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Hey, i'm kwame christian and you are about to step into the world of negotiate anything.
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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, me 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.
I did a little more research and I saw there's still such a paucity of negotiation books authored by women.
And so I 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.
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.
I work with the United Nations women as a vice president of their board for the San Francisco chapter.
So You know, 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 an 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 going to 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 say it in Latin.
And I don't know if you remember from law school Kwame, but usually when they said something in Latin, it meant something bad.
You know, like bad quid pro quo harassment.
But pactum factum is good.
It's a done deal.
It means we're helping 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 one of the things I love about your approach too, is that 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.
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 and 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 teed up.
And I said, his name was Nathan.
I said, Nathan, what? 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 going to teach you.
And it's this book and it's so bottom line is even for 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 see now, you know, it's going to, it's 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 soapbox look.
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.
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 that I'm going to build on.
Be careful because I'm actually listening to you.
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 this.
It is more, it is female voiced, not male voiced.
And that does matter because of our different experiences in life.
And I realize 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, starting 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 in other states.
I know Illinois just passed some about bullying and in schools.
We don't hear an awful lot about it vis-a-vis adults and 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.
I have, 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, my bully 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 Lucia, I'm finished and I really want to talk to you about chapter 15.
Can we talk about chapter 15?
And then I'll get on a Zoom 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 sort of shame associated with it and confusion.
And, and now they have someone to talk to about it.
Like, Oh, you really get it.
So I 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, but 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, what?
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 here.
I'm going to talk a little bit about, you've 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 going to reach out to Bill Eddy.
He's an attorney, therapist and the world's leading expert on managing disputes involving people with high conflict personalities.
Okay.
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 apply 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 building can be disarming.
So I call it sort of channeling your inner Nelson Mandela who, as you I'm sure know, modeled the ultimate in 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 windup 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 them.
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 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 that 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 BATNA so I probably don't have to even spell that out for people, but that's our buddies Fisher and Urey.
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 right.
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 too.
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 mediator, 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 the 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 them.
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 you are with that Kwame and how his iterated trials of the prisoner's dilemma, game theory problem he got from this computer program.
He ran a contest.
And 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 in kind immediately.
When the other 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 negation of 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, Kwame, I think you either need to prepare for war or walk away.
You are not going to change an environment.
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.
I might say there are 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.
Oh, yeah.
It makes a lot of sense.
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 BATNA, 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?
Hmm.
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 BATNA.
And so tell us more about that strategy of affecting their BATNA.
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, right?
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 group, 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 can go.
Huh well, I wonder if that person has any idea that this is going, or I 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, right?
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, 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, right?
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.
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Did I answer your question about that?
Absolutely.
Let's go deeper into that strategy because I think that coalition building in general, in negotiation in general, is not utilized enough as a strategic tool.
Essentially, this is getting allies to assist you in the negotiation.
If I'm giving 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 is, 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 bully's social estrangement.
This is thorny.
And Barack Obama actually cautioned about this.
About youth, this youth trend to cancel peers for 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 I've been hearing from the My Bully stories is that 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 the scenes, they're saying, oh, Lucia, oh, Lucia, this is so awful.
This is so awful.
Right. 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 fits stuff.
She is a sociologist who said that today's wars are mainly about the 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 in, say, the fraternity or in financial terms.
It is time-consuming.
So allyship, not terribly easy.
I'm not saying it's easy 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 other women authors of a book on negotiation.
There's like five of us.
There's 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 negotiations.
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 you're going to.
She calls it what 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, right?
Alex Carter is sort of the expert on the questions.
And I do two podcast episodes on that, because one of them actually has a demonstration of it with me and my co-host.
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.
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 bullies.
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 and side 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 like top the top five or six allies 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 stand beside you and say hey, you're being a jerk and knock it off, that's using social proof.
That's why I say it needs to be peers, not authority.
So you're leveraging that heuristic, which is an old 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 to 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.
None of this, 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, silver bullet.
I'm dealing with a bully.
How do I deal with it?
Oh, cool.
Say these three words and like a magic incantation, the bully automatically becomes a puppy.
It's not, 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 try this alone, kids, okay?
And you said, oh, some sort of magic incantation.
That made me sort of wonder.
When I did read Bill Eddy's advice and I say this with all the love in my heart and, Bill Eddy, if you're listening to this, I think you're such a ninja
I wondered...
If it was a little bit like the, okay, I hope I'm getting this right.
Was it Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who, in the late 60s, 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, right 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.
This is sort of like the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stuff, 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.
And 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.
And 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 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 going to get steamrolled.
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 how and 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 introduce 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, 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.
Didn't matter, Kwame.
I was, this is getting back to what you just said.
Don't worry.
I'm going to come 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, you know, the batna, the watna, the malatna.
This is the worst alternative, 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 emotions in one way or another.
They want us to do something, make some change, make a concession or something like that.
We can tell they're angry about it.
We don't want them to be angry anymore, so we make a concession.
Even if we don't care about their emotional state, we care about ours and we feel pressure, we feel fear.
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 it.
I have a chapter on this too.
I think it's chapter nine.
You'd 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 a snake?
Oh, it's a snake.
So I've got it.
And so it's the fear center.
It's the emotional response center.
Terribly difficult to be aware of 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 of California UCSF, San Francisco, on lying lies and emotional micro expression.
And he talks about in his book, Emotions Revealed, the refractory state.
The refractory state is.
This period lasts an average of 20 minutes in which your brain is at the reptilian level.
It's the amygdala response.
You cannot take in any information.
It's going to be purely reactionary and emotional, not necessarily productive.
The tough part is recognizing in yourself when you're 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.
The thing about bullies is yes, they want to get that emotional response and 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 then as you said, it's a short-term goal and in the end, it doesn't really benefit you.
And you've given in, which was one of Bill Eddy's advices 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 tip.
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 are 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, goes to this idea of loyalty versus justice and fairness.
So this fascinated me, Kwame.
I wrote about this somewhere in my book.
I can't even 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 disruptor 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 and BATNA and done your listening and asked those window and mirror questions that Alex Carter helps us with and all these things, you are going to be so much better in the moment because you'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.
So 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.
But a warning is more like this is something you're doing to yourself.
So it's an if-then proposition.
Right.
I like the self-empowerment of that.
That's very much like the mediator toolkit, isn't it?
Exactly.
The self-determination.
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, BATNA.
And I let people know.
And now it's up to you.
Now it's 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 bullyable.
So I've been encouraged in this situation.
And then one about the refractory period.
I love that idea because again, 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 is going to be no.
But if you give me some time to think about this, 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 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.
And now the person might still be aggressive.
They still might want to talk.
And I'll say, Lucia, 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 won't make 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, it's a type of creating scarcity.
Often false.
Scarcity is one of Cialdini's top five or top six that I referenced earlier in Influencers.
Right.
So B I see that Kwame and to everyone out there listening, that scarcity effect or that time pressure that's, 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 you know a court filing deadline for the memorandum of points and authorities for the motion for summary judgment in court.
OK, that's a deadline.
Right.
Absent.
Something like that where it's a real objectively imposed from an outside source and neither 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 isn't somebody who is me speaking of myself, not somebody who naturally enjoys conflict.
My whole first book was Finding Competence 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 Lucia, so 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 that that you don't really care.
Right.
Well, remember, they're at war with the world, too.
So it may be that there's a certain sort of personality type or there's just sort of malcontents that people who are people pleasers you're never going to please them anyway.
Right.
That's true.
That's a great way to put it.
Yeah.
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, I'm 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.
They're like this to everybody.
OK, so I don't need to take it personally.
And I'm probably not going to 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 stand 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 make a decision right now.
I'm going to say no.
Watch, that's going to make him mad.
There he is, Matt.
Okay, cool.
This meeting's 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 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 going to stick to my guns and know what my BATNA 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 simplifies 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 sort of defense in 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, right?
This defense is actually used to obfuscate what really is a bias gender or religion or race or whatever 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 been back there.
And I brought my husband, and he'd never been to Chicago.
And at the reunion dinner, I saw my childhood bully at the bar.
And I write about him in Chapter 15.
I change his name.
And I went over and I eavesdropped.
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, you know, remember me?
And yes.
I'm facing my bully and he kind of looked at me blankly.
He kind of looks at my name tag.
He looks, he Kwame, he really did not have any idea who I was.
And that's when it dawned on me.
He 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 hours. to avoid him.
I had tried hiding in a library and then the librarian came and said well, 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 unit.
I look him up on LinkedIn.
He is, I kid you not.
Remember how I said, bullies succeed, bullies win.
He is some C-suite level executive working in, pause for dramatic effect, human resources.
Oh, my goodness.
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.
I love that story from your book.
Cracks me up.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
Listen, I'm better now.
I'm better now.
But yes, I love playing chess.
And so I remember when we were first starting to play chess in grade school and how it goes.
Somebody learns the four-move checkmate.
Somebody lands a 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 four-move checkmate.
When it comes to bullying and difficult conversations.
Most people don't take the time to learn the art and science of negotiation, understand communication in difficult conversations.
And so the bully just keeps on running through life, hitting people with these four move 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 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.
Right.
So you don't get into that refractory state.
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 that.
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.
Right.
You know what I might advise my kid self, growing up in the pre-personal computer or social media or smartphone 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 Cialdini social proof, and 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 death.
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 get to give that a try and I will provide a full report.
What do you think of that?
I love it.
And then you saved an entire human resources department in the meantime.
I saved the human race, Kwame.
Come on.
This is great.
Lucia, I really appreciate it.
And, before you go, remind the listeners about your company, your book and your podcast and how they can get in touch with you.
Oh, sure.
So it's pactumfactum.com.
It's Latin for a done deal.
So you could just Google Latin, a done deal, pactumfactum.com.
And I'm Lucia, L-U-C-I-A at pactumfactum.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 are working for the forces of good.
Thank you.
Appreciate you.
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