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Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation.
Moshe, thanks for joining us today.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
It is my pleasure, my friends.
So how would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
So I teach negotiation at both at Boston University and companies all over the world and lots of different organizations for -profit, nonprofit and government organizations.
I'm a mediator, I've been a mediator for a long time, since 1995, and I've been teaching negotiation and then other fields like leadership and communication conflict resolution since 1996.
My background is actually a little unusual because I started off in physics and engineering.
My undergraduate was in physics and discovered that physics is really, really hard, moved over to electrical engineering, which didn't seem quite as hard as physics, because nothing is as hard as physics and did that for about 13 years and got a master's in it before going to business school and discovering negotiation mediation and falling in love with what I do now.
I love it. And listeners, this is our second attempt at a podcast because our first time we just hung out and chatted for like an hour and had to reschedule.
So we are making it happen for you listeners.
This is really exciting.
So let's start off with this.
because when we were chatting, just kind of pre -gaming thinking through this, one of the things that you told me you were interested in is not only just how to negotiate, but also how to get out of your own way as a negotiator.
So before we actually break down how to do that, tell us what you mean by getting out of our own way.
In teaching negotiation for all these couple of decades that I've been doing it, one of the things that I noticed that was we keep teaching people skills and strategies and they do them fine in class, And then they go out in the real world and something gets in the way, they get upset, they get shut down, they get excited, they get angry.
Something happens between the theory and the execution that interferes with their ability to be effective.
And I started thinking about what is that that's getting in their way of applying the skills and strategies that they brought to the table and came to the conclusion that it was them.
and more roundly it's us.
We are the ones who get in our own way.
Our emotions get in there.
Our fears get in there.
The stories we tell ourselves get in there.
Our concern about things like uncertainty and authority figures, all of those things can get in the way of us being effective, and what happens is it's not that we don't have the skills, it's that these other things suppress our ability to access those skills when we need them.
So we might prepare, we might have a great strategy, but if I'm going to go and negotiate with my boss for a raise, but I find that every time I approach my boss's office, I can't breathe.
It's going to be really hard for me to negotiate if I can't breathe." So then the question is, how can we manage those things that are getting in the way so we can then access the skills and strategies and preparation that we brought to the table?
I love this. You're spot on.
And I think it can feel disempowering for a lot of people when they can't articulate it with the clarity that you just did, because they say, hmmm, in the moment, I'm not doing what I need to do.
I need to study more.
I need to do more trainings.
Maybe I need to do more coaching and they focus on skills building, but they don't recognize that the skills are not the most acute issue in the moment.
There's something else that's holding them back.
Yeah. And I think that gets increasingly frustrating, right?
Because they take another class or they look at another video or they read another book and they feel better going in.
And then the same thing happens all over again.
And that does feel very disempowering and they're very discouraging and no one should have to suffer through that as people do.
I agree. So for the person who's listening and can relate to this experience, where should they start when it comes to trying to solve for this?
So I think there's two things that you want to think about.
One is managing moments and the other one is managing longer term effects.
So let's talk about moments because that's what I would start.
So in many negotiations, things go well until they don't or or you function optimally until you don't.
And what happens is something happens in a moment that throws you off.
The other person might ask you a question you don't know how to deal with, or they might say something that challenges you in a way that you don't know how to respond to.
Or somebody new walks into the room and that throws off your strategy.
So, I firmly believe that life happens in moments and that you need to manage moments in order to be able to respond to situations effectively.
And what mostly that means is recognizing that it's a moment and slowing it down.
So, if, for example, I walk into a store to buy something and I have every intention to try to bargain down the price, and as soon as the sales manager says, sorry, we don't negotiate our prices, I find myself speechless and I don't know what to do.
Well, then typically I'll do one of two things.
Either, I'll say, okay, all right then, and I agree to their price, or I walk out of the store.
But what I could do is just stay with that moment, slow down my heart rate, give myself a chance to breathe, and then think, okay, how do I re -engage this person and what do I do next?
But I can't do that in that moment.
I'm just overwhelmed and I don't know what to do.
So the idea is try to identify the triggers that make it difficult for you to negotiate, then try to identify that you've been triggered and then engage in some techniques that work for you to slow down.
I'm happy to talk more about all of those things because they're all very important.
Absolutely and I think this is a great opportunity for us to slow down and recognize this moment here too because I'm hoping that a lot of people are having this ah -ha type of moment when they're realizing this because in these negotiations and difficult conversations not all moments are created equally.
If we're establishing we're poor we're flowing everything's good they're asking questions that we know the answer to we're good, and then that one moment comes up.
And it reminds me of a bit of advice my dad gave me when he was teaching me how to drive.
He said, you're going to make more mistakes by going too fast than by going too slow.
Oh great advice. Yeah, a teenager definitely needed that one.
Right? So you just slow it down.
In some of our episodes in the past, we've done sparring sessions, which are just live unscripted negotiations where I try to be ridiculous and they deal with me as the guest does.
We don't edit those and I think the beauty is that you can see that expert negotiators when they're in the heat of the moment, in these tough conversations, they're not brilliant rhetoricians under pressure, nobody really is.
When they come to that really tough moment, they slow it down, they become more precise.
If they recognize their response is going in a direction that might take the conversation in a negative direction, they pause, restate it because they recognize, no, no, no, this is a moment that is of vital importance.
I don't want to make a mistake.
I'm going to slow it down and I'm going to make the right move because I know if I move too fast it's a higher likelihood that I'm going to make a mistake." One of my concerns sometimes with watching experts like that is that what they do works perfectly for them, given who they are and their personality and experience.
And yet someone else with a different personality and different experiences might think, Oh, I can't do that.
So, the important thing is to find your way of recognizing the moment and your way of slowing things down, and there's lots of different ways of slowing things down, right?
For some people, that would involve disengaging.
Find some excuse for a break.
You take what they gave you and you say, thank you for giving this to me.
Let me look at it and get back to you.
And then you give yourself whatever time you need so you can come back to the conversation in a better place.
For some people, it could involve things just not saying anything, just staying silent, right?
because if you're not saying anything at all, you're also not saying anything you're going to regret.
Well, my favorite technique actually involves acknowledging what the person said and then turning around and asking them questions.
So I put the floor back to them and while they're talking, I don't have to say anything of my own.
And again, that gives me time to calm down.
I also take notes when I negotiate and one of the reasons I take notes is because I can't write as fast as I talk.
Writing things down slows me down.
Right, there's so many different ways of doing it And I think if we try to emulate or imitate somebody else's way, it's not going to work for us, especially when we're under emotional stress.
So I think the important part is to find your way.
And there's lots of different ways.
And what I would suggest for people to do is look to other contexts, other areas in your life where you have been able to slow down and ask what worked for you there, and see if you can translate that into this context.
Because if you can do it in another context, chances are you can do it in this one, but you just have to make the shift to apply it over here, right?
Was if you're trying to do something that you saw somebody do on a video and it's something that you've never done before and doesn't really work with you and who you are, that's a much harder thing to pull off I think.
I agree. And essentially what we're doing is we're taking the principle and then making it personal.
We're finding an authentic way to implement the principle.
So I'm really glad that you paused the conversation there to shout that out because it leads to authentic negotiation.
Because if I'm trying to act like somebody else, acting is a discipline and of itself and I'm not an actor.
So we have to find a way that works for us and then be okay with that too.
I'm not an actor either.
I try to be a comedian, but for some of my family members, that doesn't fly either so they don't think I'm that funny.
But yeah, you've gotta be yourself, and that applies to all of these dimensions.
So for example, how do you know when you're emotionally overwhelmed?
Different people have different stress symptoms. For some people, their heart races.
For some people, they stop breathing.
For some people, their muscles tense.
other people feel it in their stomachs, some people feel it in their hands, their hands drop out with me, do they feel very hot?
So you need to know what shows up for you when you get stressed, and then you got to be alert to that during the negotiation.
So when it happens, then you can go into those behaviors that help you slow things down, right?
And it's going to be different for each person.
So a lot of success comes from self -awareness, right?
Because in my book, Collie Wobbles, I talk a lot about the intersection of negotiation and emotional intelligence, and the cornerstone of emotional intelligence is self -awareness.
So if you're aware of what you're doing, if you're aware of what you're feeling, and then you're aware of what techniques help you manage your emotions in real time, that gets you halfway to being able to negotiate effectively.
And then the other side of that is becoming more aware of what the other person's doing and what's going on in the situation.
But you can't do that if you're completely emotionally out of control for yourself.
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It makes a lot of sense.
And to that point, let's say people are listening to this podcast and they say, okay, great.
I'm going to acknowledge when I'm triggered, I'm going to become more self -aware and they can figure out when they're triggered.
One thing I've recognized is that there is an acknowledgement of a deviation in their emotional state, okay I recognize I'm feeling something right now.
But then there isn't a humble acceptance of that and what it means.
So for example, somebody might be in the midst of a conversation and they say I'm getting triggered but I'm a leader, I'm a mother, I'm a father, I'm a whatever it happens to be, I should be able to overcome my emotionality in this situation and push through.
So when you're coaching people, how do you get them to be okay with accepting the fact that emotionally in this moment, they have become triggered and now it's time to slow down instead of feeling like they should push through that emotional distress anyway.
So I think this gets to another really, really interesting topic, which is the stories we tell ourselves.
So in chapter six, I talk a lot about.
Narrative chapter six of Kaliwalla was called What's Your Story.
and it's all about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about the other party, and about the situation.
So if you're saying to yourself, Oh, I'm a leader, I should push through this, that is nothing more than a story you're telling yourself.
Now, as far as I'm concerned, you can have whatever story you want about yourself.
And if that story is serving your interests, keep it.
But if that story is preventing you from being effective in this negotiation, you need to make a decision whether you want to keep it anyway, or question it and perhaps substitute a different story.
I am a leader. I should push through situations.
I do in most circumstances, but right now it's better for me to slow down, right?
That's a perfectly good story too.
And the question is who owns the story.
You want to be the author, not the victim of your own story.
And if you are so wedded to a narrative about yourself, that is now no longer serving you, you've become the victim of your own story and your story exists entirely in your own mind, you should have the ability to change it.
Oh, my hand cannot keep up with the notes that I'm writing.
This is incredible, because this kind of speaks to the internal negotiation that has to happen.
Because a lot of times we are wedded to the story in such a profound way, that it almost feels as though if we get rid of the story or change the story, we're losing a core part of ourselves.
So How do we begin to let go of these stories that are not serving us in the moment?
The first thing is, once again, you need to become aware of the story.
When I coach people in negotiations, a lot of times, I'll just be like, stop, stop, stop, stop.
What are you telling yourself right now?
Wow. And it's amazing when you stop yourself and articulate it.
I don't see when I have to do that for myself.
It's harder for me to do that without actually writing down my story.
So I say, what am I telling myself right now?
And maybe I'm telling myself that, oh, I'm just a one -person consultant and I'm negotiating with a 30 ,000 -person company.
I don't have any power here.
They're going to dictate to me a contract and I just kind of agree to it.
I've just told myself all this stuff.
And I'll tell you, once I write it down, I start questioning, like, is that the story I want to go into the negotiation with in my mind?
Because if I go in with that story, I'm completely disempowered.
And so I think the first thing is to try to become more aware of your story.
As I said earlier, I'm not going to argue with your story.
If you want to keep your story and it's serving your purposes, go ahead and do it.
If it's not, then you have a choice.
Many of us, including me, walk around with unproductive stories, know it, and choose to keep them anyway.
But then you can't say you didn't choose to do it.
You did it on purpose.
If I have a story that says, I'm a nice guy.
I don't like to rock the boat.
I don't want to upset people.
I know that that prevents me from actually advocating for myself, but it's a story I really want to keep for myself, then I just have to accept that I'm not going to try to negotiate in situations where it would have benefited me to negotiate.
But now it's an affirmative choice I'm making.
What I don't think is healthy is to make those choices by default and not be aware that you're doing it.
Because once you're aware of it, it's actually harder to keep that story at that point.
It really is. So then you're more likely to say I am a nice guy, but nice guys deserve a higher salary too.
Exactly. Exactly. Oh, and that's a great example of just how empowering a subtle edit to the story can be.
We don't have to rewrite our own stories entirely.
I think a lot of times what we need to do is look out for false dichotomies within our stories, right?
I might have a story that if I try to advocate for myself, I'm being selfish.
And that's just a false dichotomy.
I mean, I can advocate for myself and be collaborative and caring about other people.
There's no contradiction there.
So I still want to be a person who is caring.
I don't want to be selfish, but I need to change the story subtly so I break that link between those two things that shouldn't be linked anyway.
If there's one thing I know about people, we love false dichotomy.
So much, yes. We love it.
And we see it a lot too when we think about the stories, not only we tell about ourselves, but also the stories we tell about other people.
So let's go deeper into that one because that's really interesting too.
Yeah. So we have stories about the other negotiator all the time.
We say, well, this person is someone who always says no. So there's no point in asking them.
I just talked to myself out of negotiating, or we say, oh, this person is never going to give me a straight answer.
So now I've primed myself to disbelieve them.
Now, we tell ourself stories about ourselves and about the other person but also about the situation.
You say, well, I'm buying this house, but it's a seller's market so I can't negotiate, and the truth is the market's working against you, but you can still try to negotiate.
That means you might not get this house, but maybe that's a good thing, maybe the next house is actually the better house.
So just think about what you're telling yourself.
It's not about yourself, just about yourself.
It's really about yourself, and the other party, and the situation.
But whatever it is, you tell yourself, very often will translate into behavior.
The stories we tell ourselves impact how we feel, what we do, and how we interact with other people.
And one of the major impacts of these stories is that they make us avoidant.
Because if I think, Oh, there's no point in talking to this person because of how they are, not going to engage.
And I'm not going to advocate for myself, because what's the point?
Whereas the truth is, I don't know what the point is.
Or if I don't ask for something because I think, Oh, this person's going to say no. I just guaranteed that by not asking it, but they haven't said anything.
It's me just saying stuff to myself.
Wow. And the voices on our head can be so loud sometimes.
We don't even realize it's a story.
We just assume that it's true.
And it makes me wonder when you think about this, because now I'm revisiting my own approach to negotiations, and particular the preparation stage, like this is one of the first things that I should be asking myself.
What is the story I'm telling about myself about the other person and about the situation?
Can you help us to really bring this to life by showing how we can utilize this mentality and changing our narratives before, during, and after the conversation?
Oh, absolutely. I think that's an awesome question.
So the first thing is, try to recognize and identify your stories.
And honestly, I find that sometimes very hard to do for myself.
So writing it down helps and bringing somebody else into the conversation.
A friend, a family member, a colleague, a trusted advisor of some sort.
Because sometimes when they ask you the question, you can think through and answer it much better than when you're doing that.
It's, by the way, a great service you can do for your friends and colleagues and family members is to help them identify their stories.
The second thing is you want to ask, what's the impact of the story?
What is the story causing me to do?
And if the impact is positive, keep it, if the impact, not so much, you want to identify what's it doing to me in this negotiation.
And then the third question I would ask is What do I actually know?
And, sadly, very often the answer is, not much. All these things that I think, oh, they never agree to this.
If I ask myself, how do I actually know, I don't.
It's an assumption I'm making.
And it's an assumption that I'm making mostly because of my fears, not because of anything I actually know.
So be a skeptic there.
Ask yourself, how do I know what I think I know?
Very often you don't.
So then, what you do is you say, okay, given what I actually know, what could be an alternative story?
And it's sometimes hard to replace stories.
You don't say, my old story is wrong, because you don't know that either.
It might be right. This person might be a total jerk, and you don't want to negotiate with them.
You don't know. Maybe it's true.
But what you want to do is you want to set it aside and say, there are other possible stories.
Right? That one story I have isn't the only possible story that defines the situation.
So again, if I'm negotiating with this big company, I can say, well, I have no power here, or I can say, well, of all of the negotiations teachers in the world, over the thousands of negotiation teachers in the world, they picked me and that means they want to work with me.
And that means I have some power here.
Same situation, different story.
And that changes my attitude.
I'll give you an example from another realm.
So I have a colleague who called me up and said, I have to speak at a conference in front of 500 people, and I'm terrified because I've never done that before.
I asked her, so what have you done before?
And she said, well, I've done lots of public speaking, but never this many people.
I said, how's that different?
And she said, it's not, it's just more people.
And as soon as her story changed from I've never done this before to this is exactly what I've done before, just with more people in the room, all her fear went away.
And the only thing that changed was her narrative.
That's how powerful this can be.
Listeners, just recognize this is a story that also helps you to understand the beauty and sometimes annoying nature of having a negotiation expert as a good friend.
Because not only will they be able to identify these things, but they'll be able to persuade you in a very subtle way because I want to highlight this too.
Because you didn't just come in and say, excuse me, I'm an author on this topic, the story that you're telling is warped.
You ask a series of insightful questions and she came to that realization herself.
That's powerful too.
That's really powerful.
Well, thank you. And I think that really highlights how much of negotiation is really listening because my ability to ask that question actually stemmed from my ability to hear that story of hers without her saying it explicitly, right?
And as you know, negotiation succeeds the better we understand the other party.
And in order to understand another person, we need to develop our listening skills.
We need to develop the ability to ask open -ended questions that contain as few of our opinions and judgments as possible.
So to keep our questions really short and really open, to invite the other person to say whatever is on their mind, and then we need to learn how to stay silent and wait for them to answer and not give in to our impatience and start talking.
And then we need to actually listen As distracted as we would naturally be, we'd need to actually listen to them and then try to hear what's behind the words and then reflect back to them what we hear so we can confirm our understanding and acknowledge them and give them an opportunity to keep talking.
That's something I like to call the listening triangle, but it's just focusing on the other person and asking questions, listening and making sure that we're clear on what they said to us.
That's what I was really doing.
My ability to help her came from my ability to ask questions, listen, and then play back to her what she was saying because she was the one that said that she had this fear.
She was the one that said, I've never done this before.
All I did was hear it and play it back to her in a way that helped her think about it differently.
So I think negotiation is much more about listening and asking questions than it is about pulling out sort of amazing negotiation techniques and strategies and tactics and brandishing your skills.
I agree. And for those 17 people in the audience who were saying, Hey, I wanted a zinger.
That's what I came to hear.
What are the zingers?
No, listen. They see that 17, that's a minority of the audience, but most people recognize listening is an important skill, but I'd be interested to hear you and your opinion on this because I think most people listening would say, yeah, listening is an important skill.
I need to become a better listener, check, check, check, right?
What is it that people misunderstand about listening that holds them back the most?
I think the first thing is they misunderstand how difficult it is to do.
And the big problem with listening is first of all, that so much else gets in the way.
And the main thing that gets in the way is our own heads.
We have our own things that we're telling ourselves while we're trying to listen to the other person.
So in effect, we're trying to listen to our own voice and the other person's voice at the same time.
Our own voice tends to be louder.
We are busy, we tend to have a difficult time disconnecting from whatever it is we're doing to actually focus on the other person listening, so listening is extraordinarily difficult to do.
We also have what we want to hear and what we want the other person to be saying.
And if they're not saying that exact thing, we fight it and we have a hard time actually listening to them.
So I think the first thing is to realize that, yeah, we all sorta know how to listen and we've all been told how to listen since before we could talk.
And it's a really difficult thing to do.
So, we need to actually devote some attention to it.
The second thing is, in listening, very often we think, if I come up with the magic, perfect question, they'll say the perfect thing that will explain everything, and there is no magic perfect question.
The idea is to take whatever they give you and try to hear what they're really saying and see if you got it right.
Based on how they react, And then ask another question that really follows from what they said.
And it's a slow iterative process.
Nowadays, I feel like I've been doing this for a long time and I tend to hear things very accurately, pretty quickly.
But that's because I've had a lot of practice getting it wrong before I started getting it right.
Remember, I was an engineer, right?
Nothing in my prior training had anything to do with listening.
when I started in this field, I was awful.
People would say something and I'd go, Oh, so you mean this?
And they'd be like, Nope.
And I'd have to start all over and ask them again and get it wrong.
And it was frustrating for them.
It was frustrating for me.
And over time I got better.
So I think practice and being mindful that that's what you're trying to do and what's your purpose in listening.
Cause for the longest time, my purpose was to listen long enough so they would just stop talking and I could start talking again.
because I love talking.
It's fun to talk. It's much more fun than to listen.
Or my purpose was to listen just for enough so I could refute what they were saying or argue with them.
It wasn't really listening to be curious.
I really urge my students to replace judgment with curiosity and empathy.
To try to be as curious as possible about the other person, and to know that you know so little about the situation, about them, about what they need, about how they're thinking about how they operate.
And the more curious you are about that, the more you'll have the tools to negotiate for your own interests effectively.
But you have to suspend judgment first and say, okay, I'm going to learn something interesting here and something I don't know.
I love to give my students a sound effect.
I say any time anybody says anything or does anything, I want you to think, huh?
And just be curious to find out more about what's there.
And then you can follow on with some questions that will help uncover this next thing.
And the empathy part is really demonstrating to the other person that you get what they're saying, that you get what they're going through or feeling.
And that doesn't mean you agree with them, that doesn't mean you like them, that doesn't mean you're going to give in to them.
That just demonstrates that you really have made the effort to try to understand things from their point of view.
We all need that. And it changes the tenor of the conversation.
It absolutely does.
And I want to focus in on two key words here, attention and effort, two things that are often lacking.
And again, when we think about attention and effort, we recognize that the majority of our effort and attention during these conversations has to be allocated towards listening.
And again, let's go back to folks who are hunting for tactics and strategies and zingers to win, using air quotes heavily and aggressively for the audio listeners here to win these negotiations, we have to recognize that if you're focusing on what it is that you're trying to say and all of these types of things, you're not focusing on listening.
So you're trying to be tactical at the expense of being a good communicator and a good, generous listener in the conversation.
And I think that can almost be kind of scary because we can hold on to our positions, our interests, our tactics that we want to employ, and we cling on to it like a security blanket.
But while we cling onto that security blanket that feels good, we let go of our ability to be good listeners at the same time.
And that's what really makes it so tough.
Yeah. As humans, we're not good at distinguishing what is effective and what we feel helps us.
So talking makes me feel like I'm in control of the conversation.
But the person who's actually controlling the conversation is the person who's asking open -ended questions and staying silent and listening.
That's who really manages the negotiation.
If you've seen good negotiators negotiating, what they're trying to do is get the other person to talk, get the other person to reveal what it is that they really care about in the situation.
And look, there's a part of it that you do to create collaboration, but there's also a part of it that you do to create strategic advantage to you because in the course of that conversation, you're going to find out those things that actually will allow you to be a more effective, more powerful negotiator, right?
I negotiate well with you by finding out what you need, and then helping craft a way for you to get what you need in a way that maximizes what I need.
That's success in negotiation, but if I don't know what you need, I don't have the tools to do that.
And if I'm talking, I'm not learning anything, but I feel like I'm in control when I'm talking.
In many areas in our lives, what we feel gives us control is actually not what gives us control.
It's like driving, right?
If you drive into a skid, you feel like you control the car by turning the wheel in the wrong direction, but what actually controls the car is going with the skid, but we're not wired that way.
Definitely not. And as somebody who has driven in Ohio for many years, I have learned the hard way during winter, but I'm still here.
I'm still here. That's a really good thing for me.
Yes. This has been fantastic.
I so appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us today.
by the time this episode drops, you will have your next book out.
Can you let them know, not only about Colly Wobbles, but about this next book.
We'll put links to everything in the description to all right.
So very quickly, my first book was Colly Wobbles.
How to negotiate when negotiating makes you nervous.
It really addresses this intersection of negotiation and emotional self -management.
The idea is that having skills and strategies is nice.
Being able to use them when you need them is better than you may recall.
But we had this pandemic a few years ago, kind of a depressing time.
What I do when I'm depressed is I write, so I started writing essays during the pandemic.
I compiled the first 61 essays into a volume called Optimism is a Choice, named after the first essay.
And then I kept writing essays, so I have a new set of essays, 64 essays coming out, called The Optimistic Pessimist. It's a lot about mindfulness, a lot about optimism, taking a positive approach to things.
But there's other essays that are sprinkled in there about negotiation and about a whole host of other topics.
And that's going to be coming out in the next few weeks.
Love it. Moshe, this has been a MasterClass, my friend.
Thank you for sharing your time with us today.
Thank you so much for inviting me, Kwame.
It's a pleasure to be here with you, and it's a special honor to give a MasterClass with someone who himself gives a MasterClass while you're doing it.
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