Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: So one of the big things that you wrote about in your book, that I thought was so cool, was you talk about something that you call tactical empathy and my brother works at a suicide hotline and you talk about working at one of those yourself and kind of using that experience to gain these skills. So I'm really interested in how that worked out and how tactical empathy might be used with a teenager, especially towards the beginning of an important negotiation or conversation to kind of break down their defenses a little bit.

Chris: Sure, it can absolutely be used with teenagers, we're seeing people use it with children anywhere basically from about age five up.

Andy: Okay.

Chris: So let's start with why do we call it tactical empathy instead of empathy, how about that?

Andy: There you go, okay.

Chris: All right so, when I first learned this a lot of people learned that empathy is just very broad, very general term. But the application of it we'll come to find out, and it's backed up by neuroscience, that when you use what we referred to in a hotline as reflection, what I called is a hostage negotiator emotion labeling what we now call as business negotiators, just labeling.

Andy: Labeling, okay.

Chris: You know you label a positive emotion, it reinforces that positive emotion. You label a negative emotion, it defuses that negative emotion. And these work every single time. Now what people get confused by sometimes is it doesn't guarantee the matter of degree. But since we know even more now in listening for different, what do you want to defuse the negative, do you want to reinforce the positive. That's the tactical application of empathy and the understanding of what it is. So it's just a more precise, intentionally understanding than just sort of labeling the emotion you hear and waiting to see what happens. It's looking for specific things and intentionally trying to dial up or dial down certain emotions.

Andy: That's what I thought was cool about your techniques in your book here, is a lot of it is kind of about really having like a deep knowledge about the person that you're talking to and that if you can know things about their motivations and about what drives them, then you can kind of use those. And you talk later in your book about you call them black swans, things that you don't know that are really, maybe important to the other person, that if you knew them would like really alter the course of the negotiation. And I thought that was such a cool idea and I wonder how do you find those and especially with a teenager that you kind of have known for a long time, are these things that you maybe already know that you just have to kind of recognize, or are these things that you maybe don't know about yet that you have to uncover or find out?

Chris: Yeah, good question and it's really not about knowing it in advance, but what are the skills that uncovered, what you want to learn and are they in really predictable places? So-

Andy: Okay.

Chris: When I was at hostage negotiation, they just said, label emotion that you hear the presenting emotion. Now the vast majority of time, the presenting emotion is going to be a negative emotion.

Andy: Sure.

Chris: And then you combine that with they all always told us to look for the loss, if we're talking to somebody who's barricaded someplace, for whatever reason, there's going to be a loss. And nine times out of 10, it's going to be a loss within the last 24 to 48 hours. So we didn't know that that governs all behavior. We just thought it governed hostage-taking behavior. I learned hostage negotiation in the early 1990s and then along about 2002 or so, Daniel Kahneman wins a Nobel Prize in Behavioral Economics on prospect theory, which says that fear of loss is the out sized influence on all behavior, and the different biases.

Andy: Yeah, cognitive biases.

Chris: And they're all built around that and they didn't say in hostage-takers, they said all behavior. And they didn't say Americans, they said human beings, again all behavior.

Andy: Sure yeah, it's universal right.

Chris: And so now I'm like, all right so I guess what we were talking hostage negotiation just didn't apply to hostage-takers, it applied to human beings. And they happen to be involved in hostage situations, but again they're just human beings and what we now refer to as the limbic system which is the amygdala, the hippocampus, couple of other long sounding names. In the brain, the limbic system operates I think a great analogy is to the respiratory system.

Andy: Okay.

Chris: When is your limbic system off? When is your respiratory system off? Neither one ever turns [crosstalk].

Andy: Hopefully never.

Chris: And that's a lot what we psychologists use to identify as the subconscious, they say your subconscious is working and influencing your thought patterns, at all times and even while you're asleep your subconscious is at work. Well, the subconscious is the limbic system.

Andy: Sure.

Chris: And again, the great analogy to the respiratory system is, I might ask you, "Can you control your emotions?" and you say, "Sure I control my emotions." And I can say, "Can you control your breathing?" and they'll say, "Sure I can control my breathing." and I say, "All right, well stop breathing for an hour." So the degree of control we have over our emotions is very similar to the degree of control we have over our breathing. We can intentionally slow it down and gain control from about 30 to 45 to a minute and a half seconds.

Andy: Yeah.

Chris: But then the autopilot's going to kick back into gear and it's going to go back and begin to operate the way it operates.

Andy: Okay, but so then what you're saying is that we can notice these times when emotions maybe don't make sense or when behavior kind of seems a little irrational. Are Teenagers maybe doing something that seems like, that just doesn't make sense, why would you do that? That these are signs that you can use as clues to somehow uncover black swans that you can use in negotiations.

Chris: Right, those are absolutely the clues that take us right there. And you know what you said is really interesting in that, behavior that doesn't make sense or it's irrational, so there's kind of two things there. When behavior doesn't make sense to us, somebody is being driven by an emotion either that we're not recognizing or we choose not to recognize.

Andy: Right.

Chris: Like when you say you shouldn't act that way to someone. What you're doing is, look I recognize what's driving you, I just don't like it, otherwise I wouldn't use the word should. You shouldn't be angry, well, you're angry, I recognize it and I've just chosen to decide for you that you shouldn't be angry. Should is the word that if you as a human being are using the word should, then you are out of sync with the situation.

Andy: Right, but you think you totally understand better than everyone else what they should be doing.

Chris: Right, what is in fact happening doesn't conform to your set of rules. So you're saying, well reality shouldn't be this way. You're recognizing that you don't like what's going on but it's actually going on.

Andy: Okay, but isn't that hard as a parent because don't you feel like some of your job is to tell your kids what they should be doing and what they shouldn't be doing? So how do you do that in a way that you're not really telling them what they should be doing?

Chris: Right, well it's not just hard as a parent, it's hard as a human being.

Andy: Sure, yeah.

Chris: An awful lot of what we misinterpret as parent-child dynamics is really just human being to human being dynamics. It's two human beings dealing with each other that happened to be very close and very vested in the outcomes with one another which makes both sides less rational.

Andy: Sure.

Chris: Everybody acts in patterns, everybody other than actual paranoid schizophrenics, because they are hearing voices, they are seeing things. These are actual, for lack of a better term, wiring problems that they're struggling with. And those voices that we have, whatever it is that induces schizophrenia into somebody, we have no way of knowing what those voices are saying or what they're seeing. So they're the only ones that are really kind of pattern less. Everybody else acts in patterns, we may not like those patterns. If you don't like a certain politician, and I'm not taking a side now just having a good example. People will say Donald Trump is irrational. But nobody's surprised by anything he says or does because he acts in patterns. He's a human being, how many times does CNN have to say, "Can't believe that Donald Trump tweeted this out." Every other day, because Donald Trump is a human being he's going to act in patterns and when we don't like those patterns, we say they're irrational.

Andy: It would be more shocking if all of a sudden he started only …

Chris: If he stopped tweeting.

Andy: Tweeting G-rated, yeah politically correct politics right.

Chris: Yeah, but his supporters are saying, "Well, he's not irrational at all." So it's like beauty, it's all in the eye of the beholder. One rationality is really more about whether or not you agree with someone's behavior.

Andy: Ah right, and reality is subjective.

Chris: Correct.

Andy: So that's interesting and I wonder if we could break that down a little bit, in a little more detail, like some sort of specific example, how would you notice an emotion that doesn't make sense? Then, how do you tie that to the underlying black swan behind it? And then from there, once you figured that out, then how do you go ahead and use that to establish the tactical empathy?

Chris: When you start simply recognizing people's emotions, the black swans will come up. I remember that sometimes for practice, when I was volunteering on a suicide hotline, I'd be in conversations that the only thing I would do would be recognize the other person's emotions, just for practice.

Andy: Okay, yeah.

Chris: And I can remember walking down the street with another FBI agent, a female FBI agent that I was working with, and we were discussing an issue. And all I was doing was reading her emotions and articulating them back to her and connecting them to her behavior. And we're not two minutes into the conversation and she goes, "You're reading my mind." And I said, "No all I got to do is read your emotions, you're going to open your mind up for me." It's really kind of that simple.

Andy: So what would some of those phrases look like or what would you say to someone to label an emotion?

Chris: Well, a great thing is the emotion is going to come through in their tone of voice, you're going to hear a sound a lot angrier, they're going to sound upset, they're going to sound distant, they're going to sound cold, they're going to sound hurt, they're going to sound happy. You just label it and if you confused by what you hear a great one, we teach everybody whether they're interpersonal interactions with people their close to are business. A magic label is, "Sounds like that's important to you." Now, no matter what they just said, you're going to get more information as a result of putting that out.

Andy: I see, sure, and encourages them.

Chris: And at different versions of that, another one would be, sounds like you've given that a lot of thought.

Andy: Right, right.

Chris: Now what happens when you say, "Sounds like you've given that a lot of thought." Then you just grabbed onto the thread that's got that whole thought string behind it and you're going to pull it all up.

Andy: And you're communicating that I understand this thing is important to you, but you're not judging it, right? So you're like bringing it up, but in kind of a really open way that allows it to be discussed. That's pretty cool, it sounds like you've given a lot of thought. That would be when you see a topic that seems to be something that your teenager seems to be kind of excited about or something.

Chris: Yeah, one way or another you're going to start to get them to, for lack of a better term we call it vomiting information, you want information, you want them talking, especially with teenagers, because you want to trigger thought processes to be articulate. It helps them hear what they're saying, simultaneously it also sure to wear them out and that is never a bad thing.

Andy: So, another thing that we want in the conversation that you talk about in your book is, we want yeses and it feels good to get a yes. And a lot of times I think as parents, you go into a conversation and your objective is, I just need to get the kid on board with XYZ thing as okay, is it okay? Is that okay? Is it okay? Like give me yes, okay, good, got it, done. Got to move on to the next thing and so maybe it's a rush kind of thing, but I feel like a lot of times those yeses that we get when we just kind of push for a yes from our kids are not genuine yeses, like you talk about in your book. So I wonder how you can tell the difference and how you can avoid falling into the kind of fake yes trap?

Chris: Yeah, well the simplest ways is just don't try to get yes. Like what you said, we're trying to get yes cause we're trying to coerce the other side, again this is a human nature issue. We're trying to coerce and we're trying to back him into a corner, we're trying to take away their autonomy, we're trying to force him. No human being likes that, none, it doesn't matter whether it's your kid or not. It just creates resentment, but kids since we do this to our kids so much, they then figure out really quickly because they see this eight billion times. All they got to do is give us the fake yes and we move on, we get really happy and satisfied and we move on.

Andy: Like you say, it's a pattern that gets triggered.

Chris: We teach them to give us a fake yes. And they're, all right look, all I got to do is say yes to mom or dad and they'll lay off.

Andy: Right and then it conditions them.

Chris: It conditions them.

Andy: So the solution is then you're saying to notice when you're going into a conversation that your objective is looking for a yes, and then to tweak that objective a little bit more to kind of understanding or something.

Chris: Yeah, well really the platinum response that you always really want to get from somebody else that's much quicker, but it seems like it's a waste of time is to really articulate their perspective till you get them to say, "That's right." Because when someone vents on us, it seems like they never shut up. And what this does is actually short circuit, shortcuts, hacks, whatever term you want, it hacks the venting process. And so you do not even get into venting at all, where you just wait for the other side to run out of energy but they just keep getting madder and madder and madder. What it just does is it just completely short circuits it.

Andy: So, how do you get a, "That's right," from your teenager?

Chris: Typically you want to paraphrase what they've just said, you get really good at it, you paraphrase what they've said, you paraphrase it and you label it, sounds like this is really important to you. Your kid says to you, "But everybody's doing this." Your answers, "It sounds like this is really important to you." But most parents want to say, "Well if everybody was jumping off the roof, would you jump off the roof too?" Or, "I'll just die. If I can't get this." Sounds like this is really important to you. Again we're talking about defusing what's driving, which is the recognition of these emotions seem to be such an utter waste of time until you try them out and find out how fast and make the conversations go.

Andy: Right, and it's like in this classic technique that they teach therapists called motivational interviewing, which is a big in our literature on alcohol use cause it's a technique they used to help people with addiction. But one of the things they talk about is rolling with resistance and that just really strikes me with what you're talking about is, if your kid is really emotional about something or they're driving really hard in one direction towards something, you don't want to meet them head on, you want to kind of roll with that and you want to kind of slowly turn them to a better way. So by doing what you're saying and saying, "Oh, sounds like that's really important to you," it sounds like you've given that a lot of thought and allows them to open up so that you can kind of start to steer them a little bit I think, which is really cool.

Chris: Exactly and it defuses also what might be driving them out of control.

Andy: Yeah, rather than if you meet it head on, it blows up and that escalates the energy, whereas what you're saying, just sucks the urgency out of it or something and it's really cool.

Chris: Yeah, that's exactly it.

Andy: But so then, it's funny because you talk about that and how you defuse the situation, but then you also talked about that sometimes it's actually beneficial to kind of strategically use anger or take the other person off, I think you call it strategic umbrage. Is that something that you think you would ever use with a teenager where you kind of purposely get them a little riled up?

Chris: Yeah and that was one of the things that we talked about a little in the book that we're really reluctant about and we thought about a lot since, and We just had a consultant call, my son is my Director of Operations and he's a top coach, and some people were mad at some counterparts. And it's the old do you fight fire with fire? And everybody loves that, but ask yourself when was the last time you saw a fireman going to a fire with a flamethrower?

Andy: Yeah, right.

Chris: Let's fight fire with fire, if that worked, firemen would go to fires with flamethrowers. And when you put it like that, it just sounds utterly insane.

Andy: So, it sounds like what you're saying is if you worked to rewrite the book at this point, you might kind of change that or not include strategic umbrage as a strategy?

Chris: That's correct.