The Five Step Framework for Unshakeable Emotional Control for Men

Have you ever looked back at a moment and thought, man, why did I blow up like that? Maybe it’s your spouse asking for that one more thing. At the worst possible time when you’re already tired and fried, maybe it’s your kid hitting you with that attitude at the worst possible moment. Or maybe it’s just work.

Someone questions your judgment and before you know it, you are in defensive mode and saying things that, well, it could cost you and you’re certainly gonna regret. Here is the hard truth, gentlemen. Modern men are not trained for emotional control. We’re trained to suppress, we’re trained to man up or just keep pushing through, but suppression isn’t control.

In fact, it’s often the reason that you lose control when it matters most. Today I’m breaking down exactly why men. Struggle with emotional hijacking ’cause that’s the right term for it. Straight from the neuroscience. And then I’m gonna walk you through a five step framework that I use with my coaching clients to help them develop real emotional mastery.

Stick around, because this one skill will change how you show up as a husband, as a father, as a leader, and as a man. The driven to thrive broadcast purpose, growth, and lasting impact for men, helping men go from living to thriving purpose-filled intentional lives. Welcome to the Driven Thrive broadcast where men learn to lead themselves, their families, and their world with purpose, growth, and lasting impact.

I’m your host, Brent Dowlen, and so let’s get straight into it and talk about emotional hijacking, why control slips away. Well, let’s start with a quick story. One guy I worked with, we’re gonna call him Dan, because I, I always like to protect people’s privacy. Well, Dan is a data three. He runs his own business.

He’s a solid guy. One evening, he walked in the door after a brutal day and his daughter asked him an innocent question. Nothing confrontational, just a normal kid moment. And guys, he snapped. It was loud. It was sharp. And the second he came out, he felt a wave of regret. He told me later, I don’t even know why I reacted like that.

It wasn’t her. She didn’t do anything. What happened to Dan is what happens to most men daily? His brain got hijacked. So here’s what’s happening under the hood. So you understand when you perceive a threat, be it physical, emotional, or social, and it can be real or perceived, your amygdala lights up. That’s part of your brain, responsible for the fight or flight or freeze.

In milliseconds, it can bypass the rational part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, and it just kind of takes the wheel and takes over. That is what American psychologists, an award-winning author, Daniel Goldman calls it an amygdala hijack. We’ll see if I can say amygdala more than a few times today.

For most men, modern. Threats. There’s air quotes. They’re not lions. They’re things like someone questioning your competency at work on something you did or questioning after you’ve done a lot of work on something, they’re a partner’s comment that hits you just wrong and sticks that pride a little too hard.

They’re your kids pushing your limits after a long day with seemingly nothing. Nothing at all, but it’s just the wrong moment. The problem. No one ever trained us to recognize what’s actually happen happening or how to prevent it. We’re told keep it together. Well, when your nervous system is running red line, willpower is not enough to keep it together.

You need more than just your willpower. So here’s your first practical takeaway, guys. Start recognizing the early signs, tight chest jaw clenching, heat rising. That’s your emotional check engine light coming on, and awareness of it is the first step towards mastery. So you have to dial in and be aware of what’s happening in your body, but here’s an immediate emergency break for that moment.

This can save you. Just that quick. Five deep nasal breaths in through the nose, slow and deep, out through the nose, slow and controlled. It is nature’s Uno reverse so you can hijack your amygdala. That got hijacked works every time. One of the guests I had on the show years ago, John Anderson, is a professional speaker.

More interestingly, he is a professional stuntman and he trains other stunt mans, and he taught me this amazing trick, which has made a huge difference in my life, and now I use it with my clients. When that amygdala strikes, when you start to skyrocket, the body’s natural response is to freeze up. Hold your breath, fear and excitement.

Same reaction. Hold your breath. If you take those five deep, full nasal breaths in and out, you’re overwhelming the body’s natural instinct and it goes, oh, I guess there’s not really a problem. Thus returning control to you. You know what makes emotional control really hard is running on no sleep. Guys, I talk to a lot of men who are burning the candle at both ends.

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You’ll get up to 80% off, and you’re helping us keep these conversations coming. Alright, back to it guys. Before we talk about the five steps, let’s zoom out for a second. Stoicism is making a big comeback in men spaces. You’ll find it all over social media, and while it’s not perfect, there are some good things coming out of it and some good reasons that it’s being recognized again because it gives us a framework for agency, not for becoming emotionless, but for choosing our own responses.

Now, there’s three stoic principles that I want to. Share today to lay out the foundation of emotional control. One is the DI dichotomy of control. That means know what is yours, your actions, your judgements, your choices, and what’s not. What is outside of your control? What is others’ behavior? What is others’?

Act choices and separate the two. The second concept is perception, shapes, experience. It’s not things that upset us, right? It’s our opinions about those things. Last season we had a specialist on who talked about anger, and this is one of the things he talked about deeply with learning to control your anger.

You are not angry at an in eminent object. You are not angry even at the guy who cuts you off in traffic. You are angry because your opinion of the guy who cuts you off at traffic. If I could tell you that guy cut you off because his child is sick and needs emergency help and is in the back of the car and he is trying to get the emergency room as fast as possible, you would no longer be angry.

If I told you that his wife had been rushed to the emergency room and he is scrambling to get there because he is scared to death, you would not be as angry. See, we’re not angry that he cut us off. It’s not the thing. It’s our opinion of the thing. And if you start giving people space in your brain, whether it’s true or not, if you start rationalizing a reasonable solution, why they did something stupid.

Then you control how you perceive it and how it affects you. Number three is pause creates power, stoics train themselves to separate stimulus and response to create space between the two. Right? To not react. But to choose action after a process, after some distance. An example of this in action is those deep breaths we discussed, right?

It’s not just philosophy, speaker and soman. John Anderson, like I said, taught me about those deep breaths, and it actually hijacks your amygdala back by creating a psychological counter in your body, and at the same time, it’s creating space between your reaction. The stimulus. So all of these compound and are great stoic principles that help us build this foundation.

For our own emotional control. Imagine if in a heated moment you paused and took five deep breaths, you reframed what’s happening and responded from your values instead of your impulses. That’s what these ancient principles were for. That’s what they’re about, and that’s what they are practiced for now, the same as they were practiced 2000 years ago.

So let’s move on into the five step emotional mastery framework that I share with my clients. It’s really easy, guys. I’m gonna be just clean and concise with it, so you can take notes if you want to. Here’s the framework I walk my clients through. It’s simple, it’s repeatable, it’s powerful, and most importantly, it works and you can apply it today.

Number one, notice the signal your body knows before your brain does tension, heat, heart rate. Breathing. That’s your early warning system. One client called it his whistling kettle. As soon as he noticed those sensations, he knew it was time to intervene before his top blue. Number two, create that micro pause.

Even three seconds can change everything much less. Two to five breaths. So take a couple deep breaths, take a sip of water, look away. Mentally, ask yourself, is this within my control? Those few seconds will help shift blood flow back to the rational parts of your brain. It will arrest that immediate response that.

Put you into the red zone and it will give you control of the situation. I’ve had Dad tell me this. One step alone is turn shouting matches into calm conversations with their teenagers. You just gotta break. Create that micro pause. Step three, reframe the narrative. Challenge the story in your head. I know it’s easy to jump to a conclusion.

I know it’s easy to spin it in the worst possible light, but ask yourself, what else could this mean? Or what would a neutral observer see or say from the outside here looking at this situation, listening if they weren’t involved? Feedback at work isn’t always an attack. Your partner’s comment might not actually be criticism.

You might just be tired. Reframing turns emotional spikes into opportunities. Step four, regulate the state. You can’t think your way out of a hijack. You have to regulate your physiology. Once again, we’re returning to that deep breath, right breathing. Step outside. Quick exercise. Anything to downshift your nervous system.

I have a punching bag. Well, we broke the, we broke the hanger for it, but I had a punching bag in my backyard, literally for this reason. A, my daughters like to punch it, and B, if I just needed to regulate the state and I could go outside and a couple moment minutes of punching take me back to baseline. I learned to control my temper, my anger years ago this way, and it’s something I still do.

30 plus years later is use a heavy bag to regulate myself out. And number five, respond intentionally. Anchor it to your values. Ask yourself in every moment of conflict, what kind of man do I want to be in this moment? Because you’re gonna get one shot at it. Guys. That’s it. Just one. So ask yourself, who do I wanna be right now?

What kind of coworker do I want to be? What kind of husband do I want to be? What kind of man do I want to be? What kind of dad do I want to be? Ask yourself and from your personal values, you can then respond, right? Your responses where your leadership lives, in your marriage, in fatherhood, in friendship at work as a man, your response is where leadership lives.

Practicing these steps doesn’t make you emotionless, it makes you effective. You know, a lot of what we’re talking about here is emotional control. It hits the hardest in relationships, those relationships with your wife, those relationships with your kids. And if your relationships are not where you want them to be, I want you to know I got you.

Relationships take a lot of work and they can fall on the back burner pretty easily as you are empire building in your life. Men actually frequently suffer from damage to their relationships while they’re trying to provide. I help men with the skills, techniques, and solutions to rebuild thriving relationships with the people they love.

Look, even if you have struggled with being the husband or father that you wanted to be in the past, it’s not too late. Reach out. Schedule your free discovery. call@purposedrivenmen.com to learn the skills you need to connect deeply with the people that matter most in your life. Gentlemen, mastering your emotional control is never about feeling.

It’s about training your response. So your emotions serve your mission, not sabotage it. Remember the framework. Notice, pause, reframe, regulate, and respond. Here’s your challenge this week. Pick one emotionally charged moment at home, at work, wherever, and walk through these five steps in real time. Reflect on the outcome one rep at a time is how mastery is built.

Now, if this episode hit home share with another man who’s working on leveling up and. Make sure you’re subscribed. ’cause most of you guys who listen to this are not so, make sure you’re subscribed so you never miss an episode. This is Brent Allen reminding you lead yourself first. Everything else will follow.

As always, be better tomorrow because of what you do today. We’ll see you on the next one. The Driven to Thrive broadcast, purpose, growth, and lasting impact for men, helping men go from living to thriving. Purpose-filled intentional lives.