Disarming Power Plays

Wrote this article a while back for my site, and thought it might be appreciated here as well. I wrote it for the general public, but you can adapt this info for pickup and AMOG purposes. The PUA I reference* is Heartiste.

(And no, this isn't an advertising account - I just primarily lurk. The only subreddit I really post on is Learn DotA 2.)

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Social situations can involve power plays that can crush your confidence.

These especially occur in group situations, where other people want to gain social status and try to do so at your expense. Eventually, you should develop enough self-esteem to shrug off these power plays entirely and effortlessly. In the meantime, it is fruitful to learn methods of disarming them or executing them more deftly than the unfortunately bullish people trying to put you down. Your aim is primarily to preserve your confidence, and secondarily to maintain (or even boost) your social status, which will have flow-on effects for your confidence as long as the interaction continues.

It is crucial to play these games to win, rather than merely not lose; a feeble attempt to regain control will often only prompt further attack, while reluctant submission will ruin your mood and create limiting beliefs about confidence. The moment someone initiates a power play, you must summon all your courage and will to compete; an assault on your confidence and status should be repelled vigorously, not only out of self-respect, but also for the sake of group cohesion.

Let’s look at some examples of power plays and a possible method of dealing with each of them.

Power Play 1

Setup

It’s the middle of winter, and you’re wearing a sweater while out for lunch with a few work colleagues. You don’t get along with one of them, and sure enough, he pipes up: “God, that’s an ugly sweater. Looks like a dog threw up on it.”

Strategy: The Agree and Amplify

This terminology comes from a self-described pickup artist*, but it’s a relatively universal tactic that ‘naturally confident’ people often use without knowing. When insulted or questioned, you respond (humorously and unexpectedly) by agreeing with the other person and taking it one step further. Aim for as confident a tone as you can muster; agreeing and amplifying with a reluctant or hurt tone can come off as genuine self-loathing. Being able and willing to make jokes about yourself is a sign of strong self-esteem, and often diffuses the situation; even if the other person didn’t find your response funny, they hardly want to be seen as the person who turned a joke into a mean and bullying conversation.

Possible Response

“I know, right?! It’s like something my grandfather would wear. You should see the looks I get wearing this thing.” [chuckle]

Power Play 2

Setup

You’re chatting up someone attractive at a conference, and the topic of occupation comes up. When they find out you (probably) don’t earn much, they sniff dismissively and inform you: “I usually prefer my dates to earn more than I do.”

Strategy: The Comeback

If someone is [unkindly] poking fun at you, a witty retort (if you can think of one) is a great way to shut them up. As before, you demonstrate high self-esteem by not bothering to defend yourself from a silly attack. Instead, you will probably put them on the defensive and shift the focus back to them. The implicit message is that you’re just as capable of mockery as they are, and probably even better; they had far more time to come up with something funny or ‘cutting’ than you did. Most people will recognise a losing situation and back off slightly.

Possible Response

[start singing or loudly humming Gold Digger by Kanye West]

Power Play 3

Setup

A friend is hosting a house party, and you end up playing one of their video game consoles. Your opponent is much more skilled, and beats you easily while trash talking: “You’re terrible at this game, why don’t you just quit? Holy shit, you’re the worst player I’ve ever faced.”

Strategy: The Callout

This usually works best in a group setting, where most others present like or at least tolerate you. You reposition yourself as a victim, being bullied by the other person but not seriously affected. Aim to ask a serious question in a firm but merely curious tone; if you sound overly hurt or offended, you’ll still probably gain sympathy from a crowd, but run a higher risk of being labelled as overreacting. If possible, position them as overly emotional.

The aggressor will usually want to avoid being seen as a mean person (or having to think of themselves as one), and either back off or say they were just joking (which you can use to pressure them out of starting again). If they keep insulting you, it’s viable to just take the flak – knowing they will rapidly lose favour with the group, and you’re the one ‘winning’ the exchange – or pursue another strategy.

Note: Please only use this strategy when the other person is genuinely using bullying behaviour and deserve to be called out. There are too many people in this world with a victim complex; we don’t need more!

Possible Response

“Why are you so angry? I’m just curious – I play video games for fun but you seem to be taking this personally. You okay?”

Power Play 4

Setup

Exams have just finished at your university, and you’re sharing the obligatory piss-up with your mates at the uni bar. You cram your way into the drinks queue and order a Long Island Iced Tea. A rowdy engineering student next to you looks over and derisively snorts: “What a sissy drink.”

Strategy: The Blissful Ignorance

Highly confident people often possess a happy-go-lucky attitude, which you’re trying to mimic here. Just as Agree and Amplify turns a power play into a joke, the Blissful Ignorance seeks to turn a power play into friendly advice. Your goal is to pretend they were trying to help you and appear genuinely grateful for their help. (If you can actually find a way to improve yourself using their comments, all the better.)

Your tone should be one of total innocence and slight gratitude – too much will seem fake. This makes it difficult for them to continue attacking you without seeming like a jerk, and they’ll likely leave you alone, albeit sometimes with a final snarky comment trying to save face. Don’t worry about seeming stupid to others; you always have the option of revealing that you knew they were trying to start a fight, and you didn’t want to stoop to their level. A socially savvy group will often pick up on this anyway, and you’ll win respect for taking the moral high ground.

Possible Response

“Yeah? Any recommendations for what I should get instead? Thanks for your help mate, I owe you one.”

Power Play 5

Setup

While travelling overseas with your partner and a tour group, you notice someone always disrespecting you in front of your partner, and trying to flirt with them. Eventually, you decide to do something about it.

Strategy: The Confrontation

This is an extremely conditional strategy that typically requires leverage over the other person; the three forms most likely to succeed are:

• Physical size or strength
• Much higher social status
• Having a more dominant personality

If you don’t have one of these advantages, I would not recommend this strategy. The aim is to escalate a subtle power play into an extremely open confrontation, in order to catch them off guard and force them into a defensive posture. Offers of physical confrontation, closed-ended questions, and ultimatums can be used here.

It is particularly difficult to strike the right tone here. You want to balance righteous anger with self-control, and communicate an expectation of total honesty and straightforwardness from them (as opposed to the subtle power plays they’ve been attempting on you). Aiming to emulate a parent sternly telling off their child is a good start. Use direct eye contact. If challenged, stand your ground; backing down will make you seem unsure of yourself, as though you realised you were overreacting. People will pick up on that.

After they back down, it’s usually best to ignore them. They might make snarky comments about you to others in the group, but you’ve already established who’s boss – they’re simply trying to regain their self-esteem at this point, rather than keep bringing you down, so don’t be bothered.

Note: This should be obvious, but don’t offer or escalate towards a physical altercation if you’re not willing to actually engage in one. Make a judgement call about whether stopping the attacks on you is worth a fight, and how likely it would be if you confronted the other person.

Possible Response

“If you keep insulting me and trying to steal my girlfriend, I’m going to hit you. Understand? Good, now fuck off.”

Power Play 6

Setup

Your sports team is invited to an awards ceremony, and you get seated at a table rather far away from the bar. One of the other players has never really liked you, and starts trying to exclude you from the conversation by insisting you go get the next round of drinks.

Strategy: The Mimic

Once you start looking for power plays, you’ll notice them everywhere. Eventually, you’ll build up a mental catalogue of them, and how they can be most effectively used to manipulate or influence others. This can be an extremely valuable toolkit, that you should use sparingly and with good intentions. Stopping others from using their own power plays to bring you down is one of those permissible contexts for using your own power plays, as long as you make sure you stop when they do.

There is a relevant lesson from Judo here:

“In short, resisting a more powerful opponent will result in your defeat, whilst adjusting to and evading your opponent’s attack will cause him to lose his balance, his power will be reduced, and you will defeat him. This can apply whatever the relative values of power, thus making it possible for weaker opponents to beat significantly stronger ones. This is the theory of ju yoku go o seisu.” – Jigoro Kano

If you’re going to compete with someone using power plays, you should use their efforts against them if possible. Simply resisting their power plays won’t stop them, and a clever opponent can frame it so you seem socially inept. (For example, if you loudly refused to get more drinks for the table, your opponent might say “Okay mate, I was just asking, no need to make a fuss” and get more drinks himself. Suddenly, you look like an stubborn and unfriendly git.)

Rather, send a message that you know exactly what they’re up to, and are just as willing to play their game. Try to create an atmosphere of mutually assured destruction; if they bring you down, you can bring them down. The more subtle and passive aggressive you are (ideally, if you’re with a group, they won’t realise anything is up), the better. If properly executed, they’ll get the message and back off.

Possible Response

You ask the rest of the team, “Does anyone want another round of drinks?”, making it seem like this was your initiative all along. When you return, you stall giving your opponent their drink as much as possible (if they try to grab it, “Don’t snatch!” would work well) and hand it to them as an afterthought. If possible, you get their order slightly wrong as well, and apologise for your mistake with a shit-eating grin.

Power Play 7

Setup

At a weekly meetup of your book club, it’s your turn to share your thoughts on a novel. One of the pseudointellectuals in the group ridicules your opinion: “That’s the silliest interpretation of The Life of Pi I’ve ever heard of!”.

Strategy: The Dismissal

Genuinely confident people often favour this strategy because it’s so low-effort; if someone is trying to bring them down, it doesn’t even merit a response. They will simply ignore them, or dismiss them very simply (perhaps with a raised eyebrow or a slight smile). When the person using power plays against them is unable to get any validation for their efforts, they will – unless they really hate you – quit and look for a more satisfying target to bully.

This strategy has a lot of utility because it’s versatile (you can use it in pretty much any situation), easy to execute (just don’t do anything!), and relatively low-risk (you don’t give them any words or actions to reframe to their advantage). Similar to the Blissful Ignorance strategy, a group around you will often realise your opponent is picking on you and turn against them, without any effort on your behalf. It’s also solid mental training; learning to ignore negative stimuli is a huge boon for confidence, and being able to dismiss power plays is valuable practice. For this reason, I strongly recommend trying this strategy.

Possible Response

“If you say so.” [smile and ignore]

Power Play 8

Setup

While working at a restaurant, a customer expresses dissatisfaction with their meal and takes it out on you personally. Your apologies, explanations, and offers of a refund fall on deaf ears: “This is ridiculous! I paid $50 for a nice night out with my family, and you’ve just ruined it, and…”

Strategy: The Exit

This is the simplest of all strategies. If someone is impacting your confidence negatively, you find it difficult to ignore them, and you simply can’t get them to stop no matter what you try… you nearly always have the option of leaving the conversation. This doesn’t necessarily involve bailing out of the social situation entirely; if there are other people, you could go talk to them, for example.

The key is to leave on your own terms; if you storm off and sulk or start disparaging them to others, they will know they got to you, and keep using power plays in future if this was their intention. More importantly, it will create the limiting belief that a bully can take away your confidence any time they choose, and you are forced to run away.

Rather, you should exit the conversation calmly, and with the mindset that you are choosing to leave, because you don’t particularly enjoy their company. Emphasise to yourself that by doing so, you are retaining control over your actions, thoughts, and emotions; possessing the ability and discipline to leave a situation hurting your confidence is a sign of maturity, not weakness. There is nothing shameful about refusing to associate with bullies.

Possible Response

“Here’s your refund, and I’m sorry you had a bad experience with us. If you’ll excuse me, I need to serve other diners now. Have a nice night.” [leave]

Conclusion

The more confident become, the less you will need to consciously deal with power plays. You’ll find your mindset naturally manifests itself as one of these strategies, and you may not even realise people are trying to bring you down, since it’s so incompatible with your optimistic and friendly worldview.

Hence, while consciously disarming power plays is a valuable skill to have, don’t become paranoid and feel like you have to be ‘on guard’ at all times; focus on approaching social situations with confidence and ease instead. You’ll enjoy yourself more and disarm most power plays intuitively, only having to plan a response for the most persistent and hurtful attacks.

Dealing with a power play that deeply affects your confidence requires an enormous amount of social savvy (or so it seems to me as an introvert!), both to select the appropriate type of response and then to effect it smoothly. If this content seems new, you probably do not possess this savvy yet, and sometimes your attempts will fail, or horribly backfire. Any of the possible responses given above could just as easily make the situation worse if delivered in the wrong context or with the wrong tone.

Don’t worry about it; the trial and error will prove instructive, and your errors will only be isolated incidents. It can even be beneficial; in my experience, many people would rather hang out with an unpredictable asshole (figuratively!) than a submissive wimp. Make of that opinion what you will.

Once you become sufficiently skilled at dealing with power plays, you will need to place particular emphasis on mercy. Even if your opponent set out to crush you, your goal should not be vengeance; constant fighting is unproductive and will make you seem a jerk. (Indeed, you would be a jerk.) Compete as much as is necessary to get them to back off, then use your social control to restore harmony to the interaction. Depending on the context and your goodwill, you may even extend an olive branch to your opponent by offering them a way to save face or regain control of their own; this is an almost foolproof way to turn foe into friend and earn respect.

Good luck, and stay calm. The underlying theme of all successful responses to power plays is control; someone is trying to take control away from you, and you mustn’t let them by letting go of your emotions.