The Art of Negotiation | with The Commercialiser Chief Negotiator Alex Adamo | My Story s7

Yes, guys, I'm Si. Welcome to ACE Podcast Nation and this is another episode of my story. We'd be very privileged to speak to athletes, journalists, media people from all walks of life, with expert analysts, experts in their field. And I'm looking forward to another episode. This is the first episode of the new series of my story, so let's dig in. Good morning and welcome. Very, very happy today to be welcoming the first guest of the series. Very excited and it is of course, chief negotiator at the commercializer, Mr. Alex Adamano. How are you, Alex?

I'm very well. Sigh. I'm very well. Wonderful day here in London. A bit cloudy and a bit sunny. We still haven't seen the summer, but very excited to be here.

No, thank you for joining me. And I've got to be honest, as, as I mentioned to you just now, in this series, we like to have a relaxed conversation, hear people's story, and obviously, you know, we've spoken to international sports stars, journalists, people from media, things like this. I'm very excited to speak to you today because negotiating is something which I could definitely improve in, improve on myself, among other things. And I'm looking forward to kind of hearing your style, your story. Apologies.

Excellent. So happy to be here, to be your.

No, of course. And what I like to do first of all is before we dig into, you know, your career and, and things like that, is I like to, to hear where it all began, I guess, for you and so where did it all start for, for you, Alex?

So for me, sai, it's a great question because it gives me an opportunity to, to, to really delve into my earliest memories. And it all started when I was 11 or 12 years old, when I was studying. I've asked a friend of my dad, a psychologist, I've asked about some books on psychology because I was really interested in understanding human behavior. I don't really know why, where that came from because people ask me, how did you know? How did it come to such a young age and understanding human psychology, understanding human behavior. I think it probably came from a fact that I was a bit awkward in relationships. You know, when you're, you're a child. I was very sensitive and I still am, as in sensitive in a way that I can feel people's emotion. I can experience my own emotions as well. And I think children, they tend to be a lot subject to rejection. I wasn't subject to a lot of bullying, but some of it as well, you know, from older children as well. I was like, you know, I really want to understand human behavior because reading, studying to study those psychology books really helped me decipher why were people behaving in a certain way, what was happening to the. Into the head of people, why were they making decisions? And how could I navigate the social complexity of, you know, teenage life or, you know, child life as a child. So I started studying that for one year or two when I was 11 years old and studying books and body language as well. And I was using them at school. You know, I learned about mirroring some of the techniques. Now you hear from FBI negotiators that, you know, in order to build empathy, for example, I've learned about all these things and actually they were working and I was like, this is fun, I want more of it. And then very quickly, after a year or two, I said, I love to be a psychologist. And I remember again, I don't come from a business background. My parents, my dad used to be a civil servant with a very modest, actually working class salary and my mom a housewife. So we didn't have any understanding of how business would work. I didn't even know what a company was. But for some reason, still, When I was 11 or 12, I said, I don't want to be a psychologist because if I become the best psychologist of the world, then in the world, then when I help people, I will heal them in one session. And that's not a good business model for me. So I said, how do I apply knowledge and my passion for human behavior into business? So the answer that came to me at the time was sales. And then that evolved later into something that's called negotiation, which is, by the way, very different from sales is what happens after you sell or after you buy. Then that's the part where you're negotiating terms. And I've developed that later on into my career. But to answer your question, it all stemmed from a passion and a willingness and a lot of energy for me to wanting to learn human behavior and apply that to business in a commercial way to generate profits.

That's really interesting to me because I think, particularly as children and teenagers, people are to a certain extent a product of their environment where their, their background is, what, what's happening at home, you know, whatever it may be. And you know, without being sort of stereotypical, I guess, a lot of the time, people who do do the bullying or picking on other kids, it's because of other aspects away from, you know, from the school life, home life. So it's quite fascinating to me that you had that early interest in, you know, in human behavior and. And I'm assuming body language and things like that comes into it. What were you like? As I know you said, a little bit awkward and things like that. Like what sort of interest did you have in. In as a child and things like that.

So interests. I just, you know, I just wanted to, I think, get along with others, you know, as much as I could. I was very competitive, as I still am. So I wanted to be, you know, one of the best children if I could. You know, I want to get the best grades. And I was very serious about it. So I wanted to do a good job. That was very important to me. But again, my most. The thing that I was spending a lot of time on in the evening studying was again, human behavior. That was the thing that interested me a lot. And I think again, the reason why that came about was that I felt. So I come from a family where I can define and that inspires our mission, which is to help people get what they want on their terms. Helping good people get a bit more of what I want in life. And I come from a family that my mom and dad are the nicest people. They have the biggest hearts. But I've always been exploited by people around them because they've never been commercial. So you would have my mom that would open the door to a door to door salesperson and she wouldn't be able to say no to the person because she would feel a lot of empathy for them, but not that she had the money to buy what. What the person was offering. You know, imagine like a Uber or these kind of things that were sold many years ago door to door. And the person then would come out after a one hour meeting having my mom signed contracts and papers with debt that we weren't able to service. So what was happening was I witnessed the result of my mom and dad being the best people having very good hearts and then yet being stressed and being submitted by society and, and by others when they were not taking control of their own behaviors. So again, this, this wanting to learn more about human behavior not only came from a personal need, but also as a result of the environment that was exposed to.

Of course. So as you gained that sort of knowledge into human behavior.

Yeah.

Did you contemplate, I know you mentioned obviously you started off with sales. Was there any other avenues that you were tempted to take that in? Whether it be like, I don't know, like law enforcement or, you know, I think which body. Body language human behavior can be used in was There ever any other avenues which you sort of contemplated for some reason?

I mean, when I was younger, I wanted to go into the military actually, because I thought I didn't. I wouldn't have gone with a clear idea wanting to go into the military to apply human behavior. But I like the balance in between, you know, having to work hard, being both very clever and having also to be physically fit at the same time. So you do all these things to embark into a journey into the military. But then equally when I came across the decision on how to use my life, I think business was always more attractive to me. I don't know why, maybe movies, but I imagined. And it's finally, finally you asked that. Funny you asked that because when I was about 15, I imagined myself being in this very tall glass building giving a presentation to executives, to a board of, you know, executives or, you know, wearing a suit and a tie. And the place I come from, I originally come from the south of Italy. I moved to London when I was 17. And the place I come from, small town with 13,000 people. But people don't even tend to leave the town, they don't leave the country or these kind of things. So I didn't even know what these rooms look like other than the movies. But then finally, now fast forward a few years, just after university, I remember being in one of the largest banks in Spain for the job that I had in financial services. And I was delivering this presentation and I stopped for a moment and I said, well, this is what happened. This is what I wanted when I was 15, you know, and I remember that moment they gave me about five minutes before walking into the room and I looked out of this glass building. I was like, this is it, this is what I was looking for. So I was always attracted to, attracted to business in a way because I always saw in my ignorance at the time, again, I didn't know what a PNL was. I didn't know what revenue minus cost equal profits. I didn't know any of those business mechanics. Even when I was president of the enterprise Society at university here in London. I didn't even know what the word entrepreneurship meant when they asked me to become president of that. So it's not that I had a preconceived notion about it, about what business was, but for some reason it sounded exciting to me. So I always wanted to be in.

Certainly sounds like you are very driven even from a young age, I think, because, you know, Sometimes I've got three teenage boys myself, while the oldest is nearly 20 now. But I mean, being a father and watching them, them grow up, they.

You.

Know, they have, they're quite. The older two particularly are very driven to what they want to do. And one of them has actually joined, but it's me. As a teenager, I struggled. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I got into some bad things. I had some bad experiences, made bad decisions a lot, probably through youth and inexperience. But do you think having that drive as a young, as a, you know, as a, as a child, a teenager, that that helps you as. As you focused in on your, your goals and what you wanted to achieve?

Absolutely. I mean, I was lucky to have a drive and a passion, so I was lucky to have it. It. It's important as well. So there is two, two, two ways to answer the question, actually. Two areas in which I can dissect. Dissect the question. It's a great question. So the first one is certainly drive and passion massively helped me achieve what I have today, both materially and emotionally. So it was massive. And he still is today. I still wake up in the morning with the same drive. You know, sometimes I would describe things which you love as well in the sport arena. I would describe myself as waking up like a possessed person with blood coming out of my mouth and wanting to go and attack the world out there. I don't want to hurt anybody, but I do want to achieve my objectives. And the objectives that I achieve are going to help others as a result. And so that is the kind of drive and passion that I have in the things that I do. And if I have to think back into how did this contribute when I was a teenager? Well, it certainly does contribute because I would say probably zeros down the noise of distraction, you know, like, like you said, if you're not, if you don't have an old star to a witch to go to, then it's easy that you get distracted. You know, you get the guy that offers you a cigarette and after the cigarette is you start drinking very early, and then after the drinking, then that can become drugs. And you know, once you have these very powerful chemicals that enter your brain as a child, it thankfully didn't happen to me, but I can imagine when, when that happens to a lot of children, then that obviously takes control of a lot of your decision because it's very powerful. They're very powerful chemicals that take care of your. That drive a lot of your decisions. So it really helps. But then the second thing, the very important thing that I Love to explore as well in this conversation, if that sounds interesting to you, Sai is, and it's something I've learned over the last couple of years only, and it's one of the massive things that I'm writing my book on is where does the emotional fuel of that drive come from? Is it an emotional fuel where like, I want to help the world, I want to do well, you know, I'm in a great place and I want to help others do it, or is it an emotional fuel that comes from feelings like anger, frustration, fear? And I can confirm sign for the first 10 or 15 years of my career, my emotional fuel and my drive came up from anger and fear completely Anger and fear that I felt in my parents because they were under the elements of the economy. And my dad used to make a thousand hundred euro or a thousand euros a month and still does today. And you can imagine you cannot do many things with that when your wife is a housewife as well. And you know, every little increase in, in bills, electricity bills, as you know, we just went through energy crisis over the last two to three years. Every little increase would bring this, that my father was the most loving person in the world, would walk back in the house angry or anxious about what the future was holding or being angry against the institutions that were not giving us what we were supposed to have. Now, thankfully, I never missed a meal, but equally, we were always on the brink of is this enough? Can we, you know, maybe we could go have a pizza once a month, you know, as a little treat or that was, you know, a little treat and those kind of things. And I was like. So all of that harbored into me as a sort of resentment, as some sort of social injustice because I was like, why do two people, my mom and dad were good people, need to enjoy this kind of life where they're always anxious and afraid or angry about the status of life. So those were the emotions that were fueled me fueling my actions for the first decisions. For the first 10 or 15 years, I thought the world was wrong and I need to fix it. And now to close this long answer to my question, and then we can build on that. That actually, and this is what I'm writing my book on now, which is called the Pillars of the Negotiation Negotiator's Mindset. That kind of sort of drive, when you push it really hard, and it comes from a place of anger and frustration and fear. It broke my nervous system. So in my late 20s or early 30s, probably late 20s, I started developing anxiety Panic attacks and all those kind of things. And I was still achieving. You look at me from the outside, complete achiever, building companies, doing well, working the largest companies in the world, working on deals between 5 million and $5 billion. Like I was having a dream life from the outside, but in the inside I still enjoying it by the way, and grateful about everything I was having. But then equally it broke my nervous system. I couldn't physically talk anymore. And this is where then I started studying about, you know, how can you experience life getting what you want in terms of materially but also getting what you want from an emotional perspective? Because if you get what you want from an emotional perspective as well, and you, you live in a place of joy and gratitude rather than fear and anger, then you're rich twice. You know, you're getting what you want materially and you're getting what you want emotionally. And that's my journey now. And this is how I want to help others in that, in that position. But yeah, to answer your question, there drive is really important. But then make sure that we are aware on where the drive comes from.

Yeah, of course. And I think, you know what I find really intriguing about your answer? There is so often people associate like business and the high achieving businessmen as cold and calculating. But actually you know, your, your is based very much around, certainly in the, in the early years is based around emotion, you know, and the three emotions which are very, very powerful in passion, fear, anger. And I think a lot of people watching this will, he was saying about your, your mother and father and that living paycheck to paycheck, that worrying, you know, how the bills are going to get paid, things like that, you know, that's, that, that, that is the, the reality for, for so many people, you know, especially as we are today, but generally speaking as well. And I think from a personal aspect for me I get angry sometimes with myself because I found something that I'm good at and I'm really passionate about, about which has given me a whole new sort of life that I didn't realize that in me, but I didn't discover it until my late 30s and I feel like I've wasted a lot of time. I had, you know, I had a, a serious car accident which kind of came into that. But my point being is that if you can find something that you're, you're passionate about, the drive almost comes within itself then because you're getting up wanting to, to go to work and to do those things to achieve your goals. Whereas obviously if you're for lack of a better term, if you're sort of in the rat race and you're, you know, you go into a job that you don't really like, but you've got to go there because you've got to pay the bills and stuff like that, you lose drive and it's. And of course, that's reality for, I'm sure, a lot, a lot of people out there.

Yes.

Dango. And the fear thing is, is interesting to me because I, I think people can relate to that. I really do. And it's. And again, I go back to what I sort of. The first sentence I just said. There was so often people associate business and successful business with cold and calculating. But you know, even in this sort of first 20 minutes or so talking to you, you seem like a, a very empathetic person, which isn't the stereotype of a successful businessman. You've talked several times already about helping other people.

Yeah.

Do you think, do you think anybody can find that sort of that passion, that thing that they're just, that they enjoy or even if they're just, you know, just passionate about that they can then take and use that to make something of themselves? Or do you think they have to go the academic route in order to succeed?

That's, that's a great question. So I want to take on two points that you mentioned there, sign and the comment you made about both about, you know, lots of people, they, they end up into their careers, if you will, kind of stuck. You know, they, many times they don't feel the, they don't have, they don't get the courage to follow either their own ambition or passion or they don't have any. You know, they don't get lucky when they're 11 and they're like, I'm really passionate about this. I'm going to make it happen and I'm going to dedicate my life to it. They don't get that calling. But by the way, that calling comes with all those sufferings because it means you need to break the system around. That means you need to make yourself uncomfortable. So you also need, once you have the, let's say, the calling or the vocation that gets given to you by somewhere inside you or outside or whatever it is that also needs to come with a certain, if you will, genetic makeup or mental fitness that allows you to want to make yourself uncomfortable because it comes with a lot of decisions of, you know, I'm not going to get drunk on a Friday night when my friends at university, I'M going to take a full time job in the evenings, for example, I'm going to work to the night and so on and so forth. Which for me again, when I did it, it wasn't a sacrifice. It was the only way for me to experience life. So I wasn't even sacrificing it. So that's an important consideration to make. But then, you know, your question is when, when you're. The comment that I want to make about your question was there is a lot of people that work paycheck to paycheck or they go to the, you know, they experience their jobs 9 to 5 or they take the academic route to get something now or you were saying can they make something of them of themselves now? I think no one should, should make something of themselves because they've been told to. You know, we live in this society and I see lots of people more and more from my place of steadiness within the things that I know what I want and I'm working hard to achieve and to help others on those elements. I see lots of people, especially you know, obviously younger generations where they have less of a stable life, they're still building it. You know, they may be studying, maybe they're going through university, maybe they got a job when they, they finish school. I see lots of people that measure themselves against those impossible standards of that society gives you right. So you should be enjoying yourself every day. So you should be rich pretty much. You should be born rich, you should be having, you should have a private jet, you should have, you should be drinking every night or you should be partying every night or you should have also six pack at the same time, which is very hard if you party every night and drink every day by the way, as you know, you know, given your, your expertise and at the same time you should be, you know, rich and successful and do only what you want and what you want at any time. Now if you are born commercially or professionally in this kind of expectation ridden world, it's impossible for you to emotionally make it because you are being told by society what you should be or what you should look like or what you should do, what your life should look like. But it's impossible to achieve that standard, especially when you look at that, when that get repeated to you fifty hundred, a thousand times a day through social media, you know, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and all this kind of other things. You constantly, you're constantly, constantly, constantly reminded that you're not enough. And then you wonder why, you know, you have A mental health crisis nowadays because it feels nothing we have is enough. So my question to people is, you don't need. My suggestion to people is you do not need to make something of yourself. No, you only do that if this is what you want, if this is your decision. So the main thing is choose what it is that you want and then fight to achieve it. But it must be your choice, not someone else's. And there is another place as well, which I would recommend, which can help you in that journey, which is start being, existing in a place of joy and gratitude for what you already have. So objectives are important, and I know all about objectives. And I lived for the last 15 to 20 years waking up in the morning thinking about my objectives and going to sleep in the night and thinking about my objectives every single day. And I still do that. But then what that creates is it can create a scarcity mindset. It creates a mindset that if I don't achieve the objective, I'm useless. If I don't achieve the objective, I'm not worth it, or I'm not worth being good at what I do. For example, right? Instead, what you want to do is you want to have very, very stretching objectives. This is what you want, or very big objectives. But then equally you need to remember to express joy and gratitude every day about the things you already have and start from the basics. Can you breathe? Yes, you can. Well, then be grateful about it. Do your legs work? Yes, they do. I mean, some people don't, you know, a lot of people, their legs and limbs don't work well or they have some other major illness. Well, if you don't have that, then be grateful. If you do, then find something else to be grateful for. Can you drink water? Yes, you can. Can you drink clean water? Now, if you can eat. My standard of happiness and joy is three things. Being healthy, being able to eat once a day, and having a shelter under which to live. If I have these three things, then I am fulfilled emotionally. Everything else, I spend 99.5% of the day I spend achieving more. I wanted more and more and more. But you always need to be able to come back to that. Not even minimum. It's a lot to have those three things in 99% of your life. So if you have those three things and you protect them, I suggest that everyone begins to being grateful about them. And all you do is what I recommend in my book. Spend a couple of minutes in the morning, wake up, spend a couple of minutes, do some breathing exercises, and then you Spend a couple of minutes about being grateful and joyful about those things that you have, and then I can guarantee. And by the way, this is not spirituality, this is neurology. Then what happens is you're anchoring, you're priming your nervous system into thinking and looking at the things that you already have. And then you're in a place of relaxation and serenity, which then allows you to go out there and fight for what you want instead. If you wake up in the morning and the first thing you think about is the overdue credit card bill or the mortgage that is due at the end of the month or anything else, then you're going to be in a place that you're going to be enslaved to that emotionally as well, and it's going to be very hard for you to achieve your objectives.

Indeed. Indeed. I mean, there's like, I forget what it is now, but to paraphrase it, there's a kind of saying, isn't there, about you, you get what you, you get out or you get back what you out to the world in terms of your, how you feel, your positive energy, things like that. But I mean, my point being, I guess I, I completely agree with you. And I think sometimes, particularly people who feel maybe they're like, they're a bit stuck, they, they forget actually how much, you know, how much I've got to be, to be thankful for. And that's not criticism by any means. I, I do it a lot and it's something which I'm trying to change about myself is that ultimately, yes, I've got goals and I've got things that I would like to do. Sometimes it can be frustrating, but I've also, you know, I've got a life of 20 years and three children and I've built my own little sort of media company from, from nothing. So ultimately, yes, you can be frustrated and day to day you can think or the Fs and the. But, but there's always things to be, to be, to be grateful for. I wanted to ask you about some of the, the problems and the challenges that you've kind of had along the way. But I kind of also wanted to, to personalize it a little bit to myself just in that, as I mentioned at the start of the, of the show, I sometimes struggle in that sort of negotiation factor. And I, I think, to be honest with you, I, I undervalue myself or I have a little, not enough confidence in what I've already built and brought to the table. And you know, sometimes when I'M speaking to, to companies or to people about potential opportunities. I almost undersell myself a little bit because I forget that, you know, they've come to me for a reason or they've come to me because they've seen something I've done or whatever it may be. And I'm interested in one of the challenges that you have faced and overcome along the way, but also in maybe ways to, to help myself, help people deal with that sort of, maybe I can't think of the right terminology, but like underselling yourself effectively and not having that belief.

Yeah, I see where you're coming from. Okay, so. Absolutely, absolutely. So this is a great point, Sai, and I think you are hitting on the nail one of the number one things that we teach in negotiation when we work with CEOs of the largest enterprises in the world on their biggest deals. And no matter how big or small your negotiation is, about 92% of times we tend to give more power to the counterparty than it really has. So that's a human. And you were talking about my background, my training as an anthropologist. This is actually where this comes from. And now I'm going to explain it to you as well. So we have a lot of parts in our brain, but there are two particularly significant parts in the brain that we take into account when we're negotiating. One of them is called the amygdala, and the other one is called the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala is somewhere inside our brain, very deep, so very one of the oldest parts of our brain. And then there is a newer part of our brain, as in newer over the last hundreds of thousands of years, as we have evolved into what we call homo sapiens sapiens. And that's the prefrontal cortex, which is the large part here on the front of our brain. So what happens is once you get into a negotiation, obviously there are things you can gain, but there are also things you can lose. You know, like you said, you can lose the opportunity with a potential client, with potential guest, or, you know, when you need to make a deal for your media company. That's always important. Right. So what happens is when we're afraid, or when there is some element of fear, or when there is something that we can't lose, then the amygdala turns on. And the amygdala is a primitive part of our brain which, which is designed to make us survive. And it's a really, really strong device which helped us 300,000 years ago when you and I were non Negotiating where all we needed to care about was to protect ourselves from the cybertooth lion or to survive, you know, to eat every day and reproduce. Those were the main priorities. So it did really work when someone were coming to me and was about to hit me. So the amygdala turns on, and it turns on that part that we call fight or flight reaction, which is something that increases your blood pressure, your blood flow. Your blood flow goes to your muscles, it goes to your extremities. It will change your nonverbal communication as well. So it will show some level of nervousness as well. And the negotiator will look at it, and it will, however, deactivate the prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex is the part, instead, that makes us make the executive decisions, the decisions that we make, you know, the more complex decisions, which are the kind of decisions that we need to make during the negotiation. So what happens is every time you can lose something or there is something to lose, the amygdala turns on because there is an element, a little bit of fear, the amygdala turns on. And then the automatic reaction psychologically is we give more power to the counterparty than they really have. Because giving more power to the counterparty than they really have will make us more likely to get a deal. We'll be more tame. We'll be less aggressive. We'll be less dominant. We will not go and fight with our counterparty. We will be there, and we'll try and get just the deal if we can. Now, that will save you from the conflict that always happens in negotiation, but it will not allow you to maximize your negotiation. And your job as a negotiator is not to get a deal, is to maximize your deal. As a company person. Yes, we need to get deals still. We still need to get the deal. But once you put your negotiators hat, you're like, all right, there is $100 on the table, and this guy can give me between 70 and 100, I'm gonna get 100. So one of the strengths of the negotiators and the book that I'm writing, the Pillars of the negotiators mindset, is to be able to switch that on at will. You decide, no, this is wrong. I don't have less power than the counterparty. We have the same level of power. Maybe I have less power, but I'm making that as a conscious decision, not as a. I'm afraid I don't want to close the deal. I need to close the Deal decision, because that will work against you and it will make you leave money on the table. It's what we call a negotiation, buying back your comfort. So, you know, you're in a position where you're going to be uncomfortable, you're going to have conflict, and you start making concessions because you want to reach a deal. Sometimes you don't want to make concessions. Sometimes you need to fight and use conflict.

So obviously now you're, you know, the chief negotiator at the commercializer. You're very successful. When you first started being, you know, doing negotiations and. And that side of things, what challenges did you encounter then? Did you make any kind of mistakes along the way that you had to learn from? Because, you know, I'm a big believer that everyone makes mistakes and you've got, you know, the most important thing is you learn as you're making them.

Absolutely. I mean, I still do make mistakes on a regular basis every day. So, you know, in negotiation, I think I'm extremely successful at that in supporting and advising companies and negotiating on their behalf. As an entrepreneur instead, I make mistakes 10 times a day. Like just figuring out the thing every time, you know, how do we do this, how do we do that? So that's a continuous thing of trial and error as you constantly grow the business. So that's for sure. But very early on, I can tell you about. I wouldn't call them mistakes. I would call them as learning experiences. Right. Like different kind of approaches and mindset that you go into. And one of them was, I remember a very clear one, which actually shared very recently, one of our workshops with a company that we were supporting last week abroad. And it was when I first started. One of my first jobs when I was 16 or so was to sell sausage casings for my uncle's company. So such sausage casings are the intestines of sheep and hog. And I wanted to sell them. I had to sell them to butchers inside of Italy. So I had to go to them, and they would reject me. They would say, alex, get the hell out of here. With a knife in their hand. And bloody hands. Hands are bloody. Because they were doing their work and they were like, get the hell out of my shop. And at that point, you know, I came out of the store and I was shocked because I wasn't expecting that, you know, I was going with an open heart as a nice guy, you know, trying to do my job and trying to earn my living for the day. And instead these people, they were kicking me out with the strongest Aggression, depression and conflict that I could have ever imagined, as if I had attacked them, right? So that rejection hit me emotionally. I went out, I sat on the pavement, you know, was like a little bit of a lifted pavement, so it was like high enough for me to sit on it with my little bucket of sausage casings in the middle of the summer. It was like 40 degrees inside of Italy. They were starting to smell a little bit as well. And I was there and I was like, why did he attack me this much? And I was actually shocked. I was in pain, you know, the rejection that I felt. I was emotionally scarred. And I remember, however, at that very moment I said, what do I do now? Do I let this rejection define me? And now you're wondering how the hell is this 16 year old thing that way? But this is what came to my mind. And I was so driven that I to achieve my objective that I needed to have that conversation with myself. And I was like, do I let this rejection define me? And therefore I relent and you know, I go back maybe to another butcher, timidly and afraid and try and get something out of the next one and then the next one, or do I push the back? And I decided the second, because I was like, I'm not prepared to live with this level of fear in my life. You know, I don't. This is not like I decided that I wanted to be a salesperson for the rest of my life. I'm like, am I going to live like this for the next 70 years? This is unbearable. You know, I projected the whole thing, but then went back and I started to use conflict. And I said, Mr. Butcher, this is what I'm selling you this for €80 50. And he was still with his hat, you know, with his knife on his hands. And he looked at me and he said, no, 60 Euros 50. And this is where the negotiation started, you know, then it went 750. Then he bought like €7 or something like that. And. And we did a deal. But to extrapolate the learning opportunity, there is that, the rejection moment. And also this is another thing that we look at in terms of personality types. There are personality types that are called red, green, blue and yellow. There are people that, you know, when they get some emotional attack, they don't keep it with themselves for too long. One instead there are others, like these are the reds and I'm that kind of personality. Then there are the greens instead that take more and more and more and more and they push back only when it's too Much when they're close to mental breakdown, for example. Right, there's no right or wrong. It's just our personality trait. But the learning opportunity that I want to share with others, that is, do not accept rejection is how long is it going to take you for? How much emotional pain do you need to endure for you to be in a position that helps you understand that you being sorry about yourself is not what I get, is not going to get you what you want in life. And I could have again, that moment, me sitting on that pavement could have lasted five years, 10 years or five weeks or five, five days or five seconds. I decided that that moment was going to be five seconds. And again, every single time I was still rejected, like 95% of the times, people were still kicking me out. When I was selling tickets on the beach in Ibiza, when I was selling door to door in North London paintings, when I was trying to recruit dry cleaners for a dry cleaning tech company that I've helped build, which is one of my companies now, when I'm still looking for new, when I was looking for clients, when I was in banking, when I still looking for clients with a commercialize, I still get rejection every single day. But the point is, how do you emotionally enjoy and digest that rejection? So that's, that's a great learning point. And a mistake that people tend to do is they take it as personal failure or professional failure when someone says no to them. And that is incorrect. You shouldn't take it as such. That's one thing. The other thing, in terms of giving too much power to the counterparty, it happens all the times. And I can tell you again that early story in sausage casings, but we do that all the time is I remember my uncle telling me, hey, Alex, you know, when we buy, and I was also helping him buy these materials, he said, when we buy, we're the smallest company. When we buy, we cannot get the payment terms that we want. We cannot get the prices that we want. We cannot get even the volumes that we want because we're too small. And then when I was selling on the other side, you know, to our potential clients, I was like, alex, we're too small. You know, we cannot give them the price that we would like to give them. We cannot give them the volumes that we would like to give them. We cannot impose our payment terms that we would like. And I told them, I said, you know, this is impossible. How can we be, you know, missing power on both sides? You know, when we buy and when we sell so again it's again, it's again defeating that perception that you have less power than you think. So you need to force yourself to do that a little bit because it's not human nature, the wanting to push a bit further. But if you do it, you'll start and you will be uncomfortable at first and it will make you lose some deals sometimes. But if you start doing it, it will put you into a world where you're not scared of rejection anymore, where you're not scared, scared of failure anymore. Elon Musk says, you know, when you feel very, very often and very constantly, the harder you fail, the bigger you fail, then the less sensitive you become. TOYA and if you can develop that, that's a great base of the for you to build really strong negotiation skills.

Interesting, interesting. Just very quickly because I want to talk to you about the commercializer. I'm really forward to hearing about that. I just one thing I wanted to sort of ask about what you just said there. You mentioned about the different personality types, different colors. How do you say people who are in the, the personality types where they do take it, you know, that rejection personally, whether it's professionally or personally, whatever it may be, and they do kind of hold it to heart and they hold on to it. How can they weigh up that with needing, you know, the occasional conflict in, in a negotiation and pushing back a little bit because obviously their personality type is such that they find that difficult.

Yeah, yeah. So there is, there are people that it's more natural for them to push back. So for me it's more natural. So I'm, I'm personality wise and genetically designed to do this job and I also love it and I have the passion and I've demonstrated I can do it properly. So it comes from a place in my case that yes, it was a lot of hard work and it was a lot of learnings and a lot of mistakes and a lot of failures. But inequally I was designed to do it so it's an easier place to be. Instead you have, like you said, some people that they really take it personally. And one thing that I would recommend is to be aware of that. So the first step is awareness. Awareness. So we do an exercise during our workshops, for example, where we discover through different psychological and personality assessments what personality type are we? And then we think, right, so we have this kind of personality. If this person. And then I look at this personality and I call this person with this personality John. And then I need to give advice to how John, after We've learned all the things of negotiation. How John, given that particular personality trait, what are three strengths that John would have and three weaknesses that John would have, for example. So the point is, when you look at the weaknesses, is to be aware that, you know, sometimes you just, you know, you're just trying to run a negotiation, but you've got like the, you know, the handbrake on, and you can be as fast as you would like because your personality is stopping you there from doing it. So the first point is to be aware, to know that example, if you're a yellow, if you're like the social person that wants popularity, that wants to be liked by others, that's a personality trait that is very, very common. If you're that kind of person, then, yes, you will suffer when someone says no to you or rejects outright your proposal. So you need to be aware of it, and you need to hijack your system, your personality system, and accept it and understand that that's actually what we call a bias. A heuristic bias is a way in which your brain is working, but that is not what we say, appropriate for a negotiation environment. So be aware of it, and you need to kind of force, outmaneuver your own system in that negotiation. You need to accept instead the voice of reason, what you prepared in your negotiation before going to the negotiation table, when you knew that these things were going to help you and you decided what you were going to do and stick to your plan, which you created with your prefrontal cortex instead. When you're under stress, you'll tend to revert to your standard personality type, and that will sometimes put you. And it will make you liable to make more mistakes or make unnecessary concessions during a negotiation. So awareness and develop a plan to protect yourself from your natural personality trait, just like I need to protect myself from my personality trait. For ex example, a red that is as. And also have a maximizer mindset. So there are people that have a maximizer or satisfies satisfies or that tend to be happy with getting the deal maximizer. They're only happy when they get the very, very, very, very best deal. And beyond that, right? So both are fine. But if you're too much, if you want to win too much and you're too much of a maximizer, you will tend to have less deals done. You will break more, you will, you know, we'll have more deadlocks. So I need to be aware of that and decide when that is too much and slow down sometimes. So everyone needs to be aware of their personality traits. But the first thing is to develop that awareness, and a great way to do that. One of the people that we're really inspired by here as a business is Ray Dalio, the founder of the biggest hedge fund in the world, Bridgewater, and he created an excellent free tool called principlesu.com so you can do your. Your people can do. Their test takes about 10, 15, 20 minutes. And that will give us. It will give them a beautiful. I think it was developed with a great psychologist called Adam Grant. And they get. They get out a great personality description, and that allows you to begin that journey of self awareness.

Interesting. I might check that out and see myself. Apart from that, just. Just another question I thought of, which I was quite interested in. When people are negotiating, whether it's, you know, like a small business or. Or a larger type of deal, what advice would you give them in terms of weighing up risk, that kind of risk reward? You know, I know myself, I've been in a few situations over the last couple years where there's been opportunities, but there was a risk attached to it, and I perhaps procrastinated a little bit and, and, you know, maybe didn't take that risk. And I, you know, it's difficult then to not think back and think, oh, if I had done that, would this have happened? Like, how would you advise people to weigh that risk negotiating?

And. And sai. Is the question related to a negotiation or to a business decision? It's like, you know, because they're two different things.

Yeah.

You talk about both.

Yeah. More so of a business decision, I guess.

Sorry, sorry. Over to you, sir.

No, no, I was just gonna say more. So I was thinking in, in my, in terms of my decision, it was probably more of a business decision. But, you know, it can. I suppose it could apply to either, I think.

So let's, let's do both. You know, like from a. I think it's more. It's probably more applicable to many of us from more of a career decision, business decision potential. And then we can dissect the negotiation piece as well, but that becomes a bit more technical. But if we go into the business decision and career decision piece, you said you apply this risk, you're looking at the risk of a decision that you can make, and then you don't make it, because in that moment, you see the risk as too big. And then after a few months or years, you're like, maybe I could have done it right. So I would start from something that. And I've done a Very interesting talk. Very recently in India, in Bangalore, to a group of students, to a group of MBA students there. And I was talking about something that actually Jeff Bezos talked about the first time or created and something I learned from him. And it's called the Regret Minimization Framework. So, you know, you have a new business idea for your business, or, you know, you need to make £100,000 or million dollar investment to build your business and you can decide, you know, should I invest this money? And then, you know, I got 20% chance that I make it or 80% chance I don't make it. So you're making all your calculations and then life gets in the way. Your standard business gets in the way. And before you realize it, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months gone, opportunity is gone, nothing's going to happen again, right? And now you need to wait for another opportunity for that to happen. So one thing that I really, I'm really mindful of and I not fight against, but I'm aware of every day is I think about the moment I'm going to die. Oh, and by the way, I'd love to talk, if we have time later, about transcendental meditation, which is a great thing that really helped me align with myself, what I want, what I'm looking for. And now we're supporting the foundation as well, to, to connect with it, to help as many people as possible on that. And one thing that I think about is, you know, when I'm going to be 90 years old, 95, 85, whatever, is, you know, the average age, I think is 86 or less for men, right? And I'm on my deathbed and I'm about to die, you know, that moment's gone, you know, like I've got a few minutes left, maybe an hour. And I'm looking back my life journey, the opportunity I was given to be a conscious being in this beautiful working body that I've been given, that I've built. And I think about that moment when I was 25, you know, like, should have built the business, should have. I not build the business, should have I've taken this step or not, Am I going to say, yes, I've done the right thing, or am I going to feel, right, regret, Am I going to have regret about something I haven't done? Now the thing I really want to avoid, sorry, when I die, like, if there is one thing I'm really afraid of, is that one hour before dying that I'm like, fuck sake. You know, when I was 35, I should have done it. I should have pushed harder. I should have done it because we're all getting out of your debt anyway. So that really helps. It's called Regret Minimization framework. When you make a decision, think about 70 years forward or 50 or however many you think you've got left and look back and say, when I look at that, should have I done it? Even if I fail, what will I think, you know, when I'm 85 or 90, have I done a good decision or not? Or am I going to regret not having done it? Because if you regret not having done it, then time is over at that time. But you might have wanted to push. So that's really powerful to me and it has helped me leave my very well paid job when I was employed and decided to build a business from zero from nothing. You know, I pushed, I worked so hard to get that position, you know, like six figure salaries and everything else. And then I was like, yeah, let's kill it all and let's start my business with no clients on the books. I was like, it was crazy. But I was like, no, if I look back, you know, if I look forward when I'm 90, that's the only thing I need to do because otherwise every day that I don't do it, I'm going to regret with my life and I'm going to die of some illness because I haven't done it. So that really helps. Regret Minimization framework.

Interesting, interesting. I, it's another thing which I, I'm going to look into I think and have a look at for myself and I'm sure others who are watching will do also talk to us about the commercializer. Where did it come from? You know, what is it? And you know, I'm, I'm really looking to hear about it.

Great. So we started a business in, in 2018 out of 2018 or late 2018 or so. And at the beginning the mission was to, well, the mission, the job or the objectives that we had. I didn't really have a mission, I just wanted to do what I love with passion and add value to clients. And initially we started off by helping startups or mid sized companies find new clients. So I've added a team to find new clients but that didn't really work out and then Covid started and everything else. So it was really hard because I found that financially speaking, so I went into the business not really having a defined idea of how we were going to make money. Just thought, yeah, let's do top line revenue. With little savings that I had on the side. And I was hiring people with monthly outgoings that were higher than the revenues that we were making. But I was like, yeah, I've got two weeks until the end of the month. Let's make was. So it was. If you look at it now, now I'm. I run it very differently but. And I was caught by it because I was living. I even done an Ironman well training because then Covid arrived and I couldn't complete it. But I've done the Ironman training like cycling up to 180km, like doing half marathon after that or the of 30km and, and swimming 2-3k before doing just during the training. I was doing that just because I wanted to get my mind off work, how stressed I was. But I. We started it selling on behalf of companies. Then I saw that the margins were not there and it was harder for us to get, you know, to get to the top line goals that we had. So we pivoted and we started working mostly on negotiation, which is an expertise that I'd accrued throughout my career, my career before the commercializer. So what we did, what we do now with the Commercializer is three things and that's, that's, that's what we do is direct execution, advisory and trainings. So direct execution and advisory. We currently have $6.5 billion of negotiations under management. We support the largest companies in the world, like big household names that you can see every day in either fmcg, beverage, supermarkets, but also pharmaceutical companies, investment banks. And we help, like I mentioned earlier, on deals between 5 million and $5 billion in size. The company is mostly built around me. I'm the chief negotiator and we've got negotiations associates that are actually either current clients that they love what we do so much that I want to be involved in some of those negotiations on a consultancy basis or ex clients that have decided to join the business. So in those kind of negotiations we manage some of the largest and most complex negotiations. We also support on a adult basis, on a diplomatic perspective as well, like the Foreign Office or other entities, other such entities, for example. So my job pretty much to make it a bit simpler is to go to CEOs and commercial directors and chief procurement officers and their teams and tell them what to say, how to say it at the negotiation table, how to spot the counterparty's breakpoint, how to write their emails. So imagine a little bit of a lawyer, but from a commercial and negotiation perspective, it's a very nice Job. There isn't many companies that do this actually. So it's extremely exciting. And it allowed me to couple the passion that I always had about human behavior with very, very important deals which has put us in a very strong financial position as a business. And then the other 20% of my time is done to deliver, is used delivering trainings where we have four days long trainings, 12 hours a day. Where people come to those trainings tend to be executives and obviously C level executives where companies can afford the investment for people to join those trainings and they learn everything about, about negotiation. All the things that we apply in the field, we share with them so that then they can use them, they can use them into their negotiations. And the overall mission side that I've developed over the last say after the first couple of years of starting off the business, instead of being a bit more aligned with myself and doing more work about, you know, what is, you know, to end where we started it, where did these, this drive come from? You know, looking back at my life, you know, it was always about helping others other being better negotiators better be better salespeople or advising them and consulting them, getting people beyond what I thought they could achieve even in that power balance perspective that you shared earlier. And I realized that my entire life was about helping others get what they want. And this is beautiful because it aligns with our mission of maximizing profits for the companies that we work with and, and turning for the, for the negotiators that we work with. I work in what we call, we have war rooms. We have a product called War Rooms which is when we prepare those negotiations, you're in the boardroom and you're preparing the most important negotiation for the company with the company. And in those rooms you only have fear. You know, people are stressed. They're like, what's going to happen if we don't get a deal? What's going to happen if this happens? And I was living in fear for many hours and weeks. And I used to have, now I, you know, slow down a little bit because I need to do it in the appropriate way in terms of time, investment. But I used to have 12 war rooms a day of 15 minutes each. So I was studying 7am in the morning and like 8 to 9pm at night. And you were always in fear, fear, fear. So one of our missions has become, which I realized what we were doing during those war rooms is to turn fear into excitement, which is possible to do. So if you can help people that are afraid in that moment to be excited, they will perform better in a negotiation. But then the overarching objective, which is something that, and this is what happened, what happens through the book that we're writing in this podcast as well, is to help people, we're talking now day to day people get a bit more of what they want in life, you know, realize, help them understand what they want and get a bit more what they want and live life on their terms. And that comes through people being able to develop their own consciousness, being able to realize, you know, what can I do in my life? What is, is there a calling? And if there is, what can I do with it? For example, deciding rather than being, you know, swayed by this year society tells you to, this next year, it tells you to do that, and so on and so forth, helping people decide what I want and help them achieve it. So we're trying to do. Obviously our core business model still is and will always be B2B. But we're starting to use some money and making some investment to help day to day people that are less fortunate and that do not have the budget to come to our extended workshops or our extended trainings. They don't have a commercial background, just like my mom and dad. How can we help people if we can help people through this teachings as well that you're asking me today? Sai. If we can help people to renegotiate their rent and save 50 pounds a month, if we can help people reduce their energy bills or save £1,000 on the car that they buy, if we can help like a large enough amount of people on that, then we're increasing the net emotional score of the world, which is, which I think is a great calling.

Yeah, 100%. I think that's, that's amazing. And I think like you're right. If you can reach those people who are struggling, you know, or living paycheck to paycheck or whatever it may be, and they can utilize the skills set out in your book or like you say, like we've talked about today, it's going to have a massive impact on their month to month life, whatever it may be. And then they, but then they may also be able to then take that on to their, you know, their professional life and whatever they may do. So I think it's vital that I think personally is vital everybody to have the ability to negotiate. I think is something which sometimes we learn so much stuff in school at a young age that we never use again in life. Whereas things like negotiating and human behavior, to me I think is much more useful for a child to learn about those sort of things into their adult life. One thing I am kind of interested in is how on earth do you find any time for any sort of personal life when you're, you know, you're working so hard constantly.

Thank you, that's a great question. Si. So I used to exist in a world made of sacrifice. And that broke my nervous system. I used to sleep about three to four hours a night and I was feeling guilty if I was sleeping more than three to four hours a night. I was like, you loser. You know, you're not enough. You need to be able to, you know. I was like, probably again watching all these movies and things. I thought that was the way to do it. I remember I used to sometimes sleep under the desk in my bed in my office. So I had like a mattress under the desk. It wasn't an even heated office, so like kind of cold in the winter. And it was like one of the first offices that we had in Chelsea here in London. And I used to drink every night like at least two to three glass of whiskeys or so, because that would help me, you know, when you get like 6, 7pm and you need to have another five hours of boring admin like I was doing during the day, the negotiators job. And then in the evening, you run the business, right? You need to do the invoices and the admin. I mean, for us that, you know, run a small business and you know, these kind of things, right? So when he started, I started, you know, I was doing all these kind of things until. And then eating junk food, like sugar, heavy food, like 9pm, 11pm what else was I doing? I was not exercising very little as well. And personal life, like, I mean the personal, I was like, sleep, if you will. But you know, like I was neglecting my relationships. Not spending any time with my current wife at the time was my girlfriend. That was me, you know, all the time. And then until I was lucky enough. Now I can say lucky. But when it did happen, I didn't feel lucky at all. I broke the nervous system. I was like anxious. I started like having, you know, this heavy feeling on your chest of anxiety every day for like eight to ten hours a day. Oh, and I was drinking about six to eight coffees a day. That probably didn't help. You know, that was, was. That was the whole thing. And I was getting, I started getting panic attacks as well during presentations, during a video call like this one. I wouldn't have been able to talk anymore. Now the reason why I can talk so openly about it is because I've done the entire circle. I've done the journey as in I was in it. But when it did happen, I didn't know there was a light at the end, at the end of the other side. And I think most people that get into where I was in, they don't get out of the other side. They stay in there for like 10 to 15 to 25 years. It's not easy. Like when it did happen to me, I started studying a ton of books. I was scared. I called the doctor, I said my business is going to go bankrupt. I can't present anymore, I can't talk to people. So this is where my journey started. Out of this calling of life that I burned my body pretty much in my mind. And I was working so hard because I thought that was the only thing that I had to do. And I was never emotionally speaking as well sai I, I was never giving myself any emotional reward. I was never feeling joy. I was feeling joy twice this morning I was telling a colleague I was feeling joy two to three times a year. Only when I was achieving above and beyond our company targets. You know, like maybe mid year H1 and end of financial year. And then I was like, joy, great, let's get drunk one night and then day after. Now let's focus again on next year. So the moments of joy, I was having it twice or three times a year. You know, something would be very successful, a delivery would be successful. You get out of 20 clients in the room, everyone, you know, five or six point, like, you know, like the feedback system, they would give you everyone five star out of 20 people out of six per person. And then one person would put four out of five out of one of the six that they have. What would I focus on for the following week? Why I had the four out of five and not everyone gave me five out of five. So I felt miserable for a week because a person gave me four over. So that was the emotional prison I put myself into which clearly broke. You can break. I think it would break anyone's nervous system if you live like that. So I started studying really intently about what do you need to do. And again I was panicking when I was doing it. It wasn't now, like I'm telling you as a nice, you know, road map, I was like, cool, we go bankrupt. I was in fear. I'm not going to be able to eat anymore. I've destroyed my career and I Thought I lost my mind as well. I said, you know, am I going to be able to experience joy again? Because here, by the way, I couldn't even have conversation with my own family anymore with my friends. I was getting to my friends and I was like shaking and shivering. That's just how bad it was. So, so, so then, now this is to get to your question, which is how do you now do your personal life? Well, after studying like I was reading like three books a day because I needed to get out of it and it took me about two years, by the way, to get out of it completely. And I'm still learning about these things now because it's a constant thing. By the way, number one thing is mental fitness equals equal to physical fitness. So one thing that people don't do nowadays is they don't do mental exercises. They don't do anything to take care of their mindset. They think their mindset just happens. They think they wake up in the morning and one day they're happy, one day they're sad, one day they're pissed off, one day they're frustrated, one day they're joyful and this is just what happens. No, it doesn't. It's your decision. It depends on what you put in your mouth, you know, what you eat, it depends what you think, it depends how you manage your thoughts and all these kind of things. You know, cognitive behavioral therapy. There is like so many things which I put into this book, the pillars of the negotiators mindset, which will put you in a place that you end up actually deciding and experiencing the emotional experience that you want in your life. Now 95% of the times you don't know why we're not going to be machines or robots, but it's certainly better than waking up and saying, hopefully I'm not going to be afraid today, hopefully I'm not going to be anxious is what most people experience instead. Maybe not to the extent that I went through, but in a way everyone does experience it in a less controlled manner. So now you're asking me where do I put my personal life there? Well, now I've pivoted the pyramid. We have what we call the pyramid of the negotiation. Of negotiations, mastery, which is at the top. There is execution, as in how you behave, what you say, how you say it, how you control your verbal, non verbal communication. Because today you see me in a relaxed interview. But if you see me in a negotiation, then I would decide to have different behaviors based on what the negotiation needs me to achieve. Then at the second step, you've got methodology just in the middle. You need to be aware, how do you run a win lose negotiation? How do you run a win win negotiation? How do you do conditional trading? These are a lot of methodological things that people need to learn and they're very important. But at the bottom of it, there is mindset. And now mindset mean your nervous system needs to be as healthy as possible. And this is where personal life comes in. Now, my priorities in life before used to be first the client calls and then everything else. Now my priorities, when I plan my week thoroughly, every single week, on a Saturday or Friday or a Sunday, and typically two weeks in advance, you know, in terms of what's going to happen, what we put in the agenda. The first things that I start from now are the non negotiables, and the non negotiables are sleep. So now I, I put eight and a half hours of sleep a night because I don't want to lose my mind again, to be fair. And by the way, it's not about that or about the scare that I went through is then I started learning about the science of sleep. Great book from Matthew Walker, the site why We Sleep. Excellent book. So sleep is the first thing. Then the second thing I do is I book. In exercise, we tend to do lots of baris classes, like three to four. It's like a boot camp. Three to four classes per week. Then the third thing is transcendental meditation. Two sessions of 22 or 20 minutes each. And also now people might be thinking, yes, but who's got time for this, right? Lots of people might be thinking, you got time for 40 minutes of transcendental meditation. You have one hour and a half for your training. 30 minutes to go, 30 minutes to return. One hour of training, eight hours of sleep. Are you crazy, Alex? No, I'm not. I sell my time for a Living site and my time costs between $3,000 and $20,000 per hour. So me deciding to spend one hour on meditation, it's a cost, it's an opportunity cost. Believe me, I wouldn't do it if I wasn't. If I didn't see 1000% return on investment. So I think one of the greatest thing, if you want to get to the next level for everyone who's listening, is yes, early in your career, more time worked means a bit more money. So your productivity equals your number of hours. But once you get to the next level isn't, you know, like the Jeff Bezos at the Elon Musk they do not work a million hours a day. They cannot, they only have 24 hours like we do. It's about the quality of work that you do. And for me, being successful at what you do and running a successful business or a successful personal life as well comes from first understanding your limitations. As in, you have a body that requires leap, that requires exercise, that requires my case, meditation, and that requires good eating, good healthy habits. And then that also creates your time for personal life. So to end on the personal life now I am quiet, I mean in a lucky spot in a way, because the biggest joy that I get at the moment in terms of personal life is when I see my wife and she's pregnant and we're expecting a baby due very soon in August. So like that's my personal time with us pretty much, you know, when we spend like a Friday night together or a Saturday or a weekend. But I just decided to make time for those kind of things. And I've made my life a little bit like quite kind of very fluid in terms of work and personal life. If I want to take three hours off on a Wednesday and I know I can do it and it's not going to be a massive cost to the business for me to do it, but then I need to work back to back Thursday after Wednesday, the week after, then I will take the three hours off with my wife on a Wednesday, for example. And also I think.

Sorry, go on.

Another important thing I think si is that is one of the pillars of the negotiators mindset is focus management. Is, you know, where do you put your focus on, you know, is it when you're with your friends for two hours, then be with your friends. Do not take your phone and send emails, do not take work calls. If you can enjoy those two hours when you're out for day, you know, spending time with your family on a Sunday or all day on a Sunday or all weekend, for example, then try and focus a thousand percent of that because then that will fulfill you completely. Otherwise what happens is if you, if you, when you know, when you play, play, when you work, work, because if you bring work, you know, into your, your family and you're actually with your wife or with your children or with your partner, with your children there, but you're thinking about work, you're not actually relaxing and your personal life will also pay out of that, you know, it will be a cost for your personal life because people will feel that you're actually not present.

Indeed. Yeah, no, I, I can completely relate to that 100 I so often find myself when I'm, you know, with my wife or with the kids, I can hear my phone going off or I can hear an email coming through or someone will call. And I've had to start, you know, train myself to say, no, it will wait till later tomorrow, whatever it may be, because I so often there was period where, you know, I would be with my wife, but I wouldn't really be with her because I'd be, you know, doing something on my phone, but something, you know, graphics or emails or whatever it may be, messaging guests, but so then you're not with the food, you know, you're not really there. You may as well be in work because you're not balancing your time. So I think balancing that time is massive.

Yes. To finish, I think for me comes not from. I have to make the sacrifice for the business and for, you know, to sacrifice the business for the family. I have to sacrifice the family for the business. It must come from a place even that of gratitude of, you know, I can afford to spend time with my family. I can decide that my business keeps running even when I take, you know, Alpha day off with my child, for example. Like it's, it's a statement of wealth, actually being able to do it and you should enjoy it, such, not as another sacrifice, because otherwise you're feeding again, negative emotions to your nervous system. And that doesn't help you in the long term.

No, no, of course. I mean, that takes us full circle to the very start of the chat where we, where we discussed about being. Having gratitude for what you have to start the day or whatever it may be, you know, to, to appreciate what you have.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Just to kind of round us off nicely. Alex, I would like to kind of hear you mentioned your book. I'd like to hear a little bit more about that and also then hear about, you know, what's next for you and where you see yourself going on now over the next period of your life.

Thank you, Si. So the book is something that we're writing now as we speak, and again, it's a distillery. It's a very simple book I think is not. It's not going to be rocket science and I'm not a writer. Hopefully I'll be able to. To focus the right amount of time and I've set myself this deadline and we're having some, some help, of course, on doing this by completely by July and then having it published over the next couple of. Over the next few weeks. So we can use it for our busiest season as well to help as many people as possible between September and February. So the book is my experience on how I broke my nervous system. You know, how I lived according to someone else's standards, you know, the standards of society and doing by the book all the things that the movies tell you to do or you know, society tells you to do, do, like work hard, don't sleep, make sacrifices, live a miserable life, but achieve more money and these kind of things. And which I hope will be able to relate with or to a very large number of people. And I would hope that, you know, most people have, will not have broken their nervous system as much as I have mine. But then I want to share with them my personal journey of study and research within that from a moment of complete pain and complete sufferance and not having hope and have that, then finding those little gems that we call the pillars of the negotiations. Mind negotiators mindset, you know, like sleep, exercise, ice, you know, cold therapy, focus management, blue light management, dopamine management, all these kind of things that. Transcendental meditation, all these things which now are part of what I do on a day to day basis. And what we also teach during our advanced workshops. Yes, we teach negotiation and execution and the highest levels of that. And we also teach how do you take control of your mindset because that's the strongest thing you can ever do. If you do that, then you'll be able to apply, well, your best methodology and your best execution as a negotiator. Your mindset is all over the place. They can give you the best methodologies, the best tools you're not going to be able to apply. So I'm really keen on getting this out there as a message to the world to help as many people as possible. Because ultimately my mission is to help the universe become more conscious. To help people, you know, take consciousness. We are consciousness existing into bodies. Why do not, you know, live in as conscious way as possible, this life experience that is given to us rather than living on someone else's terms or society's terms, or being trapped into emotions that we don't actually want to experience. How wonderful the world would be if people actually decide what they want to experience. There would be less sufferings, less pain, people would get along better with each other and probably that would also help prevent nuclear wars and solve massive sustainability and pollution problems. So not my book, but that's a lot of the work that to do towards that in the next 50 years or so. So that's, that's the book next thing. What's, what's next for me? I think. So we're going to keep growing the business. We just started a business in the US We've opened an office in the United States. We're hiring people there and we're going to work a lot with private equity companies and their portfolio companies on maximizing their negotiations. And that's, I mean that's a short term plan with, it's, it's going well. But what I'm most interested in, I think if you ask me, what are we going to be in the next 15, 20, 25 years. So I think the commercializer will always exist and I'll always be, it will always be a small boutique company where we have selected negotiators and I'm the chief negotiator supporting the most important negotiations probably will go into a bit more of a political advisory maybe supporting presidents in 15 to 20 years on their most important negotiations. But again, out of wanting to help because I don't think there's a lot of capital there. You know, we're happy to help, you know, in terms of, you know, avoiding massive, averting massive wars, but we'll continue working in, in the private sector. And then one thing that I really want to do as the commercializer becomes more and more stable and I can support in a more punctuated manner as chief negotiator within the business, then I like to use some of the profits that we generate to build more companies, actually truly scalable companies, so to get into building more enterprises. And that probably is going to begin from next year onwards because then with that you can impact the world much more once you have more, more leverage, more capital and more impact. So I'm really interested in increasing our capabilities to impact the world because I think what we're doing now, it's extremely valuable to all the people that we come across with and to all the people that we, whose lives we touch. But there's not enough people, you know, so I think we should get now into the hundreds of millions, you know, like we're now still a boutique, you know, hundreds of, maybe tens of thousands of people, but we should get into the hundreds of millions because we have a positive message to give the world and people can benefit from it.

Amazing. It's, it's really refreshing to hear, I gotta say. And also like, I've genuinely enjoyed our conversation over the last sort of hour and 20 minutes. It's been really, really enjoyable. I feel like I've learned a few things and I got a few things which I'm gonna. Gonna look into. The trans. And then Transcendental Meditation is something which I'm going to look into as well because there I've been looking for something along those lines to, to help me. So there's something which I'm going to do a bit of research on and.

And connect you to, to. To our, to our friends the Foundation. It's. It's. It's a great, it's a great journey where people will do a structured training and they train you how to do Transcendental Meditation and for me is one of the pillars but has made a profound difference to having be able to increase your mental clarity on a day to day basis which when you have a lot of things in your plate, it really helps.

Alex, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I will. I'll drop links to everything which you, you know, which you've got the commercializer, everything else in the description below. Obviously we'll have clips and everything like that. But most of all Alex, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it. Guys, please like subscribe all that good stuff and spread the word and please check out Alex's book and, and the conditionalizer and everything else. Thank you very much, my friend.

Thank you S. I'll see you soon.