I just got around to listening to this episode, so I apologize for the lateness of this post. While I think most of the episode was very good, the part at the beginning where you discussed Neurolinguistic Programming I found problematic.
Let me explain. I'm an Work/Organizational Psychology student. My primary focus of study is manager/worker interactions. I did a project a while back reviewing a bunch of the literature on interactions and NLP. Essentially, the conclusion I drew about NLP is that it is almost never correct and is in most cases completely wrong. NLP is not science. It has no empirical support, and where the phenomena it observes actually occur, the reasons behind them are nothing like the causes supposed by NLP.
The specific thing that made me want to post is when you talked about matching the emotional level of the problem person. You said that if the person is very emotional and high-energy at the time, you should enter the conversation being just as high-energy and emotional. This has been shown to consistently make it worse. What happens is not that the individuals move together through emotional states, as described by NLP, it's that people tend to match each other on emotional states. Essentially, it's the Cold.War. People tend to respond with the level of emotion they feel they need to in order to protect their position. They will escalate their emotions if they feel that the other person is doing so or is attacking them. If you go in being very emotional, you're probably only going to make the situation worse.
Instead, you need to be calmer than the emotional person, in order to encourage him to match you and calm down. Meg, you mentioned that, if you are emotional and someone acts very calm, it pisses you off. I'd argue that it's not because he was calm that made you mad, but that you felt like he didn't care or understand. When maintaining calm with an emotional person, the key thing to do is demonstrate that you do care and are empathetic and that you do understand the situation. You want to do the paraphrasing, active listening, and other communication techniques you discussed, and you want let the person voice his side of the issue, but you want to remain calm to avoid making the problem worse.
NLP is a theory, like the theory of Multiple Intelligences, that lost widespread scientific support in the early '80s. That it continues to receive support in education and industry is unfortunate. Some of the things NLP observed actually happen, but the techniques it proposes to evoke these events are usually very wrong.
But anyways, I want to reiterate that I really appreciated the episode and thought that it was very worthwhile overall.