From LinkedIn News, I'm Jesse Hempel, host of the Hello Monday Podcast.
Start your week with the Hello Monday Podcast.
We'll navigate career pivots.
We'll learn where happiness fits in.
Listen to Hello Monday with me, Jesse Hempel on the LinkedIn Podcast Network, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's chief product officer.
In my new podcast, Building One, I interview some of the best product builders out there.
People at the intersection of dreaming and building and learning.
Together, you and I will learn from their experiences.
If you're just as curious as I am, follow Building One wherever you listen and check out the conversation on LinkedIn.
Well, that's known as failure to answer the question and it's a red flag when it comes to deception.
This does not mean that Tom Brady is a cheater, but he should have answered.
I had nothing to do with deflating the footballs if he didn't.
Instead, he says, I would never cheat.
So there's like a rationalization going on here.
I mentioned my work doing kind of intelligence gathering in the corporate world.
Well, let me see how I can put this right now.
I've been sort of an auxiliary member of a legal team dealing with an extortion case.
And I called up one of the people that might be involved and that person was frightened.
And he was saying things about, I swear I didn't do this, I swear I didn't do that.
Invoking oaths is another red flag when it comes to detecting deception.
If you're innocent, you just say, no, I had nothing to do with that.
Once it gets like that mafia thing, I swear on the eyes of my children or something, why so dramatic?
People who are telling the truth tend to just be very candid.
Now this guy could legitimately just be scared and he could be exaggerating because he's so frightened, but it's a red flag when people use that kind of hyperbolic language.
And there's a couple of other red flags in this area as well.
Hey, I'm Kwame Christian and you are about to step into the world of Negotiate Anything, the number one negotiation podcast in the world where we teach you how to make difficult conversations easier while getting more of what you want in the process.
Each episode is packed with practical tips and strategies from the experts.
We delve into negotiation, conflict resolution and leadership skills that are crucial in both business and in life.
Whether you're closing a deal, managing a team or navigating personal relationships, Negotiate Anything provides you with the tools you need to succeed.
Our conversations are real, relatable and most importantly rooted in practicality.
So if you're ready to transform your conversations and elevate your negotiation skills, join me on Negotiate Anything.
Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you love to listen.
Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation.
Jeremy, thanks for joining us today.
Great to be with you Kwame.
Yes, and it is exciting to have you.
So how would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure, happy to do that.
So right after college, I went overseas.
I like to joke around that I was hoping to be some form of Ernest Hemingway meets Kurt Cobain.
I went overseas with a backpack and a guitar, a lust for adventure, big dreams.
Kicked around Europe for a while before settling in Prague where I spent the following seven years as a freelance journalist.
Also helped build the media association project Syndicate.
Moved to China after that and spent two more years there.
So just under a decade abroad, came back to New York where I'm from and I've essentially worked in the field of corporate security, corporate intelligence, corporate espionage for the last 15 -ish years.
During COVID decided it was time to write a book called Sell Like a Spy based on not only the interactions and work that I've done directly with intelligence officers and all the reporting I've done on the space, but also the book is a synthesis of the learnings, the lessons if you will, from FBI counterintelligence
officers, military special forces, snipers, interrogators, generals, what have you.
So it's a synthesis of lessons from an elite level of government experience.
And these days I do that, I give talks, I give trainings and I also am an advisor to a corporate intelligence firm called The Interfor international.
Incredible. This is probably one of the most fun bios I've ever heard.
Lots of clues to turn.
So this is great, Jeremy.
And I love the idea of selling like a spy because a lot of the folks who are in this space when they're having negotiations, difficult conversations, it's in a more transactional type of world where we're having those conversations, there's dollars and cents attached to it and everything like that.
And now we recognize though there are a lot of skills from spies, people who are in espionage in that type of world and counterintelligence that could transfer over to the selling space.
And before we get into the skills, I want to make sure that the audience is sufficiently tantalized.
So when you think about the skills that are required to be good at sales, what is the spy story that encapsulates that the best for you?
Well, I mean, just kind of from a top level down, I kick off almost every talk I give saying that I think spies are the world's best sales people because the sale that they have to make, which is convincing someone to buy into treason is the hardest any of us could possibly make.
So the skills they leverage to do that are really like hard fought and effective skills and they're so relevant to everyday life.
Now you're looking for an example of a spy making a sale or some element of trade craft to tantalize people.
Oh, yeah. Okay, well, the funnest one that comes to mind, it's in the book too, is the notion of access agents.
And I just describe access agents as people who are kind of facilitators, who they may not be the person who you're trying to make that sale to, but they're the coach or the influencer in any organization that can potentially get you to that decision maker, right?
Because talking with salespeople, we all know cold outreach is important, but the warm introduction is the holy grail.
So I talk a lot with salespeople who wanna be strategic about getting to the right person who will influence the final decision on whatever they're trying to do to use an access agent.
And there's a great story in the book by a former very senior well -regarded case officer named John Cipher who recounted when he was a case officer in the, I think it was in the Soviet Union, understand these people are kind of vague a little bit about it, but he recruited an access agent, a very influential
person among social circles of diplomats at that time.
And that person would host parties and he would put all the coats in a cloak room that he kept locked, but he would quietly give the key to John or one of his guys and the spy would go in and go through the coats of the individuals there and copy keys with special technology, note things in their diaries,
see what else is in their pockets, maybe a note from a lover, that kind of thing and use that intelligence to collect information.
I always tell my audiences, the people I'm training, we're not looking for you to steal secrets that way.
Access agents can be a really effective way to connect with people.
So I thought that might be a good answer for you there.
Oh, that's brilliant.
That's good. That is good.
Cause we, like I mentioned before we got on the call, we've had a lot of CIA, FBI, counter intelligence agents and the stories.
Stories are just always the best part.
And I love it because again, it shows just the more you know the better you're going to be in these conversations.
At the end of the day, negotiation is an information game and the more information you have, the more high quality information that you have, the better you're going to be.
And now in this world of counter intelligence, we understand that sometimes people do not want to share that information.
Sometimes they might not be in their best interest to share that information.
Same happens in the business world.
So how can we go about navigating these conversations in a way where we can still get the information we need to be effective when the other person at first doesn't feel comfortable sharing?
Yeah, that's a great question.
And it leads to one of the most popular skills that I talk about in my talks and trainings, which is the skill of elicitation, which is I describe it as kind of a more subtle way to collect intelligence because whether you're a spy or a salesperson, when you meet somebody or if you're in a negotiation,
you want to learn all about that person and figure out details about them.
But if you come across too overtly in that way, you can kind of trigger the opposite response, cynicism, suspicion.
So in a negotiation, you're trying to figure out sensitive pieces of information.
So using the skill of elicitation to gather that information is a smart strategic move.
And there are a variety of triggers for elicitation.
So one of the first is people tend to respond to things in kind.
If I say, oh boy, the weather is just so hot today and I'm just really dying, you might respond and say, you know what, I'm from the South, this is nothing, I'm used to it.
I didn't ask any question there, but you responded in kind.
Another is the tendency to correct.
If I say, Kwame, your favorite color is red, right?
You'll go, no, my favorite color is not red, it's blue.
So anything I ask you about yourself or I assume about you, you will have a heavy tendency to correct it.
It would have been strange for you to just say, no, my favorite color is not red.
You would want to then finish that sentence and tell me that.
So strategically that can be a good way to do it.
There's a lot of other triggers of elicitation flattery.
When you flatter someone, they tend to become self -deprecating.
They might tell you more and in different more helpful ways, secrets of their success, for instance, rather than if you asked directly about it, gossiping, awkward silences, these are always that we can get people to reveal more than they would want to.
And so those are pretty effective ways to in a negotiation, think about how to get sensitive information in a different way than asking very directly.
I love this. Yeah, because there has to be a lot of nuance to this.
There's a sophisticated art of asking questions.
And whenever we have somebody on the podcast, we often hear, yes, ask questions, predominantly open -ended questions to get information.
So people who are well in schooled in negotiation and sales, they understand that.
But then the art that we're talking about with the elicitation method, I think this is really, really powerful.
And I think most people do not approach it in this type of way.
And when you think about what it would take for somebody to start to develop this skill of elicitation, where should they start?
Start easy with all the skills I write about in the book.
I say it at every talk at the beginning, these are skills for everyday life and you should practice these skills in your everyday life with friends and family in low stakes environments.
So if you mess up, you can just get made fun of by your buddy or your family member, right?
Especially when we talk about things like mirroring, where if you get that bad, it can look really bad.
So you wanna start using these things in your everyday life before you bring them to your career.
So you can kind of subtly scale them and get to know them.
And one other thing I can add also about elicitation, it just came to mind, where you ask the question in a conversation is really important too.
So sometimes you elicit on the fly and other times you have a premeditated attempt, which it occurs to me at a negotiation, you would probably have more of a premeditated approach.
And to give you an example from my life, I'm a corporate spy and I do a lot of what's called reputational due diligence.
So if someone wants to do business with Kwame and you wanna find out all these details about you, I might call up former coworkers, former people who served on boards with litigation foes, and I might have five or six questions, but the real question I wanna ask is right in the middle.
And that's because people tend to remember things at the beginning or end of a conversation and less in the middle.
So I call it the violin conversation because it's narrow at the end, bigger in the middle and that's where the sweet music gets played.
So that's, I think, an important tip for negotiating too.
This is so fascinating, Jeremy, because I think about, this is great because I think about primacy and recency effects a lot of times in the conversations.
I never really thought about the value of embedding your most strategically potent question to the point where they won't remember it.
Go deeper on that because I think that's really fascinating.
Yeah, I mean, one of the examples I give in my talks is I call it the surprise party.
So I'm like, I'm gonna throw you a surprise party, Kwame.
You got a big birthday coming up.
All your friends are trying to decide how to make this special for you.
We wanted your favorite food there, but we can't remember it.
So I call you up, I chat with you for a little while about how amazing it is that the New York Yankees are now in the World Series, which I'm really excited about.
Then I'm gonna ask you about, hey, this is the example I use.
Hey, there's a new Thai restaurant in my neighborhood.
It's getting great reviews.
Are you free any night next week?
I remember, Kwame, you saying that Thai is your favorite food, and then you say to me, no, I don't know what you're talking about.
Thai's not my favorite food, but pizza's actually my favorite food, but I'd be happy to go next week.
And then we do that and I get that information from you and we wind up talking a little bit more about, say, a favorite TV show we're both watching.
So the middle part of it is where the action happens.
And then, at the end, by then, you're not necessarily thinking about it as much.
And it's better because if I had said to you at the very end, hey, this Thai restaurant's great.
Isn't it your favorite food?
You might get off the phone with me going, what's he talking about?
I never said that. I would never say that.
And I don't want that, right?
Oh my goodness. This is so good.
So the next birthday party, the next surprise party I plan is going to be fire.
And now I have you to thank.
You say it's fire. Yes, exactly.
Oh, that's great. And what I love about this is the subtlety of this as well.
And what I'm recognizing is that delivery matters.
And of course, we want people to be as authentic as possible.
But we also recognize that whenever we're having these difficult conversations, there's a performative aspect to it, too.
How you deliver it matters.
So when we think about it in terms of acting notes and the method of delivery, what are some things people should keep in mind as they are going through this elicitation method?
You want to make these things your own, okay?
You know, you want to make sure that you're putting your personal touch on all of these skills.
That's another reason why I suggest doing them in your everyday life, using these skills, practicing them in your everyday life to get comfortable with them.
Again, back to mirroring.
If you're somebody who tends to speak with a lot of body language or an animated person, if you're meeting with somebody and negotiating with someone who is just very serene and very mellow, whatever the case may be, you want to adjust a little bit to the people that you're dealing with, but you don't
want to become an entirely different person.
It's performative, but you still want to be yourself because people value authenticity.
They don't expect perfection.
They expect you to be likable and authentic.
When they see phoniness, when they see you trying to, that's when you're going to have a big problem.
So these are subtle skills.
Use them yourself. But, you know, when you're talking about performative and it makes me think about another line from the book, which John McCarrie talks about spies as performers and entertainers.
And I think there's value in negotiation and just about any aspect in life in cultivating people and understanding that, that people want to be with somebody that can kind of add value to their life.
So you want to make sure that you still have that charming aspect of yourself and you don't lose that thing that makes you you and likable by trying to be somebody else entirely.
I agree. And this goes right back to what you said at the beginning, when somebody's trying to figure out how to utilize these skills.
You want to practice this in low stakes scenarios, so it becomes part of you.
And when you think about any skills, especially communication skills that we've developed, they take time.
They take a lot of time.
And I think about my life.
Some of the skills that I'm known for are the skills that I worked the hardest for.
They were not natural, but it can be done.
You can make it your new natural just by sheer repetition.
And it was something else that comes in to play when I'm thinking about the folks who are out there in the field as spies.
You have to not only put these skills into practice at a high level, you can't just be smooth with it.
You also need to be able to utilize these skills under massive amounts of stress and duress.
And when it comes to communicating confidently under duress, what advice do you have for the folks who are out there having these tough conversations?
Yeah, a lot of it is making sure you're in the moment.
And what you're talking about right now makes me think about what I talk about and write about on active listening and the evolutionary challenges related to that.
So for instance, you're talking to somebody and they seem quite jumpy, their eyes are moving around.
Part of that is because of our evolution.
And it's not just because they think the person they're talking to is boring, right?
Like when we think about active listening, I talk about archaic man, like cavemen surveying the savannah.
And the fact is, our evolution has created a dynamic where we comprehend four times faster than we speak.
That's because when primitive man was surveying the savannah and they started to talk, they needed to very quickly understand what the other person meant.
Very rapid, because they were looking for something they could kill and eat or something that would kill and eat them.
So in my book, I think I refer to, I think it's Mark Polymeropoulos talk.
He's a very gregarious, outgoing guy.
And he talks about the challenges of meeting with an agent in the Middle East in a dark alley and how he needs to put aside his gregariousness and really focus on that person and calm himself to be in the moment to make sure that person has their attention 100 % and they're getting everything they can from them.
So I also talk about how different forms of exercise can really help you to steady yourself.
I do yoga, specifically hot yoga.
And I think it really helps me to be in the moment and to calm myself at certain challenging moments.
So those are a couple things that come to mind.
I hope I didn't kind of digress too far.
Oh no, this is perfect.
Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I wanna ask you a question.
Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better, difficult conversations?
At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills.
Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands -on training for your team, we've got you covered.
Don't just negotiate, master the art with the American Negotiation Institute.
Click the link in the description to find out more.
Elevate, negotiate, and succeed.
Hey you, I'm Andrew Seaman.
Do you want a new job or do you wanna move forward in your career?
Well, you should listen to my weekly show called Get Hired with Andrew Seaman.
We talk about it all and it's waiting for you, yes you, wherever you get your podcasts.
From LinkedIn News, I'm Jessi Hempel, host of the Hello Monday podcast.
In my 20s, I knew what career success looked like.
In midlife, it's not that simple.
Work is changing, we're changing, and there's no guide book for how to make sense of it, so come figure it out with me on the Hello Monday podcast.
I've been a journalist for two decades, writing cover stories for Business Week, Fortune, and Wired, and now, every Monday, I bring you conversations with people who are thinking deeply about work and where it fits into our lives, like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on growth mindsets.
The learn it all does better than the know it all.
Or NYU professor Scott Galloway on choosing a career.
I think the worst advice you can give a kid is follow your passion.
Or MacArthur Genius winner Angela Duckworth on talent versus grit.
Your long -term effort and your long -term commitment are surprisingly important.
Each episode delivers pragmatic advice for right now.
Listen to Hello Monday with me, Jesse Hempel, on the LinkedIn Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is perfect because I want to address these things in being in the moment, focusing, and then the benefits of exercise.
This comes up quite frequently on the podcast, and maybe that might be my own bias too, but with the benefits of making sure that physically you're trying as much as possible to be in the best possible shape, I don't think people recognize just how much of a nexus there is between your performance at work
and your physical capabilities.
And I recognize that the more I started to exercise, the calmer I was at a baseline level.
It gave me a lot of confidence and it increased my mental acuity.
So when people ask, why do I work out so much?
I'm like, I cannot afford not to.
I see how much it helps.
So I'm really glad that you talked about that.
And being in the moment, I agree 100%.
And I think that's a term like being present, being in a moment, achieving flow.
I'm glad that it's reached more conscious awareness of people, but I've recognized that a lot of times it has been utilized to the point where people don't fully understand what that means.
And so let's go deeper into being in the moment and being fully present because I think that's something that people really, really struggle with today.
So let's say we have somebody who is going into a difficult conversation and they are nervous about it.
It's a massive conversation.
It's the biggest one of the year.
There's a lot riding on this and they are really struggling to stay focused on the conversation and not catastrophize in their mind.
What advice would you have for them in that particular scenario to live in the moment and focus?
Well, one of the things that spies are really good at, and I think people in the business world are not as good at is ascertaining the motivations of the other side.
So in the business world, we think, hey, I have a great product or service, I'm a charming person they should want to buy from me or the force of my personality in this negotiation will come through and my position is reasonable and I have something to offer.
The CIA doesn't work quite like that.
People get recruited on the fly, but for the most part it's a highly methodical process of figuring out who that person is, what their interests are, what their weaknesses might be, and what might motivate them to become an agent.
And I think I encourage people to bring that mindset into sales and into negotiations.
So I would encourage the person that you're thinking about there to do a ton of homework on their counterparty.
Understand where they went to college, what boards they serve on, did they spend 15 years at the job that they're at right now or have they changed jobs every three years on their LinkedIn photo?
Do they have like sunglasses on and a camouflage hat holding up a duck that they just shot or are they looking very serious in a suit and tie and not really smiling?
I think going into a negotiation and understanding what I call the atmosphere and intangibles about the atmosphere that we're in and the intangibles of the personality of the person can give you within that conversation a lot of confidence about relating to that person, what their risk tolerance might be,
how conservative they might be.
So just based on what I said, if I see someone has been at a job for 15 or 20 years and I see someone who's changed jobs every three to five years, the person who's changed jobs more is potentially more willing to take risks than the other person who might be more of a conservative person.
Now, I'm not wed to that assumption.
I will not double down on that to the detriment of everything else, but this is intelligence that I want to take in to inform my approach about how to connect with that person.
So if I'm that person who's feeling nervous about going into the conversation, I want to do as much homework as I can about that person and write it out, create a dossier on that person and start asking yourself questions about them and go deep.
And you'll feel a little bit more reassured feeling like you know that person going into it.
Yeah, I agree 100%.
And I think that the homework aspect is often overlooked.
If you talk to most people and you say, hey, how would you prepare while I do some homework?
I think the way that they think about homework is gonna be very different from the way that you think about homework as well.
Yeah, maybe. Because they might just go, hey, I checked out their LinkedIn and that's it.
It took me 37 seconds and I feel pretty secure.
Yeah, but what did you check out on the LinkedIn, right?
You asked these questions.
Yeah, so let's say if we're kind of trying to be as practical as possible, I've got a meeting coming up, we're gonna go through their LinkedIn about how much time are you allocating to this process of doing homework on the person versus doing strategic preparation for the conversation?
I don't think you need to do a ton of time -based research on that person.
I'd say give the LinkedIn profile a really solid review.
Like I said, take some notes, ask yourself some questions.
It's probably a 15 -minute process if you're being pretty fulsome about it.
If you wind up finding out all sorts of things, making connections like, hey, this person went to Big Ten College and I'm a big college basketball fan and wait, I go to their social media profile and they're at these games.
And I was at that game too.
And so if it starts, steamroll link, that's great.
Maybe it takes longer.
Go as deep as you can, essentially.
But somebody might have a really basic LinkedIn profile.
They might have really basic social media, not much about them online.
So get what you can.
Don't think you have to spend an hour or otherwise you're being negligent on it and just see what you can glean about that person and trust your instincts about who they might be, but be willing to be contradicted and understand that people are complex.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And just one point of clarification too, if they went to a Big Ten school, most likely we should talk to them about football, Jeremy.
We are football. Okay, that's right.
I'm a baseball fan but I'm not like college sports.
So thank you for that direction, Bob.
I'm an Ohio State guy and I go to the games.
I'm like, listen, we don't talk about basketball here.
Just talk about football.
I'm sorry about that.
I messed up. This is great.
I think there's a great opportunity for us to transition as well to the reality of deception.
This comes up all the time because people say, hey Kwame, I'm asking all these great questions.
What if they just lie straight to my face about all of this because the quality of the information matters.
So first, without even steering you in a particular direction, tell us about what you've learned about deception in the world of espionage and what you've learned about deception in the business world.
Yeah, absolutely. Great question and very relevant here.
One of the first things I would like to point out when given this question is that anybody, and I've seen this in the corporate world, people who come in and say, hey, my group, we're former CIA, we're former FBI, whatever.
I'm former Mossad, that kind of thing.
And we're gonna come in and make your team a human lie detector.
That's BS, okay. Nobody is a human lie detector.
Lie detectors are as reliable as you might think.
The human beings are so complex.
It's just so hard to tell when someone is lying with any true veracity.
What I talk to people about, what I train teams on is in detecting deception, in picking up red flags that become part of the mosaic of intelligence in any good negotiation, sale, relationship development, spy cultivation, understanding the complexities of people, but using the clues that they give
you to form an opinion on whether they're truthful, whether they're reliable, whether they're anxious about this, whether they're feeling confident, you know, body language is a part of it, all this.
But when it comes to detecting deception, I write about it in the book.
And there are some key things.
Failure to answer a question.
We're talking sports here, and I have a sports analogy for that in the book.
I'm a New York guy, so I love to stick it to the Boston fans, you know, New England fans.
So a while back, I'm sure you'll remember Kwame when Tom Brady and the Patriots had the deflate date scandal.
Yep, Tom Brady, you know, they were like, we wanted to know if he was involved, and a journalist asked him at a press conference, hey, Tom, were you involved in deflating the footballs to make him easier to catch and all that and handle?
And Tom replied, I would never cheat.
Well, that's known as failure to answer the question, and it's a red flag when it comes to deception.
This does not mean that Tom Brady's a cheater, but he should have answered.
I had nothing to do with deflating the footballs if he didn't.
Instead, he says I would never cheat.
So there's like a rationalization going on here.
I mentioned my work doing kind of intelligence gathering in the corporate world.
Well, let me see how I can put this right now.
I've been sort of an auxiliary member of a legal team dealing with an extortion case, and I called up one of the people that might be involved, and that person was frightened, and he was saying things about, I swear I didn't do this.
I swear I didn't do that.
Invoking oaths is another red flag when it comes to detecting deception.
If you're innocent, you just say, no, I had nothing to do with that.
Once it gets into like that mafia thing, I swear on the eyes of my children or something.
Why so dramatic? People who are telling the truth tend to just be very candid.
Now this guy could legitimately just be scared, and he could be exaggerating because he's so frightened, but it's a red flag when people use that kind of hyperbolic language, and there's a couple of other red flags in this area as well.
Jeremy, this is great because there's so many things that are floating out there in the media and social media about how you can tell deception, and usually those things are very wrong, right?
We have the eye contact thing, all of these different types of approaches.
But what I love is that yours is grounded in personal experience and experience from other people through this robust analysis you've done through the book, but also it's grounded in the reality that we can never know, we can just gather clues.
And so I'm really glad that you said, hey, this is how you know for sure that they are lying.
But it's like, no, this is how we can start to connect some potential dots.
And I think a lot of times sometimes you have people who are just completely unaware of the fact that people are deceiving them, and that's a problem.
And then I think there are other people who are way overconfident in their ability to detect deception, and that's also very problematic too.
So I like that this is grounded in reality.
Yeah, well, thanks for saying that.
There's some things I've seen in everyday life through my work, and then there are things that just researching the book have come up.
So the only thing I do know is the only person lying when they say, I'll make you a human lie detector is that person, because they're lying and saying.
No doubt. It's uncertainty I have.
No doubt. This is great, and I wanna wrap up with one last thing.
And you mentioned it in passing, but this is something that really has not been explored very much on this show, and I wanna give it a mention here.
You talk about instincts.
You talk about instincts, because we talk about skills.
We talk about strategies.
We like to have a little playbook and everything like that, but there is a characteristic that is assigned to all great people in whatever field it is, whether it is espionage or corporate success, and that is developing good instincts.
And you don't go to like instincts class and learn instincts that way.
So when you think about the instincts that are required to be effective in these tough conversations, what are those instincts and how can we start to cultivate them?
Yeah, I got two things here.
I hope I can remember both.
Two different directions.
One, if I forget is the book cover cliche.
So you can draw me back to that.
But the first is using who you are.
I mentioned I spent so much time overseas and living in China was fascinating, but it drove me nuts because I am a candid New Yorker.
I wear my heart on my sleeve and you know where you stand with me.
I'm kind of no BS in that way.
I value telling people the straight dope about how I feel and I value that so much from others.
In China, people wouldn't tell you no.
And I was just like, it would drive me crazy.
So I lean into candor as one of my instincts.
And I think it disarms people sometimes, especially in a business setting when they're expecting you to be somewhat strategic or just laying your cards on the table sometimes as something that I think is an instinct of mine.
So if you're from the Midwest, where you're located there, Kwame, if you have those kind of traits, which is maybe not as quite as candor, maybe not quite as hard charging as folks that like where I'm from in the Northeast or from, you want to lean into those things and you want to make them your own
and make sure they're a part of what you do.
Now, the other part of that, I mentioned the book cover cliche.
I like to say that the idea that you can't judge a book by its cover is nonsense.
You can judge a book by its cover.
And behavioral science backs that up.
We make very fast assessments of people that proved to be largely correct.
But getting back to the complexity, I usually refer to one of my favorite quotes by Walt Whitman, which is that, do I contradict myself very well?
Then I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes.
Again, these are part of the mosaic of the intelligence we're gathering.
But if I see somebody dressed in a certain way, you shouldn't just say, oh, I can't judge a book by its cover.
You should say the opposite.
You should say, do I think I will connect with that person?
What assumptions am I making about that person?
And how might I approach them?
And that's also true, I think, for a negotiation, how they're carrying themselves, what they look like, their body language, their tone of voice.
All of these are advertisements for how people want to be approached or should be approached.
So you should lean into them, but you should always keep that caveat in mind about the complexities of somebody and be prepared to be wrong and pivot.
This is brilliant. This is brilliant because I think about this a lot because in the world of just behavioral science, psychology, or just human interaction, we understand that biases can really inhibit our ability to connect and cause problems.
And then we often do not talk about the flip side where we recognize that the biases, just in general, speaking in large generalities, is gonna come from the same place as a lot of our instincts that are just hardwired into us for survival instincts, but then also just pattern recognition over many,
many years of experience.
And so sometimes what we do in our attempts to be good people often can make us worse animals when it comes to honoring our instincts in the moment.
So I'm really glad that you have that balance.
Say, hey, listen, those instincts, they're there for a reason.
Don't ignore them, pay attention to them, but also have that higher level thinking that allows you to treat them as assumptions, not true conclusions, and you can navigate with flexibility.
I think that's incredibly powerful.
And the part that really struck me is the fact that teachers, when we're reading a book by its cover, we have to make these reads, so I'm glad that we're encouraging people to make these reads because people present themselves in ways that help you to understand them in those two different ways.
So we're saying, hey, there are gonna be some signals that people give out that they cannot help but give out, even if they wanted to try, right?
So that is important information so I can understand how to work with or work through or communicate with this particular person.
And then there are gonna be other things that the person might put on themselves.
They might present in a way to tell you how they want to be treated.
How am I gonna interact with you?
So if somebody comes to a meeting with a baseball cap and a t -shirt, and I'm surprised at how much they're dressing down, I'm not going to introduce them myself as, hi, I'm Mr.
Christian. How might I address you good, sir?
That would be weird.
That's clearly not how he wants this engagement to go.
So I love that we're giving ourselves the ability and the right to just say, hey, listen, your instincts are there, lean into them, make adjustments, and be flexible.
Yeah, and I love how you put it, and I might have to bite it because you talked about how the things that make us better humans sometimes make us less not as good at them.
Yep, that's it. So I'll move you out of the way, we're eloquently.
I'll listen to the podcast, but you really hit it there.
I was poetic and I appreciate that.
Thank you, man. Well, you brought up Walt Whitman.
I had to step my game up, you know?
I appreciate it. There you go.
Game -recognized game.
This is great, man.
I appreciate you, you crushed this, and I know there are a lot of people who are out there who are saying to themselves, listen, I need more Jeremy in my life.
How can I learn from this man?
So for those of you who want to learn more, Jeremy, what's the best way for them to get in touch?
Well, grab the book, you know, it's available online at all the usual places, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all that stuff.
Well, go order it from your favorite local bookstore.
I always want to put that out there because I love small bookstores.
So the book's a great place to go.
My website is sullicaspi .net.
You find out more about me there, you can reach out to me there.
I'm pretty active on LinkedIn.
You can find me there and follow me there.
And I have started on Twitter with grave reservations, but I'm there, sullicaspi too.
So those are some ways people can reach out.
Amazing. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us.
Really appreciate it.
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
I enjoyed it. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Now, before you sign off, I have something to tell you that I've never told you before.
Just kidding. I've told you before about it.
You should listen to it again.
I want you to know about Negotiate Anything Premium.
Imagine all of the things that you love about our traditional feed, plus so much more.
I know you like our traditional feed because you're at the end of the episode.
And with Negotiate Anything Premium, you'll get more bonus content you've been asking for, more of the expert insights that you can't get anywhere else, and more exclusive behind the scenes access into every conversation.
Are you ready to get more of what you want out of your life, career, and every conversation?
With Negotiate Anything Premium, you'll have access to more high level, custom design content and insights, giving you the tools you need to negotiate higher salaries, better deals, and better relationships in your life and career.
Once I had a listener share that Negotiate Anything helps her to negotiate a $53 ,000 raise, could this be you?
What would that mean for your life?
I've seen firsthand the impact this model has had on my life and the lives of my corporate clients, and I am confident that it can do the same for you.
Are you ready to negotiate more of the best things in life?
Click the link in the show notes to learn more.
I'll catch you later.
I'm going to start a test.
I'm going to start a test.
I'm going to start a test.
I'm going to start a test.