Dropping Dimes with Todd Kashdan

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute here at A&I we believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations, and we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Todd, welcome back, my friend.

So good to be here. Kwame.

Yes, thanks for accepting the invite. You're one of the guys where it's like, listen, you have to. I would have you on like every week. And so I have to have discipline and restraint. So for the folks who haven't heard of you yet, can you tell them a bit about yourself and what you do?

Sure. I've been running the well Being Laboratory at George Mason University for the past three decades, and we study all the things you wish you were talking about at a cocktail party. So we study how do people fall in love, how to maintain love and romantic relationships. What is the role of purpose in life, how you develop it? What's the nature of curiosity? Should we be focusing on how strong someone's curiosity be or the way in which they are curious? Creativity, meaning and purpose in life. And then more recently, I've been interested in these constructive, productive conflicts that we can have across the moral divides.

I love that. And just out of curiosity, have you written any books recently?

Todd Yes, I have. Thanks for asking. I just recently published the Art of How to Dissent and Defy Effectively. The original title was supposed to be Minority Influence. Publishers didn't like that, but it's really 60 years of research on this thing called minority influence, which is if you lack power and status in a social hierarchy, the whole world is a junior high school lunchroom. You got your tray in. Which table are you going to sit at? How are you going to be persuasive? And Robert Cialdini's work on being influential and the basic Research about kind of power dynamics don't work the same when you lack power, status or the numbers on your side. And so I just synthesized a whole body of work wondering why no one's done this before.

Love this. So important. Everybody check out the book. We will have links to that in the description. And this is one of those podcast episodes that almost didn't happen simply because Todd and I have been, you know, just talking for the last half hour. So we decided to pause and capture some of this magic. And we were really just talking about the state of conversation and communication and conflict resolution now in society. And the two terms you used in your introduction, Todd, you said you want to talk about how we can have these con in a way that are. That's constructive and productive. When you think about those two terms, what, what do they mean to you?

Well, for me, we don't do a good enough job of figuring out what are the group memberships that form our identity or that we would aspire to, like to be part of identity. The second part is even less consciously discussed, which is what makes a good group member in those groups that we're part of or aspire to be part of. So when I think about being a professor, what makes a good group member? When I think about being an instructor for a classroom of students, what makes me a good group member? If I think about being in my local pickleball league, what makes me a good pickleball league member in my community? Or if I think about in my household, in my neighborhood and in all these ways, if you were to really deconstruct what makes life amazing, living in your cul de sac, what makes life amazing, living with your family. Often it's not. You're not just focusing on the harmonious times. You're talking about when I despise my kids because of what they did, when my neighbor did not hand back the snowblower and ended up being. There was a tornado and a snowstorm and they were in Dominican Republic for a week and a half that happened there. How do you manage that relationship? How do you manage that conversation? And for me, that conversation about what makes a good group member should be had by every single organization in every single place where there are multiple people. Because only then can you realize, let's not take the entire culture of the world and try to put it into our little small mom and pop shop. It's what is the micro culture in our little world? And then only there can we realize we're going to deviate from the world because look at the characters that were around.

Oh, there's so much to unpack here. I mean, the therapist version of myself heard that very specific story about somebody going to a tropical paradise with your snowblower that seemed precise to be a throwaway. So we'll explore that off air. But with this, I think it's so interesting because when you're thinking about every relationship and every group that we're with, we are creating these small C cultures everywhere that we go. And the big C culture isn't always going to fit in our small C culture. Right? So what might be within the cultural zeitgeist of society in this moment might not apply 100% or might not apply at all to our little micro culture that we're creating. And let's really tease this out. If we try to use a one size fits all approach to our individual relationships and our micro cultures and try to force the societal norms on these smaller cultures, what is the danger?

Let's go to a really concrete example. I think there's a lot of research on romantic relationship that has not been stolen by the organizational world. So what we know is, is that equity in a romantic relationship is a great predictor of marital harmony. And if there is, perceived equity is more important than actual equity. So what's equity in a romantic relationship? You have relationship withdrawals and relationship deposits. Anybody with kids will understand this completely, which is that if Kwame decides, I'm going to go to this conference and it's a week and a half to build up my public speaking skills, not that you needed it. What that means implicitly is when you come home, you are on the clock for weeks to make up for the fact that you left your household alone and those little kids were being taken care of by other caregivers. That happens there. So you have done a relationship withdrawal, and now there is a slight natural consequence that comes with it. Relationship deposit is if you come back and you have tickets for spas for your romantic partner, tickets for amusement parks with babysitters for your kids that happen there. So in this case, it ends up being a relatively equitable relationship. You made a withdrawal, you made the deposits, you're good to go. It's usually seen as that if you view your relationship excessively as a bank account, how much is in there? How many withdrawals has my partner made? That is predictive of really relationship problems and dissolution. Now, move this to the organizational world. And you and I would say argue that you have to determine, as your word, like small C culture in some Organizations that bank account approach of being obsessed about it is a great way to prevent social loafing. So you have to depend of like is an authoritarian structure work for the individuals and the type of work and the time urgency to get things done. So living in Virginia, right outside of Washington D.C. i have friends that work in the Situation Room. They have been there while Obama was on a conversation with Ukrainian officials and they're on the other end and they're typing down all the details and of course I don't know anything what they said, but they were there listening to this conversation. In that scenario, you can't be thinking about equitability in those relationships. Stuff has to get done. I'm urgency. There is a random factor of whatever President Obama wants, when he wants it, when he's president, that's going to take precedence over anything else that you care about. There's an authoritarian structure. It's not a democracy. And it works because it prevents war and it keeps peace during peace times.

There's so much richness in what you're saying. First of all, the realization is the example that you gave with me and Whitney is apartment and it's helping me to realize I still need, I still owe Whitney big time for the first half of this year. So I'm glad you said that. I've got some work to do. And you're absolutely right too, because if we try and say within a standard organization, all right, hey, everybody has a voice, everybody's voice has value. And when we're making big decisions, everybody should be heard in that meeting room with President Obama. We're not trying to hear from like the interns in this moment. And so again, that's not being disrespectful, it's respecting rank in that circumstance. And what we're recognizing is that within our individual relationships and within our organizations, we can be inspired by what's happening outside. We can learn from what's happening outside. But we should probably not just copy and paste what everybody else is doing, because every organization and relationship is unique.

I'm glad you used the word admired because one thing I always think about, well, there's many things. One thing that I think gets lost in the mix conversation on culture is climate. And climate is each person in the group their interpretation of the culture. So you might not want everyone's voice, but you do at some point, periodically, and not annually get an indication of what is your interpretation of the culture. Because the culture shifts. They could be huge tectonic shifts. So I just learned from my high schoolers now that Africa. The tectonic shifts are for some reason quite extensive and it might be breaking apart the entire continent. Interesting. Learned this this week. It's a good metaphor for thinking about organizations is are you not noticing the slow, 10,000, 100,000 year slow shifts in the tectonic plates? And because you're not paying attention to them, you're not noticing that for whatever reason in the environment or the emotional dynamics that are occurring with the particular people that are now employed, that the shifts increased in speed and in power. And if you don't get a regular gauge of the climate of individuals, you're not going to understand what the culture is. But that's different than giving everyone a voice. And so this terminology is pretty important.

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Giving voice is saying we want to make sure that everybody has the conch every time we have a meeting and every time we're talking. And you could do it by email, in person. I'm going to leave this open slate of time. Not every person or every week or every organization should be designed that way. So there should be some intentionality with the design. And one thing we know is that time urgency is a very important variable for predicting creativity as well as the quality of a culture. If the urgency is extensive, it leads to greater convergent thinking and less divergent thinking moving in the creative direction. That happens neither good or bad. It's just. It's what is. But the key to understand that is, can you anticipate when urgent time periods will occur when you might have to shift from more of a democracy or an oligarchy to more of an authoritarian regime that happens there. And if it's predictable based on time urgency, then you don't have an authoritarian regime. You have a very contextually sensitive organization, which is good.

So first I want to highlight the focus on design. Because this isn't just something where you, as the listener, I want you to say, well, I remember Todd came on and he said we should check in every once in a while. So every once in a while I'm going to check in. In my organization, every once in a while is not time frame. So when we are in your organization, you should design it in a way that you're having these check ins from time to time to measure the shifting climates. Because every organization is dynamic, the society we live in is dynamic. Things will change. We need to make sure that we're keeping track of those changes. And then I love the fact that you talked about the time urgency and how that will change the way that people act and the way they interact with each other and the way that decisions are made. If we understand there's going to be some kind of cyclical nature in the time urgency, then we can design our culture in a way that helps us to schedule those check ins or however we decide to have it. So we're not always feeling rushed. But if it's unstructured, it's kind of hard to kind of predict how that happens. And you talked about the distinction between convergent and divergent thinking. I want to clarify those two points. Are you talking about just within an individual's mind, convergent thinking in terms of being more focused and divergent being more creative, or are you thinking more in the macro sense within an organization as a whole?

That's a great question. You could think of creativity in at least three different ways. There is the actual creative product or process. There is the. There are the creators, the individuals that are responsible for it. And then there is actually the way in which creativity is decided upon. So in terms of how is the audience trained in terms of the receptivity and persuadability with those ideas, how is it potentially normed? Are those ideas revealed anonymously? Or they're revealed with me, Todd, or you, Kwame, where all of our baggage, good or bad, gets attached to it, such that maybe people put a halo effect and assume our ideas are good because here we are in a podcast. Or maybe people put a horns effect where they view it as negative because there's automatic jealousy built in, is they're getting more attention than I am. So as you're saying with intention, that creative process of thinking about I want the ideas to be separated from the messenger is different from the creative individuals, as different from the creative product itself that happens there and then add a layer onto that. And I just want to say this because I want to appreciate how complex these things are. Is there is divergent and conversion of thinking in the individual in terms of are you engaging in behavior that exploits the existing knowledge structure and strengths and capacities that you know are available? That's convergent thinking. We're just capitalizing on that and going in that direction. Divergences, we're looking for gaps, holes. We are borrowing from other places. We are mixing your peanut butter with my chocolate to figure out new ways of doing things. And we'll sprinkle in a little, little pomegranate seeds that go in there. That's diversion thinking. You are intentionally searching for new ways of doing things, not just the sake for newness, because you want it to be useful in some way. But as people start to talk and tinker and build on each other's ideas, then you could have a convergent thought with a divergent process or a divergent thought where in the group it does a convergent conversation around it. And this is meant to be listened to multiple times. But what I want to say is we just say, hey, I value creativity, innovation. And I say, what do you mean by that? And which level are you exploring? Because we could intervene at any one of those levels and depending on what we're looking for or where we see a problem or where we want to aspire to be better, this is great.

And to your last point about levels, what you're showing is that there are levels to this game too, right? Because when it just comes to the game of human interaction, there's so many things that we can consider. So we can start with the baseline level of hey everybody, we should have more conversations. I think that's, that's very great, right? That's, that's an important place to start. But now as you start to develop and develop that complexity, especially when an organization grows, we have to recognize that just simply having these sporadic huddles from time to time does not guarantee that we are accomplishing the goals that we set forth for ourselves in these huddles and these conversations too. Because what we're seeing here, we might just say, hey, think outside the box, be creative. But we're recogniz recognizing that on a micro and macro level, those things like the creativity, it doesn't happen accidentally. Like, you have to put yourself in the right mindset. And if you are not in the right emotional state, it's much more difficult to engage in the divergent thinking that's required for creativity. But then as a collective, if we don't structure these interactions the right way, then we might go into this conversation saying, hey, we want to be more creative, we want to hear your voice, we want to make better decisions. But the process of having that conversation is not narrowly tailored to meet that end.

I'm going to liken this to my 16 year old daughter's sleepover this weekend because I think this is very relevant to organizational design. So just asking about the weekend and she told me that she decided that she wanted to kind of see if she wanted to expand her social circle. So she hung out with none of her close friends, completely different group, and they had a sleepover. Six girls. I wasn't there thankfully. And when she came back, I was like, hey, did you find any candidates for new best friends? She's like, no. And actually there was this one girl who we will not name one o' clock in the morning said to the other five girls that were there, you know what? I feel like this is like really boring and we can be a lot more interesting together. And I want to link this to what you just said because there is a pressure cooker element that occurs in the conversations about productive conflict, curiosity, creativity. And in these spaces, or even going into like the world of anxiety, right? The public speaking world. In these spaces, when you point out that there's a problem from the perspective of a problem, focused framing as opposed to solution focused framing, and you say, so Kwame's about to go on stage, I happen to be in the green room with him. And I say, kwame, just relax. You've done this before. And you would turn to me and say, todd, what the hell are you talking about? Do you think I don't want to be relaxed? You think that you telling me to be relaxed is like this Buddhist strategy that now all of a sudden my heart rate went down and like all of a sudden my blood pressure lowered. Like, I know to be relaxed. I'm just. That's not the way. And similarly, that we can make fun of those people that say, just relax for creativity. When you tell people I want creative thoughts to what I just said happens there, you are basically paralyzing people because you started with a convergent approach for people to listen attentively and elaborate on what you're about to say. And then you just tell them, basically a ungoverned rule. Now I want your creativity. And the brain doesn't work that way where it's easy to switch and oscillate just because you're told to do so. You can't go from Mindless to mindful just by being told to do so. It requires some deliberative practice. You can't go from curious to incurious. You have to set that little C culture where when you were in a room and having a conversation, set the parameters in the beginning before content arises, which is, this is what I want. Instead of cohesion, instead of unanimity, instead of everyone agreeing with that gal over there that everybody wants to sit next to a lunch because she's cool and interesting, and she's worked in New York City, in Paris and Australia. I want you to focus less on the messenger, more on the message, and I want you to ask tough questions. I want you to think independently, and I don't want you to worry about your popularity and status because it will not be affected by what happens in this room if you are not mean towards other people in this room. You set the parameters of the culture, and then creativity may or may not emerge. But telling people to be creative actually is one of the deterrents and barriers to making people creative, especially in extemporaneous conversations.

Oh, this is good. This is good. Okay, so let me run an idea by you, and I'm genuinely looking for feedback. If it's dumb, I want you to tell me. Okay, Todd. So one of the things kind of playing off of this, one of the things that we do at the American Negotiation Institute is when we are trying to brainstorm, we sequence things this way. Like, we'll have a meeting that's all about creativity, and we call it a bad idea race. So you're not allowed to critique or anything like this. It's just get out every single idea that can possibly, like, potentially work, and we can use improv strategy and build on it, but we can't tear it down. And then in another meeting, we'll say, all right, now we're going to start to whittle down on these ideas and start to formulate it. But I want to maximize divergent thinking in that meeting, because I know if they are in the mindset of, like, editing and critiquing, it could make people hold back from vulnerability. And if you're in that editing and critiquing mode, it holds yourself back from creativity as well. So let's say I'm an organization. I come to you as a consultant. I say, that's my process. Tear me apart. What do you think?

Well, my initial impulse, I mean, and I start off as being a researcher, is constraints are good for creative thinking. So in general, I like the idea of we're not having the wild wild west, you can just say anything that happens there. But for a lot of people, they are not necessarily what's called promotion focused. They're more prevention focused. So promotion focused people, they're looking for utopian ideals. They experience lots of positive emotions, they tend to be much more effervescent, they are more likely to shove their stuff out there and they're looking for eagerly waiting wins. And in some ways whoever creates, you know, this, this bad idea race, that's like a promotion focused framing. It is God. But a good portion of people, and I mean it might be close to 50, 50 in the country are prevention focused. Especially if you have in more collectivist cultures, East Asian cultures where people are, they're trying to avoid errors, mistakes and failures and they're trying to have that strong loss aversion. And so if you design it where you're not allowed to critique and save that, just curtail that and suppress, hide and conceal that you are going to lose the prevention oriented people potentially from that creative process. A good number of people are creative as a function of negative emotions. And so hearing the critiques inspires them to think of new ideas and hearing the problems inspires them to think of solutions. And other people, they like to think about the questions. Well, what are the questions we focusing on? And you hear a lot of people talk about it sounds like you have a solution in search of a problem. So this, yeah, this would be like a very promotion oriented person. A prevention oriented person would say I want to know all the problems are where all the critiques are because then I'm going to build something that addresses them that happens there. So I would say think carefully about going too sequential and allow the individual differences in personality to emerge having their different directions to getting to the same creative endpoint.

This is brilliant. So helpful, so helpful for so quick recap for the listeners here. I love the fact that we're talking about prevention focus versus promotion focus because when it comes to like the psychology of personality, I don't think that's discussed enough when it comes to persuasion and conflict resolution. So simple metaphor for people to keep in mind. Imagine a mousetrap. So you have the mousetrap and then you have the cheese. A prevention focused person will see the mousetrap. The promotion focused person would see the cheese. Right. So it's about goals like risk versus reward. And I am that super extroverted goal oriented, promotion focused person who came up with a brad idea race and thinks it's brilliant. But what you're showing is that there are other people who think differently, who have a lot of value, who spark creativity in their own lives in a different way from more focus on the risk. And so I'm inadvertently inhibiting their creative process by just putting mine over them. And so this is really important when it comes to like diversity of thought too, because, all right, cool, we have a super extroverted leader. That's cool. But I have blind spots and I don't see how I might be inhibiting the creativity of other people. So this was an incredible thought exercise.

Yeah, I'm glad you talked about the intersection of personality or individual differences. And then thinking about negotiation and almost every hot topic right now in organizations, I think about the lack of this. So before we went on air, we were talking about diversity initiatives and should people actually reveal all their biases ahead of time? Whether you're a police officer, whether you're a CEO, whether you're working for the United States Postal Service? Is it useful for people to kind of reveal these things? Is there a sufficient little C culture that exists that you can reveal them and not get crucified, have a witch hunt because of them? Because if that's the case, people learn very quickly. You're told you can reveal your biases, but you can't really reveal your biases. Happens there. And if we don't think about promotion and prevention oriented differences, you're going to get a lot of these things. You're going to get diversity initiatives wrong, you're going to get productive conflict issues wrong. And you're going to get any research and development or mergers or transitions or how do you onboard newcomers. All of these areas you're going to get wrong. If you're not thinking from a prevention focus and a promotion focused mindset that is so fascinating.

Okay, and now I'm processing about my own process within the company. I'm like, man, I got to change it up.

You know what would be fun is like, you know, like they listen to this and just see how they respond. Like, like, am I off? And you might find just like we were talking about is that in your organization there is a sufficient understand. Like they've downloaded the Kwame DNA to such a degree and there's such good faith that it doesn't matter. So, you know, it might depend on the nature of the leader who's kind of bringing these ideas in the forefront and someone who has, you know, a lower approval rating in terms of like their likability. It might be much more important. That happens that now that's like, this is like a question that hasn't been explored. Is the nature of your relationship with the leader, does that end up altering how important these individual differences are?

It's so interesting, Todd, because once you start to dig deeply into these examples like this us as a case study, you start to see the complexity and nuance of it. And so you can see the value of research and also where you have to be a, have a discerning voice in your head to understand where research loses some validity. So for example, it's super important for us to understand the research and understand like how people work and operate in general when we think about it from a correlation type of perspective. Because even, especially when it comes to the social sciences, we have the fact that we're talking about correlation, not causation first of all. And then if you really want to get nerdy, we have the replicability issues with social psychology. We have P hacking where people can kind of twist the data to get the results that they want and things like that. And so what I've started to recognize is for me, like when I first got out of school, I was saying this is what the study says, this is gospel truth. But now as I'm starting to get a little bit more mature, I'm realizing that the studies give us a really good starting point for things that we should consider as we go and do our own self experiments within our own cultures and our own little environments to see what really works for us.

We travel the same exact trajectory. I mean, I used to walk around with play cards like I was boycotting a store for being homophobic in terms of like you didn't follow the science, you don't have five citations, your leadership sucks, Your leadership workshop sucks. And then realize is that as long as you are constantly experimenting and collecting some form of data which just getting people's insights. But the best way of doing this is that people can respond relatively anonymously and with the hopes that you've created a culture where you're not going to get trolled if you open up the anonymous wings for people to provide feedback. If you haven't done that, the worst thing that you could do is have open meetings and ask them, hey, here's the idea that I brought about the, you know, the bad idea race. Everybody who has problems with it, please let me know what you think. So this is what happens in, at George Mason University, my home boys. And I've been telling them for 30 years now this does not work because people know who is at a point of social stature, that they're so likable and so socially attractive that you would never want to disagree with them in public because it's not worth it, because you will lose their fans. And not just them. Every organization has these people. There are people that are cooler, wiser, funnier, friendlier, more interesting than you and I. And those people exist in every organization. You don't want those people, their presence, altering other people's opinions such that they are falsifying what they believe so that that cool character will like them. And this is happening on a regular basis. And it's probably like a plague that's affecting organizations.

No doubt. No doubt. And it's hard to stand up in the face of a situation where you disagree, especially if you disagree with somebody popular, but also if you disagree with popular ideas that have a lot of cultural momentum. It's hard because we say that we want to hear people's voices. We want to hear people's voices as long as it aligns with, with our perspective. And I'm looking at the clock here. I know I have a podcast coming up in about 15 minutes, but I'm going to push it. Todd, I'm going to, we're going to go to the. I'm going to ask you this question. Do you have, do you have a few more minutes?

Of course. Yeah.

Okay. We're going to have some fun. It's you. I appreciate it. So just heads up. We're either going to have a lot of fun or we're going to get canceled. Or maybe both. Maybe both. Okay. So now as culture is shifting, we're having a lot of these conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion. And what I've found, even as somebody who has written a book called how to have Difficult Conversations about Race. Right. I find that one of the things that often happens is we stifle discussion when the person on the other side disagrees with us on something that relates to diversity, equity and inclusion that we disagree with. And I personally find a lot of value in creating understanding, mutual understanding, even if we do not agree. But that sentiment seems to be losing steam in modern society. And given your expertise, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah, I mean, we know from the best research we know about changing people's minds is on the deep canvassing work from Los Angeles LGBTQ Community Center. For those people that don't know about that, it is the most well endowed, financially run, marginalized group center probably in the world. Their annual budget is likely $100 million and they basically designed how to deep canvas and have these 30 minute plus communications with people door to door to get people to move. Not 180s, not from yes to no, but just to move on issues such as immigration, transgender rights. You know, whether you're talking about, you know, red light, red lighting districts and re altering them or altering the the amount of playgrounds and grass space in predominantly black neighborhoods compared to predominantly white neighborhoods, these are tough issues because you're often voting against yourself with a limited amount of resources. So how do they do this? They do it very differently than how the diversity initiatives are happening. Organizations, the first place where they start is they ask people where do they stand on issues as you've been saying, they truly are listened to and from based on what they say is they ask them, have you ever experienced a time where you felt out of place or rejected or didn't fit in? That happens there. The experiences that are personalized of the person who has already announced that they are in opposition to the thing you care about. So relate this to diversity. They're saying they're anti diversity, they are anti affirmative action, they are anti their time being spent on DEI compared to something closely related to what makes them make money and support their family, as opposed to viewing them as a detractor and an inefficiency. They view them as this is a source of information and I want to understand you. And first they understand their personal perspective and they're looking for a story of their own difficulties in their lives because everybody has them. And then one of the things the deep canvases are taught is to tell a story that relates to either them personally or someone they know who is diverse in themselves. And the idea is that those n of 1 stories, those individualized stores, not just saying this is a greater good, this is a moral good, this is what society is saying we should be doing. This is part of the ethos of utopian ideals. It's that there are individual suffering. Hear this story and then let me know. Hearing that story, how does that move you? On a scale of 0 to 10 on the issue that we've just been talking about. And if it doesn't move them, you ask them why didn't it move you? And there's so much give and take. Imagine in a DEI conversation where someone was saying what worked for you and what didn't work for you, and someone says what didn't work for you? You don't attack them. You say, well tell me more. Like besides that part that didn't work, was there anything that Worked out now if they say nothing. The beauty of those kind of questions is if you're all or nothing about this, then it's kind of on you as the opposition of you're not really playing with, you're not playing fairly with this conversation. If there's an inkling, if there's a nugget, that's what you build upon. And the goal is not to get them to green light the DEI issue. The goal is to get them to think after this occurs. And if you try to shame or maim or put someone into an out group as a function of their view on the issue, all you've done is created an unnecessary adversary as opposed to a potential ally in the future.

Beautifully articulated. I love this. And I think with this deep canvassing example, we're recognizing that when you said I want to understand you, it's not I want to understand you so you could reveal your vulnerabilities. And I can counter you right as I genuinely want to understand where you're coming from. And what we're doing is we're creating a true connection, triggering mutual empathy. It's not just me forcing you to empathize with me, it's I'm trying to also empathize with you as well. And so you're deepening the relationship. And then the goal is to get them to continue to think after this process. And for me, when I think about these difficult conversations, I think about all effective difficult conversations should be transformative to everybody involved. So if I go into this conversation and I don't change at all, then I think there's a miss because I should be gathering new information throughout this process. And I think a lot of times when one goes into these conversations believing that they are the sole arbiter of truth in that conversation, that arrogance is sensed. And it not only makes the person less likely to agree or change their perspective, but it actually makes them, like you said, actively against you because they realize that you just see them as a problem and not as a person. And when you think about anything, anything in our lives, what is it that we all agree with? We don't even all agree that humanity can survive beyond a couple centuries from now. We can't even agree on that.

Right.

It's wild. And so we assume that we're going to agree on these super sensitive issues. Not completely, but we have to do our work to have conversations and try our best to understand.

You just had me have the greatest idea for a PowerPoint slide of the percentage of people that agree with Affirmative action organization and the percentage of people agree that Creed and Nickelback are good bands and just show that, like, listen, there is lots of variability on things that should be very clear and obvious to everyone. And it's a good place to start.

I love it. Yeah, man. And I think that just, it helps us to be more humble in these conversations. We're all different. That's what diversity is about, the fact that we're all different. Right. So, yeah, I appreciate you sharing on that because that's been something that's been on my mind for a while and I think it really inhibits these conversations. But if we're doing inclusion right, inclusion should include you, whoever you happen to be. And I think that part of inclusion is often missed.

Yeah. And. And because our listeners didn't hear this and I know you have to go real soon, I do want to give you props for something you said before we went on the air, which is that one of the things that you bemoan is that you feel that in the modern world right now, as a black man, you feel as if some people are actually stifling their disagreements with you for fear of like what it might look like in terms of the, you know, the performance element to it and you wish that people would disagree with you. And, and it's those kind of comments that just like, immediately I'm going to walk away. Like, I respect the comment before, but the idea of like he's looking for disagreement and feels he is being deprived of it because people are worried about what they're going to say and that's not the world that you want to live in. And that lens, I think, is what's going to bridge people more than a lot of the, A lot of the really heavy handed approaches that are being thrown out there.

I appreciate that, man. That means a lot. And yeah, what, what I'll do. And of course we will, we will edit it because we had some real convers at the beginning. But I think that would be cool to show that little snippet to hear that part of the conversation because I think the quality of conversation is decreasing in a disturbing type of way at a time where it's like a pivotal time for our society. And if we're just afraid to engage with people for trivial reasons, I think that's highly problematic. And we as a society are missing out on good information, good conversation just because of fear. Yeah.

And I always worry of the people that are seeking the strongest seating that's stable at the table, at the conversation table. They are Often being the most deprived. But there's a good motive, but there's a bad consequence. And it's worth considering. In the attempt to try not to make a mistake, you are actually depriving people of what they want, which is spontaneity, playfulness, mess ups, mea culpas and then just kind of like really sloppy early, you know, early working conversations. And you don't, you don't always want the perfectly curated version of people's personalities. You want to meet people who they actually are. You know, and there's, there's some good science behind this in mixed race interactions is a lot of white people, they are less likely to, to stumble and kind of make missteps in the way that they communicate out of fear of they need to get things perfectly right. And as a result, they are seen as inauthentic by people that are non white because they can see right through it. Like, this is not how a human being talks. This is how someone who is perfectly articulating and preparing what they're going to say sounds like. This is not someone who I meet for breakfast or see someone on a basketball court or see someone in a pickleball match.

This is why I love having you on, because we could just keep on going and going and going because the cycle continues. It's like, well, you know, Todd, he didn't make a mistake when he talked to, he didn't seem reserved. That's a form of bias. I think he's a little bit racist. And then, and then the world slowly falls apart because we can't talk to each other. This is so good, Todd. I appreciate you man. And before you go, just remind the listeners about the book and how they can connect.

I love talking to you anytime, any place. The art of insubordination. How to dissent and defy effectively. And you can find that and 250 free articles from science on toddcashion.com love it.

And yes, follow Todd on, on LinkedIn. He's always dropping dimes. And follow me too, if you don't already and please disagree with me if you disagree and let's chat it out. Todd, pleasure as always, man. Appreciate you same. Congratulations. You've just joined an elite club by listening to a full episode. You're now officially on the Negotiate Anything team. So welcome aboard. What most team members do is they start subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to automatically get the latest episodes of the show. The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations. Keep learning, keep practicing and Keep getting better. Your relationships will improve, your career will soar, and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crucial conversations. Again, thank you for joining the team. We're excited to have you. And I will see you in the next episode. Episode. I'll catch you later.

I just don't think it's any person who's a businessman or woman. Like the idea that someone could write something clearly has not consumed your product, has no, has not seen access to you, and they have a grudge. And it's clear, even if it's unclear. It just seems like you should err on the side of, remove someone who's like trying to get their vendetta by attacking your reputation online. I mean, I, I feel bad, I feel bad for restaurants in the modern world where, you know, these one star reviews because the waiter didn't give them, you know, a free dessert for their wife's birthday. You know that no one's going to read those details. They're going to see the average rating and then double click it. So if you get a number of people that don't like a waiter, I mean, I don't care whether you like the waiter or waitress. I'm like a nice guy, so I treat them well. That does, that's, that's not going to stop me from going to the restaurant. But I feel bad for these people.

Yeah, man. It's a disproportionate amount of power and I think we can be pretty clear on that. It was racism. I mean, the person said, this white guy talking about these issues, they described your race in the critique without addressing the substance or merit of the work you consume. Like flagrant racism.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've gotten a lot of heat for the fact that I did mention in the acknowledgments that I grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood, which I did grow up in a predominantly black neighborhood. And it's, that's, that's interesting.

You want to, you want to see the double standard? Because I said the exact same thing in my acknowledgements, like in my intro. Like, I grew up in an all white community. Everybody's like, wow, that must have been so hard. You're so amazing. You're so strong. Like, no, it's just like a fact that colors my perspective that you should probably know about. We should disclaim that.

Yeah, right, yeah.

And it just shows the double standard. It's, it's a very strange time we're living in, man.