From LinkedIn news.
I'm Leah smart, host of everyday better, an award winning podcast dedicated to personal development.
Join me every week for captivating stories and research to find more fulfillment in your work and personal life.
Listen to everyday better on the LinkedIn podcast network, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Did you know that small and medium businesses make up 98 percent of the global economy, but most B2B marketers still treat them as a one -size -fits -all?
LinkedIn's Meet the SMB report reveals why that's a missed opportunity, and how you can reach these fast -moving decision -makers effectively.
Learn more at LinkedIn .com.
Hey, I'm Kwame Christian and you are about to step into the world of Negotiate Anything, the number one negotiation podcast in the world where we teach you how to make difficult conversations easier while getting more of what you want in the process.
Each episode is packed with practical tips and strategies from the experts.
we delve into negotiation, conflict resolution, and leadership skills that are crucial in both business and in life.
Whether you're closing a deal, managing a team, or navigating personal relationships, Negotiate Anything provides you with the tools you need to succeed.
Our conversations are real, relatable, and most importantly, rooted in practicality.
So if you're ready to transform your conversations and elevate your negotiation skills, join me on Negotiate Anything.
Subscribe and listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you love to listen.
Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation.
Robin, thanks for joining us today.
You know, Kwame, I'd say, thank you for having me, but that's, I can't even come up with the words to say thank you for having me.
It is so profoundly awesome to be with you and share time with you and to make such a great, healthy connection.
Thank you, likewise.
And everybody shout out to our, a good friend of the show, Mike Reddington for for making this happen.
Robyn and I have been just chatting for the last 45 minutes.
You still want to do this podcast, but just hang out.
So I'm pumped about this.
It'll be fun. Me too.
And I got my goosebumps are going on my arms. I use that as my gauge of how well we make a connection as my soul saying, Hey, we're good.
I love it. I love it.
I'm feeling it too.
So how would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Boy, life arcs are great.
They started all long ago or we can go forward and close.
Real briefly the fun, sexy one that people like is, so yes I'm a veteran Marine, former FBI spy recruiter.
I was a head of the FBI Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program.
I ran our behavioral team for a number of years, wrote numerous books on how to build trust, rapport and how to grant great healthy relationships with people because that's the foundation for everything we do.
Retired from the FBI in 2018.
And I've been a keynote speaker, lecturer, trainer, podcast hoster, basically anything having to do with human interaction where we can make it a good healthy interaction, free of manipulation, free of subterfuge, free of all the things that cause divisiveness I'm in.
Oh, this is so great.
Listeners, I will put links to all of Robin's gems into the chat, but this is great.
And you know what, let's mix this up because I've read some of your work my friend and one of the things besides the brilliance that it contains in terms of skills development you're a great storyteller so when it comes to your ethos as it relates to human interaction relationships what is a story that you think really encapsulates your experience?
We have the what was the impetus for me to be on the life arc that created that story and then we have the humbling moments along the way that accentuate the story.
I think I'll start with, because again what you get with me, was called a narrative answer.
It's this worthy, long, really profound, as you said, it's a storytelling answer.
Each of us has an event or series of events early on in life that cascade on top of our genetics and our biology and all the things that make us who we are as an organism on the planet, and all those experiences early on forge, kind of the likes, wants, the desires and the path we want to start pursuing in life that makes us feel safe and valued by others.
Mine was like many kind of profound and impactful because it was full of some challenging moments.
I was bullied, you know, anyone with the name Robin with blue eyes, blonde hair, and moved around a lot because his parents didn't have any money.
You're setting yourself up for bullying and part of that being bullied was having no money.
Like I said, in my family, we never owned a home.
My parents still never owned a home to this day, and one of the places we moved into, we lost our furnace and we had to heat our house all by wood for a number of years.
My parents took the last amount of money they had and installed a wood burning stove.
So when I was in seventh grade, I was chopping wood all night long, trying to keep the house heated because you had to keep it from freezing as much as you could on the inside even though you actually had to chip your way out in the morning because the condensation on the inside would freeze the door closed.
All these moments created resilience and a tenacity like we were talking about earlier, but it also created us profound because of the bullying and being an child, I just want to be liked.
It really comes down to I want to be liked, I want to make connections, I wanted friends.
I couldn't wait to go to school growing up because I could have friends.
So that became part of my life arc is just wanting friends and overcoming people that are bullies and facing down bullies and then having tenacity, grit and resilience to provide for yourself and make yourself feel safe.
Because in order to have school clothes to fit in and not get bullied more, I had to go cut grass, paper boy.
I had them all. If I could make cash, I was going to figure out a way to make cash and do that.
All these things compounded about my genetics and biology, about being an extrovert and deriving my energy from the outside world, being from upstate New York, all these things compound together too, I love connecting with people, absolutely loved connecting with people.
But because I do embody a sense of empathy, a decent amount of empathy with others, what would happen is I had a dichotomy as I call it out of balance, everything in life the dichotomy between good and bad, the yin, the yang, all these things, because we can't experience great, beautiful things and appreciate them unless we've seen some real garbage.
We can't experience how good someone is until we experience someone who kind of fell short of that.
For me, another dichotomy is we can't really become profound, great leaders, which are resources for the success of others.
Be other focused until we understand how to be selfish.
And when you're gritty, resilient, and trying to provide for yourself to feel safe, you become very self -centered.
Not in a narcissistic look at me, I'm the best way, but in a way of muscle memory over time says I need to feel safe, I need to feel safe, I need to feel safe.
And so it makes us very self focused.
But when you have empathy and people that are going through trauma, we tend to be very good at nonverbal behavior and assessing the behavior of others and whether we're causing comfort or stress in others.
And what would happen was along my path I could tell immediately when my behaviors caused people to be uncomfortable, caused stress.
In other words if I wasn't making it about them and it was too me focused, they walked away, they didn't wanna deal with me, or they bullied me.
And so I became really profound, the acutely aware of when I was too self centered, too focused that I need to change my behavior.
The other thing that people are is on the dichotomy is they're either wound collectors or they're problem solvers.
Wound collectors tend to keep a score sheet against the world and seek retribution.
Problem -solver is just like, what am I going to do to work the problem and move forward?
I luckily came up with the work the problem and move forward mentality.
So when you put all that together, a lot of beautiful humbling moments along the way were my first, I had the major ones, but one of my earlier major ones was when I was ranked last in my Marine Corps squadron out of all the second lieutenants and they said, you suck because you need to be a better leader.
I had no idea what they're talking about.
I was popular, which I thought was leadership.
No popularity is about self, it's look at me, look at me.
I'm really funny, I'm a outgoing gregarious guy.
That's not leadership, that's power.
Learn that, reading Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power.
Not only did I recognize a little bit about myself, I recognized a lot of executives and a lot of organizations I had worked for.
But on the opposite side of power is leadership, which is otherly focused.
And how do you do that?
How do you use language and behaviors to focus on others when you have a lifetime of reps of trying to survive, which is about self?
This is where that awareness comes from and this is where those humbling moments generate the ability to not change who we are because you don't want to change who you are.
We've got a lot of beauty in here.
In order to offset some things that might be accentuated and too extreme, we need to add to who we are.
If you find yourself, like in my case, I was a little too self -focused, I needed to add the ability to make it about others.
That's what my life journey has been, is about what behaviors do I need to add to myself to really balance that dichotomy and learn how to put it out of balance if I need to.
In other words, who needs more from me today so I can actually put me aside and still feel like I have enough energy to do that?
Because a lot of times, people need a lot more than we might be willing or able to give.
So as leaders, we need to be able to draw from a deep reservoir to be able to serve when it's needed.
Long answer. Robin, I just showed you how I took 19 pages of notes on your book.
I feel like I might get there again on this, this podcast. This was great.
And there are a lot of different ways I can go with this next question, but I actually wanted to touch base, give a little nod to something that we talked about before the interview happened, which is.
Talking about resilience, because people could look at your story and we can talk about the trauma and the difficulties.
And a lot of times we use the trauma and difficulties in our life circumstances to kind of justify our inabilities to accomplish certain things in the present.
So what was it about you and your mindset that allowed you to turn the hardships of your past into resilience?
That is such a great question.
I've examined this one a lot because I do a lot of true crime commentary on different shows and stuff and when you're doing true crime stuff, you see a lot of wound collectors.
People that commit heinous things against other human beings tend to be wound collectors that are taking out, like you said, retribution against others and then the victims tend to be people who aren't, that are problem solvers and they're just trying to make their way through the universe as they say.
I was very fortunate for my parents.
What they couldn't give me in a lot of areas in life materially or even from healthy behaviors, because most families deal with addiction one way or the other.
They couldn't give me a lot in that area.
But for some reason, my parents never complained.
So, I had behaviors modeled earlier in life that even though I was the poorest kid, I didn't know I was a porous kid.
You know I didn't know I was a porous kid because my parents never said, over so poor?" My parents never said, oh, they're not entitled to that.
We should have what they have. In other words, there was never a, woe is me.
It was like, we don't have, what are we going to do about it?
We're going to have more jobs.
We're going to try to get into the Naval Academy because they can't afford to go to college.
There was always thinking about, then this is the most important thing I think when working with people and working with ourselves, it's good to know the Simon Sinek says, start with why.
You've got to understand the overarching why.
What's the purpose of life?
What's the purpose of you?
What gives you your fulfillment every day?
That's the big why.
But underneath that one why, you've got to stop asking why.
Because if you start asking why, you're looking for a subjective opinion and belief system to justify your actions and failure or why someone else is doing something wrong, you're looking to place blame.
That's when we get in the danger area of ego, vanity, and insecurities.
They can be our undoing.
So instead of asking, why did they do that to me?
You ask, what? That what question, the power of what?
What can I do about it?
What outcome am I seeking?
What specific actions can I take to have a different result?
So luckily for me, I had models of people in my life that just asked, what questions?
When I was in the Marine Corps, I drive my son who's also Marine Corps officer now, nuts with this one.
It's called, what now Lieutenant?
We're always looking around us for solutions that someone else can give us.
That's great, but part of that resiliency and tenacity and grit like you said, is you solve problems. Instead of looking for someone else to solve your problem, which is great.
That's why we have allies, having teachers, mentors and guys and people in our lives that can be there with us is fantastic.
And I use the word with instead of for us.
With us is great, cause we want to team with these people, but at the bottom line, we want to ask, what are we going to do to work this problem, just solve it, just work the problem.
One of my My favorite shows and books was The Martian.
I don't read a lot of fiction, but one of them is The Martian.
And you taste, every day, we were talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson before, the universe is not out to get you, it just is.
Stop thinking that the universe, it's all about you.
It just is being what it's being.
People are being who they're being.
People are literally not focused on you.
They're doing the best they can in the moment to solve their problems. Sometimes it's gonna clash with what yours are.
Well, let's have a conversation about that.
So that's it, I think is just literally focusing on the, what question to move forward and solve that problem where I learned it again, behaviors models for me earlier in my life, and then reinforced through a life of being a leader and put in leadership because I was not an old born leader, no doubt in my mind, very few people are, but a natural desire and passion to want to be one.
And when you'd finally discover that leadership is about service to others.
That's and not just saying the words, but living that experience.
I mean, if you're a leader and you say you're a leader, when's the last time one of the people that you work with was in a hardship, was in dire straits, did something a little wrong?
And you threw yourself in the line of fire to protect their career, to protect their reputation, to protect them from the fallout that could happen.
And you're willing to take that for them because it was they did the right thing and they made a mistake.
That's powerful. And when it comes to that mindset of resilience and that problem solver mentality, now I want you to help us to draw a clear connection between those mindsets and your unique ability to connect with other people conversationally and relationally.
Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question.
Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better, difficult conversations.
At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top -tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills.
Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands -on training for your team, we've got you covered.
Don't just negotiate – master the arts with the American Negotiation Institute.
Click the link in the description to find out more.
Elevate, negotiate, and succeed.
Hey you! I'm Andrew Seaman.
Do you want a new job?
Or do you want to move forward in your career?
Well, you should listen to my weekly show called Get Hired with Andrew Seaman.
We talk about it all, and it's waiting for you—yes, you—wherever you get your podcasts.
Small and medium businesses don't have time to waste, and neither do marketers trying to reach them.
On LinkedIn, more SMB decision makers are actively looking for new solutions to help them grow, whether it's software or financial services, our meet the SMB report breaks down how these businesses buy and what really influences their choices.
Learn more at linkedin .com backslash meet dash the dash smb that's linkedin .com backslash meet dash the dash smb This, I learned this like you, doing interviews.
What we do when you're having a conversation with someone, you're taking an opportunity to give potentially—if you do it well—the greatest gift you can give any human being, and that's to give the presence, to see them for who they are, to hear their story and most importantly not to see them for who they are and hear their story but do so in accepting non judgemental curious way.
In order to do that we've got to let go of our agenda.
My good friend Jim Pyle, numerous beautiful books on human behavior, he's an army interrogator, and he says if you approach every human being as a young child, like imagine yourself, do your own thought experiment, which we love doing our thought experiments, imagine yourself back when you were five or six years old.
It's your first day of school going to kindergarten, and you haven't lived outside the four walls of your house all that much, and you are just curious.
Our survival as a species has come about, because we were born with no survival mechanism except our curiosity.
Our curiosity is what gives us the ability to learn rapidly from the environment around us, and so you engage life with the curiosity of a five -year -old, where you have no confirmation bias of things you're trying to see, but you just want to take it all in so you understand it.
That is the greatest gift you can give another human being.
That's how you make a connection.
You just be curious.
And when you discover someone's life arc, you ask them questions so simple as this, Kwame, looking at you as this dapper, amazingly gifted interviewer, connector of human beings where I just am compelled to want to speak to you.
My question is, will you make that with these deep connections?
What was it all those years ago that gave you that spark to want to have great conversations with people?
Who was that inspiration for you?
and then you just shut up and be present.
That's it .m It's beautiful.
And now because you've had this experience, this really diverse experience of leadership in the military FBI and now interviewing some of the brightest minds in the world, when it comes to everyday people, trying to replicate that success, what would you say are some of the biggest barriers to them accomplishing that?
One biggest barrier is ego.
Everyone's thinking someone's doing something to us.
We do a lot of things in life when it comes to human behavior to make us feel more powerful because we feel weak.
We're insecure. If we want to learn how to elicit information, I'm not putting any skill set down.
These are all beautiful.
I know all these skill sets because in order to get to the level of wanting to make a deeper connection with people, you actually have to do these other skillsets, which are, in order to become an artist, you have to learn how to paint by number first. Leonardo da Vinci, one of my most favorite people in history wasn't born learning how to paint Mona Lisa, it was a lifelong processment of his.
Mona Lisa was never finished in his mind because it became his lifelong journey to learn new skills and techniques along the way.
And so it carried Mona Lisa with him.
So as he learned something new, he applied it.
And so that's what we're doing at this mastery level is being aware of enough to know we're not gonna use carnival tricks to play with people we wanna understand and make these deeper connections.
So even when people say he lied to me or she lied to me or they're trying to take advantage of me, where's the focus, literally think about that.
When I'm using those words, is the focus on them or is the focus on me and my own insecurity, that someone's doing something to me?
Here's an interesting thought experiment question to ask yourself.
Instead of thinking, Why did they lie to me?
Ask yourself, What did I do to make them feel insecure and unsafe with me that inspired them to have a behavior that wasn't conducive to a good healthy relationship?
That's owning it, as taking accountability for the only thing I can control is me, and it makes it about them, It makes me curious about them.
Different way to look at it.
Wow. Now, Robin, let me speak on behalf of all listeners because I know what a lot of people are thinking.
They're saying, I don't want to do that.
Good. Then don't. They're saying, I don't want - there's that reflexive response, right?
And it comes from the fact that I feel as though it is convenient and also comforting to believe that when bad things happen to us, it's somebody else's fault, because then it absolves us of responsibility of taking action and ownership of doing what is needed to be done to make the situation better.
Because if I then take responsibility, that means I can't sit here in the comfort of having the righteous indignation of feeling right.
I need to actually step up and do something and be a problem solver, like you said.
Yeah, and as I said all the time, there's no right or wrong to any of this, there just is.
So if it, part of this process of making a beautiful connection, like I'm a goosebumps going again with a beautiful human being is doing our best to recognize where they are on their path, being available, if they want to take a different path, but not judging their path and where they're at on it.
I liken it to race cars.
we're all born driving a Prius and along the way some of us start upgrading our cards pretty rapidly to Ferraris or whatever you want to say or use or Tesla maybe and some people are still driving a Prius but they think they're driving a Ferrari now those that are driving Ferraris they can actually shove the Ferrari and those guys faces driving a Prius and say yeah but you suck as I'm driving a Ferrari or they can say hey that's a nice Prius you have how do you enjoying that car?
If it's getting you where you want to go?
Did you ever think about anything else.
Are you happy with what you have?
And if you're happy with what you have how can I make it a little bit more comfortable for you to drive that Prius?
If you are interested in driving something different, would you like me part of that life to help you get there?
Because you can't go from zero to 100.
It's a journey. If you go from zero to 100, it'll fail majestically.
James Clear in Atomic Habits does a great job of saying if you go from zero to 100 on anything, you'll stop doing it because it's uncomfortable.
But if you make one micro -change a day and then make it that one little thing habit, it becomes sustainable over time.
And so it's the same thing with human behavior.
And you don't have to do anything, but I think the ability to recognize where someone's at on their path, don't judge a path, and then just ask yourself, is where they're at interacting with me, is it healthy for them and me or not healthy?
If it's unhealthy, but we just disengage today.
Maybe tomorrow will be different.
Again, because it's free of resentment, it's free of judging.
That's the big thing.
Is the judging of where people are in our path is all about what?
Our own insecurities.
we think we're right.
Going back to Robert Greene again, The Laws of Human Nature, human beings, we're hard -wired to consume information that makes us feel good about ourselves and our own opinions.
Stop it. So I love another quote by Brene Brown in her book, Braving the Wilderness.
She's written a lot on this, and that is, if you don't understand someone good, get closer.
I love when I don't hear something I agree with, because I can honestly say these days, it's not that I don't agree.
How can I agree with anything?
Because there's so many different opinions.
I hear something...
Here's a healthier way to look at.
If I hear something I haven't heard before or in a particular way, I get excited.
It's like, wow. Here's a thing to really put that context use here.
If it comes out of your mouth, Kwame, if I hear you say something I've never heard before, maybe it goes against all the other things I've heard for a period of time, that's a great opportunity to say, huh.
Kwame most likely put a lot of time and effort and thought into what came out of his mouth because you know what?
I put a lot of time, effort, and the thought, the things that come out of my mouth, he guaranteed he did too.
Wouldn't it be appropriate of me to at least give him the benefit of the doubt that there's a lot of time and effort and thought in that?
Let's hear what it is.
How hard is that? I'm not saying you have to agree with it, I'm not saying that you're going to change your mind.
I'm saying let's explore what his mind is.
We were talking about this beforehand, we're talking about diversity and inclusion and all the things that are challenging our society right now.
You only have to think about that if you just think of, huh, he's got a different point of view than me, He must have put a lot of time and thought and energy into it.
I'm not saying I agree with it.
I want to learn about it.
Where did it come from?
One of the best things that you can do to make a connection with another human being as well, and you do this all the time, consume what they consume.
Like if I have someone on my show, if I have someone I'm going to meet, I've done lectures with people that sat on a stage with me.
If they mention a book they read that meant a lot to them, they quote someone, I read that book.
Why wouldn't you? I understand if something means something to you, If something you consumed has impacted your life so much, why wouldn't I want to read it?
Because now I'm going to understand you.
I'm going to understand where you get your ideas from.
It's not going to be total.
It's not going to be all -encompassing.
But it's going to be a little more to understand Kwame where he's coming from.
That context. All the books I read, half of them, at least, come from the people around me.
I kind of divide what I consume into things that I'm interested in, and the things that people around me are interested in.
Because if I consume the information about the people around me and what they're interested in, I'll have a better ability to connect with them.
because then I can talk about things in a way that is about them and what their interest, their priorities, their challenges, their pain points are about.
When they explain something in a particular way, I'll understand where they got that phraseology from.
I understand where their thought process is coming from.
Again, this isn't about saying someone's right or wrong.
It's not about agreeing with someone or disagreeing with someone.
This is called deep nonjudgmental curiosity.
It's the third step in the keys of communication, by the way.
Oh man, this is good.
This is good because I want to pause here Because I want to really highlight this for the listeners, because we have spoken little about specific tactics and specific things to do, but we've spoken a lot about the mindset that puts you in a position to do the right thing when the time is right.
And I think that's a really important thing for us to recognize too, because I think a lot of times we can get so tactical, some people might listen to this podcast and say, I want negotiation tips and tricks that I can pull out of my back pocket in the middle of a to win the conversation, right?
So I just want to highlight the fact that we start with this foundation of mindset, the way that we view ourselves, the way that we view others, the way that we view the whole world is going to really play a, I would say, a greater factor into our success in relationships and communication more so than specific tips and tricks and strategies.
And now, that being said, I'll give you exactly the thing to do this.
Because in order to build the muscle memory, we need to be able to do this, we need to be able to communicate.
So all those years ago when the Marine Corps major ranked me last out of 14, and I said to him, what do I need to do to be a better leader?
You say I suck, what do I do?
And he goes, well, that's easy.
Make it about everyone else but yourself.
Huh, what? I don't get it.
What specific, again, there's that what question, what specifically should I do?
And he goes, I don't know, figure it out.
Here's what he couldn't tell me.
Here's what was not part of my human interaction repertoire yet, as when we're gritty self resilient, resilient, a type A personality that's trying to win.
We inevitably are going to talk in terms of ourselves.
We're going to talk in terms of what I'm going to do to succeed and win.
What the greatest leaders are thinking about is what can I do to make the lives of my people around me easier?
What can I do to make them safer with moving forward?
Because if when people feel safe, they innovate, when they innovate they solve problems, when you solve problems, the mission is accomplished and you look like a champ and they look even better.
But here's exactly the four keys of communication that are the bedrock for everything.
If you incorporate this into everything you say, everything you write and every interaction you have, it shifts the focus from yourself to them.
It demonstrates to their brain that you see them, that you value them, that you want to affiliate with them.
The dope means release is serotonin release.
And hopefully if you do it long enough, the oxytocin for longterm alliances are released.
This is it. It's very simply seek their thoughts and opinions instead of telling them yours Two, talk in terms of their challenges, priorities and pain points in life, instead of telling them yours.
Three, validate them non -judgmentally by having deep curiosity about them instead of you.
Four, empower them with choices in their life of what they can do to move forward, instead of telling them exactly what they can and can't do.
You do one of those four things, and I guarantee you this, take any one of those things about the people that in your life that you absolutely love, that you love to be around, that you can't wait to talk to.
Think about this. I love this one too.
Robin Sharma wrote this in Who Will Cry When You Die.
It's think about who you love to see walk through that door.
Think about the greatest person that can walk through the door that makes you feel like a million bucks.
When you see the email come in from them, when you see a text come in and you're like, oh, I see you thinking Kwame.
Good. Then ask yourself, am I that person for everyone else?
And I guarantee you that person that you think is doing that for you, they're doing those four things if not one of them very very well most profoundly I guarantee you this they're seeing you without judging you they're asking those questions about you they're talking about what's going on in your life and never during the course of that conversation are they sharing they're burdening you with themselves this is great because I love the simplicity of this and you're right it shifts your focus from yourself to other people because a lot of times let me just go and give the inverse something that fun
little thing I did in a training recently is I said, okay, this is how you would do it.
Now, I want you to end in the chat to give me bad examples of how to not do it.
It was hilarious. So with this, first, we're going to seek the thoughts and opinions of others.
So first of what a lot of people do is they start the conversation and focus the conversation on their own thoughts and opinions, and they try to force it upon others, talk about their challenges.
No, we talk about our own challenges, validate through deep curiosity.
We try to push out the validity of our position on others.
And then a lot of times, opposite again, number four.
Empower with choices we try to limit their choices and tell people what would work for us.
And I think a lot of times what people do when they try to be really assertive negotiators is they take the four keys and do the inverse, do the exact opposite, and then they wonder why it doesn't work.
Here's another fun thought experiment, think about the people around you that you don't like interacting with.
Here's a typical opening statement that we generally hear from someone that censors, rankles up, can you believe what he said?
Can you believe what they did?
Isn't that horrendous?
So they're giving you their thoughts and opinions.
They're judging what's going on without any understanding about your context.
You might think it's totally awesome and cool.
Instead of saying, can you believe what they did?
They should say something like, huh, pretty interesting.
What do you think about what's going on?
In the FBI one of my jobs was to work with companies that China, Russia, Iran, all these nefarious actors were targeting to compromise the national security of the company, the proprietary information, as I worked in counter intelligence.
The worst thing you can do is walk into a company, not know the company and say, hey, China's eaten your lunch. What are you going to do about it?
What if they're already partnered with them?
Instead of saying, hey, what do you think about China?
Then you get the context and you'll say, oh, I think they're eating our lunch. I said, oh really, that's an interesting point of view.
What kind of things you think you might be able to do about it?
Maybe we can partner together.
Instead of saying, hey, I need you to do this because China's eaten your lunch. Boy, you set yourself up for real fail.
Again, those just to look same.
Why? It's changing the what and the how, how you go and engage.
Ask those questions.
Seek that context before barreling in.
So when the people that you'd love walking through that door, you can't wait to see them.
They're not coming in and saying, Hey, can you believe what they just did?
It's the ones coming in and saying, Hey, how are you doing today?
What's going on? And the sign of a brilliant insight is that it seems obvious in hindsight, elusive obvious.
Exactly. And I think that's the experience that a lot of listeners are having today.
And Robert, you know this, cause we've been talking for the last hour and 15 minutes.
I can talk to you forever, my friend, but before you go, I want to give you an opportunity to let the listeners know about your work, how they can get in touch with you, and let them know about the new book that's coming out.
First of all, I want to do the most important thing, and that is to have listeners do the most important thing they can do for themselves and others, and that is hit like, hit subscribe, and share Kwami with the world.
What he does, not just in the information he brings, but the amount of work, dedication, and effort he puts in to bring great people and great information with no benefit to him, to others is profound.
So I want to thank you for that.
I want to make sure people take this message and take you and get that out there for me, easy go to people, formula .com all one word people, formula books, resources, podcasts, newscasts, you name it.
I'm on there. Whatever kind of free flavor you want, I'll upsell you on anything you want, buy anything you want from me.
Hire me as a million dollar coach in your life.
I don't care. Next book.
That's coming out is just like we were talking about working on it right now.
I'm hoping in the fall manuscripts almost done it right now.
working titles alliance GPS guiding principles for success it's all about the behaviors about creating good healthy strong alliances in life because what we've learned and what we experience on this planet you can't do alone we're beautiful organisms that were put here to interact with others in a good healthy profound way there's I asked that one question who do you want to have walk through that door and are you that person next question is this you have five hours left on this planet no matter what your belief system you have five hours left what do you do with your five hours.
This isn't a bucket list. There's no time for a bucket list anymore.
What do you do? I guarantee you this.
It's going to be a deep, beautiful, meaningful conversation with the people you love and care about the most. Do you have those people?
Who do you value the most?
For me, it's really some of my two kids are adults.
I love sitting around, all of us together on those rare occasions, laughing together, listening to the stories of their lives and that beautiful happiness they're having, the prosperity they're having, funny struggles they're having as we're playing a game of exploding kittens, that stupid little card game, laughter and joy with the people that you love in life.
Those are healthy relationships.
So that's what the focus should be.
And so that's what the book is about, how to have a good healthy alliance and good healthy relationships with everyone you touch in life, because that's all it's about.
Just be present, give others that great gift. Robin, thank you so much. This has been an absolute masterclass and I cannot wait to have you back on the show.
Me too. Congratulations!
You've just joined an elite club.
By listening to a full episode, you're now officially on the Negotiate Anything team, so welcome aboard!
What most team members do is they subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to automatically get the latest episodes of the show.
The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations.
Keep learning, keep practicing, and keep getting better.
Your relationships will improve, your career will soar and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crucial conversations.
Again, thank you for joining the team, we're excited to have you and I will see you in the next episode.
I'll catch you later.