Former Hostage Negotiator Reveals How to Pay 70% Less in Any Deal | Scott Walker

So you want to be one of the world's best negotiators.

Here's the thing.

Here's the trade secret. You need to practice it. But by you having the courage to raise it first, that shows a lot of understanding and it helps the rapport building with the other side to go, you know what, even though this might be to Scott's detriment, he's raising this. You've got to get yourself into the right place first emotionally, because if you're rankled, if you're irritated or frustrated with this person, that is not gonna end well, right? So you've got to be the right person to have the conversations where you may not be.

Techniques or tools or tips have you got for somebody thinking about how to get it done?

There's a number of things there. First of all is, I'm Scott Walker, and I'm a kidnap for ransom and extortion negotiator. And I've spent probably the best part of 20 years having a ringside seat into what makes human beings think, feel, and act, particularly in times of stress and overwhelm and challenge and conflict, a bit like the world we're living in right now. And I picked up from that, it doesn't matter where I was in the world, what industry or sector we're supporting, we do things pretty much very similar. And I also realized over the years, actually, there's so much relevance to everyday business and life. And that's what I spent the best part of my time doing. And now I kind of apply that in the corporate world and sort of negotiation workshops and in coaching based on all those insights and tools and techniques that equally work from trying to get somebody to put the gun down and release the hostages through to getting a long-term client or customer for your business.

And I, I remember when I was embarking on my coaching journey and I was doing some NLP training, coaching course, the guy at the beginning said, don't try this on your wife. So I was just curious as you were talking there, I was thinking, do your kids tidy up the playroom and do you negotiate with your wife or do you just leave that all at the door?

Well, when the kids were younger, like primary school, there'd be times where I'd get the phone call, It was always the most inconvenient time. I'd have to go and I could never be more than 3 hours away from an airport. And I was saying to the kids, come on, Daddy's got to go, got to get out the pool. And they're like, yeah, Daddy's going to go and chase pirates. But over the years, and obviously I've taught them everything I know, but now they are wise to it and they are the only people on the planet who know which buttons to press. As far as my Better of the half goes, she just goes, don't try any of that negotiating shit on me. Okay, good, good.

It's the same in your house as it is in mine then, right? Um, right. What, Scott, what, um, what is it that you believe that either you think the rest of the world think is bonkers, or you think the stuff the rest of us believe is nonsense?

The ones that I think of the most, particularly now the way the world is, is that conflict is not a dirty word.

Okay. Right.

And what I mean by that is so many times I see it in business deals or in private life where people are looking to try and avoid ultimately having difficult conversations, which is all conflict is. And I remember, uh, in the, in the kidnapping days, you know, 300 cases, nearly 20 years, pretty much every major continent you can think of. It was the same thing. Yeah, we had to at some point have what we called a conflict call with the bad guys. This is where they'll say, okay, we want $10 million for Dom, but your company or your family are only going to pay $1 million. So I need to, I need to manage their expectations about what they're going to get. So I'm going to have to have, I'm going to embrace a load of conflict. And when I would get on the phone with them or get somebody to do it, because the language might've been an issue, we had to go, well, you're not going to get $10 million. We're going to make an offer of maybe $250,000. And they'd come back with mock executions, these threats and other demands. But we just had to kind of hold our own, hold our, hold our nerve. And actually 80% of my time on a case was spent dealing with my own side, having these difficult conversations. And we actually called it the crisis within the crisis. Imagine in, in your business, dealing with the customer or the client is relatively straightforward, but most leaders spend their time, effort, and energy and focus Spin on dealing with all the internal politics, egos, competing demands, silo thinking. And so I just realized over the years that we've just got to embrace conflict. It's difficult conversations that need to be had, but it doesn't mean you have to be belligerent and rude and obnoxious. You have to ground yourself and be centered yourself. You can't be emotionally dysregulated. You need to be super clear. You need to get to the point, be candid. And if more people did that, I think people's businesses would be in a far better place for sure.

Fab. We'll, we'll, we'll dig into that in a little bit more detail. Um, I'm gonna— yeah, what's, what's number 2?

Number 2 is we don't need a trigger warning. We need to manage the triggers better. Because is it fair to say—

Stop. No, no, just like, well, let's give me number 3 and number 4, and then we'll dive in.

Okay.

So let me do it. So we've done conflict is not a dirty word. You don't need a trigger warning. What else? Oh yeah, don't rush to problem solve.

Okay.

And then the 4th one would be when we're negotiating, remember, it's not about you. Okay.

I think let's just start with, let's keep going with number 4 then. So when you're negotiating, it's not about you. Oh, I'll tell you what though. I was about to ask you this a little bit. I just, because you were saying there, people would say, we want $10 million and I'm going to give you $200 grand. Did anyone die? Did anyone die?

Okay. Touch wood. In 300+ cases, and which included things like piracy and extortion as well, every single person I dealt with came back. There's a, there's a 9— industry-wide for 50 years, there's a 93% chance of hostages coming back through a negotiation. Not 100%, but 93% in the most unregulated, ungoverned, dangerous industry in the world. And that's why—

That means the industry, that means that's a better win rate than the All Blacks. When you look at salespeople and they've got a 30% close rate, which might come back to the whole, you are fantastically well-trained in a super niche, it's only professionals are playing, whereas most salespeople are complete amateurs and have no training and are messing about. So I was just, I was— that is, that isn't the fact that yours, that your win rate is 100% and the industry average is 93% are just staggering numbers, really.

Here's the thing you mentioned in your book about the importance of specializing. If you want the best sales team, they need to specialize in closing. They don't want to be doing all the admin that comes with it. But likewise, in negotiation, if you want to be one of the world's best negotiators, here's the thing. Here's the trade secret. You need to practice it. But life gives us opportunity all day long. I'm not talking, you don't have to be doing the multi-billion mergers and acquisitions. We're not talking about that necessarily. It could be everyday stuff where you need to ultimately influence and persuade somebody. And the gold medal of it all is to bring about cooperation and collaboration. And as I said, life gives you plenty of practice to do that.

I, I've got another thing that just popped into my head, which you might have at your fingertips and you might not, but because you had the other data at your fingertips, 350 people in your career, how much ransom money did you pay to get those 350 people back in total?

Do you know?

Do you have a swag at it?

It'd be in the millions. However, it's A tiny, it's probably less than 30% of the actual total demand, initial demand.

Right. Okay.

So, so here's the thing in negotiation, most people, they'll set the bar quite high and no one really expects to pay that or get that. And so we would have to manage expectations, as I said, and come up with what we called This target settlement figure. Where do we want to end up? And it's just like in business. Where do you want, at the end of this negotiation, when you walk away, where do you want to end up? It might not be exactly where you wanted or be the perfect outcome, but everybody's got to walk away from the table feeling as if they've got a decent deal. It might not be the deal they desired, But everybody can walk away heads held high because the last thing you want is that classic 11th hour sabotage deal breaker where you're just about to sign and they go, oh, actually, yeah, can we just extend payment terms? Or can we just do this? Or can we just put this in? And in my case previously, it'd be, can we have 10 Rolex watches? And it's like, mate, we've been negotiating for 6 months. No, you can't.

So look, back to these things, right? So it's not about you. What's that? What's that?

It's a cliché of seek first to understand before being understood, right? And that's important because rarely in a negotiation are people going to come together and go, yeah, this is what I want. This is what I'm going to be willing to pay. Okay, great. Let's sign that off. There's normally going to be some back and forth. But if I can spend the time demonstrating and reflecting back to you my understanding of where you are coming from, what's going on inside your head, if I can get inside your head and work out what's driving you, what your beliefs, values, rules, perceived obstacles, and I'll tell you how we can do that in a second. If, if I can demonstrate understanding, it's gonna diminish reduce, dissipate any kind of maybe friction or reluctance for you to move forward in the process. Yeah.

Do you have any sense?

So if, um, if you think as if I'm taking too long to deliver on my end of the bargain here, I might actually bring that elephant Screaming. I don't know if elephants scream, but anyway, bring the elephant that's in the room front and center. Again, why don't you deal with this thing that is likely to come back and bite both of us in the backside later on? You know, and you know what, Dom? I reckon it seems like that you think I'm taking too long on my end of the bargain here. I'm taking too long to produce the report, whatever it is. And then you're gonna go yes, no, or maybe, or something else completely. But it doesn't matter because I'm doing what we call an empathy loop, is I'm actually taking the time to go first by trying to understand you. And ultimately, all you want to, to, to experience in a negotiation, you wanna feel seen, heard, and understood.

All right.

And if I can do that, And this is not some pink, fluffy, woolly thing here. This, this stuff works in high stakes as well as every day. And it's the height of arrogance for me to assume what influences you. So I can't influence you unless I already know what influences you. And the way I do that is by taking the time.

Uh, do you know what? It's, we were chatting before we were recording about Is sales and coaching and negotiation, is it all the same thing? And you said, look, it's conversation with purpose. And as you were talking, I was just thinking, we have Matt Dixon on who wrote the Challenger Sale book years ago. And then his latest book was The Jolt Effect. And 60% of sales opportunities don't go forward, not because the person doesn't think it's the right deal for the company, but for them, they think it's too risky. And so I was just thinking that the thing you were just talking about, taking the time to understand what's in it for them, is absolutely how 60% of the time when the client says yes, the deal doesn't get signed. And it's for exactly that reason. It's like there's— it's the things, exactly the tools you're talking about are in that. How do you unlock that?

Yeah, it's being devil's advocate. If you were the other side, if you were a counterparty, in this conversation and you really wanted to mess things up or put something in the way, a spanner in the works, what would that be? And so for the example you just gave there, I'd say, do you know what, Dom? I'm sensing that you think this is too risky for you. And then when I say this to people in the workshops I run, they go, well, aren't you planting seeds in their head? Aren't you trying to sow doubt?

It's already there.

They might not even— they might not have even said it themselves to themselves. There's just— they're feeling a resistance, they don't know why.

And it'll be there. I'll tell you what, it will be there. It will. I guarantee I've done it too many times. It will be there somewhere. But by you having the courage to raise it first, that shows a lot of understanding and it helps the rapport building with the other side to go, you know what, even though this might be to Scott's detriment, He's raising this and then, and then what we want to do, you know, this from the coaching world, we want to align with them and isolate the issue. So be okay. Other than the perceived risk for you here, is there anything else that is likely to prevent you from saying yes today and meaning it?

Mm-hmm.

And they'll go, uh, no, no, it's just that. Great. So now, you know, then you can kind of, from a coaching perspective, dig a little deeper as to what is about the risk, et cetera, et cetera. That you can kind of then come up with a solution to solve the problem.

So, um, that was, it's not about you. What about the, um, don't rush to solve the problem?

Yeah, the biggest problem, biggest problem I saw with that in negotiation was something would happen, there'd be a crisis, it could be a kidnapping or it could be some kind of commercial setting. And particularly busy leaders who are used to making fast decisions, quite high stakes decisions in day-to-day life. Like, okay, this is what we need to do. We need to do this. We need to do that. If you, if you do that, we'll do this. And it feels that action imperative, which a lot of newly promoted leaders like to demonstrate them doing. And there's a danger, as I said, you could get initial buy-in, initial yes. But unless you've taken the time to be ideally in the best possible place yourself to make the decision, rather than coming from a place of fear or lack or what you're looking to lose, et cetera. And you've taken the time to actually understand what's the real issue. You know, we were speaking before we started recording about with coaching, the first 2, 3 things that a client brings aren't the real thing that needs to be improved.

Yeah.

It's the same when you're making problems too quickly, not all the time, but in the big decisions, you might actually be missing what the real issue that needs to be solved here, and you're actually solving the wrong problem. And so just by taking, we used to have a saying, buy time in the negotiation world. We just need to buy ourselves time. And what that does is that allows people to become far more emotionally regulated. And it allows the real issues to present themselves rather than us rushing off, putting in loads of time, effort, and resources into solving something that probably, just with a bit of time, doesn't actually need resolving, or we can come back to it later on.

Okay.

Um, and then no trigger warnings. What's, what's that?

Yeah, you don't need a trigger warning. Because is it just me, or is it fair to say that life is not going to go according to how you want it to? People are not going to say the thing you want them to say or do the things you want them to do. And so therefore, if we are desperately trying to control other people and the world around us to fit in with our model of the world, our map of how we think things should be, we're going to be severely disappointed.

Yes.

And anxious. Far better for us to develop the skills and the techniques to go, do you know what? No matter what happens, I'm going to develop this resilience. You know, resilience is not something that you hashtag resilience on a t-shirt or mug, and then all of a sudden you can cope with all of life's problems. The only way you become resilient is by doing hard things and overcoming challenges and being uncomfortable. And actually, I think that the successful leaders and successful negotiators I've worked with have all been really good at this. They've been able to withstand the uncertainty, the hot buttons being pressed, et cetera. They're able to cope with that real adrenaline or cortisol dump of chemicals whenever they meet those situations or those people. And, you know, I think it was Viktor Frankl. I know he gets quoted a lot, you know, between stimulus and response, there's a gap. And that gap about how you respond rather than emotionally react is the only thing you can control. And so I'd say to my kids, just because you read something on social media, okay, you can feel angry or frustrated with it, but then work with that. Get curious. It's okay. Well, what is it about it that's making you angry and frustrated? And then just let it go. Let it work its way through rather than thinking, well, they need to be stopped from saying these things. And it doesn't mean that you're condoning or acquiescing what's being said or done. It just means you're not letting it control your life or the quality of your life.

Let me interrupt the conversation just for a minute because I don't want you to miss this. My new book, Mind Your Fucking Business, is out on Amazon. If you're thinking yet another business book, I think you're wrong. This is actually a blueprint to cutting through the noise and achieving unparalleled success for you. It's based on 10 years of business coaching, spotting similar problems that people have had, and coming up with real-world solutions. If it's supercharging sales, if it's mastering talent acquisition, building a powerhouse brand, cultivating a company culture that breeds success, then this book is a ticket to your transformative journey. It's filled with practical tools and frameworks that I use every single day with my clients as part of their coaching program. If you want to take your business from good to great, look, you can go to Amazon and you can buy it, or you can click the link in the show notes and head over to monkhouseandcompany.com and I'll give you a copy. I'll send it to you today. I'll send you a copy for free. I want to help you build Do you know what?

I was listening to your book preparing for our conversation today, and I thought to myself, in what circumstances do I behave in a way that I wish I had more control? And I look back, either actually at work, not so much, but certainly when we were yacht— we used to have a racing yacht and spent 10 years yacht racing on the Solent. Things would go wrong, and in the moment I would instinctively blame the boat. Blame somebody else, and and I do that, and I do that at home as well. And so it's just how do you? And so I was so I so not only am I shit at that, but I was just thinking, did you end up in this job because you have a natural ability to control your emotion? Did you know that before you took the job on, or did you have to work? Or you just as shit as everybody else, and you had to work out learn how to do it? Like is it because quite often people end up in jobs that. they're a natural fit for? And, you know, there are jobs that, you know, some, you know, I, I don't think I could ever be an accountant or a lawyer, like the attention to detail thing. I just never would have got through training.

So what? I think good negotiators are very EQ, a good EQ kind of score. They're very good at emotional intelligence, relating to people. reading between the lines, just staying cool, calm, and collected more often than not. They're not really high highs and low lows. And, but a lot of it, it's, it's like a muscle. It's developing that muscle memory.

And hey, and, and practice.

And practice. It's, it's getting the flying hours. It's like you didn't become a great, um, sailor driver of a yacht, whatever the term is.

Sailor, probably. Yeah.

On the first go. When you're racing, it's like you've got to be doing that for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And that's the same in terms of being in it, putting yourself in a position, sat across or on the phone with somebody who is not doing what you want them to do. And in fact, if anything, Is looking to try and aggravate you. And the kidnapping case, so many times where, as I said, they're doing a mock execution. They're literally threatening to kill the people unless I did something that I know we weren't going to do and we couldn't do.

Mm-hmm.

And so the client and the family are looking at me, and if I'm flapping, if I'm shouting back at the kidnappers, and I can tell you about a case where the client did that.

Later.

Um, it doesn't end well. And so I, over the years, I developed a technique that I learned in my very first case where I actually threatened the poor family. The parents of the, of this, of their son had been taken hostage, and I lost my cool. I lost my rag. I allowed myself to become dysregulated. I talk about it in the book, and I ended up turning around to these poor grieving parents going, What's wrong with you people? Why can't you just listen to what I'm saying? It's common sense. If you did, we'll get your son back. As it is, you're gonna make it worse. And he'd had the shortest career. My good friend Steve, who was a bit more experienced, he's like Yoda. He put his hand on my shoulder, squeezed it really gently, and that was enough to interrupt my pattern. I thought, oh, okay. What's, what's going on? Then I saw a masterclass and how he did it, and that was the start of nearly 20 years of practicing this technique of— I'll call it the immediate action drill. And it's simply a case of imagine you're on the riverbank and the river that's flowing in front of you, that's your emotion. And sometimes life happens, pushes you in the river. That's fine. You get out, dry yourself off. To carry on with your day. But occasionally what happens is we get nudged in the river and then we go for a swim and then we allow ourselves to get carried off downstream, out to sea, drowning in the waves of overwhelm. And so I realized that actually we need to kind of just stand there or sit there, feel our feet, feel my feet, the soles of the feet on the floor. Interrupt the pattern, which is usually a way of like maybe breathing, just change our breathing. Change our focus. That's the first step, interrupt the pattern. The second step was to feel the feeling, but not the story, to ride the wave. This is the hardest bit. I mentioned earlier about the cortisol and the adrenaline. For 90 seconds, that you can't stop that. That's going to be pumping through your body.

Absolutely.

But what happens is, again, I must be, I can't be the only one here. Who in those 90 seconds, I'm the one who then presses send on the email or says the words I wish I could get back. As if, why did I say that? No, no, no, I can't unsend it now. So we need to kind of ride the wave, ride that cortisol wave. And once that's dissipated, then we move to step 3, which is asking better questions. As in, okay, what's the real issue here? What's the opportunity? What don't I know? What am I missing, et cetera? And those are questions, what would you have asked whilst you're riding that Corriza away?

Yes. Well, it's, oh, doing some conflict workshops with clients, do those from time to time. And COVID was a great time to do it. Because people could passionately disagree about certain elements of COVID Should you wear a mask or shouldn't you or something like that, which was great. And you could probably find 2 people in a room and get them to disagree. But what quickly you can demonstrate to people is they stop listening very quickly. They just start articulating and nobody's listening to each other because the red mist comes down and you're— it's like, if I just say this louder, the other person, but you know, Experience is that that never works, but somehow it's an inbuilt pattern. Why did you end up in this thing then? So you were in the Met Police as a detective. How did you end up as a hostage negotiator? Is there a waiting list and you put your name forward or?

You know, I always say this. You know when you're at school and you have a chat with a careers advisor and they say, Dom, what do you want to be? Do you want to be a train driver, plumber, lawyer, kidnap ransom negotiator?

Well, I didn't get that either.

Um, and so usually it's our second or third career, people who do it. But I was very fortunate in the police. Yeah, as you said, I was at Scotland Yard for 16 years, and the last probably 4 or 5 years of that, I'd been promoted a couple of times. Uh, I was a detective inspector, but the only kind of danger excitement that I was involved in at that point was trying to avoid paper cuts on the crime reports I was supervising. And I bumped into a colleague of mine in the canteen at one of the police stations and he just looked full of life. And I said to him, what's up with you? And he said, well, I've just spent the last 3 days negotiating the release of hostages from this Albanian drugs gang. And I'm like, I want some of that. You know, that's what I want. He goes, okay, well, I'll put you in touch. And so I had to apply and I went through a selection process. And then you get mentored with a far more experienced Yoda-type figure. But then most of my experience, and I left the police and I went to work for the United Nations in the Middle East for a while. But then most of my kidnap negotiation experience took place in the private sector. So I left the police on the Thursday and on the following Monday, I joined this consultancy firm in the City of London. And they said, okay, Scott, we're going to give you like the world's best training course the first week. Um, and world's best training course was 3 live kidnaps that I was kind of parachuted into along with some, like, proper, you know, Abu Sayyaf terrorist group and Nigerian armed kidnappers on another continent. And it was like, ah, baptism of fire. But again, it's one of those things where, yes, you have like an innate personality type that is genuinely interested in people, etc. But you, you, you have an ability to observe and learn and absorb all this great stuff that people far more experienced than you are doing. It's just same with sales, you know, you watch and you listen to great salespeople and you'll go, okay, how, what do they say? How do, what's their inflection like? How, what, how do they overcome those objections? Then you practice it. You make it your own, of course, and that's how you get better and better and better and better. So that's how I got into it.

And so how many of the 350 were in the private sector?

300? Well, I'd say at least 300 were in the private sector.

Okay.

Well, because it's like you watch a detective show on TV and 10 people get killed in the space of the show and you think, that's more people than got killed in that county or in the last 10 years, let alone in the last week. So it's not like everybody, you're not getting kidnapped every week in London, are you?

No, there's about one a week. Right.

Okay.

But just to reassure people, if you're the average law-abiding citizen, the chances of you getting kidnapped in the UK are negligible. It was normally what we call bad on bad.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Whereas in the private sector, so Central and Latin America, um, Sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria, Somalia, Middle East, Asia.

That's all right. So, uh, I get kidnapped in Central America. Why do they call a company in London to fly you out to get— like, is that—

Is that how— because actually Central and South America is really quick, really, really, really super quick kidnapping. So we would have people based out there permanently who could be, um, on scene. But ultimately I didn't need to be in the same country.

Uh, okay.

Negotiations, or where the kidnappers were. In fact, I was never going to get face to face with them anyway because I value my life. I want to come home at the end of the day. Um, but we would sometimes send a negotiator or 2 to the head office to deal with lots and lots of corporates.

Um, and so is this— is it— what's the— just help me understand the economics of this. So do people have insurance policy and they're claiming on it and you're the thing, or that might be the corporate thing, but if If I'm a high net worth individual, is it the same thing? People have got insurance, and so you are working for one of the world's largest providers of this service?

Yeah, good question. I should have explained that. The ecosystem, how it works is most of the kidnap for ransom negotiations that take place are linked to insurance. So say you're big companies, who've got a factory in West Africa or do lots of business travel to Latin America or the Middle East, they will have, but it's not disclosed for obvious reasons. They will have something called a special risks insurance policy. And if somebody gets taken, business traveler gets taken, just like when you claim on your house or car insurance, you phone a number, a hotline.

Mm-hmm.

That gets routed through the insurance company 24/7 and then out Eventually to me.

Mm-hmm.

I then speak to be like the risk manager maybe, or legal or whatever. One like the director, usually kind of C-suite or country director. I would then give some initial advice and then myself and a colleague would fly out to sit with you, Mr. C-suite exec or country director, and form, help you form part of the crisis management team. And then I would stay with you until we would get your colleague back. So we would advise on the strategy, the comms, media, how you're going to manage it, all the logistics of it, what we're going to say and how we're going to say it. And also we might send somebody to the families, them support them, and also maybe somebody to, um, Support and help with the logistics of actually getting around some money to the bad guys.

Yeah.

Like the big companies like Shell, BP, like the big FTSE 100 companies, a lot of them would self-insure. So say if one of those companies did need our services, they would just phone us up and go, we'll sign a contract, pay a day rate, and can we have your— cover a number of your guys for X amount of time? And, um, and high net worth families would do the same, do quite a lot of that where they would just bring us in or we'd be on the retainer, uh, in case they got taken. And we got told on day one when I joined the company that more people have been to the International Space Station than do this job full-time. Now, it was a great ego boost. I don't know if it's true, but I worked out, okay, there's probably no more than 30 Certainly negotiators doing this full-time anywhere in the world properly. Yeah, I'd say probably more people have been to the space station.

And by the time you'd done 300, you were at the top of your fucking game, aren't you? And then you quit, right? That's like playing for the Premier League. Do you get too old to do this shit, or—

No, I was one of the youngest ones, to be honest. Um, I— a couple of reasons. One, I was away from home all the time, didn't see my kids a lot. Ironically, I'm probably away from home more now, but it's on fun, you know, delivering keynotes or workshops. I'm staying in nicer hotels and earning more money. Um, but, and so, but also I come to a point where I go, do you know what, I just need a little bit of a break because the tempo is quite high.

Yeah.

And, but I thought, actually, do you know what, so many crossovers To real life, to, to the business world. Somebody said, well, you should write a book. I went, okay, not really. I'd spent 20 years in the shadows, so to speak, not really online or anything like that. And they just turned around to me one day and said, um, that's really selfish of you. Oh, excuse me. You've been really selfish. I was like, why is that? And they said, well, you've got all this knowledge, all this experience. And you're keeping it to yourself. No one's asking you to send any or share any super secret techniques, but all the ways you influence and persuade and bring about cooperation and collaboration, have difficult conversations in high-stakes life-or-death scenarios where if you messed up, people died, and they can apply them to create a better workplace. What, why wouldn't, why would you not share that? I was like, okay, fair point. So I wrote a book. And, um, Order Out of Chaos, which is essentially my job title. That was my job, to bring order out of chaos. And, um, it did better than I or anybody expected. Came Sunday Times bestseller, which then opened up loads of podcasts and media requests, New York Times, Forbes, et cetera, Harvard Business Review. And then I've not looked back really since, since then.

Fab. And so look, before we jump onto some book recommendations, if I'm listening to this, I think I was saying to you before, I spend a lot of time with clients saying, look, how do we increase the level of constructive conflict in their workplace, particularly CEOs and leadership teams? I do think that there is a strong correlation between the type of people who are the sort of visionary entrepreneur who start a company and the type of people who find it particularly hard to have difficult conversations. I don't know why, but that seems to be that those 2 groups of people really do overlap. So if people are thinking, I've got to have this difficult conversation, it's really timely that I'm listening to Scott, how should they approach this difficult conversation? What Um, techniques or tools or tips have you got for somebody thinking about how to get it done?

Yeah, I know there's a number of things there. First of all is you've got to get yourself into the right place first emotionally, because if you're rankled, if you're irritated or frustrated with this person, that is not gonna end well, right? So yeah, you've got to be the right person to have the conversations where you may not be.

Mm-hmm.

And you know, that's where the ego comes into play. You know, well, just because I'm the boss, I should be able to have this conversation, but there could be somebody far better. So first of all, you need to make sure that you're, you've got your own mindset and emotions squared away. And then as alluded to at the beginning, fast is good. Candid is good. Clear is even better. If you can be clear and candid with that person from a place of, you know, regulated emotion, you're going to cut, you're going to cut to the chase. None of this feedback sandwich, none of this around the houses, because a person's sitting there thinking, what's the point of this meeting? Right. The reason I called you here today, Dom, is actually we've been through this before. And so you've had some coaching, trying to improve your performance. It's still not cutting it. Unfortunately, we've come to the point where we're going to have to let you go. There you go, 20 seconds. Then we can come all the niceties and how you're going to exit the company and all of that. But it's like, Dom, do you know what? You've been a great asset. It's like people can see through that. So being candid, being clear, and being direct with it and managing yourself is key. And that's the first thing I'd say. The second thing is you've got 2 responsibilities here, not only to have difficult conversations, But to, to increase and improve the conversations in your workplace. First one is we think we're better listeners than what we are. So we need to listen on what I call level 5. Talk about in the book, level 5. Level 1 is you're just listening for the gist, or you're waiting to argue back your point to prove you're right, they're wrong. But when we get to levels 4 and 5, we're listening about, listening for emotions, but ultimately point of view. What is this person really telling me here? Because people won't share things with you unless it's really important. And so, okay, so they're saying one thing, but what's driving it? And if we listen at level 5, almost for what's not being said, remember, it's not about you. We need to first seek first to understand. The other side, well, like it's a client, customer, or colleague, they will give you their pain points, their issues, their challenges. And if you listen properly, they will give you a bridge to a solution that all you've got to do is, well, here's a solution. How does this sound? And, but you've already done the hard work by actually getting underneath the surface. And if you can somehow reflect that back your understanding of it to them, you've got the gold medal. And actually, people are more likely to want to work with you long-term as a result of that.

Yeah, I think it can work. I mean, I've ended up getting rid of people and then they've invited me to their weddings. Because if you do it, I think if you do it right, it's not, people feel as though it was inevitable and it was on them, it wasn't you. You weren't being mean or vindictive or, or whatever it was. It's like you just teed it up right.

And you mentioned the All Blacks earlier, and we're going to come on to the book recommendations.

Uh, go, go, go on to the book recommendations.

Legacy, you know, the book about the All Blacks. Yeah, I've got it here. James Kerr's book.

I've had him, I've had him on the show. I just think it's— I think I read the book and then I got him on the show. It's just fab, isn't it?

And I think Hugh took one of their lines as their business motto. Vision was, don't be a dick. Just don't. I remember you got like this stick on LinkedIn. People go, no, it's outrageous to have that behind your reception desk in your office. It's really insulting. But here's the thing, everybody knows what it means, right? And if, you know, if you, if you want to negotiate and sell something, or you want to get a queue of people waiting to come and do business or come and work for you, don't be a dick. You know, people need to feel as if they're seen, heard, and understood. And ultimately, you've got their best interests at heart. So there's—

Well, there's another one I like because one of their other values is stab me in the belly, not the back.

Yeah.

Which I like, which goes to this conversation thread we've been having all the way through about, you know, direct, be direct, be straightforward. Um, don't avoid the hard, hard conversations. What else you got? What are the What other— what else you got?

There's 2. Um, there's one, uh, Tony Robbins, um, Awaken the Giant with him, right? I actually spent 4 years working for him.

Okay.

I wasn't involved in kidnapping cases. I was one of his business coaches. And, um, I actually picked up that book when I was 18.

So what— hang on, hang on. Before— what— how are you— Tony Robbins, world-famous coach, but you were coaching him. What were you coaching Tony on?

Let me just I wasn't coaching him. I was coaching his clients, his business. Right.

Okay. Right. So he was— so Tony Robbins wins a deal. Some of those people end up on your— at your door.

Those who did not want to spend between $1 and $5 million a year being coached by him personally and wait 6 years, they got Scott Walker instead. Okay. And the thing is, the reason why I enjoyed doing that, just as an aside, Similar skills and techniques. People are people, right? And with nearly 3,000 coaching hours working for him, again, just on top of all the kidnapping stuff, it was this exposure to human beings and psychology and how we think, feel, and act, how you persuade and influence and cooperate and collaborate. And because most of the clients were business clients, very quickly I understood actually there's only probably half a dozen issues that affect any kind of business. And if you don't keep on top of those, then your business is going to be screwed. And again, there's a real, real-world, tangible experience of getting, you know, of leveraging the experience of, you know, one of the world's greatest coaches, really.

What's your, what's the last one?

Last one has to be, it's an oldie, but it's a golden, which is How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Oh yeah.

Dale Carnegie.

Yeah.

I read it again last year on holiday and I thought, there's a reason this book has been around for so long. It's just every page is golden around how you actually speak to people, how you converse, how you look into the swaying, which is what it's all about. And it stood the test of time. And if there's only one book people want to read, I would recommend that. I mean, I've given copies to my kids, I've given to clients sometimes. It was one of my own books, of course, but I think it's a great read. It really is.

I loved it. I avoided reading it for a long time because I thought it felt like a cliché, and I thought I don't, but I thought it was fab. I've read it a couple of times, and I think it's a great book to read if you realize you need to influence people, but the idea of saying sales makes you feel like Del Boy and Rodney. It's because it's, it's, you know, how to influence people without sales, the S-word. Um, so Scott, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting today, mate. Thanks for coming on.

Likewise. Thanks for inviting me on.