To learn how to stand up to bullies, you need to stay calm and think with a cool head.
Many have already given you advice on how to behave towards bullies.
Your mother probably told you to ignore them and that they’d leave you alone, but you can’t buy into that.
Besides, they didn’t leave you alone.
They followed, teased and challenged you until you felt you were going to get angry or, worse, cry.
And as each new insult burned at you, destroyed your conscience, you wondered what planet your mother had grown up on.
Maybe Dad told you to stand up to it.
If you listened to his advice, you understood what pure horror means.
You and the bully circle each other on the playground, while your opponent is having fun, and you scare each other even more by imagining the scariest possible scenario.
The assistant manager, who is also a bit of a bully, has clearly told you that there should be no fighting on this playground.
If you fight, you’ll be expelled.
If someone hits you, you’re not to hit back.
As an adult, you’ve probably searched the library or the Net for self-help books looking for more helpful answers.
The books advise you to stay calm.
Don’t take the bully’s anger personally, the books advise.
Be determined, but not aggressive.
This may be good advice, but it’s harder to implement than the instructions for setting margins in Word.
Everyone advises you differently.
So how do you know what to do?
Everything you’ve heard is both true and false.
All these strategies can work, depending on the situation.
But not every strategy works in every situation.
Better than looking for detailed advice, remember one rule: you won’t beat the bully in the dust of the playground, but in your own head.
If you stay in touch with the thinking part of your brain, even if you’re scared to death, you’ll win.
The most important thing is what’s going on in your head.
All you have to do is break the old hypnotic pattern by doing something unexpected.
To better understand, let’s look at this situation from the bully’s point of view.
First of all, bullies are angry people.
If you were to ask them, they’d tell you they hate their anger.
They know that anger, like drugs, makes them addicted, can cause heart attacks, ruin their careers and scare away people close to them.
Anger is the addiction of an emotional vampire – a tyrant.
They can’t stop, because they’re always overwhelmed by the flood of chemicals in their brains.
Bullies don’t know that anger is something they create; they think someone is forcing it on them.
They think they’re just trying to mind their own business and some jerk does something stupid to ruin their day.
From then on, their behavior is automatic.
Bullies experience an adrenaline rush of the “fight or flight” response, just like you, but they choose to fight.
Bullies say they don’t want a fight; it’s just that they can’t allow others to treat them as they wish.
Indeed, when they’re angry, and this is most often the case, they see others as obstacles, or worse, a threat to their dignity.
Throughout history, the most serious forms of violence have always been committed in the name of defending reputation.
As you can imagine, with such a view, bullies often get into fights.
Thanks to this, they are very well informed.
When ordinary people get angry, they try to hold back.
Not so with bullies.
They indulge in rage and fan it as much as they can for maximum effect.
Later, they may regret it, but in the heat of the moment, they give themselves over completely to the primal excitement of battle.
Not only do bullies indulge in excitement, they also actively provoke it, whether they’re aware of it or not.
If you look at the lives of bullies, you’ll see that, again and again, they try very hard to provoke quarrels.
Many of them abuse intoxicants, which lowers their anger threshold.
Everyone, however, claims to take them to relax.
Always bear in mind that bullies argue to achieve an altered state of consciousness, rather than to force you to do anything.
Any of the three responses dictated by primitive brain centers is perfectly acceptable to them.
Bullies are just as happy if you stand up to them, run away or back away in fear.
The way to defeat them is to do something unexpected, which will get the bullies out of their usual, primitive pattern and make them think about what’s going on.
They hate it, because it spoils their fun.
Of course, to do something unexpected, you have to be able to think in the midst of an adrenaline rush.
The primitive part of your brain tells you that angry people are strong, powerful and dangerous.
Maybe they are, but they’re actually stupid.
This is true no matter how smart they are in other areas of their lives.
If you use the thinking part of your brain and it acts in accordance with primitive instincts, you have an advantage of about 50 IQ points.
However, it’s not easy to think when a bully is attacking you.
To beat bullies, you need to stay calm and think with a cool head.
Here are some tips to help you deal with bullies:
1. Take time to think
Only in the primitive world of the jungle do you have to react immediately to attacks.
That’s where the bully wants to send you, but nowhere does it say you have to go.
Normal people won’t be angry with you if you ask for a moment to think.
By your behavior, you’re showing that you take the situation seriously and want to resolve it successfully.
Bullies may try another method to get you to react directly and emotionally.
They want a quarrel, not a reasonable debate.
They may misinterpret your silence as you being stunned by fear, which may even be true, but you don’t have to admit it to them.
Whatever you’re feeling, asking for a minute to think things over is usually so unusual that you may be able to end the quarrel right away.
Whatever happens, don’t rush and think carefully before you respond.
Think about what you want to happen.
While you’re spending time thinking, think about possible outcomes.
Immediately reject anything the intruder should back down on and admit you’re right.
You can’t be efficient and right at the same time.
2. Get the bully to stop shouting
This may actually be easier than you think.
Sometimes you can only achieve this by speaking softly.
Bullies expect you to shout back, so don’t give them the pleasure.
If you both shout, no one will say anything intelligent.
Another unexpected way to get a bully to stop shouting is to say, “Please speak more slowly, I can’t understand you very well.”
You can also prevent shouting by slowing down your speech.
Have you ever tried shouting slowly?
This strategy works particularly well on the phone.
When talking on the phone, also remember the “m-hm” rule.
As the caller takes a breath, he or she usually responds with “m-hm”.
If you let him continue talking three times without interrupting him, he’ll probably stop and ask: “Are you there?”.
With this technique, you can interrupt him without saying a word.
3. Don’t give any explanations
If you’re being attacked by a bully, you may feel a strong urge to explain the reasons for your behavior and justify yourself.
But don’t!
Explanations are usually a secret form of conflict or escape.
The typical justification boils down to: “If you knew all the facts, you’d see that I’m right and you’re wrong,” or “I’m not guilty; you should be angry at someone else.”
It doesn’t matter if your explanations seem true and reasonable.
Bullies always recognize primitive forms of behavior in the face of aggression.
They’ll take your excuse as an invitation to sink their teeth into your neck.
4. Ask “What do you want me to do?”
Nothing can stop a bully’s attack as successfully as this simple, unexpected question.
Angry people don’t know or admit what they want you to do.
Bullies just want you to stay where you are while yelling at you, but it sounds awfully stupid when they have to tell you.
When you ask bullies what they want from you, they’ll have to stop and think.
This may be enough to bring them closer to a more rational part of their brain, which can only help you.
If bullies are trying to hide their true motivation, they’ll have to ask you for something more acceptable than what they really want.
5. Don’t take criticism personally
This isn’t easy at all.
To listen to this advice, you need to know what it means to understand something personally.
We all have external things – our children, our pets, our favorite sports clubs, our opinions and our business successes – that we experience as part of ourselves.
Psychologically, we can hardly distinguish between a verbal attack on all the above and a physical attack on our vital organs.
This doesn’t mean we have to respond to every criticism with an instinctive “kill or be killed” counter-attack.
If a bully is attacking you, it’s time to implement strategy number one – let your own confusion be a signal that you need to stop and think about what’s really going on.
With bullies, what you feel is often exactly what it is.
The violent attack isn’t personal.
Bullies yell at everyone!
If you think about it, these attacks usually say more about who and what the perpetrators are than they do about you.
To prevent yourself from taking the attack personally, you need to look beyond your original emotional response and look at the pattern, then step out of that pattern.
6. Understand that criticism can be a good way to learn
Every criticism, in addition to the attack, also contains useful information.
If you don’t hear anything useful at first, keep listening until you do.
Not everyone who criticizes you is a bully.
Be especially careful when you hear the same thing from several different sources.
If you get used to always waiting twenty-four hours before responding to criticism, it will drive bullies crazy.
Other people will be amazed at your maturity and reasonableness.
You might even learn something.
If, on the other hand, you need to criticize someone who tends to take everything too personally, reverse the roles.
Resolve the situation in such a way that the other person doesn’t have to admit he was wrong to accept what you say.
Always offer something to save face.
In your comments, make it clear that you understand how it’s possible for a reasonable, honest person to have done what they did.
Focus your advice on improving your situation rather than pointing out mistakes.
Focus on what you want to achieve, rather than on what’s wrong and what’s already happened.