You Feel: The Two-Word Technique That Calms Any Crisis

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Most leaders try to manage a crisis with logic; it rarely works. In this episode of Leading Through Crisis, host Céline Williams sits down with Doug Noll — a former trial lawyer, peacemaker, and author of De-Escalate — who spent over a decade teaching maximum-security inmates how to stop fights before they start.

Doug breaks down the neuroscience of conflict: why 95% of the brain is emotional (not rational), why the prefrontal cortex shuts down under threat, and why leading through logic during a crisis is fighting biology itself.

He introduces a simple, research-backed technique called affect labeling (saying "you feel" and naming someone's emotion) that can calm a nervous system in under two minutes, whether you're in a boardroom, a family crisis, or a prison yard.

Along the way, Doug shares one of the most powerful stories from his 10 years working in California and Connecticut prisons: a woman serving a 25-to-life sentence who used this exact skill to reconnect with the son she had relinquished 18 years earlier.

If you're a business owner, executive, or leader who wants practical tools for leading through change, conflict, and crisis — not just theory — this conversation will change how you show up in every hard conversation you have next.

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Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA, is a lawyer-turned-peacemaker. He is an award-winning author, teacher, trainer, and highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. His training has included everything from teaching life inmates to be peacemakers and mediators in maximum-security prisons to training analysts at the Congressional Budget Office how to de-escalate members of Congress and staff.

You can learn more at https://dougnoll.com. The special site with resources for our listeners, https://dougnoll.co/crisis, goes live August 17th.

You can also connect with Doug on...
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougnoll/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/DouglasNoll
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/douglasenoll/
Or subscribe to his YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtAHXdBT1Y0Pl7SGrM_HcFw

Doug's new book, Empathy Leadership, comes out at the beginning of September. Pre-order here: https://dougnoll.com/books/empathy-leadership