Updated on Feb 17, 2008 by At Basil & Spice

Dr. Mark Goulston, member of the National Association of Corporate Directors and the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches, is the best selling author of three books and writes a column on leadership for FAST COMPANY, Directors Monthly, Knight Ridder Tribune, and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He is frequently called upon to share his expertise with regard to contemporary business, national and world news by television, radio and print media including: Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Newsweek, Time, Los Angeles Times, ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox/CNN/BBC News, Oprah, and Today. Mark Goulston helps high performing leaders, senior managment and sales people reach their full potential using skills he learned training FBI and police hostage negotiators. He is the author of Get Out of Your Own Way at Work and PTSD for Dummies.

Guest Blogger Mark Goulston--

When you lose the capacity to empathize with human beings, people become objects to like when they make you happy, or become violent towards when they make you angry.

Empathy is the greatest deterrent to violence and even anger, because literally and figuratively, you can’t walk in someone else’s shoes and step on their toes at the same time. Glibness aside, the reason for that is because empathy is a sensory experience where you are feeling what another person is feeling (what jargon wielding psychoanalysts call “vicarious introspection”) while anger is a motor function where you feel and get angry at another person as a reaction to a real or perceived hurt or injury by them.

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Updated on Feb 15, 2008 by At Basil & Spice

Dr. Mark Goulston, member of the National Association of Corporate Directors and the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches, is the best selling author of three books and writes a column on leadership for FAST COMPANY, Directors Monthly, Knight Ridder Tribune, and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He is frequently called upon to share his expertise with regard to contemporary business, national and world news by television, radio and print media including: Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Newsweek, Time, Los Angeles Times, ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox/CNN/BBC News, Oprah, and Today. Mark Goulston helps high performing leaders, senior managment and sales people reach their full potential using skills he learned training FBI and police hostage negotiators. He is the author of Get Out of Your Own Way at Work and PTSD for Dummies.

Guest Blogger Mark Goulston--

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to recognize potentially violent teenagers. You just have to scrape away some of your denial and your “not wanting to get involved” and tune into what your stomach is trying to tell you.

Many potentially violent teenagers make us feel physically unsafe, and we can feel that uneasiness in our stomachs, tightness in our necks and throats or a severe headache. We have many early warning signals built into us that tell us when a person or a situation is unsafe. Sometimes we can be fooled, but more often than not, when we feel we are in danger, there is usually something or someone to be frightened of.

Our general reaction when we feel unsafe around a person is to avoid them, looking away and trying not to provoke them. We employ an “out of sight, out of mind” approach because they make us feel so uncomfortable. We hope they’ll just go away. There are clues* that you should LOOK and LISTEN for to determine if you might be dealing with a potentially and imminently violent person. (although both girls and boys do commit violence, I will refer to the person as male, since the majority of violent acts are still perpetrated by males).

What to LOOK for:

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