Harnessing Practice for Negotiation Prowess with Jonathan Mahan

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. Jonathan, thanks for joining us today.

Hey, thanks for having me here, Kwame.

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

Yeah, for sure. So my name is Jonathan Mehan. I'm co founder of a company called the Practice Lab. What we've really done is we've gone and looked at what other disciplines are doing, what professional athletes do, what musicians do, what Olympics teams do to grow their skill and improve performance, time, behavior. And we've taken all those techniques and applied them to the world of sales and sales training so that salespeople can actually grow their skills and sharpen their skills in the same way that those other disciplines do. I got to say, I've been doing this a couple years now. It's just been so fun and interesting to go through the process of, like, taking something that was born in another discipline and trying to find ways to, like, work it into the world of sales, which is what I've been doing for the last 10 years. And it's an industry I know and love, and it's been so interesting to do it and of course, really encouraging, too, as we've seen that this practice approach works every bit as well in sales as it does everywhere else. So that's kind of my background for the last few years.

I love it. And listeners, you could probably hear the glee in my voice as I introduced Jonathan. And it's because we had a nice little practice session of the first, about seven minutes of the podcast because we had some audio issues. And so this is our second time going through it. Listeners, check out how sharp this question is going to be. It's going to sound really organic, too. So, Jonathan, I have a question for you. Now that we're talking about practice, I'm realizing that folks who are in professional disciplines like sales, negotiation, or leadership in general, where we're communicating all the time, I think one of the biggest disconnects that they have is that they don't have a really great or strong understanding of what practice really means in the context of communication. So let's start off with some of the common misconceptions that people have about practice before we actually get into what it really means in this context.

Wow. Such a deja vu moment. It came out even better the second time, though, thanks to your practice.

Thank you.

So that's a really good question, Kwame. And honestly, I think there's some misconceptions that really stop people from even getting started with practice. And the biggest misconception that I also had early my career is that all practice is, is like rehearsal, like an actor rehearsing their lines. Which means that the only time you can use practice is when you're heading into a really predictable conversation where you know what they're going to say and you know what you're supposed to say, and then you can practice it. But practice goes so much deeper than that and goes so much further than that. And we can kind of see this by looking at other disciplines, too, because there's a lot of other disciplines where people do spend time practicing even though they're heading into an unpredictable situation. Right. Great example of this is like martial artists, they don't know what their opponent's going to do. They don't know what moves they're going to face. They don't know anything that's going to happen once they get on that mat. But they still practice, right? They practice the individual moves to make sure they're fluid and second nature and they can perform them flawlessly. They practice giving their brain the experience of reading an opponent and making snaps, second decisions about, you know, what move to use next and they still use practice to sharpen their skills, to grow their brain's ability to perform so that when they get into that unpredictable situation, they can perform better. So practice goes far beyond just rehearsal and practicing your line, so to speak. And practice really involves sharpening and strengthening your brain so that your brain can perform better under pressure.

I love this. It's so true. It's so true. And I think something else in addition to all of those things is that sometimes people get to that point where they reach the okay plateau, where they say, all right, I am good enough at this skill. I've been in leadership for 10, 15, 20 years. I've been doing okay. I've been advancing in my career. Why do I need to improve my negotiation skills? Why do I need to improve. Improve my ability to communicate and resolve conflict? So can you help us to understand the payoff that comes with practice compared to just continuing to float along without dedicating practice to these skills?

I mean, of course, the first question is, do you want to get better? And there may be some times where you look at your role and you look at your life and you say, I actually am as good as I need to be, so no need to practice, Right? So practice really applies when you are in a place where you realize, I either absolutely need to get better, or I at least strongly want to get better. But in terms of why it's better to use practice than just to like, go through your day to day life and pick up experience and get better as you go is simply a matter of time. Right? Getting your experience and growing your skill through just doing the job, doing the task is a very, very slow way to grow skill compared to practicing outside of performance Time is a very fast way to grow skill. And actually, if you want, I can kind of unpack why that is.

Absolutely. Let's get into it.

Yeah. So really, there's. There's two modes your brain can operate in, either the performance mode or the improvement mode. When your brain is in the performance mode, its goal is pretty straightforward. Do the very best that we can do in this moment. And when you are in a real life situation, a real negotiation, a real conversation with a subordinate, a real sales call. Right. Your brain is always going to be in that performance mode where the goal is to do the very best we can at this moment with the skills we have now. So what tends to happen when your brain's in the performance mode is it goes to doing whatever its current best is. So day in and day out, call after call, all you're doing is whatever your current best is. So whatever your current best is is actually becoming more permanent. And it's actually becomes harder to change your behavior and behave differently after you've had tons and tons of repetition of your current best. So typically, if your approach to growing skill is just, well, I'll just, you know, practice on my sales calls or practice on my real negotiations, you'll find that journey to growing your skill is very slow because your brain is just focused on doing whatever your current best is. And all that really happens is your current best becomes more permanent. Right? You might add little small 1% improvements here and there as you go, but not a whole ton. So it's a very slow process. Takes people 10 years, right, to get to a point of, you know, real expertise. Whereas if you're using focused, deliberate practice and your brain is in the improvement zone, the improvement zone is very different. In the improvement zone, the brain isn't necessarily focused on doing the very best we can. At this moment, the brain is focused on getting better. And sometimes in order to get better, you need to try something new that you haven't done before that feels a little weird and awkward and doesn't land right. And then you gotta back up and try it again and see if you can do it better. When you're in the performance zone, you tend to not have the luxury of time. Someone hits you with an objection, you've got maybe a one or two second pause to take a deep breath, and then you gotta hit em with the best response. You gotta. Which again is probably going to be the same as what your best response was last time you got that objection. Right? Because it's your current best that you've got. Whereas in the improvement zone, you have that ability to slow down, to pause and to think, okay, what did I just hear? What are my options that I have for how I could respond? What are the pros and cons of each option? Let's try this one. Ooh, that didn't feel good. Let's back up and try that again. Let's try this one. Ah, yes, that felt better. And now suddenly your brain is actually handling a situation differently. It's experimenting, it's learning, it's filling out its like patterns and mental models of how the world works. And it' actually learning things that never learned before, doing things that never did before. And suddenly you can start to change your behavior and grow skill and take things that were always theoretical things you learned on a page and turn them into things that are really baked into Your brain's networks and you're able to do so. The power of practice is that it allows your brain to be in that improvement zone where again, it can slow down, where it's safe to make mistakes, where it can make different choices, where it can be more aware than it normally is when it's just in that improvement zone. I'm sorry, than when it's in the performance zone. So when you are in improvement zone, you can dramatically accelerate the process of growing and building skill. Comp to when you're just always at performance time hoping you'll get better from repetition alone.

I love this because as I was listening, I'm sure other listeners had this same revelation once you said it. It's like, duh. Because if you imagine being a coach of any type of sports team, they're just not like, hey, go play the sport. That's not practice. They're just throwing somebody a ball and say play. Right? We actually have dedicated time for specific skills, honing those skills. And this is beneficial for me even as a negotiation trainer. I have a, a training that I'm doing tomorrow and I give people simulations A lot of times. I like this idea of injecting a little bit of time because like you said, if we are in our performance mode, we're just going back and forth with what we're comfortable with and familiar with. But now I'm going to give them the instruction to say, hey, if you're not exactly sure what to say next, take as much time as you need and try to utilize something that you learned from the training. So I appreciate that little gem. This is really important because we're recognizing that these small tweaks in our mentality, in our philosophy and our approach to learning these skills can have a massive impact when it comes to the growth that we experience after going through dedicated and intentional practice.

Yeah, and intentional practice is the key phrase there because I found that repetition alone doesn't grow skill. Whether that repetition comes during game time or that repetition comes through some half ass awkward role play your manager makes you do. Right? Simple repetition doesn't grow skill. Think about it this way. If simple repetition grew skill, by the time people reached the age of like 65 to 70, they would be expert drivers because they would have gotten their 10,000 hours in of driving. Anyone who's driven in Florida knows that 65 to 70 year olds are not expert drivers. So simple repetition does not grow skill. Right. I'm no better at tying my shoes now than I was when I was 12 years old. Even though I've had so many repetitions at it. So to have practice benefits, you have to be more than repetition. There has to be that awareness going into it of what exactly you're trying to do here, what good looks like, and what you're aiming for. There needs to be a chance to, of course, practice in the improvement zone, where there isn't this pressure to perform and where you do have the benefit of some space to think things out. But then there needs to be immediate reflection on what just happened and measuring it against that standard that you had in mind going into it, you got to highlight maybe where your performance missed the mark. And then you try immediately try again and try to implement that feedback. Whether it's feedback you gave yourself or feedback a partner gave you, try to immediately implement it again and see how that feels. And do this back to back, over and over, and your brain can very quickly start to again learn new patterns and pick things up that it didn't used to have before. But what I see all too often happening when people do do some kind of role play, whether it's sales or negotiation, is like, there's no clarity going into it as to what good looks like. It's just like, hey, I'll hit you with an objection and just give me your best response. And then they'll get a little bit of feedback on something that could be better, and then they'll move on. And there's no chance to implement that feedback. There's no chance to try doing it again differently, to give the brain a chance to really feel what the difference is between doing it the first way and doing it the second way, because that's where the real learning comes, right? The real skill growth happens is when your brain has a chance to actually experience firsthand what the right way feels like compared to what the wrong way feels like. But just getting a list of feedback from somebody for things to try next time doesn't give your brain that ability to really experience firsthand, hand again, what it feels like to do it the right way. So intentional practice is important, and the way you structure it matters. And in the work we do with sales teams, we even identified that depending on the situation you're in and depending on the type of skill you're trying to master, there's even four entirely different types of practice that you can use that might best fit the circumstance.

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. Well, let's talk about that. Tease us here. Jonathan, what are the four different types of practice?

Yeah, so for the most predictable moments, we use something called word practice. And that is actually kind of similar to what I mentioned at the top of the episode where you know going into it roughly what you might hear and you know going into it roughly what you want to say. So of course lots of things don't fit this type of practice, but there are a lot of predictable moments. For example, if you're in sales at some point this quarter, you're going to hear someone say, we're going to have to push this back six months. How are you going to respond? Are you going to immediately jump in with a kind of a pushback response of hey, wait a minute, no, no, we can't do that. Here's why you can't do that. That tends to not work too well. It raises defenses, spoils the relationship, gets people to close their mind off, and that doesn't really work. Or you could have maybe more of a flight response where you just say, okay, yeah, sounds good, I'll talk to you in six months where you're almost like fleeing the conflict altogether. But neither of those are great reactions. So you can practice what your reaction is in that moment to that specific objection. So that's word practice. And again, it's useful for those more predictable moments where you know someone's going to say something like this and you know your response should be something like this. Another type of practice we call situation practice, this is a little bit more dynamic where you don't necessarily know exactly what you're going to say going into it, because what you say depends on what your partner is saying. So you have to adapt to what's there. An example of this is a really good behavior, whether you're selling or negotiating, is to occasionally summarize back to your party what they heard or what you heard, but using slightly different language and maybe even making a few inferences. It's a really good behavior. You get in, but it's actually kind of hard work. To do for the brain to a keep track of everything it's hearing and not forget what it's heard, but also find the through lines, create a nice condensed summary, find ways to rephrase it, and again, make some inferences in there as well. That's kind of actually a cognitively very difficult thing to do. So a version of situation practice is where you could have conversation with your partner, do that work of keeping track of their main points, finding out what the through line between it is, finding a way to rephrase it and throw a few inferences in there, and then regurgitate it back to them and say, hey, how do you think my summary was? We call that situation practice because you can't do that without a partner. And what you say is entirely dependent on what the partner says, right? Word practice you could actually do on your own with a mirror. You don't even need a partner for word practice. For situation practice, you need to kind of feed off of what that person's saying. Another example of situation practice is Chris Voss. In his book Never Split the Difference talks about specific behaviors of like mirroring and labeling. So when you hear something use labels like it seems like it sounds like it feels like, or when you hear them use a key word, just mirror it back to them and say difficulties to get them to talk more. That was a beautiful opportunity for situation practice, where you just have a conversation with your partner and wherever you can, throw in a mirror, throw in a label. So it's still kind of a role play setting where they're pretending to be a buyer, you're pretending to be a seller, and it's very dependent on what they say. So those again are good for less predictable moments, but still fairly predictable moments. We'll say it's good situation practice. The third type of practice we found is really good is called skills practice. This is personally my favorite because with skills practice, you completely throw out role playing and pretending. You even step away from the context of sales and negotiations, and you just focus on core fundamental human skills, communication skills, and brain abilities. Good analogy of this, that there's a football team out there, I forget which one, but they actually have their linebackers train as boxers during the off season. Not because they want them throwing punches on the field or anything, but because when you train as a boxer, it strengthens the neural connections between your hands and your brain. It makes your hands faster, it makes them more accurate and more agile. And of course, linebackers need to have accurate, agile hands. So you can do the same thing when it comes to negotiation, you can focus on what are the abilities I want my brain to have. Maybe it's listening, maybe it's reading body language, maybe it's managing your own emotions under stress. You can pick up those skills in any context. It doesn't have to be a fake role play negotiation for you to grow those skills. In fact, it's usually better if you're in a real conversation that isn't pretend, and you use that conversation to grow those skills and abilities in your brain. And then once you step into the sales arena again, or the negotiation arena, you tend to perform much better because you've taken the time to train your brain. So I love that type of practice. And the fourth one, we actually don't have a great name for it yet. We call it mental practice. But it's where you actually take recordings of real conversations, whether they're yours, a colleagues, or else some stranger off the Internet, but real negotiations. And you play it. And whenever the partner, right, your buyer, if you're a sales contact, whenever they say something, something pivotal or important, you pause the tape and you make your brain go through the process of thinking about what I just heard, choosing what direction you want to take the conversation, and then picking a specific question to ask in that moment to direct the conversation that way. So this is, again, you can do it alone in a room. You don't need a partner for this. You're just training your brain. But rather than using a fictitious scenario of a roleplay partner, you're using a real life scenario saying, if I was the seller in this moment, if I was the lawyer in this moment, how would I handle this situation? And it forces your brain to think through that, make those choices, make those decisions, which, again, is training your brain to perform well under pressure. So four entirely different types of practice, again, depending on the situation and how predictable it is. With, of course, those last two I mentioned of skills practice and mental practice being great for the stuff that is less predictable. Right. Those can be great ways to practice. So that was a lot. I'm gonna take a deep breath there, Kwame.

This was a masterclass in practice because these four elements of practice are so powerful. And I think even beyond the power of each strategy or methodology of practice is being able to give names to them, label them. So we could actually do it with intentionality. So we have the word practice. So this is specific situations, understanding that you have to say specific things and you could do that by yourself. We have situation practice, which is these are more dynamic. So you need A partner to practice these types of skills. And then we have skills practice in particular. So we're talking about this, the core fundamental human skills and brain abilities that work in the negotiation context. And then we have the mental practice. And I love this. Whitney and I do this when it comes to watching reality TV and nonsense on Netflix, you know, because it's like, okay, listen there. There's no pedagogical benefit to watching these shows, but we're going to make one. So I'll commentate. I'll be like, oh, you know, did you see the inflection? Did you see the change of the tone? This was a point. They should have done this. But of course, they put fuel on the fire. Let's watch get the popcorn.

Right for that, specifically, pause the movie or the TV show and ask yourself, what is that person thinking right now? Beautiful exercise in empathy and being. Okay, someone over here just said this inflammatory thing. What is of the people in the room? What are they thinking right now? Just trains your brain to get out of your own perspective and more easily adopt the perspective of another, which, again, is one of those hugely important abilities for negotiation, to drop your own perspective and step into someone else's. But who knew you could practice that brain ability with reality tv?

I love it. I love it. Everybody listening to the podcast is like, listen, get the Netflix subscription again. Time to learn. This is great. This is great. Let's wrap up with some of these everyday scenarios that we can turn into practice opportunities. These are all around us. But you really have a really cool approach to this. Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, definitely. So you know those four types of practice that I mentioned above? Right. That's what we bring to sales teams. Actually, on that note, there is a, like a exercise practice blueprint that we've built that people can run without us even being there, which will give people a chance to try out that situation practice I mentioned in the context of responding to some common objections. So this will be really valuable to sales teams who face probably those exact objections, but probably be useful to anyone who does negotiation. And again, is used to hearing things like, hey, my boss said no, or hey, can we put this on ice for six months? Right? So there's actually an exercise that we have. I'll talk a little bit more about that at the end, but that'll be kind of a free giveaway for your listeners where you can do this with your own team. However, in general, I recognize that for a lot of people here, they might be solopreneurs who don't have a team to practice with. They might be on a team where none of their colleagues are really supportive of practice, or they might just feel like they just can't possibly carve out the time for practice. I would encourage you to do it anyways. But some people, that might be a barrier for them. So if that's the case, there are a handful of ways. There's really a lot of ways that you can practice these core foundational brain abilities in your real life. Things that are already happening to you today just change the way you engage in that conversation and you can use as a practice opportunity. So I got four specific examples in mind. But if you can imagine this, there's many more. So here's one. It strengthens the ability that you have to really get people to open up. Because of course negotiation oftentimes people are a bit standoffish, whether they're specifically trying to hide something or whether they're just not mood to share the details of their business with you. It can be really good to learn those skills of how to use simple questions to get people to open up. So a real life situation where you can use this is when you're picking up your kids from school, trying to get them to tell you about their day. Because I'm telling you, no matter what age you ask a kid, how was school? You get the same answer every time. Good. What'd you do? I don't know. What'd you learn? I don't know. So you got to learn how to be more specific with your questions. You got to learn how to use intonation to create a little bit more curiosity, a little more intrigue. Right? You need to learn how to control, you know, or how to work with. With both, you know, simple, close ended, easy to ask questions like did you have gym today? With more open ended, maybe harder to think about questions like, you know, what was something that made you bored today? Did you have any moments where you were bored? Or do you have anything funny happen at lunch? Right, but that's just a real life situation. If you can get your kid talking to you in detail about how their day was. You are really good at using simple words and tones to open people up. Second one, training your ability to really get curious, especially get curious in the face of conflict and disagreement. Right? Because oftentimes our most natural reaction will be hear conflict and a different opinion or something is to try to overcome it, try to change someone's mind. But oftentimes the key to moving forward is to slowing down and taking the time to really understand their perspective and their worldview before you jump in with your perspective and your worldview. So a great opportunity for this. So when you're having those conversations with your partner, right? So for me, it's my wife. And when I'm talking to her, oftentimes we'll be making a decision like, where do we go on vacation? Or how should we do the landscaping in our yard? Or what should the boundaries around TV time be for the kids? And she'll say something, something that is just so preposterous and so idiotic and so wrong that all I can do is just stare at her, cock my head to the side and say, are you serious? That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. As you can imagine, the conversation doesn't go very well from there. When you have those moments happen, that's a perfect opportunity to fight back that reaction. Instead, get curious and make it your intention to use questions to fully map out and fully understand their perspective, their worldview, how they came to that conclusion. Chris Voss, in his book Never Split the Difference, talks about the power of the phrase. That's right. When you can get your counterpart to say, say, yeah, that's right. That's when you know you really understand them. And that's a breakthrough moment in negotiation is when you understand them and they know you understand them and they felt understood. So make it a challenge of yours for, for yourself next time you have a run in with your partner and you very much disagree on things and you just can't understand their perspective, make it your goal. Over the next 20 minutes, half hour, whatever it takes to ask them questions until you thoroughly understand their situation, their perspective, you can verbalize it to them, get them to say, hey, that's right, exactly. You've got it. If you can get to that point. A, you just avoided an argument and strengthened your relationship. B, you've just strengthened your negotiation skills. Should I keep going?

Keep going, man. I'm taking all these notes. I'm loving this.

Yeah.

So what's next?

Cool. So another really, really important brain ability is the ability to hear things that trigger strong emotional reactions in your brain, but not let those emotions cloud your judgment, not let those emotions drive the bus, so to speak. Right. So again, in negotiation, this is someone saying, saying, yeah, I don't think this is going to work out. Or this is someone saying, you're way too expensive. You're going to have to do this for half the cost. When you hear those things, your brain has an emotional reaction and Your ability to move forward depends to a large extent to your ability to manage that emotional reaction, tone it down, and focus on the matter at hand, which is typically a matter of asking good questions, understanding their perspective, et cetera. So one of the great way to develop this skill is to intentionally talk to someone where, you know, things they're going to say are going to create a strong emotional reaction in you. You easiest way to find these people, find someone on the very far end, opposite end of the political spectrum from you, and talk to them about political topics. Most people will go white as a sheet when they think about this, but if you're, you know, far left liberal, go talk to the most right wing conservative person you know, or vice versa. Talk to them about those hot button issues of politics and money and immigration and gay rights and whatever kind of issues you guys disagree on. Talk to them. Your intention here is not to change their mind. Your intention here is simply, simply to better understand their world. And more importantly, your intention is to manage your own emotional reactions, because there's going to be a lot of things they say in that conversation that cause some really strong reactions in you. But this is a beautiful opportunity for you to train your brain to take that emotion, set it aside, focus on the task at hand, which is understanding their perspective, right? I actually had a podcast called Courageous Conversations that I did for like a year in like 2021. And that podcast helped me become a better seller more than anything else I've ever done. Done had nothing to do with selling, right? It was me and a bunch of people I disagreed with strongly talking about race, talking about religion, talking about sexuality. And yet it trained my brain and how to get curious, how to listen, how to manage my own emotions, and it made me a much better seller. So as terrifying as it sounds, I encourage you to do that next family reunion, right? Your neighbor, whoever it is that you disagree with, use the opportunity to train your brain. And just the last one also kind of in that area of nerves. I know a lot of times going into negotiations, right, People are just around with nerves, right? And they're just so nervous, their whole body is feeling it. Makes them hard for them to prep, makes it hard for them to perform. One way you can train your brain on how to respond better to that is to intentionally do things that make you nervous. Involving humans, human communication, human interactions. An example of this is for most people, the idea of walking up to someone in a Starbucks who's sitting there and sitting down next to them and saying, hey, can we have a Conversation or hey, you know, would you mind if I sit with you? For most people that's absolutely freaking terrifying, the thought of doing that. Right. I can just picture for myself if I was actually going to do that, standing there in Starbucks looking at that person and being like, oh boy, I'm gonna do it. The sweat would be pouring out of me, my stomach would be twisting in knots. I'd be breathing hard. Like that's an opportunity to train your brain though, on how to like handle that, feel it, set it aside, move forward, do it anyways. Do that half a dozen times and suddenly your brain isn't quite so nervous. And then when you're getting on your next negotiation call, you don't have quite the same amount of nerves going into it. So there's many more examples, I imagine, but those were kind of a few I thought up of in advance of this show that again can really help you to strengthen your brain and practice negotiation skills, skills even outside the context of practicing with colleagues. And I don't anything like that.

Absolutely. This is strong. This is really strong because I believe just incorporating a handful of these, just incorporating one of these tools, one of these tools is something that could absolutely change the game for people. And imagine if you were to try to just dedicate a day or a week to one of the things that Jonathan suggested and then the next day or the next week trying another thing, those type of little micro experiments and, and just creating your own opportunities to improve your skills. This is powerful and it can pay massive dividends to you for the rest of your life. I was going to say career, but I think that's too limited because these are everyday skills that will apply in life but also in business. So Jonathan, I really appreciate this and before you go, I want to give you an opportunity again to shout out your business, your company, things that you're working on and make sure you let the listeners know about that freebie again into.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So name the company is the Practice Lab. So our website is the practice lab.co.com is actually something totally different unrelated business co will get you to us. And again we work with sales teams to give sales teams a chance to practice these skills that we've mentioned today in a way that's really easy for them, really easy for management. Right. Really lightly for everyone all around. But ultimately grows to the kind of record skill development that other disciplines have tapped into to grow a lot of skill in a hurricane. And it's much, much quicker than traditional sales training or much, much quicker than letting your reps just kind of figure it out on their own as they go. So anyone who manages a sales team who wants to see their sales team practicing their skills, certainly reach out. But for anyone who just wants to try out this type of practice on their own, reach out to us. Because as I mentioned before, we have this like blueprint kit of exactly how to run a practice session that incorporates all those principles I mentioned at the top of the episode. What makes for good practice, right? Being the improvement zone, getting feedback, knowing what good looks like, et cetera. And it's already pre built ready to go for you. It really doesn't take more than maybe 30 minutes of pract prep time just to look through the materials. And then you can run this session with your team and they'll get a chance to learn about a specific approach to responding to objections that helps to lowers your counterparts defenses, get them to open their mind up to consider and hear out new ideas and ultimately just keeps the conversation going long enough that your deal doesn't die right there, right? Because all too often an objection comes up and it's like, all right, you got two minutes. Either change their mind or follow up in six months. So this shifts the conversation a bit so that you have the time, time to really settle in, have a longer conversation, get to know the perspective and work together to try to find a way past it. But again, it also immediately from the very first words out of your mouth starts the process of lowering their defenses and opening their mind up. So we designed this for salespeople, right? So a lot of the objections we'll have in practicing is things like my boss said no to this or you're too expensive or you know, we got to push this out six months. But truthfully, anyone who handles negotiations, anyone who hears objections and bad news will benefit from using this as well. So if you want to get access to that blueprint so you can run this practice exercise with your colleagues and your team, you can simply email hello at thepracticelab. Co Mention the name of this podcast, right mentioned that you heard it on Kwame's show and we can send you the blueprints. It's just like a document we'll send your way. This has like a bunch of videos and instructions embedded into it in a slideshow. We'll send that your way. That way you can very easily without having to spend any time or effort planning and being about planning this out. You can run a practice session and with your colleagues and your team and just see how it feels.

Jonathan. Exceptional work, my friend. Really appreciate it. And we also appreciate your generosity. Thanks for coming on the show today.

Hey, thanks for having me, man.

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