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I’ve spent a good part of my adult life arguing with people. As a practicing attorney, I actually got paid to do it, which is probably why I became so proficient. I’ve also been stopped by police officers more than 100 times over the years, giving me ample opportunity to test my negotiating skills under circumstances where the other guy had a gun, a badge and the legal authority to make my day considerably worse. After nearly seven decades on this planet, I’ve finally figured out something that would have saved me a great deal of time, money and aggravation had I understood it 40 years ago.
Most arguments are completely unnecessary, and even the necessary ones are usually better handled without getting angry. This isn’t some New Age revelation I picked up at a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, although I’m writing this while visiting the country. It’s something I’ve learned through experience, often the hard way. And there’s a pretty good neurological explanation for why it works.
The human brain is a remarkable piece of biological engineering, but some of its most important operating systems are badly outdated. Deep inside your skull are two almond-shaped structures called the amygdalae, which help process fear, threats and emotional responses. They’ve been around in one form or another for a very long time, and they were essential when our ancestors had to worry about becoming dinner for a saber-toothed tiger. Unfortunately, the same basic machinery that helped us survive prehistoric predators can also turn a minor disagreement with your spouse into a three-day cold war.
When somebody says something that makes you feel threatened, embarrassed or disrespected, your brain can react as though you’re facing an actual physical danger. Your heart starts pounding, your blood pressure rises and your body prepares for a confrontation. Meanwhile, the parts of your brain responsible for weighing alternatives, considering consequences and making rational decisions may become less effective. Psychologists sometimes call this an amygdala hijack, and if you’ve ever said something in anger that you regretted ten minutes later, you’ve probably experienced it.
The really interesting part is that this process is contagious. Somebody raises his voice, you raise yours, he gets louder and pretty soon neither of you remembers what the original disagreement was about. You’re no longer trying to solve a problem. You’re trying to win a fight, defend your dignity and make sure the other bastard doesn’t get the last word.
This is where de-escalation comes in, and I think it’s one of the most underrated skills a human being can develop. The objective is to move the argument away from the amygdala’s emotional threat response and back toward the cerebral cortex, where you can actually think about what you’re doing. That’s a simplified description of how the brain works, but it gets to the heart of the matter. You want to stop reacting and start thinking, and ideally get the other person to do the same thing.
I recently had an experience that brought this whole subject into focus. I’ve been updating my book, The All-New Speeder’s Guide to Avoiding Tickets, and a reader named Dan from Long Island made a suggestion that forced me to rethink the sequence of my traffic-stop strategy. The result was the DAMN System, which stands for De-escalate, Admit, Mitigate, NOW! Dan created a bunch of additional work for me, since I now have to revise the book, but I think the improvement was well worth the aggravation.
The first step is the most important. When a police officer pulls you over, the last thing you want to do is start arguing about radar calibration, constitutional rights or whether you were actually going 47 in a 35. The officer doesn’t know you, doesn’t know whether you’re dangerous and doesn’t know what’s inside your vehicle. What he does know is that he wants to finish his shift and go home to his family, preferably in one piece.
Your job is to make him comfortable that this encounter isn’t going to become a problem. Keep your hands visible, speak calmly, don’t make sudden movements and treat him like a human being rather than an enemy combatant. Once you’ve lowered the emotional temperature, you can begin addressing the actual reason for the stop and looking for an opportunity to mitigate the consequences. The objective isn’t to prove that you’re smarter than the officer. It’s to leave the encounter with the best possible outcome.
In the past fourteen years, I’ve been stopped seven times in Florida. Five resulted in warnings, including a written warning from the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department on September 1, 2026. The other two tickets were resolved through conditional discharges, with no points or insurance surcharges. I can’t promise you’ll get the same results, but I can tell you that fighting with the cop on the side of the road is a lousy strategy.
My new motto is, Don’t Fight the Cop. DAMN the Ticket! You can learn more about the system at SpeedersGuide.com.
But here’s what really got me thinking. Why limit this approach to traffic stops? The same principles apply to marriage, raising children, dealing with employees, negotiating business deals and virtually every other situation where human beings disagree. In fact, the more important the relationship, the more valuable de-escalation becomes.
Consider the typical argument between a husband and wife over money. One says the other spends too much, and within seconds they’re dredging up purchases from three years ago, questioning each other’s judgment and wondering why they ever got married. The original issue might have been a $500 credit card charge, but now the entire relationship is on trial. Both parties are angry, neither is listening and nothing productive is going to happen until somebody regains control of the situation.
Now imagine one spouse saying, “I’m worried about our finances. Can we sit down and figure out where the money’s going?” The underlying issue hasn’t changed, but the emotional context is completely different. Instead of accusing the other person of being irresponsible, you’re inviting him or her to help solve a problem. You haven’t conceded anything, and you haven’t agreed to overlook the spending. You’ve simply made it possible to have a rational conversation.
The same thing happens with children, especially teenagers, who seem to have an almost supernatural ability to push their parents’ buttons. Your kid comes home two hours late, and your first instinct is to start screaming about responsibility, respect and how things were different when you were his age. He responds by rolling his eyes, slamming a door and informing you that you’re ruining his life. Congratulations, you’ve just converted a missed curfew into a family crisis.
What if you started by telling him you were worried and asking what happened? There may still be consequences, and there probably should be if he deliberately violated the rules. But at least you have a chance of finding out what actually occurred before imposing punishment. More importantly, you’re teaching him how to handle disagreements without turning every conflict into a battle for control.
I’ve seen the same dynamic in business more times than I can count. An employee makes a mistake, the boss blows his stack and the employee immediately starts looking for excuses or somebody else to blame. The boss thinks he’s demonstrating authority, but what he’s really doing is teaching his people to hide bad news. That’s a terrible way to run a business, especially when you need accurate information to make decisions.
A much better approach is to find out what went wrong, why it happened and how to prevent it from happening again. You can still hold people accountable, fire them if necessary or demand that they correct their mistakes. But you don’t need to humiliate them in the process. The purpose of management is to get results, not to satisfy the boss’s emotional need to demonstrate who’s in charge.
Of course, none of this means you should become a doormat. There are legitimate interests worth fighting for, principles that shouldn’t be compromised and situations where your physical survival may depend upon decisive action. I’m certainly not suggesting that you respond to a genuine threat by sitting down and discussing everybody’s feelings. What I am suggesting is that even when fighting is necessary, you’re much better off if you can keep your emotions from taking over.
Think about the airline pilots we’ve all heard about who managed to land airplanes that were literally falling apart around them. Engines failing, hydraulic systems destroyed, warning alarms blaring and hundreds of passengers whose lives depended upon the decisions being made in the cockpit. Yet when you listen to recordings of some of these emergencies, the pilots sound almost unbelievably calm. They’re running checklists, talking to air traffic control, evaluating their options and doing whatever is necessary to keep the aircraft flying.
They’re not screaming about how unfair the situation is, threatening to sue the manufacturer or arguing about who caused the problem. They’re too busy trying to stay alive, and they understand that losing control of themselves could mean losing control of the airplane. Years of training have prepared them to respond to an emergency by concentrating on the next decision rather than the enormity of the disaster. That’s an extraordinary skill, and it’s one we can all learn something from.
Captain Chesley Sullenberger’s landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009 is probably the best-known example. Both engines lost power after a bird strike, and suddenly he had 155 people aboard an aircraft that had become a very expensive glider. He and his crew had only a few minutes to assess their options and decide what to do. They landed in the Hudson, and everyone survived.
When pilots like Sullenberger are subsequently interviewed, they tend to emphasize their training, preparation and the professionalism of the crew rather than their own heroism. You hear some variation of the same explanation over and over again: I was just doing my job and following my training. They weren’t necessarily fearless, and they certainly understood the danger. They simply knew that panic wasn’t going to improve their chances of survival.
I find that attitude enormously instructive. When your airplane is coming apart, you don’t have the luxury of an emotional meltdown. You have to fly the damn airplane, regardless of how frightened, angry or overwhelmed you might feel. And the same principle applies when your marriage is in trouble, your business is failing, somebody is threatening you or you’re facing a financial crisis that could wipe out everything you’ve spent a lifetime building.
This is also where the subject becomes particularly relevant to investing and financial survival. Financial markets are practically designed to exploit our emotional weaknesses, and the financial media has become extraordinarily proficient at helping them along. Every market correction is the beginning of a historic collapse, every rally is the start of a new golden age and every economic statistic is presented as evidence that something extraordinary is about to happen. The objective is to keep you watching, clicking and reacting.
Fear and greed are two of the most powerful forces in financial markets, and both can overwhelm rational judgment. When your portfolio is falling, the amygdala starts screaming that you need to do something before it’s too late. When everybody around you is getting rich in the latest speculative mania, the fear of missing out can become almost unbearable. In both cases, your emotional response may be pushing you toward exactly the wrong decision at exactly the wrong time.
I’ve watched this happen through numerous market cycles, and it’s remarkable how consistently people repeat the same mistakes. They sell after prices collapse, buy after enormous rallies and then wonder why their results are so disappointing. It’s not necessarily because they’re unintelligent or incapable of understanding financial markets. It’s because they allow their emotional reactions to dictate decisions that should be based upon analysis, probabilities and an understanding of the larger economic picture.
Governments and central banks add another layer to the problem. Their policies can have enormous consequences for currencies, interest rates, precious metals, equities and the purchasing power of your savings. Yet investors often respond to political personalities and inflammatory headlines rather than examining the incentives driving policy decisions. They become emotionally invested in being right about a politician or an economic prediction, even when the markets are telling them something different.
I’ve always believed that incentives matter more than intentions, and nowhere is that more apparent than in government and finance. If you understand what motivates the people making the decisions, you’re in a much better position to anticipate what they might do next. That doesn’t mean you’ll always be right, because nobody is. But at least you’re making decisions based upon something more substantial than the latest headline designed to make your blood pressure rise.
This brings me back to the Zen aspect of de-escalation. I’ve been spending time in Thailand, where Buddhist philosophy is woven into everyday life, and it’s hard not to notice the contrast between the ideal of equanimity and the constant emotional agitation that seems to dominate so much of modern Western life. I’m not about to shave my head, put on saffron robes and move into a monastery. But I can appreciate the wisdom of learning to observe an emotional reaction without automatically acting upon it.
There’s a huge difference between feeling angry and allowing anger to control your behavior. There’s an equally important difference between recognizing danger and becoming paralyzed by fear. You can be furious about an injustice and still respond strategically, just as you can be frightened about your financial future and still make intelligent investment decisions. The emotion itself isn’t necessarily the problem. The problem begins when it takes over the decision-making process.
One of the advantages of getting older is that you eventually realize how expensive the ego can be. I’ve watched people destroy friendships, marriages and business relationships because they couldn’t tolerate the possibility that somebody else might get the last word. They were so determined to prove they were right that they lost sight of what they were actually trying to accomplish. I’ve undoubtedly been guilty of the same thing myself, although I’d like to think I’m getting better at recognizing it.
When you’re twenty-five, winning an argument can seem like a major accomplishment. When you’re sixty-nine, you begin to understand that peace of mind is a valuable asset and that most arguments aren’t worth the price of admission. That doesn’t mean I’ve lost my willingness to fight when something matters. Anyone familiar with my legal battles knows that surrender isn’t exactly my preferred negotiating strategy.
But I’ve learned that there’s a difference between fighting effectively and fighting emotionally. If I’m going to spend my time, money and energy pursuing something, I want to maximize my chances of success. Getting angry may make me feel better for a few minutes, but it rarely improves the underlying facts or strengthens my position. I’d much rather have a clear head and a good strategy than a temporary feeling of moral superiority.
Here’s a simple experiment you can try the next time somebody says something that makes your blood boil. Before responding, give yourself four seconds to think about what you’re actually trying to accomplish. Ask whether the response you’re about to make will improve the situation or simply make you feel better for the next thirty seconds. You may discover that a surprising number of arguments can be avoided without sacrificing anything of value.
And when the situation really is serious, those few seconds can be even more valuable. The ability to remain calm doesn’t guarantee that you’ll make the right decision, but panic and uncontrolled anger can make a difficult situation considerably worse. Whether you’re dealing with an aggressive police officer, a family crisis, a failing business or a genuine emergency, maintaining control gives you more options. And having more options is almost always preferable to having fewer.
Which brings us back to the airline pilot. His engines have quit, the alarms are sounding and every instinct in his body must be telling him that he’s in mortal danger. But he’s got passengers depending upon him, a crew looking to him for leadership and only a few minutes to make decisions that will determine whether everybody lives or dies. He doesn’t have time to be outraged, offended or concerned about who deserves the blame.
He has to fly the damn airplane.
That’s a pretty good philosophy for the rest of us, too. De-escalation isn’t about avoiding conflict or pretending that everything is wonderful. It’s about refusing to let somebody else, or your own emotional reactions, take control of your decisions. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is walk away, sometimes it’s to negotiate and sometimes it’s to fight like hell. But whatever you decide, make sure you’re the one making the decision.
Don’t Let Somebody Else Fly Your Financial Airplane
If there’s one area where I see people surrender control of their thinking on a regular basis, it’s their financial lives. The headlines frighten them, the politicians enrage them, the market commentators confuse them and the endless predictions of catastrophe leave them wondering whether they should buy gold, sell stocks, hold cash or move to a cabin in the mountains. Meanwhile, the people who understand the underlying economic forces are making decisions based upon incentives, capital flows and the consequences of government policy.
That’s one of the reasons I created Insider’s Advantage. After more than a decade and thousands of interviews on the Financial Survival Network, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with an extraordinary range of investors, economists, entrepreneurs, market analysts and people who have actually built businesses and made fortunes. I’ve also heard more than my share of confident predictions that turned out to be completely wrong. The experience has reinforced my belief that understanding how the system works is infinitely more valuable than becoming emotionally attached to how you think it ought to work.
Insider’s Advantage is where I bring that experience together and go beyond the daily headlines. We look at precious metals, currencies, government debt, inflation, emerging technologies and the economic and political forces that can affect your wealth. More importantly, we try to understand the incentives driving the people and institutions making the decisions. The objective isn’t to tell you what to think, but to give you a better foundation for making your own decisions.
I can’t promise you’ll never make another bad investment or that we’ll anticipate every market move. Nobody can, and anybody who claims otherwise is probably trying to sell you something considerably more expensive than a newsletter. What I can promise is that you’ll get my perspective, my research and my continuing effort to separate meaningful developments from the enormous amount of financial noise competing for your attention. And I’ll tell you what I think, even when it isn’t what everybody else wants to hear.
Right now, I’m offering 35% off a paid Insider’s Advantage subscription. If you’ve been reading my free material and listening to my interviews, you already have a pretty good idea of how I approach these subjects. The paid newsletter takes that analysis further and helps support the independent work I’ve been doing since I launched the Financial Survival Network in 2011.
Join Insider’s Advantage today and save 35%.
Think of it as another form of de-escalation. Instead of allowing the next frightening headline to dictate your financial decisions, you can develop a more informed understanding of what’s happening and why. You don’t have to agree with every conclusion I reach, and I wouldn’t want you to. I want you thinking for yourself rather than reacting to whatever the financial media has decided you should be frightened about today.
Because sooner or later, every investor encounters some financial turbulence. Markets crash, currencies lose purchasing power, governments make bad decisions and investments that once looked perfectly safe suddenly become anything but. You can’t control all of those events any more than an airline pilot can control the weather or prevent a flock of birds from flying into his engines. What you can control is how well prepared you are and how you respond when something goes wrong.
The worst time to learn how to handle an emergency is when the emergency is already underway.
Join Insider’s Advantage, get informed, stay prepared and keep your hands on the controls.
And whatever happens, fly the damn airplane.
— Kerry Lutz
America’s Top Recovering Attorney®
Great commentary. Based on real world experience with critical thinking behind it. Great down to earth advice, thanks.