You Cannot Control Others But You Can Control Your Response

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Hello, and welcome to today's podcast where we are talking about let's talk about choice.
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And it's just me.
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So the good news is it will probably be a little bit shorter, and we're going to talk about do we have choice?
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And the reason we're talking about this today is because sometimes I feel that we get overwhelmed with everything that's going on in the news, that it can feel quite suffocating when you watch what's happening in other countries.
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There's lots of differing opinion, there's lots of hate, there's lots of anger, there's lots of blame towards other people about problems that we have here in the UK.
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It's not going to be a party political broadcast.
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I'll leave you to make your own decisions around that.
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But I do want to talk about that hopelessness and that helpless feeling that we can have when we are watching the news or when we're hearing an interpretation and listening to other people's beliefs.
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Now I'm going to start with climate change as an example.
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There will be people who strongly believe that climate change is a thing and that's affecting us quicker than we're anticipating.
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There's scientific belief proof fact, however you want to call it.
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So there's those people there are very concerned about the climate and trying to make changes hugely at the moment.
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And then there are people who are like, well, I don't really believe it's happening.
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And then there's everything in between.
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And we'll all have our own opinion and belief system.
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And that can cause conflict when we have those conversations, of course.
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Well, what I want to talk about is that choice that we make.
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So some people who are kind of sitting in the middle believing climate change, uh, they feel that they can't do anything because if they do something, it won't be enough.
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Because there's other big countries that are causing far more issues with the climate than they are in their two-bedroomed house.
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And I just thought that would be a really interesting subject to talk about today about choice.
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How much choice do we have?
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Does it exist?
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What do we choose to do and why?
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And then I'll also talk about a conversation I had with some young offenders around a quote from Victor Frankel, which also talks about choice.
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Fascinating discussions.
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So let's talk about do we have choice as individuals and can we make a difference no matter what it is?
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So I'll just go back to climate change.
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I've chosen this subject because I think that lots of people have different views, and I think there is sometimes that I can't make a difference, even if I believe it to be true, I can't make that difference.
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And I was listening to a podcast from The Rest is Politics.
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If anybody from The Rest is Politics is listening to this podcast, there's a little plug for you, and they were talking about the truth about climate, and they talked to a lady who's the Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Technology in the Maldives, which is the lowest-lying country in the world, and what that means for the people of the Maldives.
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And she was saying that actually their impact on the world as a country is the smallest of any country.
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Like we're talking 0.007%, and yet they are going to be one of those the first countries that have to migrate, all of their people, if climate change continues.
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And listening to her talking, it kind of brought it home for me a little bit more around gosh, this is really starting to affect people's lives.
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This is causing people to have to leave, to become refugees, to search for safe places to live when they are not part of the problem, but they're going to be the first ones to be affected.
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And so they are doing all they can to make people more aware of it.
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And I often hear people saying, Well, I'm not going to do that because it's not going to make any difference.
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Or I'm not going to do that because it's not going to make any difference.
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I remember as a small business having a webinar around climate change and the things that you can do as a small business and how those little things actually make a difference, like having solar panels, like using heat source pumps, like investing in wind turbines.
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Just those little things that you can do to make your own difference around how much pollution we put into the air.
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And then it was like, but we do have choice.
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And some of you will be listening to this and disagreeing with me, and that's absolutely fine.
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And some of you will be like, I don't really get what you're going for to, Nick, and that's absolutely fine as well.
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But it's about choice, it's about how we choose to respond.
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Now, as a hostage and crisis negotiator, I had the privilege of working with some incredible people, one of them an FBI agent, and he said this to me.
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He said, Nick, you can't change other people.
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You can do your best to influence them, but you can't change them.
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The only thing you've got any control over is how you respond.
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And I really like that.
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And it's it comes from not just him, but if you look back in time, there's lots of people that have said that this, including Victor Frankel, and we'll talk about Victor Frankel in a minute, around how you choose as an individual to respond to the things that are going on in the world.
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Now, climate change is a huge one, it's a big one, and of course, with choice there comes cost, so all of that has to be borne in mind, depending on different people's circumstances.
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But I am a great believer in that we can choose how we respond.
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Now I'm going to caveat that because I also know as a human being, as an emotional human being, our brain takes over very, very quickly and goes into reaction.
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So it will work from the primitive brain, fight flight freeze, especially if we feel under attack.
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And sometimes when we have conversations about big topics like politics and religion and climate change and all of those things where there's a lot of differing opinions that can cause conflict.
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And it's how we choose to respond during that time of conflict that we have choice over.
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So we can make choices on a day-to-day basis, like for example, we can use our washing machine overnight when it uses less electricity, so we're not using as much electricity.
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We can choose to put insulation into our lofts, or we can choose to wear more jumpers rather than put the heating on.
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Whatever your choice is, we that there's all always choice.
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And some of you will be saying, No, Nick, we don't have choice, we can't afford to do that, we can't do this, and we can't do that.
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I would ask you to just change the can't word to well, what can you do?
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and start to think of the options that you have there because that is a far more positive way of just changing the sentence to get your brain to start thinking, okay, well, what can we do?
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And I had this highlighted for me personally when I was driving home the other day.
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I had a four-hour car journey, and I was driving home, and I was thinking a lot.
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So, for those of you that know me, know that the 19-year-old in my life has disappeared off to the army.
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So she's been gone for nine days now.
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So that first week, I was doing a lot of reflection on being a parent and being a person and all those things that go with that next stage of parenting.
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And I was thinking about that, and I was listening to the news, or I was kind of half listening to the news.
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And as I listened to the news, first of all, there was a talk show on where there were some values and beliefs of the people on the talk show that didn't resonate with me at all.
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And I could feel myself starting to react.
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And I was like, Well, this is not good.
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I'm reacting whilst in the car journey on the way home.
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What choice do I have?
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And I was about to switch it over because that's the choice that I had was to listen to something different in the car.
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When the news came on, and there was the terrible news that a young baby had been murdered, a newborn had been murdered.
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Not just had they been murdered, but they'd been murdered in a very, very violent way.
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And my heart literally sank.
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It literally felt heavy and sank, and I felt in that moment hopeless and I felt helpless.
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And I remember driving, feeling physically that heaviness, you know, where you feel that real overwhelm.
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And I was like, oh my word, or words to that effect.
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What sort of world are we living in at the moment?
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How could anybody use such anger, such aggression, such violence to a newborn baby?
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Now I don't know the story.
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Of course, we all make judgments.
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I don't know what went on in the background.
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I'm not saying there's anything that would possibly justify that at all.
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But what I'm saying is it just from my perspective in the car, listening to that at that time, it just felt awful.
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And some of you may feel the same every time you turn the news on.
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You may feel the same about the heaviness of what is going on across the world in this country.
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Perhaps you are struggling with the violence that is happening at the moment.
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Whatever your perspective is, if you're feeling that feeling, you can get lost in it.
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It's quite easy to get lost in it.
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It's quite easy to get into Patari's box where the attitude and behavior of other people will start to affect your attitude and behaviour, and you'll get to that stage where there's nothing I can do.
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And I was feeling like that.
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But then I remembered that amazing FBI agent who'd said those words to me.
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And I started to think about well, what can I do?
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What can I do?
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Now I can't change what's happened, but what I can do is I can continue to make my little bit of difference in the world.
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I can continue to share my stories of what I learned as a hostage and crisis negotiator and how that impacts other people's communication and build better relationships.
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Because ultimately, what happens when you have a better conversation and there's no stress and there's less conflict, it can just re-reinvent almost the relationship that you have with another person.
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Once you've had that honest conversation and listen to them about what's going on, I will keep being respectful even when I don't agree with another person.
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Because it's easy to fall into the trap of getting angry and frustrated because somebody doesn't see your perspective or your point of view.
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Remember, you can't change other people.
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What you can do is listen to their perspective, share your perspective in an open, honest way and logical, and they're far more likely to listen to you anyway when you do that, rather than if you start attacking or become defensive.
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Now that sounds like a small, a small thing, and some of you may have heard about the broken glass theory.
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So there's a theory that's in the world of policing, and I'm sure it spreads from not just policing but to other places, that when you're looking at an is, let's say, an estate of houses, and one of the houses has a broken window, and nobody does anything to repair it, it becomes the norm, it becomes the acceptable.
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So other windows might start to get broken because, well, actually, there's a window over there that's broken and nobody seems to care about it.
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So why would I care about this window?
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And that has a knock-on impact effect.
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It's the same with litter.
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If you walk past a piece of litter in your street outside your house, you're you are accepting that that is okay.
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It might be so okay that you don't even see it now, that you're completely tuned out of it.
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That there's so much litter around where you live that when you walk past it, it's just part of the environment.
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And there is a level of acceptance that that's okay for you.
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Now, I'm not saying that's right, I'm not saying that's wrong, because you have choice.
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You have a choice to pick that piece of litter up and put it in a bin.
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Some of you will say, Well, why should I bother?
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It's not my litter.
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Why should I bother it's not my litter?
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And that's your choice is to have that opinion and to not pick it up.
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So think about that broken glass theory.
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See some litter on the floor, it's okay to drop litter.
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And it happens more and more.
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And you'll see it around where you live, and you'll start to notice these things a little bit more if you start to become more conscious and aware of what's happening around you.
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And so I was like, Well, I can I can do these things, I can keep doing what I can keep doing.
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And I believe in the ripple effect.
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And if you plop a stone into the water, it creates ripples.
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And if you keep doing those little things every single day, it will make a difference, it will create those ripples.
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And we all have in our power, through our communication, through our listening skills, we all have the power to leave somebody feeling empowered, valued, and validated, but we also have the power to do the exact opposite.
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So you can walk away from a conversation, not even knowing this, that the other person might feel devalued, devaluated, and demotivated.
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And that's all within our power.
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But it's about being more conscious of how we're communicating, how we're living our lives, what we're choosing to do.
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So when you're in that helpless, hopeless moment, they would encourage you to say, Well, what can I do rather than what can't I do?
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And then I'm going to come on to Victor Frankel now because I had an experience with some young offenders, some young men recently, and I wrote this quote on the board for them to read and discuss.
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And it was this it comes from Man's Search for Meaning, and it says, Everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's way.
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And I asked this question Is he right?
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And I'm gonna ask you the same question.
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Is he right?
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Do you believe that that everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms?
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To choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
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Now, for those of you that don't know anything about Victor Frankfall, I would highly recommend his book.
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It's a great book, one that you can keep going back to because there is so much information in there to consume and to reflect about.
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Oh, Austria, that's it.
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Gosh, he was a physicist from Austria.
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Ended up being caught up in the Holocaust and being taken to a concentration camp.
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And it was his experience of this concentration camp.
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I think he actually he went to four different concentration camps over a period of time.
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But it was it was his experience of this and his observation of human beings and how some survived and how some didn't.
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That created the book Man's Search for Meaning.
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It's a fascinating book, and there's lots of different quotes that have come out from that book.
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And so I asked these young men if they felt that he was right, and it was a very interesting conversation.
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Some people said yes, some people said no, some people said it depends on the circumstances, and that if you're being forced to do something against your will in that moment in time, you don't have any control over that at all, but you do have control over what you do next, what you do after that event.
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So it sparked a very interesting discussion around is it true?
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And do we have choice in all circumstances?
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Now, Victor Frankel was a person who suggested that your attitude and the way that you react to things has a huge bearing on the outcome.
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And I often talk about an equation called E plus R equals O, which is event plus reaction equals the outcome.
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And if you think about your own life and how this might show up, and sometimes in your own life you might feel that you have no choice.
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I can certainly reflect on times in my life where I didn't feel that I had choice.
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And then once somebody had given me a good listening to, I realized that perhaps I had more choice than I had thought I had at the time.
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And I've spoken to hundreds of people, a real privilege to speak to hundreds of people in crisis, who sometimes felt they had no choice, that they'd got themselves caught up in a spiral of emotions internally, and that they didn't feel that they had the choice to live on a particular day, and that the only way out was to die.
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And after speaking to them and giving them a really good listening too, as I like to say, they were able to recognise that they did have choice.
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And sometimes I think it's not just about listening to other people, but it's also listening to ourselves, it's also listening to our own inner dialogue, it's thinking about our own thoughts and our beliefs and our feelings, and we're all very unique and very individual, thank goodness.
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And none of us are the same, so we all have different sets of circumstances, beliefs, experiences, values.
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But I do firmly believe that we all have the choice to make a difference, and that we when we learn how to consciously control our reactions and move ourselves into a logical space, which sounds so simple and so easy as I sit here today, but it's not, and I know it's not.
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That when we can start to do that, we are far more in control of our own lives, and that control gives us choice.
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Because when we feel out of control, we don't feel like we have any choice.
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I can give you lots of examples of negotiating with people where they felt they were out of control and that they had no choice, and gradually over time, they realized that they did have a bit of control and they would exert that control.
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I negotiated with a young man up a tree for 13 hours, and he had all the control because we had no idea who he was or anything about him.
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And then his grandma turned up and we found out all about him, and we told him she was here, and of course, in that moment he suddenly knew that his choices were not as clear-cut, that he wasn't going to be able to remain anonymous and stay up this tree for much longer because now we knew who he was, and so the control that he felt he had was beginning to slip away.
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But he could still control one thing, and that was how he came down, and he came down in exchange for his grandma's chicken and rice, and that's what got him out of the tree.
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But that that's about feeling in control, and so when you're negotiating with somebody like that, there's always a compromise, and if the compromise is chicken and rice, so you still feel in control, then that's great because we still bring everything to a peaceful end, nobody gets hurt, and we work in collaboration, so you come out of down to the tree, and in these circumstances he was arrested and taken off for the crime to be investigated.
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Think about your own life where you don't feel like you've got control.
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What about the young people in your life?
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Do they feel like they've got control?
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Because I'm guessing that they probably don't at times, and you get a huge reaction when that happens, or maybe your partner or a loved one, or perhaps your parents, you know, we've talked in the podcast before about having those difficult, challenging conversations with your parents where it feels like the control is being taken away from them.
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So I'm gonna leave it there.
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I'm gonna leave you to think about that question of is Victor Frankel right in what he was saying around those quotes.
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There are, if you've never heard of him, then please Google him.
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He also says another one of his famous quotes is between stimulus and response, there is a space.
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In that space is our power to choose our response, in our response lies our growth and our freedom.
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Some people say he didn't come up with that quote, somebody else said that, but it doesn't matter in my head, it's about the quote rather than the person.
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So have a think about that.
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Have a think about do you have choice?
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And start to reframe questions of I can't do that into what can I do.
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And I look forward to hearing any comments that you might have.
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Please let me know.
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Otherwise, please continue to listen to the podcast.
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I really appreciate it.
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Please like and subscribe and share with anybody who you think might find this useful.
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And let's keep having those conversations that other people avoid because they're the conversations I believe we should most definitely be having.
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If you have in any way been affected by today's podcast episode, there are numbers at the end of the transcript which you can contact.
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We'd like to thank you all for listening.
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And if you'd like to join our Facebook group, there is also a link to that in the notes that go with this podcast.
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Have a great day.