From Anxiety to Assurance: Mastering Negotiation Skills with Kit Pang

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 Kit. Thanks for joining us today, Kwame.

I'm super excited. Let's chat. Thank you for having me.

Oh, man, it's our pleasure. So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Yeah, sure. I'll start off the personal side and then professional. Personally husband, a proud cat, dad of three, and I'm also an enthusiastic crossfitter and obstacle course racer. On the professional side, my goal is to help individuals like yourself that's listening right now is to help you improve your communication public speaking skills. Public speaking is my bread and butter. I know you're listening to this right now when it comes to negotiation, but. But I want you to know, keeping an open mind when it comes to the spirit of communication, that's one of the best things that we can do as communicators. Being a Harvard business public speaking coach, a three time TEDx speaker coach, and the founder of Boston Speaks, I'm here to help answer any questions that you have. So, Kwame, thank you again for having me.

Oh man, this is great. So, everybody, we just learned that Kit is much tougher than me as a crossfitter. I did one exercise, it was 15 minutes long and I never went back. Okay, that's pretty impressive. And I know too, you have this awesome webinar opportunity as well. Can you tell the listeners about that?

Yeah. So for those who've been struggling with speaking anxiety, this webinar is for you. Even if you've been struggling with speaking or presentation anxiety for years, you can go to bostonspeaks.com NoFairSpeaking again. BostonSpeaks.com NoFairSpeaking, but thanks for the plug, but let's just dive into the content here today.

Let's do it. So, everybody, we're going to talk about three main things. First, we're going to talk about how we can get rid of anxiety for speaking and in negotiation, how to replace stress with confidence, and why communicating with yourself will help you to be free. This is going to be great because there are a lot of corollaries when we're talking about the anxiety related to our difficult conversations and the anxiety that we have related to public speaking. And so first, before we even talk about how to get rid of the anxiety, can you just describe what you mean when you're talking about the anxiety related to these conversations?

Yeah. So when it comes to anxiety, I would say that most of the time, I would say we probably know what we're talking about. We've been preparing hope, hopefully, Right. We're experts in what we do. But when it comes to the event itself, maybe it's the build up or maybe it's that inner noise. It's that inner game playing mind games with you.

Right.

My yoga teacher said when you're stuck in your head, you're dead. And so when we get into high stakes situations, we sometimes get stuck in our heads. We hear this noise in our head and then we start playing games and then that's when the anxiety builds and we can either spiral or rise up from that. So that's basically what I'm talking about.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's something that most of the listeners here can identify with in one way or another. And when it comes to the anxiety, is this something that you've experienced too professionally?

Yeah, I would say we, I mean, anxiety is one of those things. Most people say they want to get rid of their anxiety, but anxiety is human nature. That's the kind of the same thing as saying we want to get rid of being hungry again. We will get hungry again. Do we know how to manage it next time? So, but actually, Kwame, I want to ask you, do you have nerves when you negotiate or when you speak? Like any big situations, I'm just very interested.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And for the people who followed my career and read the book, they know that I had a lot of social anxiety when it came to difficult conversations. As a recovering people pleaser, learning how to advocate for myself was something that was really difficult for me. And it wasn't until law school when I actually learned the Skill of negotiation and conflict resolution. That's when I realized that, oh, my goodness, this is. It's a skill, not a talent I can actually learn and improve. So that's what put me on this journey, to share this message as much as I can, far and wide. But I also had challenges with public speaking. It was terrifying. It felt like I was having a heart attack. And the thing that's funny is that those nerves never fully go away. I just became more accustomed to it. And I think one of the best descriptions I've heard is that it's not about getting rid of the butterflies, it's about making them fly all in the same direction. And that's what I try to do every single time.

Yeah. Yeah. Would you say you're confident now, like 100% every single time?

No.

What would you say?

Not every time. I'm. I'm confident enough to take the action I need to get the job done. That's what I would say. And especially on the negotiation front, usually my confidence is correlated to the amount of preparation I do. So if I'm lacking in confidence on the negotiation side, usually I would take those negotiation guides. And listeners, I know you've heard me say it a bajillion times, but let's do it again. So if you go to American negotiation, you can get access to all of our free negotiation guides from business negotiation, conflict resolution, car negotiation, salary negotiation, all there. And I go through those exact same negotiation guides when I'm going through a big negotiation. And that preparation helps me. Then on the public speaking side, the nerves are. They're similar, but different. It's very, very different. But I realize on the public speaking side now, I'm still going to feel those nerves. And for the first minute or two, I feel those nerves. But then once I start to get that flow, nail the first couple minutes, then everything starts to go into order. But again, preparation matters, too.

Yeah. And there's two things that you said that I want to touch upon. Like, first you said something on the lines of, like, when in your career you believe maybe it was more talent first, but then you figured out it was more skill. So did you believe it was something kind of like it was more innate? Is that what you were believing in before?

Yeah. Yeah. When it came to advocating for yourself, when it came to negotiation, persuasion, leadership, and all those, I thought they were born, not made. I thought you either had it or you didn't. And it wasn't until I took that class that I realized there's, like, there's A system that we can put in place. There's skills, there's a strategy and everything like that. And if you take the time and practice, it's just like anything else. You. You can get better and you can get better quickly if you're willing to put in the time.

Yeah, and I wanted to touch upon that because there's probably many people that's listening right now that might believe, hey, other people have it. Oh, no, I see this person, they're so good at what they do. But I can never be that good. Right. Or it's, man, I've been doing everything. So, you know, for so long, I've been preparing. And then if I fail, that means I'm a total failure 100% every single time. Well, kind of like what you're saying is you also have to shift the mindset of you're able. Just, just like any other skill, like playing a piano or playing basketball, you can get better at this skill. So every single time that you fail, it's another opportunity to learn. Right. They said the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. I forgot who said that. I just keep on using it every single time. The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. Because sometimes we have anxiety. We all have different reasons of why we have anxiety. But one of the big reasons also is sometimes people feel like if I fail even one little thing, even if I say one little, I'm going to fail everything because this marks who I am as an individual. But every single time that we fail, I want you to know the people who's confident, here's how they could think. Every single time that they fail, it's an opportunity to learn. Actually, they want to fail. Because if they don't fail, that means they're not going anywhere, they're just staying at the same place.

Absolutely. Yeah, I firmly believe that. And if you're not failing, you're not really trying. So I always try to push myself a little bit farther. And it's not that I want to go on stage and make a fool of myself. Kit, you know that that's not the goal. But you know, the thing is, you're going to have various types of failures. Micro failures, macro failures are going to look differently, but all of them are opportunities to learn, opportunities to stretch yourself. And I think about, again, the comfort zone. The more you take the opportunity to have more of these difficult conversations, to put yourself out there and speak and communicate at a high level and speak in public, the better you will be at the skill of managing that anxiety, too. But feeling, again, to your point, if what you're saying is, success is, hey, I don't want to feel anxiety at all, then it's going to be highly unlikely that you achieve success. Because I can't think of anybody I know who doesn't feel those butterflies when the stakes are high.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And there's one other thing that you said, Kwame, that I wanted to touch upon. It was I asked the question, how confident are you now? And then you said something on the lines of, well, the more that you prepare, the more that you'll feel better. Right? But I want to talk to those people right now. No matter how many hours you put into preparing, months, years, weeks, you prepare, but then you still have anxiety every single time, even though you know probably more than anyone at the table. You've practiced it so many times, you went through it in your head, maybe you said it out loud like you know everything. But yet, why do you still have anxiety, even though you're probably the most prepared person in the room? And that's what I. The key thing I want to talk about now is the main reason people have anxiety. I just want to break down kind of like three reasons. The main reason why people have anxiety is what I call the mental noise. Okay? That mental noise is basically, how do you talk to yourself? How do you. What kind of beliefs do you really believe in? Right? Kind of like what we touched upon earlier. If you don't believe, like, you can fail, then, therefore, there's a little bit of that. Okay? So mental noise, that's a big one. A second reason you might have anxiety is because of there's no skill mastery because you haven't done the skill enough, therefore you don't know how to do it. And then the third reason of why people have anxiety is they don't have enough opportunities. It's like going and learning how to ride a bike, but all you do is watch videos on how to ride a bike, but you never get on the bike, so you don't have enough opportunities. But again, here's the main pitfall. Most people actually think they have anxiety or they're not good enough is because they don't have skill mastery. That's the mistake most people make. Okay? Most of the people that I help get this. I'm going to say 99% of the people that come to me when it comes to speaking anxiety, when people hear them speak, the audience will say, wow, you're a pretty darn good speaker. Already, okay, they know more than anyone in the room. But then when they go through the speaking event, it's that mental noise. It's that self critic that keeps on coming back over and over and over and over and over again. And so one of the main reasons, the biggest one, is because we have that anxiety is that mental toughness, that inner game that, you know, that mental noise. That's basically it.

Does your company invest in professional development training? If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable, and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing, and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more. And now back to the show. That's fascinating. That is fascinating. And so when you are working with somebody and you're helping them to manage that anxiety, what would you say is the first step for you?

The first step is awareness. Okay. And let me give you. I'm going to give you an example, because if so, awareness of what you might be asking. Awareness of what you are saying to yourself. Okay. Awareness of your thoughts. It all begins with, you know, some people might not believe this, but, you know, you are what you think. And then you take actions based off of how you think and how you perceive the world in a way. So let me give this example, Kwame. Have you. Have you ever gotten angry before?

What? Me? Never.

Did you remember the last time? Actually, no, I got. Do you remember the last time? Perhaps maybe you got annoyed or angry, but then you started to see the other side and then that kind of went away because you saw the other side. Do you remember any situations?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, with my team, we have a growing team. And so I drive the team really hard, and I started the company on my own, so I'm used to doing everything by myself. And so now in the past couple of years, the staff has grown, the team's grown a lot. And so a lot of times I'm still driving hard, but I'm relying on my team as I should. And then if things don't come to me as fast as I. As I wanted to or anticipated. Then I get frustrated, I get annoyed, but then I slow down and I say, oh, yeah, well, you know what, maybe you should have asked Maria, you know, maybe a couple of weeks in advance, not the day before, to come into the office and help to do this recording. And I know she'll get a good laugh as she's going through this, but yeah, as I start to empathize and see the other side, the reactions become a lot more reasonable.

But you went through a great process and that's awareness first. Right. You were, you know, maybe you're moving so fast, but then you became aware of, oh, maybe I should have asked a while back. But you came to that realization yourself, is that correct? Or did someone say, hey, yeah, yeah.

100% at this stage? Yes, I did. It's been a journey, Kit. It's been a journey of friends and family helping me to become more self aware. But I'm glad to say that now usually I'm able to notice it. And I recognize that often for me, the more emotional I am, the more I need to slow down, stop and think because I'm usually missing something. And it's usually the perspective of the person on the other side.

Yeah, yeah. And exactly. And here's the thing. If you weren't aware of that, you'll be doing the same thing basically.

Exactly.

But again, it's one real being aware. I'm not saying change anything. Being aware of some of the things that you're thinking about that's making you this way. And then second is coming to the realization that is actually a problem. Yeah. Okay, So I want to give an example to this. I was working with one of my clients. This is not speaking related, but he said his wife was annoying the heck out of him. And we started to talk about it. Okay. And then I asked him, hey, what's the problem? So the situation is every single evening he would come home and, you know, come home late. And then the wife would say, hey, you know, go make the dinner. And I didn't make it because they were coming home late. And in his mind, he was saying this out loud to me, okay. He was saying, I can't believe you didn't make me anything. You know, I was coming home late, why can't you support me that way? Why can't you, you know, cook? And then he was feeling annoyed. So what he would do, you know, he was just like, you know, mumble and then go away. But then when I dig further, okay, again, he was saying to me, I can't Believe she was doing this. And then when I dig further, eventually we came or he came to the realization, well, I kind of. Kind of like jotted him that way. But basically, it's. He had no judgment here. But he's. His core belief is the wife should cook. Okay? That's how he grew up in his culture. That's how everything was. That's normal to him. That's completely normal. The wife should cook. So therefore, when she's not cooking, she's not doing what she's supposed to do, okay? Now, he became aware of that when he said that out loud. And then what he noticed was that here's the thing, even if we both say to him, hey, maybe you both should cook, you know, no one has one better than other. Even if we tell him that, he might not come to that realization that is a problem. He might think it's still normal. So he himself has to come to that realization that it's a problem. Now, here's the thing I want you to see. This is the same thing when it comes to anxiety. Most of the. I'm going to give an example. Sometimes people have anxiety because they might think, if I make a mistake, people judge me, okay? I'm in the spotlight, people will judge me, and I'm just going to fail miserably. Okay? When people, let's say you don't get annoyed anymore or you don't get angry, what happens? You started to see it from another side. You started to see it from a different perception. That's the same thing with anxiety. If you can see that, your truth, oh, people are going to judge me. People are going to judge me, right? That's normal for a lot of people. That's real life. But what if there were another reality or another perception that people are not judging you, they're actually rooting for you? But here's the thing. They have to come to the realization that it's a possibility. So when we talk about negotiation and getting rid of anxiety, you're actually negotiating with yourself because you're trying to see it from different perceptions. If you don't see it from a different reality or different perception, you will always, always be stuck with fear. Because what is fear? Because fear nowadays is not a lion in front of us. It's a scary thing that we've created in our minds that's probably not going to happen in real life. It's something that we've created in our minds that we think is going to happen. Because we think that's reality, because we didn't see it from the other side yet. Does this make sense?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

No, this makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense, and I think this gives us an opportunity to transition into why communicating with yourself will help you to be free. Because that's what we started to talk about, having that internal monologue or dialogue with yourself, rather. Now, can you walk us through a little bit more about what this looks like in practice and how we can make it work for us?

So when it comes to communicating with yourself, we first have to talk about, too, you know, the importance of communicating with yourself. You know, since you don't do CrossFit anymore, what do you do to work out now? Are you doing anything?

I do. I go to the gym five days a week in the morning, and then a few. A couple evenings in the week, I do some jiu jitsu. So I still get it in. I just. CrossFit was a little bit too much.

Oh, man. Hey, that's awesome. That's awesome. I was reading this American Ninja book. I'm into all the obstacle stuff, and there's this one guy saying, the champions are actually made not at the event, but everything else that they put in before the event on their own. Right. So a lot of the time when it comes to practicing, you know, communication skills, it feels like, oh, hey, what's the technique we have to work on to get better at our skill? Kind of like fitness in a way. The most important thing is how can we communicate with ourselves, to stay disciplined, to explore more of our minds? It's the battle that's not out there. The battle is in here. The way in is the way out. Most of us think, oh, I need to prepare more or I need to learn this technique more. Well, if they dig down a little bit further, the problem could be, let's say, if you think people are going to judge you, the question is, why do you think people are going to judge you? And you should solve the question for that. Not how can I make this statement better, but the problems that you have. So when I say communicating with yourself, are you asking yourself the hard questions? Ask yourself, why. Well, let's say you figured out, well, I need to be perfect. Why do you think you need to be perfect every single time? Ask yourself why. Five times. Dig down, dig down, dig down. And then you'll communicate with yourself more. And you need to make this basically a daily practice. The best people out there, they know if you want to be a better communicator to others, if you don't know how to communicate with yourself. Can you be a strong communicator with others? Right. Learn how to communicate with yourself first, and then it's basically the same thing with other people. That's it.

I love that because you're absolutely right. And when I started to recognize the depth of understanding that I could get through some thorough introspection, negotiating with myself and asking myself those questions over and over and over again, it helped me to realize that when I'm having a conversation or a negotiation with other people and they're giving an answer, they might believe that answer is correct based on their current understand. But a lot of times they haven't done the mental work to dig down deeper to fully understand what it is they believe and why. And so a lot of times in my conversations, I try to be that internal voice to help them go through that internal process in front of me. Of course, you have to have a lot of trust, build a lot of trust for them to be vulnerable enough to do that. But then you start to get interesting revelations that are not just new to you as the listener, but to them as the speaker, too. And so when you are going through this introspective process, what you're going to start to realize is that not all of your thoughts are true. Just because you think it and believe it doesn't mean that it's true. And so again, you're going in saying, oh, people are going to laugh. They're going to judge me if I say something wrong or something like that. Instead of going into it with that fear and saying, how can I make sure that they don't laugh at me or judge me? You stop and even go beyond that and just say, hey, well, why do you even think that's true? Because especially with public speaking, people are rooting for you. I don't want to go to a speech and see somebody fail in front of me. That's awkward. I want the people that I go to see to succeed. And once you start to recognize that, you realize that you're usually performing in front of a group of allies. And then even in a negotiation, I don't want somebody who doesn't have everything together because then it makes it harder for me to do my job because I don't fully understand where you stand in this situation. I need information in order to perform effectively. So even in a negotiation, the negotiator on the other side wants you to be able to comp competently articulate yourself so we can have a productive conversation. And so a lot of those fears that we have are really unfounded.

Yeah. Kwame, can I ask you, do you do any kind of, like, mental work or reflection? If so, like, how do you do it?

Yes, yes, yes. So mental health is important. I've been focusing a lot on meditation and gratitude. Those have been the core, just like foundational mental health. But when I think about it in terms of reflection during a difficult conversation or if I'm speaking in public, I think about it in terms of self coaching. And so I say, okay, after I have this conversation, I'm going to replay the tape just like a coach would for a sport. And I'll say, okay, Kwame, what are the things that you did well? What worked well for you? Great. I'm going to try my best to replicate that and improve upon it in the future. What are the things that I did poorly? What could I have done better? What should I have done differently? Great. I'm going to go back. I'm going to make sure that I don't make those same mistakes again. And so one of the best ways to continue to improve, in my opinion, is by making sure when you review your performance over the day or whatever it is that you did, just trying your best not to make the same mistake twice. And that's a really simple way to continually improve your baseline from time to time.

Yeah, yeah. And that's a great one. You know, just taking time to review by taking the time. Taking the time to stop and slow down and review instead of just go, go, go, go, go at times.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And when you think about some of the challenges that people have when it comes to communicating with themselves, what is it that makes this part of the process so difficult? Even though it's so important?

Most people don't find it important enough. They don't value. Here's the thing. If it's really important to you, you will make time for it. Okay? We think that everything is so important that we gotta go again. It's that go, go, go mentality. But innately, sometimes we know, hey, maybe we should meditate more. We should have maybe a gratitude routine. Maybe we should take the time to reflect. Right. Because even just doing that for five minutes will bring you so much more clarity in the next five hours. But the thing that's holding us back is we don't make it important enough to us. Right. So the question is, for those who's listening right now, what's really more important? What's more important to you? Taking some time for yourself or really writing that next email? That's in your inbox, because we do it every single day. Are you gonna take five minutes for yourself or 50 minutes somehow writing that email? Right.

Absolutely. No, you're right. And really, it just comes down to desire. You have to want it. You want to have to want. You have to want to improve, and you have to believe in the process. So that'll make you desire this a little bit more. Right. And I really want to impress upon this important point to everybody. It's it. We might be making it sound simple, but it really is that simple. And what I found is that overthinking is another manifestation of fear. It's just another excuse for you not to take the action that you need to take in order to do what you need to do. And so these tips that Kit has been giving us on how to overcome anxiety, how to essentially negotiate with yourself to overcome some of these fears, it's really that simple. You just need to get into the habit of doing it. And, Kit, I know we're coming up on time here, but before you go, what would you say is one thing that the listeners can do to make sure that they improve their ability to speak in public and negotiate with confidence? What is something they can do today?

One thing that you can do today is be in the moment when you're speaking or negotiating. I'm going to give a quick example of that. Let's say a Broadway actor, okay, they're going to take time to practice singing, to practice their script, but when they are live, they are in the spotlight. They are giving themselves 100%. They're not thinking, oh, did I sing this wrong? Did I take the wrong step? Because once you start having that mental noise, you're not performing, you're not being in the moment. So the best thing that you can do when you speak, negotiate when you're in the moment, is be in the moment, Deal with what's in front of you, not what's in your mind. And that mental negative noise. It's deal with what's happening in front of you. Enjoy it. Because all the hard work that you've put in that event, the situation is your reward for it.

I love it. Powerful. Thank you, my friend, Kit. We really appreciate it. Thanks for taking your time with us today.

Thank you for having me on.

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