their points about various topics clear. Yet they talk over others, shut down dissenting views or use withering criticism. Their intensity is intimidating. It sucks the energy out of the room.
They focus their intensity on you. Your fight or flight system engages and starts to shut down your thinking. You feel the tension in your body. You want to fight back or leave the room. Strength, clear thinking and rationality leave your body.
You feel your response to this stressor is either weak or unprofessional. You may experience other unfounded thoughts. Your colleague’s behaviour leads to you feeling fear, shame, and anger. These strong emotions can derail your day.
So what can you do to regain your composure? Let’s start with your “why”. Do you want to build your executive presence? Would you like to be unflappable during intense discussions?
Executive presence
Executive presence is the missing link between merit and success. It is a combination of self-confidence, poise, and authenticity. This combination impacts your ability to inspire confidence in others to believe in and follow you.
- Sylvia Ann Hewitt and Dina Smith
Building your executive presence takes time and experience. Your gravitas comes with valuable life experience. You may at first struggle to deal with CRAP — criticism, assholes, rejection and pressure. Depending on your life experience and temperament, some challenges are more complex than others. No professional runs the CRAP gauntlet and comes out unscathed.
Gravitas comes from making mistakes — then making the conscious decision to evolve. Building your executive presence may be a strong enough motivation for you. Could it be that the aggressor is robbing you of your sense of balance? In doing so, they are stealing your sense of balance.
Hara. In Japan, hara is one’s belly or centre. The hara is one’s source of balance; with balance, you have power. Persistent self-training and discipline are essential for developing your “belly”. By facing many challenges with aggressors, you make mistakes and sometimes lose. But you end up with an exquisite sense of balance.
…the man who has accomplished or finished his belly, that is, himself: for he is mature. If this development does not take place? We have…someone who has not developed. Someone who has remained immature, who is too young in the psychological sense.
The Japanese also say… the man who has not finished his belly cannot stand above others (is not fit for leadership).
- Hara: The Vital Centre, Karlfried Graf von Durkenheim, 1962 (in 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene (page 40).
I like to reframe the problem of dealing with aggressive colleagues as a challenge. Much of the challenge involves rewiring how we respond to aggressors. Need further inspiration to tackle the “aggressive colleague” challenge? Buddhist or Stoic philosophy may provide a mindset to bolster your resolve.
Emotional intensity at work
Poise under pressure is an essential part of your executive presence. Showing poise under challenging situations is an important skill to develop. You have at least six tactics at your disposal. Each can help you before, during or after your difficult encounters.
- Remember the space between stimulus and response.
- Prepare for, predict and be ready for when a problematic conversation occurs.
- During the discussion: check in
- Go to your breath and body
- During and after the discussion: name it to tame it
- Don’t expect perfection from challenging interactions
Remember the space between stimulus and response
Years ago, as I was wandering between the stacks of books at a university library, I chanced to open a book in which I encountered one of the most powerful, significant ideas I’ve ever come across. The essence of it was this:
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
That idea hit me with incredible force. In the following days, I reflected on it again and again.
- Stephen R. Covey
There is a profound difference between a response — and a reaction. What if your colleague is aggressive? What if they pressure you for an immediate answer. Here is a profound insight that helps me:
You don’t have to respond immediately.
There is no reason for an immediate response in anything to do with office work. Sometimes even in life and death situations like saving a dying patient.
‘The Third Space®’ is the transitional gap between “What the hell just happened?” and “What’s next?”. High performers use this space to decompress, jettison the negative and bring new focus and energy to the next task at hand.
- Dr. Adam Fraser, author of The Third Space
Response is clear thinking. Reaction (in contrast) is emotional and powerless. Response beats reaction.
Prepare / predict / be ready
Prepare. Gain an advantage through simple choices. A good night’s sleep, nutritious food and relaxation make a solid foundation for life. If you’re feeling anxious about a difficult conversation, strive for a decent sleep. Sleep affects your mood and energy levels, which are crucial for your mental health. Getting enough sleep can help you stay focused and on track.
Before your conversation, avoid alcohol, drugs, and caffeine. These substances may affect your mood and thinking. Robert Greene suggests crowding out feelings of panic by focussing on simple tasks. In his book 33 Strategies of War, his third strategy deals with powerful examples and tips. These examples and guidance help you maintain your presence of mind.
Unintimidate yourself. Intimidation will always threaten your presence of mind. And it is a hard feeling to combat.
See the person, not the myth. Imagine him or her as a child, as someone riddled with insecurities. Cutting the other person down to size will help you to keep your mental balance.
- Robert Greene, 33 Strategies of War page 38.
Predict. In a difficult conversation, it’s crucial to consider worst-case scenarios. This brief consideration helps you prepare for the possibility of things going wrong. Yet the word brief is the operative word in this statement. Don’t venture into rumination. Rumination can impact your sleep and sense of emotional balance.
Be ready. Consider what is at stake. Are you worried about “losing” the discussion? Are you concerned about damaging your reputation if the conversation doesn’t go well? Will this conversation matter in one year, as awful as it may be? What about in five years?
Some colleagues will never change their strong personalities. You might think some people have emotional or interpersonal halitosis.
Colleagues with moderate to high IQ but low EQ may bristle with psychological defences. They justify their bad behaviour and confrontational ways. Yet they often perform well at work; other colleagues and managers adapt to their quirky ways.
Others may have personality constellations that might border on something warranting clinical attention—for instance, an undiagnosed or sub-clinical personality disorder. Yet people, in this case, may be on team members’ radars due to so many red flags. If so many people are off-side due to this person’s approach, does this make a difference to you?
Some people you won’t like. Yes, you don’t like them. Yet they don’t blaze a trail of emotional destruction in your workplace. You’re simply butting heads. It is what it is.
Are you taking their “attacks” to heart for these types of people? Yes, criticism, contempt or very different views feel awful sometimes. The question is: will you “lose” anything if they “win” the interaction?
Come up with a couple of go-to lines that will allow you to respond and buy yourself more time.
“I will keep your views in mind.”
“Thanks — I will look into this later.”
“Thank you for sharing your feelings and perspective.”
Write and rehearse two to three short lines that feel natural for you. Choose scripts that are simple to remember and applicable to many conversations. Your script could include habits. Instead of looking into an aggressor’s eyes, you could look at the space between their eyes. This way, their gaze is less likely to intimidate.
What if your feeling of intimidation extends to the physical domain? Your aggressor invades your space, or do you fear violence? Rory Miller, an experienced martial artist and corrections officer, offers you credible advice. His book, Meditations on Violence is an excellent read on managing situations where you risk violence. You might stand at an angle with your hand stroking your chin. You appear thoughtful like you are considering the aggressor’s views. Yet you are in a defensive stance. This feeling of defence may give you comfort while keeping your mind clear.
During the discussion: check in.
Check in with yourself when you are in challenging or confronting conversations.
- Body signals. Do you feel physical signs of stress and anxiety in your body? For example, sweating, increased heart rate or shallow breathing? What about “butterflies in your stomach”, dry throat, or muscle tension?
- Emotional signals. Most people may feel fear or anger. The limbic system in your brain governs these strong emotions, especially fear. Intense interactions make thinking difficult. Could our fight or flight brain system start to shut down higher-order thinking? For some people experiencing high-intensity confrontations, this can happen.
- Behavioural signals. Do you avoid or engage in unhelpful behaviours? You might not say what you think. You might leave the conversation or become quiet. Or you go on the attack — raising your voice.
Go to your breath and body.
Deep abdominal breathing is your superpower during intense discussions. There is a technique called box breathing which is particularly helpful.
Box breathing is a form of yogic deep breathing employed by the United States Navy SEALs and by stressed-out people everywhere. It’s also known as sama vritti pranayama, born of the yogic practice of pranayama, or focusing on the breath.
Its common name, “box breathing,” refers to the fact that a box has four sides, a concept represented here by breathing while you slowly count to four for a total of four times — four counts of breathing in, four counts of holding your breath, four counts of exhaling and four more counts of holding after your exhale.
Deep abdominal breathing engages your parasympathetic nervous system.
Your heartbeat slows, your blood pressure stabilises. Your body maintains a restful yet alert state. Your prefrontal cortex gets back online. Responding with logic, creativity and empthy is within your power again.
- Cleveland Clinic
Do anything to divert your attention away from any strong emotion you currently feel.
For example, focus on another sensation in your body, such as the feeling of your weight pressing into your seat. You might wiggle each toe. Or touch your fingertips together to see if you can feel the ridges of your fingerprints.
During and after: Name it to tame it
You might put your feelings into words via your thoughts in the middle of the discussion. It means you have to be mindful enough to stop and do this. The intensity of a conflict might mean you don’t always have the space to do this.
Afterwards, away from the discussion, put your feelings into words. Try this alone or with a trusted ally.
This technique — emotional labelling — can reduce the grip on strong emotions. By “naming it”, you “tame it”, which may lessen your physiological distress.
The goal of emotional labelling is not to explore and process your feelings. Labelling helps you pull yourself from the edge of a regretful stress-induced response.
Suppressing emotions and pretending not to be upset is a common strategy. Yet suppression can have adverse outcomes. These outcomes include elevated blood pressure and increased negative emotions.
Process your feelings more fully alone or with someone you trust to determine the relative costs and benefits of expressing them.
Don’t expect perfection from challenging interactions.
It happens in the movies. The “good guy” overpowers the “bad guy”. They defeat the “bad guy” in style. There’s even a handy quip casually tossed out after defeating the “bad guy”. Does this happen in the workplace? No.
Things often get (or at least feel) ugly. Intense discussions prick up bystanders’ ears. Managing conflict with style happens with practice. Like public speaking — exposure offers the chance for you to build skills. Exposure — and having the humility to learn from each encounter — builds your skills.
You learn to say less (so you aren’t taken out of context by your aggressor or bystanders). You spend less energy and more time in a balanced, present state of mind.
Who knows? You might even enjoy moving from a frightened “passenger” of conflict to something more. For instance, a creative, empathic and skilled negotiator. Someone who enjoys exploring differences. Someone proud for remaining calm — and enjoying the odd surprise which keeps things interesting.
In time, others may admire your “belly” — your centre in the face of storms. Your “belly” is hard-earned and worth the hard work you’ve invested.
Check out the book The Change Manager’s Companion. It’s available now. You can also check out an online course on Change Management.