Don't Crash Out! Here's How to Win Anyway

We've all seen the videos. Someone gets told "no" by a manager, a police officer, or an employee who's simply enforcing the rules—and suddenly everything spirals. In this video, I share practical ways to stay calm, think clearly, and handle those moments without making your situation worse. My goal is simple: I want you to win. Sometimes winning, anyway means getting home safely, keeping your job, not catching a charge and making sure one emotional moment doesn't create long-term consequences.

New episodes weekly. 

Contact me at sonya@yourinnereconomy.com

Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to provide medical, mental health, psychological, legal, or financial advice. Please consult a qualified professional regarding your individual circumstances.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello guys and welcome to your inner economy. I'm Sonia, and each week we talk about managing overwhelm and stewarding our attention and energy so that we can accomplish our big dreams. So today I want to talk to you about avoiding the crash out and how to emotionally regulate yourself and win, even if you lose the argument. Right? And what I mean by winning is that even if the argument doesn't go in your favor or you feel that perhaps you're being unfairly treated, you will still win because you've kept yourself cool. You've kept yourself calm. You will keep your job, you'll keep your freedom, you'll keep your reputation, and you can keep your health. Because you'll keep yourself out of those very, very stressful situations that can happen when we don't emotionally regulate. Now I got a couple of things I want to talk about. I've got about five key points that I want you to keep in mind. And I've got a little bit of a, I don't know, an allergy, sinusy kind of thing. So I apologize if I sound a little froggy, but we're gonna get to this nonetheless. Okay? So the first thing we have to remember is to stay calm. We have to center ourselves because that's the only way you're gonna get perspective on the situation and have the correct one. You know, I was watching uh YouTube recently, and I don't know what the algorithm was doing, but I got caught up in the algorithms of all the crash outs that were probably happening in 2026. And the one thing I noticed is that they were unable to keep themselves calm. And so there was a lot of confusion about what was actually happening. And it was real interesting that I'm watching the exact same thing as this person is experiencing. I'm watching it because it's all been recorded, and they have a very different understanding and idea of what they feel is happening and taking place. And I thought to myself, either they're lying because they want themselves to look better, or these people have no clue of what's actually happening because their emotions are on 10 and everything is being magnified around them, and they just don't really have a good perspective. So that's one of the reasons you want to be calm, is because you're not just being calm, just to be calm. You're trying to make sure you can calm yourself and slow things down so that you can make sure you're taking in accurate information, that what you see is actually happening and what you hear was actually being said. Now, I like to use a slow-mo method, at least that's what I call it. And I'm going to tell you about this slow-mo method. Okay. What it is, is it's getting your mind and your nervous system and your body to calm down. And breathing is shown to create that type of calm state. Because when we're upset and we're in the flight or flight or what is it, fright or flight syndrome, what's happening is our breath becomes very shallow, you know, as our body prepares to either have to fight off the big old angry bear or whatever's, you know, threatening us, or the body's preparing to run from it if they don't, if the body and the mind doesn't feel like it can take the challenge. And so, in order to do that, our body creates this very shallow breathing. It's a protective mechanism for us. But in today's modern life, we aren't running from bears typically, right? We're not fighting, you know, monsters typically. So you want to get your breath to be nice and slow because that's gonna trigger your brain to think, okay, there's no problem. Everything's fine. Now, we're not just trying to be calm, just to be calm. We'll talk about why we need to be calm in a second. But my slow-mo method goes like this: I take a deep breath in through my nose, out through my mouth, and when I get to the end of that breath, I sort of turn my head to the left and I look and I observe. Then I take a deep breath in through my nose, out through my mouth, and then I turn my head to the right, and I look and observe, and then I take a deep breath in through my nose, blowing it out through my mouth, and I turn back to the front and I'm looking and I'm observing. Now, a couple of things happened in that slow-bo method. The first thing is that immediately my flight or fright, fright or flight, what is it? Flight, I can't get it out. Flight or fight, either running or fighting, that calms down. When that calms down, I can look around and I can be very observant, very observant, and I can make sure that what is happening is actually happening. That gets my brain clear, that gets my brain rational, that gets my brain logical. Now, obviously, you got to do this with some some quickness because you want to make sure that you're safe. So while I'm looking and I'm observing and I'm breathing, I'm asking myself, what's happening now? What do I see? What do I hear? I am watching very carefully and I'm asking myself, am I safe? Are the other people safe? Is there any danger signal that I'm seeing? Any danger signals to the left of me, the right of me, or in front of me? And these danger signals can be things like threatening body posture. I'm checking for myself, am I, you know, behaving in a threatening way? Is my body puffed up? I'm looking at them. Are they, you know, demonstrating threatening body postures? Are there elevated tones of voice from me, from them, from the other people? What's going on? Is the crowd closing in on me? Is there enough personal space between me and this person that I'm having this situation with? Do I see any objects that could be used as weapons? I'm thinking about all of that stuff while I'm having my slow-mo method. Okay? Now, once you've kind of assessed the situation and you are very clear on what's actually happening, you don't have some made-up fantasy in your brain. You have to make sure it's logically based in fact what you're saying. Because it's real interesting to me how so many people have so many different perspectives about what they feel is happening when everybody's watching the same thing. So you have to make sure you're calm enough and clear enough to make sure that the data you're taking into your brain is accurate because you don't want to be moving on wrong information. You could make some bad choices thinking somebody's, you know, doing something that they probably may have not been doing. So the next thing you want to do is you want to listen and respond respectfully to the questions that you're asked. Uh, this is very important if you're in an authoritative confrontation of sorts, which I'm telling you, the algorithm, that's pretty much what it was pumping to me when I was watching this, these crash-outs. And by that I mean you're either talking to your boss or you're talking to the owner of an establishment you may be visiting, or you're talking to the police officers. These are people that are in authority. And let me tell you, one thing we were taught when I was a young person, and I've taught it to my uh kiddos, is that we addressed people with ma'am and sir, especially if we were dealing with somebody that was in law enforcement, or if it was somebody that owned a restaurant, and if there was a confrontation that was happening, we would immediately get into a respectful manner. And we would just simply do that. Now, I know we've had a woke culture that's been going on for probably about eight, nine, maybe ten years, really pronounced in the last like five years. And everybody's kind of a little, especially Gen Z, you guys may be a little skittish about referring to people as ma'am and sir, but you can ask, you can say, Well, how may I address you? And then they can let you know. They can either tell you their name or they can tell you, well, you could just call me ma'am. Now, if you're dealing with a situation where you're not dealing with somebody that's in an authoritarian position over you, they may say, I'm not gonna tell you my name because you might, you know, retaliate. That's fine. Then you just go ahead and just respond to that person as respectfully and politely as you can. Right? Now, after you're able to establish that respect for that person, if that person is in authority over you, or if that person is um someone that's just on the street that you're having a problem with, after you get that respect situation in check, because remember, when you're dealing with somebody in authority, you are respecting the position that they have. You're respecting the uniform if it's a police officer. I don't know where this new culture is coming in where we believe we do not owe police officers respect. I maybe, maybe it was all the defund police foolishness we had going on here, as if a society, a functioning society doesn't need law enforcement. I don't know who told us that was a good idea. Well, actually, I do know who told us it was a good idea. I guess the better question is I don't know why we listened to it. That's my that's my real question is why do we listen to that? Because we do need great police officers. They should be, you know, people we spend a lot of time trying to hire and train. Yes, if we come up with bad ones, we got to get rid of them quickly. But we need our police officers. And when I was younger, we were taught that they were our community helpers. And we, you know, I have always had a great relationship with police officers, but I realized that there's things that I do that these people on the YouTube videos were not doing. And this is the first one. I immediately give that person respect. I off the bat, that's the first thing you want to do. Be respectful when you respond to them. The next thing you want to do is you want to speak as clearly as you can. This is another violation that I saw is that everybody wanted to talk in slang or in some fashion that, you know, half the time I couldn't understand them. There was this heightened emotion, and then there would be these slang, and you know, it's just what is this? We have a language, it's called English. There are times when it is very important that you communicate using the best English you can get, you can muster up, being as grammatically correct as you can. Yes, I said it. This is one of those times you want to be as grammatically correct as you can be. It doesn't have to be perfect if you're not able to do it perfectly, but you do it as perfectly as you can. If you're someone from another country and you don't understand English very well, try the best you can. And it's okay to say I don't speak English well, and then you know, maybe they can get you an interpreter or you just do the best you can. But I'm speaking for people that have English skills and they are able to use English, they're able to understand English, yet they choose to use a lot of slang when addressing people in a confrontation, when addressing authority. You don't want to do that, you want to make sure that everything you're saying is clear the first time. That way you don't have to keep repeating yourself. Okay. Now, after you're making sure that you're speaking as clearly as you can, excuse me, you want to make sure that you're standing reasonably still. Now, I have to say that because the amount of people that I saw pacing back and forth, moving their hands, and you know, huffing and puffing and and behaving in a very erratic way was mind-boggling to me. And I think we forget that when you're in these types of confrontational situations, everybody's assessing everybody. You're assessing them, trying to make sure they're not gonna jump you or hurt you. Well, they're looking at you too. And if you're moving up and down and doing all that kind of stuff, understand that you're communicating to the other people that you are irrational. You're communicating to the other people that you are possibly a threat. And if you're dealing with the law enforcement person, a police officer or someone like that, they are going to have to put you in handcuffs and put you in the cop car. Because they got to contain the situation. Because when you're moving like that and you're all over the place, you're over here one minute, the next minute you're standing over here and they keep asking you, stay here, stay here, and you're not doing it, they're gonna have to contain you because they don't know if you're gonna just pop off and run up and bite, hit, whatever. And it's interesting that a lot of this very erratic behavior and this disrespect, it would happen even before the pat down started. So they don't know what you have if you have a weapon. They don't know. So expect if you give this kind of disrespectful behavior and erratic sudden movements, you are going to be treated as if you are an irrational person. And if you don't want to be treated that way, then don't do those things. I suggest once you've done everything and you know that you're in a safe space and that you know there's no logical threat coming in your direction, then I suggest you find a place, plant your feet, and stay there. You know? And you have to be logical. You cannot decide, oh, it's a threat, and you think it's a threat and you've not done your due diligence, and nobody else thinks it's a threat but you and your people that are in your tribe because they're rocking for you no matter what you do. It can't be that kind of thing where, oh, I feel like I was threatened, but you're the only one that sees that. You and the people, the five people in your tribe. It has to be logically, you know, that you perceive a threat. Like if you're standing there, you think that because people aren't agreeing with you and because people are holding you to a rule and a responsibility, oh I'm threatened now. No, no, it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way in society. So once you are standing still and making sure you're not shoving anything or throwing anything, a couple of situations were just interesting to me because people would shove things or they would throw something, not realizing that, oh, now you have just given these people reason to say that you're destroying property. And what if that object hits someone else? Which in one case an object did. It was a chair. The person pushed the chair out of the way, and unfortunately, it hit someone and damaged their leg, drew some blood. Now you got an assault and battery charge. Okay? And you're thinking you just threw a chair, or I'm sorry, pushed a chair, but you don't realize because you you, you know, you stormed out and you're walking down the street, but you don't realize you left somebody back at the place bloody, and now they have a cause to chase you down. So it's little things like that. When you stand still and you control your body movements and you know what you're doing, those things don't happen. And the last direction I'm gonna give, the last point, and I cannot believe I have to say this, but I do, is that you have to follow directions when you're in a confrontation that involves authority. You cannot crash out and not do what you're being asked to do. If you're talking with someone, dealing with someone in an establishment that you don't own, and they ask you to leave or they say something to you that you have to either wear something or you can't do a certain behavior while you're at their establishment, then you have to follow that direction because that person has been given a certain amount of authority in that establishment from the owners of that place. It would be as if somebody came to your house and you told them don't do a certain thing, and they say they're gonna do it anyway, right? You have a right to ask that person to leave. So we have to remember we have to follow directions. We have to follow directions, and we want to always remember that police officers have a job to do. People that are managing these establishments, they have jobs to do. People that are our bosses, they have a job to do. And one of those jobs is following whatever protocols and responsibilities that they've agreed to do because they took that job. Now, to you or me, we may think it's a silly little thing that you have. Why are they asking me to do that? Well, they're following their company's protocol, and they're not gonna let you cause them to get fired. And so you have to realize that a lot of times when they're asking you to do something, it's not them picking on you. They're just asking you to do the protocol that's in place when these types of things happen. So the easiest and quickest way is to just do it. They're not asking you to commit a crime, they're typically asking you to do something like tell them your name or go stand over here or give me your documents. They're asking you to do things that you are perfectly capable of doing, right? Or saying you can't do it because you don't have it. Just be honest. Because remember, the cameras are rolling. And you have to ask yourself, how do I want to be seen on TikTok? Should this thing go viral? You know, reputation is important, guys. You know, it's how we get our jobs, it's how we find our future, you know, spouses a lot of times. People will pull up your, you know, find you on YouTube and they won't want to deal with you. And you have to get back to realizing, you know what, the decisions I make today, they can affect me and have consequences long into the future. Because ultimately the goal is for us to get back home safely and for the other person to get back home safely, right? Because we don't, we want to live, we have a beautiful life, we want to be able to, you know, get back to our life. And we don't want to get caught up in anything where we've hurt somebody else, and now we've got to deal with those consequences because that person may want to is probably gonna press charges. So those are the strategies that I have for you. It is my hope that if you are struggling with emotional regulation, and you know what, this channel is all about uh stewarding our resources that we have, our inner economy, attention, energy, time, emotions, and things of that nature. If you're someone that is scattered or overwhelmed, perhaps you have a diagnosis that makes it that way for you. This is a challenge in a lot of cases, having emotional regulation. So if that's something that you struggle with, look at these strategies, practice them, use them. They'll keep you out of trouble. They'll keep you out of trouble. Alrighty, that's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for stopping by and chatting with me. And until next time, I want you to make sure you steward your inner economy by now.