The Soulful Way to Get What You Want — Without Manipulating Anyone

Hey, I'm Kwame Christian, and you are about to step into the world of Negotiate Anything, the number one negotiation podcast in the world, where we teach you how to make difficult conversations easier while getting more of what you want in the process. Each episode is packed with practical tips and strategies from the experts. We delve into negotiation, conflict resolution, and leadership skills that are crucial in both business and in life. Whether you're closing a deal, managing a team, or navigating personal relationships, Negotiate Anything provides you with the tools you need to succeed. Our conversations are real, relatable, and most importantly, rooted in practicality. So if you're ready to transform your conversations and elevate your negotiation skills, join me on Negotiate Anything. Subscribe and listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen. Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation.

Jason, thanks for joining us today.

Hey, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

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

Sure. All right, Kwame. So I'm. My name is Jason Harris. I'm the co founder and CEO of an advertising agency. Our name's Mechanism. We're about 200 people, four offices. We work on big brands like Ben and Jerry's peloton, Charles Schwab, Jose Cuervo, et cetera, et cetera. We got about 25 brands. We do business to consumer advertising in every facet that that takes. We do a lot of hardcore brand strategy and creative work. And really, I've been doing advertising my whole entire career. And in about 2020, I launched a book called the Soulful Art of Persuasion. And it really packages up what I learned as an entrepreneur building a business and really, my foundational beliefs in approaching persuasion and becoming an influential person and how I built a business. And the real impetus for writing the book was I had read a Gallup poll that said the three most dishonest professions in America were congressmen, used car salesman, and advertising practitioner. And I thought, well, my industry has a really bad rap for being dishonest. And to talk about negotiating, to negotiating and persuading customers to buy things with a lack of transparency and honesty. And I never built my business or the brands that I work on with that in mind. I've always done it in a very transparent, honest way. And so I kind of was like, okay, well, that's not how I feel the industry is. I feel like it's the backbone of capitalism. And it's really. Brands matter. Consumers love and support Brands and the brands that they love matter to them and say something about them. And so I wrote this book that's really about brand building and your personal brand and its values that I've built the business on. So that was the idea behind it.

I love it. I love it. And Jason, you know what else I love? What? I love the fact that lawyers weren't on that top three list. That's great.

They were definitely in the top 10.

We can't avoid it.

Probably like five or six was lawyers.

That's funny. That is funny. No, man, I love this. And I love the name Soulful Art of Persuasion, too, because you're approaching it, and for me, as like a potential consumer, I'm thinking about it from the element of, hey, okay, a lot of this stuff can almost seem manipulative. Sometimes it can feel a little bit mechanical or, you know, just robotic or too tactical. But the fact that you. You're approaching it with that soulful, that kind of shows that you're approaching it from a different angle, which I appreciate.

Yeah, exactly. And really, the soulful thing, whether it's your personal brand or your business or whatever, you're. Whatever you're selling, because everyone is persuading at some level, we're selling all day long. You know, whether you're selling in your personal life, you're selling your spouse to take a trip, right. Or your kids to get to school or your boss to give you a raise, in your professional and personal life, you're persuading all day long and negotiating, right? And so, like, those are. Those are linked together. And the idea of the soulful idea is that you can be influential and persuasive, but you can do it in an inspirational way. And really, persuasion is based on personal character. And if you have good personal character, you're going to get a lot farther than if you don't. And it might be that you can persuade people or sell or negotiate. In the short term, you can get some transactional wins, quarter to quarter, right? You can do those. But in the long run, if you're not transparent and honest and empathetic and generous as a person and respectful, you are going to. That'll burn out, right? You'll get some easy wins, but that's not going to carry you through and you're not going to build really large base and a big network because you're acting in a very transactional way.

Yeah, man, that makes sense. And one of the things that you said that I want to focus in on real quick is the term Character, because we throw it around almost flippantly right now. As you're talking about character as it relates to persuasion, what does that mean to you?

So personal character to me is really this notion that when you're interacting with people, they're getting the real you, right? They're getting you as an original. They're getting you as the person that you're putting forth. You're being vulnerable with them. It's sort of a makeup of four principles that I believe in. And the first is this original of putting yourself out there and showing people who you are. The second is about being generous and sort of cultivating this idea of generosity for other people. Whether that's advice or counsel or connection or even giving something away to someone. It can be a thing, it can be advice, but it's really about being generous as part of having a good character. Empathetic is another big one that we're going to dive into. And then this idea of the final one is doing something in your work or in your life that is bigger than yourself, that is making the world a better place. As Kumbaya as that sounds, it is really about. That's how you develop an inspirational character, is you're doing something with some of your skills that is above and beyond something that's for profit or pleasure or what you might benefit from. So those are sort of the basic principles that I found. Make up a good personal character, that people will support you and want to work with you and you're going to build your business around. So that's sort of the outline of what it means to me. It's going to mean something to someone else. Those are the four values that I've cultivated that I've also had to work on in my career. So I was not born a generous person or an empathetic person. I was born maybe more myself and comfortable with myself than maybe other people. I did have the sort of idea of trying to give back, but I was not. You know, I would hoard my contacts. And when I was building my business right, I would not. Someone asked me for, hey, do you recommend someone for X, Y and Z? I thought that the way you built a business was to keep all of your contacts, like, close at hand and not give anything away to anyone, or if I turn down a piece of business, not give it to a competitor. And I quickly learned that my circle and my network got really small and the opportunities got limited. And when I started to habitually practice being a more generous person because it didn't come naturally to me, I realized that it comes back to you in exponential order because you are putting out good things into the world. You're practicing positivity and you're giving things away to other people that you're sharing. In essence, generosity is sharing. They will then share with you. You'll get leads from them and it sort of balances itself out and you end up growing your network. And that's something that I really had to work on in my career.

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This is very interesting and I appreciate that your candor here on this story too, because what you're showing is that when it comes to character, there are things that you can do to improve upon it. Right? Because it's. We have a, of course, we have a baseline of who we are.

Right.

But then if we recognize, oh, there's some areas where I can improve or need some improvement through practice, you can make those necessary changes. Like you said, when it comes to generosity, too.

Yeah, that's. That's right. Kwame, you, you. I think there's. It's what I found in my career, but I really had to understand it, identify it, and then practice it to make strives to become better and develop that character. Because it definitely was not. I wasn't growing the way I was sort of naturally wound. And so I had to make. I had to identify it so then I could then change and become a more generous person or a more empathetic person. And, you know, like, even as a leader, I would think of leadership as never acting like there was any problems in the company, never acting like I had any personal things to work on. And really that old school notion of leaders as sort of stoic, everything's okay, never a problem, I've got it covered, don't worry about it. That sort of approach is very limiting. And when you are more open, transparent, vulnerable, there's this connection that you have with your team that you can count on each other. And it opened a whole, you know, really helped blossom and grow the company and have a real strong executive team that's been with me for a very long time. And so that's something that I had to really develop and change the way I was working.

No, this is great. I want to focus in on the empathy side of this too, because. And we'll dig deeper onto the fact that again, just like generosity, you improve your ability to be empathetic because empathy is a skill. It's something you can improve upon. But let's, before we dig into that, let's actually get a definition on the table for what empathy means in the context of persuasion and human interaction.

Yeah, I think for me, there's a few different steps to becoming more empathetic, but it's an essential habit to have a persuasive character. But really, empathy is the ability to understand the other person's perspective or point of view. And I think we're under the misconception that we might think we're more empathetic than we really are, or we think we understand the other person's perspective when we actually aren't really making an effort to. And so for me, one sort of key attribute of being empathetic is this idea of developing a natural curiosity for other people by listening and learning from them more than trying to convince them or jumping to a conclusion or getting the answer, but really to listen to their perspective or their story or where they're coming from. To have that as a natural curiosity, which I had to develop that curiosity about other people, that's sort of one of the foundations of, I think, being empathetic. And the overriding notion is that we are all 99.9% the same. Right? We all have the same DNA. There's that 0.1% that makes us different as people. And if you sort of go into it thinking how connected we are and how similar we are, I'm talking about the mass majority of people. I'm not talking about some people who might be serial killers or on the fringes or on the outskirts, but I'm talking about most of the population. We all are very similar, but we have experiences and the way we were raised and different. Different encounters that change us and develop us into different people that have different perspectives and different viewpoints. And so part of being empathetic is understanding the other person's story, what makes them have a particular view or opinion. And that's sort of the first part of understanding somebody else. I don't know if you have any questions about that piece. But I can keep going for.

Oh, no, I love this. I love this, Jason. And I want to go deeper on the curiosity aspect, too, because that's something that we talk about a lot on this podcast. Now, here's something that I want to explore. When we think about some people, some people just are not naturally curious. It's just not how they're built. So we talk all the time about how we can. How curiosity is so critical to persuasion, connection, communication, all that stuff. What types of things can people do to spark a little bit more curiosity within themselves?

Yeah, so that's a good question. So I think in order to be empathetic and be curious about other people, one technique that really helps is if you learn to be a good storyteller and you have certain things that have happened in your life, whether it's, you know, it could be. It goes back to sort of understanding and being comfortable with yourself. But stories that impacted you through your life or your favorite movie or book or music or story, and you kind of write those down like, you know, collect a journal of stories that make you you. And so you sort of know those, and you're a good storyteller. One way to become empathetic and to get other people to open up and be naturally curious is you can start by saying, you know, I'm going to tell you a story about some pivotal thing that happened to me. You're being vulnerable. You're opening yourself up. That's going to allow them to then bring you a story. Right. They're going to be comfortable that you put yourself out there. They're going to bring a story to you about who they are, and maybe something interesting that happened in their life or in business or whatever it might be, you start to have a dialogue, and that opens the curiosity lens where you're learning about them, and then you can probe more questions and really get to know them on a much deeper, not just transactional, level. And I think that develop a natural curiosity about them. When you're sharing a story about yourself, they're going to be apt to share some information or a story or an experience with you, and you're going to go a level deeper in connection. And so that's one technique or one way to be curious about other people is start with yourself, and then they'll be open to talking to you, and you'll be able to listen and really understand them.

I love it. I love it. And, Jason, one of the things that I've noticed with myself I'm going to tell on myself a little bit here, and hopefully I'm not the only freak out there who experiences this, Jason, so we'll see how this goes. But here's something that I've noticed. Like I said, curiosity is the base of my. Of my communication style. And so we talk about the compassionate curiosity.

You host a podcast for a reason, right?

That's right.

Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. So the curiosity is there. So here's what I'm realizing, is that there are times where my curiosity vanishes. And so in times when I feel more certain about the situation, my curiosity vanishes. If I'm feeling more emotional, my curiosity vanishes. And so there are certain mental states that I get into where the curiosity disappears. And so if there are other listeners out here who are struggling with the same thing, what advice would you give them to maintain that spirit of curiosity, even if they are not feeling it in the moment?

Yeah, I think that, you know, I mean, right before I came on this podcast, I had, you know, I was dealing with a client thing that I'd prefer I wasn't dealing with, you know, so it kind of put me in, like, a different headspace. And I think the idea is to really try your best to be present in the moments when you're, you know, meeting with someone or negotiating, pitching, selling, whatever it might be. Try to really put yourself in that present moment and tap back. What I always do is tap back into the core of who I am, what makes me me, so that I can reach out and try to connect and have that curiosity about the other person. And then, like, after this podcast, I'll go back to dealing with the issue I need to deal with. But for this period of time, that's out of my mind, and I'm focused on where we are now. And going back to who I am in a core is a good sort of grounding place to go back to and kind of take the noise out of what's happening in your head, and then you can pick that back up when you're working on it by yourself and not, you know, in front of somebody else. So that's one way I do it, is really pause, try to be present, go back to, all right, these are my core values. This is what I believe in, and then sort of reset and go from there. So that's. That's one way I do it, because I. Believe me, I hear you. It's not. You can't always be naturally curious about other people all the time because things get in our way. And Our days can get thrown off, and it doesn't always work that way. But another, if I can kind of hit a couple more points on this empathetic thing that you asked about. The other part of being empathetic is finding value in joining forces with other people and different areas of expertise and different experiences and different backgrounds. But this idea of collaboration is also kind of at the heart of developing an empathetic characteristic. And collaborations can be really, really beneficial. And I think I've seen that in running a company. Being an entrepreneur, I used to try to do so many aspects. I had a company before. I have three other partners now in this company, for example.

And.

And I started a company prior that was just by myself. And I found that I thought the way to do it as an entrepreneur is to go it alone and do it all yourself and show how successful you could be. And I realized that led to burnout and not as quick success as I would have liked. That's not the way to do it. But by seeking out collaborations and joining forces with others, you can go, you know, much farther than you can by yourself. I think it's that old notion of, you know, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And I think that's really true now.

For you, having partners. As an attorney, I know some of my most interesting cases. They were interesting for me, incredibly painful for my clients. The most interesting cases for me sometimes were business partnerships where you have multiple owners having these difficult conversations. And one of my mentors said it best. He said a business partnership is a relationship second only to marriage. That was his opinion. And so when you have these tough conversations with your partners about something that's so important to you, how do you maintain that empathy, curiosity, and have that still high level of character, even when something that you care so much about might feel threatened in that moment?

Well, that's a great question. And I'm certainly not. Part of having good personal character is also knowing that you're not perfect. And I certainly do not always exhibit the amount of empathetic characteristics that I want. But I think when you have tough conversations with business partners or a personal partner. Right. Whatever it might be, I think the one way to approach it is to put the filter through their eyes of the issue at hand. And try to do that before you go in to negotiate, persuade, talk, discuss, try to really put yourself in their shoes and see the issue through their eyes, and then go in with sort of through your eyes and through their eyes and sort of Start the dialogue or the conversation that way is a much better way than just jamming your point over and over and kind of beating your head against the wall and getting nowhere. You kind of go, I mean, I got divorced about two years ago and we went through mediation and it was a technique that worked really well. I'm not saying there wasn't like blow up arguments or fights or anything like that, because there certainly were. But I would go into it thinking about, all right, she sees it this way, I see it this way. How do I approach this so that she understands that I see her perspective and her point of view and then try to get her to see my perspective and my point of view so that we can come to some agreement in the middle or some compromise. And so I think that's one way that I like to deal with the partners that I have in the business or a client issue or a personal issue is really trying to understand why they might feel that way and what's leading to that. And if you were them, how would that make you feel? And almost starting the dialogue from that perspective versus your perspective is also very useful technique.

Yeah, I love that. And it's so hard to do, especially under duress, but it's critical and it's incredibly valuable.

I mean, how do you, have you ever been in that situation where you're, as a lawyer, you're going lawyer to lawyer? Lawyers aren't necessarily incentivized to be empathetic to the other side. Right. You're incentivized to be empathetic to your client, not to the other side. Right. So you're sort of, the structure of that is almost, you're almost doing your client a disservice by seeing the other perspective in a way, right?

Depends. It depends. And look at me answering like a lawyer. It depends, of course. Right. But it depends, because here's what I realized, Jason, is that I have to always remember that even though I'm the legal expert, they're the boss, they're the boss. Everything I do has to. I need their blessing to do it. And even though for me, sometimes it feels good to flex on another lawyer kind of going toe to toe and have, you know, let's, let's call it an ego measuring contest, you know, I know ultimately that is not what's best for the client because it's cool for me, because I get paid regardless. We bill more hours, I get to fight more. I feel like the big man on campus. That feels great, but it's not helping the client you know, and so oftentimes when I'm. When I was practicing, when I was confronted with a lot of emotionality and somebody trying to, you know, to be really aggressive, what I had to do was a bit of negotiation jujitsu here, kind of diffuse the situation. But what's important, Jason, for me to do, when you think about the dynamics of the relationship, is that I need to negotiate with my client beforehand to set expectations for how the conversation is going to go. And so I have to tell them, hey, listen, there are going to be times that this person is going to insult us, they're going to be attacking and those type of things. And what we are going to want to do reflexively is fight back, but we have to stay focused on the goal. And as things heat up, let me take control in this moment and I'll defuse the situation so we can stay productive. And so the thing is, if I were to not have that conversation with the client and not walk them through the strategy and not tell them what they are about to see, they'll say, what you see, what that lawyer's doing, that lawyer's a bulldog. Then my attorney's over here being diplomatic. And so if you don't have that conversation and negotiate the strategy beforehand, then your client's going to feel like you don't have their back. So in order for me to use a good negotiation strategy, I have to negotiate with the client beforehand to make sure that they're on board with the approach. So it's tough, and it's tempting to go toe to toe with another lawyer. That's always fun to do, but it's rarely, rarely productive.

Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't get. It doesn't get the result that you want. You hope. On the other side, there's a. There's also a lawyer that isn't, you know, there's going to be bulldog lawyers, but that they also understand that what's best for both clients is a resolution. Right. And just sticking, just digging in and digging in is not going to get anyone anywhere. Right. Like, you're not going to move and you're not going to go. It's just going to keep your clients paralyzed longer. Right. And they're just going to be waiting for some resolution that's going to be harder and harder to come by. But if you can try to keep your cool and negotiate and make your point clear, then hopefully you can get to some kind of common ground.

Right, Exactly. But that's where the discipline comes in. Right. Because we have to really suspend our emotional agenda and hold back what we want to immediately say in the moment in order to say the right thing to keep us moving in a productive direction. That's. That is one of the toughest parts.

It can be. It can be a negotiating right, can be a street fight where you. You want to get like a zinger.

In there.

But ultimately it might feel good in a moment, but it's going to chip away at the outcome that you want. It's not going to get you where.

You want, as you say. There's several conversations are coming up in my mind where I'm like, oh, man, I nailed them with that one. Yeah. And then I made everything worse. Felt great in the moment, though.

Felt great.

Jason, everything fell apart. No, man, this. This was fun. I appreciate this. And before you go, let the listeners know again about your company, your book, and how they can get in touch with you.

Yeah, sure. My. You can find out more about the book@the soulful art.com website. You can buy the book on Amazon anywhere books are sold. And my company is mechanism m e k a nism.com that's more about the advertising agency. And you can find me JasonHarris on Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Appreciate it, man. This was great.

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And.

And I will see you in the next episode. I'll catch you later.