How to Negotiate, Lead, and Win in Any Situation with Chris Voss

24:29Well, first of all, they don't have their fear of soft skills, which are emotional intelligence-based. Empathy, being able to state the other side's perspective without agreeing. You know, demonstrating comprehension. Showing that you comprehend and showing someone what you comprehend. Women seem to be comfortable with that faster. Women seem to be more willing to experiment with it faster. Now, once people start to catch on, then it's like, this is great. Like, this is astonishing. I've got a couple brand-new salespeople on my team. I'm training both of them. They're working out of my house, so they're seeing me on a daily basis.

25:14One of the guys, or both guys, has been reluctant to use the skills because they're very different. And he wants to make sure he gets it right. You know, I don't know if it's a male trait that he wants to be sure it's right before he tries it. So he's frustrating me so much. Like I grabbed him yesterday. I go, we're going on a field trip. And so I'm taking it to the grocery store because I keep telling him small stakes practice. Well, I don't have small stakes opportunities. Yes, you do. They're right in front of you. So here's what you're going to say to the cashier who's checking us out at the grocery store.

25:52because one of our magic wand phrases is, what do you love about either where you work or where you live? And it has to be that word for word. What do you love about where you work or where you live? Not what do you do for a living, not where do you live, what do you love about it? And I tell him, you're going to do this with the cashier because you're going to feel like she's busy, she's in line, you don't have an opportunity. You're using this, I don't have opportunities to small interactions. I say, you go to the grocery store, you got a chance to talk to somebody. So I tee him up, and I'm in line behind him.

26:34She doesn't know that we're together, but she knows somebody's waiting. And he looks at her, and I'm happy to say the store, because her reaction was phenomenal. He says, what do you love about working at Albertsons? And she stops, and she goes, you know the benefits here are phenomenal i mean we're only paying seven dollars a week and our health benefits are through the roof and we got this benefit and that benefit and to be able to tap into these kind of benefits working here for albertsons like you only got to work 20 hours a week you don't even have to go in full time she said but i've been working here for 20 years and i've worked at other grocery stores and this place is well run and it's really clean and a benefit And she's going on and on.

27:18Now, he doesn't expect this deluge. You know, he thinks she's going to blow him off. I got another customer to deal with. He didn't see it as an opportunity. But I'm standing right there, and he knows that I'm going to figuratively beat him with a baseball bat if he doesn't do this. And the look on his face is she's gushing about all this information. And finally, she kind of looks back at me. She's like, I'm sorry. Are you guys together? And I go like, no, no, no, it's cool, it's cool. Nobody gets a chance to talk this much. And she goes on and on and on, and then, you know, we pay and we move on, and we're walking out.

27:56And he goes like, I had no idea. And I said, yeah, man, I've been trying to get you to do it. You felt like you didn't have an opportunity. You think you got to be in a conversation to throw it out. And I said, you just made her day better. She feels 10 times better than she did when we were in line before. And she didn't mind talking to you because the other advantage of these skills are nobody talks to anybody. Like she hasn't had that kind of a gushing conversation with anybody today, let alone this week. So how do I get a man to do that? Like I would be willing to bet that I wouldn't have had this much trouble getting a female, you know, drag a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

28:41I don't think dragging the female to the water is, it's that hard for her to drink. She's been educated in soft skills since she was five years old. But the men haven't been hit with this as much in this. And overall, they're scared of them to start out with.

28:57Heather Monahan:Well, I just want to mirror you for a second and hear it back what I just saw. So one, you, and for everyone listening, if you're a leader in sales and business, this is such a, it's so important. Well done, Chris Voss. So when you saw somebody on your team struggling with a situation, you declare pattern interrupt. This is so powerful for anyone learning, for anyone when you're speaking to an audience. Pattern interrupts are incredibly powerful because it completely takes you out of whatever struggle you're in physically, mentally, emotionally, and breaks that loop entirely. Then the next thing you did was you lowered the stakes of the game and people perform at such a better level when they take pressure off themselves.

29:38Heather Monahan:The reality is the pressure was only that this guy was putting on himself anyway. You just wanted him to try it. So now we lower that we pattern interrupt him, get him out of his environment, put him in another situation, take all the pressure off low stakes game. And then you he does the thing that you've already taught him to do. And one thing I want everyone to know when you allow or encourage someone to speak about themselves and how they feel about things, especially things they feel good about. To your point, what do you love about you? What do you love about where you live? people begin to elicit dopamine in their brain they don't know they're doing this it's happening genetically in their body biologically this is not something they're aware of and it induces happiness it induces a connection to the person they're speaking with this is one of the reasons why podcasting is super interesting when you're interviewing somebody and they're getting the opportunity to teach and speak about themselves they are listening to dopamine it improves their day.

30:33Heather Monahan:It improves how they feel overall. And I just, I love that you just laid out those unbelievable lessons for everybody right here in real time. But I have an important question for you, Chris. You mentioned that women would be more prone to do that. I have a question for you. Women are told often in business, especially in male dominated businesses. I was in the radio business for a long time and it was incredibly male dominated. Here's what I was told. Emotion is for the weak. Empathy for the weak. Heather, don't show your emotion. Don't ask so much about the other person. I was almost taught the opposite of what you're teaching, the opposite of what I felt inclined just to do from a connection standpoint to connect with somebody.

31:18Heather Monahan:So when women are being told, hide your emotion, put up a mask. I used to listen to that and I did it. How do you help them to understand you shouldn't always take the advice that a man in business could potentially be giving you? Yeah, that's a great question because it's an enduring problem. It's not as bad as it was. What I love about today's day and age is I'm delighted to meet enough really successful women executives like you who didn't become guys. And last century, you know, and even in somewhat into this, they were all encouraged to become one of the guys, and it destroyed them. And they lost their femininity, and they lost who they were.

32:04In today's day and age, you got no shortage of women that are great examples of being completely feminine, not being one of the guys, and being ridiculously successful. So we're starting to get out of that. But that counseling was there previously. They didn't know any better. The men didn't know any better. And they didn't realize they were mediocre. I mean, the highly intelligent guys were keeping it to themselves. And a lot of empathy is invisible unless you're the recipient of it. Now, I can use empathy on someone, and on that person, I will open them up, and they will get ahead of all the neurochemicals that I want them to get ahead of, the ones you just mentioned, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, principally.

32:54the people watching don't get those hits. So the magic happened in front of them, and they were just, they were like, yeah, you know, the minute ago we were here in this conversation, and three minutes later we're here, and I didn't see it happen. So it blows right by them. I had a moment a number of years ago where I got Jack Welch. I connected with Jack Welch based on one sentence. And the guy that was standing there with me watched me do it, I mentioned it to him a couple years later, and I go, you remember that moment with Jack Welch? And he's like, yeah, I still don't know what happened. I don't know how you got there.

33:35So if we learn by seeing it done, empathy is so invisible, most people don't pick it up when it happens in front of them. So many people in business, unless they're specifically counseled, the men, and even the women to some degree, if somebody didn't tell you what they just did, it blew right past you. And so to figure it out in the school of hard knocks of experience, how observant are you? How curious are you? You see it a thousand times and you're never going to get it once because you don't learn and because you're not someone who's mentored. So you get a lot of bad behavior being reinforced among the guys, if you will, because they want to feel like a club.

34:21They all want to be mediocre at the same time. They compare themselves to each other. And, you know, I'm batting. I'm not an A player, but I'm pretty good here. They have no idea how much better they could be. That's the problem with being competitive. You're limited by the abilities of your competition. You don't know how good you could be. And I think that's held men back in their advice, well-intentioned as it may have been, here's how I succeeded. You got to do what I did. Well, the point of fact, you're a C player. And so if I do what you did, I'm a C player too. How do I pick up how to be an A player?

34:59It's a little more difficult.

35:01Heather Monahan:Oh, that's so good. I love that you just brought that up. Who you were competing against is everything. Okay, wait, get back to the Jack Welch story. And for anyone listening right now that does not know who Jack Welch is, CEO of GE, chairman of GE, incredible author. What else am I missing? He was one of the first real rock stars of business. And Jack has since passed, but he ran GE at the height of what they were doing based on his leadership. They were a global force. And so when he retired, there was a series of business books because he was a business rock star. The book Jack, the book Winning.

35:42And then finally, he and his wife Susie put out a book called The Real Life MBA. And so they're rolling through Los Angeles, and they are promoting the book. And although Susie didn't get credit, she originally, I think, wrote for Harvard Business Review, a phenomenally talented writer. I think she was very involved in the writing of every one of Jack's books. There's no way she wasn't. She's finally getting full credit at The Real Life MBA. They're doing a book signing. I'm walking up to them with a book signing, pitch him cold, come speak at class I teach at USC. Now, you have no time. You have no seven seconds to make this pitch.

36:22He doesn't know who I am. I'm just some other schmuck standing in line trying to get his book signed. Everybody's got an ask. Jack, come to my house for dinner. My wife's a great cook. Jack, take a picture with this fishing rod I developed that's a fishing rod and a water cooler and a beer holder all in one and a shotgun. You know, that kind of crazy stuff, right? So I'm trying to pitch Jack to come and speak at a class I'm teaching at USC at the time. Now, there ain't no value there. And most people would want to say, hey, Jack, would you like to come speak at the USC Marshall School of Business and EMBA program?

36:59Now, for the ordinary human being, that's a good opportunity. For a business global rock star, that's a waste of time. even if it's promoting his book. Like, I ain't got time for that. So I can't pitch a positive to Jack. And I can't introduce myself because that burns up my seven seconds. I can't ask him how he is. That burns up my seven seconds. I got one shot. And I know that people feel safe and protected when they say no instead of yes. I don't try to get people to say yes. So I walk up to Jack Waltz and I say, Is it a ridiculous idea for you to come and speak at the negotiation class I teach at USC?

37:39And first he glares at me, and he starts to frown. And so you've got to be careful on assuming body language, because anger is just one of three possibilities. But when somebody looks angry, you think they're angry. Now, Jack is not angry, but I don't know that. I think he's furious. And then he looks up and to the left, and he gets this hideous scowl on his face, and he doesn't move for what seems like an eternity with this hideous scowl on his face. And I think I just gave the poor guy a stroke because he's so furious and his head exploded on the inside. He's going to fall over dead. So he doesn't fall over dead.

38:12I'm relieved. But he still looks furious. And I think he's going to have me thrown out. And after the eternity, he looks back at me and he says, OK, this is my personal assistant's name. This is a special Twitter account we have set up to communicate with her. I will call her and tell her who you are. I think we're going to be in Los Angeles in the fall. If we are, we'll come in and speak at your class. Because my question to get what I wanted to move forward, the answer was no. And when people say no, it's a Pavlovian response. You feel safe and protected. When you say yes, you feel like you're letting them yourself in.

38:55There's a trap. There's always a hook. It's a microagreement. It's a tie down. They're going to trap me. But when you say no, you think you've saved yourself from the trap. And if you trigger that emotional reaction of safety in someone, while he's scowling, that's his thinking phase. He's thinking through the steps. And then he looks back at me and gives me implementation. And that's emotional intelligence. If I try to get you to say yes, you're going to be worried about what you're in for. Saying yes and hearing yes are two vastly different experiences. Saying no and hearing no are two vastly different experiences.

39:40I mean, I like to hear no, but I love to say it. I know every human being loves to say no. And that's how I got through the move, the process forward, Jack Welch.

39:50Heather Monahan:Oh, that's incredible. And major props on that one. That was such a win. Meet a different guest each week.

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42:32Heather Monahan:okay so you said when people give that scowl that happens to me when i'm speaking chris i know it happens to you too because when you see you catch eyes with someone in your audience and they've got that crazy weird upset looking like they can't stand your face i've learned since then i don't know how you label it because you said there's three three different options but sometimes after the fact when I talk to people in the audience, that's a person something landed with and resonated with the most, and they started running back through their memory of something in their life. What are the three different reasons why someone would look at you like that?

43:05Well, first of all, I've been accused of having a resting serial killer face. So I'm sitting listening to a speaker myself a couple years ago, Terry Hawkins. She's a phenomenal public speaker. She's a superstar. And she doesn't know me. And I'm so engaged in her talk that I walk up to her and speak to her afterwards, and it was a small group. So she says, you were scaring me. I mean, you looked at me like you wanted to chop me up and feed me to your dog. I was like, no, no, no, that's not how I look what I'm thinking. All right, so your intense thinking face looks angry. Your angry face looks angry.

43:48And when you have gas.

43:49Heather Monahan:So you had decided Jack Welch was having one of those three moments rather than you were anticipating he was actually going to say no to you. I looked angry. I'm reading anger. But the other two are so vastly different from anger that you got to be careful on this whole body language stuff, reading something out of context. And I didn't know that that's what Jack looked like when he was thinking through how he wanted to implement what he wanted to do. And I got to some degree the same face. If I'm listening to you intently, you think I'm thinking about chopping you up in a backyard. I got a resting serial killer face.

44:32Heather Monahan:For women, they call it the RBF, resting bitch face. So yeah, it is a real thing. And to your point, coming from a place of curiosity and understanding and giving people that chance to articulate what it is that they're feeling or what it is that they're thinking. Okay, so earlier you were talking about the privilege to be in the United States, the privilege to have a job. I want to get to that right now because I've read a stat that six out of 10 companies are considering layoffs in 2026. A number of major companies have already implemented some layoffs. For people, and I get tons of DMs on this, I'm sure you do too.

45:11Heather Monahan:For people going through now, needing to find a new job, maybe they were senior level and suddenly they're scared to ask for the raise. Suddenly they're starting over and going into new companies and trying to negotiate for a job. How to set people up mentally for the best success walking in when they're thinking, I should just be grateful to get anything. I should not push back. I should not negotiate. what is the right mindset to use in a year like 2026? Well, first of all, yeah, if you can switch to gratitude at all, like, you know, there's an old phrase, this is not happening to me, it's happening for me.

45:50There's going to come a point in my life in 10 years now that I'm going to look back at this moment and realize it was a turning point to a better life. Because you're unhappy about the moment because of where you think it's taking you. And when you've lost your job, whatever you thought reality was in front of you, all this vision of the future is now gone. And you're staring at what looks like a dark place. And you don't know what's going to happen. And it's horrifying because you had this whole vision of the future mapped out. And so you think it's happened too. You feel a tremendous sense of loss, of things that never happened.

46:34So it's the inner chatter in your mind which is going to make all the difference in the world. And that's easy to say and hard to do. It takes practice. And it starts with, okay, if you just say to yourself, this is not happening to me, it's happening for me. You know, that exercise begins to get you in a right sheet of music. And then you begin to see it show up in a really successful people. and they used that two-millimeter mind shift to begin to change the momentum of their life. Now, if you got laid off, it was either the company's fault or it was your fault. Let's go with it was the company's fault.

47:16You weren't in a great place. You could be a superstar and still get laid off. I mean, that happens. So you just left a sinking ship. You just left a company whose senior executives created a bloated enterprise They were drunk on their stock price. They were drunk on success. They got drunk on the amount of money that was being thrown at them at some point in time. And they created this bloated operation that wasn't doing you any good personally. Ask yourself, do I really want to have a more enjoyable life? I just left a bad job where I wasn't growing. It's like, did you leave a bad relationship?

48:01If you're in a bad, abusive relationship where somebody's fat, overweight, doesn't work out, eats too much, doesn't appreciate you, takes you for granted, you don't fix them. You find a good relationship, but that person levels you up. So you didn't want it to happen, but you just got cut loose from a sinking ship, a place where you couldn't grow as a human being. Let's go with that as being the fault of the company. I love Bob Iger's book, The Rite of a Lifetime, detailing his success journey to first-time CEO of Disney. Then he retired. He came back for a few years, and he's recently retired again.

48:41The Rite of a Lifetime is phenomenal. Now, Iger happens to be one of these guys that survives takeover after takeover after takeover. And most of these people are shown the door. So why does Iger survive? Here's the other hard part about being in a company that's bought, taken over by another company. You were just forcefully put in another job that you didn't ask for and you didn't apply for. You get taken hostage. You were hired in one culture. They get bought. They're probably going to start cutting people back, showing people the door. You are now in a culture that you didn't ask for. And if this new culture either doesn't fit you or the shift, like, you're better off without it.

49:27Now, Auger's response in time after time and the companies that were taking over is like, okay, you guys are in charge. And whether I like it or not, there's a new sheriff in town, and we're gonna go by your rules. You know, one of the classic examples is he's working with ABC Sports, as I recall, in the Rune Arledge days, and they developed some of the most phenomenal, extravagant sporting events. I mean, they redefined how sports were being covered and with iconic clips. And, you know, there was a couple songs, The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat. That was ABC Sports under Rune Arledge.

50:10They show the Agony of Defeat, the ski jumper coming down the ramp and just wiping out before he goes off. I mean, just iconic stuff. And they created so much value for ABC, they were having money thrown at them by the truckload. Disney comes and buys them and slashes their budget. They don't care how successful they were. They don't care about any of the previous, that they redefined sports reporting globally. And they immediately slashed the budget. Now, they got a bunch of people that were successful business executives that could have said, leave us alone. We are the rock stars. We got you at the top of the entertainment heap.

50:52Do not mess with this system. Those people all got shown the door. I said, okay, you guys are in charge. You're cutting the checks. You're making the rules. And it was the exercise of empathy. This is how you guys want to have things done now? it's on me to either do it that way, quit, or get shown the door. And he had the ability to respect the people that were in charge and say, here's what you want. And we're not breaking the law, and you guys are in charge, so we're going to do it. And he's in company after company that got taken over, survived every takeover, and ended up with a career, in my view, and cut deals with Apple because the Apple-Pixar deal, Pixar-Disney deal was his handiwork, one of the best deals in the history of business.

51:55That's how you begin to survive. So if you were to ask Iger, he would have said, these changes are happening for me and not to me.

52:03Heather Monahan:Huge, huge mindset change. And as someone who was fired seven years ago because I outgrew the company. I hated it in the moment and I love it today. So your future, don't future cast negatively. You never know. It could be the turning point or jump off point of a lifetime because it was for your girl. Okay, I have one last question. And if you let me throw one more in on top of that, because what I love about that example, a guy named Harvey McKay wrote a book last century called Fired Up. And all these phenomenally successful people that their success journey started when they got fired. And that's what you were just talking about now.

52:45Heather Monahan:I'm going to go find that book and I'm going to write myself into the last chapter. So thank you for mentioning that, Chris. Okay, I have one last question before I want to get to how people can actually immerse themselves in your work and become a part of really advance themselves and be around that next level competitor, which is your team and your peeps. How do you respond to people saying, oh, Chris, I'm using AI now to help me negotiate. What could AI be missing if somebody's just going to AI to say, okay, how do I negotiate? What do I write? Is AI nailing it? Or is there a gap between AI and actual human negotiation?

53:22The human touch is still necessary. Now, we're all using AI simultaneously in my company. And I was talking about it with my head of coaching yesterday. today. And the truism is you're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by somebody who's using AI. And what we're finding in our negotiations, you know, we filter this stuff. I know people out there are feeding my book in the chat, GPT, and using it to help their negotiations. It's a great idea. But you have to then have the fundamental understanding of finding out when your AI is on the target and when it's missed or when it's close and it needs your slight adjustment to get it right.

54:06So we're using AI all over the place. I love it. Look at it as a great augmentation so that you can focus your thinking on a precise thing that you as a human bring, as a human being bring to the equation that in my view, AI will never duplicate.

54:21Heather Monahan:Well, I just like to use the real-time example that you gave us, which was you were mentoring and leading this person on your team. You're sitting there giving him all the information that's in. Don't split the difference. Never split the difference. Well, you got to a point where he still wasn't applying it in real time. You had to jump in and pattern interrupt. You had to jump in and say, I can see he's putting too much pressure on himself. Sometimes what we have to understand is it takes a human trained eye that only has seen through experience of things going wrong, not just going by the book, which we all know life does not always do.

54:55Heather Monahan:So if people do want to learn, Chris, you know, in real time from pros like you and your team, how can they work with you? All right. So the best thing to do is first of all, go to our website, blackswanltd.com. Now we have a brand new environment product community that we just started a year ago. It's a Black Swan negotiation community. Now you can go in there and sign in for free and start to get interaction with other people that are getting better at negotiation right now as soon as you sign in. And our top performing people that spend a lot of money on us with coaching are in there a couple times a week practicing because you have to do it and practice it to be as good as you possibly can.

55:43I use the Tiger Woods analogy all the time. While Tiger Woods was winning the Masters regularly, he was still practicing more than he was playing for real. So you want to, if you want to, and he never compared himself to his competitors. He'd win the Masters and they'd say, what do you think? And he says, well, I could get better. He loved getting better. And so you've got to practice to get better and you can join the community for free and start practicing with people in your profession or with your same struggles right now. That'll get you ready in our next upcoming training, our Professional Dealmaker Day is coming up in Las Vegas, May 15th.

56:21Now, these are not cheap. And if you are ready and you're making more than minimum wage, then you're going to make your money back the same day. Now, if the deals that you've got going right now are not at the level where you can afford a professional dealmaker, they join a community. And a year from now, not only will you be having a lot of fun with this stuff, we all talk about how much fun this is, you will have made enough money that our training events are going to be very cheap to you. And so give yourself a chance to get up to the level where you continue to invest in yourself. The secondary benefit is that you're going to make more money.

57:06The primary benefit is you're going to have delightful conversations every day if you want to.

57:13Heather Monahan:I love that. I love how you apply it to this works for parenting teens, as we were talking about before we got on air, just normal relationships, better your relationships, better yourself. And Chris, that's what I appreciate so much about you. You take all this wisdom that you learn through FBI hostage negotiation and apply it into being a parent, into being a spouse, into being a boss, a friend, a leader, a salesperson, whatever it may be. and we can all get better. Like you said, it's all about the level of the people we're surrounding ourselves with. So thank you for this opportunity for people to join the community, to meet you in Vegas, May 15th at your event, to learn firsthand from you and your team and for all the work that you're doing.

57:55Heather Monahan:I will link everything in the show notes so that you can meet up with Chris in Vegas. You can join the community and you can take yourself to the next level. Chris Voss, thank you so much for being here today. Heather, you're wonderful. Thanks for having me on. All right, guys. Until next week, keep creating your confidence. You know I will be.