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When I look back at that, I reacted really negatively to that because I was like, you could have just told me this as opposed to making me feel like i'm a complete idiot and no one ever does this right like sorry actually lots of people do this like lots of people make this mistake and i think it's
when we add in this sort of how does this reflect on your reputation and who you are as opposed to what's like if we just describe what happened like you did with kai right and say you know that's probably not the best way to handle like, okay, dad, that makes sense.
That's a lot different than Kai, you're a bad boy, like you did this badly, you should be ashamed of yourself, whatever, right?
But I think that weave in some of those things, because we think that they're actually going to be helpful in really learning the lesson.
And I can tell you, my own experience was that they were the opposite of helpful, they made me not want to learn or even want to engage in what I did wrong.
So we have to separate that out and say, this happens, you should learn from it.
But it doesn't mean you're a bad human being, it means you made a mistake, and you got cope with it had their struggles.
And when failure happens, you say, Okay, like, I've been to this movie before.
It's not that bad. I always say to my kids, which they hate, but they're coming around to now, keep it in perspective.
Because as you said, if we're not dead, if we're not whatever, right, like, then we're still here, and we can do something else, something better, and we learn from it.
And I think they're getting the point, right?
Slowly but surely, that life throws you difficult things.
And when you're 15 and you have a bad day at school, you think it's the worst day ever.
And then you hear about somebody getting cancer or somebody dying in an accident, and then you realize it's not.
And I want people to realize failure is not going to crush you.
It's going to help you if you can get your head around it and say, what the hell just happened here?
And how do I figure that out?
Right. And so it's just, it's like, let's just, I love that quote by Jim Collins of face the cold hard facts.
We have to do that in our field and, and in general in life.
Cause I just think it's like, are we really looking at what happened here?
And if we are, we're going to grow from it one way or the other.
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Josh, welcome back to the show, my friend.
Thanks, Kwame. It's awesome.
Always great to be with you, my friend.
Yes, likewise. So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure. Well, I've been teaching leadership, negotiation, dealing with conflict for quite a while.
Kind of have three hats that I wear.
I run a master's program at a smaller university called Bay Path University in Western Massachusetts.
It's a master's in organizational leadership and negotiation.
And then I run a project under the rubric of the program on negotiation called the Global Negotiation Initiative with William Urie, who you know well and I've gotten to know over the years.
And we focus more on international negotiation, global negotiation kind of work.
And then I have my own consulting company.
So I get myself in lots of interesting situations and troubles and challenges, doing training and advising and representing with governments and for -profit, non -profit, you name it, right?
You know that every industry needs all of this.
And so I'm typically running all over the place doing that kind of stuff.
And like you, I just love it.
It's fascinating and always, always challenging you to do more and better.
So that's that in a nutshell, really.
Yes, and so much more, Josh, my humble friend.
Today we're going to talk about one of the new projects that you're working on, which is an exciting new book that I believe should have been written decades ago.
I'm glad that you are the person who is brave enough to make this happen.
Can you tell the audience about the book?
Well, thank you for saying that.
I hope you're right.
We'll find out in a little bit.
Yeah. The book is called Getting Back to the Table.
Really, in essence, it's about what do we do when we fail in negotiation or we experience a significant setback?
And I think that if you look at the literature, there's definitely some work that's been done around this subject, but I don't think we could say that it's been exhaustive.
And I think we do what lots of fields do, which is we tend to champion the successes and the amazing things that people in this field do on a regular basis.
And we should do that.
It's important that the world understands the contribution that negotiators and conflict resolvers and mediators and all those things make, right?
But I think it's also important that we're realistic about what this process and these processes are, because as you well know, negotiation is very difficult.
And in the real world, we don't always succeed.
And so the question is, what do you do with that?
And when I ask people, they typically sort of have some way that they handle it.
But then I'll say to them, well, like, do you have a more formalized process in your, for example, like with hostage negotiators or with diplomats?
I asked them the question, like, what do you do?
And they say, well, I have my own way of thinking about it.
But, you know, come to think about it, we don't really have a structured process for how to really go about learning from what happened.
And I think one of the interesting things that drew me to this is that I saw lots of people who would apply the wrong lessons actually from their failures.
So I would be doing trainings and people would come up to me at lunch or after the fact and say, you know, I've got this upcoming negotiation.
Do you have a few minutes to talk about it?
And I would say, sure.
And they would say, so, you know, I had this negotiation that happened six months ago or whatever.
And this is what happened.
There were some great lessons in there for my upcoming negotiation.
And I would say, okay, well, let's talk about the parallels.
Like, are we comparing apples to apples or apples to watermelons here.
Are there the same number of parties?
Is the power equal in one, but different in another?
And I think one of the interesting things that drew me to this is that I saw lots of people who would apply the wrong lessons actually from their failures.
So I would be doing trainings and people would come up to me at lunch or after the fact and say, you know, I'd really, I've got this upcoming negotiation.
Do you have a few minutes to talk about it.
And I would say, sure.
And they would say, so, you know, I had this negotiation that happened six months ago or whatever, and this is what happened.
There were some great lessons in there for my upcoming negotiation.
And I would say, okay, well, let's talk about the parallels.
Like, are we comparing apples to apples or apples to watermelons here?
Like, are there the same number of parties?
Is the power equal in one, but different in another?
What's the nature of time and time pressure from the first negotiation to the second.
And so when you start to say, are these lessons really transferable?
Can you really take something from what you just did and apply it to perhaps quite a different negotiation?
What I was finding was people were really misapplying lessons and thinking it was going to help them when it actually was going to hurt them.
Wow, Josh, this is a phenomenal start because I think everybody, when you just think about it from a practical standpoint.
We should be reviewing our successes and especially our failures to try to learn and grow.
But it's really not until we're having this conversation right here, right now, that I realize that we don't have a very clear rubric for analysis.
Everybody else is kind of making it up as they go along when it comes to how they do these post -game analyses.
And then also, I think what we were seeing in culture and society that led us to this point where we had yet to have a book like this.
I think it manifests itself in the problem itself too, because there's a little bit of shame associated with the failures we go through in these difficult conversations.
And then we don't want to share that with other people.
It's very difficult for us to compare notes on our failures and see how other people are making these analyses and growing.
After you recognize this, what were some of the commonalities that you were seeing in the mistakes that people were making in their post -negotiation analyses?
And then what did it compel you to create?
People feeling embarrassed or not wanting people to know that they had a failure.
I mean, to me, and I talk about this at the beginning of the book, there's really three responses to failure.
Okay. So the first one is what you just mentioned, which is I use the analogy of Goldilocks.
Okay. So one way in which people deal with failure is it's too hot.
It's, they rationalize it.
They put all the blame on the other negotiator or on the circumstances, right?
Like none of it was their fault.
The reality is you don't really learn much when you have that perspective.
That wasn't on me. That was everything else.
So I'll just blow right past it to protect my ego and my reputation.
The second is the too cold approach, which is you failed.
And now not only do you find that failure debilitating, but it creates a level of anxiety when you go into your future negotiations.
Like the reason a lot of people don't like to negotiate is because they had a really bad experience that they transfer to these other negotiations.
So that's too cold.
You don't learn things from that either, because it's an overblown analysis of what you did and what you could control or not.
The third was the just right, the porridge is just warm enough to eat is, listen, you failed.
So you got to cope with that failure.
And it's funny because a lot of people don't, they just want to push right past it.
I'm like, no, you didn't get what you wanted and what you needed.
So accept it and take it in.
And then how do you really learn from it?
That's the third piece to this is how do I figure out what just happened and how do I do it in a way that's accurate so that I'm really learning the right lessons, not just any lessons at all.
The way in the book is kind of structured is I start with that, but then I talk about the importance of sort of building resiliency, but then get into breaking down failure and saying, I also talk about the image of somebody after the fact reads this and says, I can think of another kind of failure,
right? Because it just gets people in that mode of thinking.
But then I kind of shift gears and talk a lot about why is it that we're not really learning from this?
And that's a deep dive into the psyche, right?
Like that's all of the biases that we have that most people are completely unaware of because they are unspoken And they are unconscious in many ways.
And so we have to bring them to the forefront to really think about them.
I think that's probably going to be the hardest part of the book for people because it's the most necessary, but it's the hardest part because we all have this stuff.
And it's the stuff that gets in the way of us really saying, you know what, like if I'm being honest with myself, this is what happened.
And I deep down inside know it.
So I have to grapple with it.
Right. Like we just can't push past all this stuff.
We have to say, yeah, that's pretty much what happened here.
And then I sort of get into this framework that sort of five steps.
Like I said, for me, frameworks are a really good way to get started with something.
In my mind, the ideal is that a framework becomes second nature and you don't need it anymore.
But to get started, right, we need something.
And so, as I said, the kind of the first step in that process is this notion of facing the cold hard facts to borrow from jim collins right that when this happens we have to do that we have to sort of say well what happened here and how do i i use the terminology of grieving in the book and some people are like
are you sure like it this reaches that level for most of us i would actually say it does because negotiations are usually about things we care a lot about right And so if we don't get something we really, really wanted, there's a form of grief in there that we have to cope with and deal with.
So I think that's the part where I'm hoping, and I also sort of try to say, don't run from the emotional pieces of this, cope with it, because that's part of what's driving your behavior, right?
And then I get into sort of analysis and the forest and the trees.
But like when it comes to the trees, I really like talk about critical moments and, you know, borrowing from Debbie Kolb and her book, The Shadow Negotiation, talking about moves and turns that led to failure, like pinpoint the specific conversations, the specific things that took you down a road that in hindsight,
you can see was not the right way to go.
Right. And then after that, I talk about not just learning lessons from this, but learning the right lessons.
And I think that's a really, really important distinction from my point of view.
Because as we were sort of talking about a little bit before, I feel like there's a lot of people when I talk to them about what they learned from a specific negotiation and their desire to transfer it to future negotiations, there's a lot of application that is inappropriate, to put it mildly.
and that people are not recognizing that there's a great quote from a woman in the book that I read online that I love.
And she's a professor at the University of Maryland.
And her name is escaping me Barbara Kohler, I think is is her last name.
She said, when you've seen one negotiation, you've seen one negotiation.
Now, what I love about that is, I think it's accurate.
It doesn't mean that there aren't lessons that you can't take from a negotiation and apply it to some of these others, but you have to be exceptionally careful about doing that, right?
Because you have to say, are the dynamics the same?
Are the parties, if you have a six party talk, are you really gonna be able to take what happened there to a bilateral negotiation?
Probably not, like, or at least it's gonna, you're gonna have to do it very judiciously, right?
And very carefully, or was there a power asymmetry in one negotiation, and that doesn't exist here?
Or what was the nature of trust?
Or And I think that what I just want people to try to do is to say, what's the right lesson here?
Is there a good lesson for me to learn?
And not just learn a way to negotiate and then do it all the time that way.
Because I think that's what's comfortable, but it gets us into trouble.
The next step kind of comes back around to that, which is to actively unlearn certain things about your approach to negotiation, which really comes down to actively unlearning your weaknesses.
So I spend a good bit of time talking about the notion of actively, not just haphazardly unlearning, but very consciously saying, what do I think effective negotiation looks like?
And is some of that stuff getting in the way?
And for example, the one of the pieces that I pick up on is compromise.
And I say that in general, I feel like compromise is something that people should unlearn because we typically know that those people that engage in problem solving and creativity usually find value way better than I do.
So when you say to yourself, what should I unlearn?
So that and Peter Drucker was the one who kind of came up with this whole idea of actively unlearning things.
So you have to unlearn something so that you can learn something new and put it in its place.
And I propose a handful of things in there that people might want to actively unlearn, partly to be provocative because it's fun, but also because I see those kinds of things getting in the way.
And again, I would imagine that people will say, I actually think I need to unlearn this as opposed to some of the things that this guy is telling me to unlearn.
Who knows? We'll see.
And then the very last step is really kind of returning to the table smarter and stronger.
And what I mean by that is, is actually that you've done a lot of good learning, but you've also, there are certain dynamics that I think most people feel uncomfortable with when it comes to negotiation.
And one of them, for example, is being assertive.
Okay, so if you have to come to grips with the notion that being an effective negotiator is about being assertive, then like that's something to work on or adaptability and flexibility is something that, again, people struggle with.
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This is a great synopsis.
And I think what's really ringing true to me, the thing that is sticking in my head the most, is that none of this can happen without the humble self -awareness that allows you to say, there is something that I could have done differently to achieve a different outcome.
And going back to what you said about blame and accountability and ownership, that's where people really, really struggle with.
And the thing is, we do this in order to protect ourselves, to protect our ego, so even if we're in a difficult situation and we've experienced a difficult outcome, we can still feel good about ourselves.
So it has some psychological basis, but we understand that does not move us forward and lead us to improving and progressing in life.
for those negotiators who are finding themselves stuck and having trouble accepting ownership.
What is it that allows them to take that next step?
I would say to that, okay, I remember somebody once I was, I remember I had a failure and I kind of share this in the book.
And I remember somebody saying to me, when you realize you're nearly as important as you think you are, like you can cope with this better.
Like people aren't sitting there and saying, wow, Josh Weiss failed.
What's wrong with him?
People have moved on if they even cared about whether you failed or not.
So there's an element of checking your ego and saying, we live in a world that moves quickly.
And even if you did fail in some way, shape or form, there may be some epic failures throughout history that we recall and that people are associated with Benedict Arnold, whatever.
But for the most part, you're the only one who knows about this.
You're the only one who spends your time obsessing about it or thinking about it.
So it's not to diminish it.
It's just to say, this happens.
It's going to happen to you.
So accept it and put your ego aside and say, if I want to be better, and this is the other answer to your question, the only way you get better as a negotiator is by learning from your failures.
It's the only way. Like success teaches us a little bit, but I think we can all, as I've talked to people and they all say to me, there's no question that my failures have led me to become better at whatever it is that I'm doing.
And when I really engage with that, like I can see how I'm growing and changing.
And I think that's the piece of it.
in some ways, what I'm trying to normalize is the fact that we fail and it's okay.
Your life is not going to end.
It might be really difficult and I'm not diminishing it.
In some salary or employment negotiations, if you really want a job and you don't get it, that's debilitating.
It's really frustrating.
And maybe you told everybody you're going to get this great job, and then it doesn't look so good that you didn't.
Or in much more dire circumstances with hostages and things like that, failure means the loss of life.
So it's not insignificant, but it is to say it will happen.
And so like, let's accept that as part of the landscape of negotiation, not deny it, not sort of push it aside and say, wow, we must not be very good negotiators if that happened to us.
No, like, absolutely not.
You are a good negotiator.
And you're going to fail.
You know, I, the analogy that was always stuck in my head when I was doing this was I'm a bit of a baseball fan, right?
And so as a great hitter, you're 300 hitter, which means you get a hit three out of 10 times.
Negotiation is not that bad, but it's close.
And if people in baseball don't question it, they say, okay, that's a great hitter, three out of 10 times.
For us, we need to say like X out of Y times, it's going to happen that we're not going to get where we're going to go.
And when I was also researching this, there's also, there's a guy named Sim Sitkin, who is a professor at Duke.
And he came up with a concept called intelligent failure.
And intelligent failure is basically positive failure.
It's expecting, and we see this in a lot of product development, that people go in, they experiment, they try to create a product and it doesn't work.
And so they have to go back to the drawing board, but they know it's not going to work, or they're pretty sure it's not going to happen the first three, four, five times, but they keep improving the prototype.
And in fact, I share a story in the book from Apple and the iPhone.
And how initially when the engineers came to Steve jobs, he's like, what is this?
Like, no, we're not doing that.
And they persisted in their negotiation with Steve jobs about this technology and had to keep going back and revamping it.
But they knew that failure was going to be a piece of this.
And so in one sense, like, I want people to also, there's a lot of people who don't want to call what happened failure.
They're like, have we really failed?
Or is it a step towards success?
And I would say that the answer to that is both, that there are negotiations like peace processes, right?
Like we see a number of processes that happen in South Africa and in Northern Ireland, whatever, each one contributing to the ultimate solution.
That's failure that leads to success.
But there are other failures that don't lead anywhere that are so catastrophic.
And I even write that people go in, they experiment, they try to to create a product, and it doesn't work, right?
And so they have to go back to the drawing board, but they know it's not going to work, or they're pretty sure it's not going to happen the first three, four, five times, but they keep improving the prototype, right?
And in fact, I share during the book from Apple and the iPhone, and how initially, when the engineers came to Steve Jobs, he's like, what is this?
Like, no, we're not doing that.
And they persisted in their negotiation with Steve Jobs about this technology and had to keep going back and revamping it, but they knew that failure was going to be a piece of this.
And so in one sense, like I want people to also, there's a lot of people who don't want to call what happened failure.
They're like, have we really failed?
Or is it a step towards success?
And I would say that the answer to that is both, that there are negotiations, like peace processes, right?
Like we see a number of processes that happen in South Africa and in Northern Ireland, whatever, each one contributing to the ultimate solution.
That's failure that leads to success.
But there are other failures that don't lead anywhere that are so catastrophic.
And I even have like a magnitude scale in there.
So you can kind of do a little bit of analysis and say, well, how bad is this failure?
Is it like just a setback or is it catastrophic?
And we've now destroyed the relationship and there's no chance of this ever happening again.
I think if you have a negotiation where that latter one happened, where it's like a collapse and a catastrophe from your point of view, those negotiations happen too.
And we have to say, you know what?
It's not going to happen now.
Maybe 10 years down the future or who knows when, it's possible.
But right now, relationships have been so damaged and feelings and everything else that gets wrapped in that have been so hurt that there's no way back.
There's no path back here.
I think it's important to have that so people can also sort of say, well, should I invest time trying to revitalize this negotiation?
Which much of the time you should, but can you also recognize when, you know what, like, I'm not sure it's going to happen.
This is making me realize something.
And tell me if this is a fair characterization, because yes, of course, this is a negotiation book, but I also feel like This is a philosophical exploration into what a failure really is, what it should be, and what it could be.
Because what I'm hearing is that a lot of this has to do with mindset.
If we are able to think differently about failure, then we can use it not as just an unfortunate circumstance, but use it as a tool for growth and progress in different ways.
Because at the end of the day, as long as you personally did not die during the negotiation, most likely you will have another negotiation at some point in your life.
And if you can use that failure as a tool of improvement and advancement, then you can still use it as a catalyst for growth.
And so we have to change not only our willingness to accept failure, but then also our mentality around it and use it as a tool for progress.
Very, very well said.
I mean, that's exactly it.
And the work here is really between your ears.
much more than it is between you and the other negotiator, because it's what's going on in our mind that is really challenging for us and what it says about us and the story we tell ourselves about the kind of negotiator we are.
And how can we be that if we don't succeed at times?
And I think the answer is you can, and you are.
I mean, honestly, in some ways, and I'm trying to humanize this.
I want people to be like, I don't have to be infallible to be a good negotiator, to be a great negotiator.
Like I have to go into this.
I have to recognize sometimes things are not going to work out the way that I imagined.
And I can always step back and say, is there another way to go at this?
Right? Failure says to us, maybe that avenue that you went down didn't work.
And, you know, it's interesting in the book, I share a quote and kind of a, during a press conference with Yanis in the Eastern conference, and they lost the Miami heat.
And a reporter said to him, do you consider this season a failure?
And he said, no. He said, do you fail every time things don't work out?
Did Michael Jordan fail those years that he didn't win championships, right?
The reason I highlight that story is because when we don't call something a failure, we're sort of averting what's really happening.
Imagine if he had said, you know what?
Our goal was to win a championship.
We were the number one seed.
We blew through the regular season.
we were set up to do that and we didn't.
Didn't say that, but he could have.
And to me, if he had, and if he had said, you know what, yeah, this was a failure because our goal was here and we didn't get there, but we learned a tremendous amount.
And there's important lessons for what happened here that we could have taken forward next season, how to build on this, where to take it.
So I want people as much as they might not want to, I want them to say, I failed.
And the funny thing is, like, when I was a kid growing up, I was a very average kid.
So I failed a lot. And in hindsight, it was probably one of the biggest blessings of my career.
Because when it happens, I'm like, okay, let me learn from it.
But also let me put it back here on the big pile of failure that's already there and let me go forward.
And I have a lot of friends who are brilliant people and they were always amazing students and they didn't have the experience that I had.
So for them, it's the first Goldilocks, right?
Or it's the latter.
It's I'm going to beat myself up because I'm so not used to failing that I must have done something really, really wrong here.
It's like no you didn't what you just experienced is is real life And so I think there are a lot of people in my shoes who had their struggles and When failure happens we say okay like i've been to this movie before it's not that bad I always say to my kids which they hate but they're coming around
to now Keep it in perspective because as you said if we're not dead if we're not whatever right like then we're still here And we can do something else something better and we learn from it and I think they're getting the point right, slowly but surely, that life throws you difficult things.
And when you're 15 and you have a bad day at school, you think it's the worst day ever.
And then you hear about somebody getting cancer or somebody dying in an accident, and then you realize it's not.
And I want people to realize failure is not going to crush you.
It's going to help you if you can get your head around it and say, what the hell just happened here?
And how do I figure that out?
right? And so it's just, it's like, let's just, I love that quote by Jim Collins of face the cold hard facts.
We have to do that in our field and in general in life, because I just think it's like, are we really looking at what happened here?
And if we are, we're going to grow from it one way or the other.
As you're speaking here, I'm recognizing that, like we said, this is a philosophical exploration of failure that leads directly into practical applications of life.
And as I'm hearing this, what I'm recognizing is that we have hidden beliefs, hidden philosophies, biases towards this concept too.
Because going back to Giannis, I remember he was eviscerated for saying that because they said, you won a championship.
You're supposed to come back and win another one.
How is this not a failure?
And it seemed like he was trying to skirt responsibility for it.
And what's interesting is that I wonder how much of this is manifesting itself as a bias against the word failure more so than the concept of failure.
Because it's like, really, when we're thinking about the word failure, really, if we were to almost define it, and you tell me if I'm off on this at all, if we were to define it in this context, it's the humble recognition that we have fallen short of that makes me less than, and I should feel shameful
and bad about it. And I think it's that last part that is unnecessary, that people feel they need to carry with the stigma of failure.
But if you can say, listen, upon reflection, now I can look back and I can see that there were some missteps that we made.
At the time, I thought that was the right move to make.
And I created a strategy and executed the strategy well, and it turned out I was wrong.
And now going forward, I won't make that mistake again.
It doesn't make me a bad person.
But if I fail to accept those lessons, it puts me in a position where I cannot grow from them.
That's right. And you perfectly said that.
I mean, that's the essence of it is that people create these connections about what it means, right?
There's a meaning related to failure and what it says about you.
And I think being able to parse that out and say, it doesn't say anything about you.
It says that you're human like the rest of us, right?
And it's that opportunity to say, let me try to figure out what happened here.
Because the what happened here part of the conversation usually takes us to some kind of weakness that we have in negotiation, right?
Like I, like getting defensive, like I have had to work on not getting defensive over the years.
It was something that I felt, right?
And it draws you back to the source.
So in the book, there's a bit of a chart that says, here's my weakness, why do I have it?
And what do I need to unlearn in order to move forward?
So it's almost like your failure is creating signposts for how you get better.
Oh, this is we're about to get deep, Josh.
This is really good.
So I want you to play the role of therapist here and analyze this for me.
So a couple of days ago, Kai he's my eight -year -old he did something that was wrong I gave him some feedback and told him to do something differently and he's like okay and then he went and did it and I said to myself okay okay it would just okay and when he said what's wrong with okay it I said I he
is too emotionally well after this feedback he doesn't feel bad about this and so she said exactly But that's exactly it.
He didn't create the connection between failure and his ego, right?
He just, okay, Dad, I get it.
Like, he didn't say, this makes me Kai a bad kid.
He's like, okay, Dad, like, I hear you.
That makes sense. I'll do it next time.
Right? Right. And that's all it needs to be.
And it makes me think how much of this is put into us, ingrained in us by our parents, our society, and other people who not only want us to learn the lesson, but also feel bad as we learn the lesson, as if that bad feeling, that feeling of shame is a necessary part of the process.
And so this is helping me reflect on that for me, because I don't want Kai to carry that.
Listen, I grew up in a, in I'm Jewish and Jews are famous for Jewish guilt.
Like, so when, when I would do something wrong as a kid, it came with a heaping spoon of guilt often, not necessarily from my parents or things like that, but like the community or whatever it was, there was a piece of that.
And when I look back at that, like I reacted really negatively to that because I was like, you could have just told me this as opposed to making me feel like I'm a complete idiot and no one ever does this right like sorry actually lots of people do this like lots of people make this mistake and I think
it's when we add in this sort of how does this reflect on your reputation and who you are as opposed to what's like if we just describe what happened like you did with Kai right and say you know that's probably not the best way to handle it okay dad that makes sense that's a lot different than Kai you're
a bad boy like you did this badly you should be ashamed of yourself, whatever, right?
Like I'm a complete idiot and no one ever does this, right?
Like, sorry, actually lots of people do this.
Like lots of people make this mistake.
And I think it's when we add in this sort of, how does this reflect on your reputation and who you are, as opposed to what's like, if we just describe what happened, like you did with Kai, right?
And say, you know, that's probably not the best way to handle it.
Okay, dad, that makes sense?
That's a lot different than Kai.
You're a bad boy. You did this badly.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Whatever, right? But I think that weave in some of those things because we think that they're actually going to be helpful in really learning the lesson.
And I can tell you my own experience was that they were the opposite of helpful.
They made me not want to learn or even want to engage in what I did wrong.
So we have to separate that out and say, this happens.
You should learn from it, but it doesn't mean you're a bad human being.
It means you made a mistake and you got to cope with it.
Right. This is powerful because again, what I love about this is that the lessons are portable.
It's not just negotiation.
And it's fun for me because I think about negotiation as a life philosophy, right?
Yes, it applies here, but then it applies in so many other areas too.
So for the folks listening, if you are listening to this episode and you're just saying, okay, I could use this to become a better negotiator.
That's nice. But you're missing the deeper message.
There's so much to be learned here.
And Josh, if you're if there's one message from this entire exploration of failure that you want to make sure that people leave with, what would that message be?
This is going to sound naive, but I'm going to say anyways, it's okay.
It is part of the deal when you negotiate.
That's what I want people to come away with is this is going to happen.
So let's just normalize it and say failure happens.
It's one potential outcome of the many.
We don't set out to fail, but it happens.
And so go back to Goldilocks.
Don't be too hot. Don't be too cold.
Take the middle road so that you can really do something with it.
That's the message, I think, of the book is this is the deal.
And when you sit down to negotiate, understand that.
And it's funny because a lot of times when we talk about BATNA with people, right?
They're like, well, BATNA equals failure.
I'm like, no, it doesn't.
BATNA is another way of meeting your goal, right?
And negotiated agreement is one possible outcome.
BATNA is another, failure is another, right?
Not negotiating, deciding it's not in your interest to negotiate is another outcome as you go through that process.
So I think that's it in my mind that I really want people to say, okay, like that could happen here and I'm not going to freak out, but I am going to take the time after the fact to say what happened and how do I learn the right lessons, not just any lessons.
Amazing. Josh, thank you so much for joining us.
Really appreciate it.
And before you go, just remind the listeners again about the book and how they can work with you too.
Yep. So the book is called Getting Back to the Table, Five Steps for Reviving Stalled Negotiations.
And again, it'll be out in February of this coming year, 2025.
5. And I have my website, just joshuanyse .com that's got all my info.
And so feel free to be in touch.
And if you do, at some point, get the book, it's going to be coming out in audio as well.
If you do get it, I'd love to hear from you.
Like, I don't just say that, like, I'd be really curious to hear what people think and how they can add to it.
And I'm hoping that this becomes a conversation piece in the field and that people can build on it and work with it and say, hey, Like, let's put some energy and attention to this concept and see where where it takes us.
Josh, this is great.
I can't wait to read it.
Thanks again for coming on the show.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me as always.
It's great to see you, my friend.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Now, before you sign off, I have something to tell you that I've never told you before.
Just kidding. I've told you before, but you should listen to it again.
I want you to know.
