I have had a lot of practice dealing with bullies in my life. I was bullied as a child. I’ve encountered bullies in personal relationships. And sadly, the workplace is scattered with them—those people who need to be aggressive, abuse power, and take satisfaction from making you feel small, insecure and stupid.

Being bullied feels awful.

In my career as a worker, manager, executive and later as an entrepreneur, I had to deal with bullies. And I needed to figure out how to confront them without being intimidated or collapsing into pile of emotional goo.

I am pleased to report that I eventually found one practical thing I could say to a bully that would stop them dead in their tracks.

And it came from something I learned from my mom when I was a kid.

My childhood bully tortured me for years.  Every day I would come home from school, happy for the learning, but dejected and exhausted from the bullying. I would curl up with my Mom and we would have deep and important conversations about why people are mean.

And here’s what my mom told me about bullies:

It’s never about you. It’s always about them. Even though they are acting big and strong and cool, bullies are hurting on the inside, and they need to make you feel worse than they feel on the inside—and they feel really bad.

Ok, so this nugget of awareness is nice to know, but how to you apply it when a colleague or boss is shouting at you, or telling you that you should be ashamed by how much you suck, and how stupid you are?

Or how do you use this insight if you have a bully client who is pressuring you into unfair demands or pricing, and threating that they will cancel their contract if you don’t bend to their will?

Here is how I learned to out maneuver the bullies at work.

When a bully would start in on me, in that moment, I would first remind myself, that this abuse was about the bully’s own emotional crisis, and their need to hurt someone else to make themselves feel more powerful in that moment.

Let’s call this moment, this moment a bully needs to hurt somebody, the “Moment of Torture”.

So as time went on, when being abused by a bully, I trained myself to shift my focus from being hurt to thinking: Ah, I know what this is, I have just the misfortune and bad timing to stumble into this bully’s Moment of Torture. They need to hurt me to make themselves feel better not because I am me, or they don’t approve of my work, but because I am simply the one standing here in this moment. I could be anyone, and we could be talking about anything. It truly has nothing to do with me.

Once I learned that I could moderate my own emotional defensive reaction in this way, I also discovered a magical, practical thing I could say to a bully that would stop them.

Are you ready for it?

It’s simply this: “I will get back to you on that.”

Step 1: “I will get back to you.”

Step 2: Make your escape.

What this looks like with a colleague or a boss:

“I understand where you are coming from. You make a good point. I need to think about this and I will get back to you later with the information you want.”

With an unreasonable client:

“I understand why you feel this way, and what you are asking. Let me get back to you later with a proposal that I believe will meet your needs.”

What you need to accomplish in the Moment of Torture is to get yourself away from the bully. There is no winning for you in terms of the content of what you are discussing in this moment. They will never agree with you or show you respect because their only goal in the Moment of Torture is to hurt you. So your only useful course of action is self-preservation.

Saying  “I will get back to you” immediately takes the target off your back. It has the added benefit that it makes them feel like you respect their authority (even if you don’t). It is non-confrontational, so it doesn’t make anything worse, and most importantly, it lets you get out of there. You are not obligated to stay there and let them hurt you.

After saying “I will get back to you”, I would try to get away with not meeting them again in a live discussion for the follow-up. Instead I would send an email with a reasonable suggestion (often the same exact suggestion I was making in the Moment of Torture), and because the moment had passed, and they were no longer focused on hurting me as their main goal.  In this different moment, I could get access to their logical brain, and they would almost always accept what I was proposing.

Every time this happened it reinforced Mom’s idea that bullying is really never about me. It is always about them.

I tell a story in my new book, Why is SHE Still Here? about one of these bully moments that was not directed at me, but at a colleague. His boss was berating him in front of me and his peers, and my heart broke for this man. No one deserved this treatment. It was painful to watch. But it showed me another big insight that has really helped me deal with a bullies and preserve my sanity.

Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t need tools to deal with bullies at work? Or in life? It’s not fair that we need to do all this extra emotional labor and bend ourselves out of shape to accommodate and survive the bullies. I have always tried to remove the bullies from the organizations I have run, but even so, there is a steady supply that pop up everywhere. So it’s important to have a strategy to maneuver around them and to protect yourself.

“I’ll get back to you” has worked like a charm for me for years. Thanks, Mom.

Patty Azzarello is the author of Why Is SHE Still Here? My Ungraceful Journey from the Playground to the Boardroom, out now.