Full transcript of “You Become One of 8 Animals Under Threat”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 I want to know if you've ever noticed how people kind of change whenever they feel threatened. If you've noticed this, some people being in an argument with or in a fight with or just a heated debate, they go silent. Might even crack a joke to try to diffuse the situation. It turns out that there are essentially eight specific patterns that we fall into. >> [music] >> And you're running one of them every single time that something hits you wrong or you feel like you're not safe in a situation or you feel like you need to defend yourself or something like that. And once you see them, once you really see them, you're never going to be able to unsee this ever again. Each one is essentially a survival
0:46 strategy that a kid worked out long before they had words for any of this. [music] Maybe being cute diffused dangerous moments at home. And that kid eventually became a puppy. Or staying inside a group just felt [music] safer than being alone. And that kid became a sheep. Or the only way to make a threat stop was to hurt it back even harder. And that's the kid that became a porcupine. These patterns get installed early and they get refined through thousands of repetitions as we grow up. And they tend to be pretty stable for most of our life unless we do real work to expand them and make us less reactive to those
1:33 tendencies. These aren't pathological problems. They're old solutions that are just still running in the present. And the system that we're talking about today is officially called the NCI animal behavior chart. It's developed [music] by Chase like most of the models at NCI. And there are eight [music] responses which are grouped into essentially four big categories. Category one is connection. These are the animals that handle threats by reaching toward the other person instead of pushing away or trying to fight them in some way. And the first one is the puppy who really works off of innocence. Puppies handle conflict by being so
2:19 disarming that you can't possibly stay mad at them even if you want to. That's the puppy person under threat. What they do is they make themselves so hard to hate that you actually feel bad even just for being upset with them. Next we have the sheep and the sheep deals with things in terms of friends. So sheep gain safety through their friendships and social connections. The sheep relies on the strength of their herd. I'm not meaning sheep in the way that maybe you've heard it talked about online or on the internet before. We're just talking about a human being that gains safety from their tribe. This could even be something that we might
3:04 see of people who are in gangs and rely on a close-knit group of friends in order to stay safe. Next up we have strategy and these two handle threat primarily through analysis. Through observation and through planning, cunning, maneuvering tactics. The first animal we have in this category is the wolf and the wolf really [music] works on vigilance. The wolf is typically hyper-vigilant, hyper-observant and normally people who are wolves will walk into every room already starting to analyze the risk. They know where all
3:50 all the exits are in a room and where all the social or psychological exits are before they even sit down. They typically will notice things like your microexpressions before anybody else does. Wolf person usually has a small inner circle that they trust completely. And you can spot a wolf when somebody's quiet, but their eyes are working the whole room, and they're constantly on guard and pre-thinking any type of potential threats that might be coming their way. Next up, we have the fox, which focuses on stealth. And the fox can't really rely on its size, right? Or raw strength to keep itself safe. The
4:37 fox will often shapeshift really based on what the moment specifically is calling for. Or they might even twist and reframe the whole situation in real time. The fox is almost like a chess player who is thinking five steps ahead of every situation. And normally, you can spot a fox whenever a conversation feels like it keeps changing its shape, and the person almost feels slippery or impossible to pin down, or impossible to outmaneuver. [music] So, this brings us to removal. And in removal, we have two animals that handle threat by trying to simply get away from
5:22 it. The first one is the rabbit, which focuses on retreat. And a rabbit strategy really is quite simple. When the rabbit feels threatened, they essentially leave. >> [music] >> Rabbits typically don't get lost in arguments. They As soon as they feel that stress or that threat to their safety, they're simply just going to exit the situation. And the instinct for them is to physically remove themselves from whatever dangerous situation they're in as fast as possible. Pretty straightforward. Next up, we have the turtle. And the turtle [music] is the other side of this removal
6:09 equation. The turtle can't physically run away cuz they're pretty slow. And they got big shells. So, what do turtles do? They hide inside of the shell in order to keep themselves safe. And in human terms, what this looks like, they are psychologically removing themselves from the situation. The turtle might stay in the room, but they're the type of person who's going to completely dissociate from what's happening. You might see them glazing off into the distance, sort of half phased out with whatever's happening. And their energy just sort of goes flat. Like [music] they're almost like they're physically there, but maybe like no one's even home. Some people who are turtles will literally tell you that they might stare
6:57 at a wall and picture a beach while somebody is yelling at them. Finally, we have prevention, which is the last category here. And again, we have two animals in this category. They handle threats through aggression. But they go about it in two completely different ways. The first one we have is the Chihuahua. And just like Chihuahuas in real life, the Chihuahua looks really tough and aggressive for the exact reason that it knows how weak and vulnerable it actually is. So, it's in hollow posturing behavior, where the appearance of toughness is its only real protection. And pretty obvious, but we're typically going to see their voice get really
7:42 loud. They might start launching really hollow threats. And there's a lot of chest puffing up, but there's no real bite underneath any of it. The whole strategy is fundamentally based on if I can create enough fear that I am dangerous, then I will never have to escalate the situation. Whereas, the porcupine with the spikes, which is our final animal here, keeps threats away by causing real harm. There are two flavors of it. Sometimes it's verbal. In certain cases, the porcupine won't necessarily escalate to physical violence. If they do use language, it's going to be specifically
8:29 engineered to cut that other person [music] exactly where it hurts them the most. And it will be designed to create real, lasting, substantial pain [music] in a matter of a few sentences. And the other version of the porcupine is where they really focus on physical violence instead. And that often goes much further than anybody was expecting based on the general situation. The porcupine essentially isn't usually a big talker in conflict. They're generally going to go pretty quiet. And then the moment they feel truly threatened and their life feels really unsafe, they're going to escalate extraordinarily fast. All of
9:16 their actions will be directed towards creating the maximum amount of pain in the other person as quickly as they possibly can. You can spot a porcupine when somebody goes unusually still and quiet under threat, but you're starting to see body language gestures that will typically see >> [music] >> in pre-violence indicators. So, maybe things like nostril flaring [music] or we might see the micro-expression of anger as someone starts to flash their canines on their teeth or we might start to see some twitch movement starting to happen in their hands, which are [music] real good indicators that this person may be about to become violent. Most people that I've ever met have one
10:02 or two primary animals. Sometimes there's one, there is many times two of them, >> [music] >> but most of us also have a small amount of all the other animals that may show up in very specific contexts or in small degrees. You can identify your own animal like I did, you can notice when it's running in your life, and then ask yourself gently, is this the version of this animal I actually want to be? So much of self-improvement really starts with recognition and awareness of what's going on inside of us. And for many people, this animal can be the first thing that we look at, which allows us to begin to dig deeper into what's
10:48 really taking place. Every animal pattern is a child's solution. What I want to encourage you to do is that when you see the pattern in somebody, also try to see the child. And at least for myself, it makes it really difficult to keep judging them quite so harshly. Because no animal is better than any of the others. One is just a different solution to the same fundamental question, which is how do I stay [music] safe when I really feel like something is threatening me. The goal isn't to stop being your animal. That isn't, in my mind, really how this works. Because we all have patterns of how we relate to threats.
11:34 The goal is to become the healthier version of whatever animal you already are. Look, I know you don't want to watch another ad. I don't blame you, but I have seen this change too many lives to just let you scroll past it. There's a moment that most people have where something feels off in a conversation [music] and we ignore it. And it's not because you're wrong, but it's just cuz we don't trust what we're seeing. >> [music] >> And that's where all of this starts. NCI level one isn't about learning a bunch of tricks. It's about finally understanding what you've been noticing your whole life already. You start to see behavior a lot more clearly. The body language, the emotional shifts, the intent [music] that's behind someone's actions. So you don't guess anymore. You read
12:21 what's going on. You understand what's going on and you can actually respond with precision. Most people ignore what they see. This is where you learn to trust it. NCI one is a foundational [music] course in behavior profiling and the link is right down in the description.
