I learned this game from my mentor, School Psychologist Izzy Kalman. Here's what happens when we play it live.

What if the secret to dealing with someone who loves to get under your skin wasn't fighting back, but something far more counterintuitive? My mentor Izzy Kalman has spent decades teaching exactly that, and I've had the privilege of bringing his Golden Rule Game into schools, stages, and live audiences across the country. Once you see it in action, it's hard to unsee.

I invite a volunteer from the audience and give them one simple instruction: be mean to me. Say rude things. Insult my shoes, my hairline, my age, whatever you've got. Then we play the game twice. Same volunteer. Same insults. But I respond completely differently each time.

In the first round, I react the way most of us instinctively would. When the volunteer says my shoes look cheap, I defend them. When they mock my hairline, I push back. I get frustrated. I threaten. I demand respect. "If you're mean to me again, I'll windmill kick your face with these shoes." The crowd laughs. The volunteer leans in harder. The insults escalate. And the more upset I get, the more fun the whole thing becomes for the person doing the provoking. Sound familiar?

The second round looks completely different. Same volunteer, same instructions, but this time I respond with warmth, humor, and even compliments. "I wish I was as cool as you, bro." "I'm sure you're a very popular guy." "I've been married 22 years, so it worked out." The volunteer visibly struggles. The energy shifts. What was easy and fun in round one suddenly feels awkward and almost impossible. By the end, the person who was gleefully poking and prodding is practically rooting for me.

After both rounds, I ask the volunteer one simple question: which time was it easier to be mean to me, the first or the second? The answer is always the same. The first time. Because you took it.

And there it is. The entire lesson in one exchange.

When I got upset in round one, I handed the provocateur the controls. The cycle became self-reinforcing: the meaner the volunteer got, the more upset I became, the more fun they had, and the meaner they got in return. But here's the insight Izzy Kalman taught me, and the one I drive home every time we play: it wasn't the other person or their meanness that caused emotional upset in me. It was my thoughts about their meanness. In round two the insults were just as harsh, but my internal response was different, and that changed everything.

This is rooted in a well-established principle in cognitive psychology: our emotions are not caused by what happens to us, but by how we interpret what happens to us. When we hold rigid beliefs like "you must not be rude to me" or "I have to make them stop," we guarantee our own emotional distress. Every insult becomes an emergency. Every slight becomes a crisis. We turn someone who simply loves to bother us into someone with genuine power over our entire day. But when we give ourselves permission to think, "this person can be mean if they want and I'll be okay either way," we take that power back. We stop being a puppet whose strings anyone can pull.

Here's where it gets really interesting. When you respond to a perceived enemy with genuine kindness, you create what Izzy calls a crisis of conscience in them. Two competing forces begin to war inside that person: the impulse to keep provoking, and the natural human desire to reciprocate kindness. Most people, when treated with warmth and humor despite their needling, simply cannot sustain the attack. It feels wrong. It stops being fun. The emotional reward disappears and so does the behavior. Your grandmother probably already knew this: kill them with kindness.

I always close the demonstration with a nod to something ancient. When Jesus said "love your enemies, do good to them, bless them, treat them the way you want to be treated," he wasn't just offering a moral platitude. He was describing, with remarkable precision, the psychological foundation for how difficult people actually work. Don't treat them the way they treat you. Treat them the way you want to be treated. That's not weakness. That's strategy. And it's been sitting in plain sight for two thousand years.

The Golden Rule Game isn't just a stage demonstration. It's a framework for navigating one of life's most universal experiences: someone deciding, for whatever reason, that you are their target. Whether it's a provocateur on the playground, a difficult coworker, or a stranger on the internet, the principle holds. The moment you understand that you control your response, and that your response controls the entire dynamic, the whole situation changes.

You can't always stop people from being unkind. But you can stop giving them a reason to keep going. That's the Golden Rule Game. I learned it from Izzy Kalman, I've taught it to thousands of people, and it works every single time.