Every now and then I get to have a conversation that reminds me of why I fell in love with negotiation in the first place.
And this, my friends, is one of those conversations.
Today I'm sitting down with Mike Inman, a guy who's trained over 8 ,000 professionals across six continents, negotiated more than a billion dollars in deals, and somehow still manages to make you feel like you're just two friends chatting over coffee.
But here's the thing, This isn't just a conversation about tactics.
This is about how to be fully present, how to read people and how to adapt without losing your core and how to recognize that every day, every interaction is a chance to practice and sharpen your negotiation skills.
And by the end of this episode, you will understand why emotional presence is your most underrated negotiation tool, how to manage your tone, energy and perception to build trust and when to use pressure and when to walk away.
this one is deep it is practical and i know you are going to love it so without further ado let's jump into the interview all right we talk about vulnerability on the podcast this is my opportunity to be vulnerable but i'll do it in a playful way let's guise it as a negotiation So let's negotiate something right now.
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week so let's build this next chapter together let's make a deal so i always tell the story about my wife and we've been married 26 years now i just had our 26th and um i'm one of those really annoying people that in the morning i just wake up and i go i'm like a binary computer is on and i start and um and my wife is not like that she's one of those people that need a little extra extra time.
So what I've learned is when I wake up in the morning, I roll out of bed and I sneak downstairs, let the dog outside, fix the dog's food, empty the dishwasher and I'll hear her get up.
So I start the coffee and then I'll take her coffee cup out and put a little cream, a little sugar in it.
That's the way she likes it.
And I put, pour the coffee in there.
I put it on the counter and I wait.
And then she'll come downstairs and she'll, she'll scruff the dog and I wait.
And then she'll check my work.
Cause I don't know where all the Tupperware lids go and stuff like that is I'm a mess, but I try, but, but I don't always do it right.
And she checks my work and I wait.
And then she'll take the coffee, take a sip of the coffee and she'll say, good coffee.
and then i'm allowed to talk my my self -imposed rule is don't talk first let my wife have the first words of the day and it'll be a good day to start off because if i start talking first thing it's probably going to be a bad day that's so cool for for a number of reasons first of all i've been married 15 years i'm trying to i'm trying to get up there thank you and it's a process you know and you i'm wondering how long did it take you to to hone this this intricate process over over the years uh i don't remember when i started to make it a rule but um i have had people over the years who i'm at the office
uh this guy mark stars like i worked with at mgm mark mark was a hard -working guy but he'd start at nine and i'd start at seven so when he came in at nine i was already two hours in and going and i would just start talking and one day he just said, can I have my coffee before we start?
And I was like, got it.
No problem. And I went mental note, don't talk to Mark until he's had his coffee.
I try to be a little bit of a chameleon.
I mean, we all have to be true to ourselves, but I try to be respectful is the wrong word. We all deserve level of respect, but conscious that different people have different communication styles.
Just like us, we had a little problem getting this one going, but I use Zoom.
I use use Teams. I use Meets.
I use all sorts of different.
If that's the way somebody wants to communicate with me, I will figure it out.
I have WhatsApp because a lot of people around the world use that.
I don't have iMessage.
And I know the blue bubbles, green bubble thing bothers some people, my boss being one of them.
Email, whatever mode someone wants to communicate with me, I try to be agnostic and go back to them in that mode.
Or remember, that person likes what's up that person likes signal so i go i go back to them and bounce around because you know if i can break down those barriers of communication by something as simple as changing the mode um which is you know low value to me simple for me but if it's high value for the relationship then i i consider it my obligation to try to do that there's there's so much that i love about this mike because the and by this time the listeners would have listened to your bio so you already have been stamped as the negotiation expert.
The thing is, we've had over 1600 episodes, but we have to say that there are very few people who can say that they've negotiated a billion -dollar worth of deals, over a billion -dollar worth of deals over the course of their career.
That's an astronomical amount of value.
What I often see is that people say, this is the way I talk.
This is the way I communicate.
Almost take it or leave it, right?
This has worked for me in the past and then they are very unwilling to adjust. But what we're seeing - The late night radio DJ voice.
I didn't want to say anything.
No, it's very effective.
You know what? What I tell people is this, being a negotiator is like being a carpenter.
There's a wall of tools and a great negotiator will know how to use all the different tools and when to use those tools.
They won't be great at all of them, but be competent at it, or at least recognize the other side is using that tool, and then how to counter their use of the tool if necessary.
Thank you. Okay. So we took it there.
We're here now, because for the listeners who might not have gotten it, there's a very famous negotiator who uses a very specific style.
And Mike, I've always struggled with this, because I recognize that there are a lot of communication experts that might say, yeah, this is my style.
But I've always been reluctant to just say, hey, this is my style because the way that I would sound would be different for different people in different circumstances.
For me as a business lawyer, the way that I negotiate will sound very different when I'm wearing that hat versus when I'm negotiating here at the American Negotiation Institute versus when I have tough conversations as a mediator.
It's very different, but you have to be able to be flexible and adjust. And so for you, based on the fact that you've trained people all over the world, what do you think holds people back from being willing to embrace change and pivot and adjust to the person who's in front of them?
So we talk about the little voice in our head.
It's the little voice that when I say one, two, three, it's already at four.
And when I sing ABC, it's a D.
That voice gets in our way.
It tells us we shouldn't try that it looks for exceptions.
It looks for past failures, and I don't want to fail again.
So I'm not going to do it again.
And so I think that little voice talks us out of trying things that may be uncomfortable to do, but we might be successful.
But the voice says, yeah, but it might be a failure, too.
So we stop ourselves in that situation.
In fact, a friend of of mine, Lisa Veer that I worked with at MGM, um, she's been following my career for years and she negotiated some deals with me.
And she said, what, what do you attribute, what's the difference about you personally?
There's, there's differences in styles.
There's differences in, uh, legal communication and crisis communication and business negotiation.
She said, well, what's unique about you, Mike?
And I, and I thought about it for a second.
I have this ability to completely shut off the voice in my head.
And there are some people that don't have the voice in their head actually there's research on this but to to turn it off and hyper focus on where i am in that moment with that person and just take everything in the the the auditory the visual the temperature of the room the the tone the pace and just hyper focus for a moment while that voice is off and figure out what's the next move or what's what's the next two or three three moves while I'm just taking it all in.
There's so much to explore here.
What's fascinating about this is even if people had the ability to turn this off, I feel like a lot of them would be afraid to turn it off because they feel like they need to think multiple steps ahead.
And it's not to say that we're not thinking strategically like a chess player, thinking multiple steps ahead.
I think that they don't have the same trust in their negotiation skills to allow themselves to to be present, truly present in the moment with the person?
That's the word, to be hyper -present for that moment and then go back and do that multiple steps ahead.
But I think a lot of people try to get multiple steps ahead and they forget about being present in the moment.
Yes, this is elite level stuff.
And I wanna dig deeper into this distinction because I think for a lot of people, they might not have considered this not just from a psychological level but from a chronological and temporal level too because they hear, okay, think multiple steps ahead.
I need to be prepared.
I need to go through my prep.
I need to think about where we're going and try to steer the conversation in this type of way and they're more in their heads than in the moment.
And now how can you get people to feel a little bit more comfortable being completely present because that can feel really vulnerable especially when they're used to communicating in a way where they're thinking about their comeback while they're listening to the person speak i i don't have a good answer for that and you hear this all the time and lots of linkedin advice um about you know so many people they they listen to respond instead of listen to understand yeah um so so everybody's talking about doing it i don't have a technique to do it other than once i recognized that i was doing it and and it
was a part of the successes that I was having, I began to do it more and to be conscious of it.
Now I'm a classic over talker and forgive me.
What I tell people is this, when I meet him for the first time, and I didn't do that because we were doing some tech stuff is, is if a person turns the light bulb on in my brain, if I feel the connection and I'm interested, I will talk over you.
And it's because you've, you've excited me.
And if I'm not talking over you, that might mean and I'm just bored.
We haven't made a connection.
Oh, that's fascinating.
That's fascinating.
Okay. So let's break this down because I like this point too, because this touches personality.
This touches on just a lot of the basic advice that kind of goes out there, but about maybe not interrupting, but not understanding fully why interruptions happen.
We often think about it just through the lens of disrespect, but it's so much deeper than that.
but let's go back to the presence let's bookmark that point because what what I'm finding fascinating about this is I I was hoping you had an answer because I didn't have a good answer either when it comes to being more present and it just takes practice because it's almost like the when you think about the psychology of flow being in that flow state where it's almost like time slows down and you don't know what you're going to say or do next but it just kind of happens organically there has to be an expert level of understanding of what it is that you're doing to be able to do that, but it does
take true practice in order to let go.
And I found that in doing so, I've sometimes surprised myself as to what comes next.
It works in the moment, but if I would have tried to pre -think it, I wouldn't have come to that same conclusion.
I mean, I think you nailed it, the P word practice.
There's a guy that I've come to know, been on his podcast a couple of times, Kent Steffes, who was a former number one ranked volleyball player in the world, youngest to be number one in gold medal winner with Karch Karay.
And Kent talks actively about practicing to win versus practicing a skill and to be in the flow state.
So some people get to the championship and they look at all the people and that excitement that those nerves cause them to perform poorly because they're not ready for the moment.
And Kent talks about in practices, breaking it down, but playing a three -point game where every point is important.
And the winner of that game gets something.
You're going to buy me lunch. The winner gets free lunch out of it.
But to make everything about practicing being in the moment.
And then when the moment comes, you get to be there, not you have to be there.
I get to to be in the championship.
I get to win the gold medal.
I get the swing for the gold medal to have the mentality that it's something that you should embrace and enjoy versus something you have to go through.
So I think practice is a key to that too.
Negotiating all the time.
It's something, what I tell people is this, all day long, and all the studies say between five and eight times you get the opportunity to negotiate, but most people miss it because it's not a classic price price negotiation.
I just bought a car and that was a whole experience.
I'm going to post on LinkedIn about it.
But it's not about haggling over something.
So they don't think it's a negotiation.
When my wife and I go to a new restaurant, the restaurants we go to regularly already know this about me.
When we check in at the host stand, I will say, well, they'll give a binary choice, right?
They always say, do you want the high top or the booth?
Do you want indoors or outdoors, the bar or the restaurant?
It's always two. I always say the same thing.
I want want to sit with the best server.
And they go, huh? And I go, you know, the server, the server that trains all the other servers, no disrespect to the new people who start, everyone has to start somewhere.
But if I'm going to pay full price for a meal, and my wife has made it very clear, I'm not allowed to negotiate over the price of food.
I want the best experience possible.
Now here's where every host hostess misses the opportunity to negotiate.
What they should say is, hey, can you wait five minutes?
They just got sat. And by the way, when you have a great experience, will you leave us a Google review?
That helps them grow their business.
I get what I want and need, which is a great experience.
They get what they want and need, which is more business.
You know, both sides can take away a win on a completely separate deal point, but they don't ask because they're not thinking about trying.
They're not thinking about practicing, whereas I am.
I'm always looking for that opportunity to get something special, to say to somebody, hey, that's a good deal, but I'm looking for a great deal.
What else you got? And see what they say.
They might say, sir, that's the best deal possible.
Got it. Now it's take it or leave it.
Or they might say, well, if you can come back Tuesday, I can get you an extra 10 % off.
Ah, if I can wait till Tuesday, now we can put some components in place and solve this puzzle of negotiating but most people don't practice because they're not thinking about it they're so scared of it they shy away from it yeah so it's there's a saying you don't i don't have to get ready because i stay ready right and so it sounds like for you you you're always in this mode sharpening the sword practicing the skill so when the tough conversation comes up it feels normal to you you see it and you embrace it okay so i disagree with that word tough because I don't see, okay.
So when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to a crisis negotiator.
It's in their title, crisis hostage negotiator.
Everything is a crisis.
So therefore everything is trouble.
So I break out my hammer and I hammer the, because that's what you do in a crisis situation.
I see it as an opportunity.
I get to negotiate.
I'll tell you about a failure that I had.
It was almost a year ago now, because I just reached out to the person and said, Hey, it's been a year.
Are we going to do another, another session?
So we don't do any advertising.
Um, somebody takes our class, they leave, they change companies, they get promoted, they call us and we have a 95 % close rate because they already know the product.
It's, it's just about picking dates.
So this guy calls and he says, Hey, we're going to do a big session this fall, multi sessions.
And, um, we want to write a spec, need help with that.
And, uh, you'll you'll be on the RFP, but you know, I'm pulling for you, buddy.
So I said, fantastic.
We'll help write the spec.
So we write the spec.
It's a government contract.
So we, we, we write the spec.
We get the RFP request. It's very arduous because it's government work and a lot of paperwork to fill out.
We do it, walk through the process.
Then we've been down selected.
So, so now we're going to be down selected into this final two because we have competition because they're the buyer and, and buyers have to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt, right?
They can't tell me I have the order.
So now I've been turned over to a buyer on this and she sends me an email on Wednesday and she says, you have until Monday close of business to submit your best and final.
We will then make the decision.
I said, fantastic. And on my sheet of paper, there's five things that come up to negotiate, to teach negotiations.
And I have them and I do them all the time.
So I wrote back to her and I said, Hey, here's five things that we can do.
We can do better if you can do better and I'll let you pick a la carte, but it's your choice.
But here's five things that could make the deal better for you and it would make the deal better for us as well.
She sends me an email back.
What part about Monday close of business did you understand?
I said, no, no, I got it.
I'm trying to be respectful of your time.
Here's five things.
My phone rings from the area code where they are.
What the hell is this?
Because it's government work, right?
So some stuff has to be tracked and monitored.
So I get the phone call and she says, Mike, Monday, close of business.
What's so hard to understand?
And I said, no, no, one more time.
I'm trying to be respectful.
I know my business.
I know the things that I can do, can't do, will do, won't do.
And I put them all together and and you've got them now, we're good.
And she says, you take till Monday, close the business.
And I said, thank you, I will.
Have a good weekend.
Monday, close of business, I send an email confirming what I told her the week before.
The following Wednesday comes.
We win the business.
Here's your purchase order.
Okay. So I get on the phone call.
So I answered, and she says, can I tell you something?
And I said, yeah, I'm all ears.
Tell me. She said, I was so nervous negotiating with you.
I must've made a mistake.
What mistake did I make?
And I said, no, no, you handled it perfectly.
You were talking about my competition and fear, uncertainty and doubt.
And you were telling me.
And she said, yeah, but you were so fast. I thought I made a mistake and you pounced on me.
And I went, oh, so my mistake was I was trying to to be efficient for her, but I went so fast, she thought as a negotiator, I was trying to win, which means she was losing, and that she made a mistake.
So I didn't consider that in my negotiation plan.
I was just motoring along, trying to be efficient in the thing.
I don't know that I could have guessed that she needed time, but it was interesting when she told me that her self -awareness and and willingness to be transparent and tell me um that she was afraid in that situation and i'm like as a negotiator i don't want the other side afraid i i want them to be happy with the deal now i have a fiduciary responsibility that my clients are happier of course with the deal and we don't want a bad deal you know what one thing i tell people is that getting to yes you want to get to know fast if it's going to be a no find out early politely, professionally.
I love you. Would love to work more with you.
This isn't going to work out.
We'll be here if you change your mind, but let's move on because this isn't going to work out.
Right. But there's some people, especially salespeople, no disrespect to the salespeople that listen to your call.
They think they can win every deal.
And what they wind up doing is they win the deal, go back to their team and they go, yeah, we won.
And then finance goes, wait a minute.
There's no margin in this.
And project management goes, well, we can't, we can't deliver to this and the engineer goes well this isn't even the spec that we can do and the salesperson goes but i won they like me and everybody goes yeah but this is a loser you know to find out it's a loser early guess is what i'm saying yes there's so much to explore here right because we have the deal -making bias sometimes you fall in love with the idea of the deal and you just keep on pushing we have ego too because it's not just about getting the best deal or putting your business in a good position to succeed.
It's about me proving to you and the world that I can get it done even when it looks like I can't.
And so we have to have that self -awareness.
And then also going back to the example that you gave with the RFP, as I was listening to your story, it sounded everything that you did was very respectful, but it's one of those things where you cannot anticipate what's going on in the minds of everybody all the time.
We can make hypotheticals.
can take educated guess, create reasonable hypotheses, but that doesn't mean that we're always going to be right.
They're going to be surprises.
And there's a, there's a saying that I teach. Yeah.
Communications is not what I say.
It's what you hear, whether it's the tone or the speed or the mode, it's the way the other side perceives it that has the, the actual value.
you that's powerful and you know this this ties back to me to what you talked about earlier being willing to be flexible and adjust because a lot of times let's let's give the example of your co -worker um your colleague back in the day where you said hey let's don't talk to me until i've had my colleague my coffee there are a lot of people walking this earth mike who would hear that and take offense to it personal offense right i'm trying to be nice why are they acting this way right?
Something like that.
But you're saying, hey, listen, it's not, I personally did not do anything wrong.
What the other person is experiencing and hearing from me is not what I intended.
And therefore I will adjust. There is a humility in your ability to adjust that I don't think is seen in other people.
You know, there's a saying out there that you shouldn't talk about politics or religion.
And I'm 50, I'm 56 now.
I've heard that all my life.
I think society has has lost the ability to talk about things like politics and religion in a civilized way because we've been told not to talk about it for so long.
So when I'm online and I'm a keyboard warrior and somebody just called me, I gave advice on why you might get laid off.
That Zuckerberg was laying off people at Facebook and this one person was like, but I always got good performance reviews.
Okay, well, you and the other eight people on your team also, Also, maybe the manager was a softy.
Maybe he gave everybody great performance reviews.
Wow. And you were the eighth, seven people got better reviews.
Or maybe there's a strategic change at Facebook.
They don't need your skill set at that time.
So I gave those two reasons why.
And somebody came back and they said, you're just a corporate bootleicker.
And instead of getting into it, I just said, thank you for revealing your character.
and moved on because what they revealed is they were a name caller.
Their incorrect assumption is not my reality.
I get to choose my reality.
Now, maybe I'm a bootlooker sometimes.
I don't know, but I don't have to let emotions get involved just because they got emotionally involved in the situation.
Yes. But it's hard these days.
We're hypersensitive on online, the keyboard warriors, and every headline on the news is meant to get you emotionally invested in that story, right, left, center.
It's all about playing people's emotions.
And it's really hard to get past the emotional reaction and get to the intellectual reaction.
Let's talk more about that, Mike, because I agree.
The society is shifting in a way where we cannot not handle these difficult conversations.
We're seeing more conversations as difficult than need to be labeled that way.
And I think when it comes to tribalism, we're seeing a very scary direction where it's not just that I have my tribe and you have your tribe.
It's also that the act of listening respectfully is seen as an affront to my own people.
So it's like, I can't even even respectfully engage with somebody outside of my tribe, because then the people within my tribe will think that I'm on the other team.
Right. If you are not automatically opposed to the other side, then you might as well be on that team anyway.
Right. We can't listen to each other.
Yeah. Right. It's an interesting thing.
And I'm recognizing too, it leaks, it seeps into the business world as well.
One of my friends, I think is Bob Bardone.
He has a concept called conflict resilience which I think is really brilliant it's just the the willingness to be able to sit within a conflict without it having too much of an emotional toll on you and when I think about just on a societal level we are becoming less and less resilient in the face of opposing views and for me that's something that's very scary I don't know where things go in from this and and more importantly I don't know how we pulled this back we're seeing it a lot online we're seeing it a lot more um popularized on in the media and then people young people are looking at this and saying
this is how we engage with each other i it's it's a very scary thing so first i want to give a shout out to the to the younger generation because i think they get a bad rap and i was teaching a class for one of our clients and it was their new hire class and i was so impressed with how smart and attentive and they showed up on time and they did what I told them to do, and I called my handler after the class, and I said, hey, I think these next generation, they get a bad rap, because you got some really sharp kids in this class, and they said, no, Mike, you need to understand, we're giving you
the high pot class, the high potentials, they're pre -screened before you get to see them, there's a whole lot of kids in that next generation, so I was going through some stuff with my son and daughter, and they'd be like, you're blocked, they would tell the person, you're blocked, and then three days later, they'd be communicating with them again, so they weren't blocked, But I even saw there's a guy at one of the restaurants I hang out with and he's dating one of the bartenders and he blocked her.
A 54 -year -old guy blocked and told her, you're blocked.
So it may not be a generational thing.
Maybe the young generation is leading the older generations to different forms of conflict.
I won't call it resolution, but dealing with conflict or when there's conflict, what are the tools and techniques you can do?
I guess you're taking control when you say, I am blocking you and you are being direct about it.
You're not passive aggressively, not getting back to them.
You are saying, I am blocking you.
So maybe there's some maturity in that that needs to be explored.
I don't know. That's fair.
That's a cultural thing too.
Yeah, I think it's definitely a cultural thing too.
to do they I would say explicitly telling somebody you're you're blocked might seem cold but it is certainly more respectful and Humane than just ghosting somebody ghosting somebody yeah well but see so so shifting back to like business negotiations um I tell people I love negotiating with people from the Netherlands from Germany from that region of the world and I don't like to stereotype but there's some cultural things we need to respect when i'm dealing with somebody from that area they tend to be very direct and they will say this is non -negotiable i am non -negotiable i'm not negotiating
it must be this got it now i can work with that to be that direct now my wife is british my daughter is in london i've probably done 30 sessions in the uk love the people love the food love everything about it but it's frustrating for me because the Brits stereotypically are trying to be so polite that they won't tell you, no, it has to be this date or no, that doesn't work for us the way that a German would.
So I find that I waste a lot of time when I'm negotiating with somebody from the UK because they're trying to be so polite.
They don't want to tell me, no, that doesn't work.
And I'm like, I'm a big boy.
I can take it. But their culture doesn't let them give it.
it. So you almost have to pull it out.
I've said, did I get us fired when they just wouldn't respond?
And then when you use something like that powerful, am I fired?
Just tell me. And then they'll come back and say, no, I was just checking on dates and it turns out that it won't work for us.
But you have to pull them out of the shell because culturally they're trying to be polite versus...
And I said, I used the word direct.
I was in a session in Amsterdam.
And one one of the people from the session at the break said, thank you.
Most people say we're rude.
We're just trying to be direct.
So even, even the word used to describe the act can be rude and negative, or I see it as a positive direct.
Yeah. Yeah. This, okay.
This, this gets, gets us into perception, the power of perception, right?
Because there is a difference between what these two words mean, rude versus direct.
Rude is an accusation, like a character assassination to a certain extent.
And I'm wondering, when it comes to the conflicts that we've had, and I think about, especially for you, given your business experience, how much of the conflict that we experience is just a matter of perception and difference of perspective versus actual substantive difference?
preference? Going back to that ego thing, everybody's got to find the way to look good, to save face, to be the winner.
Can't let the other side be too happy because that means that you're the loser, even though you do want to make them happy, but you don't want to make them too happy.
Happy enough to come back and do another deal with you.
That goes to the head junk that gets in our way.
It's that self -talk sometimes.
Self -talk is a weird thing.
I read a lot about positive self -talk and about the plant.
If you put a plant out and you talk nice to it, the plant will flourish.
And if you speak mean to the plant, the plant will die.
I'm, I am unique in that I respond to negative self -talk when I make a mistake in my head.
And I, this is way over, I'm dating myself here.
I'm Bobby Knight throwing chairs.
When I make a mistake, I'm so frustrated at myself, but I don't, I won't let it happen a second time.
And when I I make the same mistake twice, then that's a really bad day for me.
Right. Whereas other people need the positive self -talk.
And I, I don't know what the numbers is, but it's probably 90 % of the population respond to positive self -talk.
And then there's some people who respond to negative self -talk when I, when I coach volleyball.
But when I see the, yeah, let's go, let's go.
Rah, rah, rah. I go, I go, I don't need that.
I don't need a coach saying rah, rah in my head.
I'm like like next point, this is what we're going to do.
But that's my perception of the situation and how I've perceived how I perform better.
So I don't know if it's a choice that I've made or if it's a, if it's a real, you know, voice in my head response, but I do think that everybody's got to have that way of getting out of their own way, figuring out what's going to work best for them and then and then seeking it out yeah right that's that's a very interesting one mike because i know and i tell whitney all the time i'm like i'm not mad i'm just intense i'm just really really focused on on the goal here um and see so you you you've got this big smile and you are so positive i i can't see you getting i wouldn't i wouldn't describe
you as mad or intense but But when I relax, I've got this scowl on my face.
So what I have for myself, um, sign that says smile.
Wow. Because I can be in a good mood, but if I'm relaxed, people perceive me to be in a bad mood.
so i have to be aware of myself and how people perceive me in that situation see that's so this is this is this is very interesting um because i because typically when i'm when i'm engaging i'm pretty gregarious um but then once i once i like lock in and i'm working it's it is that intense look and i i think that's very helpful because it's important to recognize that your internal experience can be experienced very differently from people who are outside yeah right that's a good way of saying it yeah yeah and it's it's almost a bit of marketing to a certain extent so i have to market what's inside
of me so other people don't misread it i've i've seen um i've worked with some folks who have they would call it rbf arresting that's a male version yes i have exactly and it's they're like i'm not mad i'm not upset and so we have to kind of work on like some video work some camera work mirror work to just show them hey this is the your internal experience isn't being perceived the exact same way so if you want to communicate your body language the way that you are your your affect it has to be part of your communication strategy and i don't think a lot of people miss that yeah well and it's like
um my kids um if i whip around real quick i will say things like hey is is there gas in the car?
And my daughter has said, stop yelling at me.
And I'm like, no, no, dad's not yelling.
You, all I asked was a question.
Is there gas in the car?
You will know when I'm yelling at you.
But her perception is I was being difficult or I was accusing her of not putting gas in the car.
That's her head junk that gets in there.
I can only imagine though, you know, going to, going to your specialty, being, being in law and being in front of a jury where you've got someone's life or a large part of somebody's life on the line and if that that 12th juror if five of the 12 jurors if if they don't perceive you as really believing what you're saying then they might think well this guy doesn't even believe his own bs right yes and so mike this is this is a great opportunity to talk about authenticity because people throw it out there as if it is a concept that's very easy to understand.
And it's not because we have the idea of authenticity, right?
And different people have different definitions, but then we also have efficacy because we're trying to drive towards a specific goal.
And sometimes the authentic version of yourself might be really pissed off at the moment, but then you have to drive toward a goal that kind of puts your ego to the side, suspends your own maybe emotional agenda to put put the needs of the client or the business agenda forward. And so how do you, in your experience, how do you balance the feeling of authentic, being true to yourself, being honest with also making sure that you're meeting the business objectives, the strategic communication objectives of the conversation?
Yeah. I think it goes to having a strong ethical foundation foundation, and then being flexible in the points where you can be flexible.
When I went to MGM Resorts, I was asked to help negotiate a deal when I first got there.
I was there for all of 10 days.
And it was an IT deal.
And they said, okay, you're from procurement now.
You're going to help us negotiate this deal.
I said, fantastic. Tell me about it.
And they said, well, it's going to be at the Palms. Now, the Palms is a competing property, not an MGM property.
property. And I said, uh huh.
And they said it starts at midnight.
And I said, hmm. And they said, and it's in the Playboy suite.
And I said, we're not going.
What is happening? He goes, but it's the palms. It's the Playboy suite.
This is going to be awesome.
I said, if this was on the front page, the Wall Street Journal, I would not be proud that Mike was negotiating a deal at a competitor property in the middle of the night.
No, it just reeks of unethical behavior.
So So I had to tell my team, you can go, you can be the good cop, but you're not negotiating the deal.
Make sure everybody's aware of that.
Set the expectation and we'll negotiate at one of our properties in one of our conference rooms in an appropriate setting during business hours.
The appearance of impropriety is impropriety because perception is everything, right?
but talk to me about this.
Cause, cause this comes up when, when people recuse themselves legally, when a judge refuses themselves.
And again, we won't get political here, but it comes up.
And I found that people go, Oh, well, they recuse themselves.
They must be guilty.
And I'm like, no, no, no, no. Recusing yourself is about the perception that you might be influenced in.
Someone could perceive that.
So, so I had come from IAC and Ticketmaster was one of the companies that we owned.
Ticketmaster was a finalist with Greenspun Media to sell tickets for MGM.
There was two, and we were going to negotiate with both.
I'm the head of IT procurement.
And they said, you're negotiating this deal.
And I said, no, I'm not.
And they said, why not?
And I said, because I came from a company that owned Ticketmaster.
Greenspun Media, who was very close with MGM because they're local Vegas, they roll with our CEO. If they lose, they will say, say Mike influenced the deal.
So I have to recuse myself for the benefit of whatever is the best thing for the company to do.
And they said, yeah, but we trust you.
And I said, it has nothing to do with your trust. It has everything to do with the perception of a potential loser.
Because if Ticketmaster wins, they're not going to care.
If they lose, they might be like, well, Mike must hate us because of the last company he worked at.
So even that situation, Ticketmaster could have a beef with me being involved.
Yeah. So that's the way I handle it.
How would you handle it from a legal perspective?
Did I do the right thing?
Absolutely. Because it's two things.
I think it's 50 -50 down the line because, yeah, we want to recuse ourselves if there is the potential that your judgment might be askew as a result of a relationship or history or something like that.
So there's the judgment and decision -making factor that we have to consider.
Twitter. Every bias is real.
And sometimes subconsciously you could drive yourself in a specific decision because of the past, right?
So we have to recognize that.
But to me, that's only half of it.
We want to be able to have faith in our own judgment and we want other people to have faith in our own judgment.
That's half. The other half is we want to have faith in the system itself.
And I think that if you are a person who might have that appearance of being biased in any type of way you pull it out not only for your own sake but for the sake of the system the integrity of the whole system that you're you're within at the time so yeah i think i think that was the right move well and you mentioned that bias word so i was commenting on a linkedin post about um diversity of thought and i said when i do a negotiation plan i i always want one second set of eyes at least on the plan bad news early is good news i want to find it from my team but But what I want, I don't want somebody
who's got an engineering background like I do, who spent a lot of time in supply chain like I have. Because groupthink, tribalism, that word you used, we will think too much alike.
What I really want is for a person who has the background of the other negotiator, so I know how they think before I go into that negotiation.
if I can find that person, where they went to university, what they studied, what countries they've lived in, anything that I can pick up on.
In fact, there's a famous negotiator who said they busted nine myths of negotiation.
And one of their myths that they busted was you should not research the other side.
And I said, what? Yeah, you're mine.
So I looked up, they had a very good reason.
He said, it's a hymn, because people are liars.
On social media, they lie about themselves, which I agree with.
Now, let's follow the logic.
When it's three o 'clock in the morning, they get a phone call to save somebody's life.
They've got 20 things they need to do.
Going and reading somebody's Facebook feed and getting a bunch of lies is probably not a high priority.
Plus this person probably had a, they might've had a thousand hours, but at least a hundred hours in profiling so they can show up on the scene in, in five minutes, they can profile that person.
Yeah. Got it. That's, that's their bias because of their experience.
But here's what I know.
There's stuff that people don't lie about, can't lie about it's illegal, or at least you'll get fired if you lie about it in LinkedIn.
So I'm always in people's LinkedIn and what I tell people is don't stalk anybody.
That's rude and disrespectful.
But if LinkedIn is a billboard that everybody on LinkedIn spent between five minutes and five hours putting that information out there, making it look right, making their title right, making what they did right, they invested their time and effort.
If I don't look them up, if I'm going to meet with somebody and I don't look them up, I think I'm being rude.
dude, they put the effort in, shouldn't I read it?
That's like if I sent out an agenda before a meeting with you, Kwame.
Here, Kwame, here's the agenda.
Then we get to the meeting and I go, so what'd you think about point three?
And you go, I didn't read the agenda.
I'd be like, dude, I put some effort into this.
Okay, we'll go through it, but come on.
So I think we should research each other before we go into meetings, and then we can test What I tell people is that old saying about don't make assumptions.
That's wrong. We should make assumptions, but we should test them.
Hey, I read in your profile you spent some time in London.
How did you like it?
Because it can be awesome and it can be dreadful, depending on time of year, what you're doing, where you are, but to get their perception of their experience there.
And then we can move off from there.
yeah we have to create these rebuttable assumptions and we have to be able to trust our judgment enough to be able to say okay yes sometimes people say bs sometimes it's legit and we have to suss that out and i think consistency finding the consistency is the key and also when when searching people's social media agreed you have to be respectful you don't want to cross what i i i call the creepy line there's there's a line where it gets creepy or criminal like you you use your judgment there.
But I'm on TikTok now, which means sell your stock because it's over.
But yeah, my daughter's on TikTok, so I go.
But I send her business stuff, and she stopped responding to my TikTok things that I sent her because she's like, oh, come on.
I'm like, what are you posting?
What the hell is it anyway?
See, I am recently on TikTok, so it's a whole new world.
And for me, when it comes to the social media stuff, I love to see how people people want to be perceived?
What is it that you want people to know about you or think about you?
That's a really interesting...
Hey, if you've seen my profile, it says not a crisis negotiator.
I've had three people in the past year say, why are you so adamant saying that you're not a crisis negotiator?
I said, because I don't want a phone call at 3 a .m. If you're having a problem, I know the tools and techniques.
I read, but I'm not an expert in that.
So I just want people to know when when they go, Oh, you're a negotiator.
Help me with my wife, my husband, my no, nope, no. I, I, I'm not the guy.
We're going to find you the right crisis negotiator for your situation, but just stop.
Now, if you want to B2B stuff, I'm your guy.
I'll do, I'll give you my best thoughts on it.
But yeah, you know, it's that bad news early is good news.
I want people to know that I am, here's the thing.
You've probably seen them on social media.
There are people who try to to be everything to everyone.
Right. And, and, and nobody is, but that doesn't stop them from trying.
And I want people to know I'm, I'm more transparent than most people.
No one's a hundred percent transparent, but I'm, I'm trying.
It's like, what's that line from pulp fiction.
I'm trying Ringo. I'm trying real hard. And I think that gives you more legitimacy too, because you're saying that this is my thing.
This is what I know.
This is my experience.
And you can trust me on that.
And also, I know for me, crisis negotiation, that's a lifestyle choice.
I don't want to be that person waking up in the middle of the night.
Can you imagine that?
God. And I've taken the one, MIT has one that's a chat bot.
And you've got 60 seconds or the hostage dies.
And I lose every time.
I have not gotten to the end.
Now, I've had people claim to have gotten to the end.
but they won't tell you how they got to the end and i'm like i don't know if you got to the end or you're just saying you got the end but that's that's a hard job i don't want that responsibility you know i'm i get emotional about stuff i'll choke up if i if i see somebody in pain if i see a bird get hit by a car i'm i got a little tear in my eye last thing i want is to have to focus on like saving a human life holy cow that sounds unpleasant for everyone everyone involved all.
This is great. Well, well, Mike, before you go, I want to ask, when you think about your career, you've checked a lot of boxes when it comes to B2B negotiations and training all over the world.
Just out of curiosity, if there's anything that you haven't done that you want to do, what is it?
I almost got to go to the South Pole to check the seventh continent, but it was a pay -to -play thing that was a cruise ship of speakers and and their their stick is you all speak to each other so you can say you're a professional speaker and you take the boat down and you get off at the tip there and you're all there and you go oh it's cold and then you get back in the boat and you go off to the side so i'm like i if i go i want to go to like a weather station or somebody down there that's got some extra you know government funding to spend and it's use it or lose it and they actually bring me
down um i'd like to do that um you know, I really just, I like helping people, and one of the things I get frustrated about is on LinkedIn and other social media platforms that I've tried.
When you give people advice that you know with certainty, meaning like, okay, here's the reviews for my last, every time we do a session, we have anonymous reviews at the end of every session, right?
And so we got 24 of them here, and this person at the bottom chose to write in about their conference.
Excellent. Built my my confidence.
Thank you. Didn't have to say that.
When I can help somebody like that, I really, I feel good that I've helped another human being, um, accomplish something or, or, or feel better about themself.
And then when I see, so I posted something on LinkedIn that was complete garbage.
I found it on Facebook.
It was, it was just, it was just noise.
And I said, I wonder what would would happen if I put on LinkedIn and I got 954 interactions.
When I post the stuff from our class, our content, if I get three likes, that's a lot.
So I get frustrated that the stuff that I know has value based on anonymous reviews when they're in class, when I post it on LinkedIn, it doesn't seem to go anywhere versus when I posted some stuff that is not really going to to help anybody, it tends to take off.
So I always find that interesting.
If I could figure that out, if I could figure out the magic of what makes people react, I'd be happier.
I will have learned something there.
I know our producer, Simone, is laughing because I was just telling the team, three or four people that I respect immensely in just the last week have been telling me how frustrated that they are with LinkedIn and getting any movement on it.
And now you say this.
I was thinking to myself, do I need to start posting bad advice?
People don't like good advice anymore.
Again, lifelong learner.
I try to read stuff and learn from other people.
So what it said was, here's what you do if you want something to go viral.
You post the question question on Reddit, create a fake account, the first response needs to be the wrong advice, and then the Redditors, I think that's what they call themselves, will pile on the person who gave bad advice.
They won't just give you the right advice right out of the gate.
It has to be after someone's given bad advice.
So maybe that's a whole social construct trip to the psychologist couch for all of society why can't we just give somebody good advice why do we have to wait for bad advice before we come in back over the top uh the the thought was it has to do with correcting people you you have a you have a superiority when you get to correct someone who was wrong yeah um so i don't know i that's so interesting so interesting i tell you if if we could figure that out oh yeah a little bottle of it yeah it'd be amazing it'd be amazing but i came i come from south america and i that's why i feel identified with you
because in south america we're very direct if we want to say something we just say it and then i came to canada so things are very different here and they're the one uncle to the north right they they're very kind they're very smart people very nice but yeah conflict is not something they embrace yeah exactly and i am very honest you know so when i started working with kwame i said sorry if i don't say sorry sorry if i am not polite enough but i am like this and it's my second language so it's more difficult so when i came here it was like oh my god i can't say anything because it's very it's
almost almost dangerous.
I'm walking on eggshells every day.
So what can I do? Because I think that over time I will learn more words and I will make things smoother.
But for now, I'm struggling.
So how can I be myself and at the same time don't be rude in this society?
So I'm going to give you advice that will work for me, because that's the best I can do.
And everybody's not like me.
I like that you said that.
If you were working with somebody new, you could say, hey, listen, there might be some things culturally that it might annoy you.
It might be perceived as rude.
In my culture, we're very direct.
We're very emotional.
And we just tell it like it is and we don't always say we're sorry.
So if I ever irritate you, you have my permission to let me know.
Not permission. Say this.
I encourage you to let Let me know so that I can learn about your culture.
Wow. And then just, I'll try it.
I'll try to immerse myself in your culture.
I'm trying to immerse.
That's the way you learn a language, right?
Is you get in and you have to every day.
Again, I was, I'm in Malaga and everybody's speaking English.
I want to say dos cerveza, por favor.
And they're like two pints.
And I'm like, okay, give me the two pints.
So, but you got to immerse.
So, so I think if you're somebody like me, I would appreciate you saying, hey, listen, I'm trying here.
here. It's probably going to irritate you sometimes, but just let me know so that I can fix it so I can be more in your culture.
I think that'd be a great thing.
I hope that helped.
If it doesn't, you've made the effort to try.
Now, they may not be receptive, but at least you've gone out of your way to say, I want to learn your culture, so I might make some mistakes.
Mm -hmm. Wow. Thank you.
That's great. Mike, I want to zoom in on something here because you said first permission, then you edited and said encourage.
I'll tell you, I started talking because you lit up a light bulb in my head.
I wasn't trying to be rude or disrespectful, but you got me going, but almost like a brainstorming session.
In a brainstorming session, you're not supposed to censor yourself.
You're supposed to throw it out there and then you edit later.
I threw a wrong word out there and then self -edit it after if that makes sense oh no i love it i love the edit but i want to highlight for the audience why that word choice matters so much i think you're it shows that you're trying to be or at least i was trying to be sensitive to a culture that is um less less comfortable being direct.
Yes. See, I'm glad you explained it, because I thought about it through the lens of power dynamics, because I was saying, okay, the person who has more authority gives permission.
But I love the way that you're approaching it better, because you can have permission to do something and still not do it.
But when you say, I encourage you to, it's like, No, I actually desire that you say this to me.
It seems more collaborative.
So I endorse your word choice.
I like it. I try to be collaborative.
Everybody's got an ego, and I try to just have a good time and chill, and I want people to get along, and I'm a pacifist until it's time to not be a pacifist. But I was out the other night, and there was this person who was being really, really, really annoying to a lot of people at the bar.
and my wife said to me she said don't look at him and I said oh no I'm I'm gonna look at him and I'm gonna let him know that that's not gonna be tolerated right the the rbf yeah um there's a time for power dynamics to come out but I want that to be like single digit percent yes and the rest of the time I want to be collaborative and I'm looking out for you um you know nobody's perfect but if we can uh you know check ourselves and then and then let it out at the right time the right moment uh when when like a tool on a carpenter's wall i will use this power dynamic tool not all the time but in in the right
moment use it and the rest of the time i'm gonna use the other tools and get better at those agreed so good so oh okay well can i you you have five more minutes because I want to yeah yeah no I blocked off the rest of the day we're all good okay so let's get let's get into this too because and Simone you stay here because I like seeing your face so when it comes to this um when power dynamics earlier on you you mentioned hey I don't want the other side to feel bad or feel scared I think a lot of times especially when people are new to negotiation they are surprised when they see negotiation experts
talk like this because because I'm sure you've gotten to this in trainings as well.
I've gotten people who say, well, what about when I want them to be afraid?
What if I yell at them to get a specific outcome?
And the response that I have is I don't want to have to rely on that, number one.
And number two, I don't know how they will respond with precision.
So it's entirely possible that they might submit.
So even if I get that moment of submission and I close the deal because of that, they're going going to be looking to get back at me at some point.
Most likely now going to be repeat business.
And then also I might yell and then they respond more forcefully.
Now I increase the resistance that I have. And so let's just break down the emotional state we want the other side to be in and then the power dynamics, because I think people often want to lean too heavily into these needlessly aggressive approaches.
So I would agree with that.
And I see, here's the problem with the perception of negotiations that I see.
In the movies, on television, we are fed a narrative of power dynamics in politics.
One side wins, one side loses.
Or in the movies, it's a trick.
It's a gotcha moment.
And one side wins and one side loses.
So that's the most people's perception most of the time is that that's going to happen.
And so we can't let that happen or we want to make that happen one you know whether you're trying to win or try to avoid losing so I think um we have to get past that that is the way most conduct negotiations should be conducted um we should try to look out for each other and I don't hear something I'm not saying I'm not saying negotiations are always a group hug right there there is some tension in a negotiation, but, but it should be mostly on the collaborative side.
And mostly we're going to see each other again, the project team is going to start on this.
So we can't, we can't be like in a negative emotional space.
When the project starts tomorrow, we have to be, you know, in a spot where both of us can come together.
You're giving me your money and I'm giving you my value, my product, my service, but, but there's an exchange there.
So there's been, there've been two times in my career where I got yelled at or one, one I got yelled at and one I yelled.
Um, one time I was, I was calling on Ford. I was in sales for a company called Kenmar and, uh, Varga brakes out of Brazil, um, produced the brakes for the Mustang.
Now Mustang was coming out with a Shelby Cobra edition.
They were going to beef up the engine.
So when you beef up the engine, you got to beef up the brakes, right?
You got to see, you got to have, you're going to go fast. You got to stop fast. So I think, I think our brake caliber at the time, it costs something like $18 .75 per caliber, less than $20.
And when we repriced this new beefier caliper, it was like $19 .90, a dollar more, something like that.
And Bill Lang, the head buyer at Ford, calls me up and he is lighting me up.
I've got the phone away from my ear.
How dare you? You're trying to gouge us.
This is completely unacceptable.
And I said, Bill, where do I need to be?
And he yelled at me.
I still remember this.
He said, I don't negotiate over pennies.
Bam, hangs up the phone.
And I'm like, damn, I must be really off here.
I'm missing something.
We lose the business to a company called Brembo.
Now Brembo makes racing brakes, high quality.
I'm a competitor. And I'm like, that's a good deal.
If you can get Brembo for less than us, I'm doing that all day long.
A year later, Bill leaves Ford and he comes to work at Kenmar. So I said, hey, Bill, Bill, welcome to the team.
You know, if there's anything I can tell you where the coffee pot is, you know, by the way, that, that deal that I, I made you mad on.
Well, why were you so mad?
If you got Brembo for better price than us, that's a win.
And he said, Oh, I love to play golf.
Bill played more than a hundred rounds of golf a year.
Had Varga won the business, it was an engineering nearing change and he could have kept on his his life but if another supplier won they had to do what we call a pre -production approval process a PPAP because Brimble won he had to cancel a golf vacation he was going to Scotland that he had set up six months in advance he was mad that his personal life was impacted because I wasn't competitive enough enough.
Even though Ford got a huge win.
So sometimes, so this is what I tell salespeople.
If a buyer is yelling at you and you jump, I'm yelling and you do it.
I'm yelling, you do it.
The buyer will have learned that no matter what's going on in their life, they got in a fight with their spouse, they got their car got dinged, whatever, and they're mad, they will take it out on you.
And what I tell people is you don't deserve that.
So when you're faced faced with somebody on the other side of the table that's yelling, that's in a bad mood.
If you don't really deserve it, you should say, hey, listen, clearly there's something going on in your sheet of paper.
I'm really sorry. We all have bad days.
Why don't we reschedule?
I'll come back when it's a better time for you.
And what you're indirectly telling them is, I'm not going to tolerate you yelling at me.
It's not going to get you anything out of this.
I will make time to come back.
So, so, you know, I think we have to understand the dynamics of the other side sheet of paper and why they might be yelling and the dynamics involved with teaching people how to treat us.
Because if you get yelled at and you do something, they're going to yell at you again and again and again, and that's not fun.
So fast forward, another MGM story.
We, uh, we figured out that there was a level of player that we couldn't send our planes for, but we could rent a regional jet that would handle 40 people.
And that way you could avoid going to the TSA line.
So it went to, like, it was like Baker's.
There was three cities in Southern California.
We did a little milk run.
And, man, this operator kept screwing up.
And when you have people who you've pulled out of commercial airlines and you put them on a special jet, they feel special.
But if you screw up the timing, and one time somebody said, glad to see you and your wife back.
And it wasn't the wife that was there on the previous flight.
Because you got a different manifest. fest. It's a whole different level of security anyway.
So they kept screwing up.
So my guy, Andrew that ran the program was getting yelled at by all the casino hosts.
And I said, that's it.
And I sent a very sternly worded email.
And I said, we're going to meet Saturday morning at seven o 'clock in my office.
And we're going to figure out this scheduling thing.
Send that's it. Everybody shows up.
I say, thank you for me here at seven o 'clock in the morning.
I'm leaving you're going to figure this out close the door walk out so that's that's my version of yelling at a situation now i i think i had good reason to yell it wasn't yelling because they had to cancel a golf trip but but they came out with a project plan and it was very clear that um that mike who tries to be nice and tries to be collaborative had the patience was done and it was you're gonna get yelled at now so don't do this so again it goes back to there's a time and place to use that tool.
And then there's a reason why that tool may be in play by the other side.
And we need to figure these things out as negotiators.
Yes. So, I mean, I barely can add anything to this, Mike.
You're so right. Because first of all, we can recognize, hey, the other person's emotional experience often is not about us.
But then we take that and make it about us and then make bad decisions as a result of it right and then the thing is again like a good great negotiator we have to have different tools and we i was in jamaica less than 24 hours ago just got back and um there was we they like a little spice that's great a little bit of spice is good um and i remember we we caught this tuna and so we got to we brought it back to the resort and they'll actually prepare it for you so we got to have the the tuna there they made it with jerk and sliced up peppers and everything like that.
It was great. The perfect amount of heat, right?
When you have the perfect amount of heat, the dish tastes good.
But then I remember I moved one of the habanero peppers off of the fish with my finger.
And then a few minutes later, my eye started to itch and I reached out and I touched my eye.
So in that example, we could can recognize too much spice used at the wrong time in the wrong place can be very damaging, right?
So with us as negotiators, we cannot just be one note.
We can't just be violently spicy all the time because then it doesn't work.
We have to be able to recognize the time and the place.
Hey, sometimes we need a little bit more spice to get this done.
But it's a condiment.
It's not the main dish.
And if we use it too much, then we lose our efficacy.
Yeah. Whether you're talking about tools and a carpenter you're talking about chefs and the spices it's absolutely a recipe that that we all need to be able to prepare multiple meals yes yes i love this mike this is so great before you go let the listeners know again about your company how they can connect and work with you too yeah we try to keep it really simple we're negotiation training dot com that's all we do we uh we're so passionate we bought the domain years ago go.
And we focus in B2B.
80 % of it is sales and project managers.
20 % of it is in procurement.
There's some finance folks that get thrown in there, some engineers that get thrown in there into the mix.
And we do it for companies all over the world.
We'd love to earn some more business that's out there.
And if not, if we can just help some people do better in their personal lives, professional lives, love to help people.
Amazing. Mike, thanks again for joining us.
really appreciate it call me thanks for and simone thank you and i appreciate that uh i mispronounced your work your name when we started off so um so thank you for tolerating that thank you this is so good man this is great what'd you
