Confidence Classic: Master Negotiation to Get What You Deserve with Chris Voss, Alex Carter & Molly Fletcher

23:35Heather Monahan:get the potential client to say yes, to agree with you, to agree, yes, yes, yes, this yes momentum. That's bad. However, it's worked in many situations. What is that flip approach that you're teaching and why? Well, and that's a problem with it working for some people because people say, you can't tell me that I can't get deals getting people to say yes because I can. And I'll say that, yeah, and that's why, you know, what's his name? The Wolf of Wall Street, and it's a book, The Way of the Wolf. they talk about with the straight line selling method, 2 % success rate. And a lot of people think, well, if I'm converting 2 % to 3%, those are good.

24:19And what's his name? Jordan Belfort says, look, this doesn't sound like much, but if you run this many contacts on a monthly, weekly basis, and this is your success rate, and in a year you get a million dollars. And people go, oh, a million dollars? Okay, so failure is part of the equation. No, it's not. The yes momentum is a problem. It violates people's human need for autonomy. They say H-yes is a microagreement or it's a tie down. And then when you get to the end, you got them tied down. They have to say yes. That's a violation of somebody's autonomy. It kills the relationship. It makes them want to get away from you as quickly as they can.

24:57Maybe you just got them into a deal that they were going to make anyway, but they resented the hell out of how you got them into it in the first place. And so that resentment is going to pay you back. The stupid thing is, as bad as yes is, no has a complete opposite effect. Nobody in my company says, does this look like something that would work for you? We say, is this a bad idea? Are you against doing this? Is this ridiculous? Is this a violation of everything you hold sacred? We trigger no on purpose. And we move at light speed compared to the people that are doing yes.

25:28Heather Monahan:Why? because then they're taking ownership of it and defending why it's going to work for them? Yeah. And then the word no makes people feel safe when they say it. They feel safe and protected, then they can think more clearly and they can move forward more quickly, which is one of the reasons why you move forward so much faster. Or ideally what you're looking for, let's say a salesperson is not trying to trap somebody. you're respectfully saying, does this look like something that might work for you? You're respectfully trying to find out if you're on firm ground, you're just looking for confirmation, yes.

26:06And actually the salesperson is, by that question, is hoping for what about it doesn't work so that we can anticipate problems. The problem is people feel trapped by yes. So every word that comes out of their mouth about yes, after yes, if they're tentative, they feel more tied down, which means they're not going to tell you what the problems are. So if you just flip it over and you say, is this a bad idea? Does this not work for you? And I'll say, no, it's not a bad idea, but here are the following problems. Bang, bang, bang, and I'll lay them all out, which they would not have laid out after a yes because they're not ready to commit.

26:42They don't feel like they committed when they say no. So they can give you a bunch more information because they don't feel trapped by it. then you can really work the deal out.

26:52Heather Monahan:Such a different way of approaching it. I can't wait to try it. I'm so excited. Oh, it's nuts. It sounds crazy. It sounds uncomfortable, which means I'm all in. Meet a different guest each week. I'm not a guest. Confidence creator. Confidence creator. I ask you to try to find your passion. She's happy. At the end of the day, negotiation's really just a conversation, right? It's a difficult one, but it's a conversation. And the more that we can keep that conversation going at some level through understanding what matters most to them, I think the better the outcome, but also the more preparation we have in that regard, the more comfortable we are with all the zigging and zagging that occurs in any negotiation, which is a ton, right?

27:36And we're more confident in those moments when we're prepared. But I think so, you know, getting in the head and the heart of the people that we're negotiating with is key. You know, the other thing I think is incredibly important is having the courage to pause, right? So yes, negotiation is a conversation, but it doesn't mean that it can't pause from time to time. Because when we pause, pause can be two minutes, five, two days, a week, a month. But when we pause, we send messages. We send messages probably that what we have positioned is where we are, that we're firm at some level. It's incredibly powerful.

28:14I think if you are prepared and you lay a strong relational foundation inside of a negotiation, you communicate and connect with what you want, the more comfortable you can be pausing, which sends powerful messages. And I think that's a mistake a lot of people make. A lot of times when we're negotiating, we do all kinds of things right. And then we ask for what we want. And then we keep talking. And the best thing you can do is just pause. It's like when you go work out, you're doing abs with the medicine ball with your trainer or a workout partner. Throw that ball over there. Let them hold it.

28:51Let them feel it, that you mean it. That's an incredibly powerful thing. So those were a couple tips. I would say maybe a third one would be, you know, turn defensiveness inside of difficult conversations into curiosity. Go from that when you want to come out of your chair, come through the screen, go at whatever that feeling might be that bubbles up inside of you, inside of a negotiation. Get curious. Ask more great questions to get insight and intel and information so that you can then, Bob, and we even continue to find a way to solve and at the end of the day, close a gap for them.

29:28Heather Monahan:Molly, I want to go back to the point that you made about the power of pause, because I feel like that is an art that most people don't have. I certainly have struggled with that many, many times in my career. But when you were explaining that, I was thinking to myself, why is it maybe that I'm not a master at pausing for a couple of days and standing firm, like you said, and allowing that to make the statement of how clear I am on what it is that I've asked for or what it is that I'm expecting. It's that uncertainty, that wonder, oh my gosh, am I letting this go too long? How are you able to work yourself through that?

30:03Well, you know, we teach negotiation. I have a negotiation program that we built off my book around negotiation. I think that there's a lot of data around the way that we're raised, our environment that can impact our comfort or lack of with silence. But if you follow a model that we teach, which is around setting the stage and all the things that have to happen to do that, having the courage to discover the gaps inside of the lives of the people that we're trying to connect with and serve. And when we do a lot of things in advance of our ask and we've built that strong foundation, that relationship, we understand what matters to them.

30:39We've certainly laid a foundation and communicated our position along the way as well. Then we have to have the confidence to pause. So I think potentially somebody doesn't have the confidence to pause when maybe they feel like there's something that they haven't communicated that they need to. And if we can do all those things on the front end, then when we go in for the ask, we have more comfort in pausing because we've said, I'll tell you a story. I was negotiating a baseball player's contract who was a big league guy. He was going to arbitration if we couldn't come to terms with the team. And in arbitration, there's three perfect strangers that pick whether the number that we've submitted as his agent or the team has submitted which one it's going to be.

31:22So it could be a several million dollar gap. It's not a compromise. It's one or the other. And I always hated taking my guys to arbitration because number one, the team just beats them up and tells them how bad they are because they're trying to position the judges to the arbitrators to give them the lower number. So it's never good mentally, I think, for certain guys. Long story short, I'd set the stage. I built common ground with these folks. I'd asked for what I wanted. All those things had happened over several months. It was the night before we were leaving for arbitration. I'd done everything from the foundation perspective.

31:56My client and I were very aligned. I go to bed that night. I'm getting ready to jump on an 8.30 a.m. flight to Phoenix to the arbitration hearing. And my phone rings 11.30 at night. I used to sleep with my phone by my bed, as I'm sure you're candidly familiar with. So I answer. It was the general manager of the team. And he said, unbelievable. He said, you're going to Arizona, aren't you? And I said, we are. And he said, wow, you're firm. I said, we are. And I just paused. And my husband, after about a minute and a half, said, is he still there? Right? Because a minute and a half on the phone without anybody saying anything.

32:35Seems like a long time. Super weird. And I said, yes. You're right. And about a minute and a half goes by, two minutes. And he said, you got a deal. I'll email over the term sheet. and that minute and a half would have been a lot of opportunity for me to say, here you go. Listen, why don't we just do this? I'm the bonuses. Let's just do this. And, and on the base, I'd come down to here. I didn't do any of that. My client and I were aligned. I felt good about where we were. I'd said everything I'd ever needed to say. There was nothing else to say. We didn't want to come off the numbers and we got a deal.

33:09So I think that in life, we have to recognize the power in all the things that happen before we go firm, before we ask for what we want. We teach a tool in negotiation in our program. It's called an E-Walk, and it's a deal preparation tool that's really powerful in helping people identify everything that's in play, which is the E. The W is what do you want? What are options? People love options when you negotiate with them. They loved it. We could do this or we could do this. We can do$5 million with$3 million in bonuses, or we can do$4 million with$5 million in bonuses. People love choices. And then you've also got a preload.

33:49What are you willing to let go of? What are you asking for that, though, at some point in the conversation, maybe you unload, you get rid of it, you show some concession? What are you going to preload that you could unload? So, you know, there's a model in a process, certainly, that I saw in negotiating thousands of deals and a half a billion in contracts that works. But those are a couple little nuggets that I hope can help people. What's the most common mistake that you see people making in negotiations? Well, I think often one is I believe that the stronger the relationships are inside of a negotiation, the better the outcomes.

34:28And in fact, sometimes the quicker the outcome. I think a lot of times people would think, boy, as an agent, man, you are just going head to head, you know, take the gloves off, get after it. What I found worked best was strengthening that relationship, almost pouring into it, giving and driving connection. And the more connected I was, whether it was to a manufacturer's rep for a golf deal or a general manager or a network executive or the athletic director, the better the relationship, the better the outcome and often the quicker I could get them done. I think when people think that negotiation is supposed to be a battle or a war and that we want to approach it in that way, that's fine if you only want to do one deal with them.

35:12But if you want to potentially negotiate and do lots of deals, the relational piece is really important. I don't know that I would say, though, that is the most common mistake, but I think it's something that is misunderstood from time to time. and that if we can approach everything from a relational perspective versus a transactional perspective, we'll find better outcomes and we'll find relationships that we can go back to. For me, relationships were a differentiator because there's 30 big league clubs. You got guys coming out. You can't be sideways with 10 of them because you need to be able to go to those relationships or if I had an executive at ESPN or NBC, I needed to sustain that relationship because I would have other athletes, coaches, broadcasters that they were trusting me to be a steward of their career with that relationship.

36:06So relationships and connection is huge. But I would say, though, Heather, the biggest mistake is not pausing.

36:13Heather Monahan:It's so interesting hearing you talk. I've met so many sports agents. You speak so differently than, and I only know male sports agents until now, but they are talking more of that more combative win and, you know, how can we bury them? And it's so interesting to your point, when you opened this up in the beginning, being female has led you down this path of relationship and trust and nurturing and pouring into, which I've never heard an agent say, by the way. And it's so cool to hear that's what your superpowers, that's where you got your strength or what made you so unique and different. And the more you've leaned into the fact that you're a woman, the more that you've leaned into that you're different than these guys over here, the more success you found.

36:57Heather Monahan:It makes perfect sense. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that we can all do that in whatever career and industry that we're in, right? Lean into who you are and use your differences as gifts, as opportunities to connect. And it doesn't mean that I didn't, I had a ton of very difficult conversations with general managers, but if you lined them up, I ran into a hall of fame general manager the other day, you know, and he was trying to give me half of his burger and share his French fries at a bar the other day when I was there with another client. And that's just not, not normal. And there's a lot of mutual respect there.

37:37And I think I know that that helped me to be a steward of the clients that I served. And that was incredibly important to me. I mean, when these guys and gals are trusting you to navigate their career, that is, has a real finite amount of time to it, generally. I mean, these guys, they make in five years, 10 years, what most of us make in 50. So the clock is ticking every day. And I took that incredibly serious, the impact that all of it would have on their life long-term on their family now and later. And so the relational piece just has and continues to be a big part of what I believe deeply in.

38:28Heather Monahan:Hoping if you could kind of open up first a little bit and give us a little bit of, drop a little bit of knowledge on us from your negotiation experience. And also, one of the last conversations we had, what are the primary considerations in today's environment? There are always the primary considerations that just in a higher pressure environment were more attuned to them. And I think before what you said was, which is absolutely true, was safety, trust, and need. Do people feel safe dealing with you? Do they trust you? And do they need what you have? And need is like beauty. It's any eye to beholder.

39:03But if you can establish safety and trust with people, then you can talk with them about whether or not they really need what they have in their mind. And you can't talk with them about what they need until you've established safety and trust. Now, this is really the way it always was. Kennedy had a quote way back when, comfortable inaction. The risk and costs of comfortable inaction are much greater than the long-term costs making the wrong move. Because you make the wrong move, at least you learn if you paid attention. Why am I babbling on like this? in order to deal with this, you got to hear the other side out first.

39:36You got to hear what the other side has to say first. And I think that's the biggest mistake that people made. As a hostage negotiator, that was really all we were taught to do. Get on the phone, use a soothing voice, and hear them out. And you'll be shocked at how many things will solve themselves if you just do that. And that's why hostage negotiation works in business negotiation. That's why it works in personal life. That's why it works in your relationships with your parents, your children, your significant others. Hear the other side out. You'll solve enough of the problems by doing that only that then if you hear them out, if you shut up, then they'll give you an answer that you want.

40:18I mean, whatever you guys are dealing with, you're going to hack the whole process by starting with those steps. Like tone of voice is magic. Almost everybody on a phone is a C-suite, if not CEO, if not owner of a company, right, Heather? You're going to solve nine out of 10 of your problems with just changing your tone of voice. There's neuroscience that backs that up. I can change the speed that your brain thinks just by changing my tone of voice. Hostage negotiators, we were taught to use a late night FM DJ voice. Late night FM DJ. Like if I can calm down a sociopathic, rampaging terrorist with that tone of voice, you don't have anybody in your world that you can't calm down to.

41:03And by simply calming a situation down from the beginning, how many problems are you dealing with? Would 60 to 70 percent resolve themselves if people just calmed down? It's insane. And the other thing, too, that we've learned since, Sean Acker does a great TED Talk called The Happiness Advantage. Harvard psychologist. And not shocking, it will also be one of the funniest TED talks you ever listened to. Acker's a source of my data on this. He says, you're 31 % smarter than a positive frame of mind. So you want to be more successful. You want to make your people more successful. Put people in a positive frame of mind.

41:39You are going to be 31 % smarter. The people that work for you are going to be 31 % smarter. 31 % instantaneous edge is more than enough to gain a competitive of advantage over the people you're competing with, over nearly everybody you're against. 31 % smarter, you learn faster. The other thing I'd suggest you guys take a good hard look at is this book right here, Stealing Fire, Stephen Kotler. Stephen Kotler is probably the world's leading expert on flow. In flow, your decision-making improves, your mental stamina improves, your pattern recognition improves, everything you do improves in flow.

42:19And understanding flow and how to get into it is to your advantage. You learn faster in flow. It was a Dutch CEO from 1980s, 1990s, Royal Dutch Shell CEO. And with my accent, I'm going to butcher his last name, but it's Ari Deguis. And everybody has butchered his quote one way or another. I've seen even Kotler's using his quote. the ability to learn faster than your competition is the only sustainable competitive advantage the only sustainable competitive advantage learn faster than your competition in flow you learn faster in a positive state of mind you learn faster it's a way to hack to learn the process it's one of the reasons why i'm absolutely convinced that no one is ever going to catch up with my company in terms of business consulting negotiation consulting and coaching we coach consult and train.

43:15I thought we were only going to train. We're doing a lot of coaching. All of us are focused on learning. My core team, our significant others get sick of our conversation because all we want to talk about is negotiation and how to get better and how to get smarter. Nobody will ever catch up with us because we're into learning and that will be our sustainable competitive advantage as long as we are a company. We're getting knocked off on a regular basis now too. People trying to figure out what tactical empathy is. They're trying to bring in hostage negotiators. People are stealing our material.

43:49It's going to happen. They will not keep up with us because we're busy learning. The academics at Harvard and Wharton, they have to show their knowledge so much more than they have to learn. The emphasis on if they do a study, they got to do it academically rigorous and then they got to get that study published and the amount of time they're wasting getting a study published is two or three years we were learning while they were trying to get published.

44:19Heather Monahan:Will you share with us what tactical empathy is? So we put tactical in front of empathy to try to make it less about sympathy. Empathy's origin, it was never ever meant to be sympathy, ever. It was never meant to be synonymous with compassion. It's a compassionate thing to do. But in today's environment, it has come to be equated to sympathy, compassion, and agreement. And it's not at all. It's the first reason I started collaborating with the Harvard guys, because as a hostage negotiator, I was applying empathy in a very mercenary fashion. And then Bob Mnookin, the head of the program on negotiation at Harvard, published a book called Beyond Winning in the second chapter is a tension between empathy and assertiveness, which he wrote in as a fake title because there is no tension.

45:08They actually complement one another perfectly. But then in that chapter, he said, empathy is not compassion. It's not agreement. It's not even about liking the other side. It's just identifying where they're coming from. And I read that and I was like, wow, you guys define it exactly the way we do. And that's why we started to collaborate because we had the same core definition. Empathy is not not sympathy. Now, since we came up, Bob published that book probably about 2002-ish. Now we've added neuroscience. We didn't have neuroscience. The neuroscience data that we're using on a regular basis, which takes us completely out of psychology because psychology is just too soft of a science and it changes too much to really keep up with.

45:51Neuroscientists have identified the amygdala as sort of the command post of our emotional and our decision making. There's no such thing as a decision that's not emotional, just doesn't exist. You don't make, your decisions are not emotional when you're dead. It's kind of that cut and dried. Every thought we have either goes through the amygdala or starts there. There's argument as to what the sequence is, but there's no argument as to whether or not the amygdala is involved in every thought. Everybody's heard of the amygdala hijack. The amygdala, neuroscientists have mapped out the amygdala and 75 % of the real estate in the amygdala is devoted to negative thoughts.

46:31Every one of you has an amygdala. Every one of you is equipped with a system that's designed to be negative, 75 % negative. That's your survival mode. Don't take my word for it. Google it and look it up yourself. You're going to find that out. What's that got to do with tactical empathy. Tactically, you get farther faster in a conversation by deactivating negatives than you do pitching positives. I stood up in front of the command staff of a police department two days ago, and I knew I was going to say a bunch of stuff to them that they didn't like. So what are their reasons for not listening to me?

47:13Well, the first one is going to be, All right, so this guy used to be in law enforcement. He retired 13 years ago. That was the first line on my first slide. This guy retired from law enforcement 13 years ago. He doesn't know what he's talking about. What's the next thing a cop is going to say for not listening to me? Well, okay, so you were in law enforcement. You were fed. That doesn't count. That was the second line on the slide. All right, so if he was in law enforcement, he was a fed. That doesn't count. What's the next line? All right, he was on a terrorist task force, and he worked with cops, but the cops carried him anyway.

47:45That was my following line. I went through every single reason that they would come up with for not listening to me. And instead of saying, all right, so don't think that this is why you shouldn't listen to me, but I just listed him and there was no yes, but on either one of them. One of the things I put in was, all right, so he was in law enforcement, but he was a negotiator. Those people are all part of the kumbaya crowd. All they want to do is give people hugs. I put that on a slide. Another reason for not listening to me is, okay, so he was a cop, but that was back in the 1980s. It's almost 40 years ago.

48:20And that was in Kansas City. They probably had cows in the street and rode horses. I put that on a slide. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then I told him the truth about reality as I saw it. And not one person ever rejected any one of my thoughts. Nobody raised their hand and said, yeah, but you don't understand and here's why you don't understand. I put all the reasons why I wouldn't understand and I put them first because I know how their brain is wired. And I deactivated each and every objection they had. I don't overcome objections. I deactivate them. And I deactivate them by knowing what they are and just simply calling them out.

48:57And I laid everything out and I had these guys attention for 90 minutes after three o 'clock in the afternoon. And where I was going with it ultimately was the Black Lives Matter issue. I wanted them to think about it in a different way. As it turns out, the Las Vegas Police Department is an extremely progressive police department. And they're one of the few police departments that came out and openly condemned what was done to Joyce Floyd. They opened, very few police departments came out and openly condemned what happened to Joyce Floyd. Very few. Vegas PD was one of them. I said, it doesn't matter.

49:31You guys are still a poster child for everything that's wrong in our society today. So let's talk about how we can change it in a way for you guys to think about it a completely different way. I actually talked to him about flow. I said, look at the thing about George Floyd and look at the shooting in Atlanta and let's take racism out of that equation. And instead, let's just talk about in terms of decision making. Is there anything here that you guys see that was a good decision? So reframe the entire conversation in law enforcement from racism to decision making, and you guys can move forward because you're now not accused of being racist.

50:04You can't get a single commander in any police department to look at what happened to George Floyd and say, point out the good decision making here. You're not going to find any. And that's the way they're going to fix their problems, change the conversation. But that's where I wanted to go. I didn't want them to push back on me because I didn't understand. So what are all the reasons I don't understand? bang bang bang bang bang listen and it's shocking when you simply call out somebody's reason for opposing you and you don't say i don't want you to think that and you don't say i realize you think that but you just call it out and it makes it go away it's neuroscience

50:43Heather Monahan:i decided to change that dynamic I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it. I'm on this journey with me.