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Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation.
Lucia, thanks for joining us today.
Kwame, it is my pleasure.
I am so tickled to be here.
Yes, we too. Very excited.
So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Well, what I've been doing this year, which has been sort of a banner, pivotal year of new projects for me, is in addition to practicing law and a deep background in mediation and teaching mediation and negotiation, I decided to launch my own podcast, which is sort of a teaching pedagogical podcast to help people learn how to negotiate as an everyday skill because it applies to everyone, everywhere, every day.
And then I noticed something that I had never noticed before, which is that in my 10 years of teaching negotiation at two law schools, every single assigned reading, every law review, every book, every article had been assigned by a man.
And I went and I did a little more research, and I saw there's still such a paucity of negotiation books authored by women.
And so said, well, I could maybe do something about that.
I've got so much material.
And so I also wrote a book.
So that's out there too.
And it's coming out.
And so it's super fun.
And that's part of the title, you know, the super is the superpower of everyday negotiation, and the book is for the forces of good, the superpower of everyday negotiation.
So there's that there's I work with the United Nations women as a vice president of their board for the San Francisco chapter.
So, So, I generally try to stay out of trouble by keeping busy and staying out of trouble in my case, not being so much digging in the garden like a exuberant laboratory, but just not buying more shoes.
So that's how I'm not buying more shoes is by doing these things.
I love it. Well, I'm glad that you're doing these things because it's an incredible service to the world and everybody, we're gonna link to the book and the podcast in the description too.
And also give a shout out to your company as well.
Oh, right. So my practice is called pactum factum which means in Latin a done deal because you know Lawyers always got to stay it in Latin, and I I don't know if you remember from law school, Kwame?
But usually when they said something in Latin, I met something bad, you know, like quid pro quo harassment You know but packed in factum is good.
It's a done deal It means we're hoping to bring peace and resolution to Conflict and to actually empower you to be able to do it on your own so you don't have to hire us quote -unquote experts.
That's great. Yeah, and I - one of the things I love about your approach too is that you're - you're making this accessible, and you're really democratizing the content.
You're making it so that everybody can get access, but you're also approaching it from a new perspective that I think is really fresh and important.
You know, I don't disagree with that, Kwame, and what happened just this year at my Easter dinner table, there's a true story.
We're sitting there.
I've got three high school seniors at the dinner table.
And one of them who had never met me before, he starts chatting me up, well, what do you do?
And I said, oh, I'm a lawyer.
You know, I don't really think he's going to be interested.
Well, tell me more about that.
What exactly. So I start telling him about my background in negotiation and my teaching in my book.
And he says to me, I kid you not, oh, well, negotiation.
That's really something you either have that skill or you don't, it really can't be taught.
And I whipped my head around, and I seared into my own son that penetrating gaze that only an Italian mother can accomplish as if to say, did you put him up to saying that because that's just too perfectly teamed up.
And I said his name was Nathan.
I said, Nathan, boy, when you're wrong, you're wrong.
Let me just tell you how, And I went into my whole thing about how that's what I did I taught it and I'm gonna teach you and it's this book and it's even so Bottom line is even if our high school like high school students could be reading this don't hire me.
Do it yourself. You can do it Yeah agreed.
It's so funny. I could imagine that look you gave your son like you just seen out You know, it's gonna is about to get ugly.
He's probably like mom, please don't No, he was like, oh no here, like he did the, oh no, here we go.
Like now she's getting good on her soap box look.
So. That's really funny.
This is really funny.
We just had a really interesting conversation about negotiating with bullies.
And I know that this is something that I get a lot in trainings, people are always asking, well, how do I deal with a bully?
How do I deal with somebody who's super aggressive?
And what's really interesting is that there's very little out there on the topic of negotiating with bullies.
And so what I want to do is I just want to tee you up and allow you to go on your soapbox for a bit When it comes to this topic because it's be careful with that invitation Okay Oh is that the tee up right there?
Okay So let me back up a little bit because you said something before then i'm going to build on Be careful because i'm actually listening to you.
Um, you said that I was bringing a new perspective and part of that new perspective I think with the podcast and particularly the book is it is more it is female voiced not male voiced and that does matter because of our different experiences in life and I realized I'm using cisgender vocabulary so I'll just say it's not male voiced it's other than cisgender male voiced.
And I do dedicate a full chapter on negotiating with bullies.
I have had too many experiences with bullies in my own life as a child.
I mean, started in childhood and then I guess I have been surprised time and time again at how many times as an adult, I have had to face down bullies and negotiate with bullies.
So I continue to be surprised that we hear or do hear a lot about bullying in terms of children and at school and even legislation and other states, and Illinois just passed some, about bullying and in schools.
We don't hear an awful lot about it vis -a -vis adults in negotiation.
And even when I tried to sort of put some structure around it for the book, I had difficulty finding material out there.
I did, but very, very little.
So the first thing I do want to say is a little bit of a disclaimer, and that is that I don't love labeling people as bullies or any other single word label.
It's reductive and dehumanizing.
At the same time, if the shoe fits, you know, and by the time I'm using that description for someone they've probably earned it through a pattern of conduct and after I've exhausted other tools, like listening, empathy, rapport, building, understanding, attempting collaboration, you know, all those things that mediators and negotiators try from our toolkit and people get more than three strikes with me Kwame, they get about 10 strikes.
Unfortunately, the truth is that bullies are everywhere, and they're quite successful.
Why? Well, I hate to break it to you.
We're a society here in the United States that doesn't just tolerate bullies, we enable them, with guns for one thing, and also with capitalism.
And in both cases, we have a small percentage of individuals who control a disproportionate amount of resources and use them to control and sort of terrorize others.
So this is not an easy topic.
We're going to discuss some practical steps, some ways forward, as long as people understand that by negotiating with bullies, you're actually working against the status quo that is woven into our cultural tapestry.
it's a thorny thing.
Now, here's the other thing I wanted to say, since I wrote the book and it's in its final manuscript form and I've started sending it out to people as one does with these things to start to get endorsements and things, Kwame.
What I am calling the MyBully Stories that now are coming in, that people want to talk to me about, they read that chapter, or I'll get an email from someone and say, but she got finished and I really wanna talk to you about chapter 15.
Can we talk about chapter 15?
And then I'll get on a Zoomer with them.
And I have now heard at least six, what I would call my bully stories from people who have had a situation that's, it's similar psychologically to abuse, actually.
They feel shame, they haven't talked with many people about it, They tend to relive the situation in their minds, trying to understand it, wondering if they did something to invite the treatment.
They think they did something wrong and maybe they've talked to a spouse or a partner or even a therapist about it, but otherwise they've kept it really quiet because there's shame associated with it and confusion and now they have someone to talk to about it like, Oh, you really get it.
So, I'm hearing these stories and not just from women, by the way.
This is not, I think there probably are some gender patterns and I haven't studied that scientifically, it's not just men being bullies against women, so I want to make that clear.
And I'm also going to say something that's going to make you go, wait, whoa, you just totally pulled the rug out from under us, Lucia, I don't think you can negotiate with bullies.
At least not alone.
So that, I think, is the key.
I'm going to talk a little bit about, you probably heard Kwame, have you heard of Bill Eddy?
He's like a ninja. Have you had him on your show?
No. Okay. You're gonna, you're gonna reach out to Bill Eddy.
And he's an attorney, therapist and the world's leading expert on managing disputes involving people with high conflict personalities.
So he doesn't really use the term bully but that's his term for it and he does offer some advice on negotiating with bullies and I summarize that in my book and then also add some other things of my own and from behaviorists, right?
And it's worth trying, because you never know what might stick.
So one of them—and the good news is these skills applied in so many other contexts, too.
So by trying them out, you're just practicing and building these skills anyway.
Try building rapport.
Okay. Flip the narrative.
Don't assume that building rapport is a lost cause.
A bully isn't expecting kindness or empathy in response to their high conflict tactics.
So employing empathy, listening, rapport, or building can be disarming.
So I call it sort of channeling your inner Nelson Mandela, who, as you I'm sure know, model the ultimate and empathy and compassion but actually befriending his oppressor, his jailer.
And he writes about that in his own memoir or wrote about it.
So another piece of advice is ignore them.
Now you may think you can't ignore a bully because they're so confrontational.
Try it. A behaviorist will tell you that ignoring undesirable behaviors is the most effective way to extinguish them.
Like a wind -up toy, they might simply run out of momentum.
So in episode 10 of The Superpower of Everyday Negotiation, which is my podcast, my co -host, Nina Greeley, actually provides an example of a negotiation where she successfully employed the ignoring technique with a high conflict negotiation opponent.
Then there's this one.
Avoid giving in. Now bullies don't negotiate, they make demands, they threaten, they fight, they want to fight.
That's their playground.
High conflict people are at war with the world around them And they go from relationship to relationship with intent to dominate.
But when they win, quote unquote, by dominating, they're still not satisfied.
So they think they want more and the cycle continues in perpetuity.
Giving into a bully doesn't bring relief because you have no assurance that the same thing won't happen in the future, and so it does happen in the future.
You also need to know your bottom line.
And this is just, this is basic negotiation 101, right Kwame?
You need to know when no deal is better than a bad deal, when to walk away.
And this actually hearkens to an early chapter in my book on planning and also in my podcast and then I'm sure you've covered here on negotiate anything, the importance of planning and negotiation.
Know how far you're willing to go.
If you've got a team involved, make sure you're all on the same page.
Know your BATNA. I know you've talked about that, so I probably don't have to even spell that out for people that that's our buddies Fisher and Yuri.
And that's from the program on negotiation out of Harvard Law School for people who are among the uninitiated.
And when it's time to stop negotiating, and you have to be firm about this.
Then there's your temperament.
Appear calm and patient doesn't mean you have to feel it on the inside.
You've heard the expression fake it to make it.
It's effective. Bullies, high -conflict people, love to get emotional and then try to get you emotional.
Try to stay calm and focused on what you want.
Even if you're just acting calm, like I said, if they get you emotional, they've already beat you.
Instead, prepare yourself to be patient, very, very patient.
The best negotiators aren't in a rush.
Bullies are. They tend to be impulsive and easily frustrated.
Don't join them emotionally.
Give the impression you have all the time in the world.
If you appear desperate to settle, they'll manipulate you into concessions you really don't want to make, and you might regret those later just because you want to get it over with.
It's so unpleasant.
and they're counting on that, right?
Instead prepare yourself for the long view.
And then look, you could always try to bring in a neutral decision maker or a mediator to it's all those other steps fail.
So if it's just going on too long, this negotiating is dragging out, you can suggest a mediator.
So in families, it could be a mutually agreed influential person in the family.
If it's a neighbor dispute, you could propose going to a community mediation center where people are actually trained to help.
Often bullies don't love this idea because then they aren't the most powerful person in their room and they have to follow rules, right?
They like to make up the rules, they like to make them and they like to break them.
So it's hard for them to argue with the neutral person because that person won't be intimidated or influenced by their tactics.
And this is not foolproof.
They are practical steps, and they can work.
Remembering when to walk away, and then this is making me think about Robert Axelrod and his evolution of cooperation.
And I don't know how familiar are with that Kwami and how his iterated trials of the prisoner's dilemma game theory problem he got from this computer program he ran a contest and he the one that won the contest was called the tit for tat protocol and he had these four different steps for the tit for tat protocol which is you start off by being cooperating and then if the other party defects you defect immediately and in kind and you retaliate and kind immediately with the party returns to a cooperating position so do you, you don't hold grudges.
One of the other things that he learned from the tit for tat protocol is that once the other side defects three times from cooperating so do you permanently.
So how does this relate to no graciating your bullies?
Well you've tried all these things I've just suggested it's not working didn't work didn't work.
They keep defecting, they keep defecting.
They've gotten to the 10 strikes that you get with me.
At that point, Kwani, I think you either need to prepare for a war or walk away.
You are not going to change an environment and an environment will change you.
So at that point, you could actually be at risk of becoming a bully yourself, if that makes any sense.
I think it makes sense to me and I'd say there's a bunch of women out there right there going Oh, I hate it when women do that when they question whether they make sense.
I'm asking if it makes sense to you This is great, this is great a lot to unpack here so let's break down a couple of things just For some folks, so when you think about the word BATTA I think this is one of the most critical elements of what you said So it's the best alternative to a negotiated agreement.
Essentially. It is your plan B plan a is right here We're trying to work together.
We're having this conversation.
If I cannot get a deal that is better than my alternative, then I execute my alternative plan B, and that's something I can do without you.
Or can you affect their BATNA?
Sorry. Just wanted to interject that.
Please continue. Yes.
No, go deeper on that because that's something that I don't think people address enough when it comes to overall negotiation strategy.
So when we think about our BATNA, We have to also think about the other person's badness.
And so tell us more about that strategy of affecting their badness.
Well, one of the great advantages of listening, and I mean really listening, to not just what is being said, but the emotion underneath the words and I treat emotions as just another category of facts.
That's what we mediators do.
If you're listening to the content plus the emotion underneath, the why it matters, you're getting a lot of information.
So if you're doing more listening than talking in this ongoing negotiation with this high conflict personality, you may very well discover some information where you say, oh, huh, so they're really influenced by maybe some third party, you know, in the world, maybe even just a spouse or someone else at work where you could go, huh, well, I wonder if that person has any idea that this is going on or wonder if I should, can you use that third party as an audience, or as an excuse or as a justification or as an ally?
Essentially, that by listening and by going through the information gathering process, you could discover a way to affect their choices, their alternatives.
And the other part about negotiating with bullies, remember the part where I said, you can't do it alone, gather allies.
I think the way that the bully is taken down to a human level is, or, you know, to humanize the bully is they got to be outnumbered.
They have got to be outnumbered and not by a source of authority.
By their peers. So assemble a posse of peers, of their peers, to say, Hey, knock it off.
What are you doing?
Don't be a jerk, whatever it is.
And not just one person, but like 10 people easier said than done.
You're not going to do it alone though.
Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question.
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Yeah, okay. Did I answer your question about that, Dana?
Absolutely. So let's go deeper into that strategy because I think the coalition building in general in negotiation in general is not utilized enough as a strategic tool.
And so essentially this is getting allies to assist you in the negotiation if I'm getting a very basic definition of coalition -building.
And now let's walk through what that looks like in this scenario.
Because I think people might look at this and they might inadvertently execute this in a way that creates toxicity.
So for example, it might turn into gossiping, ooh, Bill is such a bully, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then it kind of grows from that.
So I want to make sure that people are understanding what you mean and then how to actually execute it in the real world when it comes to gathering allies because I think this is brilliant.
And you have just zeroed in on something that I agree is a real risk.
And ultimately look these days with various social media apps at the fingertips of adults and youth alike, we can collectively, quote unquote, cancel a bully at speed and scale.
That is, condemn them in a flurry of social media posts that results in the bullies, social and estrangement.
This is thorny, and Barack Obama actually cautioned about this, about youth, this youth trend, a cancel pierce, we're not being 100 % politically woke 100 % of the time.
He said, look, that's judgment.
That's not social justice or progress.
The world is messy.
There are ambiguities.
So I'm actually, to clarify, I'm not talking about one moment where someone says the wrong thing or uses the wrong word. I'm talking about a pattern of behavior.
And this has been going on a long time, right?
That's how it becomes bullying.
And then the allyship part of it is just the not being alone.
What what I've been hearing from the my bully stories is you can have a bully who is apparent to everyone else.
They see the bullying.
They're also threatened by the bully or afraid of the bully.
And so they just try to avoid the bully and not get involved.
And that has certainly happened in the cases of my adult bullying experiences.
Everyone sees it. And behind And they see they're saying, oh Lucia, oh Lucia, this is so awful, this is so awful.
But they don't actually stand up and say, hey, this is not cool.
They don't stand beside me.
And part of that has been because they are part of the tribe and they can't risk their place in the tribe.
And here I am, the one that's kind of, I don't know, threatening the tribe or threatening the status quo.
And so they got to keep their status.
So this is not a simple thing, the finding allies, partly because of the, you don't want to add to the toxicity, but also because of the sense of belonging, which Mari Fitzstuff, she is a sociologist, who said that today's wars are mainly about identity and belonging, this feeling of not belonging.
And people need to belong even more than they need to be right.
So allyship as an idea is difficult to accomplish because it is usually inconvenient, it is costly in some way, in terms of your status and say the fraternity, or in financial terms, it is time -consuming so allyship not not terribly easy I'm not saying it's easy to to garner those allies I'm going to harken also back to you I know you had Alex Carter on your podcast and she is one of the one of the other women authors of a book on negotiation there's like five of us five or six of us plenty of women authors by the way on communication and conflict not on negotiation.
Anyway, she wrote the book, Ask for More.
And I love her book.
And that's part of the planning process for negotiation.
So here's where I'm going with this.
Part of that planning process for your negotiation is preparing questions, questions you're asking yourself.
And then questions are going to, she calls it, what's she called the mirror questions and the window questions, right?
In her book, there's five of each part of the question planning and your preparation should be, who can I gather as allies?
You should be looking around for them from the planning stage and continue that.
Who can you be asking for help?
So ask for more. All right, Alex Carter is sort of the expert on the questions and I do a two podcasts episodes on that because one of them actually has a demonstration of it with me and my co -host. Because one of the questions you can be asking yourself is who can help me?
Does that help you?
Understand it? Am I answering your questions?
Yeah, absolutely. Okay.
Because I think really to simplify this, what we realize is that in negotiating with a bully, one of the strategies requires additional negotiations with people who are not the bully who could be your ally.
And we have to recognize that other people aren't going to just see, yeah, that is a bully I, too have been bullied by this person.
Yes. Lucia, I'm with you.
We have to work through those emotional barriers because they see risk.
They have fear and you will need to work through that.
And it's not going to be easy to negotiate with them in order for them to join your coalition in the negotiation with the bully.
And so I think thinking about this through that layer of negotiation makes it a lot easier.
And negotiation is often a series of smaller negotiations inside negotiations.
And the other thing about trying to gather allies is it also leverages, because I know you've had Robert Cialdini on your show.
It also leverages one of the - he has top, the top five or six influencers, which is social proof.
Social proof is one of them.
So if you're gathering those allies and you do get those 10 people to, to stand beside you and say, hey, you're being a jerk, knock it off.
That's using social proof.
That's why I say you need to be peers, not authority.
So you're leveraging that heuristic, which is an old, you know, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky heuristic that they won the Nobel Prize for.
It's a really powerful one, because oftentimes when we don't even have enough other information to look to.
Just looking to social proof will inform our behavior.
And that can be there's another side of that coin as well, too.
Right. If it's uninformed and you're just jumping off the cliff, because everyone else is, well, then that's got a host of possible risks as well.
I'm not saying any of this is easy, it is nuanced.
And that is why we're talking about it.
100%. And Lucia, I think that's such an important point, because everybody's looking for that silver bullet.
I'm dealing with a bully, how do I deal with it?
Oh, cool. Say these three words and a magic incantation, the bully automatically becomes a puppy.
It's not a bully. It's going to be tough and I think understanding that it will be difficult is an important part of that too.
Right, managing the expectations going in and also understanding don't don't try this alone kids, okay.
And you said oh, some sort of magic incantation that made me sort of wonder when when I did read Bill Eddie's advice and I say this with all the love in my heart and Bill Eddie, if you're listening to this, I think you're such a ninja.
I wondered if it was a little bit like the um okay, I hope I'm getting this right.
Was it Elisabeth Kübler Ross who in the late sixties she came up with the five stages of grief, which it's like anger, denial, I'm not getting this in the right order, negotiating sadness, acceptance, something like that, okay.
She comes up with these five stages of grief and then I heard a resilience expert talk about this on Shankar Vedantam's podcast, The Hidden Brain.
That's what it's called, where she said, you know, it almost seems like those five stages is a tool for therapists to tell people so that they sort of feel like, hey look, I am giving you this tool.
And this is what's going to happen and you're going to go through this and I'm doing my job.
And she said, you know, it ends up just feeling like this, all these things are going to happen to you and you have no control over it.
And it's not actually that helpful in terms of dealing with grief and being resilient.
And I sort of wonder, when I looked at some of these steps, it's just this is sort of like the Elizabeth Kudlerasov, where some sort of experts can say, well, this is how you negotiate with bullies.
And then they get to feel like they've been really useful when actually your own experience doesn't change much. I really thought about that Kwame, before I assembled this chapter in my book.
I am still convinced that these steps are extremely worthwhile trying again, if for no other reason, that they actually help you just hone your everyday negotiation skills.
You can always fight later.
That's what I always tell people.
You're not giving up your right to fight by being in mediation.
You can always fight later.
Absolutely and I think it's important to recognize that that's an option too it's probably not the option we want to take and as a lawyer I know you're familiar with this because I have I had clients back in the day they did not want this conflict they didn't want to be in this situation but I told them that sometimes the war chooses you and you have to rise to the occasion or you're gonna get steamrolled that's that's the situation.
Exactly. At the end of the day, it's our responsibility to protect ourselves and we have to do whatever it takes to do so.
Yeah. And so that's what happened to me in a bullying situation that I ended up in last year, which was a group bullying situation.
And I do talk about it in the book, and I sort of introduced it in an earlier chapter, I think chapter 11, where I talk about the language we use in negotiation and just with other and how our vocabulary here in our culture is so laden with fighting language.
We hear it all the time, fighting for a cause, fighting for progress, battle of the sexes, battling with an illness.
And it's combative.
It creates a combative tone.
And particularly attorneys, I think are seen as fighters.
They just want to fight.
And so when I was actually advocating for some pretty simple diversity, equity, and inclusion steps in this organization last year where I was president and CEO the first woman in the almost century history of the organization, and they said, you, Lucia, you're being such an attorney, why are you fighting us on this?
They kept saying, they kept using the word fight to describe what I was doing and I kept saying, I am not fighting, I am advocating.
There is a big difference.
It didn't matter, Kwami, I was, and this is getting back to what you just said, don't worry, I'm going to come, coming back around full circle.
You are sometimes, despite every intention, every effort, every tool you have in your everyday negotiation toolkit, you get drawn into a fight.
You don't want to be there.
You didn't ask for it.
You tried to avoid it.
You tried to be the peacemaker, the peace builder, and you're in it.
And so then that's when you have to have these other...
the batnip, the watnip, the malatna, this is the worst alternative, the most likely alternative.
And who have you got to help?
Who have you got to help you now that you've been drawn into this fight?
Sometimes, as you said, the fight finds you.
Yeah, and it's a tough situation and tell me what you think about this Lucia. One of the most difficult things about dealing with a bully or a high conflict person in the difficult conversation itself is that they can be so aggressive that we don't know exactly what to do and it almost seems like we make the mistake, the classic negotiation mistake of trading substance for emotion in one way or another, so they want us to do something, make some change, make a concession or something like that, and so we can tell they're angry about it, we don't want them to be angry anymore, so we make a concession or even
if we don't care about their emotional state, we care about ours and we feel pressure, we feel fear, and then in order for us to alleviate the emotional distress that we're in, we get a concession almost like a fear of flight response so we can exit as quickly as possible.
So we satisfy our emotional needs in the moment in order to get out but then long -term goals have been thrown aside.
And so what advice do you have for people in the heat of the moment to deal with that type of pressure?
Right okay. So this is really getting into and have chapter on this too.
I think it's chapter nine.
You think I have my chapter numbers memorized, but I don't.
And this is getting to that reptilian brain stuff, this amygdala hippocampus that the executive functioning of the brain, not operating right now, right?
This is the fight or flight, is it a stick or is it a snake?
Oh, it's a snake. And so it's the fear center.
It's the emotional response center this is terribly difficult to be aware of it it it requires incredible presence of mind in the moment because then there's Paul Ekman who if you're not familiar with that name he is sort of the world's foremost specialist he's a psychologist out of University California UCSF San Francisco on on lying, lies an emotional micro expression.
And he talks about in his book, Emotions Revealed.
The refractory state.
The refractory state is this period last an average of 20 minutes in which your brain is at the retilium level, it's the amygdala response, you cannot take in any information it's going to be purely a reactionary and emotional not necessarily productive.
the tough part is recognizing in yourself with your in a refractory state.
that's where I say it's getting back to the gather allies, who do I have that can help me?
who can I have next to me at the table, or on the zoom call, or whatever because it's more likely than not that that other person and this is what mediators are so good at, we can identify when someone's in a refractory state because it doesn't affect us.
So it really I'm doubling down here on the on the gathering allies because the thing about bullies is, yes, they want to get that emotional response, they want to scare you so that you will give in.
And then when you do, guess what, you've just reinforced that behavior, they're just going to keep doing it because it was successful.
And and then as you said, it's a short term goal and it in the end, it doesn't really benefit you.
And you've given in which was one of Bill at these devices is don't get in.
The other thing about bullies is, their threats are not idle.
When they make a threat, they will carry it out, and so should you, by the way.
This is a basic negotiation chip.
Now, I am not saying, I am not advocating the use of threats in negotiation.
I think using threats needs to be extremely, carefully considered.
if you make one, if you use it as a tool, be ready and willing to execute.
Do not make idle threats.
Bullies don't. So they're not satisfied until you're not just defeated.
You are ruined and your head is on a stick in the public square.
And a lot of this too has to goes to this idea of loyalty versus justice and fairness.
So this this fascinated me, Kwame.
I wrote about this summer in my book, I can't remember where.
It's this group of researchers out of Northwestern University's Kellogg School.
They inform us of the tension between two competing values, loyalty and justice or fairness.
And depending on where you land on that continuum, how that impacts if you speak out, if you speak up, or if other people, this is getting to the allyship part, right, if those people who are potentially allies, if they're going to be willing to do it, those for whom loyalty to the tribe, to the group outweighs the value of justice will remain quiet.
And they might harshly judge people who speak out.
Okay, so me as that disrupter last year disrupting the status quo, right, those for whom justice outweighs loyalty will speak up and be judged harshly by people who value loyalty and see it as a betrayal.
And that's one of the many things that gets in the way of allyship.
That, and the fact that allyship is usually inconvenient, uncomfortable, and costly.
So I don't know if that's helpful.
It is interesting. There are so many dynamics in play, and I hope I answered your question about what can you do in the moment, which is try to be as self -aware as you can.
And that gets back to planning.
If you've done your planning and looked at alternatives in BATNA and done your listening, and asked out those window and mirror questions Alex Carter helps us with and all these things, you are going to be so much better in the moment because they're not just shooting from the hip and trying to process all different kinds of information coming at you at once.
You will have a better chance of being present in the moment and recognizing when you're becoming emotional that you can say, time out in the field, we're taking a break.
You take a break, you walk away, you let that refractory state pass.
Absolutely, yeah, and to your point about making threats and following through, I know that's not something I talk about much on the podcast, but you're absolutely right, you have to follow through on that.
And the way I think about it is that I think about it, not through the lens of threats, I think about it through warnings, where I'm still empowering the other person, because I feel like a threat is something I'm choosing to do to you.
Um, but a warning is more like, this is something you're doing to yourself.
So it's an, if then proposition.
So I like the self empowerment of that.
That's very, um, very much like the mediator toolkit.
Self determination.
Like Lucia, I understand this is really important to you.
I have things that are important to me too.
Just want to let you know that if we're not able to get an agreement here soon, then I'm going to have to use my, you know, whatever the situation is batnap.
And I let people know.
now it's up to you.
Now is your choice.
Now what happens happens if I drop the hammer, you dropped it on yourself, but I gave you fair warning about what's coming.
So they're still in control but you're 100 % right because every time you make a threat or a warning and then you don't follow through, you lose credibility, they don't take you seriously, and then they're more emboldened like, oh sweet...
now I see who I'm dealing with...
this person is bulliable.
So I've been encouraged in this situation.
And then, turning point about the refractory period, I love that idea, because, again, there's something I just said two days ago in the training, I was under duress, if you're under pressure from a bully.
Here are two things that I like to do.
Number one, if somebody's pressuring me to make a decision, they're like I need a decision now, I need you to say yes now, or whatever.
I was like, listen, hey, if you need a decision right now, the answer's gonna be no. But if you give me some time to think about this, you know, you might still have a chance, but right now, I'm not ready.
And so people find patience in that situation.
And so, then the other one is my rule is that I just don't make decisions under pressure.
And so I will end the conversation.
I'm not afraid of doing that.
And I think a lot of times people are afraid because they might make it, they might feel as though it makes them look weak.
But what I'll say is, listen, Lucia, you've given me a lot of information and I have a lot to think about.
So how about this? We schedule another time.
Let's come back. we want to talk about it more in -depth.
Now, the person might still be aggressive.
They still might want to talk, and I'll say, Lee Ji, it sounds like you still have something else to say, and I'll give you the floor, and I'll let you say that, but I don't have anything else to add at this point, so I'll listen.
I'll summarize it, but I won't add anything else, and I certainly want any commitments other than a commitment to another meeting.
Love that. Agree 100 % for two reasons.
At least two reasons.
Number one, you're flipping the narrative.
So they're using that pressure of time to, well, to pressure you and it's a power play and you are flipping it and making your own power play by saying, I'm going to actually take time to think about, well, now they have to wait.
Now they have to wait for you.
Number two, I think that scarcity effect, which is what a time pressure is as a type of creating scarcity, often false scarcity, is one of Cheldini's top five or top six that I referenced earlier, influencers, right?
So B, I see that Kwame, and to everyone out there listening, that scarcity effect, or that time pressure, that you know, it's the act now!
This deal won't last, right?
That should be a flag to you, because absent a real time pressure from an authoritative source, so a court filing deadline for the memorandum of points and authorities for the motion for summary judgment in court, okay.
That's a deadline. Absent something like that where it's a real objectively imposed from an outside source and either one of you can control authority for a deadline, it's most likely manufactured and it's being used as a ploy.
Yep, 100%. And one of the things that I've learned, and again, this is me.
This isn't somebody who is, speaking of myself, not somebody who naturally enjoys conflict.
My whole first book was finding confidence in conflict, just about getting over that people pleaser that was in me.
That's my whole ethos and motto behind everything that I do here.
What I've learned, though, is that those conversations with people who are bullies have, now that I've kind of simplified it, have become almost a little bit easier.
Because, for instance, you and me, I consider you a friend now, DeGia.
I care about what you think.
Now, somebody who has identified that they don't care about me, then I don't feel as bad if they're upset or they don't like what I'm doing or anything like that.
Because you've identified very clearly in our numerous interactions that you don't really care.
Well, remember, they're at war with the world too.
So, it may be that there's a certain sort of personality type where there's just sort of malcontents that people who are people pleasers, you're never going to please them anyway.
That's true. That's exactly that's a great way to put it.
And that's when I think about the psychology of personality, you have people on the agreeableness.
Right. If you think about the big five personality traits, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
On agreeableness, you have highly agreeable, these are your people pleasers.
And then you have lower on agreeableness, also known as disagreeable.
And it helps me to not take it personally, where I say, you know, I'm getting this from getting this pretty consistently and it didn't seem to be any trigger.
I talked to somebody else to get a vibe, another data point to see what this person is like.
Oh, they're like this to everybody, okay.
So I don't need to take it personally.
And I'm probably not gonna make this easier, but I do know what I need to do in order to protect myself in this situation.
I know I'm going to set my ground and in three, two, one, they're going to blow up.
There's the emotion.
I saw that one coming.
Yeah, he's going to pressure me to put make a decision right now.
I'm going to say no, watch this, going to make him mad, there he is, Matt.
Okay, cool. This meeting is about to end.
You want to say something else?
He blows off some steam.
Hey, thank you for your time.
I'll talk to you next week and it just made it kind of simplifies it for me because now I'm not concerned because I'm not going to play an unwinnable game where I'm going to try to get somebody to like me who is not designed to do so.
I'm just gonna stick to my guns and know what my bat -neck is, what my bottom line is, while still staying focused on my goal, because I know if we focus on our bottom line, we orient toward that more so, subconsciously during the conversation.
But yeah, just simplify it once you realize that you are not in charge of making them feel good in the interaction.
So this idea of the equal opportunity bully, which was kind of an epiphany to me, side note real quick, because this is kind of important that, that that sort of defense and an employment law case, right for like gender based harassment or discrimination, where the perpetrator says in their defense says, well, I treat everyone that way, essentially, I'm an equal opportunity bully.
This defense is actually used to obfuscate what really is a bias, gender or religion or race or bias by saying you treat everyone that way but I went to my 30th high school reunion after not going back to that small town after leaving in 1988 and I brought my younger son with me and he'd never have been back there and I brought me a husband and he'd never been to Chicago and and at the reunion dinner I saw my childhood bully at the bar and I write about him in chapter 15 I changed his name.
And I went over and I eavesdropped.
I wanted, I thought, you know, maybe he's an okay guy.
You know, look, childhood is not easy, adolescence is not easy, no one gets a free pass on that, maybe it was particularly hard for him and he grew out of it.
So I eavesdropped and I listened to the really just offensive, vituperative language that he was using with his compadres at the bar and I was like, nope, he's the same guy.
And I realized, oh, sorry, let me back up.
So then I actually said hello to him.
I said, hey, remember me?
And he's facing my bully.
And he kinda looked at me blankly.
He kind of looks at my name to how he looks.
Kwame, he really did not have any idea who I was and that's when it dawned on me.
She didn't single me out Kwame.
he really did treat everyone that way.
So I was not memorable to him, but he was not just memorable to me.
He was formative to me.
I was terrified of him.
I used to hide in the bathroom during lunch to avoid him.
I had tried hiding in a library and then the librarian came and said, you're not allowed to be in here.
Nevermind her asking why I was hiding in the library, Like maybe she could have asked a few questions.
So then I just hid in the bathroom during lunch. This was in middle school.
So then I get back home after the 33 year and I look him up on LinkedIn.
He is, I kid you not, remember how I said bullies succeed.
Bullies win. He is a, some C -suite level executive working in pause for dramatic effect human resources.
Oh my goodness. Oh, so put that in your pipe and smoke it wow wow wow.
So wow. So here let me that's incredible that is incredible.
So the listeners know this I talk about it all the time.
I'm obsessed with chess.
I love playing chess.
It's I love that story from your book.
Cracks me up. Oh yes yes yes I listen.
I'm better They're not, they're better than us.
But yes, I love playing chess.
And so I remember when we were first starting to play chess in a great school, and that goes, somebody learns the four -move checkmate.
Somebody learns the four -move checkmate, and then they just start decimating everybody.
Nobody knows how to stop it.
But the thing is, once you know how to stop it, you recognize the simplicity, and then the person's way out of position by trying to go for a 4 -moved checkmate.
When it comes to bullying and difficult conversations, most people don't take the time to learn the art of science and negotiation, understand communication and difficult conversations.
And so the bully just keeps on running through life, getting people with these 4 -moved checkmates.
They don't need a deeper bag of tricks because it always works and that's why they lead to success just like you said.
But if you start to develop that defense system and you start to understand and embody these tools and techniques and strategies that you talked about today then you realize yes I will say that this was an unenjoyable experience dealing with the bully however I will say that my outcome is far superior than the majority of people because I actually know what to do and once you get past that that bluster and emotion and force at the beginning there's really usually not much depth beyond that.
Right and what you're really talking about is that detachment So that you're not getting into that amygdala hippocampus response, the amygdala hijack, I think is what they call it.
And so you don't get into that refractory state.
And in other words, you've already said, oh, this actually is not personal, this is someone who treats the world that way.
Oh, therefore, I don't have to take it personally.
You've recognized the pattern of behavior.
You've even started to predict it.
You're like, yep, there's step three right there.
Step four is coming in about 30 minutes, right?
And so that gives you that leg up because you're detached.
You know what I might advise my kids self growing up at the pre personal computer or social media or smart phone era is to combine what Chris Voss calls a no oriented question.
Zoe Chance talks about that too in her book, influences your superpower, which came out this year.
Combine a no -oriented question, which works like this.
Would it be impossible for you to consider a break in price?
That's the no -oriented question.
So you combine that with organizing the coalition of peers, the childini social proof, to confront the childhood bully from my school.
So that is starting with close friends and expanding out, ask them, if I got 10 of us together to tell him to knock it off, would it be unimaginable for you to be one of those 10?
And once I got a no -meaning -yes response from them, we would gather and make a plan for the moment of reckoning.
So Kwame, I live just down the road, essentially, from Silicon Valley.
And once those Silicon Valley tech geniuses invent a safe and reliable time machine.
I gotta give that a try and I will provide a full report.
What do you think of that?
I love it and then you save an entire human resources department in the meantime.
I saved the human race.
Come on me. Come on.
This is great. Lucia really appreciate it.
And before you go, remind the listeners about your company, your book, and and your podcast and how they can get in touch with them.
Oh sure. So it's PactomFactim .com.
It's Latin for a done deal.
So you could just Google Latin, a done deal, PactomFactim .com.
And I'm Lucia L -U -C -I -A at PactomFactim .com.
My podcast is Forces of Good, The Superpower of Everyday Negotiation.
And my book is releasing on October 1st, For the Forces of Good, The Superpower of Everyday Negotiation.
Love it. Lucia, thanks so much for joining us.
really appreciate it.
Super fun. Thank you Kwame.
You, you are working for the Forces of Good.
Thank you. Appreciate you.
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