Episode 207: Empathy vs Ego

In this episode of Leading and Learning Through Safety, Dr. Mark French reflects on a recent verbal de-escalation training experience and shares key lessons that extend far beyond conflict management. The training focused on how workers who interact with the public can safely navigate tense situations, recognize potential dangers, and communicate in ways that reduce rather than increase conflict. 

One of the biggest takeaways was the importance of practice-based learning. Dr. French emphasizes that effective training is not simply about transferring knowledge through lectures—it must provide a safe environment where participants can ask questions, make mistakes, receive feedback, and build confidence through realistic scenarios. He highlights how hands-on learning creates deeper understanding and prepares people to apply skills in real-world situations. 

The episode then explores one of the most powerful concepts in verbal de-escalation: setting aside ego. Dr. French explains that many conflicts escalate because individuals become focused on being right rather than resolving the situation. Successful de-escalation requires empathy, active listening, and the ability to understand another person's perspective without immediately defending your own position. 

Using examples from construction and safety environments, he demonstrates how acknowledging frustrations, listening sincerely, and responding with empathy can help reduce tension and create safer outcomes. The discussion reinforces that leadership, safety, and effective communication are deeply connected. By replacing ego with empathy, leaders and frontline workers alike can build trust, reduce conflict, and create environments where people feel heard, respected, and ultimately safer.

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Mark French: 0:01

This week we're talking about a really amazing training that I went through on verbal de-escalation, the psychology of how we work around people in achieving our goals and not letting our ego get in the way. This week on the podcast I

Unknown: 0:35

Welcome to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. Your host is Dr. Mark French Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork, and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people, safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Together we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode. And now here is Dr. Mark French.

Mark French: 1:33

Welcome to this episode of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. Hi, welcome. So happy you've joined me. I'm honored to be a part of your podcast rotation this week. I want to talk about a training that I went through a couple of weeks ago. I haven't had a chance to debrief on it, but there were some really amazing lessons that came from it. So, I want to share, I want to be able to talk more about that training, and not necessarily giving away everything we did in the training, but there were some really key important parts that I feel are really relevant and really struck me as some of the most important things that we forget, I forget usually I share things that is not, I see happening, but a lot of times it rings true, because I know I've done it so many times, and it's something that we can, I can work on, and so I want to share it, and I think it's an amazing thing. So, what it was is I went through a de-escalation training, verbal de-escalation. How is it when you're working in the public or working around anyone outside in the world. How do you essentially know when there's danger, but also know when to leave, and also how do you talk to someone in a way that doesn't increase a situation that may already be aggravated. Now this is not an advertisement by no means, but I want to give credit where credit is due. And the company that came in and did the training is a company called Safe Passage Consulting. And, honestly, I felt like they did an amazing job of teaching, because the teaching part was really pretty short. Where it really mattered is if you don't practice this, it's easy not to let it sink in. It was the practice, it was hours of practicing, going through scenarios, using some of these techniques, getting feedback on these techniques in a safe place, and I think that's one of the most important things that struck me as part of training. Training should be the safe thing. So I'm gonna start with a whole different item here to kick things off before I get into really the meat of the, the what we learned. But what's important about training is it is a knowledge transfer ultimately the goal with any training is that we want to transfer knowledge, we want to give knowledge to someone, we want to share it, we want them to learn, we want them to absorb. The other key item about training is that it all should also be a chance to be vulnerable and to be able to make mistakes, because it's a very safe environment, not just physically safe, mentally safe, emotionally safe. This is the place that we want mistakes to happen. This is the place we want to learn what's really going on. This is the place that we want the tough questions or any questions to be offered, and to be for us to encounter together, because this is the chance to do it without consequences, and that's something this reminded me about very, very powerfully, watching it happen, is that I am one. It, I, I'm a weird one. Be perfectly, I love learning through lecture. I put it on the board, tell me about it, teach me about it, give me the theory. That's how I learn. I am odd that way. I think there's some, I guess maybe some social anxiety around practicing things, and that that certainly is an odd way of doing it, but the real learning does come from hands on, from learning in the classroom, which would this, what happened, and then we go out and we practice, and we do it, and we see how it goes, that is where the real value is, because we can see how it does it really work. How are you able to interact with that situation? And again, there's low consequence or no consequence in most cases. That's why it's training, that's why it's that safe environment, and having a good hands-on training location is so important, especially if you have safety tools, safety devices, and that's why OSHA mandates a lot of hands-on training, like you have to in a fork truck environment, you have to demonstrate that you can drive the fork truck in a safe location, that is to me one of some of the weird flaws in some training is they put you in the real world scenario and just follow you around. Well, there could be consequences to that. Where what if you were truly in a safe environment, you know, you break something, you bump something, you know it's okay, as long as, of course, you're not negligent. Of course, that's the the 2% that we always have to talk about, because whenever we say it's safe to make a mistake, someone goes, "Well, what if they do something really, really bad? Well, that's negligence, that's not mistake, because if you've allowed a training situation to get to where someone can make a minor mistake and have a catastrophic problem, not training anymore. It's some sort of real-world application that you shouldn't be doing anyway. Separate topic, we'll talk about that another time, but it's a safe place, and especially with this type of training, where you're interacting with other human beings in the field, in the real world. So, essentially, what the training is for is a lot of workers work in the public, so linemen, people who work municipality, construction, you're out there and people can approach you. People can walk up and do something, and there could be any number of people who may not be in the right state of mind when they approach. How do you verbally talk to them so as not to aggravate any further? Because the goal is no one gets hurt. The goal is no one puts hands on anyone else that we're able to talk, make it calm down, and then hopefully remedy the situation, and we all move on, or we see that there's a problem and we leave, or we shut it down, or we call someone for help. But the first step is that in between the time that you decide that we need to leave, or in between the time that you call for help, maybe it's the police, maybe it's a supervisor, maybe it's something else, there's still time that has to pass, and it's not like time pauses, there's still interaction, there's still something going on, and How do you not get upset when these aggravating circumstances can happen, how are you able to continue to talk and begin to bring the situation that the energy down and be able to calm the situation, be able to bring people back to a level where you can have the conversation, and that's when practicing is so important, and having people that can play the scenario. So, in these cases, the team that we were training remained as who they were. They never became the aggressor. It was the trainers that that knew and had seen this time and time again in their work of what it looks like to interact with different types of aggressors or different types of people who are angry or upset, or let's say it's just someone who is having a really great time and they're super sociable and they just stumble into your work area. How do you even handle someone like that without getting them angry and keeping them calm and escorting them out of the area and handling it in a very professional, but also very, very hands-on, very specific way. And so it's important in that situation that you're able to practice it in a very safe place, you're able to make the mistakes, you're able to say the things you're like, oh, I shouldn't have said that, or I shouldn't have done that, or I shouldn't have went that direction, I should have tried this instead. It gave everybody a chance to practice, it gave everybody a chance to get feedback, and it made the training one more interactive and more it. Made it real, as real as it could be in a safe environment, but again it made it safe. Where the training itself was an opportunity to ask questions, to be real, talk about real-world scenarios without that fear of failure, without that fear that something could go really wrong. And that's the important part about training, is that's how you learn, is that you're able to ask those questions, you're able to get that knowledge, you're able to make those mistakes. Now, let's move on to a separate topic, all about still this training, but on the second half of the Leading and Learning through Safety podcast,

Unknown: 10:39

humanizing the workplace, it is the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. What drives next level performance in your business? It's not just strategy, it's your people, and great performance starts with great leadership. At TSDA Consulting, we believe real leadership begins by creating a workplace where people feel safe, supported, and heard. TSD Consulting is led by Dr. Mark French, a recognized leader in the workplace culture, who helps organizations bridge the gap between behavioral psychology and operational safety. Learn yourself, lead others, create safety. Visit TSda consulting.com today. Today,

Mark French: 11:23

and welcome back to the second half of the Leading and Learning through Safety podcast. So, let's continue about de-escalation training, and one of the most important topics that came out that really, I don't know, that they pointed out that this was the most important, but it was pretty important, but it hit me from a behavioral psychology standpoint, that this is really the biggest thing that will be an inhibitor that will stop you from being successful in verbal de-escalation, in being able to get people to calm down as you're talking to them, as you're trying to engage, and not escalate into aggression, that's the goal, is that we don't get to a situation where we are having to fight, where we don't have real aggression, and to do that, to get rid of aggression, one has to set aside their ego, and that is hard to do, because in most cases, when you argue, when you're engaging in some sort of discussion, someone wants to be right, someone has to be wrong, that's the way we approach it, like a debate, but that's ego, that's two egos battling for who is right, you have to put the ego aside on de-escalation, you have to be able to have some empathy, and you have to be able to feel what they're feeling to a certain degree, to be able to understand it enough to continue to talk, because as long as you're talking, you're not fighting, you're not aggressing if you're talking, if you're not shouting and angry and pacing, if you're having a civilized discussion, calm voices, calm hands, ready to leave if you need to, keeping space between you in listening, truly listening, rather than trying to think of your next argument, and that's hard to do, because a lot of times you want to tell the aggressor, you want to tell something they're wrong, you shouldn't be here, you shouldn't be angry, you shouldn't be approaching me, you shouldn't be in my work zone, and those are all true things, but when you tell them, like, hey, what's the worst thing you can say to someone who's really, you're like, okay, let's calm down, whoa, they don't want to calm down, they, they're ready for something, there's other ways to be able to approach that, and the first step is to recognize that your ego will get you in trouble, and I see there's so many examples out there of fights of aggression of true like competitive spirit, where ego is the issue, which, good or bad, it is the issue, because sometimes in competitiveness that ego allows people to perform at their very top level, because they believe in it. When we're trying to genuinely deescalate, or we're trying to get someone on our side to be able to calm the situation down, the ego gets in the way. Now, one of my favorite definitions of empathy comes from the American Psychological Association, and it talks about, in generalized terms, of just being able to feel what you're trying to put yourself in the feeling of the other person, but what is so neat about the definition is that it says that it doesn't include action, like it's basically takes that out, like you're feeling it, but you're not taking any action based on that feeling, you're just simply putting yourself there, you're putting yourself in that mindset with no intention, you can put. Put action to it, and that turns into something else, but the exact act, the pure definition of having empathy is without an action. It's just putting yourself in their shoes, and that is the most powerful part of setting your ego aside, is that you're no longer, am I better than this person? Am I more equipped than this person? Am I overall going to be over top of this person? No. You put that aside and you become truly empathetic, and a lot of it is listening and acknowledgement. If I hear what you said. I see you where you are. I hear you, hear you where you're at. And let's give an example of someone who's angry about construction going on near their home. Do they have a right to be angry? Probably, because it's loud, it's disturbing, it messes up traffic, it makes a mess, it's lots of things, does the work still have to be done? Yep, it does, and the work will get done, but there's a way when someone is upset over it that you're able to potentially lower the aggression, bring it down a notch, and the first step is listening to them and having empathy. Hey, this has been going on. It's really loud. There's lots of mess. Yeah, it.. we're.. it happens. We're really sorry about that. How can we.. is there a way that we can do something? Or how long has this been like.. what? What more do you.. can we do? It's terrible that all this noise.. we're trying to get done as fast as we can, but hearing them where they're at, and even apologizing, even in apologies, are definitely setting aside ego, even if it's not, for instance, it's not the construction worker's fault, there's construction going on, there is a lot of decisions that were made way outside of that scope, that is causing that work to happen, and so apologizing on that is it's kind of weird, because it's not your decision to be there doing the work, you're just there doing what you're supposed to do, but still looking at the person, going,"Man, I, the noise, it's bad, and I'm really sorry it has to happen, but we got to get this done. Yeah, we, this is what we've been told to do, this is what we're going to do. Maybe there's someone else you can contact to talk about it. Yeah, I don't like the noise either. Yeah, that's tough to say those things, but when you realize that that is what needs to be said to avoid aggression, it's a powerful, powerful message, and again, a lot of the time it's that ego that gets in the way, and I have there have been so many times in my safety career that I have went out there to try to coach someone on the proper safety thing to do, and it became an argument, it became a something that I was out there trying to prove that I was right and they were wrong, rather me, rather than me just putting my ego aside and saying, you know what, I just want you to be safe. If you could do this, I think it would be great. Maybe there's something else we can do, but this is what we're here for. It's not about right and wrong, it's about protection, that's what we're all here for. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Leading and Learning through Safety podcast. Thanks for allowing me again to be part of that podcast rotation, and remember, when we have the opportunity, when we have that chance to have empathy, ego set it aside, allow empathy to shine through, and hopefully that allows us all to stay safe.

Unknown: 19:02

Thank you for listening to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. More content is available online@www.tsdaconsulting.com All the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity, this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training, or legal advice. This has been the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast.