Win Any Exchange: How Master Negotiators Tap Into Flow with Chris Voss

Sympathy is going to cause you a problem. Empathy is a hostage negotiator, as I would define it, as Harvard would define it. One of Daniel Goleman's definitions of it got nothing to do with your emotions. It's got you identifying the other side's emotions completely. And so your emotions might kick into gear at some point in time afterwards, but it's just really identifying the emotional emotions, the cognitive biases, the affects, the reactions. From the other side. And then by definition, Goleman says, he calls it cognitive empathy. He says it's a type of empathy that sociopaths are actually best at, and it's insanely effective.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again.

Great things. Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance. Access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. We have Mr. Chris Voss, who is simply put, just a badass. He was the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI, as well as the FBI's hostage negotiation representative for the National Security Council's Hostage Working Group. He served as the lead crisis negotiator for the New York City Division of the FBI. And Chris was also a member of the New York City Joint Terrorist Task Force for 14 years. And as a negotiator, he stopped hostage-taking in a bank robbery. He was the case agent on the Blind Sheep case. And during Chris's 24-year tenure in the Bureau, he was trained in the art of negotiation by not only the FBI but Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School. So he comes at it from all angles. And Christopher has taught business negotiation in the MBA programs of many of the world's leading schools, including Harvard and USC, and works as the managing director of the kidnapping resolution practice for inside security. And in a crisis or negotiation, he is who you want by your side. So huge thank you for joining us today, Chris. And then also, I just want to mention your book, Never Split the Difference, which is phenomenal. And I think an absolute must-read. I've seen it myself, both read and love it. So yeah, huge thank you for joining us today, Chris.

Let me jump in on a couple of things, if I may. First of all, you know, now it's Never Split the Difference: A Black Swan Group It's all business negotiation all the time. Actually, all the hostage stuff's in my rearview mirror. And I used to think I was a badass until a couple of years ago, I met this guy named Steven. He walks up to me and he says, "Hey, just so you know, I've broken 84 bones in my body." And I'm like, "This is going to be an interesting conversation.

I got to hear about this guy." I will also say the kung fu works. Chris has coached me through a couple of very tricky, complicated up and down negotiations. And those are situations that I am just not wired for. I am not built for them. I'm way too much of a pussy. And Chris's voodoo works, which to me, we like to backtrack stuff to the neurobiology. Can we understand mechanism? And then we like to roll it forward into the world and see, does the voodoo work? The voodoo doesn't work, we're not interested. Why bother decoding biology? That's really hard. So we want to come in from both angles at once, and I think which is kind of part of at the heart of the collective, there's something experimental about it. Your voodoo works.

Hey, brother. Yeah. Well, you're coachable.

Yeah, it works incredibly well. We all implement it here at the Flow Research Collective. So Chris, I want to just dive in with a question around state, which is something we talk a lot about here at the Flow Research Collective. So could you tell us a little bit about how you think about regulating your own state, how you feel from a nervous system perspective before a negotiation, what is optimal from that perspective?

Yeah, well, a positive frame of mind. I mean, you know, the stuff that I've read, Stephen's written, and other places which corroborates it. I mean, you got to get in a positive frame of mind, and we're not naturally wired to be positive. Survival mode is largely negative. So how do I think of it? You know, I think of it kind of like oral hygiene. Not only is it daily, it's a couple of times a day. I mean, just because I brushed my teeth yesterday doesn't mean I don't got to brush them again today. Just because I brushed them this morning doesn't mean I got to hit it again sometime later today. Especially in these times when our survival mechanisms are being triggered even more. When survival mode, it's negative. Success mode is positive. You've got to consciously make the switch because your natural wiring is not there. So And thank God that I've run across the stuff that Steven's written about flow, because it's gained us a lot of insight into how do we teach negotiations so that people maximize their outcomes. They don't leave money on the table. It all revolves around, you know, what's your positive frame of mind? Because you're smarter in a positive frame of mind. Yeah.

It's super interesting. The way I've thought about it or tried to think about it is that whoever has the better regulated nervous system wins. And obviously there's a ton more to it than that. But with people I've gotten destroyed with in the past in negotiations, they've always just been much more centered, much more calm, much more able to just hold their nerves and ride through all circumstances. So when you say it's a constant battle and it's like brushing your teeth, what are you referring to? Are there certain practices or things that you do in order to stay in a good or optimal state of mind?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first thing I do when I get out of bed, you know, is going to be brush my teeth. First thing I got to do, I got to go through some sort of positive mind frame exercise. Now, the time I spent in California, I know it sounds nuts and berries and hugs and kisses, but look, the gratitude thing works. I mean, you know, dial in on some gratitude, some specific reasons, you know, along the learning and accelerated learning path that we teach people to do handwriting makes a difference on your focus. So I do handwritten things that I'm grateful for each morning. Any sort of, you know, trying to maximize my mental resources is going to have to involve handwriting. I ran across an article recently. It talked about how much Bruce Lee kept handwritten journals and handwritten notes and meticulously written Now, from what I know about handwriting, I know that I'm more focused, more mentally on my game when I handwrite. So I work that into my daily ritual. We work that into our training.

There's a connection between handwriting and memory too, because you're involving more senses. It's tactile. So when you're writing by hand, right, tactile with visual with the auditory, especially if you're, you know, trying to write in a stylus manner. You're paying attention to the auditory, the rhythm, right? That is very— Now, I always take notes and try to get a cool, fun shorthand for myself, just because it gives it a little beat, coupled with the handwriting. It just helps lock it into memory more. It's just a mnemonic thing. We use it too at the Flourish and Collective, and we teach people to do gratitude lists by hand. Do you use 10 things you're grateful for, trying to really feel them? Do you do 3 things and turn 1 into a paragraph, which is the positive psychology version that a lot of people prefer? Heard you vary it up.

Yeah, I'll shoot for 3 things normally when I get started. They got to be little things, appreciate the little things. I'll end up with more than 3 and a number of much broader things. As what I'm trying to cycle into— what I am cycling into my day now is revisited in a handwritten fashion a couple times through the day. Ideally, a theme for the day emerges.

Oh, that's neat. That's really interesting.

So it's kind of like an ongoing journaling practice throughout the whole day?

Yeah, it is. Absolutely. You know, and ideally each day— I've always had trouble distinguishing days because I get so up in my head. Like, I don't remember when that happened. Could have happened a week ago, could have happened 6 months ago. So I'm trying to slow time down to some degree by getting more present in the day. And if the day can suggest it a theme for the day. Like today is open my mind up, just open up, which is get out of my head a little bit more, open more to the day. Let me hear what's in today.

I love that.

So that it'll be a unique day.

Yeah, very interesting strategy to try and shift the perception of time passing, I think. I know that I've been finding time passing so bizarrely in quarantine. It feels like it's constantly Friday. I keep saying, "How the hell has another week gone by?" But so obviously, Chris, you know that the Flow Research Collective, our whole thing is flow. So I'd love to dive into that in relation to negotiation. And if you have felt in the past, amid some of your massive hostage negotiations and how you see it show up at the moment, people getting into flow or getting into a flow state amidst or within negotiation.

Yeah, well, you know, great negotiation, great listening is really being completely in the moment in a flow state. I mean, You get into a process that you rely on so that you can worry less about where it's going and just get into it and feel it in the moment. I mean, begin to slightly anticipate what the next few moments are going to be. The interesting add-in for us when using the skills, like, I can pick the next moment. Like, if I know how you're going to react emotionally to something, I can get a very clear picture in my head to your emotional reaction and I'll choose one. Most likely what I'm going to choose is I know if you're not going to like what I'm getting ready to say, if I just say it, you're going to be angry, miffed, I'm going to trigger your negative emotions in some fashion. I could do that or I could simply stop that moment from ever happening. And you'll never know that I did that. So it's very much a flow state in the moment when you understand how our hostage negotiation emotional intelligence skills are going to work. And I get to choose the next couple of moments because I see them coming at me and I make selections.

Chris, how do you, and maybe the answer you already gave it, which is staying focused in the process, but there's such emotional ups and downs in negotiation. And that is such a flow blocker for so many people, right? We, like when we train people on, distraction management and when they go from bed to desk in the morning. We often say, "Try to go as quickly as you possibly can and for God's sake, don't look at your cell phone because that's an emotional landmine and it can totally pull you out." Yet you're in a situation where there are emotional landmines. Not only do you negotiate around them, you're often also hearing bad news and yet you're staying maintain not only state but flow. How do you do that?

Yeah, it's gonna sound stupid, but it's just as much enough rehearsal that you come to rely upon a process. And then I didn't know that I knew this for the longest time till finally jumped out at me. You know, the process can't be perfect. Like my old boss Gary Nessner used to always preach, here's our best chance of success, best chance of success, and we were successful over and over and over. And then something went bad. And then I said to myself, I guess if I've been saying best chance of success, that's not guarantee of success, which means something is gonna go bad. So that's just part of the process. In many ways, I think as soon as you start losing your fear of it going bad by simply to accept that it can, the simple acceptance that it can go bad, look, it could go bad. That's a possible outcome. I saw that happen in a negotiation I was coaching in the Philippines. Guy was a superstar. His brother's life was at stake. And afterwards, I had him come in and lecture at a business negotiation course I was teaching at Georgetown at the time. And I remember he said to me, I got no idea what I talk about. You say I performed really well. But, you know, I took your coaching and I realized early on that my brother could get killed and I just accepted that. And I said, that's exactly all I need you to say, because your acceptance that it could go bad essentially freed you up, and then you got into the moment. I mean, he was astonishing. He took the coaching. He was coachable. He came up with some stuff that we didn't coach him on. He processed it in his brain, and we saved his brother's life.

Wow. Building that outcome independence.

Very well put.

How do you maintain—

So let me ask you a question. Hold on. I got to ask a geeky question because that's what I'm here for. That's what I'm here for. So because you know about the challenge-skill balance in flow, right? And that flow sits right in the middle of it. It seems like by accepting the worst possible outcome, essentially what you're doing is lowering cognitive load, which is counterintuitive But by accepting that the terrible thing could happen or this is really going on, we all had, by the way, I think we all experienced this in the early days of COVID right? Those early days you had a lot of resistance and this was so crazy heavy. And then you went, oh, this really is happening. Like, oh, I'm in the middle of a crisis. I got to get into crisis mode. Okay. It's a different game. Cognitive load lightened and you got present. That's the trickier shift, that's what we're talking about in a weird way? Yes?

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, absolutely.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is, one last geeky question, that's counterintuitive that accepting the worst possible outcome frees up energy, focus, right? Accepting the worst possible outcome actually has incredible high-performance benefits is the point we're making. Why is that the case? Do you have any idea?

As we're talking about it, I'm trying to think through the steps, you know, because I mean, I got my sort of success library behind me, although I could populate it with Stephen Kotler books and would crowd all the other books out of the way.

So I can't quite do that.

But, you know, one of them all—

Ass-kissing will get you very far in this interview, Chris.

Very, very far. I'm going to tell you something too. You know, I'm blown away that you can write fiction also. Not that many nonfiction guys can write fiction.

I came up, it's where you started the actual, the harder one was learning to write nonfiction because I came up as a poet and then I became a novelist. That was a very tricky, weird shift, but it sort of made, I got there. But by shifting into actual, like real things with real people and that stuff, that was hard. But being a reporter wasn't hard because the same level of detail you have to notice to be a good negotiator You have to notice to be a good fiction writer. You have to notice to be a good reporter. And by the way, I had to notice all that shit because I was a good bartender first, right? And I worked on tips. So I had to know what you were feeling and how to make you feel better very, very quickly with some alcohol involved, 'cause I needed to pay my rent.

You gotta pay the bills. That's a masterclass in emotional intelligence being a bartender. Yeah, all right, so forgive me. Over my other shoulder, Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, writes a blog by the same name. One of his blog pieces, he talked about samurai and he said, how did the samurai lose their fear of death? Did they ignore it? And he writes, they thought about it all the time, just that it's an outcome. And they thought about it so much and accepted it was an outcome, they lost their fear of death. Now there's a next step in there. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it's very much like what you talk about where you release that burden in the cognitive load, and you can get more in the moment.

Not to make it too woo, but it sounds like there's an element of surrender before going in.

Yeah, well, yeah, it might be. Some of us react differently to the word surrender.

Yeah, exactly. Because you're also maintaining some level of paradox, and that obviously you're going as hard as possible for the outcome you want while being okay in a certain respect with any outcome. And that's what I wanted to ask you about is how do you maintain outcome independence while also sticking to a backstop, being clear where you are not going to settle for anything less around? How do you reconcile those two?

Basically letting all of it go. And then for me, it's just, this is a big conversation with Tal when we wrote the book, because we wanted to write a book and said like no goals whatsoever in the negotiation. And he said, well, human beings don't work that way. They got to have goals. And so then, well, basically what we're doing is our aspirational goal is actually our minimum. You know, I intellectually and emotionally know there's a better deal to be had. And the more fixated I get on any outcome, whether it be positive or negative, the less likely it is that I'm going to find the best deal possible. So it's just completely, and again, Zen's not my word or Tai Chi, but you know, Tahl said, this is like Tai Chi. It's like Zen. You're very Zen-like, you know. And my answer was like, I don't know. Okay, if you say so. But all I know is I got to find the maximum best outcome to clear my mind completely. I got to let go of positives and negatives. And so, if people ask us about goals, I say, well, think about what your aspiration is and realize that by definition, it's too low and your goal is to exceed that.

Is this— and by the way, understanding that there is a somewhat flexible script essentially that's underneath how you're thinking about negotiation, meaning there's training. This is what to do in this situation kind of stuff, which your book is awesome about. How many laps until through? Is this a 10,000-hour thing? So my question is, why does this skill that seems so hard, you can actually learn it fairly? It's sort of like flow in that way. It's this thing that seems really hard, but it's readily trainable. And then it takes a lifetime to kind of master the execution of.

Yeah, a couple things. First of all, yes, it seems hard just because you're hitting a new neural circuit and you're just not used to firing that circuit. We got an exercise we do in training all the time where we have people just do this with their hands, you know, switch thumb to forefinger. That's ridiculously simple. The first time people do it, they're going like, ah, ah, and their head almost explodes because they just haven't fired those circuits. So the repetition to just get some sort of competence there is actually somewhere in the neighborhood of about 60 repetitions, which is why frequently anecdotally, I've never seen any hard evidence, but everybody says anecdotally it takes 3 weeks to pick up a skill. Well, if you're hitting a few reps every day, it's going to take you about 3 weeks to get to 60-ish reps. In terms of negotiation, it might be exactly what you're talking about with flow. To get a little bit better in negotiation and emotional intelligence will almost instantaneously have a 23, 31, 75% increase in your ability compared to everybody else. Your initial leap is going to jump you significantly in front of everyone. Now mastery then comes in decreasing increments. And of course, every time you master it, you're going to pull ahead of some other people. But just to get a little bit better in negotiations and have it have a substantial immediate impact on your life isn't that hard. And then at that point in time, you know, it's that old analogy, you know, the two hikers are confronted with a bear in the woods and one guy stops to put on his tennis shoes and his buddy says, 'Your tennis shoes aren't going to help you outrun the bear.' And he says, 'I don't got to outrun the bear. I just got to outrun you.' it doesn't take that much before you're outrunning the pack and making a huge difference in your life. And then, you know, then you got time to put in the 10,000 hours because you got more time back in your life. You're making more money. You're wasting less time. Your relationships are better. People want to collaborate with you. It's a virtuous circle that takes off really fast.

What's the first big thing, Chris, that you find gets people to that 80/20? First big shift or insight or thing they need to understand?

You know, it's usually going to be one of about 3 things. It's going to depend upon how they've gotten to where they are. They're either going to get out of asking yes-oriented questions and switch over to no-oriented questions. Instead of saying, 'Do you agree?' they're going to say, 'Do you disagree?' Instead of saying, 'Does this look like something that would work for you?' They say, are you against doing this? Instead of saying, have you got a few minutes to talk? They say, is now a bad time to talk? You know, if you could just switch out of yes to no questions, and there are 7 or 8 yes questions everybody asks every day, and flipping them to no is a real simple thing. People will just go like, good God, what just happened? You know, so that could be it. They might not be good at saying no gently, letting it know out a little at a time. So that shift is just learning instead of saying no or blowing up or pretending to go along, they might learn to say, "How am I supposed to do that?" Then bang, something massive happens. I get a story of a mom used that on her 13-year-old kid who was bugging her to buy a video game for him. She said, "How am I supposed to do that?" His immediate response was, "All right, so I'll pay half." You know, he immediately cut his price by half. I got another guy dealing with a landscaper at his house, and the guy gives him a price for all the landscaping, and he says, how am I supposed to do that? And the landscaper immediately cuts his price by half, you know. So that might be the other skill that people kick into gear really quickly.

When I teach writing, one of the things I talk about is you can do certain things, certain sentences with language to produce a dopamine response. And one of the things is hyperbation, which is a fancy way of saying scrambling word order. So this is Yoda in Star Wars. Size matters not. Judge me not by my size, do you? Right? Hemingway used to do this. He went to the river. The river was there. All kinds of like, it's not quite what you— and your brain has to sort of unscramble it a little bit. And it forces you, when you unscramble the puzzle, you not only get dopamine, which drives focus, but you get pattern recognition from the dopamine, and that allows you to get the new knowledge and the new feeling. How can I do that produces empathy very quickly, right? That forces the listener into empathy. That's what you're doing with that question, right? And it demands that they see you as a person. It's interesting. And the word order is, I think, why it does that. There's like hyperbation, the same technique you can use in literature, you can use out loud here. That's interesting. I don't know if that's it, but, and I don't even know if it's a comment or a question, but—

No, you're 1,000% on the money and you describe it almost word for word the same way my son Brandon has. He's called it forced empathy. It forces a thought pattern in the other side. And the word how to start that sentence off is critical. And yeah, you're forcing empathy into a situation which then of course, triggers a bunch of the neurochemicals that you're talking about.

Does that mean, Chris, that if you're attempting to get the other side to be more empathetic, that how do you deal with having empathy on your side? I've noticed even in myself sometimes, and this might sound a little bit sociopathic, but I've actually turned video off when negotiating because I find it challenging to do a hard negotiating from seeing their face because it's arising maybe excess of empathy in myself. So how do you think about being empathetic yourself? Because obviously it's also critical from a listening and understanding standpoint. So how do you get an amazing deal without being overly empathetic?

Yeah. Well, you're sort of conflating, if that's the right word, empathy with sympathy. And sympathy is going to cause you a problem. Empathy is— a hostage negotiator, as I would define it, as Harvard would define it, one of Daniel Goleman's definitions of it. Got nothing to do with your emotions. It's got you identifying the other side's emotions completely. And so your emotions might kick into gear at some point in time afterwards, but it's just really identifying the emotional, the emotions, the cognitive biases, the affects, the reactions from the other side. And then by definition, Goleman says, he calls it cognitive empathy. He says it's a type of empathy that sociopaths are actually best at. And it's insanely effective.

Chris, you said there were 3 interventions that can make the most difference, right? One was the negative yes questions to no questions. The second one was, how am I supposed to do that for the empathy trigger? So what's the third big bit of kung fu you think that makes the biggest difference?

Well, being able to restate the other side's position, especially the negative aspects of their position that are pointed at you. And that is, you immediately take a quantum leap when you get good at that. And a lot of people just have a lot of trouble bringing themselves to it. It's just, it's massively, it's probably the single most deeply rooted counterintuitive thing.

So this is me saying to my wife, honey, I can see why you think this is totally irresponsible of me, or that is not what I'm doing?

Well, that's really close. I mean, I'd alter your delivery a little bit because there's some word choices in there that very much like what you're talking about, different words having different impacts that either working for or against you, but you're real close, you know, and especially with a—

Coach me up. What do you do?

I can see that I've made you angry.

Okay.

I can see that you see this as a stupid thing for me to have done.

So you're labeling.

It's labeling. It's a little bit of an adjustment in a label, like the closer. There's sometimes our labels are sort of like tentative checks. Most of the time it's, you seem angry. Like, you know, one of my, the first time I began to learn the difference, the ex-Mrs. Voss, we're having a discussion a long time ago in a galaxy far away. She's really upset with me. And I said, you sound angry. And I think her brain matter splattered all over me in the entire room when she blew up. And I remember thinking at the time, but I say, you sound angry on the hotline all the time and it works. I don't understand why this isn't working here. What I should have said instead of you sound angry, as if like I was surprised, my proper response would have been, I could see that I've made you angry. Now I've dropped the word I in there. It's an awareness on my part. People, the closer somebody is to you or the more upset they are about the situation, They don't want you to be tentative about it. They want you to know. And that's when we shift from, "Sounds like you're angry," to, "I know you're angry." We coach people up to say, instead of saying like, "Seems like this situation has probably got you upset," to, "I know you're upset. I know you're scared. I know you're worried about the future." The word "I" there is placed strategically with I know at the very beginning. So there's some very conscious word choice there depending upon how close somebody is to you or what they expect of you. I used to walk into a kidnap victim's family and I couldn't say, seems like this situation's probably got you scared. I'd have to say, I know you're scared and I know you're angry. And they would snap out of it almost instantaneously. Because they needed to know that I knew. And so depending upon the severity of the situation or the closeness of the relationship, you need to make that shift in a label.

It makes it sound much less accusational as well when you make that switch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, good point.

Just brought on a new sales guy, funnily enough, in the last 2 weeks. And in his first week, he just had this massive surge in his conversion rate on calls. And we were trying to, we were digging in, we were trying to figure out what the hell it was, what he was doing differently. And ultimately realized that what he had been doing differently to our other guys that have been on long-term is just listening much more and not allowing patterns or, you know, things that have been frequently heard again and again and again to block from actively listening within the actual engagement, which was then resulting in much better questions and much better realizations on behalf of the person that he's talking to. And then obviously that's translating to better results. So I'm curious as to how you think about listening and any advice that you have on improving listening.

Yeah, well, I could see that happening, especially with a new guy. I mean, there's a lot of things which you guys have probably done research on beginner's mind, but somebody who's new is going to be more curious. He's not going to be reacting to sort of past patterns that, that he felt the defeat from. So the more curious you are, I mean, the more you're going to hear. It's a highly positive frame of mind. Your pattern recognition is going to be there. You can't get in your own way and be curious at the same time. Genuine curiosity is a great hack for listening and hearing the other side. So a new guy's probably going to just automatically tend into that more because he's going to be much more in the moment. He's not defeating himself based on predictable patterns and our biases, which just massively get in our way. And, you know, something might have gone wrong 1 time in 10, but our survival mechanism overreacts every time you get a whiff of that. There's so many ways that we get in our way, which requires some real attention to stay out of until you're locked into staying out of that. And even then, it still requires attention because eventually you're going to fall out of that mode if you don't do some maintenance.

Pardon the interruption, and thanks for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio. If you're listening to this, here's a bold bet I'm willing to make about you. My guess is, even though you're a high performer, you're still only performing at about half of your capacity, maybe even 10%. Now, even if I'm wrong, assuming that you're performing at less than your full potential opens up the possibility for you to improve. And that's good news. When you've already outperformed most of your peers by a long shot, you've got a skill stack why you earn what you earn, and yet you're just warming up. You know those days when you knock out more in your morning than most do in an entire day? Well, what if you could perform at that level every day, reliably, consistently? What would that unlock for you? Now, here at the Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. After training thousands of high performers, from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives, here's what we've found. Your evolutionary hardware hardwired to perform at your best. All it takes is pressing the right mental buttons and pulling the right biological levers, so to speak. It's about getting your neurobiology to work for you instead of against you. Now, if you want to make operating at a 10 out of 10 level as natural as breathing, just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll show you how to reliably trigger a flow state where you feel limitless and you do your very best work. This won't require any biohacking or nootropics or gadgets or caffeine guzzling. This higher gear is endogenous, which means it's a state that your brain produces on its own. No external stimulus is required. Just go to getmoreflow.com to learn how to get your biology working for you instead of against you so you can make peak performance second nature.

All the best. Chris, when you train people to get past their cognitive biases— years ago, I got a chance to talk to Dan Kahneman about this. What a conversation. It was amazing. What I wanted to know is, it seems like our cognitive biases, and this may be a cognitive bias itself that it seems this way, but it seems like they fall into categories, like patterns. I was talking to Dr. Kahneman, I was like, "Could you ever organize them that way? Could you trace them back to underlying neurochemistry, neural anatomy, like actual brain changes in each category of cognitive bias so we could find out are there categories of errors?" He had tried to do it at one point, but we're just not there yet in terms of our ability to measure thought in a sense. That said, he agreed with me, but he couldn't do it in any way. Do you think there's any way to broadly categorize cognitive biases as types of errors so you can help people steer around that?

Yeah, I think there has to be. And I put this caveat, probably a starting point of one of three categories, you know, for lack of a better term. I mean, we believe that there are three instinctive approaches to conflict: fight, flight, make friends. And if the world splits pretty evenly into thirds. So I think it would probably start there. And that's why I talk like, I mean, we're seeing broadly kind of three sorts of initial bad habits. I'm not sure entirely how that relates to type, but we still keep running into this thirds thing. And you can still be ridiculously unique individual, but you can get a head start based on type. I mean, how many duplicate fingerprints are there not only in the world today, but in the history of mankind? As far as we know, none. And ideally, there's roughly at least 70 billion separate fingerprints in existence on a planet today. 10 prints for each person, 7 billion people. But there are only 3 types of fingerprints. So you can start with type. And as long as that doesn't define your thinking, it can give you a head start on categories.

Do you find people who are instinctively wired for fight in a negotiation Where did they run into trouble? I'm wired to make friends. That's how I like to negotiate. When I get in a negotiation with somebody who runs away from negotiations, it's a fine situation for me. I know how to work with fear and that sort of stuff. When I come in with hardcore Type A's who just like to fight, I so hate fighting that I'm often so annoyed that I won't— I'm not even like, nope, if that's how you play, I don't want to play. There are of course situations where I'm forced into that, you know, into that category. So do you notice that certain types work better with other types? And how do you— if you're a make friends person, you're, you know, in there with a fight person, categorical solves, or it's all individual, or the kung fu works across the board?

Yeah, interesting. All right, so the make friends person is going to make more deals. They're going to tend to be not as many of them going to be home runs. Like, the fight guy just pays attention to home runs and not a batting average. But at some point in time, both the fight guy and the flight guy is a very highly analytical person, right? They both begin to notice that the make friends person is making more deals. They're not envious of the deals, but at some point in time, they begin to notice that the make friends person makes more deals. And depending upon their ability to learn, how open they are to learning, how long it takes them to figure that out. But in many cases, especially the analytical type, a lot of analysts will, the flight type will masquerade as a make friends type because they think about the process so much that they notice that the other person smiles a lot and it had an impact. That's data.

I think there's a whole breed of academic that is exactly that person. They're a flight person disguised as a make friends person. And when you try to do science with them, you see it because the stuff that should be like done, wrapped, analyzed, published, and walked away from in like 3, 4 months, like just a quick, you know, it's 3 years later and they can't get past the data. You're like, oh my God, I got conned. I got conned once again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they want to get it right. Yeah. My daughter-in-law is our chief of marketing in our company. She is the bubbliest person you ever met in your life. She laughs, she's delightful. She is one analytical assassin. She has learned to have this great bubbly exterior and she's an analyst just deep down to her bones.

So I got a question off the back of that, Chris. As a make friends person, or again, as someone maybe who's overly empathetic or overly sympathetic, how do you avoid compromise? I don't know if it's Irish guilt or what it is, but sometimes I just feel bad, you know, for getting an overly good deal. I feel like I've run, steamrolled over the other person or put them out. Is that just a simple mindset issue, or how do you think about that?

You know, it's a focus issue, and you got to get out of the focus in the moment and focus long term, because compromise long-term is bad for everybody. And if you get a make friends person realizing that they're actually hurting the other person by compromising, and they are, because that means that you didn't get anywhere near an optimal outcome. I mean, there's just nothing good about compromise. Compromise is not the same as a high-value trade. You know, a high-value trade, a guy makes shoes, goes to the dairy farmer, trades shoes for milk. He feeds his family, dairy farmer gets shoes. Compromise is like, yeah, you know what? I know I need a gallon of milk, but I'll take a half a gallon. I'll give you one shoe. So the dairy farmer, if he goes for that compromise, he walks back with one shoe, or maybe, all right, so maybe I gotta come back the next day to get the other shoe. I mean, there's nothing about compromise that's good. The high-value trade is a full set of shoes for a full gallon of milk. But somehow this idea of compromise has gotten in negotiation as an admirable trait. Our politicians want to compromise. How do you feel about compromising your integrity? If compromise was a good word, then compromising your integrity would be a good thing. And it is not. So understanding the difference between the two is where the real critical issue lies on great negotiation.

If someone comes to you and says, Something like, you know, I'm a pussy when it comes to negotiation. Usually, what are they doing wrong? Or what equates to being a pussy in negotiation? That's a phrase.

Can we back it up one step? I want to know how many people actually use that exact phrase.

I feel like it's a common one.

But you know what, they'll say it to themselves though. You know, what's the voice in your head saying? They might not come out with it, but what's in a voice in their head say? Probably if they're so relationship-oriented that they find themselves being taken hostage to the happiness of the other side on a regular basis and only see it in a moment. Because the other thing too is like, if you do that to yourself, if you didn't assert your own best interests with the other side, the other side's got to take a wild-ass guess as to whether or not they're giving you something that's any good. And you ain't never going to talk to them again. What you're going to do after you get out of that interaction is do everything you could possibly do to avoid engaging with them ever again, because the deal hurts you. It was a bad deal. And so you're hurting people in so many ways by not being assertive. It's just, you don't want to be assertive. Don't be a jerk when you're assertive, you know, don't be blunt force trauma, but people got to know where you're coming from to make a deal. So you'll deal with them again. And it's all about being taken hostage to the moment rather than understanding long-term compromise is going to hurt us both. And we're not going to want to do business with each other ever again.

That is a phenomenal quote, being taken hostage to the happiness the other side. I love that. That's great.

Chris, first of all, how familiar are you with group flows triggers?

Well, you know, there's a really interesting book called Stealing Fire that I read that enlightened me to some degree. So, uh, somewhat.

I heard something about that book. I can't remember what it was, but anyways, um, in negotiations, it's not always a possibility, is it? I'm just wondering how much some of the group flow triggers map onto— if you go into a negotiation, would they be stuff you're doing with your own team? Are they things you're playing with with the other person? Even if it could be a hostile negotiation, how do you think about those questions?

I think about them first in terms of my team. You know, how do we all get collectively our brain into this moment so that we're supporting each other? And we had in hostage negotiation a strong team game, and not every team was capable of that, but in a strong team game, it very definitely group flow. I mean, we'll do rehearsals in a moment. We'll predict dialogue, not just one dialogue, but a whole variety of dialogues. Another negotiation I'm coaching in the Philippines, all of our coaching notes were in English. The negotiation was taking place in Tagalog. We dialed into the tone of voice of our negotiator, and when he got done off the phone, he said, "Are you guys sure you don't speak Tagalog? Because you pointed to all the notes in English at exactly the right time." and we were dialed, we prepped, we'd gotten ready, we considered multiple outcomes, and then we really dialed into his tone of voice. So we would think about it very much in terms of our side supporting one another. It's something we're currently building out now for business negotiation because we're doing that with each other. If I get an important negotiation on the phone, I'll never get on there alone. I want my team members there in support of me and we dial in together. We're now actually in a process of teaching business people how to do that. Some of the stuff that we just invented in our training was completely designed for that. Group flow would've been on our side, yeah.

I have been toying with the idea of vulnerability in certain respects is almost like a meta group flow trigger in that it results in familiarity and risk, which are other group flow triggers that have been actually identified. But how do you think about vulnerability? With respect to negotiation? Is it a helpful thing to disclose?

Yeah, you know, there are different emotional reactions to the word. You know, like, unfortunately, you know, I'm a fight guy. My natural default mode is to fight. So vulnerability to me is like somebody says, "Be more vulnerable." I'm like, "Fuck you, I'm not doing that. That's a stupid thing." But then I'll tell something personal about myself. And people dial in and connect. I mean, you know, the masterclass that I just did, they teased the story out of me at the very end about getting bullied as a kid, how it affected what I prey upon. You know, I'm the sheepdog that goes after the bullies, you know, the wolves. I go after bullies. My life's dedication is really from that moment on have been to go after the big bullies that were picking on the little guys. And everybody goes like, wow, you were so vulnerable in a moment. I'm like, all right, fine.

I was vulnerable.

You know, I don't know about vulnerable. So it depends upon— I guess it's a rambling answer to vulnerability is a very good thing at triggering empathy from the other side. It's an enormously powerful tool. Some of us would pick another word for it because our instinctive reaction is like, you know, I don't know about this warm and fuzzy stuff. That's my type.

That makes total sense. Yeah, I think another word like maybe authentic, genuine, down to earth.

Yeah, authentic is a great word for me. I resonate with that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I definitely get the downsides to the word vulnerability for sure.

Which is a good point. When you pick your word, your adjective, your synonym, you probably ought to think of at least 2 others to go with it because we'd be in a conversation And if you said to me, wow, you know, I appreciate you being so vulnerable, I'd be like, screw you. But if you just said, man, I appreciate how authentic you would be, like, I'd be puffed up by that. I'd resonate with that word. So, you know, what's your adjective? Your adjective might not be the other guy's adjective.

So would you string it together? Would you be like, Chris, I really appreciate you being really vulnerable, really authentic with me today.

It was really nice. That would be a hangout. That's a step up. It's an absolute step up and you're connecting with the other side. Yeah.

That's interesting. Yeah. So I got a question for you, Chris, about conflict in general and how to— like, one of the things we teach in peak performance is the lean-in instinct and rising to the challenge and being willing to have that instinctual tendency to just go for things. With respect to conflict, how do you develop that same kind of ability to just lean into conflict, thrive in it, savor it in the same way way that you can train yourself to do that with a cold shower or a tough workout?

Repetition. It's small stakes practice for high stakes results. And then just be willing to drop into it, say, "You know what? I got nothing to lose here." When you feel you got no stake, when you're worried about something, and then you'll try it, you'll be astonished. I mean, just to get some practice in the other day, I called to get some charges taken off a credit card that I completely, completely owed. And I'm just like, you know what, I need to practice. And I'm completely good if they make me pay everything because I owe everything. And I went through it and the guy was giddy when he waived all the charges. But I just went in—

You called up your credit card company, you actually owed that money for shit you bought and just Talked him out of it?

Well, I paid for the stuff that I bought, but I just flat missed several months' payments in a row. So there was no question that all the late fees and all the interest fees were completely legitimate. And I thought, yeah, well, you know, let me get some practice in. These are legitimate charges. I can't be upset here. So let me see what happens. The guy literally, when I got off the phone, he literally said completely genuinely, "it was a pleasure helping you today." And I thought, the employee of a company I just took money from that I legitimately agreed I should have paid told me it was a pleasure to give me my money back.

That kind of gives rise to another interesting question. What is it, do you think, that was making that a pleasure for him?

Well, everybody else he talked to that day called to beat his ass. So almost every phone conversation he had was an unpleasant conversation. And then I, in fact, you know, he felt like he was genuinely doing something really great. So I danced him through it. I mean, I started out, you know, we don't price anchor, but we emotional anchor. And all this is really predictable. I'm calling somebody, customer service rep from a credit card company, and nobody calling him to be nice. And there are enough people that have gotten 10% off by being jerks. They didn't realize they could have gotten 100% off by being nice. They just remember the times they got the 10% off. So I know what this guy's— his emotions are very predictable to start out with. I call him on a phone and when he picks up the phone, I say, I'm getting ready to make your day ridiculously painful. And there's this long silence on the other end of the phone. In front of this sigh and this acquiescence because he's got to talk to me, he can't hang up, it's his job. And he goes, 'Okay, what is it?' And I go through a couple of more emotional intelligence things. I don't know what he's imagining, I just know whatever he's imagining is a lot worse than me asking for my late fees to be waived. And as soon as I get to my ask, he's like, 'Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can do that.' And now he's the happiest camper on the planet. It was the happiest he'd been all day, probably that week. And so by the time I got off the phone, it was a pleasure to help me just because he felt phenomenal when I got done.

Can you clarify? Because that's such an important point, the emotional anchor. Can you clarify what you mean by that for folks?

Yeah. Well, you know, we talked about the survival mechanisms in the brain being overly negative. If I just throw something out initially and let his imagination run wild, if I say, I'm going to make your day horrible, you're not going to like what I have to say. This is going to sound harsh. I got a lousy proposition for you. And then just shut up and let their limbic system, their amygdala, take off on them. It's 75% negative. They're going to imagine, you know, God knows what they're going to imagine, you know, depending upon the circumstances. At least they're going to imagine you berating them intensely and calling them names. That's what they brace themselves for. So whatever happens from that moment forward is better than what they brace themselves for. It's immediately a release. I know how the amygdala works. I know how the limbic system works. If I let it run wild negatively, it will. So let me emotional anchor low, then the entire experience, even if I get nothing, by the time we're done, he's going to feel better at the end than he did when the call started or what his mindset was before he picked up the phone. So I'm going to leave him in a better place than he was.

One of our foundational principles at The Collective is when people talk about peak performance, what you're really talking about is just getting your biology to work for you rather than against you. I'm listening to you talk and it's the same. The principles are— which I think now that I said out loud, of course, there's so much resonance between our work for this exact reason. It's both based on— and it's funny, I was talking to my editor, Michael Warden, really good friend of mine who I've worked with for a very long time over the weekend, and he was talking about how he took it personally. When he learned about peak performance, like you have to— earlier you said you got to tune optimism every day. It's like brushing your teeth. You just get right at that sort of thing. We talk about the positive psychology basics, which is that just that there's 6 things positive psychology said you've got to do this shit every day. Yeah, you could skip one of them every now and again and be fine. It's like if you're not doing those things, you can't even get into the peak performance conversation. Those are the stuff that you do to go from subpar back to zero. Peak performance, right, you got to be at zero or at least close to it to really start taking off because it's just— you need a stable foundation to handle the acceleration is how I think.

Can you just quickly mention those things, Stephen?

Oh, I, you know, to me they could be 6 or 7 actually. So there's sleep, obviously, hydration, nutrition, obviously, social support, need other people in our lives because otherwise lives feel too risky and messes with our head. Then gratitude, mindfulness, exercise. And then the big one is also, I guess, what Carol Dweck calls mindset. And what I learned is locus of control, which is you either believe you're in charge of your life and can affect change in your life, or you don't. And if you don't believe you can affect change in your life and change the world, you can't do anything else. Life happens to you. You're a victim and you've given up all your power, literally, which is odd, but it seems to work that way. And which is why Carol Dweck basically found the growth mindset is so foundational. People with a fixed mindset just can't get better. So there's those 6 or 7 things depending on how you look at them.

And then your ability to control it, that theme emerges disguised in a lot of ways. Like if you say to yourself, the universe has your back, well then that puts you in a positive mindset. Or, you know, I put up on my Instagram just the other day the Latin for fortune favors the bold, which means like if the universe has your back, then that means basically the batting average is in your favor. If the batting average is in your favor, you want to be successful, just keep going back to bat because it's better than 51%, which is why fortune favors the bold. They just keep getting back up to bat.

I think that's true. One of the defining traits of genius isn't that they just produce exceptional works of genius, it's that they produce a ton of work and a lot of it is crap, some of it is genius.

Yeah, exactly right. Volume, just keep going.

Yeah, the get more reps piece of advice is great on that. Like, that's— it's so simple and practical, but a lot of people don't think about calling up their credit card company to practice before a big negotiation they have anyway, professionally. And I'm curious, Chris, if you can give us a bit of a rundown on negotiation prep. Let's say, for example, someone who's listening now, within the next month has a big negotiation on pay or something with their business partner they're dreading, let's say. And how do you prep for that mentally, physically, practically?

Well, some of your most effective prep is to be willing to call out all the negatives. And what are the elephants in the room that are against you? I mean, if you could get— and just calling it out, you know, what would you want to deny? Instead of denying it, just calling out. Instead of just staying like— you come in, you want something more from your partner, you know that your partner is going to see you, you're your partner, your employer, whoever it is, you know they're going to see that as selfish. You wish they wouldn't and you'd want to say, 'Look, I don't want you to think I'm selfish here.' Whatever you'd want to deny, instead take the 2-millimeter shift and go like, 'Look, this is probably going to seem like I'm selfish.' You know, if you can make that shift, now the first few times you prepare to do that, it'll make you feel dirty. You're going to feel self-loathing. You're going to stay up late at night. It's going to make you feel so bad. Dirty and ugly. And if you finally bring yourself to do it, the result is going to be so astonishingly in your favor that you're going to literally go, I don't understand what just happened. But that's probably the single most powerful thing you could do. One of the guys we coached, big fan of our stuff, we call this the accusations audit. He was telling us in a Zoom call, he stayed up for 2 nights listing out all the negatives the other side was going to say about him, and it made him feel dirty. He's an IT guy. He needed a client to replace their server. His best outcome was that they were going to buy one server. They bought three. So that's the most powerful prep you can do. Be willing to call out the negatives just like they're there. And that you're completely fearless about them, you'll be shocked at the difference that will make. Plus, if you can reconcile yourself to that in the conversation, there's nothing they can throw at you that's going to catch you off guard.

That sounds like almost doing an emotional anchor on yourself so that you're not susceptible to it as well in a certain respect in the actual negotiation.

That's a really interesting point. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I think you're completely right on that. I'm going to pretend like I came up with that insight myself.

Feel free. No, that's great. That's super helpful, Chris. I know we're a little close to coming up on time, but one more question for you then, Stephen. I'm sure you got a couple of quick questions to wrap there. You mentioned the idea in your book of creating your own reality or kind of determining the reality or the paradigm for the negotiation. Can you talk a little bit about that and how people can do that?

Well, it's just an awareness of how prospect of loss impacts people. Fear of loss is the decision-making element. If you see things differently from somebody else, you guys are focusing on different loss. You know, and interesting, Stephen talks about conversation with Kahneman, Danny Kahneman, prospect theory, lost things twice as much as you gain. Yeah. It bends people's reality. And I can completely bend your perception based on how I pose loss, not how I pose gain, but how I pose loss. Completely change your mind, completely changed my own mind about it. So do a loss calculation, understand that's the way the brain works and tee up your thinking and what you articulate based around that.

Does that relate to frame control? Is that a form of frame control?

It's probably exactly the same thing. You know, if I'm looking to buy your company and you want an 8x multiple, and I can only give you 6x, but if you let me buy and I can give you $100 million down the road, but you want to get an 8x because your buddy got an 8x, I'll say something effective. So it sounds like you're willing to sacrifice $100 million tomorrow for the $2 million today. And you'll be like, oh yeah, that sounds stupid when you put it like that. But that's just teeing up the loss.

That's right. Yeah, I love that. You were going to mention something there, Steve?

Oh, it was my final question. I noticed in writing that the loss aversion, like if you've written something and you're doing a long book, the loss aversion is you really don't want to have to go back and rewrite it. You want it to be locked. You want it to be solid. It's done. And it produces an enormous amount of functional fixedness. You'll read over the same thing 100 times that will eventually have to get changed because it's crappy and you will not see it's crappy because you don't want to actually put all the effort in. I see it all the time when I work my way through a book, every quarter of the book, I'll go back to the beginning and start reading again just to try to get past it and say, "Okay, this will take a week and I'll just rewrite everything," because I know Other than that, because I've gotten to things where I've turned things into editors and they've come back to me and I thought it was amazing and they're going back to me and they're like, "This is just crappy." Eventually, I see that they're right. The horror question is, how the hell did I not notice before? The answer, in my opinion, and this is the question I was getting to, is that strikes me as loss aversion leading to a kind of functional fix. What I'm wondering is if you could switch this, if I can go into writing, for example, randomly and be like, "I know this is going to need a ton of work down the line, but," kind of that, to get past the cognitive bias. Does that make any sense?

Oh yeah. I mean, again, it's what loss are you focusing on? And when you don't want to go back and rewrite it, you're focused on the loss of all that time that you already invested. That's the loss you're focused on. How might I want to talk you into that or how might I want to talk myself into that? I might say, how long do I want to stare at this book on a shelf not selling?

That's a good mood about it. That's pretty funny.

Yeah, that's great.

That's a good question.

How long do I want to stare at this book on a shelf not selling?

I find that very motivating, Chris.

Yeah, the way— just imagine quickly, Stephen, you've described that before— is killing your darlings. Not the phrase you use often?

Well, that's a slightly different thing. That's not my phrase, that's Donald Bartholomew's phrase, a fiction writer who taught writing, was really smart. That's— darlings are things that are too cute. It's like alliteration where you like, you just love something because it's fancy and it's cute. And the problem with Darlings is they end up distracting the reader from the book often. They take up a lot of space in somebody's head because they're usually something beautiful that you crafted and produces a lot of emotion, whatever, but it's like a tangent and it's going to just take a lot for the reader to kind of work through it. And yeah, so there's some of that there also, but you end up having to kill those along the way too. But that's more functional fix. Fixiveness. I mean, I think it shows up in everything.

You know what I mean?

Like, I assume, you know, whatever you're good at, you have blind spots just basically because you've seen the same pattern too many times. Same thing you were talking about early on. A lot of what today's conversation has been about is high performance in the face of repeated patterns.

And avoiding functional fixiveness because you get those darlings on sales calls, you know, where you've got like a beautiful sentence in your head that you want to say when they stop talking, but you're just clinging to it, even though it's not the best thing to say. But Chris, I want to be conscious of your time. So I know you have an incredible newsletter that everyone should definitely sign up to. Can you tell us a little more about that? And then you're doing a quarterly challenge, I believe, as well. Maybe you can mention that, and then just where else people can find out and learn more.

Sure. The newsletter we put out, The Edge, is succinct and actionable. And free. I had an FBI colleague used to like say, if it's free, I'll take 3. But the most important thing is it's succinct, actionable, comes out on Tuesday mornings. It'll tee you up Tuesday morning. That's when people are kind of getting into the week. You get your Monday behind you, tune you up for negotiation on Tuesday morning. Short, sweet article coming into your email inbox. Plus it's a gateway to everything that we do. We've got training announcements, it's a gateway to the website. Whatever challenge you're faced with, we've written an article in The Edge in the past, which you can also search to look for. It doesn't matter what kind of— put the keywords in and search on our site. You'll find an article specifically tailored for what you're dealing with right now. Best way to sign up to subscribe. We've got a text to sign up function. You text the words Black Swan Method lowercase doesn't matter, space between the words, to the number 33777. And that's 3-3-777. If you put Black Swan Method in, shot it out to that number, you'll get a response back asking for your email. You're off to the races. We got a ton of stuff that's free. You're going to want to get to the point where you get to some of our more complicated stuff, like one of our in-person training sessions, which we'll resume as soon as we're past to social distancing, but you gotta be up to speed before you come to one of those sessions anyway. So the book and the newsletter will take you a long way.

Great. That's super helpful, Chris. Thanks a million for that. And yeah, the book is just phenomenal. I absolutely loved it.

And you know, if I may, you did mention our— we've got quarterly, we're doing a lot of stuff online now. We've got quarterly themes. It's a monthly call actually with a quarterly theme that you can tap into online. And that is selling. I mean, helping people with the challenges that they're faced with right now. So that, that a lot of people are finding that very helpful, especially with today's. We're always in a dynamic environment, no less so than today. I mean, it is even more dynamic.

Super. That's great. Thanks for those, Chris. And thanks a million for your time. Hopefully we'll have you on again. Super interesting and helpful.

Yeah, because this was amazing.

You guys are great conversation. You really are. I take away stuff every time that I read something Stephen's written or hear something that he says. I appreciate what you're putting forth in the world. Thank you.

I feel the same way about you. And I, you know, as I said, I think we're playing the same game, right? It's the like, just figure out how shit works. Don't argue with it. Just, oh, this is how it works?

Okay, cool.

We're gonna do this.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Agree.

Love that. Thank you, Chris.

All right, guys, take it easy. Thanks for having me on.

Thanks a million.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. And one of the biggest challenges of high performers is a lack of time or inefficient time management. Now, without leverage on your time, it doesn't matter the size of opportunities that come your way. It doesn't matter how excited you are about pursuing your goals. Time scarcity or poor time management blocks you from performing at your best. But here's the good news: you don't necessarily need more time. What matters is more flow. Research shows that a flow state makes you up to 500% more productive within the tiny bit of time that you have. Flow is the experience of being in the zone. It's a state of total immersion and focus where you feel limitless and you perform at the highest level. Flow Research Collective is founded by Pulitzer Prize nominee Steven Kotler, and we've trained thousands of high achievers to free up more time through flow. Here's the sad truth that we've seen: most skilled professionals find flow by accident. It's intermittent and inconsistent instead of inevitable. But what happens when you make flow a readily accessible and automatic part of your day, as natural to you as breathing, eating, or tying your shoes, for example? Well, for starters, time constraints start to matter a whole lot less. Now, multiplying your productivity by 5x sounds hyperbolic, so let's just back up a minute. Even if you only double what you can currently get done in a given day, wouldn't that be worth learning how to access flow reliably and consistently? This is exactly what we train together at the Flow Research Collective. Just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll train you in the same protocols we teach to Navy SEALs and to executives in the boardrooms of Google and Facebook. What you'll learn is backed by research out of Harvard, DARPA, Deloitte, and others. Tapping this high level of productivity through flow and freeing up your time exponentially is a measurable outcome you can expect. It's time to get your time back. Just go to getmoreflow.com right now.

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