9 Tools From a Hostage Negotiator That Will Get You a Raise | Chris Voss | EP 425

hello everyone I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024 beginning in early February and running through June Tammy and I an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the US you can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book out November 2024 we who wrestle with God I'm looking forward to this I'm thrilled to be able to do it again and I'll

be pleased to see all of you again soon bye-bye my favorite question actually is uh to ask in job interviews how can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to the Strategic future of this organization and it completely changes the outcome cuz that is not just what your skill set is for this particular job maybe they got a job you in the mail room and now you're somebody that says yeah not only will I do the little jobs to learn this from the bottom up but I want I want to make

everybody's life better I want to help everybody succeed now I'm willing to learn I'm coachable now it's a different [Music] conversation hello everybody I'm speaking to Chris Voss today an American Author teacher and hostage negotiator for the FBI we talk primarily about negotiation with foray into the into the psychology of listening the rationale of listening we're attempting to sort out and to clarify exactly what it means to negotiate successfully positing I suppose that the ultimate goal of a negotiation should be something like the establishment of a productive long-term generous Mutual collaboration and to expand even

that to understand that a good collaboration involves the joint pursuit of mutual desire let's say but also the joint pursuit of the ability to expand the understanding of what that desire might be across time that's how a relationship grows so we talk about how to do that we talk about about how to listen and do that concentrating as well on the fact that if you listen to people they'll tell you what they need and want and then you can be in a position to provide that and to be of utility in the long-term sustainable productive

generous relationship so welcome to the discussion so Chris let's start with this why don't you tell me and everybody who's watching and listening what it means to negotiate and let me put a little context around that you know one of the things I really noticed as a clinician was that people are remarkably bad at negotiating and they're not trained in it ever and so that really hurts people because it means that they frequently it means they don't know what they want they don't know what the person who they're dealing with wants and even if they

do know what they want they don't know when to talk about it they become bitter often about the fact that they're not talking about it and they have no idea how to proed and that's it's unbelievably common so tell me what you think negotiating means and how you got interested in it and also if that if that's how you conceptualize yourself fundamentally as as a negotiator or Communications facilitator yeah well for me to negotiate is to collaborate and find a better outcome uh in the early days I was always teaching the adversaries not the person

on the other side of the table the adversar is the situation and that if you're negotiating with and negotiating with versus against people but negotiating with somebody you're faced with two aspect different aspects of the same problem and if you can collaborate then not only might you solve the problem you might come up with a better outcome and I kind of backed into this uh because I wanted to be a hostage negotiator I didn't really know what it was about complicated it was going to be how satisfying it was going to be and I remember

I was on a SWAT team with the FBI and I wanted to switch over to hostage negotiation because I had a recurring knee injury and I like crisis response and I thought you know I could negotiate those I could talk to terrorist how hard could it be you know my son and I have always joked that divorc family motto is how hard could it be so stuff that looks really easy is often incredibly challenging so I volunteered on on a suicide hot hotline and then then which is just about listening to people and suddenly you

know you get a change in behavior in a very short period of time by listening to people and so that's and to to your point about people not knowing what they want in in point of fact I've learned it's impossible to know the best outcome because you don't have all the facts and so go in with an open mind and you probably discover something new and do it in a way way that the person wants to talk to you again and then then there's a long tale so that that's so those are some of the

high points I think okay okay so well let's dive into you mentioned a number of things here and I'll I'll outline them and then we'll delve into them sort of Point by point so you're paying close attention I worked with people I'm doing my best man I I worked with my clients a lot practically I did a lot of business Consulting I did a lot of work with people who were trying to develop their careers um I did a lot of strategizing around things like uh I wouldn't say raising people's salaries because that's not the

right way to think about it but helping them develop the skills and confidence to maximize their economic potential and to develop plans around that so and one of the things we could zero in on that might be of interest to people is for example is negotiating raay now you said that you want to collaborate and find a better solution that you talk with someone not against and that reminded me as well of the necessity of developing a joint Vision so let me tell you what we used to do in Practical terms when I was setting

someone up to have a conversation with their boss about advancement including arrays sometimes people don't necessarily want to to raise they want opportunity and they want advancement and the only way they can conceptualize that is as more money and so you have to get that straight too but so you know I said my principles were something like it's very difficult to negotiate if if you are not in a position to say no no matter what okay so I would make sure my clients had their CV well prepped that we had filled in any gaps that

they knew the job market around them and that they were ready and willing to look for another job if necessary so then they weren't terrified right they weren't taking themselves hostage exactly exactly because yeah and it also they it also meant they had a better sense of their actual market value right because that's something you actually need to do if you're going to negotiate for advancement or a raise it's like well what evidence you can't get a raise just because you want one everyone wants a raise right and you have to understand that you're manager

is dealing with financial constraints and the fact that everyone wants a raise so you have to make a case and then you might say you could make a case with a threat and one threat might be well if you don't give me a raise all leave but generally all you do is put people's back up with an approach like that you may need to have that in your back pocket just to make you confident but my notion was when I and I was dealing with people who either work credible or who had put themselves in

a position to be credible what they would deliver to the boss was first of all a statement of their value and a description of that because it's you don't know how much your boss knows about the work you do especially if you're one of those people who does your work quietly and well and sort of invisibly and that's even worse if you're agreeable so that other people can take advantage of your work and pretend it's theirs so the first thing you might want to do is make sure that your boss actually knows what you do

do without being chest thumping about it and then you might say what it is that you could offer if you were offer offered additional opportunity and that might be you know like the observation that if you don't believe that you're making what you're worth in the market that your motivation is less than it might be or that you don't feel that you've been valued by the organization and so if you had a pathway forward you'd be more committed to the Joint goal that you share with your boss and hopefully you have one in relationship you

have to make a case for what it is that's in it for him too and also or her and also ensure that if he has to go make a case to his Superior that he's completely armed and ready to do that so there was the de so you don't assume that you're in an antagonistic relationship with your boss and if you are and that's intractable then you know it might be time to think about either a radically new approach to your work or a different job job but if not you assume that you could present

him with a solution so anyways those were some of the ground rules that we established and so I'm kind of curious about how you might elaborate on that and what you think about that and yeah I love it I mean those are great ideas those are great great starting points and you know what I might add to uh the basis of that conversation like the the first p uh part about you know having a resume knowing what Market is not taking yourself hostage one of the things that I loved uh that I learned from being

a hostage negotiator is how to negotiate without a net um and my Harvard brothers and sisters would call that bat now what's the best alternative to negotiate agreement and that's so that you Release Yourself of fears that you don't take yourself hostage you can go in with with no alternative and have enough faith in the process to just be engaged to be curious to listen to discover the better outcome and so the Baton idea or the alternative's idea is is a good starting point if you feel like you're taking yourself hostage but what it really

is is it it's to create this psychological construct so that you don't freeze up so that you don't take yourself hostage and as hostage negotiators you know we just never theoretically we never had a bat you know you you got to make the deal you you you got to work it out and kind of get used to uh walking that tight RPP without a net and then it's no big deal but the principle to begin with is how to not take yourself hostage and that's a brilliant principle to start with okay what does it mean

give me some examples of what it would mean for someone in a practical situation or even in a dire situation to take themselves hostage and maybe a story or two about that and also some illustration of how you circumvent that that uh error yeah well it's like there aren't I don't have a better job I got to take this job and I'm coming out of uh you know I I did uh right after I left the bureau to sharpen up my resume and to create some better opportunities and I went to Harvard uh Kennedy School

of government got a masters there uh which is astonishing that they let me in uh you know very average bluecolor dude from the Midwest um and then afterwards um uh job market was horrible come come out of Harvard 2008 dep of financial crisis I mean not no jobs anywhere and one of my one of my colleagues is uh fellow students he's like look I I'm trying to negotiate for a job and I got to take the job there aren't any jobs out there and they're going to ask me what I made of my last job

and it's going to be half of what I need to make now and I can't answer that question and I said like all right so here's what we're going to do you you're going to you're going to go in with some great calibrated questions calibrated questions in my venacular Black Swan method is not questions to get answers but questions to create thoughts in the other side's mind open their brain up a little bit you you want to get completely out of the concept the fact that you don't have Alternatives doesn't change your value to this

company and and the fact that you don't have Alternatives does not change anything about their ability to pay you and how much you could contribute if you're the right guy that gets dropped into the right job and so you got to ask them what happens if you guys don't fill this role how can I be most successful for you and how am I supposed to accept a salary that's half of what I'm worth you know these are differential questions okay so let me let me let me ask you about that so one of the things

I want from someone that I partner with and this would include someone I'm hiring as well say as a peer relationship I want to know what agreement we can come to that I'm thrilled about that I know they're equally thrilled about and there's a technical reason that I want that I mean there's two sources of motivation fundamentally there's go in by negative emotion like pain and fear and there's enticement by positive motivation and that's usually associated with hope in relationship to a goal and so for the gentleman that you just described who's feeling constrained because

he only has one option which is take the job or leave it and he thinks the only option is take it he's he he still has a question to ask himself and this is a really profound question it requires honesty and the profound question is what circumstances have do I have to be do I have to have in place so that I can devote myself wholeheartedly to this job so so how can I exit the interview and accept this new job feeling that I have a landscape of opportunity in front of me and bereft of

resentment and that will require if someone's going to ask themselves that that will require that they prioritize their needs and wants and salary may be one of those things but you know you could imagine that there might be other ways of of even moving around that so to speak because you might be able to offer your new employer the following deal it's like well I'll take a starting salary that's less than I would regard as optimal or even necessary but I want to know that if I hit a certain set of Standards within a certain

time that there's a pathway to improve Financial returns that opens up to me that we all agree on and you tell the person you're negotiating with that the reason you want that is because like we're not playing around here we're trying to negotiate optimal motivation and I want to be able to assure you when I leave the motivation that I or the negotiation that I am thrilled with outcut and because who the hell wants to hire someone who starts the job feeling like they've been taken advantage of and and being resentful like that's a really

bad way to get things going okay so so so you pointed out that guy who thought he had to have the job still was in a position to tell his potential employers what it was that he had to offer to make a case for the value of his services and to point out what that is not only worth from the market perspective but also in terms of his own motivation yeah and and there's a fit issue too and it like any other relationship like a personal relationship you know business relationship close relationship significant other you

got you got to get a fit and my favorite question actually is uh to ask in job interviews every job interview and every annual review uh talk to me by a friend of mine is Tom maab extraordinarily successful guy CEO of an International Bank we uh we talked about this extensively we went to high school together his question is how can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to the Strategic future of this organization and I said before the calibrated question is designed to trigger thought that question immediately changes their perspective

of you when you ask it like you're telling them look I want to advance everybody's life here I want to play a big game I want to be with the people that are at the highest levels of performance in your company and I want to move everybody forward with that one question and it completely changes the outcome cuz then it's not just what your skill set is for this particular job maybe they got a job for you in the mail room but you want to you want to be the head of the division and you

want to know how to get there and you want to get there by succeeding in taking everybody with you now that's a completely that's a game-changing conversation that's a completely different conversation maybe they they they they thought they were bringing somebody in to push a mail card around and now you're somebody that says yeah not only will I do the little jobs to learn this from the bottom up but I want I want to make everybody's life better I want to help everybody succeed now I'm willing to learn I'm coachable now it's a different conversation

so tell say that question again well I'm willing to learn and I'm coachable and I want to make everybody's life better I'm doing a I'm doing a virtual keynote a couple years ago uh the CEO of the company and his entire sales team and we got a we got a a keynote going and one of his sales team literally asked me while he's on the on the call how do we negotiate with this guy to get more money and everybody's kind of holding their breath what am I gonna say am I gonna say in front

of him and I said ask him this question and it was a question that I just gave you how can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to our strategic future and when I said that question he interrupted and said I wish everybody on this call would ask me that did you notice that big tech companies today are masquerading as privacy companies just fix your privacy settings turn off app tracking and you're all good they say big Tech literally feeds on your information collecting and selling your data is in big Tech's

nature they can't stop themselves from looking at what you do online to protect myself against prying eyes I use expressvpn when you use the expressvpn app on your computer or phone you're hiding your unique IP address websites can't use that address to find out your real location or track what you do online on top of that expressvpn encrypts and reroutes 100% of your online activity so your internet provider Wi-Fi admin and hackers can't see it the best part though is how easy it is to use it just takes one click to protect all of your

devices one expressvpn subscription covers up to five devices at the same time so you can protect your entire family too that's why expressvpn is rated number one by CNET wired tech radar and countless others so today the day get the VPN that I trust to protect my online privacy when Big Bad Tech is at the door visit expressvpn.com Jordan and you can get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package that's exp rsvpn docomo to learn more absolutely well you know psychologically speaking so again with regard to motivation people live on Hope and opportunity

to a large degree and hope and opportunity are experienced in relationship to a goal and so to have hope and opportunity you need two things you need a goal and then you need to observe yourself walking on a pathway to that goal and so the lines that you just laid out there how can I be positioned I'm going to paraphrase it if I get it wrong let me know how can I position myself so that I'm in the company of and accompanying those who are moving forward to the destination the company actually wants to achieve

how can I make sure that I'm doing that well you said on the one hand you're opening up the vision of the people that you're speaking to and you're indicating to them very clearly that you want to be where the action is and you're going to be a part of that that but for your for yourself what you've done is you've opened up the door to meaningful engagement with the company now the price you're going to have to pay for that is responsibility like and that's why you can't use these sorts of questions as a

technique right if it's a technique you're a liar if if you've thought this through and that's what you want well then you're also the sort of person that anyone with any sense would want to hire because it's certainly the case that when I'm if you have any sense as a manager when you hire someone what you're actually doing them is offering a set of indeterminate opportunities and you're hoping that the person you're hiring is more qualified than they would need to be for the position that you're hiring them for now you may not re regard

that as a requirement but you're certainly hoping for it and the best conversations I have with people that I might want to work with or have work for me let's say are the conversations where where they clearly indicate that they know where the Enterprise is going and why they're perfectly willing to do the tasks that are part and parcel of the specified job but they've got an eye to the broader vision and then they have enough perspicacity and intelligence now and then to contribute perspicacity come on now I'm a regular guy from there you go

there you go yeah yeah you went to Harvard you should be able to have a perspicacity so and then then you know you're you're well if you surround yourself with people like that then you always have people who are looking out for where you're going with fresh sets of eyes and who are offering opportunities for you to go there too and that speaks to the idea that you had that a negotiation is a collaboration you know and you might say well I'm not collaborating with my boss it's like well if you're not collaborating with your

boss you well that's it well if you're not you should think about if that's your problem or his problem or both your problems or maybe it's time really to go look for some greener pastures exactly right cuz if it's if it is an adversarial relationship all the way to the bottom and you're being forced or compelled to do things you don't want to do against your wishes then you're not optimally situated in your life now I know that sometimes by necessity people can be stuck in situations like that for some period of time but man

you need an Escape Route like you need to plot an Escape Route if you're in a situation like that yeah yeah and and I like to touch on something else you mentioned just real quickly and talking about that you know when you ask that question that you really mean it I mean we've had these discussions in my company and with the people that are running my company and who were hiring and one of the thing we make clear like if if you come work for me you're going to work hard we're going to work you

hard you got to want it and the phrase that I'm using now is pressure makes diamonds but you got to want to be a diamond and we're telling people that up front you want to be a diamond we're going to take you there but you got to want to be a diamond and you got to you got to willing be doing the work and you want to Coast um you want it to be you know something you do when you're not at home all right there jobs out there like that but it ain't with me

you know pressure makes diamonds you got to want to be a diamond yeah well one of the things I would also do to prepare with my clients to prepare them for movement forward was to work through the blind spots in their Vision let say in the knots in their life that might be interfering with their desire to be a diamond you know because people people will also misconstrue that they'll think well I don't want to work too hard it's like you're not thinking about the work properly if that's your attitude because first of all if

you love what you're doing you might really want to work hard and if you don't love it that means you don't really see the point you don't see the end goal you don't see the value in it and then you know maybe you do see the value but you're lazy and UND disciplined and maybe you have your rationals for that too and so all that needs to be worked through you know because I I do think that first of all most of the meaning in people's lives comes from the adoption of voluntary responsibility and most

people do actually want to be diamonds but they're afraid of the work and they're also afraid that it's going to be imposed on them right and they're going to be forced into it and they don't have a vision of their own and so one of the things that everyone who's listening and watching might want to understand is that before you go into a job interview you know you might want to have done some serious thinking about just exactly why it is that you want this job and if the answer is well I need to pay

next month's rent like fair enough you know but that is not a good enough reason that's not a vision for your life and that's not the sort of vision that's going to make you a compelling interviewee because you're shallow right you haven't thought through why it is that you're going to do what you're doing you know we have this program online called future authoring and it helps people develop a vision for their life and so the game is this and you can think about this as preparation for a crucial job interview it's like imagine yourself

five years down the road okay so here's the game you can have what you want but you have to specify what it is and then someone might say well you know I don't really know what I want and fair enough cuz that's a pretty vague Global question but the program then asks people seven questions it's like what would your relationship look like your primary relationship your marriage if it was functioning the way that you would want it to what about your friendship what about your business relationships are you educating yourself how are you going to

do that how do you keep yourself in mental and physical shape what are you going to do with your time outside of work you know um how are you going to serve the community so those are and so that's starts to differentiate it right and then the game you play there with yourself is okay under what conditions would I be motivated to pursue success in those areas you know and people are scared of this because partly because they don't want to reveal to themselves what they actually want because they might betray themselves or be betrayed

by the world and partly because they're afraid of the responsibility and they don't have enough Faith but it's impossible to hit a Target that you don't aim at and and then you might say well why is that relevant to a job interview and there's a bunch of reasons is that if the job interview goes well and you actually start to have a discussion rather than just a staged interview if you have a vision for your own life you're going to be able to see if this job will work for you and that also puts you

in a good position in the interview because you pointed out earlier as we were talking that you know even in a job interview that's a negotiation and the reason it's a negotiation is is cuz well you want the job but hopefully they want you and you're the right person and so really the interview should be establishing the preconditions for the collaboration that you described rather than you know pulling the wool over some idiot's ey so that they'll hire you so you can slack off which seems like a pretty damn dismal vision of what your life

might be right yeah agreed agreed and and thinking those things through I mean we've interviewed I've had some interviews for assistance of my job recently uh that were cut short because the people that were doing the interviews uh didn't know what company they were interviewing for they got it mixed up and like all right so there's a certain lack of degree of preparation here thank you very much for your time right right yeah yeah well you know because yeah well you're going to ask yourself aren't you if someone comes in and they don't know what

it is that you do or what they would do then the first question that would come to mind is something like well then what do they know because that's so that's such an elementary error that it that it well that it's essentially catastrophic well that's an indicator of what they're going to put into the job how you do anything how you put that's right it's well what they what they already did put into the job because the the most important task they had as a potential highe was preparation for the interview and if they failed

that well that's not a great start and then that's especially true you know another thing for everybody watching and listening to think about too is that it is the case that first impressions are lasting there is a very long and dense psychological literature establishing that you know and so you want to be prepared enough in the interview so that people walk away from talking to you thinking geez you know it'd be a good thing if we got that guy and certainly you're in a much better position to do something like celer negotiation if that's the

impression and the valid impression right that's another thing is this can't be look man if you're going to start your new job on a stack of Lies you've you've you've already ensured your failure in some fundamental sense and so if you're afraid before you go into the interview that you're not prepared you want to get prepared so that you're not afraid like that so that you can go and you can admit your inadequacies honestly as long as they're not so you know absolutely multip there's not so many of them that you're obviously not the candidate

for the job so hey Jordan I'm GNA have you coach me on my next job interview you talked about listening yeah okay so tell me tell me about that and about paying attention and tell me how you learned why that was so important and tell me what you learned about how to listen wow all right so actually listening as opposed to staying silent um it accelerates a process and you need you need a set of tools to keep you on track to dig into the information without the other side feeling interrogated and that was really

what I learned way back when On The Hotline um you know I get there first day we get into the training and I remember the thing that struck me first was they said all right your calls are Li limited to 20 minutes and I remember thinking like what 20 minutes you got to be kidding me like you know on TV they're on the phone with people for hours if not days and 20 minutes and they said no as a matter of fact if you actually use the skills correctly uh it'll take less than that and

so you get taught a set of listening skills on how to dial in and the clues of what to listen for and then how to get the person interacting with you without making it feel feel interrogated and suddenly there were astonishing changes in behavior in the person on the other side you get somebody on a phone who's genuinely suicidal and 15 17 18 minutes later they're in a good place and they're ready to go back and take on the world based on the experience so and then I started learning some of the science after it

you know science pseudo scientist I'm you know I'm I'm I'm a Layman I'm not a scientist but in our capacity our capacity to hear words exceeds the amount of information we can keep in our head but the amount of information in your tone of voice is going to tell me more than the words are so how I learned to listen was the words are the starting point but the tone of voice at a body language and what's the alignment and then if there's a shift in the alignment in that moment you know to look for

it and then anticipate I know now that you're uh you as a human being you uh in general terms the negativity is going to Cloud your thinking more than anything else so I'm listening for those negatives and from the hotline and now what we do in a Black Swan method how do I deactivate those negatives to clear your head or even anticipate them so it's supplied emotional intelligence and and then why listen because the CH what we would call hostage negotiation change of behavior and in business negotiation or personal interactions you changing your mind as

to the best outcome is going to come much more quickly and effectively and in a lasting way than if I talked you into it or if I misled you you know I I want the I want whatever agreement we come to to be durable to last without me having to come back to you daily to see where we are and that's what listening is really about understanding the nuances of what's now backed up by Neuroscience and what people in hostage negotiation and you as a practitioner in a field of human nature for years came to

learn was the reality of how human beings think and how they react yeah well you said um you want to negotiate a durable solution and that means one that will sustain itself without you having to come back and so you could you could put it this way uh barring you can become a micromanager because you have a certain obsessiveness of character let's say and a certain intrinsic distrust and then that's something you should work on but you can also become a micromanager if you negotiate a very bad agreement with someone because if you've talked them

into it or force them into it then and they feel that they've been taken advantage of then their heart won't be in the task and what that will mean is that they will be looking for Escape Routes all the time instead of doing what they're supposed to be doing and that you'll have to go back to them in the most frustrating of manners and use up all your valuable time and energy trying to enforce a stupid agreement that you shouldn't have made to begin with you know and this is part of the problem you said

you know you don't want to talk someone into something now that's not the same as informing them about an opportunity that they might not have conceptualized in laying out a different route but really what you're aiming for is voluntary agreement like full voluntary agreement and right part of the reason and and you touched on this part of the reason that listening is so necessary is because if you listen to the person you can find out and help them find out what it is that they actually want and how that could conceivably be delivered to them

and you know you might think the person already knows that but it's not necessarily the case you know people think well they're talking and in fact that's how most people think period is when they're talking and it also means if no one's listening to them they almost never have an opportunity to think you know you can imagine like even if you're running a restaurant that I shouldn't say even it's very difficult to run a restaurant if you're running a restaurant you're hiring a dishwasher one of the things you're going to be concerned about is whether

that kid is going to show up to work because absenteeism in entry-level jobs like dishwashing is rif and the probability that the guy won't show up is pretty high and so that drives restur Alters mad so what you want to find out from the dishwasher at least in principle is how can we get you here 15 minutes early every day it's got to be a serious question it's like I want you to think about this for a minute you're you're 15 let's say you're you got your entry level dishwasher job it's like under what conditions

would you be pleased enough to come to this workplace so that you actually come and what impediments can you imagine that might arise and how can we set the situation up so that that probability is decreased and that is all you want to know from the kid that what he thinks might sideline him so that you can circumvent it if possible and obviously the same thing applies as you scale up the sophistication of the negotiations how can we make this work that's a good guideline for a successful negotiation not how could I come out of

this ahead that's such a stupid way of looking at a situation because it's temporary right if if I screw you over while we're talking because I'm better at verbally manipulating you and I think you won't take that out on me Opportunity by opportunity as we move forward into the future I'm an absolute bloody damn fool exactly yeah you're going to take it out of me you're going to look for outs or even when problems arise you're just going to keep silent you like ah you know what I I know people will hurt you by doing

nothing and you don't want that to happen either the Black Swan technique that you referred to tell me about that well it's a collection of the emotional intelligence skills that started with hostage negotiation there were eight FBI hostage negotiation skills and I I came out uh thinking like you know there's some adaptability here after after I went through um the Kennedy School I was looking if I got into Harvard Law school's negotiation course as a student when I was an FBI agent and I work with some brilliant people there Sheila Heen Doug Stone Bob manukan

Bob bordone brilliant people and I just did my hostage negotiation thing while I was going through the course and they said to me you know you doing the same thing we are the stakes are different but the Dynamics are the same so I thought all right so I'll use these FBI called them active listening skills Harvard called them active listening skills we had made them very definable very practical very usable because when you're teaching skills to cops if it's not usable and practical and clear like you get booed off the stage fast they want to

pla practical stuff and when Harvard really gave me the green light like this stuff works I started teaching at Georgetown afterwards my son Brandon was a critical part of the development of those skills and we just took the eight skills we made them we got them nine now made some slight tweaks in some of the thoughts as we appli them to business and personal life but it's a collection of emotional intelligence tactical empathy skills that work because the way human beings are wired um worldwide just they work on a lyic system the which is the

emotional components the circuitry the wiring and the brain that everybody has by virtue of the fact that they're human and it pretty much operates the same regard less of gender ethnicity religion geography diet because you're human we are experiencing a lot of global instability as we plunge into primary season how are you protecting your family in the midst of all this chaos the fact is there is one asset that has withstood famine Wars and political and economic upheaval dating back to Biblical times and that's gold it's not too late to diversify an old Ira or

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skills and you mentioned that there are there were nine components to that is it possible to walk through those nine sure yeah and I think a better term these days is really proactive you know you're anticipating you're paying really close attention you're understanding how the person is wired and you're understanding how what sort of neurochemical changes take place when you feel understood I stand up in front of a group of business people on a regular basis and I'll say to them how much time do you have for somebody who's not listening to you and they

don't have any time for it now they'll they'll test them a little bit they'll interact shortly but somebody's only pitching or somebody's only got answers it doesn't even matter how good those answers are because if somebody's not listening at some point in time they're going to need an adjustment and if they're not listening they're not going to make that adjustment you know salesperson counterpart of any kind you come up to me with the perfect answer maybe you got four perfect answers you're most interested in giving me your answers as opposed to hearing me out first

I I I know at some point in time you're not going to have a perfect answer and if you haven't been listening you're not going to catch it and we're going to have some real problems so you start showing how you listen uh uh intermittently proactively then it's really going to accelerate our conversation and I know that when there's a problem you're going to catch it instead of me having to come back to you after the problems become very damaging it's about anticipating and staying ahead of the game in general terms part establishing a relationship

P yeah instead of selling you know I went out to sell 20 years ago probably out of Academia I I was still practicing as a professor but I also started to sell some products that I had designed and I had the wrong idea about sales really to begin with I had a solution to a a set of problems that I thought were rif in the business world and I wanted to convince probably with evidence that the solution I had developed was going to work and it was a hiring solution but what I didn't understand it

took me a while to understand was that I was actually introducing a problem into the mix because they already had a way of hiring and so if they were going to switch to me there was a lot of retooling that needed to be done and I didn't actually know what their problems were and so I learned eventually that there was no such is selling there was the establishment of a relationship and also the feeling out it's like if you go talk to someone in a given company it isn't necessarily the case that they're going to

want what you're buying you got to figure out what their problems are and one of the things that's really cool about that too is that if you're entrepreneur oriented and you've made a product and you go out and you try to sell it to 10 people and they don't buy it but all 10 of them tell you about a different problem and all of them have it you now know what your next product could be at least in principle because you know where the actual Marketplace problem is and I learned after that that software designers

for example who have a track record if they're designing a new piece of software they do it in collaboration with their customers they build a bit of it they go ask them you know how do you think about this does it solve the problems that you have and if they say no they modify it like there's a constant dialogue between the market let's say and the producer you don't build build a better mouse trap and have the world beat a path to your door you do it in collaboration and and if you can get people

to tell you their problems then you can be the person who can work with them for a solution and then they're going to be pretty damn happy when you show up for a sales call right so and you talked earlier about iterability too you know that you you want to make sure that you've conducted the conversation so that the person would like it if the conversation happened again and that is the that's like the definition of a relationship like you have a relationship with someone with whom you would like to continue the conversation indefinitely and

the great salespeople they're relationship managers man that's what they do and they have their Rolodex full of the people they know and they listen to them they don't go sell them junk that doesn't work to rip them off to make a quick buck and vanish that's what Psychopaths do and it's not a very good strategy so all right so you talked about proactive listening and you give the person an opportunity to lay out what they have to say what what other steps are associated with this nine step process well it's kind of it's nine tools

as opposed to nine steps uh the step you want to gather information and establish a relationship simultaneously now most people think you do one or the other hey how are your kids where' you go to school uh uh what do your kids do your kids in Little League the small talk that's people the this Common Ground thing which is it's for C players um common ground in my opinion is was designed initially like if we got similar Common Ground then ideally you understand where I'm coming from but in point of fact it's highly inefficient look

at your siblings how much more common ground could you possibly have than with the people you grew up with talk about common ground of geography ethnicity diet religion as much as possible and how many family gatherings around holidays or Screaming matches that's what common ground will gets you but people really want to know is do you understand what my problems are do you understand my perspective do you understand where I'm coming from so if I dial in to start out understanding and feel you out and I'm going to say seems like this whole process has

frustrated you seems like there's a reason that you're struggling with this you know I'm I'm actually I'm taking emotionally intelligent educated guesses and I'm listening now that gives me gets me into an information gathering process and relationship building process simultaneously instead of one and then the other which is highly inefficient which is why this ends up being a much this indirect route ends up being much faster I'll look at you and I say look look it seems like you're having a good day if you look like you're having a good day I don't I don't

I don't ask people how they are I make a guess as to how they are based on what I'm seeing because that tells them right away I'm dialing into you I'm seeing you as you are I'm not trying to make you something you're not that gives me an advantage right off the bat I get I get help in airports and in places where people are constantly interacting with people in customer service faster than anybody else does because if I see the the lady behind the counter at LAX who's clearly worn out and distress by the

last five people that were demanding and I walk up and I go like seems like it's been a tough day she's helping me right off the bat I don't walk up and say how are you today as if I'm trying to make her happy I'm I'm I'm letting her know that I see her as a human being and I'm I'm started off much faster with far less friction by paying actually paying attention to people with this proactive listening set of skills than than than other people you're putting yourself in her position really and by using

non-verbal cues and so forth to to occupy the same conceptual space that she has right well and I was thinking too while you were saying that you know that you're also approaching cuz if if you're selling something you might think that you're goal is to sell like the product right but you see the thing is too you don't know if that's your goal because you might not want to establish a short medium or long-term relationship with the person that you're talking to you might really want to but you might not to you might not be

the right vendor for them you might not be offering a solution to a problem they have they might be a psychopathic son of a that's unlikely but it's possible like it could be a real problem well and also especially if you're dealing with big companies you know if you enter into a sales agreement with a company so you've hit a home run from the monetary perspective you can easily end up as the employee of someone you don't want to work for right so you have to be very careful and so one one of the things

I try to do this with my podcast is like we haven't talked before and I want to get myself in the headspace before the podcast like well who is this person like what is it that they're up to you know and why have they had the course of success that they've had it's a the the encounter in some ways is open-ended it's like I I'm here because I think something might arise out of this that's positive but I'm not exactly sure what it might be and so I need to know what they want for sure

maybe more than anything else and then I want to see if there's something here for both of us that we couldn't accomplish on our own and and then that it also stops you from using the club say if you're a sales if you're selling or if you're negotiating and and that's a very ineffective way of moving forward anyways people hate that fundamentally and they get resentful and bitter about it and so okay so you you try to put yourself in another person's position and that's not a technique again you're doing that by actually paying attention

and there's a bit of an open-endedness about what it is that you're that you're aiming at and how you're going to go about it so you have the proactive listening element you have the close attention um you're not too concerned with that sort of formulaic small talk that might establish a False Consensus or similarity and that can easily become manipulative okay so what else what else yeah well then I'm going to tease out you know never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn't take something better which is a little bit of the

point you were making a moment ago what do you really want from the person what what do they like friend of mine Joe polish has a phrase don't deal with people who are half and Joe says half is hard annoying lame and frustrating they suck the life out of you and they're very inefficient and they make your life miserable so I'm I'm gonna want to try to find out what kind of person you are how good of a match we are how our core values line up because I want a long collaboration is prosperous for

both of us now you might not want that and you're entitled to not wanting that but then I'm entitled to move on because I want to find somebody that wants that well and you also definitely want to figure that out because if that's your goal because that is the establishment of a productive gener generous collaborative goal oriented relationship that's mutually desirable and you want to let the other person reveal themsel because you don't want to delude yourself even as a consequence of your own verbal ability you don't want to delude yourself into thinking you've established

the kind of relationship you wanted and find out that you were wrong that's another reason to listen it's like you want to be sure you you got the picture yeah so you know what sort of thing you're stepping in to right right and and I I know it's going to sound very harsh but when I was teaching at USC had a female come up to me to class and she's like you know there a lot of employers out there that want to pay me less because I'm a female if I got an employer that's paying

me less because I'm a female how do I negotiate a better deal and I said all right so I'm going to ask answer you as if I was your dad and you just asked me hey the guy I'm in a relationship with treats me badly how do I get him to treat me better my answer to you is go someplace else there are plenty of places you want to be somewhere where they value you and if their core value is to pay you less based on your agenda they're going bankrupt anyway that's a bad strategy

they're going and you don't want to go down the tubes with it so you want to be someplace where somebody values your work don't try to fix a bad employer any more than you try to fix a bad significant other there's somebody out there better for you and you're far happier and far more productive and have a far better life by moving on so if the person whether you're in sales or whether it's your employer if their core values don't line up with yours they're entitled to their core values move on and line up with

a team that's going to move you farther ahead in your life than anybody else that doesn't line up with you ever would you said that you shouldn't try to fix a bad employer you know in the the managerial literature indicates very clearly too that you shouldn't try to fix a bad employee so two relations I like your thoughts on this but well absolutely well so first of all it's not easy to fix someone and um it takes a long time it's a dubious Enterprise and they need to be bloody well fully on board with that

and willing to make the appropriate changes and the probability that you're going to have an errant employee with a history of bad behavior and that you as a manager say with 20 people to ATT to are going to make substantive changes in that person's basic psychological makeup while the evidence suggests very strongly that you're just not going to and all the literature I read that was at the crossover between the clinical and the managerial suggested that you spend all your time as a productive manager with your best people and what that also implies is those

are the people that you hire you know and with regards to firing people which is also a kind of negotiation you know I had this friend who's one rough guy and companies used to hire him to fire people and I didn't like firing people and I still don't and I asked him how he tolerated the emotional stress that came along with that and he said that he liked do doing it and I said what do you mean you like doing it cuz that was just like outside of my wheelhouse but I I knew this guy

and I respected him and he said look I go into companies and I find the people who kiss up and punch down I find the people who take all the credit I find the people who don't distribute any of the benefits I I find the manipulators I find the people who are lying about their motivation or even who are just in the wrong place doing something they shouldn't be doing and I let them know that I see what they're doing and I'm pretty damn happy when they leave and I thought hey man fair enough you

know and the negotiation there like if you do have an employee that isn't performing well part of the negotiation there is to say something like look it should be evident to both of us that there's something that isn't right about what's happening here and we could drag this out painfully Kicking and Screaming bitter and resentful for the next 15 years or we could just like cut our losses and maybe you could go find something that would suit you and you know I've seen this in my clinical practice cuz I had lots of people who came

to me in the aftermath of being fired and of course that was often almost always to some degree devastating but it wasn't that uncommon for people 6 months later especially if they actually did try to put themselves back together to be immensely relieved that they no longer had that particular noose around their neck yeah there's so many reasons why the severing of a bad relationship is good for better for for both parties and who has to do the severing is often a hard part I was involved in trying to let somebody at a charitable organization

go a number of years ago affiliated with a church and I'm going to the minister of the church for guidance and I'm expecting him to say to me because this was a great man man's name was Arthur calandro minister of marble Collegian Church New York City phenomenal human being one of the best guys I've ever known and I thought Arthur was going to counsel me on you know guidance and you know all the stuff I expected and he looked at me and he said there's no gentle way to cut somebody's head off and I thought

wow you know and for Arthur to tell me that was the reality of business relationships personal relationships like if it's bad for you it's bad for them too and they're going to be better off you if they're half for you if they're hard annoying lame and frustrating you are for them too so you're not doing anybody a favor by hanging on to a bad relationship it's hard to separate and in many cases uh the jolt that comes from it leaves both sides much better off yeah well I know I know a phrase like that too

I I don't know if this was something specific to Northern Alberta but um if you have to cut the tail off a cat you don't do it an inch at a time yeah well said yeah that's rough but but it makes sense all right so we wanted a fair ways through the the nine um tools that you associated with proactive listening is there more to flesh out there well they're mostly the different skills label it's is a verbal observation it sounds like there's something on your mind sounds like what I just said it's causing you

hesitation there's something we refer to as a mirror that's just repeating one to three-ish words of what somebody just said it's not the body language mirror it actually really opens up people's thinking paraphrasing you're kind of putting yourself in a position to come up with a great summary for the other side summarize their perspective if you can summarize the other side's perspective the two of you are on the same sheet of music there's calibrated questions what and how questions that are designed to cause somebody to think about somebody I might say in in order instead

of me saying to you like look you got to take action because the status quo is killing you instead of if I want to put that thought in your head I'm going to say what happens if you do nothing how are you better off by failing to address this problem you know those are two different questions designed to uncover the same thing which is point out pointing out to you the the the the comfort of inaction I think Kennedy made some uh saying statement about that the long range con uh consequences of comfortable in action

far out way addressing the problem that's an absolutely crucial point I mean one of the things that and this is an impediment to negotiation in in marital relationships constantly and it's a absolute killer you know like I don't like conflict but I learned something a long time ago and I learned that conflict delayed was conflict continued and multiplied and so if I have an issue with my wife I'm I would rather ha you know I read a paper yesterday I really lik this paper it was really smart they were doing uh fmri scanning looking at

activation of pain systems in relationship to other people's pain and there's quite a variability in that so people high in trade agreeableness who are easy to get along with and who who are sympathetic and empathetic but who can be easily taken advantage of by the way that's one end of the distribution the other end is disagreeable people who can be callous and hurtful blunt now slightly somewhat disagreeable managers by the way are more successful and many people who seek therapy are agreeable people who are being taken advantage of so the fact that you're empathetic and

sympathetic is not a virtue without its vices or dangers the brain research revealed that the more empathic people had a larger degree of pain activation in the pain systems when they saw the pain of other people okay so now if you don't like conflict part of the reason you don't like conflict is because if you see the person you're having conflict with in pain you're going to mirror that pain so that's uncomfortable and I'm an agreeable person so if I see someone in pain it strikes me to the core but I learned that if I

deferred conflict then it's like the cat with its tail being cut off an inch at a time it's like we don't have the blowout and so we're minimizing the pain in the present but we're radically prolonging it across our iterated interactions and so it's much better just to call a spade a spade and to say look I see the elephant under the rug I see the snake's tail you know poking out from the cabinet we're going to sort this out right here and now and we're going to we're going to straighten it out and that's

going to be delving Into the Depths and there's going to be discomfort in that but if we can nego if we can identify the problem and negotiate a compelling Mutual solution we don't have to have this problem anymore and man it's such a you know I saw couples all the time who had the same bloody fight every day for 30 years you know it's just that's hell and it much better just to have like the discussion even though that's that inaction you know that that you pointed to that you described Kennedy as pointing to it's

the classically speaking even theologically there is much more stress placed on sins of commission right things you do that are clearly wrong but avoiding doing something right that does people in man especially if they do that repeatedly and they do it cuz they don't want to cause trouble cuz they want to avoid conflict it's like there's no avoiding necessary conflict is a downward spiral yeah yeah it ends up you end up having your discussion in divorce court right for $200 an hour right while your bank accounts are drained making the lawyers Rich yeah yeah lawyers

buying a new car we're keeping the argument going yeah now you said when you were trying to circumvent the proclivity for inaction you'd ask questions like this is something I used to do when I was talking to people about say negotiating for a raise if they were resentful about their current situation something like that one of the things we would do is say okay think about how you feel about the situation you're in right now okay now imagine yourself 10 years older you're in the same position okay except you're 10 years old 10 years older

yeah you bet man you've put yourself through an lot of misery for 10 years you're weaker because you've backed off right you're more bitter you're more hopeless you're suffering from more pain like think about that like empathize with that future person and tell me what you do in the present to avoid that fate people would think oh my God you know that's the last thing I want because everyone thinks well I'll deal with it tomorrow but you can say well you you haven't dealt with it for the last 5 years and how's that going for

you like would it have been better if you would have dealt with it 5 years ago and now you know stretch that out 10 years into the future see cuz that's so such an interesting thing to do because the person has this impediment of the conflict in front of them that's causing them to be afraid and what you do is you swing that behind them it's like getting the devil behind them get the behind me Satan I think it's the right word it's like right right this is the thing you're afraid of but you should

have a different fear pushing you forward that way more profound and that would be the fear of the consequences of inaction right and how do you get people when when you're doing that how you said you ask them open-ended questions is that how you get them to explore and realize the costs of inaction yeah the F the first one is the the what and how questions I can trigger you into a really a very sort of narrow confined mental state without you feeling it's narrow or confined I can put you right there with a what

question or how question you know one of one of my favorite ones these days is if somebody whatever they doing for a living and if I ask them what they do for a living they're going to give me pretty much of a Canan response I help people do this or uh I help people do that or they're going to they're going to give me a memorized response it's not a conversation first time I did this I'm I'm at a Hollywood party a couple years ago fundraiser for Forest Whitaker I believe uh and uh and I'm

talking to one of the self- involved people there force a great human being by the way phenomenal human being and but I'm talking to the self- involved guy and I don't want to hear a self-involved conversation so instead of asking him what does he do for living I go what do you love about what you do for a living now what I've done with that what question is I have put him right Square in to a part of his brain focused on love and he transformed in front of my eyes and I saw him light

up so you know I took I took the what question and I put him right there and he he lit up and he started talking to me about all the things that made him come alive as a human being and it ended up being a really satisfying question now it's one of my stock questions in nearly any interaction because I want to find out about what you you're about what are you into it's going to give me my my core your core values almost right off the bat in a very quick way every now can

you ask what people are afraid of well same way or do you focus on the positive now you bring no you're bringing it you're bringing in the secondary point which I know I know you know that many psychologists many uh human nature practitioners believe that everything we do is motived by either love or fear so I can I will also ask in a business context when I'm trying to find out out what the motivations are I'll say what are you afraid of happening here because then now I've got them in to a different headp space

and I know that fear is a very substantial significant motivating factor in people's lives I'm not going to wield it like a weapon I'm going to want to become aware of it with you in a collaborative way and I will ask a question is very similar to that in business conversations when we're talking about what whether or not we're going to collaborate because I need to know the fears are going to drive you the love is going to drive you but fear has a tendency to overcome fear of loss of you know a limited number

of fears they'll overcome the love if you're not careful so I want to know what the fears are so I can map out better how I can help you well I would say you know if if you're having a conversation with your wife and it starts to get choppy this this probably occurs in any conversation I suppose what what the way you would construe that from a psychoanalytic point of view is that you're starting to encounter resistances right the person doesn't want to move in that direction maybe that's even a direction that you jointly had

negotiated would be desirable at least in principle but then you do want to find out okay what are the obstacles what are the fears because the fears will become obstacles and if they're not cleared out they'll be in visible barriers to progress right and it's so interesting you know when you when you get people to lay out what they're afraid of and then what they perceive as obstacle sometimes merely letting them describe what it is that they're afraid of will make the fear evaporate because they realize that that's a fear that applied in a different

situation or that you know that they've actually grown out of Without Really noticing or that you've already established a pattern of behavior that indicates that they don't have to be afraid of that from you and you know sometimes you can have a dialogue about that and clear away the obstacles but often listening is sufficient to clear those away by itself you know these active proactive listening skills that you have been discussing many of them have their roots in Carl Rogers work you know ah yes of course yeah absolutely well absolutely abely absolutely he was really

quite brilliant at detailing out the preconditions for a conversation you know and that that uh other point you made about mirroring and summarizing that's really that's that's one of the only things I've ever really discovered that actually works in some ways as a technique now it still has to be honest but there is almost nothing more useful in a conversation than keeping track of what it is that the person is saying and then at the right moment saying here's what I think you just said you know compressing it because that's also a favor to you

because you could remember it then but also to them right to to compact it in a in a in a more elegant casing let's say and it's such a relief to the person it's a mark of respect because it shows that you've been paying attention and it's such a relief to the person because they now know that you have decided their concerns are sufficiently worth attending to that you actually did in fact pay attention right exactly when you're negotiating with a hostage in a hostage situation what because that's a high stake situation what what have

you found has had the most effective consequence is it is it listening like what do you do in a situation like that that that would be different perhaps or or the same for that matter that you would do in a business negotiation or marital negotiation yeah well to some degree every interaction that somebody's frustrated with where they've chosen an action that's adverse to some degree there's an element of driving them of not being heard I'm going to deactivate the the adversarial responses to some degree either a little or a lot just by making them feel

hurt and whatever I don't deactivate is going to get us down to the real issues it's going to separate the wheat from the chaff if you will so I'm going to start listening right off the bat and I'm also going to start listening for you know what what's a deep-seated problem here and as you said before you know identifying the elephant in a room often makes the if it doesn't make the elephant disappear makes it diminish far much more and then the the negativity that we talked about and you mentioned the fmri scans it's been

shown consistently in a number of fmri studies that simply describing negativity diminished it every time now the degree it diminishes it changes but it diminishes describing it labeling it calling it out not denying it not explaining it just describing it always moves you closer to the deal always now how much it moves you partly it's cuz you know partly what happens is that imagine you're being chased by something one of the reasons you're afraid of it is because you observe yourself running now imagine you turn around and face it you've instantly signaled to yourself that

you have faith in the part of you that's looking at the problem and that will immediately produce positive emotion and diminish negative emotion it's unbelievably reliable and the the psychophysiological transformation is systemic like it's been mapped from the literally from the level of DNA upward so there there's a complete you're it's like you're inhabited by a different Spirit when you're running from something that's chasing you and when you turn around to confront it and so if you do that collaboratively you also indicate to the person let's say if you're the person is terrified they're the

hostage taker but they're still terrified at the situation they've got themselves into if they see that you're brave enough to face the reality of the situation going to trust you a hell of a lot more than they would otherwise and so you do indicate that by listening so what kind of situations have you been in on the hostage front that that tell me a story if you would about one of the situations that you've been in where where were you able to put what you know into practice and how that how did that turn out

yeah well I was uh very early in my career I was lucky enough to be involved in a bank robbery bank robbery with hostages which while it happens in the movie all the time in in the real world it's a very rare event usually the bank robbers are long gone for the police show up and there's almost never a situation where there's a negotiation of bank with hostages it happened in New York City early in my career and it had been 20 years since one had happened in New York City prior to that that's how

rare they are and they were there were there were two bank robbers inside one guy was a highly manipulative person who figured all along that he could he could outwit everybody and he actually demonstrated a lot of techniques that I would refer to as a great CEO negotiator he was constantly diminishing his influence on the inside he we got on the phone with him early on he was like these guys I'm in here with they're more dangerous than I am as a matter of fact I'm afraid of them it's like a CEO saying like look

I can't make this deal because my board's going to fire me you know I I don't know I I don't have any influence in my company I'm a figurehead that's an important guy the guy who's diminishing their influence has a lot of it and doesn't want to get cornered and that's exactly what this bank robber was about now I gently confronted him I was a second negotiator on the phone and I was coached into some gentle confrontation by the NYPD Lieutenant Hugh McGowan brilliant guy he said I want you to do this this and this

and I want you to confront this guy on his name first chance you get because this guy wouldn't even give us his name what happens when you give up your name when you give someone your name you agreed to influence and if you ref refus to give your name voluntarily then you're holding a barrier up and this guy had refused to give us his even his first name all along and about 5 hours in when when I was called in to be the next negotiator on the phone we'd figured out who he was was and

Hugh said you know I want you to brace him with his name you know not not uh accusingly but let him know that we know who he is and see what happens triggered a bunch of changes he immediately first went and got a hostage and put her on the phone to show us that he still had live hostages inside without making a threat I'm talking to him and suddenly this female comes on the phone she says I'm okay and and I'm completely caught off guard and he takes the phone back away from her and it

was his way of reminding us he had hostages without making a threat because he was smart enough that he knew that if if he tempted fate too much there's a pretty good chance that a sniper would take him out he didn't want that he wanted to figure his way out I gently confronted him on a couple of other things it was definite confrontation but it was gentle he hands off the phone to the other bank robber who does not want to be there this guy is more concerned with surviving than getting away and I dial

into him very quickly and just with what I often refer to as a late night FM DJ voice about 90 seconds into my conversation with this guy he says I trust you and two hours later he was surrendering to me outside of the bank what happened to the other guy who was more manipulative and smarter and More in control well he never right up to the last minute about 12 hours into the scenario he got talked out now the the second bank robber comes out explains everything to us about what's going on there aren't seven

people inside there aren't seven bank robbers from different countries there's one guy left in yeah even though he still won't admit what his name is that is the name that you have so we get back on the phone with him and and uh now I'm out of the game because I'm debriefing the guy surrendered to me next negotiator up is a hostage negotiator named Dominic MSO NYPD negotiator that in to to this day and Dominic has since deceased but Don Dominic was one of the world one of the world's great closers Dominic was a closer

and he just gently narrowly kept taking ground away from the the other guy that was inside and his first conversation with him was gentle confrontation he said all right so we've got your partner out here we know who you are we know what's going on what do you want me to call you and even being told that we had his name this guy comes back and says call me Billy which is not his name Dominic is smart enough to go like I'm not going to get into a fight with this guy over his name he's

like you want me to call you Billy okay I'll call you Billy Dominic continue to talk to him we start working on this guy to come out so what does he do to continue to maintain control inside and buy himself time he lets a hostage go he's got three of them inside he's got hostages you know he's got spares and he knows that if he lets a hostage go the chances of us assaulting the building now diminish radically and buy him more time so he lets one go and finally he lets another one go and

the irony of this guy's nature and not collaborating with us no matter what was when it came down at the end while we're pressuring him to let the third hostage go he agrees to come out just to spite [Laughter] us and these type of situations a human being trapped into a in a foreign environment which is not their home we call it unprepared uh un un unprepared for he's not prepared for long Siege in a bank that he's walked into first thing in the morning he's not going to be able to get a good night's

sleep he's going to start running out of gas at about 12 hours in it's just the nature of human beings and almost exactly 12 hours into the siege he agrees to come out and he is looking around uh I can I can see the images in my head right up to the moment that we put handcuffs on him he was still looking for a way out and interestingly enough while he was inside the part of the bank was under construction so what he did was he took a lot of the bank money and he set

it on fire in the middle of the floor and then he hid a lot of bank money in the construction in the walls OB obviously with the plan they're not going to miss the hidden money in the walls they're going to think that it was all burned up I'm going to be able to come out of here when I get a CH uh come back here when I get a chance when I'm out on bail and I'm going to grab the spare money and I'm going to get out of here that that's how he convinced

himself that it was finally okay to surrender I want to maybe close this up with two questions and they're somewhat interrelated when we first started talking and obviously all the way through this I noted that you have a very you you mentioned you brought this up this FM radio voice and I I noticed immediately you know not that this is a testament to my uh my powers of observation but that you have a very calm and measured voice and a patient voice as well and so and then so I want to talk about that and

then I want to talk about something potentially Associated um and that's the role of let's say deception versus truth in negotiation and sales you know the amateur salesman that I've met and Bean for that matter I wouldn't I never used deception so that's not exactly true but the amateur salesmen that I've met who think that an appropriate sales Venture ends with you know you as the brilliant manipulator convincing the idiot who's made the purchase that he needed something he didn't need are perfectly willing to use deception and they regard the outcome as the victory but

my sense has been that a negotiation that you can't obtain with truth is one that's very unlikely to have any lasting staying power and it also has complications like that are just going to multiply like man but I'm wondering you know even in these tense situations that you're in how do you view the relationship between truth and deception in negotiation and then I'm interested too in the relationship between that and the the communication pattern that you have developed the voice that you use the the Cadence you know the calmness how much of that was practiced

how much of it is practice things can be genuine too but you but I'm I guess I'm trying to differentiate you know Persona from from what's genuine and I'm I'm trying to see that in the relationship between deception and and Truth in negotiation yeah well I I'll start I'll start on the first one deception first um deception is always a bad idea and you know my currency is integrity now if you deceive somebody they're going to find out and the invitation to deceive you know in a hostage negotiation world they're going to attempt this because

number one they're better Liars than we are anyway so they're going to since they're better at it they're going to spot it right away so then you just fail the test and secondly they're going to find out and then your your credibility is gone if they find out that you're a liar before they they come out people get killed and one one of my favorite conversations favorite I mean it was I'm working a kidnapping in um in the Middle East and it looks Al-Qaeda got a gentleman and uh I'm talking to the uh gentleman's Widow

to be and uh his boss uh the hostage was Paul Johnson and we want the uh the woman that were just darar there completely sure al-qaeda's going to kill him on Deadline and it looks that way that that ends up being what ends up happening and I want her to go into the media and do an interview before it happens and Paul Johnson's boss great human being is watching out for this young lady and is not exposing her to harm and protecting her as much as possible and he looks at me and he says if

she does this is this going to save her husband's life now I don't think it's going to and I look at him and I say this is probably not within reach and he said I didn't think so I just want to see if you're going to lie to me we'll do whatever you want and so I you know I I in despite what the Temptation was you know my core value core values are what you would still do even if it costs you and I was willing to risk her collaboration over my integrity and it

ended up increasing the relationship as a result and and that's the dynamic in in life I mean people want to know that you'll tell them the truth they want to know that you're a straight shooter they want to know if there's bad news you're not going to hide it from even by there's deception by Omission okay so you didn't say anything you still no and so I'm I'm a very strong believer that deception by commission or Omission will always cost you far more than sticking to your integrity ever will how did you learn that wow

yeah no kidding you know I think I you know my father was a uh was a hard man and his integrity was extremely important to him both my both my parents were that way and I think I I I had the drilled into my head as a core value growing up and then I think I probably made a mistake a couple of times and behind besides the values that my parents gave me uh I think I I screwed up a few times and paid for it probably so let's sum up here a little bit if

we can so and I'll I'll do a little bit of it and maybe you can do a little bit of it filling in where I miss so if you're negotiating with someone you're trying to find out what they want and you're honest about what you want and you're trying to formulate a joint vision and plot a course forward for both of you that you're both very happy about and that you would abide by voluntarily and if you're very fortunate that's going to be a long-term reciprocal relationship that's pretty good summary you're good at this summary

stuff and so you you want to find out too if the person that you're attempting to play with let's say isn't interested in that kind of outcome and so part of the reason you listen to them is to find out what they want so that you can negotiate that outcome that you desire and that hypothetically they desire but you also want to find out if that isn't what they want so that you don't waste your time or theirs and you don't NE you shouldn't regard that as a failure because you weren't there to convince them

anyways you were there to find out if there was something you could jointly do together and then and then the the the tricky part the hard part is there's a better outcome no matter what when uh when I was working on the book never split the difference and my son Brandon very involved and working with t RZ who who's the writer tall RZ is a genius writer and we don't have anything in it about goal setting and and we said like look here's a problem with a goal you quit when you get there and the

first problem or you get close to it you quit you give up ah you know close enough so you quit ear and then the other thing is since since we live in a in a world of imperfect information that means that there's something better beyond your goal and you'll miss it if your goal focused it that your goal becomes blinders you miss better opportunities and and so we want to leave stuff about goals out of the book entirely and tall's like no no no no you don't understand human beings need goals so okay and we

can see it right so what we're going to say is your goal is to exceed your goal and that's what you jump into a negotiation with and that's how you come uh to better outcomes with people right right right that's a well that's a great place to end like that's a that's a that's a very um that's a very successfully negotiated solution to the problem of the problem with goals because you were both right right we can't live without goals but goals are provisional and so you have to the Buddhists know this to some degree

you have to hold on to what you're pursuing even with a light touch because you don't want it to be an impediment to what's better and you don't want it to be finite and you know this is actually part of the reason that you're trying to negotiate a relationship with someone because a relationship is a sequence of mutual goals and if the relationship ship is conducted properly that the expansiveness of the goals increases across time right and then that can happen in an unforeseen Direction so part of the reason you're trying to find out who

this person is what their problems are what that they want is to establish the relationship that allows you to pursue proximal goals in a way that allows you to expand your vision of goals across time right and that can be indefinite if the relationship is good right so that's right my favorite phrase well all right sir that was good and so for everybody watching and listening um first thing I would say is it's very good thing to learn to negotiate and and the things you heard today about making sure there's someone in it for the

other person you know that might even be your primary goal when you're trying to establish a relationship with someone else you know that doesn't mean you take yourself any less seriously but man the more there can be in it for the other person the more you can bloody well be sure you know with in the bounds of justice that the negotiation the settlement that you're aiming at is going to be sustainable so that's and then you don't have that concern on your mind and that's a really good deal and so and you should be encouraged

to negotiate to the end that you most truly desire right again keeping the other person firmly in mind or the other people and it's a great skill to learn and concentrating as we've discussed on listening to the other person you know they'll tell you how to provide them if you listen enough the other person will tell you how to provide them with what they want and that is a bloody good deal and you get there from listening and so if you do that with everyone you meet you'll never run out of people who want to

collaborate with you they'll line up and that's a great deal for everyone especially if you're you know if you have integrity in your offerings and you're playing a straight game so it's not going to work anyway anyways if you don't yeah all right sir so I'm going to continue this conversation on The Daily wire side of things um for half an hour I'm going to find out um what's motivating Chris and how that developed across time and uh we're going to delve into that I'm very interested in you know how people are motivated by call

and conscience let's say to end up not only pursuing the things they're pursuing but also have ended up successful in that it's good to see examples of that so that you know from those examples what to do and what not to do so we'll we'll delve into the background to everything we talked about today on The Daily Weare plus side and in the meantime thank you all for your time and attention thanks very much for talking to me today it was quite the pleasure and uh we'll take a bit of a break and everybody watching

and listening well thank you for tuning in thank you for your time and attention and to the Daily wire plus people for facilitating this that's always much appreciated good to meet you sir a pleasure thank you [Music]