On Purpose with Jay Shetty - Chris Voss: #1 Secret Formula FBI Negotiators Use To Always Get What They Want & 4 Ways to Apply These Tactics to Your Life

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

What's a simple negotiation trick you can try today? How can you get better at persuading others? Today, Jay welcomes former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator and author of "Never Split the Difference", Chris Voss. He is renowned for his innovative negotiation strategies that emphasize empathy, emotional intelligence, and tactical communication. After retiring from the FBI, Voss founded The Black Swan Group, a consultancy firm that provides negotiation training for businesses and individuals. He is also a popular speaker and has taught negotiation at various business schools. Chris discusses his journey from being on a SWAT team to becoming a lead FBI negotiator. He shares that his career path changed after a knee injury and his growing interest in crisis response led him to hostage negotiation where he found the work more satisfying than his previous roles, emphasizing the importance of decisive action in crises. Chris and Jay discuss how human beings are naturally wired to be negative as a survival mechanism, which impacts negotiations. He reframes negotiation as a collaborative process rather than a confrontational one and suggests that effective negotiation often goes unnoticed because it looks like seamless collaboration. They also talk about gender dynamics in negotiation, with Voss providing advice on how women can better negotiate in environments where they might be undervalued.   In this interview, you'll learn: How to calm tense talks How to negotiate with narcissists How to disarm aggression How to foster collaboration How to build rapport In any situation, effective negotiation is not about winning at all costs but about creating a shared path forward that benefits everyone involved.  With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 01:23 Becoming a Lead Negotiator 04:08 Suicide Hotline Conversations 08:03 Labeling the Negative Emotions 09:35 Negotiation Isn’t a Form of Conflict 14:59 How to Get Someone to Collaborate with You? 21:15 How Do You Slow Down? 25:10 How Do You Prepare for a Negotiation? 29:54 Biggest Negotiation Mistakes 31:42 Always Look for the Patterns 40:20 Used and Taken Advantage Of 44:21 The Illusion of Control 46:17 What’s Your Intention? 48:37 How to Negotiate a Better Salary? 50:49 Reward Strategy in the Workplace 53:33 Negotiating Unfulfilled Salary Raise  58:57 How Can Women Negotiate Better? 01:00:57 Negotiations That Don’t End with a Deal 01:05:03 Work with the ELFs 01:11:05 Polite Boundary Setting 01:16:29 How to Not Be Emotional When Negotiating 01:22:08 Are You in the Right Relationship? 01:25:55 Respecting Other People’s Values 01:30:52 Tactical Empathy Documentary 01:34:01 Chris on Final Five Episode Resources: Chris Voss | Website Chris Voss | Instagram Chris Voss | LinkedIn Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Something that makes me crazy is when people say, well, I had this career before, but it was a waste. And that's where the perspective shift comes, that it's not a waste that everything you've done has built you to where you are now. This is She Pivots, the podcast where we explore the inspiring pivots women have made and dig deeper into the personal reasons behind them.

Join me, Emily Tish Sussman, every Wednesday on She Pivots. Listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Get emotional with me, Radhita Vlukya, in my new podcast, A Really Good Cry. We're going to be talking with some of my best friends. I didn't know we were going to go there, Amit. People that I admire. When we say listen to your body, really tune in to what's going on. Authors of books that have changed my life. This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol. The joy they brought to the nation.

You're free completely. No one is there to destroy you. The danger they endured. They said my head should be cut off. I'm John Legend. Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Chris Voss, retired FBI special agent. Former lead international kidnapping negotiator. An author of Never Split the Difference. We don't really see the great negotiators as great negotiators. One of the greatest negotiators has got to be Oprah Winfrey. What are women doing wrong or what can they do better in negotiation? You're out of order on the sequence.

Can you negotiate with a narcissist? Of course you can negotiate with a narcissist. One of the things we advise people to do is... We're thrilled to announce that we've reached three 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

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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 the 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 directions.

And originally I was on a SWAT team. And originally, I was on a SWAT team. I was scheduled to be on a SWAT team with Kansas City and Missouri Police Department. I was on a SWAT team when I joined the FBI. And I re-injured my knee. And I love crisis response because I think 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. 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, we had hostage negotiators. They went along with the SWAT guys. I didn't really know what they did. We'd be out there in the cold and 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? My son and I, Brandon, have always joked that the Voss family motto is how hard could it be, which is similar to a Redneck's 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 difficult 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 was secondary. It's good secondary. But I went there to learn, and I help people. Helping people was 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. I knew it was a highly successful process. So when I started hostage negotiation, I just leaned into a process that I had, it was familiar with and had been proven to me 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 you 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 supervisor said, your voice was great. That was great. You started out great.

And I remember thinking like, wow, I don't even know what I did. I'm going to 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 Black Swan Method, we just called 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 gonna go in today too. And that guy got eaten too. But the negative guy is shied away and we've inherited that wiring. And I remember one night in particular, this guy's really frantic, sounded super frantic, says, you know, I need your help putting a lid on this day, I gotta put a lid on this day. So I just said, you know, I just, I need to put, 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 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 a guy who was paranoid, just 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, sounds like your family's really close.

And I remember how good it felt in that moment. And I've never forgotten that. So as 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 gonna go on a car trip tomorrow and I'll be fine.

Thanks for everything you did. Hung up the phone. That's not every conversation, but that's the way they're supposed to go. You know, 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 may get 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. Like the problem with giving advice is the person receiving it doesn't feel empowered. They might not be able to sort through it emotionally. And 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, what, 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. Yes. 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. Myself and my team, we believe, and we've got enough anecdotal data that the world splits up evenly into three types. Fight, flight, make friends.

Assertive, analyst, accommodator. And we've seen this show up globally. It's disconnected from gender, the 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. Analyst 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. Conflict is one option, and it tends to be highly destructive, highly inefficient. 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. 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 places 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. It'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, victory, tends to overshadow how the losses pile up. So, two out of three, we want to avoid that. So, you know, two out of three, we want to avoid that. So the real challenge, though, is we've 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, a tendency 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. Nobody sees her as conflict oriented. Let 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 celebrities mad at Oprah? What rock fight has she gotten into? Who's throwing shade? It is not there. Simultaneously, her financial success and the different phenomenal interviews she's gotten, they were no holds barred interviews. One of, 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, Warren Buffett, we don't think of him as a great negotiator. And they have to be.

So that's, we're 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, I'll define negotiation as great collaboration, long-term relationship, where we're both ecstatic about our success. And if you can reframe it like that, then people are a lot more interested in negotiation. I think that's one of the reasons the book has succeeded, because it's not a series of stories where we beat anybody. Sometimes we had to force collaboration with a highly competitive negotiator. That was what kidnapping was about.

I'm going to force the kidnapper to collaborate. I'm going to force that guy from Al-Qaeda into a collaborative conversation, but I'm not going to force that guy from Al-Qaeda into a collaborative conversation, but I'm not going to hit back. Walk me through how you force that person into collaboration and not hit back, because I think you're right. I think the overarching belief we have is, oh, we've got to beat them. We've got to find a way to get what we want from them. Like that's what you think of a negotiation even in normal terms, let alone those high stakes. But how do you do that in that scenario? One of my favorite conversations describing this a number of years ago,

I got hired to train a hostage negotiation team in the Middle East and the country that I was in, very pro-Western country, a Muslim, you know, ostensibly a Muslim country, but really tolerant of all religions as most of them are. So you're brought in to talk to the sheikh that's the head of counterterrorism. And I'm told in advance, the sheikh, if we have, if al-Qaeda comes here and grabs people, or if any terrorist organization comes here and grabs people, understand the sheikh wants to kill them. The people of his country are his children, and he wants to protect his children at all costs.

So you sit down with the sheikh, he's gonna wanna know how you're gonna protect his people. So I get a meeting with this guy, brilliant young man, brilliant. And he looks at me and he says, all right, what are you gonna teach my guys to say? And I looked at him and I said, they're gonna say to the terrorist kidnapper

on the other end of the phone, what you're doing is a great thing. And his mouth fell open. And I said, now I got you because you can't wait to hear what I'm going to say next. You were so caught off guard. You were in complete curiosity mode. You're hanging on every syllable that comes out of my mouth and that's what I'm going to teach you guys to do. And he went, oh, you're hired. But so what is driving the other side in their mind? How do they see what they're doing?

What do they see as a justification for it? Like so much conflict will go away if I can simply recognize what you see as the reason for your problem without agreeing with it. Probably about two years ago, myself and a friend, Nicole Benham, were hosting a room on Clubhouse. At the time, the Israel-Palestine, it was the watered down version of what's going on with Hamas now. Israel had started shelling the Gaza Strip, because Hamas, in fact, is hiding weapons in hospitals and schools in the press office.

And Israel gets tired of it, after a while, they start shelling those offices. So it's a milder version of what's going on right now. But the vitriol going on online was huge. And Nicole calls me up, she says, you know, we got to find a way to help sell this out. I said, all right, well, we'll do a room on Clubhouse, and we'll invite people favoring the Palestinians and people favoring the Israelis on. And they can talk it out with one rule, one caveat.

Before you say whatever you have to say about what you think of the other side, you gotta summarize where they think they're coming from, what their point of view is. And as soon as you get an all clear from them, as soon as the other side effectively says, that's right, that's how I see it, you can say whatever you want now

Did we come to any agreements at night? No, but what was more important was there were no arguments as Soon as somebody tries to articulate how the other side sees things it actually makes you smarter. I Once heard a guy saying empathy is a species of reason. You're analyzing where the other side's coming from. And in attempting to genuinely analyze it, you start deactivating the reasons for the escalation. Because the reasons for the escalations is at least

they don't feel heard. Let me take that one off the table. You don't feel heard. Now we take that one off the table. You don't feel heard. Now we can be in a position where we could actually talk about this. So I'm interviewing, I got this thing on fireside. It's a social media app. What it is is largely, I have guests and it's live Q&A.

Bring a woman on, head of a coffee company. And she says, I use your Israel-Palestinian thing to negotiate a resolution between two my top executives. They're at each other's throats, and I love them both. And I can't lose either one. So remember what we did on, you did on Israel-Palestine, and I brought them in the room and I said, okay, you could say whatever you want about the other side, but first you got to summarize their position. You got to summarize how they see things and what is motivating them.

And she said two things. She said, we resolved it on the spot. And she said, it was such a moment that I still cry when I think about it. So you know, what's all this rambling about? Take a shot at summarizing how the other side sees things. If it doesn't solve the problem on the spot, it at a minimum brings you closer together and we're all better off. Closer together. Yeah I think it's such a powerful skill whether it's in a

marriage, whether it's in a friendship, whether it's in the corporate setting, it's such a need. And I find like as life has got faster and faster and faster, we have less and less time to summarize. And so what we end up doing is we just end up reading someone else's summary, right? That's what we're doing online on social media is we're reading someone else's summary and analysis of a highly complex situation. And more often than not, we're reading someone else's summary and analysis of a highly complex situation.

Right. And more often than not, we're reading the summary that supports our viewpoint. Right. Not the viewpoint of the other. Right. And so now we have less time, we're reading someone else's words, which means we're not even doing the complex computation of trying to understand and comprehend what someone's going through. Yeah.

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shopper head there right now and at Sprouts as well this summer go grab your Juni. How do you encourage people in this busy fast pace you know we're trying to be efficient environment to actually slow down and embody these skills that actually require us to use our brains. Most of the time we you got to walk somebody through something and and coach them into applying it because we don't see it around us is the first problem is we're not seeing anybody do this effectively. Exactly that's a great point. So we got no models for it. All we got is models for instigators, the professional agitators. Professional agitators are everywhere.

They're not a majority, but there's enough of the agitators out there that they tend to get a lot more of the traction. How would you define a professional agitator just for people to... I totally agree. Yeah, well it's those in the media that are clickbait oriented, agitation oriented, it's highly profitable short term, you know, you're getting advertising dollars based on how many views, how many clicks you're getting. And it's so overwhelming and we're so tired of it. The other thing we're so tired of it, I think, you know, one of the things that I'm most fascinated with right now is, you know, the hot tool girl. Like, people are so tired of negativity that anything that's like positive and fun and refreshing and catches

them off guard. I checked her Instagram today, she got like 2 million followers with 36 posts and she's been there for 15 minutes. But I think it's we have such an appetite for something that's not negative and not designed to be agitating. And a very small number of agitators can turn a peaceful demonstration into a raging mob. And so then they get clicks over that. And most of our media is guilty of that. You know, nobody's got neither the left nor the right has a monopoly on agitation. So Fox is guilty of it. CNN is guilty of it.

And they get short-term profits. They get a lot of clicks. They get a lot of views. So I think we're not seeing the summaries. We're not seeing the demonstration of understanding. But in reality, it accelerates us to a positive outcome by probably about a rate of about 14 times faster. And it's invisible. It's astonishing. And so since it was invisible, we didn't really see it when it happened. One of the guys on my team, Derek Gaunt, wrote a book about leadership applying tactical empathy to leadership. It's called Eagle Authority Failure. He's got a great stat at the very beginning of it where report-based interviews in law enforcement gets you to

an agreement slash confession 14 times faster than anything else. But nobody knows it happened. times faster than anything else. But nobody knows it happened. So then to get good at it, you're never gonna get congratulated in the moment. That's the other thing, it's in the moment, it's not that satisfying very much the way the slot machines are satisfying in Vegas. You know, you lose 83 out of 84 times on those slot machines,

but the wins are so satisfying, that's all you notice. So to be really good at this, you focus more on how suddenly we're in a better place. And nobody's congratulating you because they didn't see it happen. So it really has to be intrinsically self-satisfying. The reward is getting it done faster and better. Very few people are gonna congratulate you

on it in the moment. Yeah. Something that makes me crazy is when people say, well, I had this career before, but it was a waste. And that's where the perspective shift comes. That it's not a waste that everything you've done has built you to where you are now. This is She Pivots, the podcast where we explore the inspiring pivots

women have made and dig deeper into the personal reasons behind them. Join me, Emily Tish Sussman, every Wednesday on She Pivots, as I sit down with inspiring women like Misty Copeland, Brooke Shields, Vanessa Hudgens, and so many more. We dive into how these women made their pivot and their mindset shifts that happened as a result. It's a podcast about women, their stories, and how their pivot became their success.

Listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get emotional with me, Radhita Vlukya, in my new podcast, A Really Good Cry. We're going to talk about and go through all the things that are sometimes difficult to process alone. We're going to go over how to regulate your emotions, diving deep into holistic personal development, and just building your mindset to have a happier, healthier life. We're going to be talking with some of my best friends. I didn't know we were gonna go there on this.

I mean, don't let me get this to you. People that I admire. When we say listen to your body, really tune in to what's going on. Authors of books that have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right? And basically have conversations that can help us

get through this crazy thing we call life. I already believe in myself. I already see myself. And so when people give me an opportunity, I'm just like, oh, great, you see me too. We'll laugh together, we'll cry together, and find a way through all of our emotions. Never forget, it's okay to cry

as long as you make it a really good one. Listen to A Really Good Cry with Radhi Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When the Taliban banned music in Afghanistan, millions were plunged into silence. Radios were smashed, cassettes burned. You could be beaten or jailed or killed

for breaking the rules. And yet, Afghans did it anyway. This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol. The danger they endured. They said my head should be cut off. The joy they brought to the nation. My head should be cut off. The joy they brought to the nation.

You're free completely. No one is there to destroy you. I'm John Legend. Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think that's the only mindset shift we need is that if we want a real resolution, we want to feel like we've really accomplished something, we're really moving forward, it requires us to move from that point of view of if we negotiate effectively, if I take time to summarize the other person's opinion and they take the time to do mine, we're actually going to get somewhere. Even if it's a slower process, even if it's a harder if I take time to summarize the other person's opinion and they take the time to do mine,

we're actually gonna get somewhere, even if it's a slower process, even if it's a harder process. How do you prepare for a negotiation? Because I think a lot of us also think, great, I'm gonna walk in there, I'm gonna try to figure it out, I'm gonna say something,

but walk us through how you'd prepare for some of the biggest negotiations in your life. What do they look like? Well, I'm gonna think of how I would summarize their perspective. That's going to really get my wheels turning. I'm going to get a lot of clues. How do they see things? I've done it enough that it's almost become second nature.

You've got to do it a lot, like anything else. It simply requires practice. There's this magic hack for life called gratitude. It's amazing what a difference it could make and it sounds stupid. I was once in a highly adversarial negotiation. The other side was, it wasn't adversarial, the other side was very deceptive, which is one of my buttons. I don't like deception. One of my main currencies is integrity. So that's a violation of one of my core values.

But thinking that put me in a very negative place. And I thought, well, how did I get into this in the first place? The only reason they're trying so hard to do this deal with us is because we're good. It was a training company that wanted to make our training offering part of their platform. So I thought, this is a byproduct of success. I'm actually lucky to even be having this conversation. So, you know, I found gratitude in the moment moment and then it opened up my mind because you're 31% positive, smarter in a positive frame of mind.

So you know, whatever your hack is, and different people have different ways, gratitude exercise first thing in the morning, meditation, whatever you could do to clear out your natural negative survival mechanism so that you can be more appreciative of life. And that's one of the ways. And then if I think about that, then I can summarize your perspective. And another thing that I'll usually do is I'll think of the questions that I might normally ask to elicit a yes, and I'll switch them so that I'm eliciting a no.

Do you agree becomes do you disagree? There's a Pavlovian response to yes and no. People, if they say yes, they feel like they're being led into a trap. Whether they are or not, it doesn't change the fact that as a general term, somebody's trying to trap you is going to litter that path with yeses. So when you say something like, does that make sense? And they say, yes, that's moving in the wrong direction. Well, it's going to trigger that Pavlovian response because the person that cheated them

said something to the effect of, would you like something for free? Would you like to make more money? Would you like to live in a big house on a hill? And that led them into a trap previously. So it doesn't matter that you have integrity. It doesn't matter that you are not doing it. It got done to them enough times already that they're gonna have a negative reaction.

The ridiculous flip side is, the Pavlovian response to saying no is that people feel protected. They feel safe when they say no. Would you like? No. When my son was a teenager. Dad can't?

No. But then I looking back on I realized every time I said no, I felt all right. So I walled myself off from being walked into anything here. And I would look back at him and say, okay, so now what was it that you wanted? Now I could hear more, having protected myself. So I may say to you, look, does this sound like a stupid idea? And then you won't have been triggered and you'll listen to me. You'll actually to some degree listen with a critical mindset and you'll think

well you know no no I don't I don't have any problem with that but your follow-on is actually what's important. Now I don't think it's a stupid idea but I think here's some things that I want you to think about. You give me those freely. Now, we're in an actual collaboration. So your original prep question, how do I prep for negotiation? I'm going to try to do what I can to put myself in a positive frame of mind. Work at summarizing the other side's perspective. Think of a couple questions where the answer is no, where it moves things forward as opposed to the yes,

and I've avoided that psychological feeling of the other side feeling I'm trapping them. Yeah, those are the things to do. What are some of the biggest mistakes you've seen people make walking in, preparing for a negotiation? Well, the inadvertent thing to start off with is, you know, number one, they're going to ask a yes or

any question. And then number two, they're going to make their pitch, the value proposition. I got to tell you what's valuable here. Now that's important, but you're out of order on the sequence. Because the other side's dying to have their say too. If you go first, you kind of rolled over. But the whole time you're going, they're thinking, but I got something I want to say. I got something I want to say. It's a voice in the back

of their head, which is interfering in them listening to you. So I'm gonna start out by trying to hear you out first. I'm gonna want the information from you. I'm gonna want your perspective. I'm also gonna wanna know what you think is important. Going into this conversation, let's say we're collaborating to do a deal, or you and I are significant others and we wanna go eat something to eat. I'm gonna wanna know what's on your mind first

because that's the order of priority for you. Then I'm going to know on my list what matches up with what you want instead of maybe I start out with something that's number one on my list but it's number nine on yours. Now you're distracted by the other eight things that you think are important. I'm going to try to dial into you as quickly as I can because because I want to talk about what you think is important, because that starts our collaboration. So really understanding where the other side is coming from is information you need for the analyst and for the relationship oriented person. Makes the other person feel good. So you're building a relationship.

Have you had, I'm sure in your experience, you've been speaking to such incoherent individuals on the other side that there isn't a one to nine on their list. There's like a Z to A, right? Like it's, it's topsy turvy because they're not coming at it from a logical rational. A lot of the people, sometimes when we're negotiating, we feel like, what are you talking about? Like what language are you speaking in? And we can feel that even with our partners, people can feel that at work where they're

just like, I'm talking to a toxic individual who has no idea what they want. They're so off the rocker. Like, you know, when you're speaking to someone on the other side who you actually can't figure out and you're feeling like, I can't even read this person. How do you navigate that? Well, I liberate myself from the idea of rationality or logic. I really see those two things as beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And so when I let go of that, and then I think in terms of patterns.

And then other than someone who's actually paranoid schizophrenic, where their wiring is actually wrong, and someone who's suffering from, or layman's terms, wiring issues versus chemical issues. What we used to refer to as manic depressive or bipolar, you know, they change those terms all the time. Those are principally chemical imbalances. Paranoid schizophrenia, somebody's actually hearing voices. It's a problem, but you don't know what the voices are saying. Those people are in fact unpredictable. They manifest

themselves very rarely. In a hostage negotiation, we also found out that unfortunately one of the downsides of being a meth addict, someone could be clean for years, but methamphetamines does actual damage to the wiring and they'll have an episode when they've been sober for years that mimics a paranoid schizophrenic. So the people that are actually messed up in that fashion are very rare. Most of it's chemical imbalance. If you look at it like that and then you say, all right, so there are patterns here. Let me look for the patterns. And then they're eminently predictable. If you let go of the judgment that it's rational or

irrational and you just start looking for patterns and then listening for them, now they could be so upset with negative emotions that they are in a state of confusion. Very much like the guy that called in on a hotline that night. So I'm just gonna, I'm gonna sort of pick off that negativity one at a time and I'm gonna feed it back and I know it's gonna clear your head. In a business scenario or even a personal scenario,

people who feel under a tremendous amount of pressure tend to be very demanding and can be very attacking, which feels predatory. It even feels like the magic phrase gaslighting when in fact they're under a massive amount of pressure. A company that I just did some training for, coaching and training. They're based out of the Middle East, but their executives are international in nature. And they happen to be in a discussion in a deal in South Africa. And the person on the other side of the table, they called a bully, very attacking, not sticking to the written agreement. So of course in a negotiation, lawyers on the table, the side that I'm coaching,

what's the lawyer going to do? He's going to open his laptop. He's going to read you the agreement, which does not help. It's a great way to pour gasoline on a fire. Let me remind you of what our agreement says. Thinking that would help. So now the guy gets worse and he starts adding profanity and telling them that he's gonna rewrite the agreement. They keep their poise and when you're being attacked that much, if you don't come up with a great thing to say, the most graceful, the smartest move is to withdraw quietly.

So the lead said, it's probably not a good time for this discussion. We'll be happy to leave. Guy settles down a little bit. They hit him with a couple of labels. They get to a good place in a conversation. But then on the way out, he says to the guy, sounds like you're under a lot of pressure. And the guy completely relaxed. He says, oh man, he says, you don't understand what's going on over here. I've got all these demands. I got people coming at me from all sides.

And the recognition of the pressure that, sounds like you're under a lot of pressure, for someone he perceived as an attacking, gaslighting bully, the guy was being driven by an internal pressure that he was having trouble keeping control over. And that changed everything, that offhand label, and it turned everything around. Can you negotiate with the narcissist?

If you look for the patterns, and then, you know, the narcissist is demanding, so short answer is yes, but how are you gonna do it? You gotta make what you want the path to where they wanna get. Ultimately, narcissists are self-centered, so let them be self-centered or whatever it is that they're after. Make your want a step on the journey to their goal.

And if you can change the sequencing around, that's how you can get the upper hand on a narcissist. One of the... Of course you can negotiate with a narcissist. If you've been trained by the Black Swan group, Chris Voss, yeah, we'll train you, we'll teach you. Yeah, it's whether you want to or not. It's whether you want to negotiate with a narcissist in your life. Well, and actually that's a great secondary point. Yeah. Because this is going to be repetitive behavior. One of the things we advise people to do is terminate the relationship.

You know, are they dragging you down? You can do a couple things to try to, the psychologist or therapist would call it boundary setting. Sometimes you set a good hard boundary the psychologist or therapist would call a boundary setting. Sometimes you set a good hard boundary and the other side says, oh, I respect that. They're looking for you to set gently, not aggressively. They're looking for that boundary.

Set a couple boundaries, gently, politely, but firmly, and find out if they're going to straighten up. Then you can continue the relationship. You make an attempt to set the boundaries, a couple of gentle attempts. They don't pay any attention to it. Whether it's personal or professional, that's a preview of the future. You don't need to be attached to that. You're not going to be who God puts you here to be by being attached to people that drag

you down. And I think a lot of us do that. For good intention, very good reason, and we're not required to continue once, you know, be willing to be smarter today than you were yesterday. Do we ignore the patterns? Is that what it is? I think we do. I think a lot of us do. For, again, for different reasons. The relationship-oriented people, the accommodators,

they're very hope-based, and they have this tremendous faith and hope, so to speak. And there's a lot of feedback in it. I think the world is largely a very supportive place. If the world wasn't largely on our side, we wouldn't have continued as a species. We'd be dead, we'd have gone extinct. We're not the most durable.

We don't have a fair fight with most of the predators on a planet with just what God gave us. We lose most of the time. So that means that I'm a firm believer that the world is largely very supportive and on our side. So that reinforces the accommodators because the numbers are on their side. They're just not real good in anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of the people that are that are that are situations that are harmful so we have reason for sticking in there and

Then allowing wisdom to get a smarter as we go then we eliminate more and more of the people that are dragging us down If you feel like you're one of those people that people always take advantage of, I can imagine a lot of people that are listening may feel like they've been an accommodator, but now they've started to feel like people always take advantage of me, I feel used, I feel like I'm the one who's always getting the short end of the stick. Like, how do you shift that pattern for your life? Because you've now made people believe that that's who you are. Right.

And all of a sudden now you wanna change who you are. How do you go about that transition and shift in a healthy way so that you no longer feel that everyone's taking advantage of you? Yeah, the healthy way to start with is first, the recognition is that you're not really helping them. You know, if they're taking advantage of you, you're effectively a crutch,

and nobody becomes their best self by leaning on a crutch. So not only you're not helping yourself, you're not really helping them. To do the best for them is to let them get out there and fend on their own. You know, let them deal with it. They need to deal with reality. You're not helping them by letting them lean on you.

All right, so let's say you're willing to accept that. Now, how do you get out of it? And again, I'm gonna refer to one of my negotiation heroes, Oprah Winfrey. I'm in a discussion with one of her top executives, and I was telling this executive, yeah, our philosophy is the last impression is the lasting impression, so always end positively, no matter what, but end. And she said, yeah, that's exactly Oprah's philosophy. And she says, in the entertainment industry, it's usually in an Alamo, out in a taxi.

With Oprah, it's in an Alamo, out in a limo. No matter what, at the end of any relationship, we have to make people remind them that we love them and that we value them. And then we have to effectively, we might need to part company. And I'm having a conversation, confrontational confrontation. Oprah Winfrey has taken people to the woodshed, but she does it in such a positive way and a way that she underscores to them

that they feel valued, that they're okay with it. In this conversation, she finishes by saying like, whatever you do is your decision. And I want you to know that if you decide not to participate in this interview, I will always love you. I will always be supportive of you. I will always have your back. And so that was her way of saying it's my way, the highway. And if you choose the highway, I'm still on your side. But we are gonna part company at this point in time. And finding a way to gently say, enough.

Should you ever change your mind, I'm here for you. And then withdraw. And that's, it always feels hard to do that because somewhere deep down inside of us, we don't want it to be the end of the road. We don't want to, we want to be hopeful. We want to save, we want to accommodate, we want to mold, we want to become whatever the other person needs us to be.

Yeah. So we keep doing that. We keep shape shifting. Yeah. The desire to take yourself and them to a higher existence, to a higher level of being, to, you know, to make the unique and amazing dent in the universe that each one of us is capable of doing. And we love bringing that out in other people. It's very addicting.

I'm sure when people meet you, they feel like they can learn from you how to control a situation. But you don't strike me as someone who believes that is the way it ever goes. And that that's what you're trying to teach. But I can imagine people come up to you and companies come up to you and be like, Chris, basically show us how to control this in our favor. Some do. Yeah. Yeah.

Again, about a third. You know, the assertives love control. Yeah. How do you reframe someone who comes with that controlling mindset, who thinks that you can control? I've had, I've had coaching clients, I don't coach in what you do, but I've even had clients like, Jay, teach me the right thing to say. Like you always feel like, you know what the right thing to say.

Can you teach me how to say that to someone in my life so that they do what I want? And I'm like, wait a minute, that's, that's not how it's meant to go. Right. Exactly. All right. So the secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control. And then people will say like, oh, that's better than control.

So that may be one of the things that cracks them open. Another thing is control is highly inefficient time-wise. Like, let's say I could control you completely. I gotta be with you all the time to do that. You know, I could control maybe one person. I can positively influence a lot of people if I give up the need for control. Because I'm gonna need you to be self-directed.

I'm going to need you to be able to think for yourself. There's going to be a point in time when we're not together. If I'm not there to control you, you're going to fall apart. But if I collaborate with you, if I empower you, when I'm not there, you're going to think for yourself. There's a phrase, batteries included, so to speak, which has been passed on to me by some very smart people. I need people who are batteries included.

We all need partners that are batteries included. We're aligned on core values and we get more done because I don't have time to control everybody. So when you start understanding the costs of control, then you start thinking like, yeah, you know, there's got to be a better way. And it's guidance. It's helping people think. It's making them feel empowered to find the right outcome. Parents, ready to discover a new educational and interactive podcast for kids? Join Stories

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happy and tune in to Part-Time Genius. Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. A new season of Bridgerton is here. And with it, a new season of Bridgerton the Official Podcast. I'm your host Gabrielle Collins, and this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton. Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad. Is betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor? Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown's pen. We're discussing it all.

I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season. Watch season 3 of the Shondaland series on Netflix. Then, fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton the Official Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday. You talk about mirroring as being a really good technique in trying to get to that collaborative same page space. How do you do that in an authentic genuine way?

Is negotiation ever genuine and authentic or is it always three steps ahead, three moves ahead? Yeah, well, great question. The negotiation skills and tools are neutral. So intention has a smell. Am I trying to collaborate with you or am I trying to take advantage of you? A scalpel in one person's hand saves a life in another person's hands, it takes a life. So first of all, look at effective negotiation skills,

which emotional intelligence is effective negotiation, tactical empathy is effective negotiation. What's your intention? Like my intention is for us to have a great long-term relationship, highly profitable through the infinity. And if somebody's arguing with me, I'll say like, look, all right,

so I would love for this moment to be something that we look back on 10 years from now. This argument we look back on 10 years from now. This argument, we look back on it 10 years from now as to the moment we discovered collaboration and make both of us prosper for 10 years. That's also changing somebody's frame from short term to long term to what's my intention. And my intention is long-term collaboration.

Like there's some sales methodologies that say, your money's in their pocket, it's your job to get it out. That's not long-term collaboration. And you're gonna sense that. Like no matter how charming I am in the moment, no matter how much fun I am to be with, no matter how much I am in the moment, no matter how much fun I am to be with, no matter how much I make you laugh, you're going to notice a diminishment of your pocket before long and this is coming to an end.

So if my intention instead is for this to be great, for us to have a ball, for this to be this adventure that we both benefit from, now you're going to even if you say, Oh, that was a label. I heard that before. Or you just used a mirror on me. You know, you asked me about mirrors. That was a mirror. Then you're not going to mind because I'm trying to take you to a better place. Let's, let's take a scenario.

Like, let's say someone's negotiating for a promotion or a higher salary. Let's go down that road and act out what that would look like. someone's negotiating for a promotion or a higher salary. Let's go down that road and act out what that would look like. So I'm doing a training for a company probably about two, three years ago. Got the CEO and all his top salespeople on a Zoom call. We get to Q&A and one of them says, how do I negotiate a better salary?

Boss is there listening. I said, ask him this question. How can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to the strategic future of this organization? He interrupts immediately and he says, I wish everybody here had asked me that question. So the job negotiation is really about our future,

collaboratively. Now, as much as you'd love for it to be about what your contribution up to now has been, your contribution up to now, your boss is gonna see that you're even. Here's what I asked you to now, your boss is going to see that you're even. Here's what I asked you to do. Here's what I agreed to pay you for doing it. Here we are.

You did it. I paid you. We're, we're even. That's how your boss is going to see it. Your boss worried about the future. He's worried about his own future, her own future. Worried about the organization's future. If you shift to how do I make everybody successful?

But not just in our routine stuff. In the most important stuff here, you show them two things, you're a team player. You're gonna put the team first and you want the high profile stuff. You want to play in a championship. Your goal is to win a championship. My goal isn't to win a scoring title.

My goal is to win a team championship. Now suddenly it's about the future, a prosperous future, like what I mentioned before. We're now negotiating a prosperous future together. That changes everything. Yeah, I love that. I mean, just hearing you say that I was like, the amount of times in my head, I'm thinking as a leader, like I want people to focus on business critical activities. Like I want people to report to me on things that are like actually critical to impact and having an effect and moving the needle as opposed to, yeah, we're doing the, you know, we're doing the little stuff.

Everyone needs to do it. But as a leader, you want your team to be focused on and moving towards those bigger things. Yeah. Yeah. And it's hard because me included, when I was an too, it's you want to be rewarded for your effort. You just want to be rewarded for your energy and showing up and all of these things. But that isn't how reward generally works, at least in the workplace. Some reward works that way. Much of that is very valuable. Can you follow directions?

My girlfriend, Wendy, members of her family, they got this great camp upstate New York. It's a wonderful place. We're up there visiting. At the end of the season every year, they bring family up and they get together. And so they see me as maybe this white collar know, this white collar guy, you know, who never got his hands dirty, hadn't been outside, which is,

is not my background, but they're seeing me at FBI agent, you know, he probably white collars, you know, you never got dirty. So, uh, we're getting ready to get out of there and a gentleman that runs it, uh, very generous guy. He says, you know, you're welcome back anytime. And so I say, you know, I'd come to work for you any day. Because I like to be useful. And he goes, really come to work for me, huh? What do you know how to do?

And I looked at him, I said, follow directions. And he went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we need more people like that. So there's a lot to be said for following directions. You know, the mundane routine stuff that needs to get done. You'll do well if you're great at following directions. But you're not going to make as much as you could make. To have the maximum impact on the organization, as you said said the business critical activities. Because also you as a leader, you're having trouble keeping track of all the business critical activities.

You need the team seeing stuff that's coming at you, you know, from, from your six that you don't see rolling up on you. And you're going to want people on the team to understand the day to day and the business critical. So when that meteor comes screaming in and you don't see it coming, they catch it for you. And so that's what really takes people to the next level. Yeah.

I think one of the things I find is that as a leader, like I enjoy rewarding people who are performing phenomenally. Like it's exciting for me to see someone who's performing phenomenally and they're developing themselves and I can see that they're proactive and resourceful and they're growth oriented. And as a leader, I get excited to be like, oh, what can we build together?

Like that's my mindset. But I had a friend recently who went through a scenario where he had gone up to his boss and said, I wanna work on really important things at the company. I want to be associated with the biggest results we have. He was told to work on these projects. He went and got those results.

They promised him a promotion and then two to three months later, they went kind of quiet on it. And then they said, Oh no, we actually don't have it anymore. He's now been at this company for two years and he hasn't received a promotion. He hasn't received a direction on this is where it's going. He's getting in some of the biggest results at the company, but he's now not seeing any career growth there and he's thinking of leaving.

Right, he should leave. Yeah, but I think his boss is thinking, oh, this guy's gonna hang around. So in that scenario where you're like, wait a minute, I'm hitting it, I was promised something, it didn't happen, now I don't know how to negotiate that. I don't know how to have that conversation. How do you navigate that?

Okay. There's, there's two things. First of all, um, yeah, it's going to happen. Uh, black swan method, tactical empathy, emotional intelligence based negotiation doesn't work all the time. It just works more than anything else does. Which means there has to be an acceptance of occasionally it'll fail. Hostage negotiators got a 93% success rate. more than anything else does. Which means there has to be an acceptance of occasionally it'll fail.

Hostage negotiators got a 93% success rate. People are not going to make the deal we call 7%ers. They're going to happen. So you move on. Now if somebody's promised you something and they failed on their promise that you earned, this is also an indicator of a company that's got culture problems, they got leadership problems, they got management problems. 40%, a long time ago I heard the stat,

40% of the Fortune 500 is gonna be gone in 10 years. People with those kind of problems are going the way of the dodo. They're going extinct. So your time there is coming to an end, whether you like it or not. They're gonna to go out of business, they're going to get sold, they're going to think of a stupid reason for firing you. Except that that time frame now has its limits if someone has failed to keep a promise that they should have kept.

So that acceptance is, am I going to go someplace else? Start looking for someplace else. Because you just it to your resume You made yourself more employable with these accomplishments for somebody who's dying to employ you who's gonna keep their word They're gonna keep their core values if they lied to you if they failed to keep a promise with you That's the way they do business They are going out of business. There is a problem. You've just been alerted to the problem.

Now, short term, interim, how you potentially try to write to the ship before you get out. No oriented question. Again, I'd sit down with the boss. I'd say, I'm sure that I seem very selfish and that I seem ignorant of the pressures that you're under and unappreciative of them.

Do you want us to fail? No. Right. So, no, no, no, no. Why, what are you talking about? If you make it impossible for me to stay, how am I supposed to stay? How am I supposed to stay if you made promises to me,

I fulfilled my end of the bargain, and you're showing me that I was wasting my time? You know, it's a way of letting people see reality. Before you can be assertive, and this is being assertive, not aggressive, but assertive, you gotta be empathic. So you demonstrate some understanding of where they're coming from. Ask the no-oriented question,

which is a way to trigger decision-making in a non-threatening way, and let them know what the reality is. The reality of the situation is, you can't count on a leader that doesn't keep their promises to you. You wanna get to that moment in the conversation. You gotta get there gently.

How do you get there gently? Demonstrating an appreciation and an understanding of the other side's point of view. Give them a chance, give them one clear chance to make things right. Let them know the reality of the situation is you can't stay in a job where they're not going to keep their promises. Even if you want to keep that job, how you do anything is how you do everything. They're breaking promises to you, they're breaking promises to everybody else. you do anything is how you do everything. They're breaking promises to you. They're breaking promises to everybody else. You're going to,

you're going to be tainted by their reputation and you're going to be taken down when is the Titanic hit an iceberg, that ship's getting ready to hit an iceberg and it's going to sink. Yeah. I mean, that resonates in that kind of like, uh, when you've been hard done by that approach feels like you're having to turn up the dial on you're starting off empathetic, but then there is a turn up on like, well, this is the reality. Here's the reality.

This is the reality of the situation. And I think that's, that's a really powerful approach. So Chris, of course you're aware of the gender pay gap. Women are paid less. What are women doing wrong or what can they do better in negotiation? What needs to change? Of course there's a systemic issue, but individually. Uh, individually.

Uh, so I would answer this as if, uh, the woman asking that question was my daughter and she was asking me about a relationship and she says, dad, I'm in a relationship with a guy who's beating me. How do I get him to treat me better? My answer is get out of that relationship. All right, so paying any talent less than what they're worth is a bad core value, a bad culture value, and you're working someplace that's going to go out of business.

So this relationship is coming to an end. My advice, my guidance is the same as it would be for any other job negotiation. Talk about how you're gonna make the best contribution possible. Talk, find out what it takes to be successful there. Express that you wanna be paid in a big, play in a big game.

So what you're doing if you're working in a place is gonna pay you less because of your gender, you're padding your resume. There's somebody out there that wants talent and they don't care anything about your gender. They don't care anything about your demographics. They want talent. You're in a relationship, you're in a bad relationship.

And because it's a bad value to pay talent less, then it's coming to an end one way or the other. Just the same way as it's a boyfriend who's, if he's not physically abusive, he's at least verbally abusive. That's coming to an end. Prepare yourself to move on. There are people that want talent.

And in my company, I don't care. I want talent. We're not the only ones that are out there. There are a lot of companies that are taking advantage of women. The sooner you leave them, the better off everybody is. Find the company that values your contribution and move to it. Nice advice. Great. Tell us about some of your 7% experiences.

You said the 93% and the 7%. Tell us about, have you, some of your personal experiences have been in the 7% when it's not working? Yeah, um, they're actually far more common than I ever imagined would be in a business world. Like that one, when I wrote Never Split the Difference with Tal Raz and my son Brandon Voss, tremendous contributor to the book. It never occurred to me that there would be a lot of negotiations where the other side had no intention of consummating a deal. And we call that now proof of life.

Is there a deal and is the deal with you? Maybe there's a deal that just ain't with you. Maybe they're just kicking the tires. Maybe they're just looking for free consulting. And I started to wake up to that, and this is what falls into this category, 7%ers, somebody who's never gonna make the deal. Right after I got out and started talking about negotiating

and a gentleman who wrote a book, I think it was Bare Knuckle Bargaining. And he's talking about this thing in business called The Rabbit, where you're the rabbit, you just said to drive the price down on the people that are really gonna get the deal. And I can remember at the time thinking like, no, I'm a time is money guy,

that's a tremendous waste of time. Why would I ever engage in a negotiation with someone if I wasn't gonna make the deal? I thought it was something from a Vince Vaughn movie. I thought, that's too stupid. And so we started discussing it with sales teams and one guy says, oh yeah, that's in the challenger sale. It's in that book, it's 20%.

20% of the time, it's not 7% of the time, it's 20% of the time. And in the book they basically take a survey of a thousand executives and basically say, how often do you engage in a negotiation where you're never gonna make the deal with the other side? For whatever reason, you're just not gonna give them the deal. And a business executives admitted to 20%.

Which means that number's gotta be low because they ask people how often do you lie, and they're not gonna exaggerate how often they lie. They're gonna underestimate. And so we started implementing the methodology on a regular basis, we see it all the time. Some of it is a due diligence issue. The Black Swan Group, we have a reputation, deserved, for teaching a business

negotiation methodology that is more successful than anything else. Why would a company talk to us? Well, they've got an education provider they're gonna stick with. So what they wanna do is they want to get all the free consulting possible out of us. So we get this all the time. Tell us, you know, tell us how you do what you do. You know, give us some insight.

You know, how can we hire you if we don't know how you're going to do it? That's a tell of somebody who's pumping us for information. They're going to want us to give them time. And you know, if you just tell us everything, then we'll hire you. Not only if you tell us everything, will we hire you, we'll refer you to people that will hire. You know You know, they paint this vision of riches, you know, I call it being taken hostage to the future prosperity

that never materializes. We kind of cooperated a little bit in the early days, but now we just, we get back to this thing like, all right, so I'm gonna see what's important to you. And if you're really focused on one specific aspect, back to this thing like, all right, so I'm gonna see what's important to you. And if you're really focused on one specific aspect, if I sense that you're not focused on a long-term relationship, you're a 7%er. And then what am I gonna do?

I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go all Oprah Winfrey on you. I'm gonna say some really positive, very true things. We'd love to be the negotiation provider for you that gives your company prosperity that you've never seen before. And when you're willing to make a commitment to us, come back, we'll make a commitment to you. Yeah.

And they usually go, you usually hear crickets on the other end of the line. And that's the end of the conversation. Yeah. So Chris, as a follow-up to that, I'm sure that for years you've had calls where a company will call you and say to you, Chris, we actually want that, but we want it at half the price. And I'm imagining that a lot of people who are listening right now, whether they're entrepreneurs, whether they have a side hustle, whether they do a bit of

design work here and there, they've had that call as well, where a client calls, they want this client, they're excited by it. Like, and I want you to tell us the difference between the first time a Fortune 500 company reached out and now when you're established, because that obviously changes as well. Walk us through how do you negotiate or how do you deal with you really wanting to work with this client, but they're like, we want 50% off.

Like that's our budget. That's our max. Yeah, well, it's simply, it's accepting that working with them and have price is a bad idea. And it's not good for the health of the business long-term. And then as soon as we accepted that, then realizing that the less time we spent with

people that want half price, they're actually obstructing the people that want to pay full price. You know, a good friend of mine, a phrase that we use, Joe Polish, he's got a phrase, they're half clients and they're elf clients. Half is hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. Elf is easily lucrative and fun. So in our early days, especially- Say those two again, those are brilliant.

Hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating, halfs. Yeah, and then elves. Elves, easy, lucrative, and fun. I love that. And Joe says, don't work with the halves, work with the elves. And I heard this, and so in the early days, if you're working for me, you figure that I want you to make every deal.

And I get with my sales team and I say, all right, so the haves are going to have predictable behavior. Once we start looking for it, it's going to jump out at us. And we'll be able to see it in the first half hour of the conversation. Now they're very good at this. And that of course was the truth. And then I said, we're going to walk away politely from them early on. I don't want you wasting a lot of time.

So a young lady that's running my sales team at the time, and you know, comment on gender, if I may. We find that women pick this style of negotiation up faster than men. At the top level of performance, we see no difference. It's gender agnostic. I believe that women are conditioned at an early age to be aware of soft skills and they have a little bit of a head start. And that's why they have a tendency to pick it up faster than men. So a woman running the team, she wants to make every deal.

So before she starts walking away from the halves, she starts pulling data. You know, you want your sales team to start looking for data. How long is it gonna take to make the deal? How long is it gonna take to implement the deal? What's our profitability consequently? She gets back to me a couple of weeks later,

and she says, here's what we found. Number one, it takes us two to five times the amount of time from the initial conversation to the end of performance with a half. Two to five times as much time. So let's say it only takes twice as long. That means we've automatically taken a 50% cut in pay, maybe on top of the discount they wanted,

on top of everything else. She said then consequently, it doesn't really matter whether or not we want to do business with them again. They don't want to do business with us again. So they don't repeat. So these people that are demanding discounts, you're taking a 50% cut and pay at least, and the business is not going to repeat. So you're taking a discount theoretically for a long-term relationship and you're not getting it. They're not appreciative of the fact that they got a discount. They want to

take advantage of everybody. They're gonna look for somebody else to victimize after they get done with you. And they are standing in the way of the people that want to do business with us. It's very dark in the early days of an entrepreneur. The concept of walking away from customers. It's horrifying. I gotta make the rent. I got bills now. You want me to walk away from these people? Well it's gonna take you twice as long to get paid. So they're not gonna help you pay the rent now. And they're gonna be slow payers even if you agree on a deal. Then afterwards, get money out of them,

you're not in a loan business. So there's all these problems, and then as soon as we stopped dealing with the haves, we found that the elves started showing up. There's this invisible line of people waiting to do business with you. And the people that are gonna take up the most time in a line stop the people that take

the least amount of time. That's a scary thought for anybody entrepreneur to accept. And it's a leap of faith. And if you start looking around, you'll see entrepreneur after entrepreneur experiencing it kind of as a law of the entrepreneur universe. Yeah, for sure. I think that's such great advice. And it's so refreshing to hear that because I think everyone feels that way with it. Just like I have to do this.

This is going to be our big winner. It's going to be our big ticket, but it always ends up going the opposite way when they're being a half. And it's, it's such great advice because it could save you so much stress, save you so much pressure. And you're going to feel like you did a great job, but you only got paid half. You might feel bitter. You're now resentful. They didn't renew. It turns into a whole bigger emotional thing as well. It was blood money. Yeah. When it doesn't need to. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to shift away from work to relationships because I feel like so much of what you say applies to marriage, it applies to dating, it applies to everyday interpersonal relationships and friendship. We touched on that a bit at the beginning. But I wanted to talk about this idea that I think a lot of the time, we actually get an easy negotiation in the beginning, what it feels like.

And then things start to get more constrained. So I have a friend who she met this guy and he promised her the world and he was like, yeah, it's going to be amazing. And I love you and you're amazing. And this incredible. And it almost feels like you've just won the lottery, right? It's like you're getting everything in this negotiation. He gives you time. He gives you energy. Date nights are amazing. Everything's great. And then six months in, he starts to pull back and go, no, I need to focus on this now.

No, I can't call you every day. No, I can't. Now, not that any of those things are even unreasonable. They're actually reasonable things, but it's just that it's so different from what you thought you signed up for. What do you do as a negotiation in that setting when you were promised more or someone over delivered in the beginning and now they're under delivering? That's a real aspect of human nature. And so at some point in time, there needs to be polite withdrawal, you know, polite boundary setting.

I think both people have, you know, I don't know, I hate to say that any gender is more guilty than the other. Yeah, same. But I think that men probably have a tendency to start adding to the neglect first. And then how do you get advice? Like, how do we sustain this? How do you want me to feel about where we are now versus where we were?

How questions, how and what questions are remarkably powerful questions. We refer to them as calibrated question. The word what is primarily designed to uncover problems. The word how is primarily designed to create answers. So you could say what got us off track? Because you're off track. Now it also feels very differential. You know, how and what makes the other side feel in charge. People love to be asked how and what the real issue of both those questions is not what the answers are.

The thinking you made them engage in. The answer is secondary. At some point in time, I can say, what do you want for me? That's going to force you to see that there appears to be a disconnect between the two of us. It doesn't matter what you say. That's a secondary benefit. But the primary benefit is that I ask a question in the first place. You know, at the very beginning of the book, one of the more famous Black Swan phrases is how am I supposed to do that?

And I saw that as the first way to say no, you know, to telegraph to the other side that there's a problem coming. And then my son Brandon points out, it's forced empathy. If I say, how am I supposed to do that to you? You're forced to look at me and take stock of the position that I'm in. Your response to that is gonna tell me exactly how much you care about that.

That's a game changing phrase. And I realize now it's about implementation. I'm saying to you like, look, where we are, it's impossible for me to continue. How am I supposed to do that? Like eight out of 10 times, that immediately changes the complexion of the conversation. It's so ridiculously effective that in the two out of 10 times, it doesn't work.

People are just like, ah, how am I supposed to do that? And it backfired. It failed on me. They looked at me and said, I don't care how you do it. You're just going to do it. And my answer to them is no, it didn't fail. It gave you an answer you weren't expecting. If it's an implementation question, how am I supposed to continue in this

relationship if you never talk to me? How am I supposed to continue in this relationship if you never talk to me? How am I supposed to continue? At the beginning we had these amazing, we had date nights, we had quality time together, we were into each other. And they seemed to have gone away. How am I supposed to maintain my relationship with you under these different set of circumstances. You know, that's not refusing to maintain it. What you say and what they hear.

But what they hear is I'm about out of here and it's a great warning. And so either they're going to change, they're going to wake up because there's some inadvertent human nature there or they're going to be indifferent to your question. If they're indifferent that's just giving you a preview of a slowly descending future. Now you got a hard hard decision to make. Be grateful for the time, be willing to be smarter today than you were yesterday. And ultimately your default has got to be your own happiness.

Yeah. And how do we do that in a way that we keep our personal emotions separate from those questions? Because I think sometimes you can ask those questions, but they're, they're emotionally loaded. They're like, things used to be amazing before. Like, you know, now you don't do anything and they turn into not questions, they turn into demands, accusations. Demands, everything else.

Yeah, or they turn into things that sound complainy, like oh, things were amazing before, like how do you expect me to, and it sounds like a complaint as opposed to a question, which is what you're positioning it as, and I think that's because our emotion gets so close to the question. How do you keep your emotions separate and go,

actually I need to negotiate effectively to get to where I want to get to, rather than sound like I'm complaining, and now that person is only hearing the energy of the complaint, as opposed to the explanation of what you're looking for. Well, the two possibilities are, can you talk it through with a friend who's neutral, who's not going to give you advice? You need a sounding board. You don't need advice.

You know what the answers are, in point of fact. So the advice is a waste of time. One of the great things I realized why I was effective on a suicide hotline, in many cases, I'm just a sounding board. I'm let somebody say stuff out loud instead of having it bang around in their head, which is either confusing or it makes sense in a bad way, or you say stuff out loud and you get a better grip on it. So a friend is a great sounding board.

And you could even say in advance, look, I'm not looking for advice. I'm just looking for a sounding board. I wanna talk this stuff out. I wanna hear what I'm thinking. That's one potential option. You got friends that always want to give advice anyway. So, there's a little bit of a negotiation up front

with that friend, or maybe certain friends are good for being sounding boards and others aren't. Then in a moment, like what happens if you didn't have the time to prepare? You catch yourself in a moment. Which is similar to any negotiation. Suddenly you caught yourself in the middle, but your gut instinct is going to kick in. The mistake everybody makes is they want to deny the dynamic instead of observing it.

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining. I don't want to sound like a whining, complaining, typical whining, complaining female. Instead say, I'm probably going to sound like a typical whine and complaining female. Or whatever side of that argument that you're in. Argument, interaction, negotiation. If you simply call it out in advance, then the other side gets braced for it and they deal with it. They don't get to, you know, I don't want to sound like I'm complaining. And then the other person is saying, yeah, but you're going to go ahead and complain.

If you say, I'm going to sound like I'm complaining. That's that two millimeter shift. The other person will listen and then say, well, those were actually some legitimate points. So it's a combination of the two things, each of which take practice. Like nobody automatically diffuses stuff in advance. Nobody automatically does. If you got to the point where you're denying it, you're actually a little bit further down the line, you're aware of the dynamic.

So now just shift from denying to recognizing. Yeah, I love that. I was asked to give a keynote to one of my corporate clients a couple of months back. And when they were briefing me, they did a great job. They were like, Jay, this audience we feel is just on the cusp, ready for your message. So they said, usually they're used to dealing with much more hard hitting speakers who are going to like pump them up and motivate them. But we want them to move into this soft emotional intelligence, meditation, peace space. And they said that they're probably going to have their backs up a bit when you walk in because they'd expect someone who's going to come in a bit more.

But we really want you to be the person who takes them in this direction. So I was like, I really appreciated that briefing because it was good for me to have that. So I walk in to this conference and I can tell what the person told me on the phone is immediately the truth, I get announced, I walk out on stage. There's a few cups, but it's not the warmest reception I've ever had in my life.

And I called it out, it was exactly what you said. I said, look, I know you all think that meditation is woo woo. I said, I know you all think that, you know, stillness and peace and all this stuff is a bit intangible and it's a bit random. But I promise you everything I'm going to share with you today is highly practical, tactical, and you're going to be able to implement it. And all of a sudden I could see people change. And what I was saying was true. I'm very tactical about meditation and I'm very practical about philosophy.

But the assumption people had was, oh, well, we just want someone to motivate us. And it was amazing. Like that felt like one of the biggest wins that, I mean, the presentation went off on a beautiful arc. I felt such a great rapport with the audience. And it's exactly what you just said. It was recognizing, and again, going back to your earlier point,

summarizing what their point of view was. And recognizing that that was okay. It's not that they were wrong. It's not that they were flawed or that they weren't smart enough. It wasn't condescending. It was genuine that they had certain beliefs about meditation and philosophy that could be true, but that I wasn't presenting it that way. ascending, it was genuine that they had certain beliefs about meditation and philosophy that could be true, but that I wasn't presenting it that way. Right. Yeah. So I love that. And it was

probably one of my favorite speaking experiences because it felt like such a challenge to have to turn it around. Yeah. And then it's highly satisfying in retrospect, right? And you did it with them invisibly, like they didn't know what happened. It just happened. Yeah, yeah, it was really special. When someone's in a relationship and they're like, I want to get my partner to do more personal growth. I want to get my partner to maybe it'll be open up to therapy. I want to get my, you know, and I hear this a lot, I'm sure you hear it too, but I hear a lot of people tell me, I want my partner to, right? They want their partner to become something or do something. How do you negotiate that?

And how should that person change their mindset in order to make it a healthier thing than a demand? The real fundamental issue is, is this a right relationship? Like is this behavior that's consistent with the things that you value and the things that they value? That's the first issue. My company gets coached on EOS. Jonathan Smith is our EOS coach. And I remember the first time we sat down with Jonathan, he said, all right, so what are your core values? I'm like, what do you mean? Work hard, be honest. What more is there? Learn.

You know, have a sense of humor. He's like, no, no, no, no. First of all, it's a little more complicated than that. Secondly, he said, then all of your relationships you'll find, ALL, business and personal, succeed or fail based on alignment of core values. I'm like, wow, wow, okay, that makes sense. So does this have to do with the relationship? Is the behavior change that you're seeking

from the other person consistent with the core values that you share? Now you don't have to share every core value, but you kind of need to share about 80% of them. And if the behavior you're asking for is really a disguise for a change in a value, it's not gonna happen. And the hard part is accepting that.

You can value someone, they can remain your friend. You can still have a positive relationship, but not that intimate relationship, not that lifelong commitment, which the vast majority of us are driving for. This great, phenomenal, collaborative, long-term relationship of trust. So what I would ask is for the person to say, does this fall within, do we share enough values that this is worth the trouble? And then the conversation is that I'm now talking about a behavior change that consistent

with the values that they hold. If their behavior change is inconsistent with the values that they hold, they ain't never gonna change. And we're both gonna be miserable. And we're gonna waste two to five to seven years of our lives. And hopefully the only upside will be,

when this is over, I'm smarter. Yeah, yeah. And some of this is, it's taken me a really long time to come to accept the reality of it, that we're not helping each other if we're not in the right relationship. You're not helping them, they're not helping you. And you can value them as human beings

and you can wish them well. So the first question is, is the behavior change I want consistent with the values that we share? Now you can start talking about it within that light. So, sounds like we share. Now you can start talking about it within that light. Like, so sounds like we share this value. Consequently, here's how I think we can manifest it together so that we have a deeper relationship. In that context, there's a conversation.

If it's about the other person being happier too, not just you being happier at their expense, but it's about both of you being happier together. Yeah. And it's really going to line up to what are the values? Yeah. I think you've hit the nail on the head. The, I believe the challenge is that we want people to respect our values because in some way we

disrespect theirs. So we want people to value what we value, because we actually don't like their values. And I find that that 20% you're talking about around where you don't have to have the same shared values, I think that's when you actually respect, wait a minute, they have a different value to me in this area. And that's okay. Let me learn to value that. And hopefully they'll learn to value my deferring value. And Hey, guess what?

We may not value the same things in this area, but I respect that person for their values because I understand how they got to there and I understand why they have that value and we don't have to have the same one. And I find that we're constantly... We feel like if someone doesn't have the same exact values as us and value the same exact things, then that we can't connect at all. Right.

And I feel like you're gonna run out of people, chasing people across the world, trying to find someone who values what you value in exactly the same way. Two people can value their family, but they could mean two totally different things. Yeah. I find that we need to get beyond this idea of my values are the most important and they're all that value. And if you don't value that,

then we can't get anywhere. Right. Yeah, I agree. And then, and then be curious about the other side's values. And then how has it added other side's values. Exactly. And then how has it added to your life? Yeah. My girlfriend, Wendy, again, she got relationships with people that she, and she keeps in touch with people she's known since she was seven years old.

I don't have those kind of relationships. You know, I haven't worked that hard at it. Some of those people are still alive, but I rarely talk to them. And she's really opened my eyes in so many ways to the value of these great long-term relationships, even with people that you disagree with, operationally. You're a Democrat, they're a Republican, whatever it is, but she's maintaining those relationships.

And there's a richness to her life that I have not maintained. That I see it manifest itself and you know, I want to learn from it. That's beautiful. The book's called Never Split the Difference. Do you ever split the difference? No, never. Never.

Not in relationships, not business. So here's a caveat though. There's a difference between splitting and blending. Okay. You know, maybe this is too cerebral of an analogy, but steel is 2% carbon, 98% iron. That ain't splitting the difference. What's the proper blend?

If there is a blend. So that what we come up with is a better product. Now a 2%-98% split in human nature would be like, oh my god, now! Or if I contributed 2%, I want 50% of the profit. Now you only contributed 2%. Well it doesn't matter that we're far more better off. So splitting the difference is not really about finding the best blend. Or then never split the

difference might also mean that you're 100% right and I'm 100% wrong. One of my favorite negotiations from Georgetown, husband and wife run a discussion over real tree versus artificial tree, Christmas tree. Husband wants an artificial tree for all the practical reasons. He thinks his wife is being unreasonable, unpredictable, too emotional about a real tree and he's a student. tree. And he's a student. So he uses, he thinks to get his way, a great label. Sounds like having a real tree meant a lot to you growing up. Because he's,

he's digging in deep. If somebody's, if somebody's really seemingly irrationally sticking to something, it's not in some reason reason it's not the last 24 hours. It may be 20 years ago. And so then she opens up and finally lays out all the reasons for the real tree. He realizes she's completely right. Her goals are much loftier and more long lasting than his are. They get a real tree. So Never Spit the Difference is also being willing to entertain the idea that the other side's got insight that you don't have and you got to be open to it and be willing to accept it, which is the same thing you want from them. It's just making this a two-way street. That's a great answer.

I love that. Chris, it's been such a joy talking to you today and I know that people, I hope, are gonna run and get the book, never split the difference, but you also have a documentary out that you're talking about, so I want you to share that with us.

Yeah, it just came out. It's called Tactical Empathy. It's on Amazon. We shot it with DNA Films, Nick Nanton, Emmy-winning producer. And it's really sort of about the history of the hostage sieges and how they turned out and what we learned from them. We collectively, you know, my son Brandon is featured in the documentary. There's a phrase,

empathy is a sneak attack on racism. Empathy produces better decision-making. And when Nick came to me about the film, I said, you know, there are enough law enforcement disadvantaged community problems that I think empathy is gonna go a long way towards solving, not all of them, just most of them. And if we can get rid of most of them,

that's a pretty good start. So we're going to categorize this is going to be designed to show how law enforcement hearing people out is going to tamp down a lot of the flames, if you will. So then we end up at about the same time I get approached by NYPD. They want me to come and do a training for they've got critical people that they want emotional intelligence training for. They want to plant a seed because they want a more effective NYPD, which is a more apathetic NYPD.

And I said, all right, so here's the deal. Let us film it for the documentary. And my son Brandon's gonna do the training, not me. You get us for a full day. Brandon is as good or better at this than I am. And the interesting additional feature is my son Brandon's mother's African American, effectively to the world he's African American.

Big boy, big guy, played lineman in college football. Sizable human being. The very kind of guy that if he got out of his car, will cause most police officers to think they got a fight on their hands, just by looking at him. He's going to do the training. And so we've got a segment in there of Brandon their hands just by looking at him. He's gonna do the training. And so we've got a segment in there of Brandon

doing this phenomenal training for these guys and showing them how empathy is gonna make you more effective, it's gonna build bridges in a community. Communities got problems with law enforcement that you didn't create. You stepped into this job trying to do the right thing. That doesn't matter of the baggage between the communities. You gotta deal with that.

So there's also, besides the history of the company and some pretty good hostage stories. That's brilliant. Then we're trying to back into police community relationships a little bit with the doc, and I hope it helps law enforcement get better training so that there's less problems with the disadvantaged communities. Yeah, that's fantastic. What's it called?

Tactical Empathy. On Amazon. On Amazon. Awesome. I can't wait to watch it. Sounds fantastic. Chris, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. We end every episode of On Purpose with a final five or a fast five. Each question has to be answered with one sentence maximum. So lightning round. Yeah, lightning round. We're in the lightning round here.

Just one word from bonus points. One word to one sentence. Yeah. You know, I get to proceed to the championship level after this if I get through it. Yeah, exactly. All right. So Chris Vaz, these are your fast five. So question number one, Chris, what's the best advice you've ever heard or received? Never take directions from somebody you wouldn't trade places with. Question number two, what's the worst advice you've ever heard or received? Oh, wow. You know, hang in there just to prove them wrong.

Third thing, how would you define your current purpose? Making the world a better place. Question number four, why is empathy not a weakness? Empathy is strength, empathy is reasoning, empathy is a superpower and it's got nothing to do with weakness. And fifth and final question we asked this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create a law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? Be nice first. Nice guys don't finish last. Yeah.

No, well, you don't gotta stay nice. It's gotta be nice first. Got it. I love it. Chris Voss ever on the book is called Never Split the Difference. The documentary is called Never Split the Difference. The documentary is called Tactical Empathy. I'm so grateful, Chris, for your time and energy. I hope we get to do this again. This was just the beginning of our relationship and I feel like I learned so much. This is definitely an episode I'm going to listen to again. And I highly recommend you all go and read the book because there are so many great insights, principles, tips, strategies and stories inside of it.

And of course, go and watch The Doc on Amazon, Tactical Empathy. Chris, thank you so much for being here. So grateful. It was a pleasure, Jay. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the key to growth

and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential. If you know you want to be more and achieve more this year, go check it out right now. You set a goal today, you achieve it in six months, and then by the time it happens, it's almost a relief. There's no sense of meaning and purpose. You sort of expected it and you would have been disappointed if it didn't happen. A new season of Bridgerton is here. And with it, a new season of Bridgerton,

the official podcast. I'm your host, Gaby Collins. And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton. Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix. Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to

catch a new episode every Thursday. Guess what, Will? What's that, Mango? I've been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we've done over 250 episodes, we don't really talk about murders or cults. I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy. We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money. And then of course, can you game a dog show? So what you're saying is everyone should be listening. Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

listening. Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.