Mo Bunnell: A great relationship can make your entire career

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Or wherever you love to listen. Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation. Mo, thanks for joining us today.

Oh, I'm excited. We were vibing right in the beginning of this, in all of our prep, and we are going to drop some insights on the audience that they're going to be very glad they showed up for this show. And I can't wait. We have some fun doing it too.

It's going to be so much fun. This is almost one of those interviews where I forgot to press record.

No, we were already starting.

Wait.

We gotta bring it back. Save the energy for the episode. So, Mo, how would you get us started? By telling us about yourself and what you do.

Yeah, well, in a real short sentence here, we help high end experts grow a book of business. Part of that is negotiating either on behalf of their clients or for themselves to get the contract or the deals done. And if I go one step further down the road, a mantra that we two mantras we think a lot about are a great deal might make your year, but a great relationship can make your entire career. That's one. The other one that I think is so important is people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. And if we just combine those two, I think there's a nexus around negotiation in there that's in the heart of that, which is creating wins for everybody involved. And there's some really specific ways to do that that are backed by evidence, peer reviewed research. I know we're going to get into it, but it's something that's rarely taught and it's probably one of the most important things people can learn.

I agree 100% and this is great because we're going to go into not only the expertise that you shared within give to grow, but also just some approaches that people can utilize to get better results in their negotiations. And I think a fun place for us to start, Mo is just thinking about when you. The stigma and bias that surrounds the word negotiation and the word sales. They're cousins. Let's put them together in this context. So when you think about the stigma regarding negotiation, sales and those types of transactions, transactional discussions, what are the most problematic stigmas that hold people back from really leaning into these conversations?

Oh, there's a. There's a ton. A couple that come to mind are. And these were. This was a bunch of core level research. Not peer reviewed stuff this part isn't, but stuff that we did in our live workshops. We trained 50, 60,000 people and we found that the biggest competition that people have is not another organization. The biggest competition people have is themselves. And we, because we know that people that have a relationship centric approach, achieve more in life, have higher accolades, help other people's more. Other people more in negotiations, they tend to have better outcomes for everybody involved. That was some research that just came out this year. Jeremy England was the key researcher there. I'm still memorizing this one because it just came out. And so this idea of being other first, being about other people first, has all these massive outcomes. The biggest barrier in front of that are lies that we tell in our head. So the part that we incorporated into our own workshops because we couldn't find it anywhere was we asked people, think of a time when you went to reach out to somebody but you hesitated or never did. Everybody gets that. Oh, yeah, Yep. I remember Sue. I met her at this conference. I emailed once. She didn't email back. I hesitate. You know, everybody's got a story. And then we said, tell us exactly why you hesitated. And we collected, we collected so many verbatims until we just never heard anything new again. And what we found is there's five lies. People have five traps that they fall into before they act. And what the greats do is they learn how do I spot those and how do I overcome them. So I keep deepening relationships. I win a relationship advantage that's beneficial to everybody. Then when it does time come, high stakes time, I'm either going to get hired or somebody else is. I got to negotiate in ways. Everybody wins. They're listening to me or not. They trust me or not. If you do all those, if you blast through those obstacles, keep developing the relationships, you end up in a position, you can actually impact the world in a way that helps everybody. And it also helps you.

Oh, this is so good. Well, I mean, we have to find out what these five lies and traps.

Are because I'm sure that we've gone through this.

And it's funny because I was going through to a, I went to a conference the other couple weeks ago and it was, I wasn't speaking, so I got to be a civilian, which is rare. It's fun. And I was meeting all these people. I was like, oh, this is great. I'm going to connect with this person. Connect with this person.

How many did I follow up with, Mo?

Not one. Nary. Not one human received a follow up message. And I, you know, I, I'm going to list. I was about to list all of my lies that I told myself, but.

I'm sure they'll come up in your list. So let's hear it. What is it that holds people back?

Well, here's what we found. There's five big categories and it really helps to drop down into the exact verbatims for each of these. So this little. If you, if I go too long talking, you just stop me. Kwame, he's like, hey, stop on that one. Because we could either share one, discuss, or I could go through all five or whatever. Okay. The five lies are in order. And this is important because you've got to topple over level one lie to get to level two. Two to three. The first one is I can't do that. I can't do that. When it comes to relationship development or building a book of business or selling. The exact verbatims behind I can't do that are I hate the idea of selling. I just like doing the work. I'm not good at going to dinner. I'm an introvert. I'm not good at networking. I'm not good at chitchat. I can't do it like Debbie did. I can't do the thing. So this one's so important at first. It's why it's. The first one is if we can't get past the fact we can't do it, whether it's the entire thing, negotiation, business development, whatever, or later in career. Sometimes it's narrow. I can't sell the big deals. I can't talk to a board level person. So it can start out big in the beginning, narrow in the end, but it's the first lie because if we don't get through that, we got nothing. Your thoughts on that one before we go on to the others.

I think that's brilliant. I mean, it speaks completely to like self efficacy and locus. Of control. And if you have the external locus of control, then you're kind of living at the whims of other people and fate. But if you have a higher internal locus of control, then you believe that you can actually do something which makes you more likely to actually do it. And so it's, it's to be. It's a blend of mindset and skill set in the sense of you have to first have the confidence to actually take action, but you also have to have the skills.

You got it in. And a couple pieces of research I think are interesting here. Dr. Karen Darris Erickson, who's the 10,000 hour rule guy that Gladwell popularized, but he actually did the work. He found that any complex skill is both learned and earned through deliberate practice. His exact words, there's a whole rubric around it that's scientific. The other thing that I think so anything that's complex, no one's born with it. Is the myth we want to bust here. The second piece of research I think is interesting is Carol Dweck, growth mindset expert. Just genius. And what she finds is anytime we find ourselves saying, I can't do a thing, just put one word on the end of that sentence yet. I can't bring in the big deals yet. And she said that starts to rewire your brain and you start to build a plan to learn it a la Erikson. So that's the I can't do it. The next lie is now, again, these go in order. So we have to blast through the first one to get the second one. Second is, I don't know what to do. Okay, I think I can do it. I'm not sure what to do in this case. Exact verbatims. I don't know. I don't have anything meaningful to share. I don't have an excuse to reach out. They didn't reply to my last email. I'm not sure I know what they need. I don't know what their priorities are. I might be bothering them. You can just like, hear the tapes, can't you? Like, we all. I teach this stuff. I hear this stuff all the time. Our brain is incredibly good at creating barriers to keep us safe. So what's your. What's your thought on that one, Kwame?

This is so critical. And I think a lot of times when we, when we think about those lies, we have to just recognize that there, there should be a, like an internal fact checker in our head that is saying that because we have these repetitive thoughts, right? Because you have a belief A belief is just a thought. You've thought a. A number of times.

That's so good.

And when you realize that there's nothing really truthful necessarily about a belief, but there is truthiness, it feels true because we've heard it so many times, most likely from either, you know, society or from ourselves at some point. So, yeah, when you think about that excuse of I don't know what to do, there are very simple ways to figure out what to do. And it's just a thinly veiled form of self sabotage that holds us back from getting the knowledge we need to actually take action.

Oh, my gosh. The way you just said that, I hope that did not pass by the listener, because that's so good. Yeah. And to build, to go a step further down the road, to build on what you just said is a lot of times the solve for this lie, not always, but a lot of times is ask them what they want. So if a lot of. I know it's ridiculous because it's so simple, but. But if we don't know what to follow up or I don't have an excuse, don't have anything new, all these lies, well, why don't we schedule a meeting and say, hey, Howard, or hey, Matt, you know, we both know a guy named Matt. You could say, hey, Matt, I just had Mo on the show. I know. We had cocktails about six months ago. He told me you're off on your own now, doing some cool stuff with Justin. We should catch up so I can learn about your parties. Maybe there's some ways I can be helpful.

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Matt's gonna love that, right? Like, who wouldn't want to have cocktails with you in Columbus? Like, let's go next week. And so if we can learn their priorities and their words. Another way we say say it in the book is fall. If we can learn, if we can fall in love with their problem, well, now we have a year or two of content to share with them and follow up. It's almost like. It's almost like we went to a professor in law school or business school and said, hey, can I just have the answers to the test next Thursday? It saved me a lot of time. If you could just give those to me. And they said, sure, here they are. No one else asked, this is how easy it is, and we just don't do it.

This is so good because so much.

Of life is truly like that, Mo.

It's wild because the answers are out there. You just need to ask for them, and we simply don't do that.

And tell me what you think about this. I've been playing around with this, just trying to figure out what holds people back. And when we think about what it takes to just. We don't know. To this last point, I don't know what to do. I think a lot of times when we create these barriers to hold us back, we're doing it to keep us safe. Our perspective of what safe is. And a lot of it comes down to a lack of confidence, too, because we like. To that last point, we say, I can't do that, but we just need to figure out what it is to do, practice it, and actually have a little bit more confidence in our ability to take action and also survive if we fail. I think that's a big part of it, too, because we overestimate the amount of pain that we will feel when we fail, and we don't feel like we can recover. But if we have a little bit more confidence in our recoverability, our ability to recover, then I think we'll take a few more risks, too.

Without a doubt. There's a study I just absolutely love that tested people's expectations and then outcomes when they were asking for donations to a nonprofit. And these are rough numbers, but they're pretty darn close. I was an actuary in a former life, so I remember numbers, but they basically found that people would guess, hey, you got to go out and ask a certain number of people for donations, and we all want you to get to a certain level. That was sort of the experiment. People were off by how many asks they would need to bake by almost double, meaning they expected to having to ask twice as many people as they really needed. And as you might expect, they were off on the amount. When they guessed how much people would donate, they were off by about half, meaning people gave about twice as much as they expected. So to your point, our brains are wired to keep us safe. They are wired to remember bad things more than good things. And. And we fear much more strongly those feelings are. Fear is much more deep than the feeling of what positive things might happen. So we are by far our owner's worst enemies. We all think that competition is XYZ Corporation or ABC Law Firm, when the real competition is ourselves.

And I think a big part of this is that if you've been struggling with something for a long period of time, it becomes very formidable in your mind. So for the people who are listening to this, I can't do this. I don't know what to do. Those type of things, they've been ringing true in our heads for such a long time. And then the solutions that you've given to us are simple but not easy because we still have to overcome the fear. And it feels, and this is something that I struggled with. So I want to see if this resonates with you. If you've heard this from other people. It's almost like it feels as though it's an insult to our intellect to find a simple solution to a problem that's been causing us so much trouble for so many years. Because if I'm saying to myself, hold on. I have been letting, for decades, I've been letting myself be held back by the fact that I don't know what to do. And mo, you're telling me all I need to do is ask the person I need to ask. That's been what's holding me back all these years.

I cannot allow that to be the solution. So I'll keep on trying to find something more complicated.

It's harder than that, right?

Yeah.

It's not. It's not. Yeah. And I, and this is a neat frame because we've trained high end experts, you know, lawyers, consultants and account execs at big health care we've worked with, We've trained over 50, 60,000 people all across the world. I can tell you the highest performers are the ones that have somehow figured out a way to blast through these. And once you blast through it today, two weeks and three, one day and three hours from now, another one will pop up. They pop up in my mind for you, for the person who's 99.9 percentile rainmaker, these will come and they'll go. We just have to be that. Because the mind is wired that way. We just have to a be quick at spotting them and be quick to realize what the solution is and bam, overcome it. It's the people that do that very quickly. That have more success.

Yep. Yeah, I agree 100%. And one of the things I've seen, I've heard from other people and then I started to experience it myself. When you, when you're around a lot of high performers who are doing big things from the outside looking in, it's like these people are just gods among men, right? What, how do they do such things? Then you get closer to them and you see their humanity and we are still incredibly impressed by their accomplishments. But sometimes when you see them very up close and you have these conversations, you're not as impressed because you can see their humanity and you're thinking, okay, this, they are brilliant. But that level of brilliance is achievable. But the solutions that they're putting into place, they seem so simple. I've got to be missing something.

It's got to be something more.

But I think the people who are high performers, they figure out what is the problem, what is the solution to your point, and they do it very efficiently and they're trying to find the simplest solution because a simple solution is less prone to failure.

You nailed it. I was talking to Ali Abdaal the other day. A lot of people know as the big YouTube star. Feel good productivity. You may know Ali, and he was on our podcast and we just recorded yesterday, I guess. And you know, he's probably got in the, in the sort of productivity, self helpy kind of space. He's probably got more views on YouTube than anybody, at least that I can think of. And he's on the show and he's talking about how nervous he was to go on dates with his current wife Izzy, who's awesome too. And he's like going on and on about how nervous he was. So he would like, listen to pump up music on, you know, in the cab ride in London on the way to pick Easy up. And he would have to like pump himself up. And I'm like, ollie, can you just stop for a second? Because I think people are gonna freak out that you were nervous about anything. He's like, I'm nervous about all kinds of stuff. So like, we put to your point, we put these people up on pedestals that have achieved great things in an area or in many domains of life. Let me tell you, they are experiencing these lies too. They're just quick to overcome them. We will all feel these things, everybody.

That's so empowering. So empowering. It's scary and empowering because I think a lot of times we want these challenges, these insecurities to be more like school, hey, listen, I graduated. I'm never doing this again.

That's how I felt about. What was it? Calculus 2. Which it turned out I didn't even need. I just got abused for a semester for no reason. But when I was done with that test, I was like, I'm never doing math again. Never doing it again.

But when it comes to these insecurities.

And problems, it's just like they say, new levels, new devils.

It never goes away. Yeah, you're always going to find something. And it's to me, I've almost befriended it. It's, it's a joke where I'm doing something big. Everybody says, kwame, you can do it. We believe in you and everything. And then I hear that little voice like, no, you can't.

Yeah.

And I just laugh. I said, oh, it will never go away. But I know how to handle it. That's the difference.

Well into write two best selling books and be a keynote speaker and get up on stage like you do, I'm like, I just. We barely know each other. But I can tell that you are somebody who spots these things and says, no, I'm going to stretch out my comfort zone. I'm going to keep going.

Thank you, I appreciate that. No, that's great. That is great. I'm going to clip that out and keep it in my gratitude journal.

There you go. There you go.

So let's hit number three. What's lie number three?

Yeah. I might do it wrong. So here the exact verbatims are. I don't know the content well enough to talk about it. I'm out of touch with us, the team. I might say something wrong. I'm afraid to know. I'm afraid that they might ask a question. I don't know the answer. I'm not important enough to meet with them. So here we know what to do. Our fear is I might do it wrong. And the idea here, the solve is acting. Just do that classic thing where you take the big thing you're afraid of and you boil it back to what's the first five minutes? Do I need to call somebody internally to get to bone up a little bit on the thing? I'll talk to the client. Do I need to bring somebody with me to the meeting? Do I need to craft some really great questions? Do I need to role play the idea of saying, hey, I don't know the answer, but I can get back to you on that. Lightning will not strike. In fact, it's quite trust building to say those things. So there's Always a solution here, but it's usually pulling it all the way back to a really quick, simple action to get going. I think of this lie, Kwami, as infectious, meaning the I might do it wrong lie is like floating around in the air trying to infect someone. And if you act, you will expel it and it will go infect somebody else. So you can kick it out pretty quickly through action. But it's the idea of just pulling it all the way back to something.

Really simple that's powerful. I love the idea of this being infectious because you're absolutely correct. I mean, the, the contagion level is significant. And when you think about it, there's always a little bit of yourself that will say, I might do it wrong. No matter what it is that I'm doing, I might have done it a ton of times, I still might do it wrong. But especially if it's one of the first times, I'm definitely going to be afraid of, have that fear and taking action as the antidote. That's so I love how tangible it is because you could. They could say, well, Mo, I don't know what action to take. Which takes us back down to one.

Of the other lies.

Well, take action, do right. And I think when you just say, hey, take action, it makes it really simple and actionable so people can recognize, well, what I'm doing right now. My typical response is being paralyzed by fear. The freeze response. I need to make sure whatever I do it's not that.

So.

Bingo. That's exactly it.

So simple.

And I think boxing something into five minutes, like, that's what, you know, maybe even 60 sec. Like, what's one thing I can do right now that's so rock simple? It gets me started that generally that. That creates the momentum and gets rid of this one.

Brilliant. Brilliant. My afternoon is going to be so much more productive. Mo, you don't even know.

We'Re saving us time by doing this.

Absolutely. This is great. Cool.

So that's three. What's number four?

Number four. And you can see the sequence now even really much more clearly because at this point, we know what to do. The fourth lie is, I'm too busy. This one almost. You almost need to not. You don't even. Almost don't need to do the verbatims, but just a couple. But I'm slammed with work. Like now. We don't have capacity as an organization of this. This stuff takes too long and I don't have time. This always seems to be the bottom of my to do list. So some of these are very like freight train coming down the track screaming at you. I don't even know when I'm going to go to the restroom next week. I don't have time to build relationships. And then sometimes it's a little more nuanced. The idea here is that a face to face ask has a 34 times more likely chance of getting a yes than an email ask. That's research by Vanessa Bonds out of Cornell. Let me say it again. A face to face ask is a 34 times more chance of getting yes than an email ask. In her study, it was a difference between 68 out of 100 chance of a yes or 2 out of 100 chance of a yes. There's our 34 times. So when we're really busy, we have access, we're talking to people, we're working on stuff. Why in the world wouldn't we ask little questions that help our couple month from now self? So, hey Suzanne, we're really slammed as we try to get to the next deadline on this big project we're working. I know we don't have time now, but man, I would love to go to dinner in February in a couple months once this once we've solved all this stuff and, and we've got that senior leadership team readout done and the data analysis all presented to the board. But I would just love to take you dinner when this slows down and talk about some of your priorities and find some ways to be helpful because I've really enjoyed working with you on this project. She says yes, you set it up for February. The problem is the roller coaster effect. If we think of things like we're either doing work or we're developing relationships, we'll tend, if it's either or we'll tend to get really busy, do nothing. Oh my gosh, things dried up. I got to really work hard on relationships. And if we do the roller coaster effect just momentum grinds to a halt a little bit all the time is what wins. And integrating the relationship development with the doing of the work with these little 34x power super power access asks actually makes it super easy. Doesn't take any more time at all and we're always moving forward.

That's it's so good. And I, I'm wondering, maybe there's some psychology that speaks to this with precision, but it seems as though the busyness that we feel is magnified when it is short term. So for instance, I feel really busy today. I feel like I'm going to have A busy week and a busy month. But then we always assume that we have a little bit more time in the future. And it makes a lot of sense for us to book these types of relationship building meetings way out into, not like next year. Well, actually in this situation, it would apply appropriately. Yeah, but like more than 12 months is probably a little bit too much. But if we're saying like three months down the road, four months, hey, let's get something on the calendar. It's easy. The calendar space is there and we don't have that emotional weight that we add to it, the mental weight. Because the 60 minutes we spend to network in that meeting or just build a relationship in that meeting is going to be the same 60 minutes we spend at that time. But when it comes to the decision time, it's going to feel a lot heavier if we try to put that in our schedule right now. So it seems like putting that on the calendar is. Makes it a lighter lift emotionally and cognitively for each person in the interaction.

That's exactly right. Yeah. And to build on that for our best, very, very, very, very, very best clients or prospects, we might even suggest an annuity of meetings. So if we have that dinner with her in February and it goes great, maybe one of the things we say at dinner, again, we'll do it in person when we have our 34x superpowers is like, hey, this was really fun. You know, for my best clients, we actually do this about twice a year. We just put it on the books. I'll come up to New York. You know, I get up time anyway for business and we could just put this on the books and twice a year let's do something like this. And that'll always keep us in sync. And I can keep looking for ways to helpful. Be helpful. Just like, you know, we just came up with those three ideas a second ago. So don't. We don't have to do that for everybody. But what I love about that move is for the very best, it turns the. The communication default is on. We are going. You have to actually act to not have dinner or have the zoom call or whatever. So that can be a really powerful sort of power move for deepening relationships with your most important folks.

I love this. This is great. And number five, let's see what number five is.

This one is the holy grail of lies. So the name, I wish we could come up with a better name for how people actually think in their head, but the verbatims will drive it home. This lie, the fifth One is called I'm going to look bad. If you want to put parentheses around it, put fear of rejection afterwards. Because that's what it really is. We just don't say I fear rejection. We say I'm going to look bad. The exact verbatims are I can't ask my friends for business. I'm worried they might not even remember me. I'm intimidated by them. They cancelled on my last call. Someone there doesn't like us. What help would talking to me be? This is like all of this deep, deep, deep, deep, deep fear of rejection stuff. So we headline with I'm going to look bad. But what's really underneath it is the humans need to be loved and be seen and be heard. And we massively fear rejection.

That's powerful. I remember back when I, with my first book, I found this study where they found that people, when they were put in a situation where they were experiencing rejection, even giving them an analgesic, analgesic like Tylenol, alleviated some of the pain so that the pain of rejection is actually felt in a visceral, physical type of way.

I've never heard that. That's super cool. We need to trade studies. Yes, I want to know that one.

It's a fascinating.

Right, Tell me more.

So the thing is, when we talk about the fear of rejection, we have to recognize it is tied evolutionarily to the fear of just death. Because if you're rejected from the tribe, you cannot survive as an individual out in the wilderness back in the day. It's just not really possible. And so the that that fear isn't baked into us. That's why we are still here, because our ancestors knew to stick with the tribe and not get rejected and not run the risk of rejection or do things that ended up getting them rejected. And so when we bring that here, now we still have that fear of rejection, as if we are going to die, but we are living in a society that is significantly more advanced. If you don't get turned out for a deal, you're fine, you're going to be okay, but it feels like you're not. And that can hold you back a lot.

That's so good. And that I really do want that study, Kwame. So promise. You have to promise. And yeah. So building on that, what we find is the best solution here is actually realize you're going to be rejected sometimes or that or the just person is not going to reply when you make some offer of helpfulness, getting together, introducing them to somebody else at your company. Whatever it is. So what we, the little mantra we use on this One is think 10x, not 1x. And what we mean by that is think, hey, Suzanne's a potential important prospect for me. I want to deepen the relationship with Suzanne or whoever it is going to add value. I'm going to offer value to Suzanne 10 times over the next year. I'm just hoping one time is going to work. Maybe I'll invite her to a webinar the next month. It doesn't have to be exactly in the month, but. But maybe we're coming to New York and I could bring an expert and introduce to her. Maybe I can offer a half day workshop for her or some time of continuing education or whatever it is. But over the next year, I'm just going to make 10 offers of helpfulness. I just need one to click. And it doesn't have to be this next one. And if we think 10x not 1x, I'm going to offer 10x. I'm going to offer the value 10x times not 1x I need. If we think I need this next one to work, that's where we will fear we're going to look bad, fear rejection and not move and actually typically not even make the offer. But if we think I'm going to add value multiple times, then we act. And guess what? We'll probably get four out of 10, not one. Like so we just need to act. We just need to make the offers of helpfulness over and over and do it over a long period of time. Something will get unstuck, something will stick.

This is so good. And listeners here, let's bring this all together here because this is going to be the question that really makes it click for everybody. So I want you to compare the negotiation outcomes and business development outcomes to somebody who is negotiating these deals, trying to close, get commission, things like that. Very transactional appearing, right? And we have one person who has gone through the work. They've overcome that work, they've overcome the five lies. And they have incredibly good relationships with the people that they are negotiating with. But they have poor negotiation skills. And now we have somebody who doesn't really care about the relationship until the person's in front of them and they try to sell. And that person has impeccable negotiation skills. They might have listened to 1300 episodes of Negotiate anything, right?

They're really good.

But if they would have, we know in a real situation, if they were listeners, they would have built the relationship. But we'll keep the hypothetical rate right so we have somebody who's very skilled, but no relationships. Somebody who is not very skilled with great relationships. Describe the negotiation outcomes.

Yeah, yeah, completely different. And what's neat about this is we can actually lean on some research. So here's a study name. This is Jeremy Engelman. We talked about him a minute ago. This actual study I'm going to cite here is called Cognitive Ability and Personal Values. A large sample study of Schwarz values, hexago personality, age and gender. I mean, let's come up with a more boring title than that. Come on folks. But from the abstract this is really interesting. General intelligence correlated. So actually the smarter people correlated with positivity and self direction, benevolence, universalism, and negatively with security, tradition and conformity. So smarter people give more and then later down in the study, people that give more, which tended to correlate with iq, actually actually got better negotiation outcomes. So back to your sort of AB test, the theory you just mentioned. Somebody can be actually quite good in the 30 minute high stakes conversation. But if they didn't build a relationship over years, my money is on the person that built the relationship over a series of years and is half as good at the negotiation talk, or 80% of good or something like that. Because trust is built, people give you a little latitude. If the words didn't come out right, they'll probably, if they trust you, they're probably suggesting things that are helpful to you. Hey, what if we did this for you and you did that for us? They're engaging more than they're not viewing it as like we are battling and we're battling for a sliver of the pie. Great negotiators make the pie bigger for everybody. And if we're building trust for months and years ahead of time, the other side is likely to engage in that kind of behavior. And I just think it, it's just gonna, it's gonna result in just better outcomes.

I agree.

Your thoughts?

Oh yeah, 100%. Because a lot of times we come up with these negotiation strategies and sales tactics and whatever it happens to be and then we wonder why it's not working. A lot of times it doesn't work because we haven't set the foundation of a trust built relationship that is built on trust. And so if I don't trust you, I'm not gonna sit negotiation wizardry that you have. I'm going to try to protect myself. And when you have more trust, the person is more willing to be more vulnerable. If they're more willing to be vulnerable, they're More willing to share. Which going back to something that you said earlier allows you to fall in love with their problem and you can start to really figure out how to provide solutions. And they'll try. They'll start to be more incentivized to fall in love with your problem and reciprocate in the same type of way. So like you said, as we're trying to grow the piece of. You cannot grow the pie. If both players are in this negotiation game, are playing the game incredibly defensively because you shouldn't even approach it as a game. It should be a collaborative endeavor. If we can work something out and we can help each other, great. If not, that's fine too. And the complete approach and vibe is different. And it doesn't look like what you would assume a traditional negotiation would look like, but it is often much, much more effective and frankly much more enjoyable for both people involved.

Oh, you just nailed it. You just nailed it. I mean, who gets up in the morning and thinking I want to claw off a piece of what they get so that I can get a bigger piece for me, that's just not like, it's just not something that gets you up in the morning. But on the other side, if we get up in the morning, we think I'm going to find a way to be helpful to them. I'm going to find a solution that's better for all of us. And if I learn their priorities and their words, that's sort of the end result of falling in love with their problem. If I can learn their priorities and where their words to the point where I can say those back to them and they say, mo, that that's exactly it. That's what we're trying to achieve now. We all feel safe, more likely to be creative, more likely to in a trust based way think of solutions nobody ever thought of. And the end result of the negotiation is going to be way better. But it only happens tying it all together. If we have, if we have blasted through all those lies in the months and years before it.

Incredible. Incredible. And I feel a good place for us to end here as we land this plane. Mo if the listeners trying to find a resource like a book that has all of this information on it, do you have any idea where they can go to learn more about this information?

Gosh, I just can't think of any. I mean, maybe it's the one we wrote called Give to Grow. I don't know.

What do you think that would be a good one? I think that'll be a good one.

That's right. Give to Grow. I'm so excited about it. It came out a couple months ago as we record the this been a top 10 bestseller when it first hit. It has sustained that. I'm almost just overwhelmed by the amount of love that is flying back to us as people have read it and they're achieving great things even in a couple months. So Give to Grow. It's wherever books are sold. But the other thing that's interesting is if you can think of how much pressure somebody writes a book called Gifted Grow has to give things away. We developed a free totally gratis training course that somebody doesn't even have to buy the book to get. And that's at givetogrow.info.inf o give2grow.info and it has a couple dozen downloads tools that help them put everything to place videos from me that actually are better if you have the book, honestly, but they stand alone without the book. Anybody can go to givetogrow.info and get that in a second and if they like that, then I'd say grab the book because it's going to be even better. But Give two Grow all the way around is the solution.

Amazing. Mo, thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it.

Thanks Kwame. It was a blast. I had high expectations because of your energy level and this was even better.

Thank you.

Thanks man.

Wait, wait wait wait wait.

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