Embracing Imperfection: Lessons from Olympians and Grammy-Winning Performers with Andrew Moses

Hello, my friend, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for joining us today. With over 10 million downloads and listeners from more than 180 different countries, it's dedicated listeners just like you who have made Negotiate Anything the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, author, and the proud CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Now, before we get into today's insightful conversation, I have a golden opportunity for those of you who recognize the power of negotiation in your professional lives. Have you ever found yourself wishing that you could navigate those high stakes conversations with more confidence? Or perhaps you're looking to empower your team with the art of persuasion and conflict resolution? At the American Negotiation Institute, we've crafted specialized keynotes and workshops tailored for those very needs. We've transformed the negotiation skills of professionals worldwide, and we're eager to do the same for you. We believe the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And our goal is to help you improve your lives and the lives of those around you, one difficult conversation at a time. Don't let another challenging conversation leave you second guessing. Click the link in the description to discover how we can help you find confidence in conflict, negotiate better deals, and have stronger relationships. Because in the world of business, every conversation counts. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Andrew, thanks for joining us today.

Kwame, it is so great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Hey man, it's my pleasure. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Well, that's a loaded question, Kwame, but I think to keep it simple, I'm a vice president at a management consulting firm called Morgan Franklin. We work with companies all over the United States and around the world, and I spend a lot of my time helping CFOs, CIOs, and other executives across the C Suite tackle complex finance, technology and business issues. And I also have a personal passion project where I host a podcast called Everybody pulls the tarp. And I've interviewed over 150 Olympians, professional athletes, Grammy winners, TV stars, CEOs, authors, about their success. Secret. I'm incredibly passionate about personal and professional development and sharing those lessons with my clients and sharing those lessons with people around the world.

I love this man. And personally, I think it's cool that you have this really impressive career as a VP at the management consulting company and now you have this passion project which is the podcast where you're interviewing incredibly high level people and being super generous with the content that you create. So it's just a really cool blend that you have there with your career.

Well, thank you. I appreciate it. And it really all for me boils down to this concept of being a net giver. You know, I could go out and have conversations with people and just learn myself, but I'm always wired to share what I learned with others and try and distill those lessons down into something that everyone can apply 100%.

And this goes into what we were talking about before we started the recording, where we were talking about the mentality you have about learning from somebody else and applying what you've learned from them in other industries and other situations. Can you explain that perspective?

Yeah. I'm a huge believer that oftentimes the best way to learn is to look outside of your industry or specific discipline and try and apply what others are doing in different areas to your world. So, for example, I am the least athletic person that you might ever meet. However, I love having conversations with Olympians and professional athletes about their experiences and productivity and how they manage their time, how they overcome adversity, how they build effective teams, and then try and apply those lessons to my own life, personally and professionally. And there's a great case study. I believe it's Southwest Airlines from quite a few years ago, where they were looking to get more efficient at turning around planes and drive out wasted time in their process. And their initial thinking was, let's talk to friends and former colleagues at other airlines. And then one of the executives had the idea of going to a NASCAR pit crew because nobody on the earth does things faster and more efficiently than a NASCAR pit crew. So the Southwest Airlines executives went and they learned from a NASCAR pit crew. And that has enabled Southwest to kind of get leaps and bounds ahead of their competition in many instances as it pertains to efficiency and turning around airplanes. So I am a huge believer personally and professionally. Yes, you can learn from people in your own industry and in your own discipline, but if you really want to force multiply it, try and learn from people outside. And that's why on the podcast, I have conversations with people from all different walks of life, all different industries. Like I said, Olympians, professional athletes, bestselling authors, TV stars, entrepreneurs, CEOs. I learned something from each and every one of them. And it's amazing how when you weave it together, it's this really cool tapestry of advice and wisdom.

I love this man. You're so right. And that's kind of what we try to do here on the podcast, too, because we have people from all sorts of different backgrounds having tough conversations, but doing it in slightly different ways. So I can think about times where, for me, as a lawyer who now runs this company, I could look back on something I learned from somebody in real estate or a school teacher or a relationship therapist and pull that out and utilize it in a tough conversation. And it works.

Yeah, we're all. Whether we realize it or not, we're all building these databases in our mind. I don't have the ability to memorize everything, so I keep good notes and I organize things. We're all building this database of information and ideas and approaches, and it's about harnessing it at the right times in your personal and professional life to help your trajectory. And I think that's what's really cool about it. Learning is like putting money in the bank. There's a compounding interest. Right. Every day if you wake up and you learn, and every day, if you wake up and you have a conversation with somebody interesting about an interesting topic, it's going to build upon each other over the course of time. And you don't know when you're going to use it, but at some point you will.

Bingo. Exactly. And I'd be interested to hear your perspective after interviewing all of these incredible people, because you've probably heard them talk about some of the tough conversations that they've had to have along the way. What commonalities are you seeing between those guests?

One of the most consistent things I see is the adversity. Every successful person has experienced an immense amount of adversity through every journey that looks successful. There are at least a handful of points where you feel like quitting, you feel like it's not going to work out, you feel like you're headed the wrong direction. And all of the successful people that I've talked to have figured out a way to use adversity to their advantage. So they see adversity as an opportunity.

They see.

They see adversity as a chance to learn. And they believe deep down that if they can get through it on the other side, they're going to be better for it. And that's one of the most consistent things. The other thing that's been really apparent is, and it's similar to adversity, but it's different, is on the surface, success often looks perfect. The performance of the Olympic figure skater often looks perfect. The concert that the Grammy winner puts on looks perfect, but it's never perfect. People who have extraordinary success in a discipline do better than maybe the average performer in that discipline is. They're actually comfortable with the lack of perfection and they're willing to acknowledge that they're going to do something that's imperfect. Take Tara Lipinski, for example. She's an Olympic figure skater, won a gold medal. And she told me, she said, andrew, I'm a self proclaimed perfectionist. Like, there's a lot of aspects of my life, even in skating where I'm a perfectionist and skating on the surface looks like a discipline where you have to strive for perfection. They're scoring you on these artistic and these technical things. And she said, the perfectionist in me had to get comfortable with winging it. I had to get comfortable with winging it because you are never going to feel fully ready. No matter how many times you practiced a skating program, the Olympics come along or a competition comes along, you have to skate away from the boards and you have to be willing to perform at a level that you might not deem to be perfect, but on the way to perfection, you're going to work really hard and it's going to be pretty darn close. And those are two of the things I think, the adversity and the getting comfortable with perfection. There's so many. But those are two Kwame, that I kind of continue to come back to.

Andrew, I love this because it's perfectly in line with what we found about tough conversations too. So our motto is the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And when you think about the adversity piece that you talked about, that's so critical because a lot of times people shy away from these conversations because they say, ah, you know, it's scary. And they focus on the thing that's scary about it, but they don't recognize it's an opportunity for advancement. And you're not going to be able to avail yourself to that opportunity if.

You don't have that mindset 100%, Kwame. And difficult conversations like, never get easier with time, right? Like the topic typically doesn't resolve itself by avoidance. And I'm reminded of a conversation I had with Mike Mills from the the legendary band R.E.M. i asked Mike, I said, R.E.M. has played together for the better part of three and a half decade. How do you do it? How do you stay on the same sheet of music, no pun intended, creatively, operationally, from a business perspective, right? I mean, there's a lot of complications that go in to when a band has success Right. It starts as just playing music and playing in clubs, and then it becomes a business. And he said to me, he said, andrew, we made a decision extremely early on to have a tough conversation about credit and songwriting credits and how we were going to split money. And it was the best thing we ever did early in our history. We decided to split everything four ways. And he credits that decision with essentially the decision to have that conversation early, with getting a really tricky element for a lot of bands and a lot of successful people, money and credit off the table. They made a decision to have that conversation early. And he says it really was very, very helpful in their trajectory.

Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better, difficult conversations? At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills. Whether it's a keynote for your next event or or hands on training for your team, we've got you covered. Don't just negotiate. Master the art with the American Negotiation Institute. Click the link in the description to find out more. Elevate, negotiate, and succeed. It's incredible because we see that in all sorts of relationships. So this is a great example with a band because it is a group of friends, but it's also a massive business too, right? And when you start that band, it's. You have hope for a greater future. Maybe we become famous, maybe we eventually make some money, right? But oftentimes people don't have those conversations about how we're going to address money and equity and things like that before we actually start the business. When I was practicing law, I saw that all the time. Hey, it's my buddy. It's okay. We'll do everything. 50, 50. We don't need anything in writing. And I said, listen, people will conveniently forget certain things over time and emotions start to increase as the revenue does too. So preempting these conflicts by addressing it. When emotionality is down, it might seem like a drag because everything is fun and flowing right now. But if you take the time and have that preemptive conversation, it makes the future of the relationship so much smoother.

There's also an opportunity, I think, for teams and organizations and couples and groups of friends to do. One of the AVP volleyball champions told me she, her and her volleyball partner, they build an adversity plan. They basically going Back to the concept I talked about with adversity, they basically go into it with the assumption that things are going to happen in the course of a volleyball match or in the course of their practices that that are going to pop up, that are adverse conflicts. There are challenges individually or collectively, and they develop a plan upfront. Again, how are they going to deal with those issues? And it's attacking things and not putting things off.

Right.

Not assuming that something's going to get better with age.

Exactly. That's fascinating. And I think, again, going to that point of the adversity plan with rem, we say, all right, if things go well, how do we handle it? We also have to have that discussion for when things go badly. And they event inevitably will. If you spend enough time with somebody, there will be a conflict. If you live enough life, there will be a challenge. And so we have to make sure that we have a playbook in place. And that has to be negotiated as well.

It absolutely does. And change is the only constant. Right. And if we're not thinking about the possibilities and how change is going to impact certain relationships or certain revenue streams or our productivity, then we're going to be caught napping and asleep at the wheel. Right. So I think it's really important to accept and acknowledge that change is the only thing that's gonna be constant. And how individuals, teams, organizations, companies deal with change is oftentimes a really good indicator of success.

Bingo. Agreed. And I'd be interested to get your perspective on this too, because you're in the business world, you have a full time job within the business world and you have the podcast. How has your experience with the podcast and everything that you've learned impacted you in the business world?

The lessons that I've learned from the podcast, they become almost like part of my DNA. It's impossible to decouple the way I think and the way I look at the world separately from the conversations that I have. Right. Because when I get behind the microphone and interviewing someone, I'm not looking at it as an interview. I'm thinking of it as I'm in a coffee shop with somebody that's interesting, accomplished some level of success. And if the table next to me was eavesdropping on our conversation, what would they want to know? And that's how I pursue the conversation. And it's all based upon this genuine, authentic curiosity that I have that I want to be the best version of myself, personally and professionally. I want to be the best husband I can be. I want to be the best father that I can be. I want to be the best business person that I can be for my clients and for strategic partners. Right. And I want to be the best podcast host that I can be. Everything that I'm learning, it's kind of just being organized in my brain and in the way I go about things. And I love sharing these lessons because I again, going back to an earlier point, I genuinely believe that one of the best ways to learn is to look at someone or something kind of outside of your direct lane, talk about it and see how you can apply it. I love analogies. I love examples. It's a powerful way to learn. So to maybe answer your question more directly, I'm constantly sharing what I learn with clients and prospective clients and partners in the business community. Hey, I heard this. Hey, could you believe that this is how they approach that? How could we apply this to that? So it's just become part of my daily current just to think and talk about this stuff.

I love that. And for me, podcaster to podcast. I am very interested to hear your perspective on this question. So you are now 150 episodes in the average podcast. Dies after 10 episodes, approximately. So you are an OG in this game at this point. And when you think about Andrew Moses the communicator before starting the podcast, how is he different from Andrew Moses the communicator, now 150 episodes deep in the podcast?

Great question, Kwame. I think one of the coolest things I've learned through this process is the power of a great question. And just sitting quietly and listening to the answer, following up thoughtfully. It doesn't have to be in front of a microphone. It could be a conversation with your spouse, it could be a conversation with a parent, a conversation with a friend, a conversation with a colleague. We as like a society are so wired to want to talk, to want to share. But we learn so much when we ask a good question and we listen. And the podcast, and being a podcast host and having to conduct conversations, probably like the way you feel as well, is you have to really fine tune your ability to ask good questions. They have to be clear, they have to be direct. And then you have to listen and you have to follow up. And that's an incredible life skill in negotiation, frankly, in anything where relationships and dialogue matters.

I'm with you. I love this. So synopsis for the audience. You learned the power of a great question, the power of silence, and then thoughtful follow up. Now, great question that can be subjective. So for you, when you think about the questions that you ask, what is it that makes a great question?

Well, for me, when I think about a great question, I think you first have to say, what am I trying to accomplish with this question? Questions require intention. So am I trying to gather a fact, a piece of information? That may be a time when you want to ask a closed loop question, right? Where you get an answer of a yes or no or you get a data point. But if you're really trying to get to the heart and the emotion and the soul of an answer, you want to ask an open question and you want to give the person who's answering the question a lane to swim in. Right. And I think when you do that and you combine the two really effectively, you can really have meaningful conversations where you get to the answers that you're seeking.

This is spot on, man, because again, like you said, it requires intention. You have to have some kind of purpose with the question. And I love the fact that you talked about the reality that closed ended questions have value. A lot of times we focus so much on the open ended questions that we fail to acknowledge that there are going to be certain times where a closed ended question is simply more appropriate and offers a lot more clarity too. And it's fascinating to see the quality of the interview change and the dynamic between you and the guest change depending on how well or how poorly you're asking these questions and listening.

Yeah, I think that you can pretty quickly tell when you're listening to a conversation and the person's going through the motions versus when they're genuinely interested. And I'm sure you are obviously a much more of an expert on negotiation than I am, Kwame, but I'm sure there's a point in a conversation where let's say two people are talking about negotiating a salary. Right? There is a place and a time for a closed question to try and understand what salary range they want to be in. And then there's also in many instances, an opportunity for what I think is a more powerful question that goes with the closed question, which is what motivates you? What gives you enthusiasm? Why are you passionate about this opportunity? Right. Because those three questions are going to give you a lot of information that together with the fact or the data or the closed answer is going to inform the discussion.

And now let's talk about follow through, thoughtful follow up. I should say this is interesting because you said you didn't just say follow up or ask a follow up question. You said follow up thoughtfully. Why add that modifier just to step.

Back Here, I think the 99% of people don't follow up thoughtfully on anything. They don't follow through. If you follow up and do what you say, you're ahead of 99% of the people on the face of this earth. I believe it. So, as it pertains to questions, right, A thoughtful follow up is when you listen and what the person says informs your next question. And the person can tell that you're listening to what they're saying and you're redirecting your thoughts and perspectives in harmony with that. Now, in anything in business, whether it's a conversation or whether you're interviewing for a job, you're pitching services to a potential client, or you tell a friend that you're going to do something, you're going to introduce them to somebody that might be helpful to them. Again, I go back to what I said a few minutes ago. If you follow through on the thoughtful thing that you agreed to do, you're ahead of 99% of the pack. I don't know what it is, but I just don't think people follow up. I don't think they follow through. They have meetings with people and they don't send thank you. They say they're going to call tomorrow to answer a question that the person had and they don't follow up. They say they're going to research something and they don't. To me, if you say you're going to do something, do it. It's incredibly powerful.

It's so powerful. So simple, but so powerful. It's one of the quintessential elements of trust. Just do what you said you were going to do. And one of the things that's been really helpful for me in my career when it comes to follow through and building trusting relationships is setting clearer boundaries. If I can't do something, I'm going to let you know, hey, can you do this research for me? I honestly can't. I've got so much on my schedule. I wish I could, but I can't do it. So now I'm not going to get penalized for not following through. But a lot of times people are so afraid of setting that boundary. They're like, yeah, Andrew, I can definitely. And then they have that exact same conversation with 10 other people and they're like, yep, I can do it. And then it's just impossible for them to do it.

One of my flaws, of the many flaws I have is that I'll take on too much, I'll spread myself too thin. And I constantly have to kind of rebalance and reset and think about that. Because at the end of the day, you have to be able to live up to the commitments that you make. And if you don't, then you got all kinds of challenges. Right? So I think sometimes less is more. Every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else. Every time you say no to something, you have the opportunity to say yes to something else. Right. You just can't keep stacking and expecting the same results. That's something I've learned from conversations with Olympians. Olympians have this unique ability to. And frankly, like most people on the Earth, can't do this. Right. It's just not practical. Olympians can tune out everything else that's going on them, and they go into this bubble where they're training, and everything that they're doing is essentially consumed by their training. Now, practically speaking, most people can't do that. But what we do need to figure out is how can we reduce the noise kind of around us, and how can we, on occasion, get inside that bubble that an Olympian puts themselves in the two years before the Olympics? Now they put themselves in that bubble maybe for two years or three years or four years, maybe more. Can we put ourselves in that bubble for 20 minutes and get centered and get clarity on something that we're working on or something that we're planning? Right. Those are important. But again, if you've got too much going on, and I'm guilty of this a lot, if you have too much going on, it's harder to follow up, and it's harder to live by the principles that got you to where you are today.

Absolutely. It makes you flaky, and it's hard. And when you think about it, it's challenging in life when you're not following through and following up. And then those distractions still encroach in our conversations, too, because we might not follow up because there's a lot of noise in our head. So sometimes we're not listening to the other person. We're too busy listening to ourselves.

Yeah, exactly. And that gets down to the thoughtful conversations and listening and asking. Thoughtful follow ups is you have to be present. You have to be where your feet are. And professional athletes are really good at this. They have all kinds of mechanisms that they create to make sure that they're transitioning and that they're focused. For example, a major league catcher that I interviewed, he talked about the concept of putting on the catcher's equipment. The chest protector, the shin guards, the mask when he puts that gear on, he's a catcher and he forgets about what he was doing as a hitter. So let's say the prior inning he struck out and he missed a fastball down the middle that he thought he could have hit out of the yard. When he goes back to the dugout and he puts the catcher's gear on, it takes 15 seconds, maybe that is triggering to him that you're a catcher now. You got to go out there, you have to call the pitches. You have to be there for your pitcher. Don't worry about your strikeout five minutes ago. And then when he goes back to the dugout and it's time to hit, he takes off the catcher's gear. Now he's a hitter. Don't worry that you just called a bad pitch and your pitcher just gave up a home run or that you made an error and the ball got by you. Now you're a hitter. Lock in. Be where your feet are. And that's something, the challenge that everybody deals with, right? Whether we're in an office, in a meeting, whether we're on a zoom, there are so many distractions. There are phones, there are papers around us. There are just different noises. Not to mention all the thoughts in our own head about the things that we need to do and the people we need to get back to. It's really, really critical. And this is something I'm working on. And again, it goes back to these conversations I have, and I try and apply them to my own life. How can I be more present? Whether it's a personal setting, like something I'm doing with my family or taking my kids somewhere or during a meeting, how can I be where my feet are so critical?

I tell you, when you think about it, just being more present is going to be the key for so many things. It's going to be the key to success for so many things and the roots of failure for so many things. Because again, when you think about the conversations we're trying to have, we are competing against so many things when it comes to the attention of the other person. It is prime real estate that's being occupied and attacked by phones and notifications and all of these things. So that idea of being more present is critical. And I love the fact that the catcher had essentially a ritual that got him into that mode. And. And so it doesn't need to be anything elaborate. Fifteen seconds, just putting it on and recentering. I think that's something that we all can really emulate when we're trying to get into the zone too.

Yeah. Another example is I mentioned the beach volleyball player before. I'll go back to her. Her name is Betsy Flint. She's a six time AVP pro beach volleyball champion. She actually borrows a concept from the sport of golf. So she uses a concept called thinkbox versus Playbox. There's. And it's not like a physical box, it's where am I now? From a frame of reference. When I'm in my think box, I'm thinking. I'm thinking about my strategy, I'm thinking about how I want to approach things. I'm doing a lot of thinking. It's more cerebral. When I'm in my playbox, I'm just playing. I'm letting my talent and my preparation take over and I'm trying to get into that flow. I'm really trying to not overthink anything. So when you're in the playbox, in Betsy's case, she's in the playbox and her volleyball partner comes over and says, hey, I think the opponents are doing something that we weren't expecting. She says, I'm in my playbox. When we have a moment, I'll go to my think box and we can talk about it in between serves. Or at some point she'll quote, unquote, step out of her playbox and into the think box. But for her, she has to distinguish between the two because it enables her to be more focused and present. And that's something that we can all learn. Right. We all prepare for a meeting, a sales pitch, conversation with a client, a keynote address. There's plenty of time for thinking. But then there has to be a time where you flip the switch and you. I'm just playing. I'm letting my preparation and all the work that I put in and all the talent that we have. Right. Because we all have different talents. I'm letting that take over. And I'm going to resist the urge to think too much because when we think, it gets all convoluted.

Absolutely. And the key word here is flow. I love that you brought in that psychological principle. It's so important. And I think we could all apply this think box versus Playbox mentality as well. Because I think about it in terms of strategy versus execution. What am I doing? Am I strategizing or executing? And I found in my experience is that if I am trying to think while I'm playing, while I'm trying to execute, it inhibits the act of execution.

I agree a hundred percent. One of the things that I'VE spent a lot of time thinking about and trying to get better at myself. Is understanding what the task is in front of me. Is it a think task? Is it a strategy or is it execution? Those are two completely different disciplines that some people can do both really well and some people can do one better than the other. But we all have an ability to tap into both of those disciplines at different times. And I think the key to doing it effectively is knowing where you are. Are you in strategy or are you in execution? Or to use Betsy's example, are you in the think box? Are you in the playbox?

Brilliant. I love this. And Andrew, I know a lot of listeners are going to be asking this question. They're gonna be saying, where can I hear more? Andrew Moses, do you have any suggestions for them where they could hear more of your wisdom?

Well, I have a great suggestion, Kwame. They can check out Everybody Pulls the Tarp Wherever they get podcasts, it's Everybody Pulls the Tarp and every week we have a new conversation with an Olympic athlete, a professional athlete, a Grammy winner, a TV star, a CEO, a best selling author, a high performer from all walks of life, and we're trying to uncover their success secrets. I also have a free weekly email newsletter where people can subscribe Everybody pulls the tarp.com newsletter and I love these conversations. Everybody that becomes part of the tarp puller community. It just gives me great pleasure and great enjoyment. We're on a path to building a world full of tarp pullers. So those are the places where folks can find more.

Brilliant. I appreciate you, Andrew. Thanks for coming on the show.

Kwame, thank you so much for having me.

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