Your Thursday Three Things for July 30th, 2026
Control your state. The conversation takes care of itself.
Derek Gaunt spent 7 hours on a freezing bridge talking a man off the edge, and he’ll be the first to tell you he loses the same fight every morning with his own kids.
The guy on the bridge had already turned it into a game. He’d been stalking his estranged wife, the mother of his kid, and when the police staked out her house he spotted the officers inside, drove to a grocery store, came back, and set a cold-cut platter and a bottle of wine on her back porch. Then he called 911 from a pay phone. “Tell the guys in the house I left them a little snack.”
That’s who Derek Gaunt was standing across from on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, in the winter, for 7 hours. Concrete construction barges sat in the water below. If the man jumped, it was over.
Derek got him off the railing and walking back toward Virginia with one skill set. No force, no bigger threat. He made the man feel understood, over and over, until the guy chose to move. A less-lethal round from another team put him over the side anyway, and he survived on 6 feet of water over 5 feet of silt. “Success or failure? He lived, so I guess it’s a success.”
This same man, 20 years on hostage negotiation teams, will tell you flat out he fails at this with his own family. “I failed miserably. And I’ll tell you why. Because I’m a human being. And I’m more emotionally tied to the people in my house than I am to anybody else.”
Everybody’s a threat until they’re not
Derek’s whole thing is tactical empathy, and I know how that lands. Tactical sounds cool. Empathy sounds soft. Put them together and a lot of guys tune out. Stay with it, because the idea underneath is hard as nails.
Tactical empathy is the deliberate work of seeing and naming the other person’s world before you say a thing about your own. Derek’s claim is that almost nobody gets this anywhere, not at work, not at home, and the second you provide it, you stop being a threat. And you are a threat, by default. Any time you walk in with “I want” or “I need” running in your head, the person across from you feels it and puts up the wall. Doesn’t matter if your intentions are clean. The wall goes up anyway.
So instead of yelling “it’s better over here” from across the street, you cross over, stand shoulder to shoulder, and look at the block the way they see it. His line for it: “Never be so sure about what you want that you wouldn’t take something better if it came along.”
Then he did it to me, live, on the recording. I told him my mornings feel like a hostage situation with a 5-year-old and a pair of socks. He asked, “How bad of a position am I going to put you in if I ask you to put your socks and shoes on so we could leave right now?” And I sat there and actually felt myself want to put my shoes on. No “because I said so.” No knife hands. Just a question I couldn’t feel trapped by. He calls the other thing the BISS voice, because-I-said-so, and yeah, I’ve lived in that voice more mornings than I’d like to admit.
This is the same gap I talk about all the time, the space between what happens and how you respond. Derek puts it in negotiator terms: you’re going to get triggered, but there’s room between the trigger and your reaction to decide who you’ll be in it. Curiosity fills that room. When someone comes at you sideways, ask where the hell it’s coming from before you fire back.
Your tone is doing 93% of the talking
Derek dropped a number in the intro that stuck with me. Tone does something like 13 times the work of your actual words. When I asked him to back it up, he pointed to Albert Mehrabian’s old 7-38-55 work from the 1970s, 7% content, 38% delivery, 55% syntax. The exact multiplier gets tossed around and he admitted that, but the direction is not really in dispute. How you say it swamps what you say.
And it’s literal. Come at someone hot and their amygdala lights up like a lion walked in, and the thinking part of the brain goes offline. Derek says he can watch a person get measurably dumber in real time on his tone alone, then come back online the second he softens it. Shawn Achor’s work puts a brain about 31% more effective in a positive state. So if you’re the loud one in the room, you’re making everyone around you worse at the exact moment you need them sharp.
His fix is almost annoyingly simple. Control your state. Not the conversation, your state, and the conversation follows. This is the leadership version of something I say to the men I coach constantly: you have to be well to lead well. You cannot regulate a room you can’t regulate yourself in.
Then he roasted me for it. Said in an hour of talking he’d seen my teeth twice, that I’ve got the mug for the aggressive tone whether I mean it or not, while Will’s out here grinning like the natural accommodator he is. My kids could’ve told him that. I sat with it. He’s not wrong.
The apology I got chewed out for
Here’s the one I’m still chewing on. Back in 2002, right after 9/11, I was going through training, and I gave a shorter teammate a tip on an obstacle that worked great for a tall guy and got him nowhere. He came back and told me it didn’t work. I said, “man, I’m really sorry.” An instructor heard it, pulled me aside, and lit me up. “Do not ever apologize to your men. That undermines your authority.”
I thought it was garbage advice then. Derek thinks it’s antiquated, and he wrote a whole book about why, Ego, Authority, Failure. His take: the apology is powerful precisely because almost nobody does it, for the exact reason that instructor gave me. People think it makes them small. It does the opposite. It tells your people you don’t have all the answers and you’re still in the chair, which means they can be in the chair someday too. The thing that actually torches your authority is the leader who blows it and says “my guys just didn’t execute.” Derek said when he hears that, he wants to kick the guy down a flight of stairs. Same.
Ego, he says, is just identity wearing armor. Threaten it and the body reacts like physical danger, so people dig in to prove they were right instead of getting it right. I’ve felt that pull. Every leader has. The whole game is catching the armor as it goes up and choosing to set it down first...
What to do about it
Turn one yes-question into a no-question today. Yes feels like a trap, so people resist it. Try “would you be against” or “how bad a spot would it put you in if.” Use it on your kid, your teammate, your spouse. Notice how much less they fight you when they can say no.
Label before you argue. Next low-stakes conversation, name what the other person seems to feel before you add anything. Derek’s version at the coffee counter: “Sounds like you’ve been getting kicked in the nuts all day.” Watch how much they open up when someone finally names it.
Control your state before you open your mouth. You can’t run tactical empathy on anyone if your own nervous system is redlined. Start by knowing your baseline. Our free Awareness Self-Assessment takes about 5 minutes: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 2 turns this into a full tone-and-state audit.
Send the apology you’ve been sitting on. No “but” after it. Just the apology. Then hit reply and tell me what happened, or tell me about the apology you’re still avoiding and why. I read every one, and I’m building a future edition on this.
Reply with the hostage negotiation you face every day. The kid and the shoes. The boss who slams the table. The conversation you keep dodging. Tell me who’s across the bridge from you, and I’ll pull the best ones into a follow-up.
This week on Men Talking Mindfulness
Derek Gaunt spent 29 years in law enforcement, 20 of them on hostage negotiation teams in the DC metro area. He’s an instructor and coach at the Black Swan Group, the negotiation firm behind Never Split the Difference, and the author of Ego, Authority, Failure, a book on leadership that Will and I both think should be required reading for anyone who runs a team. His newest, Fight Less, Win More, is out now. We covered tactical empathy, tone, ego, and why the world-class negotiator still loses the morning battle over socks.
Watch on YouTube | Listen here
Three resources for disarming the people you can’t just order around
Resource 1: The tactical empathy starter kit
You will never talk a man off a bridge. You will absolutely have to move a stubborn
