how do I negotiate a better salary boss is there listening and I said ask him this question Chris Boss retired FBI special agent former lead International kidnapping negotiator an author of never split the difference we don't really see the great negotiators as great negotiators one of the greatest negotiators got to be Oprah Winfrey what
are women doing wrong or what can they do better in negotiation you're out of order on the sequence can you negotiate with a narcissist of course you can negotiate with a narcissist one of the things we advise people to do is we're thrilled to announce that we've reached 3 million subscribers we're incredibly grateful for each and every
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episodes if you think of someone who would love this episode send it to them to make their day the number one Health and Wellness podcast J shett J shett he won the only J shett why did you become a lead negotiator originally I was on a SWAT team I was uh scheduled to be on a SWAT team with the Kansas City Missouri Police Department I was on a SWAT team
when I joined the FBI and I reinjured my knee and I love crisis response because I think a comfortable inaction is one of the Banes of human existence we got to make decisions and so when I was on a SWAT team crisis response you got make a decision you know they can't let's let's sit back and wait and see what happens that's not
really the way you approach a crisis so when I was on uh the SWAT team you know we had hostage negotiators they went along with the SWAT guys I didn't really know what they did you know we we'd be out there in the cold and the rain they'd be inside someplace warm but I wanted to stay in crisis response so I thought yeah you know I could do that
how hard could it be it's my son and I Brandon I've always joked that the Voss family model is how hard could it be which is similar to a redneck famous Last Words which are hey watch this it's always going to be more complicated than you expect but I got into it and I loved it I it it uh it was more satisfying than SWAT ever was and SWAT
was great but hostage negotiation when I stumbled over it the universe sort of pushed me in that direction it was a push that I needed and I've enjoyed it ever since and you never felt scared there wasn't the fear there wasn't the difficulty in your mind before you got involved that this could be something that would be extremely
difficult potentially painful challenging no because first of all I was rejected for the negotiation team I I was in fact eminently unqualified but I went to the head of the program in New York a woman running the team and she said you know yeah you're not qualified go away but I said all right so there's got to be something I could do what is it she said
go volunteer on a suicide hotline I'm like all right so I went to the suicide hotline to learn not to help people helping people with secondary it's good secondary but I went there to learn and I was fascinated by it and so then I'm teachable I'm coachable I learned their process and I saw how quickly empathy emotional intelligence accelerated outcomes
positive outcomes and so I wasn't scared as a hostage negotiator because I'd already learned in a process that I believed in I knew it was a highly successful process so when I started hostage negotiation I just leaned into a process that I had was familiar with and had been proven to me worked walk us through what a conversation on a suicide hotline
sounds like because I imagine that being highly stressful you're dealing with someone who's in a high state of panic there's so much uncertainty walk us through what that kind of a conversation looks like and what you learned well they get you used to it very closely supervised so I think I was a little unsteady at the beginning so for
whatever reason I naturally lapsed into what I refer to is the late night FM DJ voice and the first call I just said hello this is helpline now that has a tremendously calming effect on people and afterwards the supervisor said your voice was great that was great you started out great and I remember thinking like wow I don't I don't even know what I did I'm have to
go back to it so you want to start with a calming soothing voice and then no matter what they say you want to put a label in hostage negotiation we call it emotion labeling in that Black Swan method we just call it labeling put a label on emotion that you're hearing doesn't matter what it is just label it now since they're in
crisis the emotions probably going to be negative uh and in point of fact we're all driven by negative thoughts we're 75% negative our survival mechanism that we wake up with every day to survive the caveman had to be negative the optimistic cave man said you know yeah you know Chris walked in here yesterday and he never came out but I'm optimistic
I'm going to go in today too and I that guy got eaten too but the negative guys Shi away and we've inherited that wiring and I remember one night in particular this guy's really frantic sounded sounded super frantic says you know I just I I I need to put I need your help putting a lid on this day I got to put a lid on this day so so I
just said you sound frantic and immediately came down there's a neuroscience reason for that now that you know we never knew then just simply calling out a negative emotion is the most effective way to deactivate it so he came down and then through the course of the conversation I just used three labels he was he was a guy who was paranoid he
getting a lot of support from his family he said you know I'm I'm going on a car trip tomorrow I just you know I just you know and I know my family's helping me and and I just you know I just I need my family's help but I'm worrying about it tonight and I can't get to sleep so I I hit him with a label that somebody had once hit me with in a
conversation I was telling my friend how close I felt to my family but I didn't say it explicitly it was strongly implied and my friend said to me sounds like your family's really close and I remember how good it felt in that moment and I've never forgotten that so this guy's describing to me how much support he was getting from his family how they
were always there for him it sounded like they're close so I said that exact line I said it sounds like your family's really close and I felt the strength come back in his voice immediately so then he went on to tell me about how he'd been battling paranoia and how hard he was working and he struck me as determined so I simply said you sound
determined and he he said yeah just like that yeah I am determined I'm going to go on a car trip tomorrow I'll be fine thanks for everything you did hung up the phone that's not every conversation but that's a way they're supposed to go you know you call out what you're hearing and it really helps people sort of selflevel cuz you're great sounding board and
you're picking out the negatives and de activ them and the positives and reinforcing them just by observing them the reason why I find that so fascinating is because I was thinking so many of us deal with our friends yep in that sort of an environment you may get a phone call from a friend who's like panicking yeah they've just ended a
relationship they've gone through a rejection a failure whatever it may be and our got instinct is to try and solve that problem and to fix it for them and fill in the blanks when actually what you're saying is the ability to just notice what they're experiencing what they're feeling and being able to call it out and label it as you rightly said
right that's actually giving them the tools to make sense of it for themselves yeah exactly and it's it's restoring their tools and then it's also they feel very self-empowered like the problem with giving advice is the person receiving it doesn't feel empowered they might not be able to sort through it emotionally and so then when you're not there they're
lost again they didn't feel like they got to the answer on their own a great sounding board simply helps as a guide helps them get to the answer on their own and then inside they say what wait I you know I got here on my own once I could do it again whereas if you give me the advice when you're not around I might be lost yeah there's a famous quote that
says something like good leaders make you believe in them great leaders make you believe in you yeah and this idea that if someone's leading the conversation well the person's walking away with self-belief yes and a confidence in what they have yeah before we dive into the actual tools and breaking down of a negotiation I find that most people try
to avoid a negotiation because they see it as conflict yes they see it as an argument they see it as a potential debate and most of us are trying to avoid conflict at all costs and so even if it's like your plumber and they quote you a price we're scared of negotiating because we're scared of that turning into an altercation right or if
someone's trying to sell us something at a store when we we're scared to have that conversation about a discount or whatever it may be right walk us through that fear what have you noticed about where does that fear come from that we all carry of I don't want to get into a conflict I don't want to negotiate I'll just go with what you want because it's
easier to be a people pleaser myself and my team we we believe and we got enough anecdotal data that the world splits up evenly into three types fight flight make friends assertive analyst accommodator and we've seen this show up globally it's disconnected from gender ethnicity religion so two out of three don't like conflict the analyst and the
accommodator analyst is um thinks of Life very much like chess lots of moves lots of percentages an analyst want to think everything through all the possibilities and then put percentages on it and conflict is one option and it tends to be highly destructive highly inefficient and so the analyst doesn't particularly like conflict because it
seems to be very inefficient and ineffective and there are far more better ways to communicate so they're avoiding Conflict for that reason the relationship oriented person the accommodator conflict is just ugly it makes them feel bad it it sort of pollutes their existence and they see that as a much higher cost place a very high value on
relationships optimism being very hope-based so they're going to avoid it for those reasons that you know they want to feel connected to you and conflict doesn't make them feel connected to you now the third type the assertive you know they love it they see it as combat they love it they get into it they recover from the conflict very
quickly I happen to be a natural-born assertive Donald Trump is a poster child for assertives it's just one of the three times and love combat but then don't really pay attention to the long-term costs of being openly aggressive because the you know the the adrenaline hit in the moment a victory tends to overshadow how the losses pile up so we want you
know two out of three we want to avoid that so the real challenge though is we got to collaborate but negotiation has this feeling to it that it's the loudest most aggressive voice in the room the guy who kicks the across the room to get his point screams uh slams their hands on the table storms out you know this this
thing that actually happens a tendency to pollute the collaborative environment and we don't really see the great negotiators as great negotiators you know in my view one of the greatest negotiators got to be Oprah Winfrey nobody sees her conflict oriented that her list of great negotiations her life's achievements based on collaboration and being very
positive and then if you were to try to consider the context of her life having gained tremendous success in an environment filled with maybe some of the most volatile people on Earth Hollywood celebrities what Hollywood celebrities is mad at Oprah you know what rock fight has she gotten into you know who's thrown shade like it is not there
simultaneously her financial success success in the different phenomenal interviews she's gotten they were no hold no holds bards interviews you know you know one of my favorites is uh Lance Armstrong interview I I happen to be acquainted with Lance I like him a lot but she there was no punches pulled there that was a negotiation going into
that so spectacular negotiation is really uh invisible well we don't know that because it's invisible we don't think of Oprah as a great negotiator Warren Buffett we don't think of him is a great negotiator and they have to be so that's we just not aware of what great negotiation really looks like because it looks like great collaboration great navigation as soon
as you can change the definition from win lose to Great collaboration now people are interested you know I'll Define negotiation is great collaboration long-term relationship where we're both ecstatic about our success and if you can reframe it like that then people are a lot more interested in negotiation I think that's one of the reasons the book has
succeeded because it's not a series of stories where we beat anybody sometimes we had to force collaboration with a highly competitive negotiator that was what kidnapping was about I'm going to force the kidnapper to collaborate I'm going to force that guy from Al-Qaeda into a collaborative conversation but I'm not going to hit
back walk me through how you force that person into collaboration and not hit back because I think you're right I think the overarching belief we have is oh we got to beat them we got to find a way to get what we want from them like that's what you think of a negotiation even in normal terms let alone those high stakes but how do you do that in
that scenario one of my favorite conversations describing this a number of years ago I got hired to train a hostage negotiation team in the Middle East and the country that I was in um very pro-western country a mus you know a sensibly a Muslim country but really um tolerant of all religions as most of them are so I get brought in to talk to
the shik that's the head of counter terrorism and I'm told in advance uh the shake if we have if if Al-Qaeda comes here and grabs people or if any terrorist organization comes here and grabs people understand the shake wants to kill him the people of his country are his children and he wants to protect his children at all costs so you sit down with the
shake he's going to want to know how you're going to protect his people so I get a meeting with this guy brilliant brilliant young man brilliant and he looks at me and he says all right what are you going to teach my guys to say and I looked at him and I said they're going to say to to the terrorist kidnapper on the other end of the phone
what you're doing is a great thing and his mouth fell open and I said now I got you cuz you can't wait to hear what I'm going to say next you were so caught off guard you were in complete curiosity mode you're hanging on every syllable that comes out of my mouth and that's what I'm going to teach you guys to do and he went oh you're hired but so what what is driving the
other side in their mind how do they see what they're doing what do they see as a justification for it like so much conflict will go away if I can simply recognize what you see as the reason for your problem without agreeing with it probably about two years ago myself and a friend uh Nicole Benham were hosting a rooman clubhouse at the time you know
the Israel Palestine it was is the it was the water done version of what's going on with Hamas now Israel had started shelling the Gaza Strip because Hamas in fact is hiding weapons in hospitals and schools in the Press office and Israel gets tired of it after a while they start shelling those offices so it's a milder version of
what's going on right now and and but the the vitri all going on online was huge and Nicole calls me up she says you know we we got to find a way to help settle this out I said all right well we'll do a room on clubhouse and we'll invite people favoring uh the Palestinians and people favoring the Israelis on and they can talk it out
with one rule one caveat before you say whatever you have to say of about what you think of the other side you got to summarize where they think they're coming from what their point of view is and as as soon as you get it all clear from them as soon as the other side effectively says that's right that's how I see it you could say whatever you
want now did we come to any agreements that night no but what was more important was there were no arguments as soon as somebody tries to articulate how the other side sees things it actually makes you smarter I once heard a guy say empathy is a species of reason you know you're analyzing where the other side's coming from and in
attempting to genuinely analyze it you start deactivating the reasons for the escalation because the reasons for the escalations is to at least they don't feel heard let me take that one off the table you don't feel heard now we can be in a position where we could actually talk about this so I'm interviewing I got this this thing on Fireside it's social media app
what it is is is largely I have guests in it's live Q&A bring a woman on head of a coffee company and she says I use your Israel Palestinian thing to um negotiate a resolution between two my top Executives they're at each other's throats and I love them both and I can't lose either one so remember what we did on you did on Israel
Palestine and I brought him in the room and I said okay you could say whatever you want about the other side but first you got to summarize their position you got to summarize how they see things and what is motivating them and she said two things she said we resolved it on the spot and she said it was such a moment that I still cry when I think about it
so you know what's all this rambling about take a shot at summarizing how the other side sees things if it doesn't solve the problem on the spot it at a minimum brings you closer together and we're all better off closer together yeah I think it's such a powerful skill whether it's in a marriage whether it's in a a friendship whether it's in the corporate
setting it's such a need and I find like as life has got faster and faster and faster we have less and less time to summarize and so what we end up doing is we just end up reading someone else's summary right that's what we're doing online on social media is we're reading someone else's summary and Analysis of a highly comp situation and more often
than not we're reading the summary that supports our Viewpoint not the Viewpoint of the other and so now we have less time we're reading someone else's Words which means we're not even doing the complex computation of trying to understand and comprehend what someone's going through yeah hey you're just catching me as I have my midday pickme
up I'm sure you've heard about juny rad and I put all of our love into creating this amazing drink it's full of New Tropics and adaptogens great for that little boost of energy enhance focus and a happy mind and guess what it's only five calories and absolutely no sugar I hope you're going to try it out it's available right now at Target if you're
a Target shopper head there right now and at Sprouts as well this summer go grab your juny how do you encourage people in this busy fastpac you know we're trying to be efficient environment to actually slow down and embody these skills that actually require us to use our brains most of the time we you got to walk somebody through something and and Coach
them into applying it because we don't see it around us is the first problem is we're not seeing anybody do this effectively exactly that's a great Point yeah so we we got no models for it y you know all we got is models for um instigators the the the professional agitators professional agitators are everywhere they're not a majority but
there's enough of the agitators out there they tend to get tend to get a lot more of the traction how would you define a professional agitator just for people to I I totally agree yeah well it's it's those in the media that are clickbait oriented agitation oriented it's highly profitable short term you know you're you're getting
advertising dollars based on how many views how many clicks you're getting and it's so overwhelming and we're so tired of it the the other thing we're so tired of it I you one of the things that I'm more most fascinated with right now is you know the hak Tua girl MH like people are so tired of negativity that anything that's like positive and fun and refreshing and
catches them off guard like s i I checked her Instagram today she got like 2 million followers with 36 posts and she's been there for 15 minutes but I think it's we have such an appetite for something that's not negative and not designed to be uh agitating and a very small number of agitators can turn a peaceful demonstration into a raging mob
and so then they get clicks over that and most of our media is guilty of that you know nobody's got neither the left nor the right has a monopoly on agitation so Fox is guilty of it CNN is guilty of it and they get they get short-term profits they get a lot of clicks they get a lot of views so I think we're not we're not seeing the summaries we're not
seeing the demonstration of understanding but in reality it accelerates us to a positive outcome by probably about a rate of about 14 times faster and it's invisible it's astonishing and so since it was invisible we didn't really see it when it happened um one of the guys on my team Derek gun wrote a book called about leadership applying tactical empathy to
leadership it's called ego Authority failure he's got a great stat at the very beginning of it where Rapport based interviews and law enforcement gets you to an agreement SLC confession 14 times faster than anything else but nobody knows it h it happened so then to get good at it you're never going to get congratulated in the moment that's the
other thing it's in the moment it's not that satisfying very much the way the slot machines are satisfying in Vegas you know you lose 83 out of 84 times on those slot machines but the the winds are so satisfying that's all you notice so to be really good at this you you focus more on how suddenly we're in a better place and nobody's
congratulating you because they didn't see it happen so it really has to be intrinsically self-satisfying the reward is getting it done faster and better very few people are going to congratulate you on it in the moment yeah I I think that's the only mindset shift we need is that if we want a real resolution we want to feel like we've
really accomplished something we're really moving forward it requires us to move from that point of view of if we negotiate effectively if I take time to summarize the other person's opinion and they take the time to do mine we're actually going to get somewhere even if it's a slower process even if it's a harder process how do you prepare for a
negotiation because I think a lot of us also think great I'm going to walk in there I'm going to try to figure it out I'm going to say something but walk us through how you'd prepare for some of the biggest negotiations in your life what do they look like well I'm going to I'm going to think of how I would summarize their perspective that's going that's going to
get really get my wheels turned I'm going to get a lot of Clues how do they see things I've done it enough that it's almost become second nature you got to do it a lot like anything else it simply requires practice there's this magic hack for Life called gratitude H it's amazing what a difference it could make and it sounds
stupid I was once in a highly adversar negotiation um the other side was it wasn't adversario the other side was very deceptive which is one one of my buttons you know I I don't like deception one of my main currencies is integrity so it's a violation one of my core VI and but thinking that put me in a very negative place and I thought well how' I get into
this in the first place the only reason they're trying so hard to do this deal with us is because we're good uh it was a training company that wanted to make our training offering part of their platform so I thought this is a byproduct is Success I'm actually lucky to even be having this conversation so you know I found gratitude in the moment and then it
opened up my mind because you're 31% positive smarter in a positive frame of mine so you know whatever your hack is and different people have different ways gratitude exercises first in the morning meditation whatever you could do to clear out your natural negative survival mechanism so that you can be more appreciative of life and that's one of
the ways and then if I think about that then I can summarize your perspective and another thing that I'll usually do is I'll think of the questions that I might normally ask to elicit a yes and I'll switch them so that I'm eliciting a no do you agree because do you disagree there's a pavlovian response to yes and no people if they say yes they feel like
they're being led into a trap whether they are or not is doesn't change the fact that as a general term somebody's trying to trap you is going to litter that path with yeses So when you say something like does that make sense and they say yes that's moving in the wrong direction well it's it's going to trigger that pavlovian response
because the person that cheated him said something to the effect of would you like something for free would you like to make more money would you like to live in a big house on a hill and that led him into a trap previously so it doesn't matter that you you have integrity it doesn't matter that you are not doing it it got done to them enough
times already that they're going to have a negative reaction the ridiculous flip side is the pavlovian response to saying no is that people feel protected they feel safe when they say no would you like no when I when my son was a teenager dad can I know but then I I looking back on I realized every time I said no I felt all
right so I walled myself off from being walked into anything here and I would look back at him and say okay so now what was it that you wanted now I could hear more having protected myself so I may say to you you know look does this sound like a stupid idea and then you won't have been triggered and you'll listen to me you'll actually to some degree listen with a
critical mindset and you'll think well you know no I don't I don't I don't have any problem with that but your follow on is actually what's important now I don't think it's a stupid idea but I think here are some things that I want you to think about you give me those freely now we're in an actual collaboration so your original prep as
question how do I prep for negotiation I'm going to try to do what I can put myself in a positive frame of mind work at summarizing the other side's perspective think of a couple questions where the answer is no where it moves things forward as opposed to the yes and I've avoided that psychological feeling of the other side feeling I'm trapping
him yeah those are the things to do what are some of the big mistakes you've seen people make walking in preparing for a negotiation well the inadvertent thing to start off with is you know number one they're goingon to they're going to um ask a yes oriented question and then number two they're going to make their pitch the value proposition you know you
know I I I got to tell you what's valuable here now that's important but you're out of order on the sequence because the other side's dying to have their say too if you go first you kind of rolled over but the whole time you're going they're thinking but I got something I want to say I got something I want to say it's a voice in the back of their
head which is interfering in them listening to you so I'm I'm going to start out by trying to hear you out first I'm I'm I'm going to want the information from you I'm going to want your perspective I'm also going to want to know what you think is important going into this conversation let's say we're collaborating to do a deal
or you and I are significant others and we want to go get something to eat I'm going to want to know what's on your mind first because that's the order of priority for you then I'm going to know on my list what matches up with what you want instead of maybe I start out with something that's number one on my list but it's number nine on
yours now you're distracted by the other eight things that you think are important I'm going to try to dial into you as quickly as I can cuz I want to talk about what you think's important because that starts our collaboration so really understanding where the other side is coming from is is information you need for the analyst and for the
relationship oriented person makes your other person feel good so you're building a relationship have you had I'm sure in your experience you've been speaking to such incoherent individuals on the other side that there isn't a one to n on their list there's like a z to a right like it's it's Topsy Turvy because they're not coming at it from a logical
rational a lot of the people sometimes when we're negotiating we feel like what are you talking about like what language are you speaking in and we can feel that even with our partners people can feel that at work where it's just like I'm talking to a toxic individual who has no idea what they want they're so off The Rocker like you know when you're
speaking to someone on the other side who you actually can't figure out and you're feeling like I can't even read this person how do how do you navigate that well I I liberate myself from the idea of rationality or logic I really see those two things as beauty beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so when I let go of that and then I think in terms of
patterns and then other than someone who's actually paranoid schizophrenic whether wiring is actually wrong and someone who's suffering from from lame layman's terms wiring issues versus chemical issues what we used to refer to as manic depressive or bipolar you know they change those terms all the time those are principally chemical
imbalances paranoid schizophrenia somebody's actually hearing voices it's a problem but you don't know what the voices are saying that those people are in fact unpredictable they manifest themselves very rarely in hostage negotiation we also found out that unfortunately um one of the downsides of being a meth addict someone could be clean for years but the
methamphetamines does actual damage to the wiring and they'll have an episode when they've been sober for years that mimics a paranoid schizophrenic so the people that are actually messed up in that fashion are very rare mostly it's chemical imbalance and if you look at it like that and then you say all right so they patterns here let me look for the
patterns and then they're eminently predictable if you let go go of the Judgment that it's rational or irrational and you just start looking for patterns and then listening for them now they could be so upset with negative emotions that they are in a state of confusion very much like the guy that called in on a hotline that night so I'm
just going to I'm I'm going to sort of pick off that negativity one at a time and I'm going to feed it back and I know it's going to clear your head in a business scenario or even a personal scenario people who feel under tremendous amount of pressure tend to be very demanding and and can be very attacking which feels predatory it even feels like you know
the magic phrase gaslighting when in fact they're under a massive amount of pressure a company that I just did uh some training for coaching and training they're based out of the Middle East but their executives are international in nature and they happen to be in a discussion in a dealing South Africa and the person on the other side
of the table they called a bully very attacking not sticking to the written agreement so of course they're in a negotiation the lawyers on the table side that I'm coaching what's the lawyer going to do he's going to open his laptop he's going to read you the agreement which does not help it's a great way to pour gasoline on the fire
let me remind you of what our agreement says thinking that would help so the guy now the guy gets worse and he starts adding profanity and telling him that he's going to rewrite the agreement they keep their Poise and when you're being attacked that much if you don't come up with a great thing to say the most graceful the smartest move is to withdraw quietly
so the lead said it's probably not a good time for this discussion we'll be happy to leave guy settles down a little bit they hit him with a couple of labels they get to a good place in a conversation but then on the way out he says to the guy sounds like you're under a lot of pressure and a guy completely relaxed he says oh man he
says you don't understand what's going on over here I I've got all these demands I got people coming at me from all sides and the recognition of the pressure that it sounds like you're under a lot of pressure for someone he perceived as an attacking gaslighting bully the guy is being driven by an internal pressure that he was having
trouble keeping control over and that changed everything that offhand label and it turned everything around can you negotiate with the narcissist if you look for the patterns and then you know the narcissist are demanding so short answer is yes but how you going to do it you got to make what you want the path to where they want to get ultimately narcissists are
self-centered so let them be self-centered or whatever it is that they're after make your want a step on the journey to their goal and if you can change the sequencing around that's how you can get the upper hand on a narcissist one of the if you're a h of course you can negotiate with a narcissist if you've been trained by the
Black Swan group you know Chris Voss yeah we'll train you we'll teach you yeah it's whether you want to or not it's whether you want to negotiate with a narcissist in your life well that and actually that's a great secondary Point yeah because this is going to be repetitive Behavior one of the things we advise people to do is terminate the relationship
you know are they dragging you down you can do a couple things to try to the psychologist or therapist would call it boundary setting sometimes you set a good hard boundary and the other side says oh I'll respect that they're looking for you to set gently not aggressively they're looking for that boundary just set a couple boundaries gently politely
but firmly and find out if they're going to straighten up then you can continue the relationship you make an attempt to sent the boundaries a couple of gentle attempts they don't pay any attention to it whether it's personal or professional that's a preview of the future you don't need to be you don't need to be attached to that you're not
going to be who God put you here to be by being attached to people to drag you down and I think a lot of us do that for good intention very good reason and we're not required to continue once you know be willing to be smarter today than you were yesterday do we ignore the patterns is that what it is I think we do I think a lot of us do
for again for different reasons the relationship oriented people the accommodators they're very hope based and they have this tremendous um Faith In Hope so to speak and there's a lot of feedback in that you know I think the world is largely a very supportive place if the world wasn't largely on our side we wouldn't have continued as a species we'd be dead we'd have gone
extinct you know we're not the most durable you know we don't we don't have uh you know fair fight with most of the Predators on the planet with just what God gave us we lose most of the time so that means that uh I I'm a firm believer that the world is largely very supportive and on our side so that that reinforces the accommodators cuz the
numbers are on their side they're just not real good in the anywhere from 10 to 30% of the people that are that are that are situations that are harmful so we have reason for sticking in there and then allowing wisdom to get us smarter as we go then we eliminate more and more the people that are dragging us down if you feel like you're one of
those people that people always take advantage of I can imagine a lot of people that are listening may feel like they've been in accommodated but now they've started to feel like people always take advantage of me I feel used right I I feel like I'm the one who's always getting the short end of the stick like how do you shift that pattern
for your life because you've now made people believe that that's who you are right and all of a sudden now you want to change who you are how do you go about that transition and shift in a healthy way so that you no longer feel that everyone's taking advantage of you yeah the healthy way to start with is first the recognition is that you're not
really helping them you know if they're taking advantage of you you're effectively a crutch and nobody becomes their best self by leaning on a crutch so not only you're not helping yourself you're not really helping them to do the best for them is to let them get out there and fend fend on their own you know let let them deal with it they
they need they need to deal with reality you're not helping them by letting them lean on you all right so let's say you're willing to accept that now how do you how do you get out of it and again um I'm going to refer it to one of my negotiation Heroes Oprah Winfrey I'm in a discussion with one of her top Executives and I was telling this
executive uh yeah our philosophy is the last impression is the lasting impression so always end positively no matter what but end and she said yeah that's exactly Oprah's philosophy she says in the entertainment industry it's usually in in and a limo out in a taxi with Oprah it's in an a limo out in a limo no matter what at the end of any
relationship we have to make people remind them that we love them and that we value them and then we have to effectively we might need to part company and I'm having a conversation confrontational confrontation Oprah Winfrey is taking people to the Woodshed but she does it in such a positive way and a way that she underscores to them
that they feel valued that they're okay with it in this conversation she finishes by saying like whatever you do is your decision and I want you to know that if you decide not to participate in this interview I will always love you I will always be supportive of you I will always have your back back and so that was her way of saying it's my way of the
highway and if you choose the highway I'm still on your side but we are going to part company at this point in time and finding a way to gently say enough should you ever change your mind I'm here for you and then with wrw and that's it always feels hard to do that because somewhere deep down inside of us we don't want it to be the end of the road
we we want to we want to be hopeful we want to save we want to accommodate we want to mold we want to become whatever the other person needs us to be and we keep doing that we keep shape-shifting yeah the desire to take yourself and them to a higher existence to a higher level of being to you know to to make the the unique and amazing dent in the
universe that each one of us is capable of doing and we love bringing that out on other people it's very I'm I'm sure when people meet you they feel like they can learn from you how to control a situation but you don't strike me as someone who believes that is the way it ever goes and that that's what you're trying to teach but I can imagine
people come up to you and companies come up to you and be like Chris basically show us how to control this in our favor some do yeah yeah again about a third you know the assertives love control yeah how do you reframe someone who comes with that control mindset who thinks that you can control I've had I've had coaching clients I don't coach
in what you do but I've even had clients who like Jay teach me the right thing to say like you always feel like you know the right thing to say can you teach me how to say that to someone in my life so that they do what I want and I'm like wait a minute that's that's not how it's meant to go right exactly all right so the secret to gaining the upper hand
in in a negotiation is given the other side the illusion of control and then people will say like oh that's better than control so that may be one of the things that cracks them open another thing is control is highly inefficient TimeWise like let's say I could control you completely I gotta be with you all the time to do that you know I I could
control maybe one person I can positively influence a lot of people if I give up the need for control cuz I'm going to need you to be self-directed I'm going to need you to be able to think for yourself there's going to be a point in time when we're not together if I'm not there to control you you're going to fall apart but if I collaborate with you if I
Empower you when I'm not there you're going to think for yourself is uh phrase batteries included so to speak which have been has been passed on to me by some very smart people I need people who are batteries included we all need partners that are batteries included we're aligned on core values and we get more done
because I don't have time to control everybody so when you start understanding the cost of control then you start thinking like yeah you know I there's got to be a better way and it's guidance it's helping people think it's making them feel empowered to find the right outcome you talk about mirroring as being a really good technique in trying to get
to that collaborative same page space how do you do that in an authentic genuine way is negotiation ever genuine and authentic or is it always three steps ahead three moves ahead yeah well great question um the negotiation skills and tools are neutral so intention has a smell am I trying to collaborate with you or am I trying to take advantage of you a
scalpel and one person's hand Saves a Life in another person's hands it takes a life MH so first of all look at effective negotiation skills which emotional intelligence is effective negotiation tactical empathy effective negotiation what's your intention like my intention is for us to have a great long-term relationship highly profitable through the
infinity and if somebody's arguing with me I'll say like look all right so I would love for this moment to be something that we look back on 10 years from now this argument we look back at only 10 years from now as to the moment we discovered collaboration and made both of us Prosper for 10 years that's also changing somebody's
frame from short term to long term to what's my intention and my intention is long-term collaboration like there's there's some sales methodologies that say your money's in their pocket it's your job to get it out that's not long-term collaboration and you're going to sense that like no matter how Charming I am in the moment no matter how much fun I am to be with
no matter how much I make you laugh you're going to notice a diminishment of your pocket before long and this is coming to an end so if my intention instead is for this to be great for us to have a ball for this to be this adventure that we both benefit from now you're going to E even if you say oh that was a label I heard that
before or you just used a mirror on me you know you asked me about mirrors that was a mirror then you're not going to mind because I'm trying to take you to a better place let's let's take a scenario like let's say someone's negotiating for a promotion or a higher salary let's go down that road and act out what that would look like so I'm doing
a training for a company probably about two three years ago got the CEO and all his top salespeople on the zoom call we get to Q&A and one of them says how do I negotiate a better salary boss is there listening and I said ask him this question how can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to the Strategic future of this
organization and he interrupts immediate I says I wish everybody here had ask me that question so the job negotiation is really about our future collaboratively now as much as you'd love for it to be about what your contribution up to now has been your contribution up to now your boss going to see that you're even here's what I asked you to do
here's what I agreed to pay you for doing it here we are you did it I paid you we're we're even that's how your boss is going to say it your boss worried about the future he worried about his own future her own future worried about the organization's future if you shift to how do I make everybody successful but not just in our routine
stuff in the most important stuff here you show them two things you're a team player you're going to put the team first and you want want the high-profile stuff you want to play in a championship your goal is to win a championship my goal isn't to win a scoring title my goal is to win a Team Championship now suddenly it's about the future a prosperous future like what I
mentioned before we're now negotiating a prosperous future together that changes everything yeah I love that I mean just hearing you say that I was like the amount of times in my head I'm thinking as a leader like I want people to focus on business critical activities like I want people to report to me on things that are like actually critical to
impact and having an effect and moving the needle as opposed to yeah we we're doing the you know we're doing the little stuff everyone needs to do it but as a leader you want your team to be focused on and moving towards those bigger things yeah yeah and and it's hard because me included when I was a employee too it's you want to be
rewarded for your effort you just want to be rewarded for your energy and showing up and and all of these things but that isn't how reward generally works at least in the workplace well not the ma maximum reward you know some some reward works that way yeah much of that is very valuable um you know can you follow directions
like my girlfriend Wendy uh members of her family they got this they got this great Camp upstate New York it's a wonderful place we're up there visiting the end of the season every year they bring family up and they get together and so they kind of they see me as maybe this you know this white collar guy you know who never got his hands dirty headb
outside which is is not my background but they're see me an FBI agent you know you're probably you're white cge you you never got dir so uh we're getting ready to get out of there and and a Gentleman who runs it very generous guy he says you know you're welcome back anytime and so I say you know I'd come to work for you any day cuz I like to be
useful and he goes really come to work for me huh what do you know how to do and I looked at him I said follow directions and it went whoa whoa we need more people like that so there's a lot to be said for following directions you know the the the mundane routine stuff that needs to get done mhm you you'll do well if you're great at following
directions but you're not going to make as much as you could make to have the maximum impact on on the organization as you said the business critical activities because also you as a leader you're having trouble keeping track of all the business critical activities you need the team seeing stuff that's coming at you you know from from your six That You Don't See rolling
up on you and you're going to want people on the team to understand the Daya today and a business critical so when that media comes screaming in and you don't see it coming they catch it for you MH and so that's what really takes people to the next level yeah I think one of the things I find is that as a leader like I enjoy rewarding
people who are performing phenomenally like it's exciting for me to see someone who's performing phenomenally and they're developing themselves and I can see that they're proactive and resourceful and they're growth oriented and as a leader I get excited to be like what can we build together like that's my mindset but I had a friend recently
who went through a scenario where he had gone up to his BS and said I want to work on really important things at the company I want to be associated with the biggest results we have he was told to work on these projects he went and got those results they promised him a promotion and then two to three months later they went kind of quiet on it and
then they said oh no we actually don't have it anymore he's now been at this company for two years and he hasn't received a motion he hasn't received a direction on this is where it's going he's getting in some of the biggest results at the company but he's now not seeing any career growth there and he's thinking of leaving right he should
leave yeah and but I think his boss is thinking oh this guy's GNA hang around so in that scenario where you're like wait a minute I'm hitting it I was promised something it didn't happen now I don't know how to negotiate that I don't know how to have that conversation how do you navigate that okay there's there's two things first of all um yeah
that's going to happen um Black Swan method tactical empathy emotional intelligence-based negotiation doesn't work all the time just works more than anything else does which means there has to be an acceptance of occasionally it'll fail hostage negotiators got a 93% success rate people were not going to make the deal we call 7
percenters they're going to happen so you you move on now before uh if somebody's promised you something and they failed on their promise that you earned this is all also an indicator of a company that's got culture problems they got leadership problems they got management problems 40% a long time ago I heard heard the F uh sta 40% of the Fortune 500 is going
to be gone in 10 years people with those kind of problems are going the way of the dodo they're going extinct so your time there is coming to an end whether you like it or not they're going to go out of business they're going to get sold they're going to think of a stupid reason for firing you except that that time frame now has its limit if someone
has failed to keep a promise that they should have kept so that acceptance is am I going to go someplace else start looking for someplace else cuz you just added to your resume you made yourself more employable with these accomplishments for somebody who's dying to employ you who's going to keep their word they're going to keep their core values if they
lied to you if they fail to keep a promise with you that's the way they do business they are going out of business there is a problem you've just been alerted to the problem now short term interim how you potentially try to to write the the ship before you get out no oriented question again I'd sit down with the boss I'd say I'm sure that I seem very
selfish and that I seem ignorant of the pressures that you're under and unappreciative of do you want us to fail no right so no no no no why why what are you talking about if you make it impossible for me to stay how am I supposed to stay how am I supposed to stay if you made promises to me I fulfilled my end of the bargain and you're showing me that I was
wasting my time you know it's it's a way of letting people see reality before you can be assertive and this is being assertive not aggressive but assertive you got to be empathic so you demonstrate some understanding of where they're coming from ask the no oriented question which is a way to trigger decision- making in a non-threatening way and let them know
what the reality is the reality situation is you can't count on a leader that doesn't keep their promises to you you want to give get to that moment in the conversation you got to get there gently how do you get there gently demonstrating an appreciation and an understanding of the other side's point of view give him a chance give him one
clear chance to make things right let them know the reality of the situation is you can't stay in a job where they're not going to keep their promises even if you want to keep that job how you do anything is how you do everything they're breaking promises to you they're breaking promises to every body else you're going you're going to
be tainted by their reputation and you're going to be taken down when as a Titanic hit an iceberg that ship's getting ready to hit an iceberg and it's going to sink yeah I mean that resonates in that kind of like a when you've been hard done by that approach feels like you're having to turn up the dial on you're starting off empathetic but
then there is a turn up on like well this is the reality here's this is the reality of the situation and I think that's that's a really powerful approach so Chris of course you're aware of the gender pay Gap women are yep paid less what are women doing wrong or what can they do better in negotiation what needs to change of course there's a systemic
issue but individually uh individually uh so I would answer this as if uh the woman asking that question was my daughter and she was asking me about a relationship and she says Dad I'm in a relationship with a guy who's beating me how do I get him to treat me better my answer is is get out of that relationship all right so paying any
Talent less than what they're worth is a bad core value a bad culture value and you're working someplace that's going to go out of business so this relationship is coming to an end my advice my my guidance is the same as it would be for any other job negotiation talk about how you're going to make the best contri bution possible talk find out what it takes to
be successful there Express that you want to be paid in a big playing a big game so what you're doing if you're working in a place that's going to pay you less because of your gender you're padding your resume there's somebody out there that wants talent and they don't care anything about your gender they don't care anything about your
demographics they want Talent you're in a relationship you're in a bad relationship and because it's a bad value to pay Talent less then it's coming to an end one way or the other just same way as it's a boyfriend who's if he's not physically abusive he's at least verbally abusive that's coming to an end prepare yourself to move on there
are people that want talent and in my company I don't care I want Talent we're not the only ones that are out there there are a lot of companies that are taking advantage of women the sooner you leave them the better off everybody is find the company that values your contribution and move to it nice advice great tell us about some of your 7%
experiences there you said the 93% and the 7% tell us about have you some of your personal experiences being in the 7% when it's not working yeah um they're actually far more common than I ever imagined would be in a business world like that when when I wrote Never split the difference with tall RZ and and my son brand ofos tremendous contributor to
the book it never occurred to me there would be a lot of negotiations where the other side had no intention of consummating a deal and we call that now Proof of Life Is there a deal and is a deal with you maybe there's a deal it just ain't with you maybe they're just kicking at tires maybe they're just looking for free Consulting and I started to wake up to
that and this is what falls into this category 7 percenters somebody's never going to make the deal right after I got out and started uh talking about uh negotiating and and a Gentleman who wrote a book I think I think it was Bare knuckle bargaining and he's talking about this thing in business called the rabbit where you're the rabbit you just said to
drive the price down on the people that are really going to get the deal and I can remember at the time thinking like no that's that's I'm a time as money guy that's a tremendous waste of time why would I ever engage in a negotiation with someone if I wasn't going to make the deal I thought it was something from a Vince vaugh movie you know I thought
that's too stupid and so we started discussing it with sales teams and and one guy says oh yeah that's in a challenger sale it's in that book it's 20% 20% of the time they're not it's not 7% of the time it's 20% of the time and in the book they did they basically take a survey of a thousand Executives and basically say
how often do you engage in a negotiation where you're never going to make the deal with the other side for whatever reason you're just not going to give them the deal and a business Executives admitted to 20% which means that number's got to be low because they ask people how often you lie and they're not going to exaggerate how often they lie they're
going to underestimate and so we started implementing the methodology on a regular basis we see it all the time some of it is a due diligence issue the the Black Swan group we have a reputation deserved for teaching a business negotiation methodology that is more successful than anything else why would a company talk to us
well they've got an education provider they're going to stick with so what they want to do is they want to get all the free Consulting possible out of us so that we get this all the time tell us you know tell us how you do what you do you know give give us some insight you know how can we hire you if we don't know how you're going to do it that's a
tell of somebody who's pumping us for information they're going to want us to and you know if you just tell us everything then we'll hire you not only if you tell us everything will we hire you we'll refer you to people that'll hire you know they paint this this vision of riches you know I call it being taken Hostage to the Future Prosperity that never
materializes we kind of cooperated a little bit in the early days but now we just yeah we get back to this thing like all right so I'm gon I'm going to see what's important to you and if you're really focused on one specific aspect if I sense that you're not focused on a long-term relationship you're a Senter and then what am I going to do
I'm going to do I'm going to go all OA Winfrey on you I'm going to say some really positive very true things we'd love to be the negotiation provider for you that gives your company Prosperity that you've never seen before and when you're willing to make commitment to us come back we'll make a commitment to you yeah and they usually go they usually
hear crickets on the other end of the line and that's the end of the conversation yeah so Chris as a followup to that I'm sure that for years you've had calls where a company will call you and say to you Chris we actually want that but we want it at half the price right and I'm imagining that a lot of people who are listening right now
whether they're entrepreneurs whether they have a side hustle whether they do a bit of design work here and there they've had that call as well where a client calls they want this client they're excited by it like and I want you to tell us the difference between the first time a Fortune 500 company reached out and now when you're established because that obviously
changes as well walk us through how do you negotiate or how do you deal with you really wanting to work with this client but they're like we want 50% off like that's what that's our budget that's our Max yeah well we is simply it's accepting that working with them at half price is a bad idea and it's not good for the health of the business long
term and then as soon as we accepted that then realizing that the less time we spent with people that want half price they're actually obstructing the people that want to pay full price you know uh a good friend of mine a phrase that we use Joe poish he's got a phrase there are half clients and there elf clients half is hard annoying lame and frustrating
elf is easily lucrative and fun so in our in our early days especially say there's two again those was brilliant hard annoying lame and frustrating halfes yeah and then eles eles easy lucrative and fun I love that and Joe says don't work with the halves work with the elves and I heard this and I and so if you in the early days if you're working
for me you figure that I want you to make every deal and I get with my sales team and I say all right so the halfs are going to have predictable Behavior once we start looking for it it's going to jump out at us and we'll be able to see it in the first half hour of the conversation now now they're very good at this and that
of course was the truth and then I said we're going to walk away politely from them early on I don't want you wasting a lot of time so the young lady that's running my sales team at the time and um you know comment on gender if I may we find out women pick this style of negotiation up faster than men at the top level of performance we see no difference it's gender
agnostic I believe that the women are conditioned at an early age to be aware of soft skills and they have a little bit of a head start start and that's why they have a tendency to pick it up faster than men so woman running the team she wants to make every deal so before she starts walking away from the halves she starts pulling data you know
you want your sales team to start looking for data how long is it going to take to make the deal how long is it going to take to implement the deal what's our profitability consequently she gets back to me a couple weeks later and she says here's what we found number one it takes us two to five times the amount of time from the initial conversation to the end
of performance with a half two to five five times as much time so let's say it only takes twice as long that means we've automatically taken a 50% cut and pay maybe on top of the discount they wanted on top of everything else she said then consequently it doesn't really matter whether or not we want to do business with them
again they don't want to do business with us us again yeah so they don't repeat so these people that are demanding discounts you're taking a 50% and pay at least and the business is not going to repeat so you're taking a discount theoretically for a long-term relationship and you're not getting it they're not appreciative of the fact that they got a
discount they want to take advantage of everybody they're going to look for somebody else to victimize after they get done with you and they are standing in the way of the people that want to do business with us MH it's very dark in the early days of an entrepreneur the concept of walking away from customers is horrifying I got to make the
rent I get bills now you want me to walk away from these people well it's going to take you twice as long to get paid so they're not going to help you pay the rent now and they're going to be slow payers even if you agree on a deal then then afterwards getting money out of them you're you're not in a loan business yeah so there's all these
problems and then as soon as we stopped dealing with the halves we found that they the elves started showing up you know there there there's this invisible line of people waiting to do business with you and the people that are going to take up the most time in the line stop the people that take the least amount of time that's a scary thought
for any buddy entrepreneur to accept and it's a leap of faith and if you start looking around you'll see entrepreneur after entrepreneur experiencing it kind of is a law of the entrepreneur Universe yeah for sure I think that's such great advice and it's so refreshing to hear that because I think everyone feels that way where they're just like I have to do
this this is going to be our big winner it's going to be our big ticket but it always ends up going the opposite way when they're being a half and it's it's such great advice because it could save you so much stress save you so much pressure and you're going to feel like you did a great job but you only got paid half you might feel bitter you're
now resentful they didn't renew it turns into a whole bigger emotional thing as well it was blood money yeah when it doesn't need to yeah yeah I want to shift away from work to relationships because I feel like so much of what you say applies to marriage it applies to dating it applies to you know everyday interpersonal relationships and
friendship we touched on it a bit at the beginning but I wanted to talk about this idea that I think a lot of the time we actually get an easy negotiation in the beginning what it feels like and then things start to get more constrained so I have a friend who she met this guy and he promised to the world and he was like yeah it's going to be amazing and I love
you and you're amazing and this is incredible and it almost feels like you've just won the lottery right it's like you're getting everything in this negotiation he gives you time he gives you energy date nights are amazing everything's great and then six months in he starts to pull back and go no I need to focus on this now no I can't
call you every day no I can't now not that any of those things are even unreasonable they're actually reasonable things right but it's just that it's so different from what you thought you signed up for what do you do as a negotiation in that setting when you were promised more or someone overd delivered in the beginning and now
they're underd delivering that's a real aspect of human nature and so at at some point in time there needs to be Pol withdrawal you know polite boundary setting I think I think both people have you know I don't know I hate to say that any gender is more guilty than the other yeah same but I think that that men probably have a tendency to start adding to the neglect
first and then how how how do you get advice like H how do we how do we sustain this how do you want me to feel about where we are now versus where we were how questions how and what questions are remarkably powerful questions we refer to them as calibrated question the word what is primarily designed to uncover problems the word how is primarily
designed to create answers so you could say what got us off track because you're off track now it also feels very differential you know how and what makes the other side feel in charge people love to be asked how and what the real issue of both those questions is not what the answers are the thinking you made him engage in the answer is
secondary at some point in time I can say what do you want from me that's going to force you to see that there appears to be a disconnect between the two of us it doesn't matter what you say that's a secondary benefit but the primary benefit is that I ask a question in the first place you know at the very beginning of the book one of the more
famous Black Swan phrases is how am I supposed to do that and I saw that as the first way to say no you know to Telegraph to the other side that there's a problem coming and then my son Brandon points out it's forced empathy if I say how am I supposed to do that to you you're forced to look at me and take stock of the position that I'm in your
response to that is going to tell me exactly how much you care about that that's a game-changing phrase and I realize now it's about implementation I'm saying to you like look where we are it's impossible for me to continue how am I supposed to do that like eight out of 10 times that immediately changes the complexion of the conversation it's so ridiculously
effective that in the two out of 10 times it doesn't work people are just like a you time am I supposed to do that and it backfired it failed on me they looked at me and said I don't care how you do it you're just going to do it and my answer to them is no it didn't fail it gave you an answer you weren't expecting if it's an implementation
question how am I supposed to continue in this relationship if you know you never talk to me how am I supposed to continue at the beginning we had these amazing we had date nights we had quality time together we were into each other and they seemed to gone away how am I supposed to maintain my relationship with you under these different set of
circumstances you know that's not refusing to maintain it what you say and what they hear but what they hear is I'm about out of here and it's a great warning and so either they're going to change they're going to wake up because there's some inadvertent human nature there or they're going to be indifferent to your question if they're indifferent that's
just giving you a preview of a slowly descending future now you got a hard hard decision to make be grateful for the time be willing to be smarter today than you were yesterday and ultimately your default has got to be your own happiness yeah and how do we do that in a way that we keep our personal emotions separate from those questions because I think
sometimes you can ask those questions but they're they're emotionally loaded they're like things used to be amazing before like you know now you don't do anything and they turn into not questions they turn into demands everything else yeah or or they turn into things that sound complainy like oh things were before like how do
you expect me to and it and it sounds like a complaint as opposed to a question which is what you're positioning it as and I think that's because our emotion gets so close to the question how do you keep your emotion separate and go actually I need to negotiate effectively to get to where I want to get to rather than sound like
I'm complaining and now that person is only hearing the energy of the complaint as opposed to the explanation of what you're looking for well the two the two possibilities are can you talk it through with a friend who's neutral who's not going to give you advice MH you need a sounding board you don't need advice you know what the answers are in
point of fact so the advice is a waste of time one of the great things I realized why I was effective on a Suicide Hotline in many cases I'm just a sounding board I'm let some somebody say stuff out loud instead of having it bang around in their head which is either confusing or it makes sense in a bad way or you say stuff out loud and you get a
better grip on it MH so a friend who's a great sounding board and you could even say in advance look I'm not looking for advice I'm just looking for a sounding board I want to talk to stuff out I want to hear what I'm thinking that's one potential option you got friends that always want to give advice anyway so there's a little bit of a
negotiation up front with that friend or maybe certain friends are are good for being sounding boards and others aren't then in a moment like what happens if you didn't have the time to prepare you catch yourself in a moment which is similar to any negotiation suddenly you caught yourself in the middles but your gut instinct is going
to kick in the mistake everybody makes is they want to deny the dynamic instead of observing it I don't want to sound like I'm complaining I don't want to sound like a whining complaining typical whining complaining female instead say I'm probably G to sound like a typical whining complaining female or whatever side of that argument that you're in argument interaction
negotiation if you simply call it out in advance then the other side gets braced for it and they deal with it they don't get to you know I don't want to sound like I'm complaining and then the other person is saying yeah but you're going to go ahead and complain yeah if you say I'm going to sound like I'm complaining that's that 2 millimeter
shift the other person will listen and then say well those were actually some legitimate points yeah so it's a combination of the two things Each of which practice like nobody automatically diffuses stuff in advance nobody automatically does if you got to the point where you're denying it you're actually a little bit further down the
line you're aware of the dynamic so now just shift from denying to recognizing yeah I love that I was uh asked to give a keynote to one of my corporate clients a couple of months back and when they were briefing me they did a great job they were like Jay this audience we feel is just on the cusp ready for your message so they said usually they're used to dealing with
much more hard hitting speakers who are going to like pump them up and motivate them but we want them to move into this softer emotional intelligence meditation peace space and they said that they're probably going to have their backs up a bit when you walk in because they'd expect someone who's you know going to come in a bit more but
but we really want you to be the person who takes them in this direction so I was like I really appreciated that briefing because it was good for me to have that so I walk in to this conference and I can tell what the person told me on the phone is immediately the truth I get announced I walk out on stage there there's a few
claps but it's not the warmest reception I've ever had in my life and I called it out it exactly what you said I said look I know you all think that meditation is woooo I said I know you all think that you know Stillness and peace and all this stuff is a bit tangible and it's a bit random but I promise you everything I'm going to share with you today is
highly practical tactical and you're going to be able to implement it and all of a sudden I could see people change and it and what I was saying was true I'm I'm very tactical about meditation and I'm very practical about philosophy but the Assumption people had was oh well you know we just want someone to motivate us and it was amazing like that
felt like one of the biggest wins that I mean the presentation went off on a beautiful Arc I felt such a great rapport with the audience and it's exactly what you just said it was recognizing and again going back to your earlier Point summarizing what their point of view was and and recognizing that that was okay it's not that they
were wrong it's not that they were flawed or that they weren't smart enough it wasn't condescending it was genuine that they had certain beliefs about meditation and philosophy that could be true but that I wasn't presenting it that way right yeah so I love that and it it was it was probably one of my favorite speaking experiences because it
felt like such a challenge to have to turn it around yeah and and then then it's highly satisfying in retrospect right and you did it with them invisibly like they didn't know what happened yeah it just happened yeah yeah it was really special when someone's in a relationship and they're like I want to I want to get my partner to do more personal growth I
want to get my partner to maybe it be open up to therapy I want to get my and you know and I hear this a lot I'm sure you hear it too but I hear a lot of people tell me I want my partner to right they want their partner to become something or do something how do you negotiate that and how should that person change their mindset in order to make it a healthier
thing than a demand the real fundamental issue is is this a Rel right relationship like is is this Behavior that's consistent with the things that you value and the things that they value that that's the first issue uh um my company gets coached on EOS M um Jonathan Smith is our our us coach and I remember the first time we sit down with
Jonathan he said all right so what are your core values I'm like what do you mean work hard be honest what more is there learn you know have a sense of humor he's like no no no no it's a little first of all it's a little more complicated than that secondly he said then all of your relationships you'll find all business and personal succeed
or fail based on alignment of core values like oh wow okay that makes sense so does this have to do with the relationship is the behavior change that you're seeking from the other person consistent with the core values that you share now you don't have to share every core value but you kind of need to share about 80% of them and if the behavior
you're asking for is really a disguise for a change in a value it's not going to happen and the hard part is accepting that you can you can value someone they can remain your friend you can you can still have a positive relationship but not that intimate relationship not that that lifelong commitment which the vast majority of us are driving for you know
this great phenomenal collaborative long-term relationship of trust so what I would ask is for the person to say does this fall within do we share enough values that this is worth the trouble and then the conversation is that I'm now talking about a behavior change that consistent with the values that they hold if the behavior change is
inconsistent with the values that they hold they never going to change and we're both going to be miserable and we're going to waste two to two to five to seven years of our lives and hopefully the only upside will be when this is over I'm smarter yeah yeah and that some some of this is it's taken me a really long time to come to
accept the reality of it that we're we're not helping each other if we're not in the right relationship you're not helping them they're not helping you and you can value them as human beings and you can wish them well so the first question is is the behavior change I want consistent with the values that we share MH now you can start talking about it within that
light like so sounds like we share this value consequently here's how I think we can manifest it together so that we have a deeper relationship in that context there's a conversation if it's about the other person being happier two not just you being happier at their expense M but it's about both of you being happier
together yeah and it's really going to line up to what are the values yeah I I I think you've hit the on my head the I believe the challenge is that we want people to respect our values because in some way we disrespect theirs so we want people to Value what we value because we actually don't like their values and I find that that 20% you're talking about
around where you don't have to have the same shared values I think that's when you actually respect wait a minute they have a different value to me in this area and that's okay let me learn to value that and hopefully they'll learn to value my deferring value and hey guess what we may not value the same things in this area but I respect that
person for their values because I understand how they got to there and I understand why they have that value we don't have to have the same one and I find that we're constantly we feel like if someone doesn't have the same exact values as us and value the same exact things than that we can't connect at all right and I feel like you're going to run out of
people chasing people across the world trying to find someone who values what you value in exactly the same way two people can value their family but they could mean two totally different things right yeah I I find that we need to get Beyond this idea of my values are the most important and they're all that value and if you don't value that then
we can't get anywhere right yeah I agree and and then be curi about the other side's values exactly and then how is it added how is it added to your life yeah my girlfriend Wendy again she got relationships with people that she and she keeps in touch with people she's known since she was s years old I don't have those kind of
relationships you know I haven't worked that hard at it I I I some of those people are still alive but I rarely talk to them and she's really opened my eyes in so way so many ways to the value of these great long-term relationship ships even with people that you disagree with operationally you know you're a Democrat there a republican you know whatever it
is but you know she's maintaining those relationships and and there's a richness to her life that I have not maintained that I see it manifest itself and you know I want to learn from it that's beautiful the book's called Never split the difference do you ever split the difference no never now not in relationships not business not so here's
the caveat though there's a difference between splitting and blending okay you know maybe this is too cerebral of an analogy but steel is 2% carbon 98% iron that ain't splitting a difference what's the proper blend if there is a blend so that what we come up with is a better product now 2% 98% split in in human nature would be like oh my God no you know or if I
contributed 2% I want 50% of the profit now you only contributed 2% well it doesn't matter that we're far more better off so splitting the difference is not really about finding the best Blend or then never split the difference might also mean that you're 100% right and I'm 100% wrong one of my favorite negotiations from Geor time husband and
wife are in a discussion over real tree versus artificial tree Christmas tree husband wants an artificial tree for all the Practical reasons he thinks his wife is being uh unreasonable unpredictable too emotional about a real tree and he's a student so he uses he thinks to get his way a great label sounds like having a real tree met
a lot to you growing up cuz he's he's digging in deep if somebody's if somebody's really seemingly irrationally sticking to something it's not in the some reason it's not in the last 24 hours it may be 20 years ago and so then she opens up and finally lays out all the reasons for the real tree he realizes she's completely right her goals are much l stier and
more longlasting than his are they get a real tree so never spit the difference is also being willing to entertain the idea that the other side's got Insight that you don't have and you got to be open to it and be willing to accept it which is the same thing you want from them it's just making this a two-way street that's a great answer I love that Chris it's
been such a joy talking to you today and I know that people I hope are going to run and get the book never split the difference but you also have a documentary out there you were talking about so I want you to share that with us yeah it just came out it's called tactical empathy it's on Amazon we shot it with DNA films Nick Nanton Emmy
winning producer and it's really sort of about the history of the hostage sieges and how they turned out and what we learned from them we collectively you know my son Brandon is featured in the documentary there's a phrase empathy is a sneak attack on racism empathy produces better decisionmaking and when Nick came to me
about the film I said you know there are enough uh law enforcement disadvantage Community problems that I think empathy is going to go a long way towards solving not all of them just most of them and if we can get rid of most of them that's a pretty good start so we're going to categorize this is going to be designed to show how law enforcement hearing people
out is going to Tamp down a lot of the Flames if you will so then we end up uh at about the same time I get I get approached by NYPD they want me to come and do a training for they've got critical people that they want emotional intelligence training for they want to plant a seed because they want a a more effective NYPD which is a more apathic
NYPD and I said all right so here's the deal let us film it for the documentary and my son Brandon's going to do the training not me you get us for full day Brandon is as good or better at this than I am and the interesting additional feature is my son Brandon's mother's African-American effectively to the world is African-American big boy big
big guy play played lineman in college football sizable human being the very kind of guy that if he got out of his car will cause most police officers to think they got a fight on their hands just by looking at him he's going to do the training and so we've got a segment in there of Brandon doing this phenomenal training for these guys and showing them how
empathy is going to make you more effective it's going to build bridges in a community community's got problems with law enforcement that you didn't create you stepped into this job trying to do the right thing that doesn't matter of the baggage between the communities you got to deal with that so there's also besides the history of the company and
some some pretty good hostage stories that's brilliant then we're we're trying to back into police Community relationships a little bit with the with the doc and I hope it helps law enforcement get better training so that there's less problems with the this dis Advantage communities yeah that's fantastic what's it called tactical empathy on on Amazon on Amazon
awesome I can't wait to watch it sounds fantastic Chris it's been such a pleasure talking to you we end every episode of on purpose with a final five or a fast five each question has to be answered with one sentence maximum it's a lightning round yeah lightning round in a lightning round one word one word one sentence yeah you know I get to
proceed to the championship level after this I get through it yeah exactly all right so Chris V your Fast Five so question number one Chris what's the best advice you've ever heard or received never take directions from somebody you wouldn't trade places with question number two what's the worst advice you've ever heard or received oh wow
um you know hang in there just to prove them wrong uh third thing how would you define your current purpose making a world a better place question number four why is empathy not a weakness ah empathy is strength empathy is reasoning empathy is a superpower uh and it's got nothing to do with weakness and Fifth and final question we ask this to every guest
who's ever been on the show if you could create a law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be be nice first nice guys don't finish last yeah no well you don't got to stay nice just got to be nice first got it I love it Chris Voss everyone the book is called Never split the difference the documentary is called tactical empathy
I'm so grateful Chris for your time and energy I hope we get to do this again this was just the beginning of our relationship and I feel like I learned so much this is definitely an episode I'm going to listen to again and I highly recommend you all go and read the book because there are so many great insights principles tips strategies and
stories inside of it and of course go and watch the doc on Amazon tactical empathy uh Chris thank you so much for being here so grateful it was a pleasure to yeah thank you thank you so much for listening to this conversation if you enjoyed it you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking
your hidden potential if you know you want to be more and achieve more this year go check it out right now you set a goal today you achieve it in 6 months and then by the time it happens it's almost a relief there's no sense of meaning and purpose you sort of expected it and you would have been disappointed if it didn't happen