Negotiation Mastery: Negotiation Lessons From A Former FBI Hostage Negotiator For Becoming More Persuasive with Chris Voss and Joe Polish - Genius Network Episode #138

You should have a win win mindset. If you're in a win lose mindset, that's actually stupid because if the other side loses, why are they ever going to want to make a deal with you again? But a lot of people don't realize that in business negotiation, most people business stories like, I had them over a barrel and they knew I beat them. And every time I hear somebody talk like that, I just shake my head. I think like, you know, you were losing so many deals. Chris Voss knows negotiations. From international crisis to high stakes hostage and kidnapping situations, Chris has used his skill of negotiation to literally save lives. Now Chris focuses on teaching business negotiations, which perhaps not so surprisingly, follows the same framework. In this episode, Chris shares common negotiation mistakes, top secret persuasion techniques, and how to gain influence and control within a negotiation, no matter how high the pressure. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event or to apply, go to geniusnetwork.com Imagine you're going.

On an African safari with your family. You fly into Rwanda. You land safely. You head to the Radisson Park Hotel in a taxi. Suddenly the taxi drives into a warehouse where you're surrounded by armed terrorists and you realize you've been kidnapped. What would you do? They hand you a cell phone and tell you to make one call. Who would you call? While an interesting challenge, right now you should be asking yourself, what does this have to do with my life and getting the most out of my time at Genius Network? What if kidnappers really were only businessmen? What would happen if the keys to negotiating a kidnapping where you feel like you don't have a lot of leverage and you don't want to make the other side mad, weren't terribly different from a normal world business negotiation. Chris Voss is the author of this amazing book which is called Never Split the Difference Negotiating as if youf Life Depended On It. It's a Wall Street Journal best selling business negotiation book. It's been listed on inc.com as one of the seven best negotiation books ever written. Chris for 24 years worked for the FBI and retired as their lead international kidnapping negotiator. After leaving the FBI, Chris used his unique negotiating skills set forth to form his own company, which is called the Black Swan Group. His company teaches business owners like us his negotiation methodologies which focuses on discovering the black swans, small pieces of information that have a huge effect on an outcome. Chris and his team have helped companies secure and close better deals, save money and solve internal communication problems. I'm going to be sitting down and interviewing Chris. And I'm going to ask him a number of questions that I know and believe you would ask if you were sitting here. First off, bring him up. Chris Voss, thank you so much. So great to have you here. I mean, I've been really looking forward to this, not only for the group, but just for myself, because your book is amazing, and I'm sitting on a whole slew of questions here. I won't have time to ask you all these, but whatever pops out. So what the heck does negotiating with terrorists have to do with people running the business?

Yeah. Well, our negotiations are calmer. Yeah. Now, interestingly, if you've seen on the Netflix show Mindhunters, right. FBI psychological profilers, they started that whole thing by just saying, all right, criminal behavior is just. Human behavior just happens to be more intense, but it's governed by the same set of rules. And suddenly they started solving all these crimes. Hostage negotiations, just negotiation. Human beings are involved, same set of rules. We would have thought that hostage negotiations are occasionally more intense, but in reality, you guys have more stories of people yelling at you and storming out of rooms than we ever had. Is it because our guys are more reasonable? No, it's because of our approach. So the dynamics are all the same as long as you're dealing with human beings.

For people that really have no context of what a company that helps people with negotiation does. I mean, what do you guys really do for people?

We kind of got a soup the Nuts operation. Now. I originally envisioned us just mainly being a training company, and we wanted to train companies, and we're doing a lot more or training individuals now besides companies. But we're also coaching in a lot of deals. We're doing a lot of coaching. People come to us with a problem, something they've been struggling with for a while. On average, I would say people come to us with a negotiation they've been dealing with. If they come to us, I've been dealing with from anywhere from six months to a year and a half. Typically, we'll have it solved in about a week. And, you know, one of the biggest things, I think what we help people do is we'll cut your negotiation time down now to about 25% or what, the amount of time you're actually spending on it.

That's awesome. Well, what I'm hoping is after our conversation here, that everyone here is more capable, has a better context of this, is really able to hear things, see things that they've never thought of before, because Chris is incredibly. You know what's great about it is, you didn't just write an amazing book on it. You've actually lived this. You've done this. And I mean, this is. Now, this training is a byproduct of. How many years did you spend with the FBI?

24. 24. And we're doing it now, too. I mean, I got a team. I mean, you guys know, you need a good team. I got a good team around me, and my guys are continuing to push forward new ideas. Like, my son is in my business. You imagine what it's like growing up. Son of a hostage negotiator. He started getting himself out of trouble in high school before I even knew what he was doing. He's got some stories that, when I hear him, I'm like, you know, I didn't know that happened.

That's funny.

Say, well, yeah, I'm bringing it up now, but we're still making it better all the time now, too. I think that's. Why Don't. What was it? Create. The phrase from this morning. Don't compete. Create. We're still creating it, so I think that's cool.

Well, you know, entrepreneurs, as Dan Sullivan says, you wake up every day and you make it up and make it real. And in the process, there's a lot of negotiation along the way, and you negotiate with yourselves. I mean, everything we're doing is a sales job. You're either attracting people or repelling people. So working for the FBI, what's the most interesting or surpr. Surprising thing that you learned or took away from there?

Wow. If you took the. It was the ultimate entrepreneur's job at the time. But that's. If you took that attitude. And I had a friend of mine who was a hostage negotiator one day, said that to me when we were in New York, and we had a ball doing it. We had an absolute ball. I worked with guys that were fun to work with, and we had fun, like working incredibly hard. There was a Jersey girl that I work with, and, ladies, forgive me, I use the term girl because it's less syllables, and I like words that have less syllables. But a Jersey girl I work with in New York, top chick, tough New Jersey chick. Named. Her name was Louise, and she went by Lou. And Lou used to say, in the FBI, there's a seat for every ass. So it was a great job. Whatever you were into, you could do it and have a great time doing it.

And you write about this a lot in the book. Not just things that were successful, but when people died and during your time There. How do you. You know, part of it is learning techniques, but another is how do you have to be psychologically and mentally to negotiate under extreme pressure where someone's life is on the line and literally, you're the guy who is going to be interacting with someone that could. That could and will kill somebody in themselves. And, I mean, how did you get yourself in the mindset to even do that? I mean, did it first come the techniques, or did it first come, like, let me. I mean, how did this training happen? How does one prepare themselves? I guess.

Yeah. Actually, I think I got kind of lucky because I learned the process really well before I actually became a hostage negotiator. So I had a really good process. And I stated in it my training level was pretty high. So I was ready for the first real deal negotiation I ever got involved in, which was a bank robbery with hostages. I relied on the process. I was really solid, and it worked out. And bank robbery with hostages, when they happen in movies all the time, they happen in the entire country about once every 20 years. They're really rare events. So I got really lucky, and then I did it right. And it turned out the other thing was I worked for a guy that taught me stuff before I knew that I learned it. And he used to always tell us we had the best chance of success, but we never guaranteed success. And I learned that sort of as a mantra before I realized that meant that if you did it long enough, something was gonna go bad. And when it did, then it was hard. But then again, you revert to your training, you revert to your process, and realize best chance of success means every now and then something's gonna go bad. Yeah. Yeah.

So when something did go bad, how did you internalize it?

That was hard. You know, it took me a while. I mean, how I internalized it was I doubled down. I just decided. And I actually then would look for negotiators that had been in scenarios where people had gotten killed. Because if you. If most hostage negotiations go well, so if you don't do very many, you're like, I'm awesome. And people get really overconfident. Somewhere north of 5 and short of 15, something's gonna go bad. And then I would look at those, because I said, all right, I'm never gonna let this happen again. What do I have to do to get better? That's when I said to my. That's when I. That's actually how I ended up at Harvard learning negotiation, because I was like, all right, I did everything we know how to do it was inadequate. We gotta get better. And so Harvard was happy to collaborate with us, but everybody. I would go out and recruit guys specifically because they were in a case where somebody got killed. And I saw they didn't quit, and I knew, you either go like, I'm gonna get better or I'm gonna go do something else. Anybody that said, I'm gonna get better? Those are the guys I wanted.

Gotcha. So I've got some interesting questions here. One is, you say that Oprah Winfrey's the greatest negotiator of all time. Why do you say that? And what skills are needed to be a great negotiator?

Yeah, it's. Oprah Winfrey got Lance Armstrong on camera and got him to admit to everything. And no question was a surprise. He agreed in advance to be asked every one of those questions. Think about that negotiation in advance, and you could pick out time after time after time where she and her people did something spectacular which required communication. She's had no shortage of blowouts with celebrities. How many of them do you know about? That's a mark of a great negotiator. Not who they crushed, but what they achieved, what they accomplished, and who's still doing business with her after those blowouts. And then also, look at where she started. Yeah, a poor black female from Chicago. Right.

Shit ton of trauma.

It isn't like she was. She didn't have her dad give her a million dollars to start out with. So when you start looking at the length of the things that she did. And then I've gotten to know her Vice President for Booking and Talent Relations for the last 19 years, recently in LA, and I've gotten to know some of the stuff they did, and I was like, wow. Yeah, a lot of the exact same stuff that we did, only in a different way. Which was a relief to me to hear that it was the same ideas. But I.

Well, Oprah's interesting. I'm not friends with her. I've met her twice. Once in 1999, I think it was in a spa down in Tucson. And she is just hardcore. I mean, you can just tell she has a force field. I mean, she has a force in nature, and she's very strong and very powerful, but she also knows how to be pleasant. And she's a very interesting personality. And she was so tired when I spent about 10 minutes talking with her about equine, like therapy with horses and stuff. And I so badly wanted to ask her to do an interview, but she just looked so Exhausted at the time, that I just had to keep it on a personal level. But, you know, and she was very pleasant but very protected until she could see that, you know. Cause all day long she's just getting hit up. People want a piece of her and you have to do that. But yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. She has not developed a reputation of being a jerk.

Yeah. I mean, anytime there's the whiff of controversy goes away. She isn't a fan of flames. Yeah. I had somebody tell me a very specific conversation she had with an extremely high profile celebrity that wanted to put conditions on the interview. And in summon substance, Oprah called her on the phone and the message was, it's my way or the highway. And the celebrity completely agreed. Now, she didn't say it like that, but that was the essence of the message. And so if you can say someone who's used to getting their way and this person has pretty much gotten their way through the entire world, you say it's my way, the highway to them, then you're good at negotiation. Yeah, yeah.

So what are the biggest mistakes that. Let's start with that. That we make when negotiating? Because we're all doing it. I mean, how would you even define negotiating?

Communicating to accomplish results in real broad terms? Information gathering is part of it. Herb Cohen wrote a book a long time ago called you can negotiate anything, and he defined negotiation as a use of power and information in a web of tension. Now, a web of tension would be emotions. And the only tweak I think, that we made in our definition is we don't just use information, we gather it and use it. Because if you're saying the use of information, you're assuming you're coming to the table. And you know you should have gathered all the information before you come to the table. The table's the best place to gather information. And a lot of people will hold themselves back from going to the table because you want to be prepared. You don't want to be caught off guard. About a third of you in the room are horrified at getting caught off guard at the table. And that's holding you back.

Yeah. So in terms of the mistakes, like, what are some common ones that are easy to fix? Like, you have a whole way of start with about no as an example. I love the way that you. Most people want to get a yes. Maybe we can talk about how yes could possibly not be the first thing you want to hear out of someone's mouth. Because everyone here is wanting to sell stuff and you Got a lot of the world's greatest marketers. And, and I've always had the conversation with Dan Sullivan that no's are great, yeses are great, maybes are what kill you. If someone says no, you at least know where they stand. And you can either it's done or you can now, knowing what you know, that's actually a starting point. But maybes where someone's like, oh, I'll call you back, or whatever. And so I'd love to have you talk about just the languaging and what to pursue and how to actually start the whole process of getting to, you know, something favorable and the result that you want.

All right, so yes is a useless word. There is no more useless word. And the majority probably yes addicts recognizing that is one thing. Getting out of it is even harder because you're hardwired. If you're hardwired to hear yes, breaking out of that dynamic is really, really hard. But it could be one of the biggest issues. And if you're hardwired for yes, of course you're horrified at now. But in any important negotiation, I don't bother with yes at all. And give you an example. We ran a training in New York a few months back and I had recently run across Robert Herjavec. Wonderful guy, I mean, generous on a strength of just an introduction from one person. I'm sitting down with this guy for lunch for 90 minutes and he's talking to me for 90 minutes and he's pieing. I mean, what else do you want, right? So through the course of the conversation, I tell him we got this training going on and I offer him, you know, give me a free ticket and he says, how many can I buy? Like, wow, even better. What an even more gracious guy. He loves so much. We're talking about, he's willing to pay too. So we're going back and forth on the tickets, how many he's going to buy. And the window's closing, it's going to slam shut and he's not going to get in. And my people are bugging me. They're mad at me because I'm giving away tickets for free that we'd be selling otherwise. So I'm in a doghouse already. Anyway, so it's, I'm in Los Angeles, my team is in New York, east coast, three hour handicap in la and they're screaming at me. And he hasn't pulled the trigger on the tickets. So I sent him an email. Are you against committing for three tickets now? Are you against Paying for those tickets before the start a business tomorrow because we're going to be three hours behind the clock. If they wait till tomorrow morning, they're going to be gone and then I'm going to be embarrassed. I get an email back in less than 30 minutes. We'll commit to three now we'll pay for them and they pay for them within the hour after 5 o' clock in Los Angeles. So every time it's really, I mean, we don't bother with yes. You can flip any kind of question, any kind of commitment question from a yes to, to a no. And you'd be shocked at what people will say no to. I mean friggin shocked. Shocked. And yes is. Yes is commitment, yes is hesitation, yes is concern. That's why people are really good at the false yes.

We'll talk about the false yes with, you know, versus. That's right. Versus you're right. Yeah, this is a really good distinction and a real, you know, something I never knew or realized until.

That's what Tim was talking to me about that one time when we met.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, by the way, I should say that too. When I first met Chris, it was a couple years ago. And Tim Larkin, who many of you know, has been a genius network for, you know, I've known Tim for 20 years and he, Tim actually is. He's been on the COVID of Black Belt magazine. He's trained, you know, lots of, you know, Navy SEALs, MMA fighters, everyday people, men and women. And he, you know, his book, the Science of Violence is the title of his book. And he has this great.

Violence is the answer. Violence is the Answer.

Violence is the Answer. Yeah. And I've interviewed him on it. You think I would know this stuff? He's a badass and he's a great guy. And he said that, you know, violence is never an option unless it's the only option. You know, what do you do in a situation where someone is going to hurt or kill you? Brian Kurtz actually organized a dinner and invited Chris to it. I sat next to Chris and Tim was there. And it was a small group. There's maybe like, I don't know, 10 of us or something. And, and Tim said, you know, he's like, I don't mean to be total fanboy, but I love your book. And Tim said, this is the best book on negotiation he's ever read. And so right from the get go I was like, wow, this is an important guy. And so there's lots of little things that most people would have no idea about. But you identify those, and you teach people how to actually use them. So let's talk about the false yeses and what you really want to accomplish to know that you are successfully, I guess, negotiating.

Right. Right. All right, so. And the thing that Tim talked about to me about that one time, too. Somebody tells you you're right, what are they telling you? They're telling you to shut up and go away. I want to maintain a relationship with you. I still like you, either because I want to or I have to. But I'm really. This is. It's designed to preserve the relationship. But please, please stop talking and please go away. And we might like your right more than we like. Yes, because we think we have to make a case. You think you gotta make a case. You think to negotiate, you gotta make an argument. You gotta make a compelling case. You gotta give your value proposition to the other person, and you think you scored when they look at you and they go, you're right. And what happens is you get real happy, and you shut up, and you probably walk out of the office, you probably walk away, or, you know, you think you made the point with your significant other or whoever it may be. Tim sits down next to me. He goes, like, you know, you saved me so much money, because I was. He was on a rant with his senior team, and he'd read the book, and he's trying to get everybody on the same sheet of music. This is the direction we're going. And he says, one of his executives said, tim, you're right. And he said, holy cow. If I'm so far off track with my guys that they're trying to politely get me to shut up, I need to stop the meeting right now. I need to back up. I need to find out where I'm off track. And then I need to go to everybody and get myself corrected. Which it kind of blew me away that he was that enlightened about it. That's what he did. He stopped the meeting, he went back, he talked to everybody, found out where he was wrong. Because if people are telling you, look, shut up, you're probably off track. A 2 millimeter difference is. Use a Tony Robbins phrase, right? I love the 2 millimeter difference. You want to get people to say, that's right. That's right is what you say when you hear the complete and total truth. You agree 1000%, no matter which side of the political aisle you're on. The last presidential election, the last presidential debate, whichever candidate you loved when they said something that you loved. You didn't look at the TV and go, you're right. You looked at the TV and you said, that's right. And that's right. What people, when they say, when they're all in and what they just heard is a complete truth. Now, the invisible fairy dust magic to that is they feel incredibly bonded to you in that moment. They don't know that. That's the other thing that's really powerful about it. Somebody once told me that's somebody saying to you that they feel empathy from you. And that's so powerful. For example, the greatest practitioners of this in the world are actually sociopaths. They're also vulnerable to it. Interestingly enough, the idea that sociopaths either can't feel it or use empathy. They do feel it and they do use it. But if you were willing to accept this premise, this outlandish idea that sociopaths are good at empathy, you should ask yourself why. Why is because it's quick and it's sustainable and they're lazy and it's the way that they maintain really solid relationships with very little maintenance from them. So empathy saves time. You put less time into relationships to keep them strong. Once you've established empathy, bridge and you've established it, when somebody looks at you and says, that's right. What I really was was an international negotiation coach. I coach negotiations in every culture on the planet. And they weren't asking for ransom for the American. They were asking for war damages for 500 years of oppression from the Spanish to Japanese to the Americans, violations under Blackjack Pershing, all this sort of nonsense. This is another story that you should be tuning out right now because you were never in an argument with someone where they were bringing up stuff from the past that didn't matter anymore. Where are you? So we, you know, we tried all sorts of logic, all sorts of in and out, you know, tried to be clever. I thought I knew terrorism, I thought I knew Islam and thought I knew all this stuff. And finally one day we just said, we're gonna get a. That's right out of the guy on the other side, the sociopath, and make no mistake, a raping serial killer chopped lots of heads off. Personally was proud of it. And no shortage of rapes to his credit. And I coach my guy to get on the phone and you just keep. Make their case. It's the Stephen Covey advice. Instead of seek first to understand, then be understood, demonstrate understanding. You gotta make their case, not your case, but just recognize it, don't agree with it. But lay it out the way they see it. Lay out everything that this sociopathic terrorist has been laying out of all the nonsense of why $10 million is a bargain basement price for five years of war damages. And he laid it out. And he laid it out, and he laid it out, and he laid it out. I said, and if you're not laying it on thick, you're not laying it on thick enough. And my guy finished it. And there was a short silence on the other end of the line. And the terrorist said, that's right. And we said, okay, let's talk again in a couple of days. And the $10 million ransom demand went away. They never brought it up again, ever. It went away. It was gone. It was completely gone. A couple of months later, the American walks away. We had done a number of things. We'd gotten them disorganized. We completely disorganized them. They didn't know we did it to them through our communication techniques. American walks away. A couple of months later, military picks him up, flies him out. We take him back to the U.S. i'm back in the Philippines about three weeks after this on another case, and the guy that I coach says, you're not gonna believe who called me on the phone. I'm like, I don't know who called you on the phone. The terrorist guy's name was Ceball Cibia. Still knew his undercover name, still had his undercover phone number, was smart enough to know that he had to either be with the police or the military, but didn't know and didn't care. Called him on the phone and said, have you been promoted yet? I have no idea what you said to me on the phone. You're really good at it. They should promote you. And also think about what he's saying. Cause would he deal with him again? What was he really saying when he made that call? I respect you. I'd deal with you again. So who would imagine that you can get to somebody like that?

You talk about three voice tones negotiators can use. What are they? And on a related topic, what is an example of mirroring and how is that important?

All right. The three voices are the three default types. You know, in our way of thinking, everybody in the entire planet, regardless of gender, regardless of ethnicity, either falls into fight flight. Make friends. Some people call that fight flight, mate. But it's the caveman that survived from the caveman days. We saw a threat on a jungle path. We ran from it, we fought it, we made friends with it. My Harvard brothers and sisters subscribe to the same philosophy. We've tested somewhere north of 2,000 people in all countries, and we believe that to be true. So the three voices are what your natural voices are. And I'm not gonna make any political statements in any way, shape or form, but the assertive, the fight type, direct and honest, that's my natural born type, Donald Trump. And if I were to talk to you, we do an exercise called 60 seconds. So she dies. And I do all three voices in the exercise. And if you were volunteering, I'd look at you. And I started with the assertive voice, and I just go, I need a car in 60 seconds or she dies. If you think of yourself as direct and honest, you're an assertive. You got a tone of voice that's combative, it causes problems. There's no way around it. It's not a good voice. My natural born type, I once had a hostage negotiator say to me, dealing with you is like getting hit in the face with a brick. And I didn't take that as a compliment, but that's my natural voice. So that's voice one. Voice two is the accommodator's voice. About a third of us are just relationship oriented. We naturally smile. We're naturally very happy. It's actually ridiculously strategically smart. You're 31% smarter. In a positive frame of mind, if you're smiling, you're hardwiring your mood, you're making yourself smarter. Everybody has something called mirror neurons. If I smile at you, your mirror neurons trigger. Even if you fire it, you started to smile back. It's an involuntary response. There are chemical changes in your brain. You're smarter too. That's a smart move. It's one of the reasons why naturally gregarious people make lots of deals. Cause people, and they're not always the best deal, but they're probably pretty good.

Okay, so you just said you're 31% smart. Smarter when you're in a positive state of mind. So if you can flip yourself into that and become 31% more effective and smarter, that seems to be a pretty good advantage.

It's huge. Yeah.

So.

And it's actually a hardwired connection. If you force a smile on your face when you feel lousy, the chemical changes still take place. Interesting. You can override it. And then the third type is what we call the late night fmdj. That's a hostage negotiator's natural tone of voice. I mean, we learn that we drill it over and over and over and over again. Because it hits the mirror neurons, it triggers a chemical change and it slows the other side's brain down. Now, while we use that about 10% of the time, if we have a term in a contract that's completely unacceptable, that term would often be work for hire. I will not sign a contract that has a work for hire clause. Well, I would, but it has to be for $5 billion. Not kidding around, because work for hire takes our intellectual property. I just don't say take it away. I'll sit down at the table and I'll look you in the eye and I'll say, we don't do work for hire. Late night fm, DJ voice. You will feel that that's an immovable term. What I say, what you hear. If I say that's an immovable term, you're gonna get mad and wanna fight me on it. I don't need that. So I will just take the term and I will lay it out like that. Your brain will slow down, it'll stop. When you recover, you'll come up with the answer for me. I also won't say, I need you to take that clause out. I need you to volunteer that idea.

I heard you say before that when someone says let's make a win win situation, they're usually going to try to. That's an indicator that they're going to probably either try to take advantage of you or whatever. And I found it very interesting because I have used that term. I have, you know, I'm willing to be seen that I'm delusional here. I have said it in ways where I really do look out for other. I want it to be a win win situation, not use it as terminology to hide dishonesty or hide attempting to be. And I know the whole thing of, like a lot of people that brag about how their integrity is and how great they are and how they want you to win, a lot of times they're the most full of shit. I also know that some people that are the most smooth talking are sometimes, you know, wolves in sheep's clothing. Sor of thing. And when I heard that though, it really struck me as like going, huh, so what do you do when you're really genuinely wanting to create a value for value deal? You're not trying to overly negotiate, if that's the right way to call it, or you're not trying to scam somebody, but you're giving too much of it away or you're letting people steamroll over you. I Guess what are some. Without making this a confusing question, what are some indicators that should be red flags or warning signs that if someone says this, be careful. And what's the caveat to that? How could I better describe things? Because I do want things to be a win win situation for someone. I mean, like everyone here, they invest a lot of money to be in this group. I want them to get a hell of a lot out of it. I genuinely care about my clients.

Right.

And at the same time, I have some people that will try to take advantage of me and they ask for too much or they're just very demanding. And so, like, what are words that are indicators? And so I'm asking you two things. You know, one, what are, like, warning signs that when you hear them, you know, antennas go up, this is, you know, something. And then on the other side, how do you protect yourself from, you know, getting taken advantage of?

Right, right. All right, so context. Let's throw context on this. And contextual intelligence is a part of emotional intelligence. That's really what we're talking about here. We're talking about military grade emotional intelligence, weapons grade empathy. How do you like that, huh?

That's actually good.

All right, so context. You should have a win win mindset. If you're in a win lose mindset, that's actually stupid because if the other side loses, why are they ever going to want to make a deal with you again? That's kind of dumb. But a lot of people don't realize that in business negotiation, most people, business stories, like, I had them over a barrel and they knew I beat them. And every time I hear somebody talk like that, I just shake my head. I think like, you know, you were losing so many deals.

No, absolutely. There's people that are in the transaction, business versus the relationship business.

Right, right. So now more context on win win. If somebody articulates it right up front, that's the tell. They're trying to cut your throat. Now, we talked about this a little bit also, you know, Joe doesn't show up and go like, hey, happy to see you. Let's do a win win deal. You know, you start talking about it further down into the conversation or you feel it or you try to live it. That's completely different than what we've seen over and over and over again. Nearly every single person that right off the bat, we've been in a negotiation with them. And if they articulated, let's do a win win deal in the first three minutes, I know they want to get our stuff for Nothing. And now I'm already headed for the door. So, you know, what are the tells? Actually, there's two tells. You got to watch out for people that are trying to cut your throat. What's worse is the people that are trying to pump you for information and never do the deal with you at all. One of the things that is not in the book, which is actually probably going to be much more the focus of the book that we're talking about now we call proof of life of the deal. And as salespeople have a saying, it's not wrong to not get the agreement. It's wrong to take a long time to not get the agreement. That's what's killing you. That's what kills more people and more business. And we shift what we refer to as proof of life, like, right up front and then we walk away, which is. It's also, you know, it's been expressed a couple times here. Play the long game. Play the long game. That's when you start being willing to walk away from stuff. Or also play the percentages, game or half. I'm in a conversation with a potentially extremely lucrative client two days ago. I get coached because I was on the phone by myself, and normally we like to negotiate in teams. But I got off the phone and I called one of our coaches and I said, this is my read. They failed the proof of life test. They did some other stuff. I think I need to email this guy back and tell him we're not interested. He's waiving a billion. A company that's going to grow to a billion dollars. They want to change their culture. They got all these problems. He outlined all these problems. I know we have answers. I know they can benefit from us. But I strongly feel like they want us to create a program for us, and then they're either going to implement it without us or they're going to go to who they want to go with in the first place and they're going to tell them to do our stuff. And I know there's a lot of people out there that are telling their favorite vendors to do what we do. It's been directly reported back to me. So we get out of those really early on who are going to be the time wasters. Long way around, though. You get taken advantage of occasionally and look at how well you do. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, be willing to be taken advantage of occasionally.

Yeah. That's one thing that I, you know, I say to people all the time, you know, like, well, you know, I try to help someone. Yeah, it's like it's par for the course. I mean, what I try to do is align myself with people that are aligned with me. And when I start seeing disalignment, even though I extend myself, even though I try and they just keep at it, they keep complaining and that sort of stuff, it's like after a point you just, like, we're just not aligned. I mean, you just see the world different than I do. And so. But yeah, it's really good to have indicators early up front and be able to, you know, bail on it because there's always signs. You know, it's just if you're.

What are you looking for?

If you're able to sniff it out and smoke it out early enough in advance.

Yeah.

Now, dealing with people that want to kill somebody, when you said that, like you talk about it in the book and I've watched interviews with you and I've seen you speak, I mean, you have a great talk at Google and I mean, even Gary Halpert would say that, you know, the problem with dealing with the terrorists is they've got nothing to lose. But from your standpoint, they always have something. And so you can. Is there anyone that you simply cannot negotiate with?

You know, I would say, or a situation if they're communicating with you? We used to always say you always have leverage. If you're talking to me, I got leverage at all. So we'd have a problem with people that wouldn't talk to us at all, or we're going to sniff out early on what they're trying to orchestrate. And we would look for indicators, we used to call them high risk indicators, like if they're where this is going, if they're setting us up. And then you just have to recognize that you're being set up. But if you're talking to me, then I have leverage. And even if you're trying to set us up, if I can figure that out before we get to where you're going, I'll try to change the destination. And some of it might be by refusing to talk or it might be by calling you out. And we did this publicly. We started ISIS executions from the 2012 timeframe when Jim Foley, Stephen Sotloff, some of the others were murdered. That was Al Qaeda 3.0. It's Al Qaeda in Iraq from 2004 that did the same thing. Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was an Al Qaeda lieutenant in Iraq in 2004. Zarqawi, I think, was the guy's name in Iraq. They started the same thing. And when we sniffed out that they were orchestrating murders, we basically went public with it. And do we change the narrative from they were terrorists to they were criminals? Because a criminal will travel the world to go be a terrorist, and that's how they were recruiting. But a criminal won't travel the world to go be a criminal. I can be a criminal here. What do I need to go to Iraq for? So we changed the narrative. And what ended up happening in 2004 when we changed the narrative, we went from chopping people's heads off in the springtime to Tuna Falls. Zawahiri, the Al Qaeda number two, actually put out an edict to stop killing people on camera because it was bad for business. Wow.

So I guess you can shift extraordinarily violent people if just by changing the. Bending their reality. You talk about bending reality. So what are some, I guess, tools that people can use to bend someone's reality?

All right, so the vast majority of decisions that we make is, are based on how we're calculating loss. Danny Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in behavioral economics. Prospect theory. It's over and over again. They said loss things twice as much as an equivalent gain. So if you accept that, that your view of loss bends your view of the realism of the situation by twice. I saw an interview that Danny Kahneman gave that said, actually, that's not true. It's not twice as much. It's more like five to seven times as much. My partner Amos and I lowered the number to two because we wanted fewer arguments from our colleagues. So if I know that your view of loss will distort your perception of reality by five times, then all I need to do is figure out what loss you have going on in your head and change it. For example, I could say, do this and you experience a 20% increase in profitability. Or I can say, don't change a thing, and you're going to lose 20% year over year, each and every day you don't change. And the second one is going to eat at you, and you're not going to be able to get it out of your head. And you know what keeps you up at night, Mr. CEO? It's some sort of a loss. 70% of buy decisions are made to avoid loss, which means you shouldn't pitch value. You should start out by finding out what they see their loss as, which this whole idea of this communication approach. I need to get you talking because I need to know what you think the loss is and how you see it. And then I need to use the same set of tools to get you to see it differently on a process that therapists would call guided discovery. But I'm looking for very specific things. And that's why in the book we refer to it as tactical empathy. We know somebody's asked me earlier about neuroscience, we know so much more about the way the brain actually works because of neuroscience these days. We know so much more about empathy that we're looking for very specific things. And if I start talking to you, what I want to know first is what you're worried about losing.

What's a black swan? Your company's the Black Swan group. You, you know black swans are. You write about it in the book.

It's. Black swan is the unexpected tiny little thing that's going to change everything. That's sort of the theoretical idea. Now, the real world idea is there's a black swan in every one of your deals. How many negotiations have you approached where you're not hiding cards, where you're not holding information that you're not holding something back you don't want the other side to know? Pretty much everyone, right? So, number one, you're not holding back unless you think it's important. So it matters. So if you could put it out on the table, it'd probably change the negotiation. You just don't feel safe doing it. If it's true for you, it's true for the other side. Now, the hard thing to see is where is the overlap on those cards that nobody's showing? Neither one of you have any idea what's in there. So you gotta get to a point where you have a reputation for not hurting people, so that then they might show their cards. Also, since there's stuff that's going to matter to you that they have no way of knowing it matters. You got to get them talking. Which is why picking out lies is not enough. Because you only lie about stuff that you know is important. And half of the black swans you don't know are important. So you're never going to give a physical tell. You know, do I look down when I'm hiding, or do I look to the side when I'm hiding? If I don't know what's important, I'm not going to give you a physical tell. That's why you also got to get people talking about the whole environment sort of in an unguarded stream, and they'll blurt something out. Quick example, an organization's trying to get me to come and speak for free, which I'M not doing all right. So how, what kind of constituency do you have? How many people? 300. Regional association. We don't have money for trainers. We could buy books. Really. Okay, they can videotape it. Really, I need videotape. But then the killer was. I said, what kind of publication have you got? Well, we don't have one, but there's a national publication. Really? What's the national publication got? You interview me, we place it in the national publication. They got to put stuff in their publication. They got 20,000 people that are immediately accessible to get them to put it on the COVID I'll come talk to you for free. National was like, of course we got to put something in the article in the magazine anyway. This is the way we support a regional association to get a speaker that would come in and charge him a bunch of money and he'll come in and do it for free. Yeah, we'll do that. If we hadn't had that extended conversation about where you have access. They didn't know I wanted to be in somebody's magazine. But it's the access to the people. So we just had to keep talking because they were sitting on assets that they had no idea would matter to me until we started talking about. We're taught that you ask questions. To do what? To gather information, you need to find out information. Two thirds of the time, questions are not the best way to get information. If I say to you what's on your mind, that's a good open ended question. We would call that a calibrated question. All your questions should start with either what or how. If you ask calibrated questions, they're very deferential. There's great power in definition. When I'm deferential to you, you're more likely to be honest with me because you feel larger than in charge. There's a whole bunch of emotional intelligence reasons why that works. But you're still going to give me a fairly guarded answer. And so you'll answer, but it'll be guarded. If while we're talking, instead of saying what's on your mind, if I say, sounds like you've given us a lot of thought, sounds like there's something on your mind that's just a verbal observation. We call it a label. It's going to bypass your prefrontal cortex. It's immediately going to re energize what you were thinking about, which brought us to the table. And you're much more likely to give me a solid download of what's going on in your head, it'll come out much more unguarded. So instead of saying to a CEO, I would never say, what's keeping you up at night, Mr. CEO? Because that's just so tired. Not that it's a bad question. CEOs are sick of not being listened to when they give the answer. But I might say it seems like there's something you guys are really struggling with. You probably, you're much more likely to come out with it. We're going to design in advance two or three things that end up being pretty much really universal. And they're going to work in almost all scenarios. My favorite one, my son, somebody calls him on the phone, business related, and they say, how you doing today? And you know what he says back? Sounds like there's something on your mind. And he gets an almost immediate download of information.

You know, how do you spot a liar and what should you look for?

One of the things we talk about is a Pinocchio effect, which means the more words they use, the more they're trying to convince you. A liar knows they're lying. So they're gonna talk at length and they're going to read your body language. They're going to try really hard to convince you. One of the real problems with if I'm telling you the truth and you don't realize I'm telling you the truth, I'm going to talk to you like you are an idiot and you're going to be offended and consequently call me a liar. So a strong indicator of truthfulness is the more concise people get and the more angry they get at you, it correlates more strongly with them telling the truth. If I tell you something, you don't buy it and I go like, well, you're an idiot. I don't even have time for you. I'm probably telling the truth because I haven't taken the time to convince you. So additional words, convincing words correlate really strongly with people lying. Bob Mnookin wrote a book called Beyond. The first chapter is called the Tension Between Empathy and Assertiveness. Bob Mnookin's the head of the program on negotiations at Harvard. I tell a story about him at the beginning of the book. Brilliant guy, though. And I'm reading this chapter and the title, the Tension Between Empathy and Assertiveness. I realize the title is a red herring because then he makes a case that they're a necessary combination, that there is no tension, but that empathy is required for assertion, assertiveness. So I want you to be emotionally Intelligently assertive for them to make a great deal with you. They got to know what you need. You have to assert your own interests. Never stop asserting your own interests. Just don't be a jerk when you do it right. You know, take responsibility for how it lands. Let it land in an emotionally intelligent way so they can hear it. So that they hear what you want them to hear. Assertion without empathy. What they hear is that you're a jerk and you're trying to take them hostage and you're trying to push them around, you're trying to make them lose. Okay? And those are gonna. That, that's just, that's just a tweak. Still be assertive, but be it in a way that actually builds a relationship because they appreciate the fact that you were a straight shooter. Everybody loves straight shooters, right? Who doesn't like a straight shooter? They tell us the truth in an emotionally intelligent way. That's the whole design of it.

Here's one trap I see a lot of entrepreneurs get into, including myself, is if you become very effective at selling people or you become very effective at persuading. And there's always ways to be far better. I mean, certainly you, a lot of times can sell yourself into deals you shouldn't even be in. You know, I mean, you just end up getting clients you shouldn't have. You're always in the, you know, and I, I know a lot of, especially marketers that they go into these pitch modes because they've studied so much damn NLP or so much persuasion, they can't frickin help themselves. And so everything becomes a negotiation and trying to squeeze. And so part of it is like, I have about six hours of interviews with Arianna Huffington. When I was helping her launch her book Thrive a few years ago. My favorite line out of the whole thing that she said was, you know, the best way to complete a project is to drop it. And there are some things in life you just need to unsell them. You need to negotiate yourself out of the deal. Right. So like, you're really damn good at just saying no and doing it in ways that are very effective. So advice that you would give for knowing what to not get yourself involved in.

Well, all right, so the question started out with cutting ties with somebody.

Yeah. Dishonest, negative or lazy people and getting them out of your life. Because I think all of those are negotiations also, you know, especially if they're relatives. That's a tough gig for people, you know.

All right, so the hard part about empathy is what empathy is their Perspective. We're happy to have empathy with people we agree with. Anybody could do that. So you're going to cut ties with somebody who doesn't want you to cut ties with them. What's their perspective going to be on? You anticipate it and then inoculate it. Go farther past it. Because you can't plant negatives with observations. You only plant negatives with denials. So if I was going to cut my relationship with you, my normal gut instinct to try to make it land softer was you're like, look, I don't want you to think I'm a jerk, but we're not going to work together anymore. So that was wrong because I denied the negative. Now my smart move is to say, look, I'm going to look like a jerk. I don't want to deal with you anymore. That simple, you know, articulate the negative just as an observation. And I might even. We do this all the time, you know, look, I'm going to seem an unappreciative jerk that doesn't realize your value, doesn't appreciate the amount of time that you put into this, and I'm going to look stupid and lazy. I don't want to deal with you anymore. What do you got left to throw back at me? You got nothing. And you're gonna think, wow, he was really honest. Your reaction to that? I mean, and that's the really hard part about this. But this is one thing, and we talk about it in the book a little bit. We refer to this as the accusations audit. Since we've been in the coaching. I mean, that's how we're cutting negotiations from 18 months to a week by just we aggressively over diffuse negatives. I mean, extremely aggressive in it, and it's making a huge difference. So the negotiation is to negotiate, to agree, to part ways. How are they going to react? Let me preempt it. Great, Great.

What should I have asked you that I did not?

Wow. I'll go back to something you did ask me, like, how do people get better right away? Let the other side go first. You know, Let the other side talk. Don't be in a rush to make your case. There's a really good chance you let the other side go first. There's going to be something in that mess that you love, and then you go, brilliant, and they think it was their idea and it'll work. A lot of things that seem really inefficient in the process are the reasons why we're cutting our negotiation time way, way, way, way down. The emotional intelligent approach is really indirect and it seems meandering and it seems like it's all over the place. But the reality is it saves massive amounts of time.

In your book, you actually have a great term about practice where you talk about God. What is it? It's towards the end, it says, effectiveness rise to the level of your preparedness. What is that?

Yeah, you don't fall. You don't rise to the occasion. You fall to your highest level of preparation.

Yeah, you don't rise. Say that again.

You don't rise to the occasion. You fall to your highest level of preparation. Yeah.

So part of bringing Chris here was to have you all hear this. Now it's your job to go and absorb it and learn. How do people get your book? Any training from you? What do you recommend for people here to go deeper with what you've talked about and become amazing at negotiating?

All right. When I need copies of the book, I buy it on Amazon myself. I get it cheaper from Amazon than I get it from our publisher. So book's an easy read.

You can also get it on audio, too.

Yeah, true. We've also got a negotiation newsletter. Comes out once a week. It's a good price. It's free. One of my federal government employees used to like to say, if it's free, I'll take three. But it's a short, sweet article each week. Comes out on Tuesday morning. Plus we get training announcement. The newsletter will take you right to the website. It's a gateway to everything that we do. We got stuff that we put out there for free. There's stuff that we charge a lot of money for, but there's stuff that we have for free. And you might as well let the newsletter take you in and do the free stuff. You can. It's called the Edge. You can subscribe via text. Text. FBI, empathy, all one word. Don't put a. Let your autocorrect. Put a space between FBI and empathy. Send it to the number 22828 and it's 22, 8, 28. FBI, empathy, all one word. You get a text box back. It'll sign you up. And when we're doing training, whatever it's going to be there, it's the best gateway to our stuff. Okay.

FBI, empathy, all one word.

228-282-2828.

And Gina will also send that out to everyone, but probably write that down or do it now. The book is called Never Split the Difference. What does that mean?

You know, pretty literal. You know, the interesting thing about it is the other side might be right. Like I can give you example after example after example where splitting the difference or compromise is the dumbest idea on the planet. I mean, it is just stupid. But to really embrace it, the other side might be right. And if your ego gets in the way, it's going to stop you from hearing what they have to say and taking it. Splitting the difference half of what you want, half of what I want. You think I should wear brown shoes. I think I should wear black shoes. I wear one black, one brown. I mean, it's just. And I give you so many examples of time after time splitting the difference of compromising just worked out bad. And that's why somebody asked me earlier, said, well, all negotiations, everybody's supposed it's a good deal. If everybody's mad, I'm sorry, that's dumb. Yeah. And that's splitting the difference.

So have you found this useful? Yes, very useful. Awesome. Thank you.

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