Negotiating with Teens Made Easy: Insider Secrets from Dr. Tim Thayne

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 AI, 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. Tim, thanks for joining us today.

Hey, thanks, Kwame. Good to be here. I'm looking forward to this.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this, too, because this is going to be a fun one.

Yeah, I think the topic is perfect for parents and teens. I mean, it's happening every day in every home out there, whether our kids and parents. This is what's happening. Especially after I read your definition of negotiation, I thought, absolutely, this is happening under every roof, all the time.

And for those new listeners, the operational definition we use for negotiation is any conversation where somebody in the conversation wants something. And when you see that broad definition, you realize that negotiation is everywhere. And especially if you're a parent, you realize that it's happening all the time.

All the time.

So how about you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?

So my background educationally is marriage and family therapy. I got my PhD in that field. But I've always been a little bit different. My first, I've been almost more an entrepreneur as I have a therapist. My first job that I created for myself was actually while I was a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech, and I took marriage and family therapy. And I wanted to see how that would apply to business organizations. And so my dissertation was applying MFT principles and models to large organizations and the relationships, because ultimately, it's just a large human system, just like a family is a small human system. And it was. It was an amazing experience. And so since that time, because I was a bit lucky, to be honest with you, it worked so well, I didn't realize that half of it was just Great timing. And I didn't realize that pain in the organization that I was working with and consulting ended up being the reason what I had to offer was so accepted. And so I almost got the wrong impression because it worked so well. I just thought, hey, this is easy. I'm gonna keep innovating. And I found out later in my career that there's a lot more to something taking off than just I had a good idea. So. But since that time, I've started treatment programs for adolescents and young adults. I've in particular, I started a wilderness treatment program here in Utah. And that's a unique setting where therapy tends to. To really move things along quickly. When you think about Mother Nature being a co therapist and, you know, the weather and all the natural elements being a part of the milieu of treatment, it has an amazing way to make change happen very, very quickly. But then later started a company called Homeward Bound because I saw that these teens could do really, really well in these settings. But the hard part was helping them transition all of that gain into the real world, back into the complexity of life, into the old relationships with family and friends and all of that, and maintain what they gained before. That's the trick. So I started Homeward Bound to try and help that happen. And then, since then, I'm just about ready to launch a tech business, which is really around the same thing. Helping treatment be more effective long term.

That is fantastic. I really love that, especially as somebody with a background in psychology and an entrepreneur. You're doing it the right way. So that is great. And just another fun note I have had. Now you are the second person who has a background in marriage and family therapy, and both, both of you are living in Utah.

How interesting.

Yeah. That's weird. That's crazy. That is crazy. Yeah, Very cool. Yeah. And with this topic, it'd be interesting to see. Maybe as the conversation evolves, maybe we could talk about some corollaries between negotiating with your teen and negotiating with difficult people in the business world too. Because I'm sure when it comes to those difficult conversations, there'll be some similarities.

I think you'll see a lot of the principles we talk about today. I think that people will be able to look at that and say, wow, I could take that to work. In fact, we work with. At Homeward Bound, we work with parents all over the country, and many of them are in business and they're doing things every day to interact with other people and they're negotiating and the skills we teach them in the home for their family tends to be something they can take right to work. And they, they tell us that, right.

Oh, I'm excited to get into these principles. This is going to be good. Before we get into the principles, let's talk about why it's so hard. I think we intuitively understand that negotiating with teenagers is going to be difficult, but I think it would be great if we could assign some labels to help the audience understand what makes it so difficult.

Well, you know, particularly when you're talking about teens and you know, keep in context. We're working with teens that are struggling a lot and the teenagers we work with, and I think every teen, honestly, they're always thinking two steps ahead most of the time. And parents are not thinking two steps ahead. You're not aware that they're out, way out in front of you when it comes to what they're actually trying to get. And we can be kind of caught flat footed, honestly, sometimes as parents, if we're not thinking a little bit like a teen does, they're trying to get what they want. And the other thing that's so hard that makes negotiating with teens hard is usually there's a co parent in the picture. And if we're not in sync with one another, when we're working through some issue with a teen and we set some boundaries and we come to conclusions, if we're not in sync with our co parent, that co parent might not agree with what we've created and the plans we've made. And in fact, I always talk about teenagers as kind of like water. It's like water going down a furrow. They're always going to go down the path of least resistance. The two leaders in the situation, the ones that need to kind of be on the same page, they really have to talk a lot. They have to be aware of what they're trying to achieve together. And they have to see how they can kind of open the gate so the team doesn't feel like they have to break through the fence. You know, let's go through the right direction. I want to get that thing or I want more freedom or I want something over here. Let's show them how they can get there legitimately instead of how can they break through the fence or go between the two of us and get what they want.

This is so cool because the corollaries are readily apparent here because a lot of times one of the mistakes that people make in negotiations is they show up and that's it. And they hope for the best, but they don't take the time to adequately prepare. And what you've said with the two big issues that we face is that teens are two steps ahead, they've prepared, and oftentimes we haven't. And then the other one is we sometimes we haven't gotten on the same page with the co parent.

And there are some others that are pretty important to consider, you know, challenges to negotiation in that relationship. And one of them is the power imbalance within the relationship. I mean, if you think about any kind of negotiation, negotiation, there's this power struggle going on or some kind of influence of power happening. And in a parent, child or teen relationship, a lot of times the parent has the power. And it's not like you can't lord over them with that power, because your ultimate goal as a parent is to bring them along and help them take the power and, and do it in a way that's mature and is moving them forward in the goals with their life. And you know, some teens don't really want to take the mature route. They just may want to have the power. And so it's an interesting challenge as a parent to have maybe the power to take away a cell phone or the power to, you know, give them a curfew or all of those things. When some parents just use that leverage and that power instead of creating true influence. And that's so tempting for people to not do it with sophistication and with caring and with love because they have the power. And I think about that even in a business relationship, that if that's what's happening, if that's how you get what you want in a negotiation because you just happen to have the power this time, that is not going to be a relationship that's going to be a really good one or a functional one down the road.

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And so it's a great practice to use and will power in a good way as you're negotiating things with your team and realizing you're going for influence, not control.

Absolutely. And when it comes to negotiation, kind of playing off of that, what you're finding is that if you are able to get a deal simply by wielding your power, the only thing that is keeping that deal in place is your power. And once that power wanes, the deal is gone. And so one of the things you want to do is create self enforcing agreements. And the way to do that is by giving the other person a sense of autonomy and control. They need to feel like they had some part in the creation of this agreement. And that means if, if your power wanes in that situation, they're still going to honor it because they see it as something that they helped to create.

Right. Boy does that play here, doesn't it? With autonomy and sense of influencing the outcome from a teen's perspective that are in that one down position.

Right. And so what about the emotions at play? What are the emotions that they are feeling? What are the emotions that we're feeling?

Emotions play a huge role in this. And you know, if you think about a parent child relationship, there's nothing more intense than that. I mean, the love you have for that child, the fear you have for that child, the anxiety, the anger at times. There's a reason why domestic violence is one of those things that probably most cops would prefer not to have to go and deal with because of the volatility of a domestic situation of families. So there's great opportunity if you do it right. There's lots of ways you can fall off if you do it wrong. Emotions play a huge role. And like I said, emotions like fear, anger, anxiety, all of those things cause negotiations to go poorly. And so there's a lot of things you got to do to make sure you're managing those emotions right.

And I really like your choice of words. When it came to what we're trying to do with the emotions, we're not trying to eliminate the emotions or judge the emotions, we're trying to manage the emotions. And one of the things that we find when we dig deeply into emotional intelligence is that we can't eliminate the emotions. And emotion suppression just leads to that expression of that emotion in a more inopportune time. And so we just need to learn how to find, find ways that work for us to manage it, you know.

And I think there's extra incentive here when you're talking about a parent Teen relationship. Because all of us parents, we want a long term. This is not just a three year deal or, you know, whatever kind of deal we might be negotiating. We really want this to build our bond and to bring us closer and closer together over the years as we're kind of dealing with the ups and downs of life and the challenges of adolescence. We don't want that period of time to. And the way we mishandle that, to sacrifice what we could have long term. And so that's always kind of something you want to keep in mind. You know, what do we want this to be like five years down the road, 10 years down the road? And that will impact the way you negotiate things with your kids.

And most likely that long term perspective will make it harder to negotiate in the sense that it'll take more preparation and care and energy in order to negotiate effectively.

Yeah, all the more reason to manage those emotions. And it goes lots of different directions. You know, sometimes parents will want to just give them all kinds of freedom and whatever they want to try and keep the peace, but they're not thinking long term, they're thinking very short term. And they're thinking in ways that is probably going to be sacrificing the peace and calm and relationship they could have down the road. So sometimes you have to become a little bit withholding of some of those things for the future and the opposite can be true as well.

Exactly. So what are some strategies we could use in order to be more effective in these types of difficult conversations?

Good question, Kwame. I would say the first thing I would do as a parent is I would try not to teach my child to negotiate in the sense of I'm going to get good with words, I'm going to become clever, I'm going to manipulate rather than you want them to actually earn a change in privileges instead of just be a good talker. Right. Or someone who can kind of, you know, work you. So you're really trying to help them realize, like I said before, there's, there's a gate they can go through where you can talk and negotiate in a good way, talk about things in a good way that'll help them get what they want and you don't want anything else to work. That's part of the key.

I like that a lot. And what you're showing there too is that it's a team effort. It's not just your ability to be a smooth talker and get what you want, regardless of the substance of your words. If we're going to have this discussion, there needs to be some substance behind it. We need to come together in some kind of way.

That's right. You want their requests and things that they might come to you for the things they want to be almost schooled over time to help them understand what's a legitimate request. Kids will ask for all kinds of things many times that aren't appropriate or they'll want things that are not going to be helpful to them. And so you want, as you move into strategies are going to help you guys negotiate things really well, is you want them to start to understand over time that you're going to be really fair. And that means on both sides of this, you're going to be open, you want them to grow and you want to give them challenges and opportunities, but you don't want to give them too big of a challenge and too much of an opportunity, too much freedom because you love your kid and you want them to be successful. So I would say that basically you want to set, you know, back to your question, how do you help this to deal with conflict that might happen between parents and teenagers? You want to set it up so that you're likely to be successful when you're going to sit down with a teen and talk through things and negotiate something. And so right off the bat, in order to be successful, you have to make sure, number one, you have to manage your emotions. Well, I say number one, get on the same page with your co parent. Number two, manage your emotions. And number three, kind of have a process where almost an orientation towards the question or the problem, where you can almost join up with your teen and say, let's look at this together and let's see how we can deal with this issue that we have here. And we're going to do it together instead of at each other like this in combat.

And that's a brilliant way to do it because negotiation at its best is creative. It's almost like a joint brainstorming session where you both are looking at the problem, trying to figure out a solution that works. And going back to what we discussed earlier, that's a great way to involve them in the problem solving so they feel like they have more autonomy and control over the decision making process.

Right. So I would get really specific about, okay, what is it that we're going to try and solve? What's the problem? We're going to talk about and get it to one thing. Most of the time there's lots of emotion, lots of history, lots of things. When all of that is kind of at play that you throw out on the table and now you've got a mess and how do you kind of sift through that and, and get anywhere together and so agree on what you're going to talk about and that everything else is not going to be brought in. Right. And that's an important first step as well.

This reminds me a lot of the good old days in law school. One of the things that our professors would always harp on was the importance of issue spotting. You have this big problem. We need to be able to identify what the issues were and essentially that's what we're doing here with this discussion with our teams. We, we have a big issue here and now we need to identify those smaller issues within it and that will give us more clarity. And I think that's one of the issues people face when it comes to these difficult conversations because it seems so huge and disorganized that we don't even know where to start. And then once we get that clarity now, we can start to approach the conversation in a more systematic way.

Right. And with every kind of negotiation, there's always two sides to it. And so what I would say for parents, a little tip for them is once you have solid ground for you and your co parent, you kind of know basically where you stand together, then you can go to the teen and really open up your heart and your mind and listen. And I'd say you be the first to do that because again, that power imbalance gives you an opportunity to kind of say, look, we're going to let you influence us first and we're going to take it in. I'm not going to make a decision right now in this moment, but I want to hear you and I want to hear a lot. Not just what you want, but I want to hear, you know, what are your thoughts, what are your feelings, you know, what have we tried to do in the past? How did that work? What would be your hope for you out of this? What would be the hope you have for me out of this? And let's let you just share all of this because without all of that context coming to any kind of decision or conclusion really can't be done. And you're leading the way by saying, I'm here and I'm going to listen at such a level that I'm going to be influenced by what you have to say.

I love that so much because first of all, it reminds me a lot of the book by Brene Brown, Daring greatly. Have you read that?

I sure have brilliant book on the.

Importance of vulnerability and essentially what it sounds like in this conversation. You say we need to open up our hearts and be willing to be open to influence and listen and do that first. For a lot of people, that's going to feel uncomfortable. It's going to feel very, very vulnerable. So how can parents become maybe not necessarily more comfortable in the situation because we can't really control that per se, but at least more willing to deal with the discomfort.

One of the problems we have as parents when it comes to opening our heart and our minds to our teens is we, we think that if we are open, that's almost saying we agree with you. And that's different. And I think that sometimes it really helps to let your team know that I'm going to be as open as I can be. I'm going to be open to your influence. Now don't misjudge my openness with agreement with this yet, because down the road we're going to have to work through where we really stand in the end. But I'm here and I'm open. I'm ready to be influenced. And I think getting that out on the table sometimes does help them to say, okay, I can go ahead. And now that I've established that, I can go ahead and really let go and really be open to this whole package of information that my team's going to give to me.

Absolutely. And the key word there is information. And information is the lifeblood of negotiation. The way I think about it is I call it the light theory of negotiation, where it's like we, in these discussions, it's like entering a dark room and our goal is to turn on small lights so we can illuminate it and walk through safely. And we do that by asking questions. And the example that you gave with the questions that you were asking, like what do you hope to accomplish from this, et cetera, you're asking open ended questions which gives them room to elaborate, which in turn turns on the lights and in the room so you can navigate it safely. And what's interesting too, a lot of times when we have these discussions, we go in there with an idea of what we think the other person wants from the conversation. But oftentimes, especially if it's emotionally charged, the first thing they want is to be heard. And that might be it.

Right. That may be enough. And I love the metaphor you use there. I can picture that in my mind walking into this dark room because that is a scary kind of situation. Am I going to step on something That I. It's going to hurt us. And just a little bit at a time, you illuminate that room and you can go first. I think that's maybe part of the message here. You can go first. Another thing I would throw out there is that you're going for solutions. It is a. We like to train our parents to think in a solution focused way. So we're looking for strengths. We're looking for positive exceptions to the situation. We're looking for times when it went well and ways that we could maybe create something in the future that builds off strengths and past successes. If you're coming at it with that kind of intention, that really comes out, you're not just looking for problems and all of those things. There's problem talk, and then we call it solution talk. And those are very, very different feelings that you get. And what you're doing is essentially inviting that other person in the same space.

Absolutely. Oh, my goodness. See, whenever I get somebody who's really into psychology, these conversations could go on and on and on. But for the sake of time, I'll start to pull it back. And I wanted you to share your thoughts on what you think. The most important skill for a negotiator is in this particular scenario.

You know, honestly, it's listening. That is an incredibly powerful skill. And it has a lot more to do with the way you are inside than it is how quiet you are. It's really a lot of internal work because if you have emotions getting in the way, you're not listening. So you've got to work on that. Or if you've got a preconceived idea or an outcome you want to have happen, you're really not listening. So you got to deal with that and you have to trust the process. So I really think that if you do understand that you're going to go for a win, win or no deal, and you're going to trust the process, then you can go into that and be the listener first and. And do it at a deep, deep level. Because what will happen if you listen really, really well, and that is, yeah, maybe a vulnerable thing, but you're actually inviting the other person to become more vulnerable through your good listening. Because they realize the trust grows in that interaction between you and another person. If you're listening at that level, they just sense, okay, I've shown you the outer surface of my thoughts and feelings and what I want. I trust enough. I'm going to peel off that outer layer of the onion. I'm going to go down one more and they share that. And if you continue to be an amazing listener that is not too quick to jump in and tell your side and want to almost take over the talking and even say something shocking like, is there anything else you want to ask for? Is there anything else that you're want to tell me that you haven't shared yet? And they go through and they'll tell you that next layer and then you say that's really helpful to me to understand at that layer. And I would have never known that had you not shared that with me. Is there anything else you want to tell me? And after a while they'll just like share all that they can share. You know, that's the level of trust that they can share. Now you've got this level of, I mean, they've honored you essentially with that information and so you want to treat it with honor and respect. And obviously you're going to keep it confidential. Probably, you know, some of it, you're probably going to, you're going to take all of that into account. Now there's a lot of people might be hard driving negotiators, they don't want to do that because now they can't treat this person like a human because they see him as a human now. And that's kind of against my negotiation strategies to try to get what I can out of that person. But this is in my mind really the only way to create a lasting long term win win situation that builds the relationship and builds the person, the people involved is to do it this way. And it all starts with that listening and modeling how you want them to listen to you.

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