Finding Your Negotiator Identity with Glin Bayley

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.

So where I look at negotiation and certainly in the way the training that I do with corporates, I focus on them an identity level because we often focus on skills. Say, okay, here's what you need to do and here's the process and here's the outcomes that you're seeking to get. But the biggest inhibitor I believe in us getting the commercial outcomes we want is our own sense of identity and who we're becoming through the process. So recognizing even if I just give my own example of when I left the negotiation consulting firm that I worked for prior to starting my own business, choosing a business name was quite the challenge. And I thought, oh, this is really interesting. What do I choose? How am I going to make a business name that I resonate with? And when I settled on the value negotiator, I thought, oh, why? That it was because I wanted people to step into the identities of being the value negotiator, so putting value at the center of it. But also it reminded me of who I needed to be when I showed up. And I think sometimes we lose the perspective of what are we? You know, we get caught in the journey of getting an outcome in the negotiations that we're having, but we're not thinking about who we're becoming through the journey. And when we're thinking about ethics, integrity, authenticity, the consistency of our identity is going to show up as the consistency of our brand and the consistency of the way we negotiate and the consistency in what people can expect from us. So even in a really gnarly negotiation association where there's egos and agendas, difficult conflict areas, if you can anchor in on your identity, it's a shortcut to process. You're not thinking, oh, I've got a pause, I've got to take a moment, I've got to breathe before I respond, which is all of the what do I need to do in order to get the best outcome? When you think about your identity, of who am I being, being if I'm reminding myself, well, I'm the value negotiator, it's a shortcut to what does that then require me to be in this moment right now? Is the value negotiator going to be someone who's going to get drawn into ego challenge combat, or is that identity going to keep me focused on elevating the conversation, looking for where the opportunity is for alignment and keep that the dialogue open to explore where the value is? So when I think of negotiation, when I focus on the training, it's very much about what's your negotiation identity and who do you want to become through the process of developing these skills that becomes your anchor in the way you show up with each negotiation going forward. And that doesn't mean that you're a pushover in a competitive negotiation. But if you've got, you know, in my case, the anchor of value, even in a more combative negotiation or a competitive negotiation, I'm still going to be minded towards how can I create maximum value and how can I still leave the other person feeling whole at the end of this interaction? Because as we know, the world is a very, very small place now with technology, you know, the six degrees of separation, I'm sure I've not got the stats, but it's probably somewhere between 2 or 3 degrees of separation in the everyone's connected. So anchoring on the identities we're choosing is going to be critical because those identities, especially in the world of social media and hyper connectivity online, are going to follow us around in any role, in any industry, in any business that we go into. So being aware of your own identity, I think is super important.

Glenn, you know what that sounded like? That sounded like the perfect introduction to this episode.

Oh, fantastic.

Yeah, I'm not. We're not going to edit that at all.

All.

We're just going to flow in. So speaking of identity, Glenn, how about you just fill the listeners in? Who are you? Tell us about yourself and what you do.

Okay. I am still an identity looking to discover herself, if I'm to be frank about my own journey. I started my career in finance. So I'm a qualified management accountant by background. I spent 17 of my career years in corporates, working for large global conglomerates in finance. So heading up finance functions predominantly in food and beverage industries. So I worked for Coca Cola. I worked for Twinings, the tea brand. I worked for a number of other food and beverage brands during my journey. And I honestly thought I was the person that was just focused on getting to cfo, working my entire career in finance, working with good people, and then coming out the other side with a nice, healthy retirement and enjoying life. Standard approach, I guess, for that time, which was get married, get a good job and work hard and have nice holidays. And then in 2014, my marriage ended. And at that time, it was the first shake up, if you like, of my own identity. Because at that point, I'd taken the path of I'm a wife, a partner, I'm a finance executive. And now, at that time, I didn't know who I was. I was navigating separation, navigating an upcoming divorce. And that sense of who am I now? Really? Became a prominent question in my mind. So I found myself moving countries, as you do, in an effort to move forward, because I had this dialogue in my head that was, do not go backwards. So I literally moved forwards in time and moved to Australia from the UK and started a new chapter where I was still in finance, But I'd got an opportunity to transfer into a new organization courtesy of an internal transfer within the group that I worked for and at that time, still in finance, started to then question, who am I being? And I think in that journey, I realized that I'd chosen a path that was very safe, very secure, very aligned to what I was good at, but not something that I had deeply asked myself if I was truly passionate about and could I get myself excited to learn how to be better at this over and over again. And the clues were often there, but you don't realize they're there until you look back. And I would be traveling to business meetings. The role I had with Twinings meant I was traveling overseas to various different offices, and I'd travel with my CFO and my group CEO at the time. And we'd be in business class and I felt really privileged. And I thought, great, I'm in business class. I can see all these people around me with their financial times. And I'd be the person that would pretend to have the financial times up, but on the inside would have something different to read. And I couldn't wait until the lights were dimmed to be able to put on a movie. When I then observed everyone else was working really hard on their laptops and doing their thing. And I thought to myself, I'm not excited enough about finance to sit here and read the financial Times to be focused on the economy. This is not where I want to spend my time. And so I found myself coming out the other side, leaving finance and deciding to go straight into executive coaching for C suite. Leaders that were focused on their self leadership and who they were being and who they were becoming in their journey of self leadership did that until Covid hit. And then when Covid hit again, it was another reset the world was looking at. Who are we now being in this current climate? What needs to be true for us to thrive in this environment? And I thought to myself, I've gone from a role that was all head to a role that's all, all heart. And there was still something missing for me in that, which was the identity piece. The working on self leadership came naturally. When I look back on my life, I'd spent a lot of my career reading personal development books, personal growth books. That would be what I would read on holiday. It would be my jam. I could have deeper, meaningful conversations with people for hours and hours. And through that I realized that I needed my head and heart aligned. And I found myself working for a global negotiation consulting firm in Sydney. And it was the same company that I had trained with back in 2007 when I was in finance, because I had been trained in negotiation at that time. And in joining that business, I realized I'd found what it was that I was missing. It was the whole human behavior psychology piece around negotiation, which was deeply fascinating to me. But the head and which was all heart because that was my area of passion. But the head piece was all of the high stakes involved when it comes to negotiation. The intellectual pressure that people are under in environments where there's deals to be created. And so it felt like a space where I could bring my heart from a love perspective into it, but also be intellectually stimulated and challenged because it's not a role you can afford to Be complacent in. There's no cruising when it comes to negotiation. It's very dynamic. You're responsive to the environment. You're responsive to the people around you. You've got to play a really clear strategy in terms of being aware of the future that could be created by each of those outcomes. And also the whole premise of when you're negotiating not to rely on what you do just at the table, but ultimately how you set the table and design the deal prior to you even getting there. And I found the psychology of all of that just my sweet spot, and I loved it. So I went out on my own after realizing that my passion was about going deep into the identity piece and helping people become the value negotiator for themselves, their business, but also their lives. Because I've realized through my own journey that the negotiation work that we do isn't just something that you put in a box as your professional skill. It's a skill that is relevant in everyday life. And I think that's what connected me to it deeply, because it's improved friendships, it's improved personal relationships, it's improved the way I show up as a business owner with clients. It's improved communication on so many levels. And if you'd asked me 10 years ago, was negotiation the path to creating deeper, more connected relationships, I'd have been thinking you were on a different planet. But. But, you know, realizing now, actually negotiations are ultimately conversations aimed at reaching an agreement. And we have conversations aimed at reaching an agreement on a daily basis, whether that's with our partners, our children, our colleagues, our friends, our family members, and being able to understand who we're being in the way we are approaching those conversations, and then having the skills to have those conversations to create value, not only professionally, but also personally. I just think it's the one skill that I wish I had registered at the time I was first trained as a life skill. But at the time I was in my early 20s, I was very excited about using negotiation, perhaps more naively, as a weapon. I think in my early 20s, because you have this superpower, once you know what you can see, you can't unsee, and what you hear, you can't unhear. And it's very easy when this is why I come back to identity all the time. It's really easy when you aren't clear of the identity. You're choosing for yourself to use skills that can be as a force for evil or as a force for good. And you've got to determine in what Capacity, you use that. And negotiation as a tool can be used for manipulation to get outcomes at the cost of others. And it can also be used as a collaborative tool and as an opportunity to create connection and deep trust and opportunity at a macro level for all. And I think having the emotional intelligence, which brings me on to why EQ is so important in negotiation. It's really understanding the application of a skill has to be in the right hands with the right level of emotional intelligence in order to really maximize the impact in the right way.

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 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. Oh, this is so good. And I really like seeing the arc of your story because when you think about negotiation experts, everybody gets into this field from a different place in a different way for different reasons. But we all more or less settle upon the same truths, right? Because you have to have that heart and mind combination. So you have to have eq, you have to have iq. You also have to have purpose as well. And you have to recognize that with great power comes great responsibility. When you understand this, it needs to be utilized in an effective way. And I, I want to circle back to what you talked about when it comes to identity, because is negotiation a skill? Yes, it Is negotiation a process? Yes, it is. But when you absorb it as an identity, then that's what we lead with. Because negotiation is a problem solving tool that we're utilizing to overcome barriers, create connections, improve relationships, and create these mutually valuable and beneficial outcomes. And if you lead with that identity, then all of those other identities can fit within it because now you are more able as a professional to be more effective because you're leading with this identity. So it's, it's really incredible to see your development in this way and how not only has it helped you, but now you're utilizing these revelations to help other people too.

Oh, 100%. I mean, I think back to my 20s and I worked for a bread business in the UK at the time. It was just before I went on the program. It was a four day immersive negotiation residential program. And prior to that, I remember being in finance with this really tough finance approach. I was working for a business that was at the time losing £52 million a year, so £1 million a week. It was going through a huge financial transformation, which meant there was a lot of pressure on the team to perform. My role was working directly with the sales account managers who were responsible for getting deals across the line with retailers. And I remember the naivety of my stance as finance and this view that I had that the sales team were only looking for the most easiest of options and were clearly leaving value on the table or giving it away to buy back their own comfort levels. And I had this, I only look at it now and think, I can't even believe in that time that this was still okay. Had this big row, shouting in the office, telling one of my sales guys that he was out of order, he was clearly leaving value on the table, he didn't know what he was doing. And I look back at that now and I think, oh my God, that was awful. Who were you even being in that moment? But, you know, I had the iq, but I didn't have the EQ developed to really understand what his position was, the level of stress he was under, the challenges he would be facing directly with the buyers of major retailers in Tesco and Sainsbury's. Only when I'd gone through the negotiation immersion, I came out the other side feeling like I had all these superpowers and said, right, okay, I want you to take me in with you. So we ended up going into Sainsbury's and having the opportunity to have those dialogues, and I played my role within that from a finance capacity and the opportunity to observe and listen to what was being said in the room. But truly, had I not had that insight around getting inside the other party's head, having deep empathy for what their needs and wants are, understanding what I could see that perhaps they couldn't see, but recognizing that by being combative, I was only ever going to get them to be more entrenched in their position rather than helping them find a way towards a mutually amicable outcome. I honestly don't know how I would have ever reconciled the relationship that we had had I not been through training to help me see things differently. And I wouldn't say I got it perfect the first time, but it does make me realize that these skills combined with the EQ in that sense of understanding Your identity really teach us the foundations of good relationships. The patience, listening deeply, seeking to understand before seeking to be understood. As Stephen Covey would say, it's the opportunity to see the world differently without making it wrong. And I think it's easy to certainly my early twenties, naive, very desperate to please my leaders, and being seen as someone strong in her field made me realize that actually the framing of negotiation had been put more as, hey, here's how you build better relationships. Just the way it opened up my eyes might have been quite different, but you put it into a box of this is a toolkit that's going to help you get a better commercial outcome, whereas it's not. It does, and absolutely it does. But it's so much more than a better commercial outcome. It's the opportunity for leadership within a corporate, when I think about a good leader creates high challenge, but high support environments. And negotiation facilitates the high challenge, but it also facilitates the high support because you are there to listen, you're there to ask the deeper questions. You're there to get under the skin of people's needs and wants and their deeper interests. But it also challenges what's possible because you're learning to step outside of your comfort zone and you have to spend more time in your most uncomfortable area than you would do in your comfort zone in any other environment. It's the one skill that teaches you to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And it. And it makes no sense because you think, the better I get at it, surely I'm going to feel more comfortable. But you don't. It challenges those boundaries and it forces you to be a better human. And especially the further you get in your career, the opportunity to have an impact with stakeholders that carry significant power and hierarchical positional power also, as well as leverage. Having these skills just really up gives you the opportunity to step into a space that you may not otherwise think you've got the capacity to do if you don't have that same power or position within an organization.

This is so good because I really appreciate the fact that you're able to point out and demonstrate how even in a very high pressure situation, when we're talking about big dollar amounts, this is real money on the line, millions and millions of dollars, pounds, whatever currency we want to talk about. It's a lot, right? And we're talking about the importance of leading with emotional intelligence and listening and empathizing. And I hear, I hear you in the audience. Somebody out there is very skeptical, saying, listen, Glenn, it's all about money. It's about the numbers. And if somebody's going to get all up in their feelings, that's their own problem. Maybe they shouldn't be in this type of environment. I don't have time to deal with people's little emotions, so I'm going to tell them what the facts are and they just need to get in line. And if they don't like it, that's too bad. So to that skeptic out there who is not sold on emotional intelligence, what would you say to them?

That's a really great question. And I would say if humans didn't have emotions, then maybe the opportunity just to rely on logic and rationale would be effective. But if I was to give an example around emotions and feelings first and then circle back to eq, emotions and feelings often get confused, right? But if we were to break it down and say emotions are the raw data, it's the body sensations that we have that tell us something's going on. So we might get the emotion of nerves as demonstrated by butterflies in our stomach. That sense of all my heart rate is going faster. So there's an emotional, emotional response triggered by a body sensation. But the feeling is first precursored by the thought that we think prior to the feeling. So if I was to have the body sensation of butterflies, I might feel that I'm nervous, but I feel that I'm nervous because there is a story that I've told myself in my thoughts first, that this is what nerves feels like. So my feelings are diluted by the story I tell myself. Now, based on the story I tell myself, that feeling is diluted in that way. And therefore then my behavior shows up in, in response to that feeling, which has been diluted by the thought that I think. Now if I was to turn that around and you know, I'm sure you'll have heard the same. The body sensation of nerves and excitement is exactly the same. The key thing that's changed is the story we told ourselves, which was the thought, the thought which then invoked the feeling, which then invoked our actions. So when I look at emotional intelligence, I don't think you can access that level of understanding of what might be going on in our bodies, let alone what might be going on in someone else's body and therefore their thoughts, their feelings and then their subsequent actions. Unless you are applying emotional intelligence. Because emotional intelligence covers from my perspective five key areas. It's self perception being one. So how am I regarding myself? What level of awareness do I have of myself and to what degree might I be working towards my own self actualization, as Maslow's hierarchies of needs would determine. But secondly, the self expression piece, that emotional expression of assertiveness and knowing when to be assertive versus managing our emotional expression, as in the example I gave when I lost my call in the office as a 20 something year old. If I had applied, which actually is this perfect example, I was applying logic, complete logic, my finance analytical brain to my colleague saying this makes no sense. Here's the price, they should just be paying that price. This works for them. This is how much volume of bread will sell. Why can't you get them just to agree to that deal? You're clearly not pushing the conversation in the right direction. Because that was what my logic brain was saying my colleague was doing, when the emotionally intelligent response to that was my colleague is under a massive amount of pressure. His feelings of going into a meeting with a retailer, a major retailer in the UK with significant power, where there's dominant players in the marketplace in the business of bread, which is a heavily commoditized product with very wafer thin margins, he's feeling the weight of if he doesn't get this account landed, the consequences on his career, his family, his reputation, what happens to the business. There's all of this that's going on in his body. He's going to be feeling emotions, but until you can unpack his thinking, what are his thoughts, what are his feelings and then understanding his feelings based on his diluted story or narrative, you're then going to observe his actions. And did his actions at times, to my logic brain make sense? No. But if I put myself into my emotional brain around what might be going on for him from a journey from emotion right the way through to behavior, I'd have had a better understanding of what he was going through. And I think that's why, even though, you know, as a finance brain and hugely analytical in being able to work through financial outcomes and what logically seems like the right answer in reality, humans always make decisions based on emotion first and then back them up by logic afterwards. So if we miss the connection to emotion at the outset, our ability to make sense of someone else's logic is hugely diminished.

Wow, that was a masterclass. And I think my favorite part of this was the distinction between emotions and feelings. Not many people get as granular with that. I love talking about emotions as the raw data, feelings being the subjective interpretation of that data. So we create a story about that and that creates our feelings and then it also helps us to understand how we can reverse engineer this for our own self talk in order to manage our own emotions. Because when you think about the magic of cognitive reappraisal in psychology, this is essentially just changing the story about the data that we're getting. Because I used to. And this surprises people considering what I do now, but I used to be deathly afraid of public speaking. And when I discovered cognitive reappraisal, what I recognized is, yeah, you're right, I do feel the exact same way when I'm excited as I do when I'm nervous. So I just started to change the story. And then that was empowering. And what we're recognizing is that emotional intelligence is something that really can and should start with us. And the more we are able to understand that more maximizing our self awareness and being able to manage our own emotions, it'll be easier for us to then extend that outward. The reality is that in order for us to effectively manage our emotions and have these tough conversations, what we have to do is we have to treat ourselves with a little bit of self compassion. And if we're not able to give ourselves self compassion, then it's going to be extremely difficult for us to give other people compassion. And that's going to make it even more difficult for us to manage their emotions and be effective in these tough conversations.

That's so true. That's so true. Often the way we treat ourselves is a filter for the way we might treat others without realizing it, because then our behavior outwards mirrors our behavior inwards. So really being able to understand how we treat ourselves is important, you know, so that that lack of self compassion will absolutely play out as a lack of self compassion for others because we haven't been able to demonstrate our capacity or capability for ourselves as the recipient of that. So we don't know what it feels like. We can't connect to it in the same way. So being able to give it to the fullest extent from a deep place of understanding is going to be limited.

Oh, this is good. This is good. And Glenn, one last question before we go. I think this is the most important question that we address. So let's say there's a business professional out there and they're looking for a way to get the inside edge in their business. What suggestion would you have for them?

That's an easy one. And thank you for teeing up that question. I have a weekly newsletter and funnily enough, it's called the Inside Edge. Thanks for the tee up, Kwame. It's great. It's an opportunity for anyone who identifies as a contemporary business leader who wants to get ahead on a number of different areas, both in negotiation, communication, business and financial acumen. Given that's my background also and the opportunity to do some of the mindset and the personal development work. So each week I put out a small newsletter which gives a topic of the week and I give you a heads up at the start which says this is for you if you're looking to achieve or learn this. So you can identify very quickly if that week's issue is something you want to go do deep on. And I share insights based on my own experience, learning and journey. And an area that I'm really, really passionate about is helping people become better business leaders. Because I know I certainly could have learned a few things myself in my early 20s about how I showed up in the world.

This is great, Glenn. I really, really appreciate you coming in and sharing your wisdom with us. This has been a great masterclass in not only how to negotiate effectively, but how to embody the identity of a negotiator and then how to be an em intelligent negotiator. So just really appreciate your expertise and thanks for coming on the show.

Oh, thank you for having me along. It's been so great. Thank you.

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