Lawyer Turned Peacemaker with a Crazy Sense of Adventure: The Life of Doug Noll

SPEAKER_01: So many people think that my story is inspiring.

How I became blind at just 17 years of age.

They always want to know how I've done it and how I've kept smiling all along the way.

Well, I just took to focus my attention.

I hope that I can also be a source of inspiration for yield to the code.

Hey, yo, welcome back to the flowdown list for what is episode number 74.

Hopefully, you're having an amazing day already.

And well, I can only hope that the podcast will make it even better.

That's the goal around here.

I'm not just putting this out for your enjoyment.

I'm hoping that it can truly be a benefit to your day and maybe bring a smile to your face, give you a little bit of encouragement, and inspire you to just get out there and enjoy life.

That's the point here on The Low Down with Kevin Lowe.

Today's episode, today's guest is no exception.

Doug Knoll is a trial lawyer-turned peacemaker who is listening people into existence.

What does that mean?

That's exactly what I was excited to find out.

Let me just say this.

Doug Knowle is a pretty amazing guy.

And this skill of listening people into existence, he teaches this to prisoners in maximum security prisons and to members of the Congressional Budget Office.

What skill can you think of that you could teach to two totally different realms of people?

And yet Doug has figured it out because Doug knew that he had a greater purpose in this life.

He wanted to serve humanity.

And well, he's doing that and so much more.

But what's really cool about Doug Noel is the fact that he's like a lot of people.

And the fact that, you know, life doesn't always go the way we think.

And for Doug, that was certainly no exception.

Because he came into this world with everything going against him.

He was dealt a bad hand right off the bat.

Coming into this world, Doug was born nearly deaf, nearly blind, with two club feet and left-handed.

And yet he would succeed.

He would go on to discover a total sense of adventure.

Becoming a ski instructor, becoming a helicopter, an airplane pilot, white water rafting.

I mean, the guy is all over the place.

And yet, when you look at the way that he came into this world, you think, wow, how could he even have done that?

And even so, for myself, I think, wow, what an awesome example that it doesn't matter how we start the race as much as it matters how we finish it.

And well, Doug, he's finishing this race in first place, in my opinion.

Before I get to my interview with Doug, I do have to tell you about the sponsor on the podcast, that of course, Freedom Nutrition Coaching.

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You can find the link in the episode show.

Alright, if you're ready, I'm ready to introduce you to today's guest, Doug Knoll.

Doug, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00: Hey Kevin, this is gonna be fun.

SPEAKER_01: Awesome, man.

Well, I'm super excited.

So glad to have you here today.

So so where are you joining us from today?

Where are you at in the world?

SPEAKER_00: I live almost in the exact center of the state of California, about 60 miles south of Yosemite National Park and about 40 miles west of Sequoia National Park in the central Sierra Nevada.

SPEAKER_01: Oh, wow.

That actually sounds beautiful.

SPEAKER_00: It is.

I'm quite blessed.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

Well, that's awesome.

Awesome.

Well, well, my goodness, I'm super excited to have you on the podcast and excited to get to share a bit about your life story and and where kind of, I guess kind of like where it was, where it started, and and you know what you're doing today.

And and so I would love for for us to kind of start your story off with you kind of explaining to me what childhood was like, because I know from my notes that you were actually you came into this world born with with several different disabilities.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

I got in the wrong line for a lot of stuff.

I was born uh partially deaf, almost completely blind, two club feet, so I couldn't walk, and bad teeth, left-handed, and all in the 19th, I was born in 1950.

And but I got in the right line for a mind.

I got a really sharp mind.

But the problem in my childhood was back then is that nobody knew how to deal with me.

My parents didn't know how to deal with me, and coaches couldn't deal with me.

I was left-handed.

I didn't learn, I couldn't walk until I was three years old.

I had multiple surgeries.

So I was way, way behind all of my peers in terms of developing physically and athletically.

And I was pretty smart to boot.

So it was a buzzkill, you know, for socialization.

And I went through, you know, a pretty miserable childhood, even though I was I I was raised in affluence and my parents loved me.

They didn't have the tools to deal with somebody like me, and really nobody did.

And so it but uh but you know, I mean, I overcame a lot of this stuff.

I learned how to teach myself stuff, and I've actually probably lived seven lifetimes in the in the time that I've been on this planet because I became a uh I went to Dartmouth College and then and graduated with a degree in English literature, came back to California, went to law school, graduated from law school with honors, and along the way I became a secondary black belt, I became a level three certified ski instructor, I um fly airplanes and helicopters, fly fisherman, rock climber.

Used in my younger days, I was a class four kayaker, whitewater rafter, did some professional river guiding, taught skiing for a while.

So I mean I've done a lot of really cool things.

And so although my life started off really rough, I have learned what true happiness is.

And I've just been totally blessed.

I think my life really started when I was around 50.

So that that's awesome.

SPEAKER_01: No, I love that.

I love it.

No, I'm just curious as far as the amount of like hearing loss and vision impairment and stuff that you that you've suffered.

I mean, did it ever improve, get worse?

SPEAKER_00: Well, the hearing loss isn't too bad.

It's mostly high frequency.

So in actually, I'm a jazz violinist.

So it hasn't, it it hasn't really affected.

That hasn't, that wasn't too bad.

Uh mostly just high frequencies are kind of outside my range of hearing.

With my eyes, I had my vision was 2400.

What most people can see at 400 feet, I could barely see at 20 feet.

And uh and uh it wasn't until I was in the fourth grade that somebody had the broad idea to test my vision.

And I got finally they gave me glasses that were as thick as Coke bottles.

And and that got me, that got me going because uh I was a couple of grade levels behind.

They gave me glasses, and within six months I was three grade levels ahead in terms of my reading.

Oh, wow.

And that's when they figured out that it was my vision that was really slowing down my educational development.

And I caught up I caught up fast.

But by then the damage was done, you know, I mean, socially.

And then over, of course, the technology changed over the years.

I got contact lenses, and that helped a lot.

But then I had RK surgery, re refractive keratotomy, and then later on LASIK.

And then, as happens to just about everybody, as you get older in life, you get cataracts.

And so I had cataract surgery, and that my lenses were replaced, and now my vision's nearly perfect.

Really?

So no glasses, no nothing.

It's amazing.

SPEAKER_01: Oh wow, that's uh that's pretty wild.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

I mean, uh uh medical technology is can do some really amazing things.

My right leg sort of corrected itself, but my left leg, they did some radical surgery on me in 1952 and 53, and it caused, uh it allowed me to be able to walk and to run, sort of.

And even today it I have limited flexibility in my left ankle, but I can still do stuff.

I mean, like I said, I'm a level three certificed instructor, so I can I can it's just I'm just not as agile as most people are.

And you know, the same thing in martial arts.

I can kick ass, but I I have my limitations.

SPEAKER_01: I love it.

Absolutely love it.

That's so awesome.

So awesome.

Now, like, did you do you feel like you you kind of always, from the very beginning of childhood, like kind of had this sense of adventure?

I mean, to do all of that cool stuff.

SPEAKER_00: Great question.

Uh I was really blessed.

I mean, uh uh, you know, aside from all my physical disabilities, my dad was really interested in getting I I'm the oldest of four boys, and and he was really interested in getting us outside.

So I did my first backpacking trip when I was eight years old.

And we got into scouting and in our community, the scouting was really a big deal and in those days, and we were we were backpacking up here in the Central Sierra and the Southern Sierra, you know, at least two or three times a year.

So that's how I got my interest in the outdoors.

And my dad taught me how to fly fish, and ultimately I just kept expanding from there.

I learned how to rock climb in college and got really got into whitewater in law school because we had some whitewater rivers nearby.

And, you know, just pick up one skill after another, get into something, found it exciting and interesting, and wanted to master it, and just did whatever I had to do to get it mastered.

And you know what I learned was that you can master anything.

If you if you're willing to put up with being a beginner and have a lot of patience with yourself and take the time to do it right, find good coaches, and be satisfied with incremental improvement, you can master anything.

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: Literally.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I love that.

Absolutely love it.

And I love I love like talking about the incremental changes.

I don't know.

Did did you ever read the book Atomic Habits?

SPEAKER_00: No, I haven't read that book.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so that that was the whole thing of of atomic habits, is is the uh the author, I believe it's James Clear, had written it and he talked about the 1% improvements.

That's right.

Incremental.

That's right.

SPEAKER_00: And that's right.

And when I'm coaching people and when I'm uh working with people and helping them with their with their lives, I say do one thing every day, even if it's only for five minutes, that advances one of your goals.

And that's all you have to do.

And you'll look back after a year and you'll be absolutely flabbergasted at how much you've accomplished.

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.

Yeah, no, that's super awesome.

Now, so now I'm I'm curious.

So the this adventurous, adventurous soul growing up and doing all that, where did all of a sudden this desire come to become a lawyer?

SPEAKER_00: Well, back in those days, if you didn't go to med school, you you probably were gonna become a lawyer.

So I was, you know, I was this was in that, let's see, I was in college from 1969 to 1973.

It was during the Vietnam War.

A lot of social upheaval going on in the country, and and a lot of people were recognizing that, you know, if things were gonna change, you had the it was gonna have to change from policymaking and law and that sort of thing.

So I sort of went into law as a default choice because I didn't want to work so hard to be a pre-med, like a lot of my friends were.

So I and I just thought, well, I don't know whether I want to really be a lawyer or not, but I do know that I want to sharpen my intellectual thinking.

And I thought law school would be a really good way to become a stronger critical thinker.

And I was right.

Law school training is excellent for that.

It's it has it's a lot of other drawbacks.

But the one thing that law school does do is teach you how to think.

So that's what I did.

And I went to law school, and it turned out that I liked it, and I enjoyed it.

And we had a it was hard.

Uh you know, law school is not easy, but but I really enjoyed it and I did pretty well.

And and even at the end, well, I graduated from law school, I still didn't know what I wanted to do.

So that's when I was offered some judicial clerkships working for appellate judges, and I decided to move to Central California because I didn't want to go to the Bay Area and I didn't want to go to LA.

I was tired of living in the city.

And by then I was pretty addicted to the mountains.

So I I came down here to Central California and worked for a judge for a year, and then still didn't know if I wanted to be a lawyer, but hey, you know, I was just going to take the easy path, whatever would pay for the skiing in the whitewater was fine for me.

So I ended up I ended up joining a firm as a young associate and a medium-sized Central California firm that was specializing in bankruptcy and commercial litigation.

I joined the firm in September of 1978, and I tried my first jury trial in November of 1978, which was absolutely unheard of.

Most of my peers were sitting in libraries for years and years and years before they even got to meet a client.

And I was trying my first trial in November of 78, and then in December of 78, I became the second chair with one of my partners of defending a$36 million securities fraud case down in San Diego in the Southern District of California, big federal case.

And in those days,$36 million was a lot of money.

So we spent seven months trying that case.

And that's how I learned to be a big-time trial lawyer.

And that's what I did for the next 22 years.

Tried lawsuits, all different kinds of complex business cases.

Federal court, state court, arbitration, you name it.

I did it.

Wow.

Trial dog.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Wow, wow, wow.

That's that's amazing.

Now, at some point, I guess maybe after that that 22 years doing that, a mindset, I guess, kind of shifted.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

I had to make a decision, you know, early on.

Do I really want to be a trial lawyer?

You know, and I said, Oh, all right.

Well, well, I it's I've been trained for it, I can do it, I'm good at it.

And so let's just let's just go into it.

But my, you know, my heart was never really truly into it, although I was really, really a good lawyer.

And I didn't lose many cases.

And and I've I I mean, I'll just tell you a story.

Uh I'll never forget walking into a court.

I've been assigned a court to try a fairly complex business matter and and walked in and went back to chambers to talk to the judge and who I knew, and the uh I knew opposing counsel, of course.

And and judge looked at me and said, Norwell, get out of here.

I'm not trying any of your your cases.

You make me work too hard.

He literally kicked me out and said, Go back to the presiding judge and find somebody else.

I'm just not going to work that hard.

Because I did.

I mean, I made people work really hard.

So that what happened was that I in my real life, where I was skiing, teaching skiing and rock climbing and kayaking and stuff like that, I had been working on my level three certification, which is the highest level of certification in the professional ski instructors of America, PSIA certification as a ski instructor, really a tough exam.

And I had taken the exam two times, three times, past everything except the skiing, because I was a part-time skier and I had a bad left leg.

So I, this is before anybody knew what cross-training was.

I decided I was going to take up the martial arts to see if I couldn't develop my balance and agility enough to be able to pass the exam.

So I did.

I started, I started uh working on my martial arts, and I was horrible at it.

I mean, really horrible.

The people in the teachers thought that I wouldn't last six weeks.

Well, I surprised everybody, but not myself.

And although in the beginning I was really klutzy and really slow, and that's the way I learned, um, it takes me a long, long time.

But then I hit a point, I hit a tipping point.

And this is true with everything that I do.

I hit a tipping point where all of a sudden everything clicks, and now my development accelerates rapidly.

So I became a black belt right at my 40th birthday.

And then I got my secondary black belt about 18 months later.

I mean, I was roar roaring through this thing.

But it then an interesting thing happened.

I my my teacher called me in to his office and said, he was kind of smiling, but he said, You're arrogant, you're you're a bit of an asshole.

I know you're tough because I've trained you, and I know that for you a fair fight is five guys with knives and you one armed, because I've trained you, but I'm really afraid you're gonna hurt somebody.

If you ever lose your temper between being a lawyer and a second degree, you you could really do some damage.

And so I don't want to teach you anything more until you master Tai Chi.

You need to go learn Tai Chi.

Well, I didn't know anything about Tai Chi, except like everybody else had seen the documentaries with the whole people in the parks doing this kind of floating thing.

Well, it turns out that Tai Chi, first, is the oldest of all martial arts.

And second, is one of the most vicious, deadly martial arts you can possibly imagine.

And I didn't know that, but I did find a teacher and started studying tai chi.

And Tai Chi has two really interesting paradoxes.

The first is the softer you are, the stronger you are.

And the second is the more vulnerable you are, the more powerful you are.

Soft to be strong, vulnerable to be powerful.

So I didn't get that for a while.

But then one day I was in a courtroom cross-examining somebody in the late 1996 or 97, somewhere in there, and the thought came to me, what the heck am I doing in here?

And it turned out that after that trial, I had a I had a vacation planned where I was going to go on a Whitewater trip with a bunch of friends up in Idaho.

And during that trip, I spent the week or 10 days on my raft all by myself, just thinking about how many people I'd really served as a trial lawyer, and really decided that even though I'd done over two or two or three hundred trials, I had only really served five people.

And I thought to myself, that's a really poor commentary on what other people would say is a otherwise successful career.

And I said, but I don't want to do that.

I don't want to go out 60 years and only help 30 people.

And so I didn't know what I want to do, but I just knew that my trial days were probably coming to an end.

And as happens in life, I was driving down of the mountains to my office when I got back from that trip, and I heard the one and only public service announcement for a new master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies at Fresno Pacific University.

And it caught my attention, and ultimately I enrolled and became a full-time master's graduate student again, all over again.

And uh during that time I was teaching law at our local law school, so I was a law professor and also carrying my full trial practice.

And that also, of course, sort of was sort of the end of my first marriage, too much.

But that's what happened.

And I I went back to school, and my my mentors completely changed the way that I saw human conflict.

And so I had a lot of talks with my partners, and they were really unhappy about the fact that I wanted to become a peacemaker and no longer be a trial lawyer because I was making a lot of money for everybody.

And but at the end of the day, that was where my heart was.

So I just I left the practice file in 2000.

I gave a week's notice and walked out and left$10 million on the table and became a peacemaker.

And my life has kind of unfolded.

That's when I say my life really started at 50 and done some just some amazing things since then.

I would that I would have never imagined and that I could never have conceived of just being a being a trial lawyer.

Amazing stuff.

SPEAKER_01: Wow.

Okay, so so I'm curious what what exactly is a peacemaker?

SPEAKER_00: All right.

So so people have conflict.

I mean, human humans fight.

They fight and argue, and sometimes it gets violent, and sometimes it's just it it destroys relationships.

People get divorced.

If they're in marriages, they Like there are business fights, people have business people litigate over stuff, and it's all based on emotion.

Everything is based on emotion.

And all fighting is based on emotion, which clouds perception and hinders good decision making.

So what a peacemaker is, is somebody who is trained to walk into any conflict, usually at the request of parties, and help people in the conflict go through a process that will allow them to resolve the conflict if they want to resolve it on the terms that make sense to them.

And sometimes people have to make, they have nothing but bad choices ahead of them, and they so they have to take the least worse choice.

But there are other times when you can guide people through a process and they actually see opportunities that they had never seen before.

And so not only are they able to resolve the conflict, but they're able to reconcile relationships.

And that's sort of the highest purpose of a peacemaker, is to resolve conflict and restore relationships.

And it can be done at any level - interpersonal, community, national, international, that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell Interesting.

So what type of I you you you you left being a lawyer, left the law firm.

Like what kind of, I guess, like does somebody go out and hire a peacemaker?

SPEAKER_00: Like So there are a lot of different kinds of peacemakers.

I and I have done a lot of different kinds of work, but the where the bread and butter money is in is in the mediation of litigated disputes, where lawyers who are representing parties in a lawsuit will engage a mediator to help them.

Basically, it's a structured negotiation, a settlement negotiation, where the mediator will help the parties and the lawyers examine the strengths and weaknesses of a case, evaluate the case in terms of its monetary, potential monetary value, and then come up with come up either, either just negotiate a straight cash payment for settlement from the defendant to the plaintiff, for example, or perhaps there are other things that could could be done to help get a matter resolved.

And so that's called mediation.

It's basically a form of what's known as distributive negotiation.

There are other forms of peacemaking as well that I've utilized in non-litigated matters that where where you can be a lot more creative.

So that's the paying work.

And then the other work is getting called into conflicts where people can't afford my outrageous rates.

But I'm happy to do the work pro bono.

And you can get I've done some really and also teaching and training people in the processes that I've developed over the years from my study of neuroscience.

And so peacemaking is the broad umbrella that covers all of that.

SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell Interesting.

Interesting.

Now is it tied in with all of that, this thing that I've read in notes that I've taken about that you and correct me if I'm going to even say this, that you listen people into existence?

SPEAKER_00: Yes.

I call it listening others into existence.

SPEAKER_01: Okay.

What what does that even mean?

SPEAKER_00: Right.

So there are two paths to this story that run parallel that so that you and the audience can understand this.

First, the first path is a more personal and professional.

And that is that as I was studying for my master's degree, the one thing that was missing from all of my training was effective ways to de-escalate angry people.

Because when you walk into a conflict, whether and as I said, most of the time you're invited in, people are desperate, so they need somebody to help them.

You're dealing with very, very angry, upset people.

So angry that they can't even almost be in the same room with each other.

But the problem is that there was no real skills out there that anybody could teach me on how to calm down angry people.

They had all the usual room, I'd go out on the balcony, take a deep breath, you know, distract people, but none of that really worked.

I had started studying the neuroscience of emotions and human conflict in my master's program, not that I took any courses, but I did some self-study on it.

And in those days, neuroscience was still pretty new because the technology was just new.

And I started studying emotions and began to understand that if we really want to help people, we have to understand that all conflict begins in our brains.

That it's all kinds of stuff going on in the brain.

So that led me to a lot of reading and setting.

And one day in 2004, I was involved in a mediation in Santa Barbara between an ex-husband and ex-wife.

They were fighting over a small trust worth$18,000.

They'd spent$50,000 in attorney's fees fighting about.

So I walk in, we're in this conference room, and I hadn't even hardly sat down when they were across the table and started screaming vile insults at each other.

I mean, they were just really ripping each other up.

And I'd seen that kind of stuff before, but this time I was really taken aback.

And I thought to myself, what the heck am I going to do with these people?

And all of a sudden, out of the out of nowhere, an idea came to me, which is listen to the emotions.

So I got him quieted down, and I turned to Susan.

And in the beginning, she had a hard time with that.

But then she got it.

And so John would talk a little bit, and I'd stop him and say, Susan, what's he feeling right now?

And she said, Oh, he's really angry.

He's really frustrated.

Oh, he's sad.

I said, tell that to him.

Oh, John, you're really angry.

You're really frustrated.

You're really sad.

And he said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And then he would continue on.

And she would continue reflecting his emotions until he got to the end.

And then they switched rules.

And I had John do the same thing with Susan.

And at the end, took about an hour to do this.

And at the end, John put his, there was silence.

And John put his face in his hands and he started sobbing, deep, racking sobs.

And finally he looked up, blew his nose, and looked across the table and said, That's the first time you've listened to me in 25 years.

Oh, wow.

They settled a case in three minutes, realized how ridiculous it was, walked out holding hands and had lunch with each other.

Whereas three hours before, if there had been knives in the room, there would have been blood on the floor.

My jaw dropped.

What just happened?

So I I didn't think it was a fluke, but I wasn't sure.

So I started testing it out in other conflicts that I was working in, and I got exactly the same result every time.

People calmed down almost instantly and were able to listen to each other and solve their problems.

Well, being a student, a lay student of neuroscience, I was really interested in had there been any research on this?

And there hadn't been.

But in 2007, neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman out of UCLA published a brain scanning study.

It's called Putting Feelings into Words, which you can Google it and find it on the Internet.

It's a seminal brain scanning study that shows exactly what happens when you do this process called affec labeling is the technical name, but when you are reflecting back the emotions of another person, all sorts of magical things happen in our brains.

And our brains are hardwired for this, and it works every time without fail.

It's absolutely amazing.

And that changed my whole life because I began to teach people, I began to teach other mediators and people who work in conflict how to do this.

And they were giving me these reports back about these amazing results we were getting.

And then in 2010, I started Prison of Peace, the Prison of Peace Project with my colleague Laurel Cawfer.

And we began, the two of us began working in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world, training women who were serving life sentences, mostly for murder and homicide, how to become powerful peacemakers.

And the first skill we taught them was how to listen to emotions.

And we began to see these amazing transformations of these women who were blackened thorns, all of a sudden became these beautiful roses as they became in touch with their own emotional experiences.

And we thought that was a fluke until we started seeing the same results in every single cohort we taught.

And then ultimately we ended up teaching, started in a men's prison, saw the same exact experience that the men were having.

They went from being these kind of hardened gangbanger types to really being emotionally intelligent, powerful people.

And then the prison of peace expanded, I mean, to our amazement.

So we were in 15 prisons in California, and we're in a prison in Connecticut, and we're in 15 prisons in Greece, and we've got startups in Nairobi and Spain, and we're now putting the whole curriculum on video, and that'll be ready at the end of the year, and we'll be able to offer Prison of Peace to any prison in the world.

And the stories that have come out of the project have convinced me and shown me, as well as all my teaching of other people who have not been in prison, that when you learn how to listen to emotions, you learn how to affect label, you're literally learning how to listen to another person into existence.

Because we all grew up being emotionally invalidated.

And it's our parents do it to us, and they don't know they're doing it to us, but it's the most insidious, pervasive form of emotional abuse that exists.

So for example, you probably had the experience, Kevin, when you were a little boy, let's say you were two years old, and you're out running around and you fall over and you skin your knee and you start to cry.

Did that ever happen to you?

SPEAKER_01: Of course.

SPEAKER_00: Of course.

And so what and the kinds of things that were told to you were be a manly man, don't be a girly girl, stop crying.

It doesn't hurt.

You know, toughen up, buttercup.

Stuff like that.

And those are emotionally invalidating statements because they're telling us, as a little two-year-old, not to feel the emotions that we're feeling.

We're being told to repress and deny our emotions.

And some people will say, well, that's really important because life is tough and we gotta be, we gotta have the stiff upper lip.

That's all BS.

It's all BS.

Because and and philosophers who for 4,000 years said that rationality is good and emotions are bad, they're all wrong.

Neuroscience now has established without question that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational.

98% emotional.

We're leaving 98% of who we are on the table because our culture for 4,000 years has told us that emotions are bad.

And what I've learned is that when I have been teaching people how to become emotionally competent, how to listen to and reflect emotions, how to self-regulate your emotions, how to be emotionally self-aware, when I how to be empathic, cognitive and affective empathy.

As I teach these skills to people, their lives transform.

And they see that with the skills that they learn, they literally listen other people into existence.

The gratitude that a person experiences when that person has been deeply, deeply listened to is so profound because they've never experienced that kind of deep, deep emotional validation.

And that's what I mean by listening other people into existence.

And I'll just tell one quick story just as an illustration.

I was working in a middle school teaching middle school teachers how to use these skills for classroom control.

And we were doing a we were doing a peace circle.

And part of the reason for doing the peace circle is it helps refine, or we call them our listening circles.

They that it helps people learn how to listen.

And when we were done with the circle, one of the administrators turned to me and said, you know, for my whole life, I've been ignored and not heard.

Not in my both in my work as a professional in education and also in my family.

I was always ignored.

No matter what I said, nobody listens to me.

This is the first time in my life I've ever felt deeply listened to.

Thank you.

And that's when I realized what we what I had done was listen her into existence.

And it turns out that there are the vast majority of people who have had this kind of experience where they've felt ignored, they've felt disrespected, they haven't felt heard, they've never felt validated, they've been emotionally abused and invalidated because everybody says you've got to be tough and suck up the emotions.

And it's it's horribly abusive.

And so when you listen other people into existence, that whole dynamic changes.

I have parents who I trained, uh, young parents, they've got two-year-olds, and I get plenty lots of reports of parents saying, We started your techniques, learned your skills, started your techniques, tantrums went away in four months.

Haven't had a tantrum in two years.

Imagine that.

Just knowing how just knowing how to listen to a child.

That's fascinating.

Yeah, it's and it's all based on brain science.

This is not pop psychology, so much BS out there from people that don't know what they're talking about.

It's based on hard brain science.

It's based on how the brain actually processes information, not based on somebody's wishful thinking.

SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm curious about the work that you've you've done in these prisons.

Uh-huh.

After the work's been done, like what I guess what kind of difference uh is seen in the prisons after this has been put in place?

SPEAKER_00: So we'll go into a prison and work on one yard at a time.

Prisons are most prisons are divided up into sections called yards.

And the typical outcome is that violence is eliminated, completely eliminated.

I mean, uh there might be a case, uh very rarely will there be there might be a fight.

But compared to pre-prison of peace, everything changes.

And what we learned was we only need to train 20 inmates on a yard, say of a thousand incarcerated people to begin to change the culture of the yard.

So violence is eliminated.

People begin to talk to each other, they listen to each other, they do peace circles, listening peace circles, they arguments and fights just go away because we teach them how to be emotionally intelligent, how to use skills they've never learned before.

And I, you know, I've had thousands of inmates, incarcerated people come to me and say, if I had learned these skills 20 years ago or 25 years ago, I wouldn't be in prison today.

And here's the other thing that's really amazing is of I don't know how many we've probably trained two or three thousand people who were formerly in prison who have been released, even lifers have been released because of the changing in the laws.

Not one reported recidivism.

None of our graduates have ever re-offended.

SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating.

That's uh now I'm curious as far as the way in which you train this.

Does it differ from a prisoner to a parent for their two-year-old?

No.

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: And all you have to do is teach the skills, which are counterintuitive and also counternormative.

In other words, they seem to fly in the face of what we think we know about listening.

But all you have to do is learn and master this skill.

And it doesn't matter who you are or where you are.

I've trained I've trained people who are coming out of gangs.

They're the most heart in level four prisons in California, Corcoran State Prison, one of the most secure prisons in California, gangbangers coming out.

You walk into a room, the first time I met my first set of students at Corcoran, they were all in manicles and cages, literally in cages, manacled, and violent people.

And within a couple of months, they were completely changed.

No more manacles, no more change.

I mean, we had them in a classroom, and they were they were amazing.

Just amazing.

And of course, everybody was a standard.

We weren't, but because we knew what would happen, but it works.

And in and what we teach them is what you te you do with a two-year-old.

Or if you've got a 40-year-old who's acting like a two-year-old, it's the same thing.

Yeah.

Because the brain is the brain.

Aaron Powell That's so interesting.

Aaron Powell That's what makes it so powerful, is it's it's replicable and it's duplicable and it can be taught.

It it's the how you do it.

This is what you do, this is exactly how you do it.

Don't deviate from this skill set and it will work for you every single time.

SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm curious also in thinking of business because I'm sitting here thinking to myself, is this something even in I don't know, maybe I'm even thinking about it the wrong way, but I'm thinking to myself, a a business owner who has a company, do you train them even in this to then be able to better be an employer in the in how they treat their employees?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.

The way that I describe it is how would you like to become a leader everyone wants to follow?

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Learn this skill, learn and practice these skills.

And you will become the leader that everyone wants to follow.

And I've trained lots of people in these skills who have gotten amazing promotions and risen quickly in their organizations because they literally became the leader everyone wanted to follow.

Not only the people, because there are four level, four, four axes of leadership.

You can lead up, you lead down, you lead sideways, and you lead inside yourself.

And when people get these skills, their superiors want to be led by these people because they are so powerful in their ability to relate and understand.

You can, with these skills, you can uh immediately understand what's motivating people and why they're behaving the way they're they're behaving and get right to the core of who they are as human beings in literally 30 seconds.

Wow.

And as a leader, once you start listening people instead of commanding them, you listen them into existence, they'll follow you anywhere.

They'll do whatever you want.

Gladly do whatever you want.

SPEAKER_01: Wow.

Does anybody try to argue with you?

SPEAKER_00: Occasionally you'll get some pushback.

Somebody will say something like, Who the heck do you think you are?

My psychotherapist?

And that's just an indication of two things.

One, you came on a little too strong, a little too fast.

But more importantly, what happened was that you saw this person for who he or she was.

And like a superhero, you penetrated this huge wall they built around them to protect themselves emotionally.

And now you're inside nose to nose with them in a very intimate connection, and it scared the crap out of them.

Yep.

And so they wanted to push you outside that wall and create emotional distance because that's the only way they know how to be emotionally safe.

On the rare occasions when I get that kind of pushback, I just drop it and I said, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to understand.

And then I'll swing back around five or ten minutes later, and I'll just be a lot more subtle in the way that I label the emotion.

Man, you're really pissed off.

You're really frustrated.

And that's all I'll say.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, they'll respond to it appropriately.

And now we're in it.

And now I can really start listening to them.

So you just have to be there are times when you have to be quite subtle about this.

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.

Now, now what about though, even in your own personal life?

Because I can only just see a scene playing out in my head of you with say a spouse, some type of personal relationship, and they're angry.

And you're just sitting back and you're like, it's okay.

I understand you're angry.

And and I can just imagine you calmly expressing what emotions you know they're feeling, and they're getting so angry because you're doing your thing again.

Does that ever happen?

SPEAKER_00: So yes and no.

First of all, my wife and I use these skills.

We have never, we haven't had a fight or an argument or upset words in 15 years.

Never.

Not once.

We use these skills consciously on each other.

And it make it it has created the one of the deepest, most intimate connected relationships that I think anybody has ever experienced.

I didn't think true happiness was possible until I met my my second wife.

We married and we started using these skills.

Unbelievable how powerful it is.

Now, you don't jump into this.

You don't, that doesn't, again, it's incremental, right?

A little bit every day.

When I'm teaching these skills, I tell people don't do this at home.

Yes.

Not until you really have mastery.

Because what happens is when you listen other people into existence, you create an intimacy and a connection that is profound and rapid.

And relationships sort of fall into a, well, we could call it like a homeostasis of emotion, where there are certain things you can talk about, certain things you don't talk about, there's certain levels of intimacy that are comfortable, but there are deeper levels of intimacy that are not comfortable.

You come in hard charging and with this very deep, intimate connection, it's going to scare the crap out of your spouse.

And so you're going to get the pushback.

So you have to be gentle and you have to be subtle.

And ideally, you and your spouse together learn these skills so that you can start practicing them on each other.

And I've got plenty of emails where people have they write and they say, We know we're not supposed to practice on each other in our marriage, but I got to tell you, you know, this is what happened.

My relationship has never been better.

And you know, so that's great.

It just depends on how strong your relationship is.

Once you do introduce this kind of emotional reflection, listening other people into existence, into your relationship, everything changes.

Everything changes.

I've got a guy who is desperate.

He his wife had left him.

He was ADD, he was totally focused on himself, self-centered, but he loved her and he took both of my online courses.

And I checked back with him in two weeks.

I said, How's it going?

And she said, it's amazing.

She's moved back in and we're working through our issues, and all I'm doing is listening to her, and she's taking the course too, and we're we're beginning to understand where our problems were.

We could never really listen to each other.

And now we are, and it's changed everything.

I had another guy who was one of my incarcerated students who said that he had been estranged from his wife for 25 years, but they still talked.

And he started using his listening skills, listening her into existence on the phone, and they reconciled over the telephone from prison.

Wow.

Wow, wow, wow.

I've got hundreds of stories like that of just amazing things that have happened.

SPEAKER_01: So let me ask you this why isn't every single marriage counselor out there using this type of technique?

SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Because they don't know it.

They don't know anything about it.

I am really sharply critical of psychologists, counselors, therapists.

I mean, there are a lot of people who are doing a lot of good.

But the kind of training they get is not based on hard science.

It's based on a mythology that started with Freud.

And, you know, psychology went through all kinds of weird gyrations in the 20th century.

But there are very few psychologists who are really taking the time to understand what's going on in the brain.

Some are, and they're and they're doing amazing work.

But for example, my niece is getting her Psy D.

And I talk to her, and her job is, I mean, what they teach is how to assess, how to look at somebody and diagnose them, you know.

And then but they're really not talking much.

And and they have the interventions, but their interventions are not based on what's really going on in the brain.

It's just on what people have basically found to sort of work.

And the other thing is this knowledge is really new.

If you think about it, Lieberman's study came out in 2007.

I'm the only one that's written about it extensively, but there's nobody else that's written about it.

And like so much other really great science, it just gets buried in the in the blast of information that's coming out.

So it's just taken a long time for this to get out.

And my goal in life is to get as many people trained in this as possible, and hopefully it does become mainstream at some point in time, because it is so powerful.

And the I'll say the other thing that is different here is that so much of what is taught in the therapeutic world is based on the work of Thomas Gordon, who was a psychologist in the 1960s.

He's the guy that invented the term active listening.

And Gordon was wrong.

He was just plain wrong in what he taught.

And yet that's the full basis for, for example, you said it earlier.

You said, oh, what I think you're feeling is anger, where we learn these I statements.

I statements only make things worse.

Anyone who has ever, has anybody ever used an I statement on you when you were angry?

And you'll it just pisses you off.

It makes you mad.

You're not listening to me.

And yet, both in mediation training, peacemaking training, and in therapeutic training, people are taught to use I statements.

And it it doesn't work.

If it did work, I wouldn't be on the this, your podcast talking to you because we would have had a technique developed back in the 60s that was just supremely effective.

But you could you could take active listening, or maybe you take nonviolent communication courses or compassionate communications as it's called now.

Rosenberg basically followed in the footsteps of Thomas Gordon.

They all went to the same grad school, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and stuff doesn't work.

It just plain doesn't work.

Otherwise, if it did work, everybody would use it.

And the proof that it doesn't work is that people don't use it.

Yep.

But when you learn affected labeling, and here's the difference, and this is why it's counterintuitive.

In the way that I teach listening, no I statements.

I'll say, I'll say something like this.

I'll say, Kevin, you're really, really angry.

You're pissed off.

You're not being listened to, you don't feel heard, you're feeling pretty anxious about the situation, and you're really sad.

And you're feeling a little ashamed too, because you don't know what to do and you're confused.

Notice that I was using direct you statements.

No I statements.

And people have a hard time with that in the beginning because it seems like it's presumptuous or it's patronizing, rude, and interrupting.

And the truth of the matter is it's not.

You know, when I do demonstrations of this in front of groups, I'll I'll have somebody tell me a story and then I'll listen to them and reflect.

And then I'll we'll stop, finish, and I'll turn around and say, What did you all see?

And invariably somebody's gonna see that was the rudest, most patronizing thing.

I could never do that.

That just seems like so wrong.

And then I turn to the person that I was listening to and I said, Well, what was your experience?

And that person will turn to me and say, I've never felt so deeply listened to before in my life.

Thank you.

And everybody in the audience says, What?

No way.

And they'll start challenging the person that I just listened to.

And the person will get indignant and say, No, man, he was with me every step of the way.

I felt like he was really trying to understand.

And he really did understand exactly what I was feeling, and I've never felt that way before.

And people just kind of shake their heads and they say, that's no, that there's a cognitive distance here.

I was taught that you have to use I statements.

And so it's really that's the first turning point for most people.

And then obviously in the workshops, I happen to start practicing, and all of a sudden they see it for themselves, how powerful it is.

But it's very counterintuitive, and it's not what we expect it to be.

And yet it's supremely effective.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, man.

This is this is awesome.

Oh my goodness.

Now, now, where where can somebody who's listening in their internet, where can they learn more?

SPEAKER_00: They can go to my website, dugnoel.com.

That's o-g-n-o-l-l.com.

And on the homepage, there I've got a bunch of questions there.

And just click on the question that you're what are you here for?

And there are a bunch of options.

And you'll see de-escalation strategies, learning emotional competency, and then it'll take you to locations on my site where you can find out more information.

You can read my blogs.

I have, I don't know, almost a hundred articles I've published on my website on all these different kinds of topics.

I've got a YouTube channel.

You just type in Douglas Knoll YouTube, and you'll come to my YouTube channel.

I have, I don't know, close to a hundred videos on all kinds of topics around this stuff, instructional videos mostly, a lot of free resources.

I've got a I've written four books, but the fourth book is on this stuff.

It's called De-Escalate, How to Calm an Angry Person in Ninety Seconds or Less.

And if you're an Amazon Prime member, you can get it for, I think, ten bucks, but it's available.

It's Simon and Schuster, so it's a mainstream publisher.

You can get it anywhere with an Amazon bestseller, so it's widely available.

And then I have online courses.

I have a course for developing emotional competency, which is both the basic and the advanced course, and you can access that through my website.

And people that take that course say it's like a PhD in emotional mastery.

They really like it a lot.

So this stuff is learnable.

It's teachable like anything else.

It takes a little bit of effort, but not a huge amount of effort.

I tell people expect to take about six weeks to really master these skills.

But if you practice three or four hours a week for six weeks, it'll become habitual and your life will change for the better forever.

SPEAKER_01: Wow.

Well, man, you you just you're awesome.

I love you're you're so interested.

You know, there's some people you talk to and you're just like, you're so intrigued, and you find yourself just like leaning in because you want to listen, you want to hear more.

You're like one of those people.

SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you, Kevin.

I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, you are, man.

And I love it.

And I just and and and I love even just your your entire story.

And I feel like there's so much that can be taken out of out of your story as a whole.

I mean, let's even just set aside all that we've just talked about here recently, and and which is just fascinating.

But even just your life as a person who came into this world broken with disabilities.

They weren't like everyone else.

Yet that did not stop you.

You kept pushing, you fought through.

And to me, what's really awesome to me about your story is the fact that not only did you go on to find success in life and your career, but it's been in ways, even when you were coming up on 50 years old, and you realized you even wanted more to help other people.

And I just think that's really, really awesome.

SPEAKER_00: Thanks.

I, you know, I do a lot of what would you say, coaching, consulting with young people and people in their 20s and 30s wanting to know, how do you, what do I do with my life?

And I think Victor Frankel really described it best.

And he was a Holocaust survivor and psychotherapist, wrote a bunch of books.

But but he said the meaning of life is service to others.

When you can learn how to have be of service to others, that really takes care of everything.

And if you can serve others and make a little bit of money on the side, that's even better.

But learn how to serve others.

And that gets you out of the trap of the nine to five or the eight to five job where you're just a cog in a machine.

If you can learn how to serve others to create meaning in your life, that's the that's the true path to happiness.

And so the trick is figuring out how to do that.

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.

Let me ask you this.

I got one last question for you.

Do you have one thing, one thought, one piece of advice for somebody listening today?

And maybe maybe they just need they need what they've listened to today has just really hit home.

And I'm just curious, do you have just one final thought for them?

SPEAKER_00: If anybody who's listened to this is feeling inspired by it, take action.

Don't sit back and say, Oh, that was a really cool conversation that Kevin had with his crazy guy on the West Coast, Doug Noel.

Take a step forward.

Incremental steps.

You know, you don't have to master everything all at once in the universe on day one.

All you have to do is take a step forward.

And that step forward could be going to my website, it could be buying my book, it could be watching YouTube videos, just one step, one little thing.

And keep taking a step every single day, even if it's a half step.

Just one five minutes every day, dedicating yourself to move forward on learning more about listing others into existence, learning about your own emotions, developing your own emotional mastery, one thing every single day.

That's all you have to do.

Anyone can do it.

The hard part is overcoming the inertia of life and propagating change in your life by making sure that you're doing something every day towards your goal.

And that's what you should do.

That's the easiest, fastest way to gain mastery.

Bruce Lee used to say, go slow to go fast.

And that's the truth.

Go slow to go fast.

SPEAKER_01: Doug, man, thank you so much for coming on my podcast.

And this was such an insightful conversation with you.

And I'm just really blessed, really honored to have gotten the chance to just sit down with you for a little bit and uh just uh get get a little piece of your amazingness uh shared with not just me, but but those listening also.

So thank you.

SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you, Kevin.

It's been a lot of fun.

And I really appreciated the opportunity to speak with you and hope that you and, of course, all of your audience are able to take some of these ideas and start studying them and learning them.

And together we can all really change the world.

And I'm not just saying that.

I mean when we start learning how to listen other people into existence, we stop violence, we stop crime, we have deeper, more intimate connections with our families and our children, we help our children grow.

And all the research shows that when we start doing these kinds of things, listening other people into existence, that the whole world changes for a better place around us.

And a lot of the nonsense that we see in our world today is simply because people are not listening to each other and and they don't feel hurt.

And once we can start listening to people, even people we sharply disagree with, we listen them into existence.

You know, we can find ways to disagree, but be civil about it and still have productive lives together.

That's the secret.

SPEAKER_01: Well, if you've been listening and you've not come away with multiple little pieces of gold from today's episode, then I don't think you just listened to the man who I just sat down with.

So for all of you listening, for you who's listening, I hope that today's conversation somehow benefit you in your everyday life.

And I hope that you can use it to motivate you, inspire you to take action and make tomorrow better than today.

Thank you for listening to another episode here on the lowdown with Kevin Low.

And at the lowdown with Kevin Low.

I hope today's episode inspired you, motivated you, and excited you to get out and enjoy life, no matter what obstacles that may be standing in the way.