SPARRING SESSION- How to Win the Meta-Negotiation with Lindsay Karas Stencel Esq., MBA

Hello, my friends, and welcome to our practice session. In our practice sessions, we invite our featured guests to show off their negotiation and conflict resolution skills in a realistic scenario. In this session, I want you to pay attention to what our guest does and not to what I do. Because while they are trying to show off their skills and teach you, I am trying to frustrate their efforts in different ways through things like aggression, annoyance, emotionality, or awkwardness. And then after the practice session, we debrief and talk about what worked what and what you can use in your next difficult conversation. All right, listeners, I am excited for this one. If you haven't listened to the last one, make sure you do, because Lindsay told a really fun, disturbing story about something that she encountered when she was trying to close a deal. And so I am going to be that guy. And so, disclaimer. If this happens to be the first episode that you're listening to, don't pay attention to what I'm doing. Lindsay is the expert. I'm intentionally behaving badly. I am not this jerk that I'm going to be. Okay?

He is not. He's a very nice man. Thank you.

So we are doing this just for the sake of example. Okay. Sound good?

Yep.

Cool.

Perfection.

All right. Lindsay Kwame. Nice to meet you.

So great to meet you. Glad we were able to get together.

Yeah, me too. I've heard a lot about you. But I have a quick question. Is your dad coming to this meeting? Hmm?

You know, my dad is not coming today. Is your dad coming to the meeting today?

What do you mean by that?

Well, what do you mean if my dad's coming to the meeting?

Oh, I was just. I was just making a joke. My dad's been dead for 25 years. That's. That's really. That's really inappropriate.

Well, I mean, I'm sorry to hear that your father passed away all those years ago, but it's also inappropriate if you make a joke and ask if my dad's coming to the meeting. So how about this? How about we skip over all of this kind of fun talk and let's just get down to business? We're here to do a deal. Let's go ahead and negotiate that through and see if we can get something done.

Well, no, I'm not just going to just pass over. Over this. I mean, here's the thing. I. I invited you to my office. You got on a plane, you got here. I'm just trying to lighten the mood and tell a joke, and then you jump on me in My office. And. And I don't understand how we got to this point.

Well, you know, sometimes when people are trying to make jokes and they think that they're being light hearted, sometimes it doesn't come across that way. So quite honestly, you know, just as you maybe feel that it was upsetting to you for me to ask you if your dad was coming, maybe it was borderline upsetting to me. So I think I'm not going to be mad about it and I'm perfectly capable of moving on in this conversation, and I hope you are, too.

So you're just going to. We're just going to pass over the insult.

I'm going to pass over your insult. Yes.

That was great. Okay, so let's do a quick breakdown here because this was. It was very short, but very good. So obviously, first thing I was doing was it was that whole dominance play with the frame. Right. That you instantly rejected, which was great. The second thing that I was doing was even though you were doing a great job of maintaining a calm, cool, collected approach to this, which is exactly what you were trying to do, I was trying my best to turn the volume back up to get you riled up again. And so there were. I think it was two or three times where I got riled up. You respond calmly, and then I got riled up again. You responded calmly, and then I tried it for a third time and then.

We snapped the hammer.

You nailed it. So from your perspective, why was it so important to respond to the fire that I was bringing in that matter of fact type of way?

So I just think that a lot of times cooler heads prevail. Right? So I'm not going to get emotional about something that I don't need to get emotional about. This isn't my family dying. This isn't my dog dying. Right. This is like, it's just business. So I have to always keep that in perspective. And then in addition to that, it's kind of like, look, if I'm going to allow one person to just like steamroll a conversation, how do we really think the rest of these negotiations are going to go if I start to give in on something that doesn't need to be given in on? That's a phrase. How does that set me up for success or failure for the remainder of all of the discussions thereafter? And I would tell you it sets me up for failure, most likely because now this person is saying, okay, I've made a power play, I've made this dominating move, and this person submitted. So now I get to ask for whatever I want because they're always just going to back down. And there's not necessarily a need to back down when someone's being a bully or being ridiculous.

Does your company invest in professional development training? If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable, and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing, and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly, and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more. And now back to the show. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. And I think for the listeners, one thing to keep in mind is we. We knew this was. This one was coming. Right. What I was going to say. And in. In the moment, those kind of things happen and we might not immediate immediately know there's something. There's like a sense that comes up.

Yeah.

Where we realize that didn't sit right with me, but I don't exactly know why. And so if you're in that situation and I. Let's say I do that, that joke, that dad joke, and it doesn't sit right, but you don't exactly know why, what do you do in that moment while you're processing?

So sometimes I just take a deep breath and I just sort of like, stare at the person on the other side of the table for me or wherever they're sitting. Right. And I just give myself a second to sort of go, where is that registering? And why does this feel uncomfortable? And like, look, I. I've done this for a long time, so I have. I'm pretty quick on my toes now. You know, I'm pretty. I'm pretty on it. But once in a while, someone will say something to you. You're just like, what in the actual hell just happened?

You know?

And so you just need to take a second, like, count to two and just then come back at it with something. But I, I would still say, like, I can't let it slide. Right. Like, I'm. I'm not fighting to fight. I'm just also not gonn bully or be ridiculous. It's just not okay.

I agree. I agree. And I think taking that time, taking those deep Breaths. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Because it gives you not only time to think, but also it, you can use it as an opportunity to try and settle yourself, to bring yourself back down because you might want to respond very forcefully with that elevated volume, which makes things worse instead of responding in the way that you did, which is calm and level headed.

Yeah. And look, that, that came over years of work. Like I used to like init when I started negotiating, people would get excited, I would get excited and then it was like this excited feeding frenzy. Right. Like, and you don't actually really get where you want to go. A lot of times if you're all feeding off of each other in the excited frenzy, sometimes you just need to take a step back, take a deep breath and then continue on in a level headed way. Also, fun fact, it does sometimes throw the people on the other side when you're like cool as a cucumber. And they're like, what is happening? Why aren't they getting mad?

And I think that's, that's a really great point. I don't want people to miss it because it's. Think about James Bond when it comes to movies, right. He's almost thought of as the quintessential cool guy. Right. But one thing we never see him do is freak out. He never loses his cool. And sometimes somebody says something to him that is meant as a threat. And his lack of responsivity is the thing that makes you realize, oh, he's cool under pressure. Right. He's less reactive. The lack of reactivity, I should say. And so that kind of shakes the other side. Oh, that's a sign of confidence.

And I would say, and I've actually had people say to me in times past, like, wow, like I just threw a lot at you right there. And it's, you know, a lot of times my client going like, oh, and they're, they're all worked up and whatever. And, and you know, I just respond very calmly and okay, well this is how we're going to do this. We're going to go through it very methodically. This is how we're. And I just stay very calm because if you're the person, you know, in my shoes, lawyer, representing other people, the last thing you need or want is your attorney freaking out. So if your attorney's freaking out, you have a real situation on your hands. Okay. And so it doesn't instill a lot of confidence for your client either. If you're the one also freaking out, like, you should, you know, you should empathize with them, understand what their point is. But you should also be able to say, like, okay, how do we methodically and calmly walk through this and give them confidence that you're. You feel good about whatever it is that you're about to tackle for them.

Absolutely. And for me, sometimes when I'm not sure what the. What the person meant by that, but I think it might have been insulting, or sometimes when I know it was flagrantly insulting, what I do is I take that breath and then I say, what do you mean by that? And just ask them to explain it. It's like, listen, where there's a joke, there's a. There is a premise and a punchline. So what was the underlying premise of the joke? So I can understand exactly where you're coming from.

And that's smart. I mean, look, for me, whenever I always kind of think about this, right? Jokes are funny because every joke has a little bit of truth to it. And people are like, they have some sort of, like, ulterior motive for saying the thing that they said. And you always have to keep that in mind. And, you know, I don't know what everyone's negotiation style is out there listening, but some jokes just aren't funny, you know, and it's probably doing you a disservice to try to inject them into conversation when you could just be a normal, rational human being.

Exactly. And let's take a second, break this down psychologically. If somebody says a joke, what do they want? They want laughter or some at least look of amusement. And so if we think about it in negotiation terms, it's offer and acceptance. The joke is the offer. The laughter or look of amusement is acceptance. If we clearly reject it, rejection hurts. Rejection hurts. And usually if you respond with, what do you mean by that? Or you let them know that it wasn't funny, they're going to stop approaching the situation from that situation, from that anger, because they felt rejection and they don't want to feel it again.

Yeah. And a lot of people. A lot of times when people are doing it, they're doing it as power play anyway. So that's what you actually need to do, is reject that behavior. If your approach is, let's be equals in this discussion, in this negotiation.

Exactly. Beautiful. I love this.

This is so fun.

This was fantastic. So, yes, we'll have you back on, definitely. And hopefully we can persuade you to start your own show. Maybe.

We'll see. I'm not gonna make any promises just yet. I gotta work through some things in my life. You heard my million things that I'm working on in my life. So I can only do so much.

Exactly. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show again and doing the sparring session. This is fun.

Yeah. I didn't. I didn't think you were going to keep going and going and going, but then you did, and I was like, okay, well.

I love it. Perfect. No, that was good. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode. If you're liking what you're hearing, please leave a review and subscribe. And tell your friends. Our goal is to help as many people as possible, and when you leave reviews, it makes it easier for people to find us in the searches. Thanks again for being a listener. I'll catch you in the next one. Sam.