I've spent four years teaching teenage students to de-escalate what I call an ego attack. Not a criminal attack, where someone wants your bag, your compliance, your body. An ego attack, where someone is testing whether you'll hold your ground or back down, before anything physical happens.

The role play for that is verbal and physical. A passive stance, hands open, reads to anyone watching as defensive rather than aggressive. Someone who doesn't want trouble. It also puts your hands in position to move faster than an attacker's eye can register, keeps your vital organs covered, and keeps you light on your feet. Reading as defensive is not the same as being unprepared. I've used role play in these classes because it works. The students have high motivation to get over the awkwardness, after I talk about the stats on violence against women. The research on applied learning backs this up too. People who rehearse a skill out loud retain it further than people who only hear about it.

So when I say the version of role play most professional training leans on has a problem, I'm not arguing against the exercise. I'm arguing against the room it usually happens in.

I'm going to ask you something by the end of this, so keep half an eye on your own honest answer as you read.

Say the words "let's try a quick role play" in almost any training room and watch what happens. Shoulders drop. Eyes go to the floor, or the door. It's one of the most dreaded exercises in professional development, and the people running the training already know it, which is why so many open with an apology before they even start. So why do we keep asking people to do it anyway, with colleagues they'll sit next to for years, or with people they've never met and may never see again?

A month on from Kerri Price's training, I keep circling one question. What makes the dojang version work when the workplace version so often lands flat?

In the dojang, nobody performs a character. The students rehearse their own voice and their own stance against a known provocation, in a room with no ongoing stakes attached to how they come across. Most professional training offers the opposite. It asks someone to play an invented person, words that aren't theirs, in front of colleagues they'll be assessed alongside for years. Two jobs land at once, performing a character convincingly and demonstrating a skill you'll be judged on, in front of people whose opinion doesn't reset when the exercise ends.

Given a choice between building a skill and managing how you look while faking one, the brain manages the looking, because the room hasn't earned the safety the exercise needs to work.

That test lands in the body before it lands in the mind. A challenge to your competence in front of a room reads to your nervous system as a threat, not a debate. The measured, plain-English answer you'd give in a quiet meeting is competing with a body that's already decided this is dangerous.

The single most useful shift I've found for that moment is narrowing instead of widening. Under pressure, most people's instinct is to widen, more words, more caveats, hoping one lands and settles the room. It reads as movement, and movement under challenge reads as evasion. What actually holds a room is one sentence that names what's happening plainly, without defending yet. That's a fair question and I want to answer it properly, rather than a paragraph that starts qualifying before it's said anything at all. It buys your nervous system a breath, and tells the room you heard the challenge rather than flinched from it.

Narrowing under pressure is trainable, just not in a room that punishes people for practising it badly in front of their colleagues.

Kerri introduced me to a technique built for this last month. It's the one I've been coming back to since. The fishbowl.

A small inner circle, four to six people, has a real conversation. Everyone else watches from an outer circle. One chair in the inner circle stays empty. When someone outside wants in, they take it, and someone already inside stands and gives up theirs. Nobody assigns you a turn or decides you're ready. You choose the moment, and you choose when you're done.

Role play puts you in the middle whether you're ready or not, and keeps you there until the exercise ends. Fishbowl only asks you in once you're ready, and lets you out the moment you've said your piece. Choosing the chair does what role play can't. Being placed in the middle reads to your brain as a threat, something happening to you. Walking into an empty chair by choice reads as something you're doing, and that shift alone is enough to turn a threat response into curiosity. What's left, once you've chosen to be there, is a real conversation and whatever your body does in response to it, which is the thing you're trying to build capacity for. The outer circle isn't idle either. Watching for the moment a question turns into a challenge, the tell that says the room has stopped agreeing and started tolerating, builds the other half of the same skill.

Regulation doesn't stay contained to the person practising it. Emotional contagion is a well established finding, people in a room pick up each other's physiological state, not just their words. A practitioner who's actually regulated, rather than performing regulation, changes what the room around them is doing without saying anything about it. Sentiment holds when the person in front of the room is regulated enough for the room to regulate around them. It slips when they're not, and no plain-English script fixes that after the fact.

Here's what I actually want to know from you this week. Would you try learning this way? Is it something you could give a go, or is it too far out of your comfort zone to participate in with an open heart? The fishbowl's own design assumes plenty of people won't want to be first into that chair. If that's you too, that's simply the starting point.

I don't have a tidy answer either. I'm testing this on myself as much as I'm testing it on you. Even a one-line reply is enough. "I'd try it" or "not a chance" both tell me something worth knowing.

Your answers will shape what I build into the Conditions for Trust Network before I open the doors for registration for the founding cohort, so consider this your chance to influence it before it exists.

Until next week.
Margot B
Trusted Voice in Authentic Engagement