Confidence Classic: Master Negotiation to Get What You Deserve with Chris Voss, Alex Carter & Molly Fletcher

The more that we prepare and understand what the person that we're negotiating with is worried about, the more that we can hopefully drive connection.

And at the end of the day, negotiation's really just a conversation, right?

I found that the more that I stepped into discomfort, the stronger I got and the more confident I got. I believe confidence is built through action. It's a muscle that we strengthen by taking action. Can't sit at your desk and go, I'm gonna be more confident. I mean, It's not a bad thing to tell yourself, but you've got to do things and take action to strengthen that confidence muscle.

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When I think of negotiation, I think of more at a war table or a car dealer, like we were discussing earlier off air, you know, really intense traditional type of negotiation settings. However, what I really like about what you're doing is your approach to negotiation is in a very different way that can be taken on by people who might be intimidated by those more traditional approaches. And I know in your materials, you talk about. It's something that someone who might see themselves as more quiet or more timid, which I'm not quiet or timid. However, when I was reading about your book and about you, there was plenty of times in my career that I knew I deserved more. I would pitch myself for chief revenue officer and I'd be told no. And I'd go back and be upset and angry and frustrated and sad and then let it go and just go back to work. Heather, you know, I really wouldn't stand up and get the results in the window of time for the job that I was doing that I deserved and I warranted, I'd end up kind of walking away. For me, it took years to, you know, gain that confidence, years to have that experience and expertise, years of people telling me, gosh, you should be getting paid more, you should be in a higher level, till I finally pushed hard enough to, to get it done. What do you say to those people, those younger versions of me that, you know, are just kind of afraid to push too far?

Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing I would say is that negotiation is not what you think it is. It is not the transactional back and forth over money. It's so much more than the money conversations. And this, Heather, goes back to, you know, we think like, how do we think about negotiation? I was in Hawaii on my honeymoon, okay, with my husband in a kayak on the Wailua River, and a guide up ahead of us turned back and said, please negotiate your kayaks to the left so we can hit that beach over there. And that was the moment I realized, you know, when I'm negotiating a kayak toward a beach, that seems simple. What am I doing? I'm steering. And so the first thing I want your audience to know is that negotiation is just any conversation where you are steering a relationship. And if you struggle with confidence, if you struggle to value yourself appropriately, it means that you've neglected the most important relationship to negotiate in your life. Which is the one you have with yourself. Negotiation does not start the moment you call somebody about that, you know, CMO position. It starts at home with us. And so when we negotiate that internal conversation, and the way you do it is by asking yourself questions. If you know the right questions to ask yourself, you're gonna have that clarity and confidence you need when you go into the room or get on the Zoom with somebody else. That's the lesson I wish I had known when I was younger. And it's the number one reason that I too would give up or sell myself short.

You're so right. And it took me, gosh, till I was in my early 40s to start figuring that out. And then once you're aware, you can start, you know, accessing information like your book to address, you know, what those issues are. For those people, what are the questions that you want them to ask themselves?

Yeah, can I start with one question that You know, the title of this podcast is Creating Confidence. I'd like to give your listeners one question that they should be asking starting immediately for every negotiation they have. I want you to sit down with yourself and ask yourself this question: how have I handled this successfully in the past? The way to create confidence is to remember confidence, to access confidence. Do you know research shows that if you go into a negotiation having thought about a prior success, you're more likely to perform better. So simply asking this question is gonna help you. But the thing is, it does more because it's a data generator. It helps you remember your strengths, your strategies that have worked for you in the past, and most often are transferable and you could use here. And here's the question that people are thinking right now, Heather. They're driving or they're cleaning their house and they're thinking, Alex, that's great, but what if I'm trying to do something I've never done before? Let's take an example like marketing a book during a pandemic, okay? So we'll take that example and let's assume this person has never published a book before and certainly not in a pandemic. This is me. So mid-market is 20 to 20.

I just wanna make that clear that everyone knows that Alex, you had not published a book before. This was your first book ever. And it all of a sudden happened in a pandemic. Okay.

And it happened in a pandemic.

Okay.

So mid-March, I'm saying to myself, okay, I've never done this before, but what do I need to do here to be successful? Let me break this down into its component parts. And I thought, okay, I need to communicate my message to a large number of people. I need to bring them on board for this message and recruit them to my team so that they too will spread the message to other people. Because I knew I wasn't going to have news or much media. Media, right? And I wasn't going to be able to go out on tour. So what I had was a network, and I thought, okay, when have I needed to marshal a lot of people like this before? And I remembered that I ran my husband's campaign for local office 5 years ago, and I did it by looking at a map of our town, and there were 21 districts. And I looked at that and I thought, you know, I know a mom in about 18 of those districts. And I invited those moms to my house and I served them wine and dinner. And I said, each of you is my captain for this district, and you're going to help me go out and get the word and set up playdates for parents to come and meet my husband. And Heather, we blew out a 20-year incumbent 2 to 1 running off the line. And so I thought, okay, I need a bunch of captains. And so I reached out to everybody I knew who lived all over the country. I made people captains for different cities, and I created a 650-person launch team to go out and be ambassadors for this book. I don't have a huge social media following. You know, I'm just a professor. There are lots of professors who write books, but I'm great at leveraging my strong relationships. I did it before and I did it again for this.

And that's really so much of what you talk about is about is in the art of leveraging relationships, the art of deepening relationships, whether it be with yourself or with these people in your personal life or people at work or people that you have toxic relationships with. It's all about how can you deepen that relationship? How do you suggest people do that?

Yeah, so one of the ways, you know, if we're talking about deepening your relationship with yourself, I tell you to ask yourself the right questions. So there are 5 of them in that first section of Ask for More. It's called the mirror. And those are the questions you ask yourself. One of the key ones is, how have I handled this successfully in the past? Then we move on to 5 great questions that you can ask somebody else. And the first question in that section, it's two magic words that people should be using first on every occasion. I don't care if it's with your kid, your spouse, colleagues, or it's a deal you're trying to land. And the two words are, tell me. You know, so often, Heather, we ask really small questions in our day-to-day life. I might ask my daughter, did you have a good day at school? Right? I might go into a client meeting and say, can I show you my pitch deck? Those are yes or no questions. Or Heather, I could call somebody and say, would you like a digital event? Right? If I call somebody and say that, would you like a digital event with me? That's a yes/no question. And what is the easiest answer for them to give? No, no, especially during a pandemic, right? When their kids are crawling all over them on the conference call. Instead, imagine that I call up and I say, Heather, tell me what your company's going through right now. Tell me your biggest needs for the next 6 months and beyond. That is an incredible opener. The secret is, tell me is not a question really, it's a command, but it reads as a sincere opener to a conversation, and it gets people to really open up. Even with my daughter, I find that when I ask her a question starting with tell me, I get so much more information. The fact is, do you know that studies show 93% of people are not asking the right questions to get the most out of their deals, including money? And the best question you can ask to start off and be in that 7% is, tell me.

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Hey, I'm Heather Monahan.

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I ask you to try to find your passion. What happens when— because I've been in plenty of negotiations like this, unfortunately, in corporate America, where it got to the point, I mean, banging fists on tables, yelling. What does that mean from your expertise standpoint? Where do you go from there when the other side is angry, visibly angry?

Well, first of all, is it a show? Or are they actually angry? A lot of shark negotiators know that shows of anger is a great way to manipulate the other side.

How so?

Because most people will, because anger makes them uncomfortable, will concede.

So they think they're going to get you to back down by just being a loud bully?

Yeah, and it works enough that people do it. And there's actually It's one of those things. There's an academic study, it's called strategic umbrage, and we are against it 1,000%. And anytime you hear a study that backs up a negotiation technique, look at how they got the data. Because the study says strategic umbrage works was taken under simulated circumstances. Simulated negotiations between students and universities. What does that mean? Number one, there's nothing to lose. Yeah, they got no skin in the game. Number two, even more importantly though, they don't have an ongoing relationship. They're not in the same industry. They're not going to continue to bump into each other at trade shows, at the Starbucks, at the convention center, at the car dealer, where you bump into everybody that you do business with over and over and over again. You use anger on somebody, it's a negative toxin that eats away at the relationship. And as they say, revenge is a dish best served cold. They're going to really love paying you back somewhere down the line where they can pay you back with interest. It's just a really bad seed to plant.

You just reminded me something that I was very surprised to hear, which is that terrorists are not one and done. They're repeat customers.

That's right. They, they stay in the business.

So to your point that if you're going to be in that same industry with someone that you want to leave it in a mutually respectable, as much as you can, situation where you're not fighting and name-calling. But one of the stories I love so much that I really want to share with everyone is when you were coaching the negotiator with the $10 million fee for that, for the hostage and what that outcome was and the strategy that you deployed. In order to have that massive success.

Yeah, we finally just decided to get a "that's right" out of the guy. I mean, it was really insane. I didn't think that was going to be as big a breakthrough as it was. I figured we get a "that's right," we'll get progress. And it had been stalemated for a while. And sometimes people are willing to try a new strategy that makes no sense because you're stalemated. They figure it can't hurt. So we had to get the embassy, the ambassador to sign off on the strategy. But I said, look, all we're going to do the terrorist, the sociopath, is get him to say, "That's right." Next time we get him on the phone, he'd come up with all this nonsense about why he wanted $10 million for the hostage and why it was suitable. He called it war damages instead of a ransom demand. 500 years of oppression from the Spanish to the Japanese to the Americans, and on and on and on and on. Typical argument where people are bringing up stuff from the past that don't matter. Everybody does that all the time. And it doesn't matter, but that doesn't stop from bringing it up. So I coached my guy. I said, "You know what? We're just going to give that a tryout. Next time we get them on the phone, all you do is summarize everything. If you don't feel like you're laying it on thick, you're not laying it on thick enough. Summarize everything and add some stuff and everything you could think of. Go on and on and on and on until the only response from the sociopath on the other side 'Cause sociopaths are vulnerable to empathy too. This guy was a perfect case in point. The only response is, "That's right." He's not going to be able to say anything other than, "That's right." Hit it perfectly. We got him on the phone. My guy goes on at length. I don't know how long it took him to get everything out. Seemed like it took forever. And he finally finished everything. And there was a moment of silence. And the terrorist, the sociopath, the murdering, raping killer on the other side, straight out of the movies badass. Said, "That's right." And there was a couple more moments of silence. And my guy says, "Let's talk again in a couple days." And we went from $10 million to zero in that moment. It was gone. It was gone. And then ultimately the hostage walks away. Story's in the book. A couple months later, the hostage walks away, which means the bad guy's got nothing. They didn't get paid. 2 weeks after the hostage walked away, the sociopath called my guy on the phone to congratulate him for how good he was.

Because he had such a strong connection to this person?

Yeah.

He just— he didn't understand it. He didn't know what it was, but he called him to pay his respects. He didn't call him angry. He didn't call him to threaten him. He called him to tell him that that he was really good and that he should be promoted. He did a really great job. He was gonna kill the American. He doesn't know why he didn't do it, but they should promote him. That's what he called to pay his respects. He lost everything. And something about— He felt compelled to let the guy know that he respected him.

So, something about being understood and feeling like someone cared and understood.

Everybody's vulnerable to being understood in just a massive way. And that's the great thing about it, because it's not a substantive concession on your side, on your part, to understand the other side. But they feel like they got so much out of it. Gives you tremendous advantage.

It's unfair when you see it that way. I've never seen it that way until now. So it's really eye-opening for sure of how much more money I could have made in my career.

Well, how much you have coming in the future.

There you go. All right, better. I like that. So The flip side of that, and I don't remember where I heard you say this, of where you have the hostage, uh, the terrorist calling to say, great job. You have another situation where a terrorist started telling the negotiator, you're approaching this completely wrong.

Yeah.

Because it's so systematic the way that you guys connect with these people. Right. That, that these terrorists, they're expecting it almost.

Yeah. Well, and he'd been negotiated with before.

Clearly.

And he didn't know what it was and they can't put their finger on it, but he knew that somehow he felt influenced, bonded, not resentful, but influenced by the other guy. And so he gets on the phone with another negotiator and the negotiator's not doing a good job. And he tells him that.

He says, "You're not doing a good job." So it really is that systematic and clear Once anyone can learn this approach, it's completely learnable, absolutely systematic.

It's a process.

It's like any other, learning how to do almost anything else. All you're going to do is put in the time and practice properly. You know, there's a saying, it's not practice that makes perfect, it's perfect practice that makes perfect. Like when people come to some of our trainings, I'll say, you say this word for word exactly the way I'm telling you to say it. It's going to be hard. It's going to be excruciating because everything inside you is going to say, "This won't work." Ignore that. Say it exactly how I'm telling you to say it. Send an email. Send the text. "Have you given up on doing business with me? Have you given up on our project? Have you given up?" Send it word for word. If you've never done it before, the discomfort is going to feel like a root canal. But you've got to do it exactly the way we teach it for it to work.

And as you're talking about these questions that you can ask that are great and able to reengage people, one of the words that I remember you sharing not to use is why.

Well, why is a surgical strike. Why is also part of finding out whether or not you're the fool in the game. But here's the issue with why. It makes everybody defensive. Why? Somebody may genuinely want to know why when they don't care, they're not trying to accuse you of anything. But the problem is when they are accusing you of something, the first thing out of their mouth is always, "Why did you do that?" Like your boss comes into your office and says, "Why did you make this contract?" He ain't there to congratulate you. That's a problem. And my son, Brandon, who runs my company, his theory is that Globally, when we were 2 years old, anytime we broke something or did something wrong, the nearest adult to us, whether you were in the Middle East or whether you were in China, the nearest adult said, "Why did you do that?" We got it beat into our head from an early day that why is somebody telling us we're wrong, being judgmental? So it triggers defensiveness. And I've seen it globally. I've negotiated kidnappings globally. And every kidnapper, if anybody ever accidentally asked them why, they blew up on the other side. They felt like it was an attack on their autonomy, and it was an instant negative reaction. So why triggers defensiveness? So why is it a surgical strike versus a never use? By the way, just change your why to what. Instead of why did you do that, you say, what made you do that? Why was that your choice? What made that your choice? Change your why to a what. Takes the sting off of it instantly. Except if you want them to defend you. And if somebody calls the Black Swan Group for negotiation training, in the first 5 to 10 minutes of that conversation, I'm going to say, you know, we got some great competitors out there. You could go to Harvard, you could go to Wharton, you go to "Kellogg." Why us?

Because you're trying to find out how committed they are to you?

Right. If they have an actual reason, if I'm not the fool in the game, they'll tell me why. If they respond with, "Well, why not you?" I'm now the fool in the game.

But at least you got clarity.

I got some clarity. And I'm going to say, "You know, I'm sorry. I just don't think it's going to work out for us at this time. I'd love to help you in the future. We'd love to help build your future." But I right now, I just don't think we're the right company for you. And I'll end the call.

One other really clear approach that is different than what's being taught out there is we're taught in sales, get the potential client to say yes, to agree with you, to agree. Yes, yes, yes. This yes momentum.

It's bad.

However, it's worked in many situations. What is that flip approach that you're teaching and why?

Well, and that's a problem with it working for some people because people say, you can't tell me that I can't get deals getting people to say yes, because I can. And I'll say that, yeah, and that's why what's his name, The Wolf of Wall Street, in his book, The Way of the Wolf, they talk about with the straight-line selling method, 2% success rate. And a lot of people think, well, if I'm converting 2 to 3%, those are good. And what's his name, Jordan Belfort says, look, this doesn't sound like much, but If you run this many contacts on a monthly, weekly basis, and this is your success rate, and in a year you got $1 million. And people go, oh, $1 million. Okay, so failure is part of the equation. No, it's not. The yes momentum is a problem. It violates people's human need for autonomy. They say each yes is a micro-agreement or it's a tie-down. And then when you get to the end, you got them tied down. They have to say yes. That's a violation of somebody's autonomy. It kills the relationship and makes them want to get away from you as quickly as they can. Maybe you just got them into a deal that they were going to make anyway, but they resented the hell out of how you got them into it in the first place. And so that resentment's going to pay you back. The stupid thing is, as bad as yes is, no has a complete opposite effect. Nobody in my company says, does this look like something that would work for you? We say, is this a bad idea? Are you against doing this? Is this ridiculous? Is this a violation of everything you hold sacred? We trigger no on purpose. And we move at light speed compared to the people that are doing yes.

Why?

Because then they're taking ownership of it and defending why it's going to work for them.

Yeah. And then no, the word no makes people feel safe when they say it. They feel safe and protected. Then they can think more clearly. More clearly and they can move forward more quickly, which is one of the reasons why you move forward so much faster. Or ideally what you're looking for, let's say a salesperson is not trying to trap somebody. You're respectfully saying, does this look like something that might work for you? You're respectfully trying to find out if you're on firm ground, you're just looking for confirmation, yes. And actually the salesperson is, by that question, is hoping for What about it doesn't work? So that we can anticipate problems. The problem is people feel trapped by yes. So every word that comes out of their mouth about yes, after yes, if they're tentative, they feel more tied down, which means they're not going to tell you what the problems are. So if you just flip it over and you say, is this a bad idea? Does this not work for you? And they'll say, no, it's not a bad idea, but here are the following problems, bang, bang, bang, and they'll lay them all out. Which they would not have laid out after a yes because they're not ready to commit. They don't feel like they committed when they say no. So they can give you a bunch more information because they don't feel trapped by it. Then you can really work the deal out.

Such a different way of approaching it. I can't wait to try it. I'm so excited.

Oh, it's nuts.

It sounds crazy. It sounds uncomfortable, which means I'm all in. Meet a different guest each week.

Confidence.

Confidence. I ask you to try to find your passion.

She's happy.

At the end of the day, negotiation is really just a conversation, right? It's a difficult one, but it's a conversation. And the more that we can keep that conversation going at some level through understanding what matters most to them, I think the better, the better the outcome. But also the more preparation we have in that regard, the more comfortable we are with all the zigging and zagging that occurs in any negotiation, which is a ton. Right? And we're more confident in those moments when we're prepared. But I think so, you know, getting in the head and the heart of the people that we're negotiating with is key. You know, the other thing I think is incredibly important is having the courage to pause, right? So yes, negotiation is a conversation, but it doesn't mean that it can't pause from time to time. Because when we pause— pause can be 2 minutes, 5, 2 days, a week, a month. But when we pause, we send messages. We send messages probably that we're— that what we have positioned is where we are, that we're firm at some level. It's, it's incredibly powerful. I think if you are prepared and you lay a strong relational foundation inside of a negotiation, you communicate and connect with what you want, the more comfortable you can be pausing which sends powerful messages. And I think that's a mistake a lot of people make. A lot of times when we're negotiating, we do all kinds of things right, and then we ask for what we want, and then we keep talking. And the best thing you can do is just pause. It's like when you go work out, you're doing abs with the medicine ball with a— with your trainer or a workout partner. Throw that ball over there, let them hold it, let them feel it that you mean it. That's an incredibly powerful thing. So those were a couple tips. I would say maybe a third one would be, you know, turn defensiveness inside of difficult conversations into curiosity. Go from that when you wanna come outta your chair, come through the screen, go at whatever that feeling might be that bubbles up inside of you inside of a negotiation. Get curious. Ask more great questions to get insight and intel and information so that you can then bob and weave and continue to find a way to solve and at the end of the day, close a gap for them.

Molly, I wanna go back to the point that you made about the power of pause because I feel like that is an art that most people don't have. I certainly have struggled with that many, many times in my career. But when you were explaining that, I was thinking to myself, why is it maybe that I'm not a master at pausing for a couple of days and, and standing firm like you said, and allowing that to make the statement of, you know, how clear I am on, on what it is that I've asked for or, or what it is that I'm expecting. It's that uncertainty, that wonder, oh my gosh, am I letting this go too long? How are you able to work yourself through that?

Well, you know, we teach negotiation. I have a negotiation program that we built off my book around negotiation. I think that there's a lot of data around the way that we're raised, our environment that can impact our comfort or lack of with silence. But if you follow a model that we teach, which is around setting the stage and all the things that have to happen to do that, having the courage to discover the gaps inside of the lives of the people that we're trying to connect with and serve. And when we do a lot of things in advance of our ask and we've built that strong foundation, that relationship, we understand what matters to them. We've certainly laid a foundation and communicated our position along the way as well. Then we have to have the confidence to pause. So I think potentially somebody doesn't have the confidence to pause when maybe they feel like there's something that they haven't communicated that they need to. And if we can do all those things on the front end, then when we go in for the ask, we have more comfort in pausing because we've, we've said all we could. I'll tell you a story. I, I was negotiating a baseball player's contract who was a big league guy. He was going to arbitration if we couldn't come to terms with the team. And, you know, in arbitration, there's 3 perfect strangers that pick whether the number that we've submitted as his agent or the team has submitted, which one it's going to be. So it could be a several million dollar gap. It's not a compromise. It's one or the other. And I always hated taking my guys to arbitration because, number one, the team just beats them up and tells them how bad they are because they're trying to position the judges to the arbitrators to give them the lower number. So it's never good mentally, I think, for certain guys. Long story short, I'd set the stage. I'd built common ground with these folks. I'd asked for what I wanted. All those things had happened over several months. It was the night before we were leaving for arbitration. I'd done everything from a foundation perspective. My client and I were very aligned. I go to bed that night. I'm getting ready to jump on an 8:30 AM flight to Phoenix to the arbitration hearing, and My phone rings, 11:30 at night. I used to sleep with my phone by my, by my bed, as I'm sure you're candidly familiar with. So I answer. It was the general manager of the team, and he said, unbelievable. He said, you're going to Arizona, aren't you? And I said, we are. And he said, wow, you're firm. I said, we are. And I just paused, and my husband, after about, you know, a minute and a half, said Is he still there?

Right?

Like, because a minute and a half on the phone without anybody saying anything seems like a long time. Super weird. And I said, yes, you're right. And about a minute and a half goes by, 2 minutes, and he said, you got a deal. I'll email over the term sheet. And that minute and a half would have been a lot of opportunity for me to say, here you go, listen, why don't we just do this on the bonuses? Let's just do this. And, and on the base, I'd come down to here. I didn't do anything. My client and I were aligned. I felt good about where we were. I'd said everything I'd ever needed to say. There was nothing else to say. We didn't want to come off the numbers, and we got a deal. So I think that in life, we have to, to recognize the power and all the things that happen before we go firm, before we ask for what we want. We teach a tool in negotiation in program. It's called an E-WALK, and it's a deal preparation tool that's really powerful in helping people identify everything that's in play, which is the E. The W is what do you want? What are options? People love options when you negotiate with them. They love to, you know, we could do this or we could do this. We can do $5 million with $3 million in bonuses, or we can do, you know, $4 million with $5 million in bonuses. People love choices. And then you've also got to preload. What are you willing to let go of? What are you asking for that though, at some point in the conversation, maybe you unload, you get rid of it, you show some, some concession. What are you, what are you going to preload that you could unload? So, you know, there's a model and a process certainly that I saw negotiating thousands of deals and a half a billion in contracts that, that, that works. But those are a couple little nuggets that I hope can help people.

What's the most common mistake that you see people making in negotiations?

Well, I think often one is I believe that the stronger the relationships are inside of a negotiation, the better the outcomes. And in fact, sometimes the quicker the outcome. I think a lot of times people would think, boy, as an agent, man, you are just going head to head fist, you know, take the gloves off, get after it. What I found worked best was strengthening that relationship almost pouring into it, giving and driving connection. And the more connected I was, whether it was to a manufacturer's rep for a golf deal or a general manager or a network executive or an athletic director, the better the relationship, the better the outcome, and often the quicker I could get them done. I think when people think that negotiation is supposed to be a battle or a war and that we want to approach it in that way, that's fine if you only want to do one deal with them. But if you wanna potentially negotiate and do lots of deals, the relational piece is really important. I don't know that I would say though that is the most common mistake, but I think it's something that is misunderstood from time to time. And that if we can approach everything from a relational perspective versus a transactional perspective, we'll find better outcomes and we'll find relationships that we can go back to. For me, relationships were a differentiator because there's 30 big league clubs. You got guys coming out, you can't be sideways with 10 of them because you need to be able to go to those relationships. Or if I had an executive at ESPN or NBC, or I needed to sustain that relationship because I would have other athletes, coaches, broadcasters that they were trusting me to be a steward of their career with that relationship. So Relationships and connection is huge. But I would say though, Heather, the biggest mistake is not pausing.

It's so interesting hearing you talk. I've met so many sports agents. You speak so differently than— and I only know male sports agents until now, but they are talking more of that, more combative win. And, you know, how can we bury them? And it's so interesting to your point when you opened this up at the beginning, being female has led you down this path of relationship and trust and nurturing and pouring into, which I've never heard an agent say, by the way.

Right.

And it's so cool to hear that's what your superpower is. That's where you got your strength or what made you so unique and different. And the more you leaned into the fact that you're a woman, the more that you've leaned into that you're different than these guys over here, the more success you found. It makes perfect sense.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that we can all do that in whatever career or industry that we're in, right? Lean into who you are and, and use your differences as gifts, as opportunities to connect. And, and it doesn't mean that I didn't— I had a ton of very difficult conversations with general managers. But if you lined them up, I ran into a Hall of Fame general manager the other day, you know, and he was trying to give me half of his burger and share his french fries at a bar the other day when I was there with another client. And that's just not, not normal. And there's a lot of mutual respect there. And I think I know that that helped me to be a steward of the clients that I served, and, and that was incredibly important to me. I mean, when these guys and gals are trusting you to navigate their career, that is, has a real finite amount of time to it generally. I mean, these guys, big league, they make in 5 years, 10 years what most of us make in 50. So The clock is ticking every day, and I took that incredibly serious, the impact that all of it would have on their life long term, on their family now and later. And so the relational piece just has and continues to be a big part of, of what I believe deeply in.

Meet a different guest each week. Hey, I'm hoping if you could kind of open talk first a little bit and give us a little bit of— drop a little bit of knowledge on us from your negotiation experience.

And also, you know, one of the last conversations we had, you know, what are the primary considerations in today's environment? You know, they're always the primary considerations, it's just in a higher pressure environment, we're more attuned to them. And I think before what you said was, which is absolutely true, was safety, trust, and need. You know, do people feel safe dealing with you? Do they trust you?

Do they—

and do they need what you have? Need is like beauty. It's in the eye of the beholder. But if you can establish safety and trust with people, then you can talk with them about whether or not they really need what they have in their mind. And you can't talk with them about what they need until you've established safety and trust. Now, this is really the way it always was. Kennedy had a quote way back when, comfortable in action, the risks and costs of comfortable in action are much greater than the long-term costs making the wrong move. Because you make the wrong move, at least you learn if you paid attention. Why am I babbling on like this? In order to deal with this, you gotta, you gotta hear the other side out first. You gotta hear what the other side has to say first. And I think that's the biggest mistake that people made. As a hostage negotiator, that was really all we were taught to do. You know, get on the phone, you know, use a soothing voice and hear them out. And you'll be shocked. And how many things will solve themselves if you just do that. And that's why hostage negotiation works in business negotiation. That's why it works in personal life. That's why it works in your relationships with your parents, your children, your significant others. Hear the other side out. You'll solve enough of the problems by doing that only that if then if you hear them out, if you shut up, then they'll give you an answer that you want. I mean, Whatever you guys are dealing with, you're going to hack the whole process by starting with those steps. Like tone of voice is magic. Almost everybody on the phone is a C-suite, if not CEO, if not owner of company, right, Heather? You're going to solve 9 out of 10 of your problems with just changing your tone of voice. There's neuroscience that backs that up. I can change the speed that your brain thinks just by changing my tone of voice. Hostage negotiators, we were taught to use a late-night FM DJ voice. Late-night FM DJ. Like, if I can calm down a sociopathic rampaging terrorist with that tone of voice, you don't have anybody in your world that you can't calm down to. And by simply calming a situation down from the beginning, how many problems you're dealing with would 60 to 70% resolve themselves if people just calm down? It's insane. And the other thing too that we've learned since, Shawn Achor does a great TED Talk called The Happiness Advantage, Harvard psychologist. And not shocking, it will also be one of the funniest TED Talks you ever listened to. Achor is the source of my data on this. He says you're 31% smarter in a positive frame of mind. So you want to be more successful, you want to make your people more successful, put people in a positive frame of mind. You are going to be 31% smarter. The people that work for you are going to be 31% smarter, 31% instantaneous edge is more than enough to gain a competitive advantage over the people you're competing with, over nearly everybody you're against. 31% smarter, you learn faster. The other thing I'd suggest you guys take a good hard look at is this book right here, Stealing Fire, Steven Kotler. Steven Kotler is probably the world's leading expert on flow. In flow, your decision-making improves, your mental stamina improves, your pattern recognition improves, Everything you do improves in flow, and understanding flow and how to get into it is to your advantage. You learn faster in flow. There was a Dutch CEO from 1980s, 1990s, Royal Dutch Shell CEO, and I, with my accent, I'm gonna butcher his last name, but it's Ari Geiss. And everybody has butchered his quote one way or another. I've seen even Kotler's using his quote. The ability to learn faster than your competition is the only sustainable competitive advantage. The only sustainable competitive advantage. Learn faster than your competition. In flow, you learn faster. In a positive state of mind, you learn faster. It's a way to hack the learning process. It's one of the reasons why I'm absolutely convinced that no one is ever going to catch up with my company in terms of business consulting, Negotiation consulting and coaching. We coach, consult, and train. I thought we were only going to train. We're doing a lot of coaching. All of us are focused on learning. My core team, our significant others get sick of our conversation because all we want to talk about is negotiation and how to get better and how to get smarter. Nobody will ever catch up with us because we're into learning, and that will be our sustainable competitive advantage as long as we are a company. And we're getting knocked off on a regular basis now, too. You know, people trying to figure out what tactile empathy is, they're trying to bring in hostage negotiators. You know, people are stealing our material. It's gonna happen. They will not keep up with us because we're busy learning. The academics at Harvard and Wharton, they have to show their knowledge so much more than they have to learn. The emphasis on, you know, if they do a study, Yeah, they got to do it academically rigorous, and then they got to get that study published. And in the amount of time they're wasting getting a study published is 2 to 3 years we were learning while they were trying to get published.

Will you share with us what tactical empathy is?

So we put tactical in front of empathy to try to make it less about sympathy. Empathy's origin It was never ever meant to be sympathy, ever. It was never meant to be synonymous with compassion. It's a compassionate thing to do, but in today's environment, it has come to be equated to sympathy, compassion, and agreement, and it's not at all. It's the first reason I started collaborating with the Harvard guys because as a hostage negotiator, I was applying empathy in a very mercenary fashion. And then Bob Mnookin, the head of the program on negotiation at Harvard, published a book called Beyond Winning, and the second chapter is the tension between The Tension Between Empathy and Assertiveness, which he wrote in as a fake title because there is no tension. They actually complement one another perfectly. But then in that chapter, he said, empathy is not compassion, it's not agreement, it's not even about liking the other side. It's just identifying where they're coming from. And I read that, I was like, wow, you guys define it exactly the way we do. And that's why we started to collaborate, because we had the same core definition. Empathy is not sympathy. Now, since we came up, Bob published that book probably about 2002-ish. Now we've added neuroscience. We didn't have neuroscience. The neuroscience data that we're using on a regular basis, which takes us completely out of psychology because psychology is just too soft of a science and it changes too much to really keep up with. Neuroscientists have identified the amygdala as sort of the command post of our emotional and our decision-making. There's no such thing as a decision that's not emotional. Just doesn't exist.

You make—

you don't make— your decisions are not emotional when you're dead. It's kind of that cut and dried. Every thought we have either goes through the amygdala or starts there. There's argument as to which— what the sequence is, but there's no argument as to whether or not the amygdala is involved in every thought. Everybody's heard of the amygdala hijack. The amygdalas— neuroscientists have mapped out the amygdala, and 75% of the real estate in the amygdala is devoted to negative thoughts. Every one of you has an amygdala. Every one of you is equipped with a system that's designed to be negative, 75% negative. That's your survival mode. Don't take my word for it, Google it and look it up yourself. You're going to find that out. What's that got to do with tactical empathy? Tactically, you get farther faster in a conversation by deactivating negatives than you do pitching positives. I stood up in front of the command staff of a police department 2 days ago, and I knew I was gonna say a bunch of stuff to them that they didn't like. So what are their reasons for not listening to me? Well, the first one is gonna be, "All right, so this guy used to be in law enforcement. He retired 13 years ago." That was the first line on my first slide. "This guy retired from law enforcement 13 years ago. He doesn't know what he's talking about." What's the next thing a cop is gonna say for not listening to me? "Well, okay, so you weren't law enforcement, you were fed, that doesn't count." That was the second line on the slide. All right, so if he wasn't law enforcement, he was a fed, that doesn't count. What's the next line? "All right, he was on a terrorist task force and he worked with cops, but the cops carried him anyway." That was my following line. I went through every single reason that they would come up with for not listening to me And instead of saying, all right, so don't think that this is why you shouldn't listen to me, but I just listed them and there was no yes, but on either one of them. One of the things I put in was, all right, so he was in law enforcement, you know, but he was a negotiator. Those people are all part of the kumbaya crowd. All they want to do is give people hugs. I put that on a slide. Another reason for not listening to me is, okay, so he was a cop, but that was back in the 1980s. It's almost 40 years ago. And that was in Kansas City. They probably had cows in the street and rode horses. I put that on a slide. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then I told them the truth about reality as I saw it. And not one person ever rejected any one of my thoughts. Nobody raised their hand and said, yeah, but you don't understand. And here's why you don't understand. I put all the reasons why I wouldn't understand, and I put them first because I know how their brain is wired. And I deactivated each and every objection they had. I don't overcome objections. I deactivate them, and I deactivate them by knowing what they are and just simply calling them out. And I laid everything out, and I had these guys' attention for 90 minutes after 3 o'clock in the afternoon. And where I was going with it, ultimately, was the Black Lives Matter issue. Wanted them to think about it in a different way. As it turns out, the Las Vegas Police Department is an extremely progressive police department, and they're one of the few police departments that came out and openly condemned what was done to George Floyd. They openly— Very few police departments came out and openly condemned what happened to George Floyd. Very few. Vegas PD was one of them. I said, "It doesn't matter. You guys are still the poster child for everything that's wrong in our society today. So let's talk about how we can change it in a way for you guys to think about it in a completely different way." I actually talked to them about Flo. I said, "Look at the thing about George Floyd and look at the shooting in Atlanta, and let's take racism out of the equation." And instead, let's just talk about it in terms of decision-making. Is there anything here that you guys see that was a good decision? So, reframe the entire conversation in law enforcement from racism to decision-making, and you guys can move forward, 'cause you're now not accused of being racist. You can't get a single commander in any police department to look at what happened to George Floyd and say, "Point out the good decision-making here." You're not gonna find any. And that's the way they're gonna fix their problems, change the conversation. But that's where I wanted to go, and I didn't want them to push back on me because I didn't understand. So what are all the reasons I don't understand? Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, list them. And it's shocking when you simply call out somebody's reason for opposing you, and you don't say, I don't want you to think that, and you don't say, I realize you think that, but you just call it out and it makes it go away. It's neuroscience.

I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're gonna hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Come on this journey with me.