The Mindset Mentor - How to Deal with Aggressive People

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

What do you do when someone comes at you with aggression and your body freezes, fights, or shuts down? In this episode, I explain what’s really happening in your nervous system during confrontation and how to stay grounded, calm, and clear instead of reactive—so you can protect your mental health and respond with confidence. If you want 2026 to be your best year yet then this video is for you. In just 30 minutes, I’ll help you build a clear, simple goal system so you stop guessing and start moving forward with confidence. 👉 Build your 2026 goal system here: https://www.goalmastery2026.com/lp1 High performers don’t wait for clarity, they create it. This Mindset University call will help you see your blind spots and your next level. Grab your spot here 👉 https://www.coachwithrob.com/mindset-university-call-rob   Feeling stuck? It's time to take back control. If you're ready to master your mind and create real, lasting change, click the link below and start transforming your life today. 👉 http://coachwithrob.com   The Mindset Mentor™ podcast is designed for anyone desiring motivation, direction, and focus in life.     Past guests of The Mindset Mentor include Tony Robbins, Matthew McConaughey, Jay Shetty, Andrew Huberman, Lewis Howes, Gregg Braden, Rich Roll, and Dr. Steven Gundry.   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself because if you can improve yourself, you can improve your life. So if that's what you want to do, hit that subscribe button and follow along. Today, I'm going to be talking about how to deal with aggressive people because aggressive people exist in this world. There's nothing that you and I can do to change that. But what you can do

is arm yourself with the best tools and techniques and knowledge about what is actually going on in the situation so that you can better protect yourself. And so when you find yourself in an argument or in a verbal attack. You know exactly what to do to remove yourself from it and be able to protect your own mental health. So let's dive in, okay? Let's start with the heat. Let's start with the fire. Let's start with the full-on confrontation moment. We can both think of one of those moments that's happened in our life, right? You know the feeling when you're in that situation and it's heightened. It might be an argument. It might be disagreement. It might be somebody's got road rage on the road, whatever it might be. Your heart is racing. You're not breathing very well.

You're short, tight breathing. Your body's kind of tight. You feel like you're either about to snap or just completely shut down. You don't really know what to do. And in those situations, that's not you being dramatic in any way. That's actually your nervous system doing its job. It's deciding without your permission at all, whether it is going to fight, flight, or freeze. Fight. That means that I'm going to argue. I'm going to yell. I'm going to escalate the situation. Flight means that I'm going to leave or I'm going to avoid or I'm going to fully shut down or freeze, which means I go numb. I go blank. I don't know what to do. I lose my words. That's what our nervous system does in those moments. Aggressive energy actually activates primal instincts inside of you. But you're not just like a brainstem. You're a human. You have a choice.

And once you really understand what is happening in these situations, you can figure out the best way to move through them. And that's really the key here is that you're in the situation physically, like you're really there in the present moment, like you're standing there, but you need to kind of see it from an outsider's perspective and remove yourself from the situation to give yourself some space and some distance.

As I always say, if you're in the jar, you can't read the label. Meaning when you're inside of the jar, you're inside of your own life, inside of your own head. You're not really fully seeing what's going on. So if you want to read the label on the jar, you've got to take yourself out of the jar and kind of look at everything from a third person's perspective. Here's the thing that's really important about this situation, okay? Aggressive people are a problem, yes, but in this situation, the aggressive people are not the

problem. Your nervous system thinks that they're the problem. Here's where I want to go deeper with you so you can actually understand the psychology of what's going on inside of you, but the psychology of what's going on inside of them as well. Most people try to handle aggressive people by trying to change the other person, by trying to yell at them or to avoid them or to argue better or to try to be more aggressive than they are so that they scare them or they try to disconnect in hopes that if they disconnect, that other person is just going to give up. But in this situation, what we're actually doing is we're skipping a crucial piece. And that crucial piece is in situation what's actually going on inside of you and so what you want to figure out whether once again

it's in that moment or after that moment is what does your nervous system associate with their aggression okay the way you react to the situation when you're in a situation like this with someone isn't actually based off of right now it's mostly based off your past and i can give you an example maybe you grew up in a really aggressive household and so whenever somebody gets really aggressive you've learned to shut down. And that's just what you learned to do. Maybe you grew up in an aggressive household and you learned when it gets aggressive, you have to get even more aggressive and fight. So the way you react in the situation today isn't based off of just the situation right now. It's based off of what has happened to you in your past. And so you have to

understand that your nervous system is programmed from everything that's happened to you in your entire life. And your nervous system doesn't distinguish between the past in the present. So, you know, if I give you a few examples, right? If your dad yelled at you as a kid, then you might still feel like you're five years old every time somebody raises their voice. Now, you're not sitting there when someone's yelling at you and be like, oh my God, I'm a five-year-old. But I mean, you're emotionally and intellectually stuck as that version of you in that moment, right? If confrontation in your family meant danger because you lived in a chaotic household, even a calm disagreement today,

can feel really unsafe to you. If you grew up with a parent whose moods changed without warning at all, then you might have learned just to stay small so that you can stay safe. You know, if in your home as a child, like love depended on you staying quiet and you staying agreeable, then you might still freeze today anytime somebody has intense emotions around you. And so I want you understand, like, it's interesting because we're looking at the situation, we're talking about there's an aggressive person in front of me, they're yelling, we're in an argument. This is also, as crazy as it sounds, besides a situation that we need to deal with in the present moment, which we're going to talk about a second, it's also one of your

biggest learning lessons because you have some sort of response in that moment that is different than somebody else's response could be. So that means that your response comes from your past. In your response, whether it's fight or flight or freeze, isn't weak. It's wired. And that's why when we're in a situation where there is an aggressive person, aggressive people can kind of throw us, not because they're powerful or because they're intense, but because they're actually activating old patterns within us. And so it's really, really important for me to say it's before we go any further. Even though we think that this situation is happening outside of us, everything is actually happening inside of us. Like, we think the situation is making

us feel a certain way. It's not the situation that's make you feel a certain way. It is how we react to the situation that makes us feel a certain way. It's really hard to distinguish when you're in those moments, but that's why I'm talking to you right now outside of the moment, is you're actually learning, like this moment can be a huge classroom for you where you can learn about yourself, you can heal yourself and you can grow yourself, not just in the moment, but also outside of the moment when the moment has passed. Okay? It's also really important to understand this. You're not seeing, like we're talking about an aggressive person. You're not seeing an adult being aggressive. What you're seeing is an unhealed child that's in an adult's body

throwing a temper tantrum. Just think about that for a second. Because you might see a 35 year old man who's being an asshole right but really what you're seeing if you take yourself out of that moment and see it for what it is you're seeing a seven-year-old boy who is in a 35-year-old man's body who's throwing a temper tantrum because that's whatever happened to him when he was in his household that's how he got the attention that he wanted whatever might have been and so just knowing that can remove you from wanting to engage in battle because you're looking at it and you're like yeah, I'm just kind of talking with a child. And you can be in these situations and you can be like, man,

that thing that that person just did was really childish. And so two things that's really important to understand. Number one, it's not happening outside of you. It's happening inside of you, even more than it's happening outside of you. And the second thing is you're just dealing with a little kid in an adult's body. Okay, so let's talk about what you actually do when you're in the situation of being in an environment with an aggressive person. And we will be right back.

And now, back to the show. The shift that you want to have is this. You don't want to dance with their fire. You want to be the water, not the gasoline. Like, their fire only grows when you feed it. And so instead of matching their energy, what it could look like is this? You know, what would it look like for me to pause?

What would it look like for me to stay calm in my body? What would it look like to breathe and relax instead of tensing up my muscles? what would it look like to respond from a place of clarity versus self-defense and you know let me give you a rule of thumb in these situations the more intense their energy is the slower and calmer yours needs to be i'll give you a really great example for my own life that i can remember where shit was hitting the fan and i realized in that moment i had to be extremely calm so when my wife and i girlfriend at the time, we're traveling in 2017.

We were out of the country for six months. We were in Bali. And in Bali, they have a kind of like mafia of taxi cabs. And Uber was just starting to come in. And the taxi cab people hated the Ubers. And the Ubers had to literally like meet us behind a building to pick us up so that the taxi cab people wouldn't get set off and people would know that there was an Uber

that was happening. So we used the Uber's a few times, no big deal, and then one day we get picked up at the beach, at night. We get picked up after, you know, we were watching the sunset, everything, we get picked up and out of nowhere, we're driving in our Uber, this car cuts in front of our Uber, and all of these guys jump out

with bats. And I'm like, holy what's going on. This is like something I would have never expected, especially because Bali, everyone's so sweet and so nice over there, right? And one of the guys, takes a bat and hits the front of the Uber's car that we're in. So that guy gets out and he's real nice. Oh my gosh, don't do this. Whatever might be they're talking. My wife hops out. She's terrified. And I hop out and I'm like, okay, what's going on here? Like, do I need to run? Do I need to

fight? Do I need to protect my girlfriend at the time? So all of this stuff is running through my head and I'm aware that if I get like more heightened, then everything's going to get worse. So I had this feeling of like, hey, I just need to be, I need to need to be ice on this flame. Like I just need to just calm the entire situation. And I don't know if I'd make the decision today. That's the same as I did back then. But what I actually did was I actually stepped in front of the Uber driver with these four guys that were had bats in front of me.

And I just put my hands up and I was like, hey, guys, can we just talk? Like there's no reason to be yelling. is there and they're just yeah fuck you da da da da they're all yelling and all this stuff i'm like hey guys it's okay can we just talk about the situation and so it took probably 45 seconds of just getting screamed dead and they weren't they weren't really screaming at me they were screaming at my uber driver i was worried about him as well because he seemed like he was terrified and eventually it got to the point where they just kind of calmed down and that's the way that i think about this is like the more intense their energy the calmer yours needs to be because

your calmness kind of short circuits, the escalation loop, which tends to be really disarming because their nervous system is also in fight or flight. So I'm trying to de-escalate their nervous system as well as de-escalate my own nervous system. So let's talk about like tools for dealing with this in real time. Like let's get tactical in the situation, right? You're in it. You feel triggered. What do you do? The first thing you need to do more than anything else is you need to ground yourself. before saying any word. How do you ground yourself? If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know.

The first thing is your breath. The first thing that changes whenever a circumstance changes, whether you get happy, sad, mad, angry, is your breath. You want to control your breath before you do anything else. Breathe in for four seconds through your nose. Exhale for six seconds through your mouth. Physiologically, the person who breathes slowest in a conversation usually controls a conversation.

It's like this weird physiological psychological thing. So I want to calm myself as much as possible and eventually when I ground myself, the other person hopefully will become ground at some point as well. So breathe slow for about a minute. Just observe what's going on. See what's happening. Don't get caught up in it. You're focusing on your body now.

Drop your shoulders. Try to feel less tense in all of your muscles. Put both of your feet on the ground. Feel your butt in the chair. then you want to name what's happening inside of you. You know, you don't say it out loud. It can be in your head. I'm triggered.

My heart's racing. I feel really afraid. My stomach is tight. I want to scream. All of this kind of gets your body back online. You're out of your head. You're back into your body. When you're triggered, you're usually not in the present moment.

You're often all of your past triggers and thinking about other thing. You're really in your head more than anything else. When you anchor yourself back into your body, you bring yourself back into the present moment, which is the first thing we need to do before anything else. So that's step number one. Step number two, after you've kind of just anchored yourself, pause for a while.

Continue to just keep observing. Just give some space to the situation. You're removing, like you can still physically be there and the person can still be yelling, but you're removing yourself from the action, right? Pause. Pausing gives your nervous system a chance to regulate before you react.

because usually when you react from a triggered nervous system, you're not reacting from a good place. So you want to just allow your nervous system just to regulate before it reacts because that's everything. When someone's being aggressive, your instinct is to defend or to fight back or to explain or to match their intensity in some sort of way. All of those just add fuel to the fire. You just want to pause. Space interrupts this emotional chain reaction that happens whenever we're in an aggressive situation or fight an argument with somebody and it gives you access to like yourself like your clarity your own self-control and when you pause you're actually not just calming yourself you're interrupting their momentum as well aggressive people often like feed

off of emotional escalation and so your stillness kind of creates a mirror that they can't control and it disarms them without confrontation and so sometimes believe it or not it even helps them hear their own behavior because they're only hearing themselves in the situation and now they're listening to themselves and they're like, oh, hold on, I'm now hearing myself more clear. I don't know if I want to continue doing this. And so like it's weird, but your calm actually starts to become contagious. So it kind of invites their nervous system to settle too, even if they're resistant at first. And then what you want to do is just set simple boundaries in those situations. Like you want to use calm, neutral language that protects

your space without fueling the fire. And it could be some phrases like, hey, I'm happy to talk when our voices are calm again. Or like, hey, let's just pause for right now. I'm not okay with the tone that we're both using. Or I hear you. I just need a moment to, you know, to myself before I respond. Or I'm not going to make myself available for this type of conversation. Now, that's not saying that they're not going to get more mad when you do that. But with the boundary, the thing that's important about a boundary is a boundary is something that you're supposed to hold firm to. And once people learn it's a boundary, because you teach people how to talk to you, you teach people how to treat you. After they realize, hey, you know, this person keeps saying

the exact same thing, they kind of calm down a little bit. Okay. And so the key is you're not trying to win anything in this situation. What you're trying to do is you're trying to stay in your own energy. Okay? And so the simple pattern is this. Number one, you're going to pause you're going to get into your body you're not just going to be in your head number two you're going to name what's going on what you're feeling i'm triggered and that's okay i want to scream i want to yell so you pause you name number three is you're going to regulate you're going to breathe you're going to ground yourself you're going to become more aware of the situation number four you're going to choose what the best thing is to do like choose the boundaries

and communicate them with clarity and then number five after the situation is over and you've removed yourself from it, you've got to ask yourself, like, what got activated in me? And you start to learn more about yourself. If you yell at somebody and you blow up, no big deal. That's what happened. Well, let's reflect after the situation. Let's learn more about you in the situation. And you just keep doing this over and over again. Pause, name, regulate, choose, and reflect. And over time, you start to retrain your nervous system to feel safe in the moments where you used to actually spiral. Because it's really, really important. You know, obviously with me being somebody who's obsessed with mindset and psychology and all of this, every

triggering moment is a window into ourselves. How you react when somebody gets aggressive doesn't just show you them. It shows you you. Like, do you shrink? Do you get louder? Do you go numb? Do you get aggressive? Do you get terrified? Do you run? All of those are not random. They're patterns. It's your nervous system playing out old scripts. And the person that's in front of you, becomes a mirror for you, reflecting back to you where you still feel unsafe or unseen or unworthy in some way. And so it's not about blaming them or any of that type of stuff or blaming yourself for that situation. It's about collecting information. That heat that you feel, the shutdown that you feel, the urge to fix or flee or to fight, that's your body revealing a wound. It's a belief. It's a

pattern. It's something that needs to be healed within you. And every time you choose to observe the situation instead of react, you reclaim just a little bit more of your power. And for those of you that are willing to put in the work, the conflict becomes a classroom and not a battlefield. And that's where you really start to get into self-mastery. So that's what I got for you for today's lesson. If you're out there and you want to master your 2026 goals, I have a free 30-minute workshop video that will help you figure out your goals, get very clear on what they are, and plan them out. If you go to Goalsmastery-20206.com, you can download it for free. All you have to do is get out a pen and paper, push play, and at the end of the 30 minutes, you'll have all of your goals for next

year planned out with a plan of what you need to do each day to hit those goals. So once again, if you want to download it for free, it is Goalsmastery-20206.com. And with that, I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.