Tactical Listening: Uncovering Deception in Negotiations with Dan Oblinger

Hello my fellow negotiators. Did you know I once had a listener share that after listening to our podcast, she was able to negotiate a $53,000 raise. And you know what I told her? Where is my commission? Just kidding. But the real story is this was after years of being too afraid to negotiate. But after listening to a couple of episodes on Salary Negotiation, she felt equipped with with the confidence and tools to ask for the payment she deserved. And that, my friends, is the power of negotiation. And through a subscription to our new membership community Negotiate Anything Premium, we're taking that power to the next level. With customized playlists based on our most popular topics, you'll be able to find the episodes you're looking for much faster and much easier. A tool that comes in handy as you're getting ready to prepare for an important negotiation. Even I find myself asking which episode should I listen to before heading into a high stakes negotiation? And you might be saying, but Kwame, you're the ones having the conversations. But I forget. So I listen to the episodes multiple times. Okay, now here's the thing about Negotiate Anything Premium. It'll allow you to dive deeper into the specific situations you're facing, whether it's a salary negotiation, an important business meeting, or an emotional conversation with a loved one. Bonus for you. In addition to ad free and extended episodes, Premium members will have exclusive access to solo episodes and insights from yours truly. And as you know, it will be very dry and very boring. Because I have no sense of humor and this is something that you all have been asking for. I'll also be offering personalized answers to some of your most burning questions through our Ask Me Anything feature. If you've been enjoying our traditional feedback, imagine the value a premium subscription can offer. I've felt the benefit of negotiation firsthand and it is life changing. Many of you don't know this, but my journey has taken me from people pleaser to a confident negotiator. Because I was able to do two simple things through negotiation. I was able to first change my mindset and then I was able to improve my skill set. And that is what will happen for you when you join Premium. I've already seen the impact of these skills and the power of this model not only in my own life, but also in the lives and careers of our clients all around the world. My family, my friends, and our team here at A&I, and I am confident that it can do the same for you. Now, are you ready to negotiate more of the best things in life? Check the link in the show notes to learn more. I'm excited to continue the conversation. I'll catch you later.

Dan. Thanks for joining us today, Kwame.

It's my pleasure, man. Thanks for the invite.

No, it's a pleasure to have you. Listeners. Make sure you check out Dan's LinkedIn page. Just constant, high quality content. So I am super excited to have you on and share some of your brilliance with the audience.

Oh, stop it. Yeah, thanks so much for pointing them that way. We call it a listening tribe. It's free to join, it's free to stay. We just ask that you join the commentary, join the dialogue.

Fantastic. Well, how about we start off by giving you an opportunity to tell the listeners about yourself?

My name is Dan Oblinger. I come to you, Kwame, from the middle part of America, the heart of America, as we say. I am based in and around Wichita, Kansas. My background is in police crisis negotiations, but I have made that transition to a business negotiator as well, running a small business centered on speaking and conducting workshops and listening and negotiations, but also running I have a bunch of rental properties, so managing those as a real estate investor. And I have five children. So those are a totally different sort of negotiation that requires a lot of emotional control. And my background being in police work and then in the business world and running a large family with young people becoming adults, I deal a lot with deception. And I think that's why we are hooking up today for a nice conversation.

Given your background, you are uniquely qualified to talk about this. And I know there are three parts about the deception that you want to talk about or three topics within it. How about you just give us that quick outline?

Yeah. So let me preface it. I'll just preface it briefly by saying that the other thing that's going to come out as we talk is that my background prior to law enforcement was as a student of philosophy. So I studied to be a Roman Catholic priest for a time. My background is in ancient philosophy and ethics. And so you'll hear that I think that's very useful when we talk about things like deception. So you'll hear that come out as well. And my academic training, that's one lens. But then being a street cop, working narcotics and vice, working gangs, working violent crime, and then becoming a hostage negotiator, doing that for about 10 years for a large metropolitan city here in the Midwest. This is what you know is that deception is complex. It is a complex human behavior and it's a dangerous human behavior. It's dangerous in a physical sense. When you're a police officer. But it's really dangerous from the sense of lasting agreements and business relationships when it's in a corporate environment. So you have to have a complex strategy and some robust skills if you really want to tackle deception. And what I will say, and Kwame, I think you might agree, is most people don't. Most people ignore deception even if they recognize it. They just move past it because they don't know what to do with it. And it's like the elephant in the room. And it prevents us from having our best value in these corporate relationships and our best value in our personal relationships as well. So you need a complex system. So this is what I recommend. You got to prepare for it. You have to prepare for the likelihood that you will encounter deception when you're crafting an important agreement. No matter what you're crafting, you have to, you must, must listen. Well, listening is the secret sauce, man. That's how you detect the deception, and that's how you manage your own emotions as you begin to suspect and then confirm that you're being lied to. And then the last thing is you need a really reliable and repeatable method to confront deception in a way that paints yourself as a very professional person who is not going to be lied to, but also gives them. It's a courtesy, right? It's a kindness to allow them to retract the deception and actually give you the truth. There's your three prongs, man. Prep, understand you see it, control your own reaction to it, and then deliver a really deft, really nice technique for confronting the deception and turning it into something that's actually useful. Deception can actually be a great thing. And we'll talk about that, I'm sure.

Oh, that's fascinating. Okay. Yeah, great. Well, let's talk about the homework and preparation, because that is something that we have harped on for a long time on the podcast, and I'm really interested in seeing how the preparation needs to shift slightly or if it does need to shift slightly, when we have that specter of deception coming up on the horizon. Great.

So homework, and that's a nasty word in America for anybody that grew up and went to our schools. Right. It's really important. You have to know what you know and you have to know what you don't and know the difference. So, you know, if I'm entering a corporate agreement, I want to know as much as I can about the likely positions that my adversary or my, I like, prefer to say, my negotiations partner is going to adopt. I want to know as much as possible about the issue that we may be resolving or coming to consensus upon. I want to know whatever I can. This could involve developing a relationship and listening well to people that have similar arrangements with this entity that you're going to be negotiating with. It could be using open source, even social media. A lot of companies put a lot out about their positions and about their values. You know, you might ask, well, how do I know who they've had prior agreements with? Just get on their social media page and they'll talk about all these partnerships and collaborations and reach out to those people and just get their perspective on your, your potential partner. Find out kind of what they, how they negotiate, find out what they prefer, find out what some of their strategies or techniques might be. And again, if you develop a relationship of trust with these other entities, you might get some insight. They're not probably going to give away the farm, but they might tell you what it looks like. And I think this is key. You can find a lot of data. Most companies, most larger companies have access to commercially purchased data about businesses and corporations. There are so many different sources of information and intelligence. It really behooves you to know as much as you can. Understanding that you'll have an incomplete picture. That's just the nature of it. But the more information you have, the better picture and better anticipation you can have for this negotiation, the faster you'll begin to detect deception.

And as you're doing this research, what are some things that could come up that could give you that little hint that, hey, some deception might be coming?

Well, again, depending on how. Well, what's funny is the second prong of this strategy comes into play in the first. If you listen well to these third party sources of information, if you earn their trust, they may tell you, hey, I think they kind of lied about this and we didn't do anything with it, we just made the agreement. But what. Or they may flat out tell you we came to an agreement and then they didn't keep their word. So this would be signs of trouble, right? Ripples in the water. Something that your radar should be on as you begin to enter this negotiation of your own. And I think it's really, this might be a good point to just let your audience know. Deception is a natural human reaction to stimuli, right? There are many, many reasons people lie. Just because your listening partner may have been deceptive in the past, or maybe they weren't 100% integral. Their actions and their deeds and their words doesn't mean it will be a deal breaker to negotiate with them, because that's a really common occurrence. It's so common that I'm glad we're talking about it. I think everybody should be interested in this topic. So you just need to be prepared for it and doing your homework. Developing your sources is very helpful to know what kind of risk you're coming into specifically to deception.

And so let's say we discover that in the past, they haven't been completely honest or truthful or transparent with their previous partners. Or where do you draw the line when it comes to these difficult conversations between saying, this is just not somebody I want to deal with and this is somebody I will still be interested in dealing with, but I'm going to watch my back.

Two things I would look for again, as you're developing these sources, as you're looking at your data and comparing it to how they behave. One, Is this the exception or is it the rule? So, in other words, frequency. Frequency is really important when we look at behavior. So if everyone you talk to has a similar experience with this entity, with this core entity, or this person, that's a problem. This is how they do business. Some cultures, I will tell you, if you detect that it's a cultural thing, they're expected to lie to represent the positions of their company. That's a problem if it's just episodic. Sometimes deception is not even deception. It is a difference in perspective or perception. Maybe it was miscommunication in the truest sense. Like, one person thought an agreement meant one thing, and they didn't do a good job of hammering it out and getting it on paper, and the other group or partner or person thought it was something else. So this is one thing. You might be talking to the source. There's like, I'm doing exactly what Dan said, man. I'm developing my Coast Watcher network here on these folks. And all of a sudden somebody says, yeah, I felt like they lied to me. And you're like, aha. And then you leave. That's the end of it. And you're like, all right, now I know Dan said, now I know they'll probably lie to me. No, you need to dive into that story. Okay, why do you think that you were lied to? Tell me the circumstances. What was your perception on this? And then what happened and what led you to believe it? And what were all the behaviors? And you have to get the whole story to know how applicable that information that knowledge becomes to the situation that you're creating. Now with this new negotiat the other thing. So that's frequency. The other thing's magnitude. Like how big of a lie is it? And I'm not one to just whitewash small lies, but it does make a difference on whether you're going to do business with them or not. If one part of a 10 part agreement didn't come true, if they represented a position one position out of seven and you learned later that wasn't correct, that's a pretty small magnitude. But if consistently everything they said they're going to do, they don't, that's a big magnitude problem. A big lie is not a big problem for them. And again, that should give you pause. And there's, there's no bright line. But if there's a high frequency and high magnitude, maybe we don't get into bed with them.

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That makes sense. No, that's really, really helpful, I think for the people who are in the business world. And that's the tough part. When it comes to these difficult conversations, there typically isn't a bright line. It's always a personal determination. And it's going to be different every time. And when it comes to doing the homework and preparing, one of the things that I always tell my students and the people in my workshops is that when it comes to deception, I think about it kind of like bullying on the playground. So imagine if you have a bully who's a third grader. That bully is going to bully other third graders, second graders, first graders, and kindergarteners. But that third grade bully is unlikely to bully an eighth grader. And it's simply because that bully doesn't think they can bully the eighth grader. And so sometimes if you do our homework and we can somehow demonstrate to the other side that we are prepared and they can't take advantage of us in that way. It makes us less likely to be taken advantage of in that way. They'll be less inclined to try to deceive you.

I agree. And we'll talk when we get into kind of the second part of this strategy or the second part of this complex system to deal with deception. I think it's important to note, yeah, deception is an aggressive behavior. It's, you could say a bullying activity. It's kind of an imprecise term, but I think that's really vivid for people. They get it. And this is the thing about bullying behavior or those kinds of aggressive human behavior, and you've given a really nice anecdote to explain it. That third grade bully is going to keep bullying. He's going to increase frequency and magnitude and he's going to start expanding the target pool until what? Until he meets a natural barrier to the behavior. Until somebody says, and that's why he can't go bully that eighth grader, because they're not going to tolerate it. Probably the fourth graders, just by virtue of that difference in authority, denomination of authority, they're like, I'm not going to get picked on by a third grader, but a second grader like you, I mean, that's the natural order of things, right? Is he going to bully the teacher? The interesting thing is he may try. And if the teacher doesn't do a good job of establishing that that behavior is unacceptable, then we've seen situations where children bully their superiors, including teachers, and it's because we didn't put a boundary around the behavior. And that's going to be a theme for the rest of the system, is we want to put a boundary around the behavior when it comes to dealing with us. We can't control if they're going to bully other companies, but they will not bully us. Best word, I think, is it's unacceptable. And there's one more thing you need to do to prepare. Accept the fact you're going to be lied to. Accept the fact you're going to be deceived. Just accept that this is going to happen. If you don't think it's going to happen, you'll miss it. Or it'll be too late, or you won't be prepared and you'll miss the opportunity. You might recognize the behavior, but miss the opportunity. So this is kind of a stoic philosophy thing, but just accept the fact you're going to be deceived and you'll be ready when it happens. You'll be Looking for it. And if it doesn't, then it's. Man, it's a pleasant surprise. And this is a great person to do business with, hopefully. So that's it. So do your homework. Have your data encounter stories of similar experiences from previous negotiators with the same negotiating partner, and just anticipate that you'll be deceived. Anticipate they're going to try. Now you're ready to start.

I think one of the problems that people have in negotiations, and I talked about this with Matthias Schreiner, is that a lot of times it seems as though the people in the business world are trained for peacetime, not for wartime. And so if everything's going swimmingly, there's no problem. Problem. But then when things start to go poorly or the negotiation gets difficult, that we don't know what to do. We're not anticipating that we're not trained for that. And I love this stoic mentality that you have, because you come to the reality and accept the reality that people are going to lie to you. And at the same time, you are equipped with the skills to handle it. You can still find success anyways. And so since you're accepted, you're more likely to identify it when it's in your presence.

Yeah, I anticipate it, and therefore I'm looking for it. So when it begins to appear, then you have it. And here's the beautiful thing. As we lead into this kind of the second part of this system, it is a beautiful, glittering opportunity when you are lied to for a brief moment, there's this huge opportunity to advance this negotiation and have a real agreement with people. And that may sound absolutely insane until I unpack it. But you have to just like, I want deception, that is a beautiful thing for me as a police negotiator. It's a beautiful thing for me as a landlord. And actually, it's dangerous. That's the nature of true opportunities, is there's a risk. But it's a wonderful opportunity when I'm raising children. And we can talk about this as we get into the second part of the system.

Absolutely. Oh, man, this is good. I'm getting excited. Let's move on to number two, tactical listening. I want to dig deeply into this because I know this is your forte.

Yeah, this is my jam. This is my little baby. So tactical listening is just one way to look at what I call active listening or empathetic understanding. But tactile listening really kind of refers to how we mix it up with people that we don't have control over them. And we're trying to come to an agreement with them, but we don't want to do it through authority and control and power. And that's a great way to look at negotiations. I mean, that's what it's about. We need the consent of both parties to get this agreement, but each party has to look out for themselves and we don't have authority over the other person. There's so many parallels between business negotiations and police crisis negotiations. The context, the language is very different, but we just have to translate that. Now here's what you want to do. Tactical listening says, and this is a general rule of thumb, Let them talk 80% of the time. Get them talking so that they talk 80% of the time. And then 20% of the time you're reflecting on what they've said and you're inviting them to tell you more. Now, in this listening part of the system, which should be like the vast majority of the time you're negotiating with people is you're listening to them to find out what they want and to develop their motives, to try to understand why they're asking for. That's how you can find extra value in these negotiations. Or you can switch from fees to terms so you can protect your dollar amount by making concessions in terms of the agreement or vice versa. If you're after the money. Listening lets you do all that too. In business negotiations, it's not as important as in crisis negotiations to develop true empathy and rapport and a wonderful relationship with a person. That is not as important. But I still think it is important. And the reason why is a number one, you're less likely to attempt to deceive someone that you love. You're less likely to attempt to deceive somebody that you trust and respect. So in the process of listening, we also earn trust and respect. The other nice thing that happens is if we're practicing tactical listening, we're asking big hairy questions, huge value questions. They're open ended. They invite the story of the negotiation. They invite the story of the position, they invite the story of the interest, which are all different things. They invite the story of the perception of your negotiations partner. If I asked you, Kwame, will you honor this agreement? It yes or no? How can you answer?

You have to say yes.

Yes. Yeah. Or you could say no and not be deceptive if you didn't intend to. But nobody's going to do that. They're going to say yes. How easy is it to lie and say yes when it's actually no. It's super simple if I know it's no in my heart. And you're like, you're going to do this right? And you're like, yep. Are you ever going to detect deception? No. But what if you said, hey, describe to me how you're going to fulfill this part of the agreement. Describe for me how you're going to honor this part of our negotiation. For instance, describe to me how you'll deliver this by next Friday as we agreed. What's that going to look like so that I can assist in the process. And they're like, well, you know, right away we've got a problem. It's not concrete in their mind. They're making an agreement without having the facts. So again, this is how deception begins to surface. It's not going to be, you know, it's a yes and they say no. You know, it's purple and they say blue. What happens is you develop a sense they're not confident in their ability to deliver on the agreement. And you should ask more probing questions that are still open ended and inviting the story. They're non accusatory, they're non judgmental. We're not ready to confront the deception yet because we haven't drawn it out into the open. That's the key part of tactile listening. It draws the deception out into the open. If deception is an animal, you want to see the whole animal. I think it might be a beaver. Okay, but how big is the beaver? Right? I mean this is trying to use an analogy. You want to see the whole beast you're dealing with before we go to that last step of confronting so listening, asking great questions, reflecting upon their answer, inviting them to tell you more. If you begin to encounter emotions, especially in a business setting, that is a concern and they should be directly addressed. And you've probably experienced that in legal negotiations when it should be about the law. But all of a sudden emotions rear its ugly head. That is a point of analysis because deception is an emotional behavior. So we need to begin to drill down into what's causing it.

I think a lot of times in the way that we approach these difficult conversations, we invite deception unwittingly because we have a deal making bias. We are having these conversations in many of the situations we want this deal. And so we ask these questions in a way that makes it more likely for us to get the answers we want, whether or not that is the truth. And so that is one of the just. Our approach sometimes can invite deception.

It is better to Know than not know. That's a motivation for a police negotiator. It's better to know than not know. And one classic thing a lot of you've mentioned Matthias Schroner. You've got the camp school that Alan Zhang comes from. You've got certainly Chris Voss and his work. Like, they talk a lot about this. If you were to negotiate with me and we all just said yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That's not a negotiation. If we haven't found the boundaries of yes. If we haven't found the boundaries of value, then we haven't negotiated no is likely true. And if all your negotiation partner says, yeah, sure, yes, yes, yes, then they're probably lying because they're not representing their interests accurately. A yes is a problem. That's where I want to ask more questions to see if it's really yes. When I hear no, boom. That's a foundation usually of truth that we can build an agreement upon. So it concerns me two things. When they just say yes, and also when they don't have a plan to carry out the agreement or they don't have a plan for the future with you and your company because that tells me they're being disingenuous. So those are the questions I love to explore when I'm working with individuals in a crisis negotiation. Do you have a plan for next week? No, that's a problem. You're telling me that you don't want to hurt yourself, but then you're telling me you have no plans for the future. This is a problem. And so it's deception. We have to begin to explore it with listening non judgmental big questions that require them to tell stories. It's much harder to lie in stories. And it's not just yes or no. All right. I think there's one thing that is really helpful as you're listening to the story and it's not making sense. As you're listening to the story and examining it from the basis of what you learned when you did your homework and, and you begin to realize, ah, this doesn't add up. We got problems. I think this is deception. There is a really critical tactical listening technique, active listening technique that applies and that is paraphrasing. And you must understand that commonly when people deceive others, when that bullying activity comes into the playground, they don't respect you and they don't trust you and it may not be their fault. So look at it as behavior that's trying to communicate to you, I don't trust you. I Don't respect you. And then this is where it gets dangerous. Because, I mean, if I told you that, Kwame, I don't trust you and I don't respect you, how do you not respond emotionally to that? That's an emotional trigger for anybody that has any kind of self respect. Right. And you can't. If you practice tactile listening, you'll realize people are trying to tell you, I don't trust you, I don't respect you. And instead of responding emotionally, ask more questions, reflect upon that and even ask them. If that's true. You can paraphrase it by saying it seems like you don't trust us yet. And they may tell you, yeah, you know, we've never done business with you. And they may unpack that for you. And that's incredible insight into what might be motivating deception.

And a couple things that I want to kind of dig deeper on because a few of these were drive by gems that I really want to make sure that the listeners caught. You said it's harder to lie in stories. Can you expand on that?

So one technique we use when we're investigating crimes is we try to have a chronological series of events. And what I try to do, practicing tactile listening within the context of an interview, I don't just say, this happened and then this happened and this happened. Right? Tell me the story, man. Tell me about the story of your evening that led up to this event. And they tell the story, and it's much harder to provide a vivid and rich deception as opposed to a simple white lie kind of one word deception when it should be no, and you say, yes, that's simple. When I'm like, tell me this story. And there is no story, It's a fabrication. Only about 1%, 2% of the population can, just off the bat, just give you this rich, deceptive story. It's just we're not wired for that because stories are based on our reality, it's based on our memory and our experiences, and it's really hard to fudge all that. So stories are the best way. What's really interesting is there's a technique where you have people tell stories in reverse. And it's even harder for people to lie if they're trying to go in reverse. If something happened in the past and you ask him about it, if you ask him to go reverse chronological, it's nearly impossible. It would take again, a sociopath or someone like that to be able to pull that off in my experience. So there's some literature on that. It's a technique that I've found to be useful. It's not as applicable to negotiations, but it just tells you the importance of storytelling.

Right. And just out of curiosity, because I've heard that too, when I was at school getting the psych degree, it made sense to me. But practically speaking, I wasn't sure how to pull that off in a conversation without it sounding offensive. And like you said, it's less applicable in the business world. But in your experience, just out of curiosity, doing the crisis negotiations, how could you get the person to tell the story backwards?

Would you explicitly ask that question in a criminal investigation? You could. We don't use that in negotiations very often. It's something more for when we're trying to figure out something that happened in the past and the perceptions and knowledge of the person that we're dealing with. You get the story one way forward, and then you can go backwards the second time around. So in a negotiation, it's not as relevant. We try to really focus on the now. So not as relevant.

Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. And one last point before we move on to the other one. You said it was in. Deception is often an issue of a lack of trust and a lack of respect. And in a few of the previous episodes, we talked about establishing trust and building trust in the other party, but we haven't talked about respect. And that's. I feel like that's a little bit more of a nebulous concept. And so in your experience, before we get to these difficult conversations, how can you earn the respect of the other side?

I think respect has a special relationship with rapport, but I think respect is also about your professional image and your professional reputation. So I can respect you when I know where you're coming from and what you say and what you do are of the same kind when they are in harmony. And respect also flows out of demonstrated professional skills. And so if you trust somebody, you probably respect somebody, right? But there's also this category, I think, and this has been my experience where I'm working with criminals, right? And I'm trying to figure out the evil that they did. And they tell me, hey, I really respect you. They don't trust me now because they know I'm out to get them, and in some cases, they're out to get me. But they can still respect you because they know what you stand for. They know that you're a serious person, and they know that you're good at what you do. And so respect sometimes exists outside of trust. It's not often that you will not respect somebody you trust. But. So what we're talking about, especially in deception situations, is we may not be able to get rapport right now, but they better respect you.

That's brilliant. No, thank you for that. And before we move on to the proven strategies, is there anything else you wanted to address with regard to tactical listening?

Become a student of listening. If you're an active listener, people will have less opportunities and also feel less empowered to lie to you. Especially complex, debilitating kinds of lies. Because if they know that you're about inviting stories and you're not going to ask them yes or no, they're probably just going to go with the truth. That's easier than trying to fabricate a really robust lie. So if you develop again that reputation, the professional reputation for being a really good listener who makes it about them, who is inviting stories, you're going to attract, I think, a higher level of negotiation partner. And that's nice.

Perfect. Good deal. Alrighty. And I know there's a lot more you want to talk about with tactical listening, so you are definitely going to be a repeat guest. So stay tuned for that invite. Let's move on to number three. Tell us about these proven strategies.

This is the simplest of the three, I think, and you have to keep it simple because this is going to be really hard. The reason why is something you already mentioned, and I've seen it several times through guests, is we desire consensus, we desire harmony. We don't want to have conflict. Conflict's so natural. But we don't want it because we don't want to have those spiked emotional experiences. So we will overlook bad behavior sometimes. And if you don't believe me, look at how hard it is to manage people in any industry. We all know the performance problems that people on our team have, but how often do we want to have that conversation? So there's that. So this is the thing. Once you've done your homework and as you begin to listen and invite stories and weigh what they're saying against what you already knew, and once you really draw that animal out into the clearing, you see the size and shape of this deception, you must be firmly committed to directly confronting it. And this is why, because you want that respect and this is how you get it, people will probably start fudging the numbers and the data and some minor details, saying yes when they mean no. And they're testing you. And like the bully, they're going to test you and they're going to Keep pushing that deception boundary out. And if you let them, they'll eat that whole agreement up. They'll gobble it all up, and all the value will be gone. That's the nature of deception. So at some point, once you're comfortable that you've listened long enough and you kind of see the size of the deception and you've done your homework, then now it's time. You have to be firmly committed. And this strategy, I've found to be the best. Because to this point, we've not been confrontational, we've not been judgmental. We may have suspected there's deception, but again, we're drawing it out. So we're going to continue to just use good minimal encouragers and good questions and just say, hmm, okay, but at some point, you have to say, kwame, you said you would do this, but then you did this. Or you might say, kwame, we agreed that this would happen, but then you did not do it. Whatever the deception is, it's going to be based upon some observation. This is the time to reveal your observation. It might be that I did my homework and I knew this, and now you're saying this. And this is the beauty of the system. This is the magic. And this is good active listening, by the way. And you just say, I'm confused. So you said this would happen, and then it did not, and now I'm confused. And that's it. You don't say anything else. Tactile listening calls that an effective pause. It's one of the active listening skills. And you just let them explain and they will explain. I sometimes get people, well, what if they don't? They will. I've been down this road so many times. They don't want their negotiation partner to be confused. We don't like confusion. In fact, we hate confusion more than we love consistency. So when I say that I'm confused, and I've given you a really clear and concise reason why I'm not understanding you, well, you will explain. And again, it's in the format of a story. And you will learn then what kind of a negotiation partner you have. If they retreat from the behavior, they clarify it and then retreat from it. Then we're good. If they double down, then guess what you get to do? Ask some more questions and then tell them, I'm still confused. And what you'll see is if you have to say that more than a couple times, then maybe this negotiation is not going to have value because you can't count them to fulfill any agreements. You come to. But I love to use the emotion of confused because it's not I'm scared, it's not I'm angry, it's not I'm disappointed or frustrated. It's an earnest and honest human emotion that people can actually work with. And they know right away what they need to do. When you say you're confused, they need to unconfuse you and they'll provide you with much more rich data to explain their position. And they may even in the process, apologize and retract the deceptive portion.

This is great. And there are two things that I want to pull out of here. Two subtleties. I liked in your example, how you used my name in the episode Shane Ray Martin when he was on the show. You use the person's name for emphasis. It's like, hey, pay attention to this. What's coming next is very important. And I love the pace too, because you gave it time to register Kwame, and there was a slight pause there. And then the way that you delivered it was non threatening. Right. You didn't allow your emotions to jump in. The tone is critical because if you sound threatening in the way that you say it now we have more of that limbic response where they're identifying you as the threat. And that can be problematic because then they get tunnel vision and they tend not to share when they're in that mode. But you're conveying something with that tone. And I don't want to put these words into your mouth. I want to hear in your words what you're trying to convey with the tonality that you're using in this approach.

Firm, interested, and eager to resolve the confusion. It's not problem solving in and of itself, but it's signaling that I'm open to problem solving, but it's firm. And that's the key to earn their respect. There's no this is the thing. Look at alternatives to this procedure. You could say, I think you're lying to me now. You'll have an argument. You could say, I'm not going to be lied to. You don't sound confident. It lacks confidence. It sounds like you're afraid of this. But when you say using their first name with a tone that I demonstrate, when you say their first name, point out what you're confused about and just tell them and end it with, I'm confused with that slight upward tone, like the upward tonality there at the end, the pitch changes. There's a question mark at the end that's understood and that's when they will begin to speak. The tone is practice for me. You need to practice it. In fact, you can practice all three prongs of the strategy. You can practice your homework. You can practice active listening. And please do. You can definitely practice this simple technique for confronting deception.

Now, this is the interesting part. So let's say this is a transactional type of negotiation where we're trying to get a deal done with the other side. We say we're confused. They kind of dance around the issue. Then you outline what you've observed again, and you say, I'm still confused. And they dance around it. And then you realize this person is committed to their deception. There's no deal. We can walk away. All right, I'm done with this person. Now the dynamic shifts. If it's somebody close to you, let's say a family member, so we can't just walk away. How do we approach it when we're getting that resistance where we've said, I'm confused maybe two or three times? What's next?

I think what's next is, now there's another active listening technique that could be used here, and that is that same effective pause, but this time without anything in front of it. This time you're not going to say that you're confused and then pause. Anytime they bring up that same deception. If they're insistent upon it and you again have made a principal decision that this is not true, then you just do the effective pause. And this is pretty extreme. But we use this as hostage negotiators. When somebody does something that's not appropriate and they continue to do it, sometimes we'll instruct the primary, or if I'm the primary, I will not respond to that. Anything else. I'll engage with one of the more positive active listening techniques that when they go back to this deception, you simply, you still look like you're engaged. You're still there. You're giving them attentiveness, but you're not responding. And what the message there is is I'm a professional and I respect you, but I don't respect that statement or that behavior. It's not productive. I'm just. I'm not going to waste my time with it. So please give me something else that we can discuss or see. Please give me something else that we can agree to. But it's done with silence. And that makes it a fairly extreme technique. I would prefer to say you're confused and have something to work with. But if they will persist in the behavior, then we will stop engaging. That Specific behavior. What's interesting is they discover really quickly that all the other things they want to discuss are still open and on the table. And so then we'll start discussing things that are true. So with family members, sometimes you need to be much more specific about what the deception is, but it's still the same tone. Still say that you're confused. It's just a wonderful emotion to play with in this kind of a situation as opposed to maybe some of the other emotions that you're actually feeling, by the way. And that is tricky because you will have an emotional response when you realize somebody you love is lying to you. Sometimes with loved ones, you may not. You can't walk away, in a sense, but maybe you could walk in a circle away and come back to it and give everybody a moment to clear their heads. I like to do that with my kids. I think it's smart, is say, give me a second, I want to clear my head and walk around for three minutes and then come back. And you might have a totally different negotiation partner when you're talking about a friend or a family.

Oh, that's interesting. That's a really interesting approach. Yeah. And I think the thing that's tough about it is that in a lot of these conversations, we're looking for the silver bullet. Dan, please tell us that magic thing that makes them tell us the truth.

Yes.

No, that's it. It's hard work. And we. At times, the best strategy is the most simple and yet the most awkward, which is you have to realize that you need to spend some uncomfortable time in silence. And I think that is some of the most difficult thing to do in these conversations. But time and time again, it's proven to be the most effective and at the same time, the safest, too. Right.

Well, and there's this other thing you have to understand, and it goes all the way back to the first thing we discussed when we talked about this. Do you want to win? Do you want to spike the deception football? Do you want a full apology and a total retraction? Because if so, I have nothing for you. Because not even the three pronged strategy, this complex system that I'm recommending, it won't do that because that is an internal motivation on the part of this person who's trying to deceive you. If that's what you're after, you may never get that, ever from anyone. But if what we want to do is put a boundary around the behavior. So it might happen a couple times in the negotiation, but when you firmly and resolutely address it with an I'm confused technique. They will stop deceiving you because they'll realize they respect you now and they know it won't work. And you make it uncomfortable for them without making it personal. What happens is this is again, the bully's trying to find how far he can go and he did not get very far. And you've set up the boundary and you've been very firm and professional. That's the point of all this. Again, if you're looking for an apology, if you're looking for them to admit that they were trying to lie to you, I may have nothing for you. Because even that may not be productive. But what's productive is when you affect and influence the behavior of the person you're negotiating with so that you get more value and you get the truth.

This is fantastic, man. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this. But before you go, let the listeners know about what you've been up to, what's coming up next, and also about the book.

Yes.

Okay, so this is going to be some added value for the people that suffer through us all the way to the end, right. I offer keynoting and workshop training on listening, tactile listening, you might say. I call it active listening in those settings. I have two books out. One is called Life or Death Listening. That's more of a how to guide, talks about the listening techniques. And then I have a book called the 28 Laws of Listening. And that is a four week program to actually work on your listening skills and turn them into a habit, a good habit. So those are kind of what's out there. Now, obviously LinkedIn is for free, so I got videos. I have quite. The question box is becoming a popular feature. If you want to see some wild and crazy questions, people pose the answers that I either come up with myself or I crowdsource. That's a good thing. On the horizon, I'm working on a book on negotiations and I'm actually getting ready to roll out offerings in coaching over the Internet. So that could be really popular. You'll be trained by either myself or my partner, who's a trained hostage negotiator, to listen better.

That's fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you again, Dan, for coming on the show. We're looking forward to the next time as well.

Well, I'm looking forward to the sparring session. Oh, man, that's like the. That is the incredible differentiator for your podcast, Kwame.

I appreciate it. Thank you. Listener recommendation. So listeners keep your eye out for that one. Because this sparring session with Dan was prompted by Alan Tsang, who is going to be another guest on the show. And it is. It is a doozy. So keep your eye out for that one.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

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I'll catch you later.