Sometimes, life can seem hard and tough to navigate, but what may seem like the smallest tasks such as getting out of bed or even brushing your teeth should be celebrated as a win.
And State Farm is here to help you celebrate all your wins.
The State Farm Personal Price Plan helps you create an affordable price just for you.
Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan.
Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state.
Coverage options are selected by the customer.
Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
Starting the journey to feeling great every day means adding some mindfulness to your daily routine.
Like taking a breather with quick meditation, nurturing your mind with positive affirmations and looking after your mental wellness.
Now let's translate that holistic approach to oral care.
Colgate Total Plack Pro Release helps prevent oral health problems like gingivitis and cavities.
Before they start, it lifts away plaque for two times less gum-harming plaque versus regular fluoride toothpaste with twice daily brushing for six months.
With Colgate Total Plack Pro Release, you'll be well on your way to good oral health and a healthy lifestyle.
Be dentist ready and get Colgate Total Plack Pro Release at shop.colgate.com forward slash total.
If you do one nice thing for yourself today, you'll feel pretty good.
But imagine how you'd feel if you did 19,000 nice things for yourself.
19,000 makes a big difference.
That's why now supplements performs 19,000 tests every month to ensure you get the highest quality supplements at the best price possible.
Like their vegan, non-GMO clinically validated, calm and focused with Zembran and GABA supplement.
Now supplements, 19,000 reasons to feel good spending less.
Learn more at nowfoods.com forward slash purpose.
There's a lot of talk about mindfulness these days, which is fantastic.
I mean we all want to be more present and self-aware, more patient, less judgmental.
We discuss all these themes on the podcast, but it's hard to actually be mindful in your day-to-day life.
That's where calm comes in.
I've been working with calm for a few years now with the goal of making mindfulness fun and easy.
Calm has all sorts of content to help you build positive habits, shift your self-talk, reframe your negative thoughts and generally feel better in your daily life.
So many incredible options from the most knowledgeable experts in the world along with renowned meditation teachers.
You can also check out my 7-minute daily series to help you live more mindfully each and every day.
Right now, listeners of On Purpose get 40% off a subscription to Calm Premium at calm.com forward slash j.
That's c-a-l-m dot com forward slash j-a-y.
For 40% off, calm your mind, change your life.
We're thrilled to announce that we've reached 3 million subscribers.
We're incredibly grateful for each and every one of you.
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on any of our new releases.
We're dedicated to bringing you the content you love.
Our team carefully analyzes what resonates most with you to bring on board the best experts and storytellers to help you improve your life.
Some of your favorite topics are sleep science, weight loss, physical fitness, navigating breakups, habit building and understanding toxic relationships.
Upcoming episodes include one of the biggest names in health and science, world-renowned relationship therapist and your favorite manifestation expert is back to drop new findings.
Hit subscribe to not miss any of these episodes.
If you think of someone who would love this episode, send it to them to make their day.
The number one health and wellness podcast.
Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty.
The one, the only. Jay Shetty.
Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose.
I'm so glad that you're back because I love sitting down with incredible minds, thinkers, thought leaders who are helping us develop better skills, better habits and better mindsets.
Today's guest is a former lead FBI negotiator and dynamic speaker who debunks the biggest myths of negotiation.
Chris Voss engages all groups with captivating stories, insights and useful tips for business and everyday life.
Chris has lectured on negotiation at business schools and across the country and has been seen on ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox News.
He's also been featured in Forbes, Time, Fast Company and Inc.
And Chris's book, Never Split the Difference has sold over two million copies and it's all about negotiating as if your life depends on it.
If you're in a space in your life where you need to get better at dealing with conflict, negotiate better and make sure that you win in one of those situations, this episode is for you.
Please welcome to On Purpose, Chris Voss.
Chris, it's great to have you in studio.
Jay, thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Oh, well, thank you so much for being here.
As I said, I find your work fascinating because I don't think it's every day that you get to learn about negotiation from someone who's done it in the most high stakes, highly critical, difficult environments.
And I wanted to ask you, why did you become a lead negotiator?
It's almost a cliche, but it's a little bit of following your bliss and then every now and then I think the universe jumps in and makes you change your directions.
And originally I was on a SWAT team.
I was scheduled to be on a SWAT team with Kansas City, Missouri Police Department.
I was on a SWAT team when I joined the FBI and I re-injured my name and I love crisis response because I think a comfortable inaction is one of the veins of human existence.
We got to make decisions.
And so when I was on a SWAT team, crisis response, you got to make a decision.
You know, they can't let's sit back and wait and see what happens.
That's not really the way you approach a crisis.
So when I was on the SWAT team, you know, we had hostage negotiators.
They went along with the SWAT guys.
I didn't really know what they did.
You know, we'd be out there in the cold and the rain.
They'd be inside someplace warm.
But I wanted to stay in crisis response.
So I thought, yeah, you know, I could do that.
How hard could it be? It's my son and I, Brandon, have always joked that the VOSS family model is how hard could it be, which is similar to a Rednecks famous last words, which are, hey, watch this.
It's always going to be more complicated than you expect.
But I got into it and I loved it.
It was more satisfying than SWAT ever was.
And SWAT was great. But hostage negotiation, when I stumbled over it, the universe sort of pushed me in that direction.
It was a push that I needed and I've enjoyed it ever since.
And you never felt scared.
There wasn't the fear. There wasn't the difficulty in your mind before you got involved that this could be something that would be extremely difficult, potentially painful, challenging.
No, because first of all, I was rejected for the negotiation team.
I was in fact eminently unqualified.
But I went to the head of the program in New York, a woman running the team and she said, you know, yeah, you're not qualified.
Go away. But I said, all right, so there's got to be something I could do.
What is it? She said, go volunteer on a suicide hotline.
I'm like, all right. So I went to the suicide hotline to learn, not to help people helping people with secondary.
It's good secondary. But I went there to learn and I was fascinated by it.
And so then I'm teachable.
I'm coachable. I learned their process and I saw how quickly empathy, emotional intelligence, accelerated outcomes, positive outcomes.
And so I wasn't scared as a hostage negotiator because I'd already learned in a process that I believed in.
But I knew it was a highly successful process.
So when I started hostage negotiation, I just leaned into a process that I had was familiar with and had been proven to me, it worked.
Walk us through what a conversation on a suicide hotline sounds like because I imagine that being highly stressful.
You're dealing with someone who's in a high state of panic.
There's so much uncertainty.
Walk us through what that kind of a conversation looks like and what you learned.
Well, the get used to it very closely supervised.
So I think I was a little unsteady at the beginning.
So for whatever reason, I naturally lapsed into what I refer to as the late night FM DJ voice.
And the first call, I just said, hello, this is Helpline.
Now that has a tremendously calming effect on people.
And afterwards, the supervisors said, your voice was great.
That was great. And I remember thinking like, wow, I don't even know what I did.
I'm gonna have to go back to it.
So you want to start with a calming soothing voice.
And then no matter what they say, you want to put a label in a hostage negotiation, we called it emotion labeling in that black swan method, we just call it labeling.
Put a label on emotion that you're hearing.
Doesn't matter what it is, just label it.
Now, since they're in crisis, the emotion is probably going to be negative.
And in point of fact, we're all driven by negative thoughts.
We're 75% negative. Our survival mechanism that we wake up with every day to survive the caveman had to be negative.
The optimistic caveman said, you know, yeah, you know, Chris walked in here yesterday and he never came out, but I'm optimistic.
I'm going to go in today too.
And I that guy got eaten too.
But the negative guys shied away and we've inherited that wiring.
And I remember one night in particular, this guy's really frantic sounded sounded super frantic says, you know, I just I need to put it.
I need your help putting a lid on this day.
I got to put a lid on this day.
So I just said, you sound frantic.
And immediately he came down.
There's a neuroscience reason for that now that, you know, we never knew then just simply calling out a negative emotion is the most effective way to deactivate it.
So he came down. And then through the course of the conversation, I just used three labels.
He was he was a guy who was paranoid.
He's getting a lot of support from his family.
He said, you know, I'm going on a car trip tomorrow.
I just, you know, I just, you know, and I know my family's helping me.
And I just, you know, I just I need my family's help.
But I'm worried about it tonight and I can't get to sleep.
So I hit him with a label that somebody had once hit me with in a conversation.
I was telling my friend how close I felt to my family, but I didn't say it explicitly.
It was strongly implied.
And my friend said to me, it sounds like your family's really close.
And I remember how good it felt in that moment.
And I've never forgotten that.
So this guy's describing to me how much support he was getting from his family, how they were always there for him.
It sounded like they're close.
So I said that exact line.
I said, it sounds like your family's really close.
And I felt the strength come back in his voice immediately.
So then he went on to tell me about how he'd been battling paranoia and how hard he was working.
And he struck me as determined.
So I simply said, you sound determined.
And he said, yeah, just like that.
Yeah, I am determined. I'm going to go on a car trip tomorrow and be fine.
Thanks for everything you did.
I hung up the phone. It's not every conversation, but that's the way they're supposed to go.
You call out what you're hearing and it really helps people sort of self level because you're a great sounding board and you're picking out the negatives and deactivating them and the positives and reinforcing them just by observing them.
The reason why I find that so fascinating is because I was thinking so many of us deal with our friends in that sort of an environment.
You make it a phone call from a friend who's like panicking.
They've just ended a relationship.
They've gone through a rejection, a failure, whatever it may be.
And our gut instinct is to try and solve that problem and to fix it for them and fill in the blanks when actually what you're saying is the ability to just notice what they're experiencing, what they're feeling and being able to call it out and label it as you rightly said.
That's actually giving them the tools to make sense of it for themselves.
Yeah, exactly. And it's restoring their tools and then it's also they feel very self empowered.
The problem with giving advice is the person receiving it doesn't feel empowered.
They might not be able to sort through it emotionally.
So then when you're not there, they're lost again.
They didn't feel like they got to the answer on their own.
A great sounding board simply helps as a guide, helps them get to the answer on their own.
And then inside they say, wait, I got here on my own once.
I could do it again. Whereas if you give me the advice, when you're not around, I might be lost.
Yeah, there's a famous quote that says something like, good leaders make you believe in them.
Great leaders make you believe in you.
And this idea that if someone's really leading the conversation, well, the person's walking away with self belief and a confidence in what they have.
Before we dive into the actual tools and breaking down of a negotiation, I find that most people try to avoid a negotiation because they see it as conflict.
They see it as an argument.
They see it as a potential debate.
And most of us are trying to avoid conflict at all costs.
And so even if it's like your plumber and they quote you a price, we're scared of negotiating because we're scared of that turning into an altercation.
Or if someone's trying to sell us something at a store, we're scared to have that conversation about a discount or whatever it may be.
Walk us through that fear.
What have you noticed about?
Where does that fear come from that we all carry of, I don't want to get into a conflict.
I don't want to negotiate.
I'll just go with what you want because it's easier to be a people pleaser.
And so from my team, we believe, and we've got enough anecdotal data that the world splits up evenly into three types.
Fight, flight, make friends.
A sort of analyst, accommodator.
And we've seen this show up globally.
It's disconnected from gender, ethnicity, religion.
So two out of three don't like conflict, the analyst and the accommodator.
Analysts thinks of life very much like chess, lots of moves, lots of percentages.
An analyst will want to think everything through all the possibilities and then put percentages on it.
And conflict is one option and it tends to be highly destructive, highly inefficient.
And so the analyst doesn't particularly like conflict because it seems to be very inefficient and ineffective and there are far more better ways to communicate.
So they're avoiding conflict for that reason.
The relationship oriented person, the accommodator, conflict is just ugly.
It makes them feel bad. It sort of pollutes their existence.
And they see that as a much higher cost.
It plays a very high value on relationships, optimism, being very hope based.
So they're going to avoid it for those reasons.
They want to feel connected to you and conflict doesn't make them feel connected to you.
Now the third type, the assertive, they love it.
They see it as combat, they love it, they get into it.
They recover from the conflict very quickly.
I happen to be a natural born assertive.
Donald Trump is a poster child for assertives.
He's just one of the three types and love combat.
But then don't really pay attention to long term costs of being openly aggressive because the adrenaline hit in the moment, a victory tends to overshadow how the losses pile up.
So we want to, you know, two out of three, we want to avoid that.
So the real challenge though is we got to collaborate.
But negotiation has this feeling to it that it's the loudest, most aggressive voice in the room.
The guy who kicks the chair across the room to get his point screams, slams their hands on a table, storms out.
You know, this thing that actually happens at Tennessee to pollute the collaborative environment and we don't really see the great negotiators as great negotiators.
You know, in my view, one of the greatest negotiators got to be Oprah Winfrey.
Everybody sees her as conflict oriented.
That her list of great negotiations, her life's achievements based on collaboration and being very positive.
And then if you were to try to consider the context of her life, having gained tremendous success in an environment filled with maybe some of the most volatile people on earth, Hollywood celebrities.
What Hollywood celebrity is mad at Oprah?
You know, what rock fight has she gotten into?
You know, who's thrown shade?
Like it is not there. Simultaneously, her financial success and the different phenomenal interviews she's gotten, they were no holds Bard's interview.
You know, one of my favorites is Lance Armstrong interview.
I happen to be acquainted with Lance.
I like him a lot. But there was no punches pulled there.
That was a negotiation going into that.
So spectacular negotiations really invisible.
Well, we don't know that because it's invisible.
We don't think of Oprah as a great negotiator.
Warren Buffett, we don't think of him as a great negotiator.
And they have to be. So that's, we just not aware of what great negotiation really looks like because it looks like great collaboration, great navigation.
As soon as you can change the definition from win, lose to great collaboration.
Now people are interested.
You know, how to find negotiations.
