Chris Voss: #1 Secret Formula FBI Negotiators Use To Always Get What They Want & 4 Ways to Apply These Tactics to Your Life

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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Speaker 2 (01:01):
How do I negotiate a better salary? Bosses there, listen
and I said, ask him this question. Chris Vons, retired
FBI Special Agent for what Lead International kidnapping negotiators, but
author have 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.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
What are women doing wrong or what can they do better?
In negotiation?

Speaker 2 (01:22):
You're out of order on the sequence?

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Can you negotiate with a narcissist?

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Of course, you can negotiate with the narcissists. One of
the things we advise people to do.

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The number one health and wellness podcast.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Jay Sety, Jay Sheety Yet. Hey, everyone, welcome back to
On Purpose. I'm so glad that you're back because I
love sitting down with incredible minds, thinkers, thought leaders who
are helping us develop better skills, better habits, and better mindsets.
Today's guest is a former lead FBI negotiator and dynamic

(02:52):
speaker who debunks the biggest myths of negotiation. Chris Voss
engages all groups with captivating stories, insights, and useful tips
for business and everyday life. Chris is lectured on negotiation
at business schools and across the country and has been
seen on ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News. He's also

(03:14):
been featured in Forbes, Time, Fast Company, and Inc. And
Chris's book, Never Split the Difference has sold over two
million copies. And It's all about negotiating as if your
life depends on it. If you're in a space in
your life where you need to get better at dealing
with conflict, negotiate better, and make sure that you win
in one of those situations. This episode is for you.

(03:37):
Please welcome to On Purpose, Chris Vos. Chris, it's great
to have you in studio.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Jay, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
Oh well, thank you so much for being here. As
I said, I find your work fascinating because I don't
think it's every day that you get to learn about
negotiation from someone who's done it in the most high stakes,
highly critical, difficult environments. And I wanted to ask you
why did you come a lead negotiate to that.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
It's almost a cliche, but it's a little bit of
following your bliss and then every now and then, I
think the universe jumps in and makes you change the directions.
And originally I was on a swap team. I was
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 in

(04:24):
action 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 to 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 the SWAT team,
you know, we had hostage negotiators. They went along with
the SWAT guys. I didn't really know what they did.

(04:45):
You know, we'd be out there in the cold, in
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 Voice family model is how hard can it be be,
which is similar to a redneck's famous last words, which are,
hey watch this. It's always going to be more complicated

(05:07):
than you expect. But I got into it and I
loved it. It was more satisfying than SWAT ever was.
And SWATT was great, but hostage negotiation, when I stumbled
over at the Universe, sort of pushed me in that direction.
It was a push that I needed, and I've enjoyed
it ever since.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
And you never felt scared. There wasn't the fear. There
wasn't the difficult in your mind before you got involved,
that this could be something that would be extremely difficult,
potentially painful, challenging.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
No, because first of all, I was rejected for the
negotiation team. 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. And 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.

(06:03):
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

(06:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
Well, THEE 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 as the late night FM DJ voice, and the
first call I just said, hello, this is helpline Now.

(07:21):
That has a tremendously calming effect on people. And afterwards
the supervisors said your voice was great, that was great.
You started out great, and I remember thinking like, wow,
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 a hostage negotiation.

(07:43):
We called 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 emotion is probably
going to be negative. And in point of fact, we're
all driven by negative thoughts. We're seventy five percent negative

(08:04):
our survival mechanism that we wake up with every day
to survive. The caveman had to be negative. The optimistic
caveman said, you know, yeah, you know, Chris walked in
here yesterday and he never came out. But I'm optimistic.
I'm gonna go in today too. And that guy got
eaten too. But the negative guys shot away, and we've
inherited that wiring. And I remember one night in particular,
this guy's really frantic, sounded sounded super fantic, says you know,

(08:27):
I just I need to put it. I need your
help putting a lid on this day. I got to
put a lid on this day. So I just said,
you sounds frantic, and immediately came down. There's a neuroscience
reason for that, now that you know. We never knew then.
It's just simply calling out a negative emotion is the
most effective way to deactivate it. So he came down,

(08:50):
and then to the course of the conversation, I just
used three labels he was. He was a guy who
was paranoid. He's getting a lot of support from his family,
he said, you know, I'm going on a car tripped tomorrow.
I just you know, I just you know, and I
know my family's helping me, and I just you know,
I just I need my family's help. But I'm worried
about it tonight and I can't get to sleep. So

(09:11):
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, it sounds like your family's really close.
And I remember how good it felt in that moment,
and I've never forgotten that. So is this guy's describing

(09:33):
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
his 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

(09:54):
struck me as determined. So I simply said sound determined,
and he said, yeah, just like that, Yeah, I am determined.
I'm gonna go on a car trip tomorrow and be fine.
Thanks for everything you did, hung up the phone. That's

(10:15):
not every conversation, but that's the way they're supposed to go.
You know, you call out what you're hearing, and it
really helps people sort of self level because you're great
sounding board and you're picking out the negatives and deactivating
them and the positives and reinforcing them just by observing them.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
The reason why I find that so fascinating is because
I was thinking, so many of us deal with our friends.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
YEP.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
In that sort of an environment, you may get a
phone call from a friend who's like panicking, they've just
ended a relationship, they've gone through a rejection of 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,

(11:06):
what they're feeling, and being able to call it out
and label it, as you rightly said, that's actually giving
them the tools to make sense of it for themselves.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, exactly, and it's restoring their tools. And then it's
also they feel very self empowered. 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.

(11:38):
A great sounding board simply helps his guide helps them
get to the answer on their own, and then inside
they say, what wait, 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.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah. There's a famous quote that says something like good
leaders make you believe in them. Great leaders make you
believe in you. And this idea that if someone's really
leading the conversation, well, the person's walking away with self belief, yes,
and the confidence and what they have. Before we dive
into the actual tools and breaking down of a negotiation,

(12:15):
I find that most people try to avoid a negotiation
because they see it as conflict. 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

(12:36):
scared of that turning into an altercation. Or if someone's
trying to sell us something at a store, when we're
scared to have that conversation about a discount or whatever
it may be. 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

(12:57):
people pleaser.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
Myself and my team we believe even we've got enough
anecdotal data that the world splits up evenly into three
types fight flight, make friends, A sort of analyst, a comminator.
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

(13:19):
and the accommodator. Analysts thinks of life very much like chests.
Lots of moves, lots of percentages, and analysts 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

(13:41):
doesn't particularly like conflict because it seems to be very
inefficient and ineffective, and they are far more better ways
to communicate, So they're avoiding conflict for that reason. The
relationship on in person the accommodator, conflict is just ugly.
It makes them feel bad. It sort of pollutes their existence,
and they see that as a much higher cost. It

(14:02):
places 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 say it's 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

(14:24):
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 adrenaline hit in the moment a victory
tends to overshadow how the losses pile up, So we

(14:47):
want you know, two or 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 agreat a voice in the room, the guy who
kicks the chair across the room to get his points, screams,
slams their hands on a table, storms out. You know,

(15:09):
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 as conflict oriented, that her list of great negotiations,

(15:30):
her life's achievements based on collaboration and being very positive.
And then if you were to try to consider the
context of our life having gained tremendous success in an
environment filled with maybe some of the most volatile people
on earth, Hollywood celebrities. What Hollywood celebrities mad at Oprah?

(15:53):
You know what rock fight has she gotten into? You know,
who's thrown shade like it is not there simultaneously her
financial success and the different phenomenal interviews she's gotten. They
were no no holds Bard's interview. You know, you know
one of my favorites is Lance armstrong interview. I happen

(16:13):
to be acquainted with Lance. I like them a lot.
But there was no punches pulled there. That was a
negotiation going into that. So spectacular negotiation is really invisible,
but 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 as a great negotiator, and they

(16:34):
have to be. So that's we're just not aware of
what great negotiation really looks like because it looks like
great collaboration, great navigation. As soon as you could change
the definition from win lose to great collaboration, now people
are interested. You know, how to fine negotiation is great collaboration,

(16:59):
long 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

(17:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:34):
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've got to find a way to
get what we want from them. Like that's what you
think of a negotiation, even in normal times, let alone
those high stakes. But how do you do that in

(17:54):
that scenario?

Speaker 2 (17:55):
One of my favorite conversations describing this a number of
years ago. I got to hire it to train hostage
negotiation team in the Middle East, and the country that
I was in very pro western country, a Muslim, you know,
ostensibly a Muslim country, but really tolerant of all religions
as most of them are. So get brought in to

(18:15):
talk to the shik that's the head of kind of
terrorism and I'm told in advance, Uh, the shak if
we have if al Kinda comes here and grabs people,
or if any terrorist organization comes here and grabs people.
Understand the shak wants to kill him, that people of
his country are his children, and he wants to protect

(18:39):
his children at all courts. So you sit down with
the Sheik, he's going to want to know how you're
gonna 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 gonna say to the

(19:02):
Terra's 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, because 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.

(19:23):
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 is
driving the other side in their mind? How do they
see what they're doing, What do they see as a

(19:46):
justification for it? Like so much conflict, the 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 Nicole Benham were
hosting a room Monk clubhouse. At the time, you know,

(20:07):
the Israel Palestine. It was the water done version of
what's going on with Hamas now. Israeli started shelling the
Gaza strip because Amas in fact is hiding weapons in
hospitals and schools in the press office, and Israel gets
tired of it after a while they starts shelling those offices.
So it's a milder version of what's going on right now.

(20:30):
But the vitriol going on online was huge, and the
cole calls me up, she says, you know, we got
to find a way to help sell this out. I said,
all right, well, we'll do a room on clubhouse and
we'll invite people favoring the Palestinians and people favoring the
Israelis on and they can talk it out. With one rule,

(20:50):
one caveat. Before you say whatever you have to say
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 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,

(21:11):
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. Soon as somebody tries
to articulate how the other side sees things, it actually
makes you smarter. I want sort of guy, say, empathy
is a species of reason. You know, you're analyzing where

(21:34):
are the other side's coming from? And an attempting to
genuinely analyze it. You start deactivating their reasons for the escalation,
because there are reasons for the escalations. Is 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.

(21:56):
So I'm interviewing. I get this. This thing on fire
side is social media app what it is is largely
I have guessed in it's life. Q and A bring
a woman on head of a coffee company and she says,
I use your Israel palestinianthing to negotiate a resolution between
two my top executives. They're at each other's throats, and

(22:20):
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 them in a 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

(22:42):
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

(23:04):
closer together.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah. I think it's such a powerful skill. Whether it's
in a marriage, whether it's in 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

(23:26):
on social media is we're reading someone else's summary and
analysis of a highly complex situation, and more often than not,
we're reading the summary that supports our viewpoint right, 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

(23:47):
and comprehend what someone's going through. Hey, you're just catching
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(24:11):
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this busy, fast pace. 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.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
Most of the time. You got to walk somebody through
something 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 here, So we get we got no models for it.
You know, all we got is models for instigators. The

(24:54):
professional agitators. Professional agitators are everywhere. They're not a majority,
but the there's enough of the agitators out there, they
get tend to get a lot more of attraction.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
How would you define a professional agitative just for people
to I totally agree.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
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 other thing, we're so

(25:28):
tired of it. You know. One of the things that
I'm most fascinated with right now is you know the
hot tool girl Like. People are so tired of negativity
that anything that's like positive and fun and refreshing and
catches them off guard. I checked their Instagram today, she
got like two million followers with thirty six posts and

(25:51):
she's been there for fifteen minutes. But I think it's
we have such an appetite for something that's not negative
and not designed to be 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,

(26:12):
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 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

(26:32):
in reality it accelerates us to a positive outcome by
probably about a rate of about fourteen times faster. And
it's invisible. It's astonishing, and so since it was invisible,
we didn't really see it when it happened. One of
the guys on my team, Derek Gaunt, wrote a book
called About Leadership. Applying tactical empathy to leadership is called

(26:53):
the ego authority Failure. He's got a great stat at
the very beginning of it, where rapport based interviews in
law enforcement gets you to an agreement slash confession fourteen
times faster than anything else, but nobody knows it happened.
So then to get good at it, you're never going

(27:15):
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 eighty three at eighty four times on those
slot machines, but the winds are so satisfying that's all
you notice. So to be really good at this, you
focus more on how suddenly we're in a better place,

(27:37):
and nobody's congratulating you because they didn't see it happened.
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.

Speaker 1 (27:52):
Yeah, 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 thing, 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

(28:13):
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?

Speaker 2 (28:30):
Well, I'm gonna I'm going to think of how I
would summarize their perspective. That's going to that's going to
get really get my wheels turn, and 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

(28:53):
called gratitude. It's amazing what a difference it could make,
and it sounds stupid. I was once in a highly
adversarial negotiation. The other side was it wasn an adversary
the other side was very deceptive, which is one of
my buttons. You know, I don't like deception. One of
my main currencies is integrity, so that's a violation of

(29:16):
one of my core values. But thinking that put me
in a very negative place, and I thought, well, how
do 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. It was a training
company that wanted to make our training offering part of

(29:37):
their platform. So I thought, this is a byproduct this success.
I'm actually lucky to even be having this conversation. So
you know, I found gratitude in a moment, and then
it opened up my mind because you're thirty one percent positive,
smarter in a positive frame of mind. So you know,

(29:57):
whatever your hack is, and different people have different waysitude, exercise,
first thing 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

(30:19):
I'll usually do is I'll think of the questions that
I might normally ask to elicity yes, and I'll switch
them so that I'm alictiting a no, do you agree
becomes do you disagree? There's a Pavlovian response to yes
and no. People if they say yes, they feel like

(30:40):
they're being led into a trap. Whether they are or not,
it doesn't change the fact that is a general term.
Somebody's trying to trap you. Who's gonna litter that path
with yeses?

Speaker 1 (30:51):
So when you say something that does not make sense
and they say yes, that's moving in the wrong direction.

Speaker 2 (30:57):
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
were you have integrity, it doesn't matter that you are

(31:18):
not doing it. It got done to them enough times already,
they're going to have a negative reaction. The ridiculous flip
side is the Pavlovian response to saying no is that
people feel predicted. They feel safe when they say no.
Would you like no? When my son was a teenager, Dad,

(31:42):
can I know? But then I'm 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 say, okay, so
now what was it that you wanted? Now I could
hear more. Haven't protected myself. So I may say to you,

(32:05):
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 listening with a
critical mindset, and you'll think, well, you know, 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,

(32:28):
but I think here are some things that I want
you to think about. You'll give me those freely. Now
we're in an actual collaboration. So your original prep at question,
how do I prep for negotiation? I'm gonna try to
do what I can't. Put myself in a positive frame
of mind, work at summarizing the other side's perspective. Think
of a couple questions where the answers know where it

(32:50):
moves things forward, as opposed to the yes and I've
avoided that psychological feeling of the other side feeling I'm
trapping them.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
Yeah, those are the things to do. What are some
of the biggest mistakes you've seen people make walking in
preparing for a negotiation.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Well, the inadvertent thing to start off with is, you know,
number one, they're gonna they're gonna ask you yes, I'm
any question, and then number two, they're gonna make their
pitch the value proposition. You know, you know, 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

(33:28):
side's dying to have their say too. If you go first,
you kind of rolled over. Well, 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 gonna start out by
trying to hear you out first. I'm gonna want the

(33:48):
information from you. I'm gonna want your perspective. I'm also
gonna 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 with something to eat. I'm going to want
to know what's on your mind first, because that's your

(34:10):
a 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 because I want to talk

(34:32):
about what you think is important because that starts our collaboration.
So really understanding where the other side is coming from
is information you need for the analyst and for the
relationship oriented person. Make sure the person feel good so
you're building a relationship.

Speaker 1 (34:49):
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 nine on their list. There's
like a a right like 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

(35:09):
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 you navigate that?

Speaker 2 (35:30):
Well, I liberate myself from the idea of rationality or logic.
I really see those two things as beauty. Beauty is
in the air 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,

(35:56):
whether wiring is actually wrong, and someone who's offering from
or 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, paranoids, gizophrenic. If somebody's actually hearing voices, it's

(36:17):
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,
one of the downsides of being a meth addict. Someone
could be clean for years, but meth amphetamines does actual

(36:38):
damage to the wiring and they'll have an episode when
they've been sober for years that mimics of paranoids gizophrenic.
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 the patterns here. Let me look for
the patterns, and then they're evidently predictable if you let

(37:00):
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 they called in on a hotline that night. So
I'm just I'm gonna sort of pick off the negativity

(37:21):
one at a time, and I'm gonna feed it back,
and I know that's going to clear your head. In
a business scenario or even a personal scenario, people who
feel under a tremendous amount of pressure, tend to be
very demanding and can be very attacking, which feels predatory.
It even feels like, you know, the magic phrase gas lighting,

(37:44):
when in fact they're under a massive amount of pressure.
A company that I just did 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 deal in South Africa
and the person on the other side of the table

(38:05):
they called a bully, very attacking, not sticking to the
written agreement. So of course they're in the negotiation. The
lawyer's on the table side that I'm coaching. What's the
lawyer going to do. It's going to open his laptop.
He's going to read you the agreement, which does not help.

(38:26):
It's a great way to pour gasoline on a 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,

(38:48):
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 the witcherw 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.

(39:10):
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've got all these demands, I

(39:33):
got people coming at me from all sides. And the
recognition of the pressure that this sounds like you're under
a lot of pressure for someone he perceived as an attacking,
gas lighting bully, the guy's being driven by an internal
pressure that he was having trouble keeping control over. And
that changed everything. That off fan label and it turned

(40:00):
everything around.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
Can you negotiate with a narcissist.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
If you look for the patterns and then you know
the narcissists of demanding So short answer is yes, But
how are you going to do it? You got to
make what you want the path to where they want
to get. Ultimately, narcisists 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.

(40:28):
And if you can change the sequencing around, that's how
you can get the upper hand on a narcissist.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
One of the.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Of course, you can negotiate with a narcissist if you've
been trained by the Black Swan group Chris Voss. Yeah,
we'll train you, we'll teach you.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
It's whether you want to or not. It's whether you
want to negotiate with a narcissist in your life.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
Well, and actually that's a great secondary point 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
of things to try to The psychologists of therapists would

(41:10):
call a boundary setting. Sometimes you set a good hard
boundary and the other side says, oh, I respect that
they're looking for you to set gently, not aggressively. They're
looking for that boundary. Set a couple of boundaries gently,
politely but firmly, and find out if they're going to

(41:34):
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 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 puts you here

(41:56):
to be by being attached to people that 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.

Speaker 1 (42:15):
Do we ignore the patons? Is that what it is?

Speaker 2 (42:17):
I think we do. I think a lot of us
do for again, for different reasons. The relationship pointed people
the accommodators, they're very hope based and they have this
tremendous faith and 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

(42:38):
wasn't largely on our side, we wouldn't have continued as
a species. We'd be dead, we'd go on extinct. You know,
we're not the most durable. You know, we don't. We
don't have, uh, you know, a fair fight with most
of the predators on a planet, which is what God
gave us, we'd lose most of the time. So that
means that I'm a firm believer that the world is

(42:58):
largely very supposed supportive and on our side. So that
reinforces the accommodators because the numbers are on their side.
They're just not real good in the anywhere from ten
to thirty percent 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

(43:22):
as smarter as we go, then we eliminate more and
more of the people that are dragging ustaff.

Speaker 1 (43:27):
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
an accommodated but now they've started to feel like people
always take advantage of me. I feel used. I feel
like I'm the one who's always getting the short end
of the stick. Like, how do you shift that pattern

(43:49):
for your life? Because you've now made people believe that
that's who you are, and all of a sudden Now
you want to change who you are? How do you
go about that transition and shift and help the way
so that you no longer feel that everyone's taking advantage
of you.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
Yeah, the healthy way to start with is first to
recognition is that you're not really helping them. You know,
if they're taking an 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

(44:28):
let them get out there and fend on their own,
you know, let them deal with it. 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, I'm going
to refer it to one of my negotiation heroes, Oprah Winfrey.

(44:51):
I'm in a discussion with one of her top executives,
and I was telling this executive, Yeah, our philosophy is
the last impression is the lasting and pression, so always
end positively, no matter what, but end, And she said, yeah,
that's exactly Oprah's philosophy, and she says, in the entertainment industry,
it's usually in an alemo out a taxi. With Oprah,

(45:13):
it's in an alemo out almo. 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

(45:33):
Winfrey has 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

(45:57):
be supportive of you, I will always have your 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,

(46:22):
I'm here for you, and then what's wrong?

Speaker 1 (46:27):
And that's it always feels hard to do that because
somewhay deep down inside of us, we don't want it
to be the end of the road. We don't want
to We want to be hopeful. We want to save,
we want to caum the date, we want to mold,
we want to become whatever the other person needs us
to be. Yeah, we keep doing that, We keep shape shifting.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
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 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 they think.

Speaker 1 (47:01):
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 that that's what you're trying
to teach. But I can imagine people come up to you,
and companies come up to and be like Chris, basically
show us how to control this in our favor.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
Some do yeah, yeah again, about a third you know,
the assertives love control.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
Yeah, how do you reframe someone who comes with that
controlling mindset, who thinks that you can control. I've had
I've had coaching clients, so I don't coach in what
you do, but I've even had clients 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 going.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
To go right exactly all right. So the secret to
gaining the upper hand in the negotiation is given the
other side the illusion to 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 time wise. Like let's

(48:13):
say I could control you completely, I gonna be with
you all the time to do that. You know, I
could control maybe one person. I can positively influence a
lot of people if I give up the need for control,
because I'm gonna need you to be self directed. I'm
gonna need you to be able to think for yourself.

(48:34):
There's gonna be a point in time when we're not together.
If I'm not there to control you, you're gonna fall apart.
But if I collaborate with you, if I empower you
when I'm not there, you're gonna think for yourself. As
a phrase, batteries included, so to speak, which has been
passed on to me by some very smart people. Any
people who are batteries included, we all need partners that

(48:56):
are batteries included. We're aligned on core values and we
get more because I don't have time to control everybody.
So when you start understanding the costs of control, then
you start thinking like, yeah, you know, there's got to
be a better way. And it's guidance. It's helping people think,

(49:18):
it's making them feel empowered to find the right outcome.

Speaker 1 (49:22):
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?

Speaker 2 (49:39):
Yeah? Well, great question. The negotiation skills and tools are neutral.
So intention has a smell. Am I trying to collaborate
with you? Am I trying to take advantage of you
a scalpel, and one person's hands saves a life. In
another person's hands, it takes a life. So first of all,
look at effectively negotiation skills. Which emotional intelligence is effective negotiation,

(50:04):
Tactical empathy is 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

(50:26):
on ten years from now, This argument we look back
on on ten years from now as to the moment
we discovered collaboration and made both of us prosper for
ten years. That's also changing somebody's frame from short term
to long term to what's my intention? And my intention

(50:48):
is long term collaboration. Like there's some sales methodologies that
say your money's in their pocket, it's your job to
get it out. That's not longtime collaboration. And you're gonna
sense that, Like, no matter how charming I am in
a moment, no matter how much fun I am to

(51:09):
be with, no matter how much I make you laugh,
you're gonna notice the diminishment of your pocket before long.
And this is coming to an end. So if my
attention is dead, 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 gonna even

(51:30):
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 gonna mind, because I'm trying to take
you to a better place.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
So I'm doing a training for a company probably about
two three years ago, got the CEO and all those
top salespeople on a zoom call. We get to Q
and A, and one of them says, how do I
negotiate a better salary? Bosses said listening, and I said,

(52:15):
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 immediately, and I says,
I wish everybody here had ask me that question. So
the job negotiation is really about our future collaboratively now,

(52:40):
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 is going to see that
you're even Here's what I asked you to do, is
what I agreed to pay you for doing it. Here
we are you did it, I paid you even. That's

(53:01):
how your boss is gonna say it. Your boss worried
about the future, 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 and the most important stuff here, you show

(53:23):
them two things. You're a team player. You're going to
put the team first. And you 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,

(53:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:55):
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're doing the you know, we're

(54:17):
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, And it's
hard because me included when I was an 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 all of these things. But that isn't how

(54:39):
reward generally works, at least in the workplace.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Well at the maximum reward, you know, some some reward
works that way. Yeah, much, that is very valuable, you know,
can you follow directions? Okay, My girlfriend Wendy, members of
her family, they got this. They got this great camp
up state New York, wonderful place, wor up there visiting

(55:03):
at 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 thirty,
hadn't been outside, which is is not my background. But
they're seeing me an FBI agent. You know, he probably
in white collar. You know, you never got thirty. So
we're getting ready to get out of there, and a

(55:24):
gentleman 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 because 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 and I said, follow directions
and he went, whoa, whoa, whoa. We need more people

(55:47):
like that. So there's a lot to be said for
following directions, you know, the the mundane routine stuff that
needs to get done. 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 an organization, as you said, the business critical activities,

(56:10):
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
your six that you don't see rolling up on you,
and you're going to want people on the team to
understand the day to day and a business critical. So

(56:31):
when that media comes screaming in and you don't see
it coming, they catch it for you. And so that's
what really takes people to the next level.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
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, oh,
what can we build together? Like that's my mindset. But

(57:02):
I had a friend recently who went through a scenario
where he had gone up to his boss and said,
I want to work on really important things of 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

(57:23):
actually don't have it anymore. He's now been at this
company for two years and he hasn't received a promotion,
He hasn't received a direction on this is where it's going.
He's getting in some of the biggest results of the company,
but he's now not seeing any career growth there and
he's thinking of leaving. Right, he should leave, Yeah, but
I think his boss is thinking, oh, this guy's going
to hang around. So in that scenario where you're like,

(57:45):
wait a minute, I'm hitting it. I was promised something,
it didn't happen. Now I don't how to negotiate that.
I don't know how to have that conversation. How do
you navigate that?

Speaker 2 (57:54):
Okay, there's two things. First of all, yeah, it's going
to happen. One method tactical empathy, emotional intelligence, space 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 ninety three
percent success rate. People are not going to make the

(58:14):
deal we call seven percenters. They're going to happen. So
you move on now. Before 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.

(58:35):
A long time ago, I heard the stat forty percent
of the fortune five hundred is going to be gone
in ten years. Those kinds 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 timeframe now

(58:58):
has its limits. If someone has failed to keep a
promise that they should have kept, so that acceptance is
am I going to go someplace? Elf? Start looking for
someplace else because you've just added to your resume. You've
made yourself more employable with these accomplishments for somebody who's
dying to employ you, who's going to keep their word,

(59:19):
They're going to keep their core values. If they lie
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 write to the ship before you get out

(59:41):
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 them. Do you want us to fail? No? Right? So? No, no,

(01:00:07):
no no. 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've made promises to me, I've fulfilled my end of
the bargain, and you're showing me that I was wasting

(01:00:27):
my time. You know, 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,
should demonstrate some understanding where they're coming from. Ask the
no oriented question, which is a way to trigger decision

(01:00:48):
making in a non threatening way and let them know
what the reality is. Reality. The situation is you can't
count on a leader that doesn't keep their promises to you.
You want to get to that moment with the conversation.
You got to get there gently. How do you get
there gently? Demonstrating and appreciation and an understanding of the
other side's point of view. Give them a chance, give

(01:01:12):
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 everybody else. You're going
to be tainted by their reputation and you're going to

(01:01:34):
be taken down when as the Titanic hit an iceberg,
that ship's getting ready to hit an iceberg and it's
going to sink.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
Yeah, I mean that resonates, and 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 the reality,
is the real of the situation. And I think that's

(01:02:02):
a really powerful approach. So, Chris, of course you're aware
of the agender pay gap, women 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, individually.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
So I would answer this is if the woman asking
that question was my daughter and she was asking me
about a relationship and she said, Dad, I'm in a
relationship with a guy who's beating me. How do I
get them to treat me better? And my answer is
get out of that relationship, all right. So paying any
talent less than what they're worth is a bad core value,

(01:02:40):
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 guidance, is the same
as it would be for any other job negotiation. Talk
about how you're going to make the best contribution possible.

(01:03:01):
Find out what it takes to be successful there, express
that you want to be paid in a playing a
big game. So what you're doing, if you're working in
a place is going to pay you less because of
your gender. You're patting your resume. There's somebody out that
wants talent, and they don't care anything about your gender,
they don't care anything about your demographics. They want talent.

(01:03:21):
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 the 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

(01:03:44):
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 contribute and moved to it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Nice advice. Great, tell us about some of your seven
percent experiences that you said the ninety three percent in
the seven percent. Tell us about have you some of
your personal experiences have been in the seven percent when
it's not working.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Yeah, 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 Raz and
my son Brandon Voss, tremendous contributor to the book, it
never occurred to me that 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.

(01:04:37):
Is there a deal and is to deal with you?
Maybe there's a deal, it just ain't with you. Maybe
they're just kicking the 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 seven percenterg
somebody's never going to make the deal. Right after I
got out, started talking about negotiating and a gentleman who

(01:04:58):
wrote a book I think, I think it 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 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

(01:05:19):
if I wasn't going to make the deal. I thought
it was something from a Vince Vaughan movie, you know.
I thought that's too stupid. And so we started discussing
it with sales teams and one guy says, oh, yeah,
that's in a Challenger sale. It's in that book. It's
twenty percent twenty percent of the time. It's not seven
percent of the time, it's twenty percent of the time.
And in the book they did, they basically take a

(01:05:41):
survey of a thousand executives and basically say how often
do you engauge 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 executive is admitted to twenty percent, which means
that number's got to be low because they ask people
how often do you lie? And they're not going to
exaggerate how often they lie, They're going to underestimate. And

(01:06:04):
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 Black Swan Group, we have
a reputation deserved for teaching a business negotiation methodology that

(01:06:24):
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 us some insight. You know,

(01:06:47):
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 get you. If you just tell us everything, then
we'll hire you. Not only if you tell us everything
what we hire you, we'll refer you to people that

(01:07:08):
will hire you. Know, they paint 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
we get back to this saying like, all right, so
I'm gonna see what's important to you and if you're

(01:07:30):
really focused on one specific aspect. If I sense that
you're not focused on a long term relationship, you're a
seven percent. And then what am I gonna do? I'm
gonna do. I'm gonna go all Oprah Winfrey on you.
I'm gonna say some really positive, very true things. We'd

(01:07:50):
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 a commitment to us. Come back,
We'll make a commitment to you. Yeah, and they usually go.
Usually hear crickets on the other end of the line,
and that's the end of the conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:08:10):
So, Chris, as a follow up 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 wanted our half the price. 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,

(01:08:30):
they've had that call as well, where a client calls,
they want this client, they're excited by it. And I
want you to tell us the difference between the first
time a fortune five hundred 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,

(01:08:51):
but they're like, we want fifty percent off, Like that's
what that's our budget, that's our max.

Speaker 2 (01:08:55):
Yeah. Well, it's simply it's accepting that working with them
and 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.

(01:09:18):
You know, a good friend of mine a phrase that
we use, Joe Polish. He's got to phrase their half
clients and their elf clients. Half is hard, annoying, lame
and frustrating. Elf is easily lucrative and fun. So in
our in our early days, especially the.

Speaker 1 (01:09:36):
Two again, that was a brilliant hard.

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
Annoying, lame, and frustrating halfs the ELF's easy, lucrative and fun.

Speaker 1 (01:09:43):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:44):
And Joe says, don't work with the halves, work with
the elves. And I heard this, and and so if
you're 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 halves are going to have predictable
behavior once we start looking for it. It's going to

(01:10:05):
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 to wasting a lot of time. So the young
lady that's running my sales team at the time, and

(01:10:26):
you know, comment on gender if I may. We find
out women pick this style of negotiating 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,
and that's why they have a tendency to pick it

(01:10:47):
up faster than men. So women 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?

(01:11:07):
What's our profitability? Consequently, she gets back to me a
couple weeks later, 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 times as much time.

(01:11:31):
So let's say it only takes twice as long. That
means we've automatically taken a fifty percent 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 so they don't repeat. So these people that

(01:11:53):
are demanding discounts, you're taking a fifty percent cut 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

(01:12:14):
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. It's very dark in the
early days of an entrepreneur, the concept of walking away
from customers. It's horrifying. I got to make the rent,

(01:12:35):
I got 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 afterwards getting money out of them. You're not a
loan business. So there's all these problems. And then as

(01:12:57):
soon as we stop dealing with the have we found
that the elves started showing up. You know, 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 a line stop the people that take
the least amount of time. That's a scary thought for

(01:13:18):
anybody 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.

Speaker 1 (01:13:35):
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 it 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
huff and It's such great advice because it could save
you so much stress, save you so much pressure, and

(01:13:57):
you're going to feel like you did a great job,
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.

Speaker 2 (01:14:08):
It was awed money.

Speaker 1 (01:14:09):
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 her a bit
at the beginning, but I wanted to talk about this
idea that I think a lot of the time we

(01:14:31):
actually get an easy negotiation in the beginning, what it
feels like, right, and then things start to get more constrained.
So I have a friend who she met this guy
and he promised her 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

(01:14:52):
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

(01:15:15):
a negotiation in that setting when you were promised more
or someone over delivered in the beginning and now they're
under delivering.

Speaker 2 (01:15:22):
That's a real aspect of human nature, and so it's
at some point in time there needs to be polite 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

(01:15:47):
to start adding to the neglect first. And then how
how do you get advice? Like? 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

(01:16:08):
them as calibrated question. The word what is primarily designed
to uncover problems. The word how is primarily designed to
create answers, so you can say what got us off track?
Because you're off track now. It also feels very deferential,

(01:16:33):
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 them 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

(01:16:58):
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 asked 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

(01:17:19):
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

(01:17:40):
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 ten times, that
immediately changes the complexion of the conversation. It's so ridiculously

(01:18:05):
effective that in the two out of ten times it
doesn't work, people are just like, how 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 just got 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?

(01:18:27):
If you know you never talked 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 have
gone away. How am I supposed to maintain my relationship
with you? Under these different set of circumstances? You know

(01:18:50):
that's not refusing to maintain it. What you're saying, 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

(01:19:17):
given you a preview of a slowly descending future. Now
you got a 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.

Speaker 1 (01:19:35):
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 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 demand else, yeah,
or they turn into things that sound complaining, like oh,

(01:19:57):
things were amazing before, like how do you expect me
to 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

(01:20:21):
energy of the complaint as opposed to the explanation of
what you're looking for.

Speaker 2 (01:20:26):
Well, the two possibilities are, can you talk it through
with a friend who's neutral, who's not going to give
you advice. 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 letting somebody say stuff out loud instead of having

(01:20:49):
a 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. So a friend who's a great sound 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 this stuff out I want to
hear what I'm thinking. That's one potential option. You got

(01:21:11):
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 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 middle, but your gut

(01:21:32):
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 wining, complaining female.
Instead say I'm probably gonna sound like a typical, whining,
complaining female or whatever side of that argument that you're

(01:21:55):
in argument, interaction, negotiation. If you simply call it out
an 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 any
other person is saying, yeah, but you're gonna go ahead
and complain. If you say I'm gonna sound like I'm complaining,

(01:22:15):
that's that two millimeters shift. The other person will listen
and then say, well, those are actually some legitimate points.

Speaker 1 (01:22:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:25):
So it's a combination of the two things, each of
which take 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 I'll
just shift from denying to recognizing.

Speaker 1 (01:22:45):
Yeah, I love that. I was 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

(01:23:08):
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 we really want you to be the person who
takes them in this direction. So I was like, I

(01:23:28):
really appreciate 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's a few claps, but it's
not the warmest reception I've ever had in my life.
And I called it out. It was exactly what you said.

(01:23:49):
I said, Look, I know you all think that meditation
is woo woo. I said, I know you all think
that you know stillness and peace and all this stuff
is a bit intangible 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 what I was saying was true.

(01:24:11):
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

(01:24:32):
again going back to your earlier point, summarizing what their
point of view was 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

(01:24:53):
presenting it that way, right. So I love that, And
it was probably one of my favorite speaking experiences because
it felt like such a challenge to have to turn
it around.

Speaker 2 (01:25:02):
Yeah, and then then it's highly satisfying retrospect, right. Yeah,
and you did it with them invisibly, like they didn't
know what happened. Yeah, it just happened.

Speaker 1 (01:25:12):
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'll be open up
to therapy. I want to get my 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 too, right, they want their partner to

(01:25:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:25:41):
The real fundamental issue is is this a right relationship? Like,
is this behavior that's consistent with the things that you
value and the things that they value. That's the first
issue of my company gets coached on EOS. Jonathan Smith
is or US coach, and I remember the first time

(01:26:03):
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.
So 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

(01:26:24):
core values. Like oh wow, okay, that makes sense. So
does this have to do with the relationship? Is it
behavior change that you're seeking from the other person consistent
with the core values that you share. Now you don't

(01:26:45):
have to share every core value, but you kind of
need to share about eighty percent of them. And if
the behavior you're asking for is really disguised for a
change and a value, it's not going to happen. And
the hard part is accepting that you can value someone.
They can remain your friend. You can still have a

(01:27:09):
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,

(01:27:30):
does this fall with it? Do we share enough values?
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 ain't
never going to change. And we're both going to be miserable,
and we're going to waste two to two to five

(01:27:52):
to seven years of our lives. And hopefully the only
upside will be when this is over. I'm smarter. Yeah,
And that some of this is It's taken me a
really long time to come to accept the reality of
it that we're not helping each other. If we're not
in the right relationship, you're not helping them, they're not

(01:28:14):
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. Now you can start talking about
it within that light, so sounds like we share this value. Consequently,

(01:28:36):
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 too,
not just you being happier at their expense, but it's
about both of you being happier together, and it's really

(01:28:59):
going to line up to what are the values?

Speaker 1 (01:29:02):
Yeah, I think you've then on had 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 twenty
percent you're talking about around where you don't have to

(01:29:25):
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 differing 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 their and I understand why they have that value,

(01:29:47):
and 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, then that we can't connect the two, 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.

(01:30:10):
Two people can value their family, but they can mean
two totally different things, right, Yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 (01:30:25):
Right Yeah, I agree, And and be curious about the
other side values exactly, and then how is it added?
How is it added to your life?

Speaker 1 (01:30:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:30:33):
My girlfriend Wendy. Again, she get relationships with people that
she and she keeps in touch with people she's known
since she was seven years old. I don't have those
kind of relationships, you know, I haven't worked that hard
at it. Some of those people are still alive, but
I rarely talk to them. And She's really opened my
eyes and so so many ways to the value of

(01:30:56):
these great long term relationships, even with people that you
disagree with rationally, you know, you're a Democrat, there, Republican,
you know, whatever it is. But you know she's maintaining
those relationships 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.

Speaker 1 (01:31:15):
That's beautiful. The books go, never split the difference? Do
you ever split the difference?

Speaker 2 (01:31:19):
No? Never?

Speaker 1 (01:31:20):
Now Now in relationship is not business, not so here's
a caveat though.

Speaker 2 (01:31:25):
There's a difference between splitting and blending. Okay, you know,
maybe this is too cerebral of an analogy, but steel
is two percent carbon ninety eight percent iron. That ain't
splitting the difference. What's the proper blend? If there is

(01:31:49):
a blend, so that what we come up with is
a better product. Now two percent ninety eight percent split
in human nature be like, oh my god, now you know.
Or if I contributed two percent, I want fifty percent
of the profit. Now you only contributed two percent, Well,
it doesn't matter that we're far more better off. So

(01:32:12):
splitting the difference is not really about finding the best blend.
Or then never split the difference might also mean that
you're one hundred percent right and I'm one hundred percent wrong.
One of my favorite negotiations from Georgetown husband a wife
in a discussion over a real tree versus artificial tree

(01:32:32):
Christmas tree. Husband wants an artificial tree for all the
practical reasons. He thinks his wife is being unreasonable, unpredictable,
too emotional about a real tree. And he's a student,
so he uses, he thinks to get his way. A

(01:32:52):
great label sounds like having a real tree meant a
lot to you growing up, because he's he's digging in deep.
If if somebody's really seemingly irrationally sticking to something, it's
not some reason, It is not the last twenty four hours,
it may be twenty years ago. And so then she

(01:33:15):
opens up and finally lays out all the reasons for
the real tree. He realizes she's completely right. Her goals
are much loftier and more long lasting than his are
they get a real tree. So never split the difference

(01:33:35):
is also being willing to entertain the idea that the
other side's got insight that you don't have, and you've
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.

Speaker 1 (01:33:49):
That's a great answer. I love that Chris has 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 always have
a documentary out you're talking about someone you to share
that with us.

Speaker 2 (01:34:02):
Yeah, it just came out. It's called Tactical Empathy. It's
on Amazon. We shot it with DNA Films Nick Natton,
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 and we collectively. You know,
my son Brandon is featured in the documentary. There's a phrase,

(01:34:25):
empathy is a sneak attack on racism. Empathy produces better
decision making. And when Nick came to me about the film,
I said, you know, they're enough law enforcement disadvantaged community
problems that I think empathy is going to go a
long way towards solving not all of them, just most

(01:34:45):
of them. And if you're 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

(01:35:05):
end up at about the same time 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 plan a seed because
they want a more effective NYPD, which is a more
pathic NYPD. And I said, all right, so here's the deal.

(01:35:29):
Let us film it for the documentary and my son
Brandon is going to do the training, not me. You
get us for a full day. Brandon is as good
or better at this than I am. And the interesting
additional feature is my son brand his mother's African American

(01:35:49):
effectively to the world he is African American, big Boy,
Big big guy played lineman in college football, sizeable human being,
the very kind of guy that if he got out
of his car, will cause most police officers to think
they got to fight on their hands just by looking
at him. He's going to do the training, and so

(01:36:10):
we've got a segment in there 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 the 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

(01:36:32):
baggage between the communities. You got to deal with that.
So there's also besides the history of the company and
some pretty good hostage stories. Then we're trying to back
into police community relationships a little bit with the doc
and I hope it helps law enforcement get better training

(01:36:53):
so that there's less problems with the disadvantaged communities.

Speaker 1 (01:36:58):
That's fantastic. What's it quote Tactical Empathy on Amazon on
Amazon Awesome. I can't wait to watch it. Sounds fantastic, Chris,
it has 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 lighting the

(01:37:18):
lightning ryeah one sentence.

Speaker 2 (01:37:21):
Yeah, you know I get to proceed to the championship level. Y.

Speaker 1 (01:37:24):
Yeah, exactly, all right, So Chris Vast, these are your
fast five. So question number one, Chris, what's the best
advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 2 (01:37:33):
Never take directions from somebody you in trade places.

Speaker 1 (01:37:36):
With Question number two, what's the worst advice you've ever
heard or received?

Speaker 2 (01:37:40):
Wow? You know, hang in there just to prove them wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:37:48):
Third thing, how would you define your current purpose?

Speaker 2 (01:37:52):
Make it a world better place?

Speaker 1 (01:37:54):
Question number four? Why is empathy not a weakness?

Speaker 2 (01:37:58):
Ah, Empathy is strength, Empathy is reasoning. Empathy is a superpower,
and it's got nothing to do with weakness.

Speaker 1 (01:38:09):
And fifth and final question. We asked 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?

Speaker 2 (01:38:17):
Be nice first?

Speaker 1 (01:38:19):
Nice guys don't finish last?

Speaker 2 (01:38:20):
Yeah? No, Well you don't got to stay nice. You's
got to be nice first, got it?

Speaker 1 (01:38:26):
I love it, Chris Voss. Everyone in 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,

(01:38:51):
and of course go and watch the doc on Amazon
Tactical Empathy. Chris, thank you so much for being here.
So grateful.

Speaker 2 (01:38:57):
There's a pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:38:58):
Good. 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.

Speaker 2 (01:39:18):
You set a goal today, you achieve it in six 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

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