It's an Inside Job

Mastering Difficult Conversations: Strategies for Effective Negotiations.

• Jason Birkevold Liem • Season 4 • Episode 23

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Do you find yourself avoiding difficult conversations or feeling anxious during negotiations? What if developing self-awareness and mastering effective listening could transform your negotiation skills? If you're ready to explore these concepts, this episode is for you.

In this episode, we explore the importance of self-awareness and resilience in difficult conversations and negotiations with our guest, Moshe Cohen, author of "Collie Wobbles." Moshe shares his expertise in negotiation and mediation, highlighting how internal narratives impact our decision-making. We discuss strategies for overcoming common pitfalls in negotiations, such as avoidance, rushing, and giving in too easily.

Imagine engaging in negotiations with confidence, understanding, and resilience. 

By listening to this episode, you can:

  1. Enhance Self-Awareness: Learn how questioning assumptions and managing fears can lead to more effective negotiations.
  2. Develop Resilience: Discover strategies for facing conflict and uncertainty with self-efficacy and self-compassion.
  3. Master Listening Skills: Understand the importance of deep listening and the techniques for reflecting back to confirm understanding and build rapport.

Three Benefits You'll Gain:

  1. Improved Negotiation Skills: Gain practical strategies to overcome avoidance, manage fears, and engage more effectively in negotiations.
  2. Enhanced Listening Abilities: Learn the listening triangle concept and techniques such as reflecting back, paraphrasing, and reframing to improve communication.
  3. Increased Self-Efficacy: Develop self-compassion and manage emotions to face conflict and uncertainty with confidence and resilience.

Bio:
Moshe Cohen has been teaching negotiation, leadership, conflict resolution and organizational behavior as founder of The Negotiating Table since 1995 and as a senior lecturer at Boston University's Questrom School of Business since 2000.  As a mediator, Moshe has worked to resolve hundreds of matters, and also coaches executives, managers, and individuals on leading others and negotiating effectively. He is the author of three books - Collywobbles, How to Negotiate When Negotiating Makes You Nervous; Optimism is a Choice and Other Timeless Ideas; and The Optimistic Pessimist: More Timeless Ideas.

Moshe Cohen:
Linkedin:        https://www.linkedin.com/in/moshecohen/
Instagram:     https://www.instagram.com/mediatormoshe/
Website:         https://negotiatingtable.com/

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Transcript


[0:00] Music.


Introducing "It's an Inside Job" podcast on resilience


[0:09] Back to It's an Inside Job podcast. I'm your host, Jason Liem.
Now this podcast is dedicated to helping you to help yourself and others to become more mentally and emotionally resilient, so you can be better at bouncing back from life's inevitable setbacks.
Now on It's an Inside Job, we decode the science and stories of resilience, into practical advice, skills, and strategies that you can use to impact your life and those around you.
Now with that said, let's slip into the stream.

[0:37] Music.


Introducing Moshe Cohen and his expertise in negotiation and leadership


[0:45] Hey folks, thank you for joining me for another episode, and here we are at the starting line of a fresh new week.
Today I have the privilege of hosting an exceptional guest, Moshe Cohen, whose expertise extends far beyond the realms of negotiation, leadership, and conflict resolution.
Masha is not only an accomplished educator and mediator, but also the author of the enlightening, book, Collie Wobbles.
Now, Collie Wobbles isn't your typical book on negotiations.
It's a profound exploration of our emotions and the profound impact on every facet of our lives.
In this brilliant book, Masha delves into the intricate interplay between our emotions and decision-making, emphasizing that unchecked emotions can hinder us not just in negotiations, in every life situation.

[1:33] As the founder of the Negotiating Table and a senior lecturer at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, Moshe has a profound impact on countless students and global corporations, with an act for resolving conflicts and coaching executives to become exceptional leaders.
He brings a unique perspective to our conversation. So in today's episode, we will unravel the wisdom within Kaliwobbles as we explore practical strategies for dealing with overwhelming moments, navigating our internal narratives, as well as mastering the art of active listening and embracing the choice of optimism as a catalyst for personal growth.
So it's time now to kick back, put on that thinking cap as we slip into the stream with my brilliant long-form conversation with Moshe.

[2:19] Music.


Introduction to Moshe, a Negotiation and Mediation Expert


[2:29] Hey Moshe, very big welcome to the show. I really appreciate that we could make this happen.
Perhaps we could kick off this episode by you introducing who you are and what you're about.
Thank you, Jason. First of all, thank you so much for inviting me to this podcast.
So I do, as you say, a number of things.
I teach at Boston University. I'm a senior lecturer at the Questrom School of Business where I focus on negotiation, leadership, organizational behavior and mediation.
I've been in the negotiation and mediation field for a long time, since about 1995.
That's when I got trained as a mediator, and started mediating, and started teaching about a year later.
And aside from negotiation and mediation, I teach in companies.
I do a lot of corporate training in leadership, communication skills, conflict resolution, change management, stakeholder management.
But what I'm most known for is the negotiation and mediation stuff I do.
Prior to that, I was actually in physics and engineering. So I have a little bit of an eclectic background.
I started off in physics and then went into electrical engineering, focusing on robotics.
And I was a roboticist for about 11 years before going to business school and discovering the whole mediation and negotiation field.

[3:46] And I guess your passion is where you are right now, where you've landed.
Yeah, and I think it's so nice to have found something that I both enjoy and I'm really good at compared to what I was doing before.
I was always an okay engineer, I was never the best engineer in the world, but I feel like I found my calling in what I do now and it's a really nice place to be.
I'm really glad I discovered who you are through your book because I really didn't know about your book.
That in a second is just through other guests I've had on the show where we've talked about the ability to negotiate, mediate, and in general have challenging conversations to find that courage. And time and time again, your name came up and the book Kali Wobbles. And I thought, okay.

[4:33] Since all these high caliber people are speaking about this book, I have to hunt it down. And here we are today, Moshe. So I really appreciate your time. I was wondering, maybe we can continue the conversation by you just defining what Kali Wobbles is. They're large international listeners and it's a very special word in English that's not used very often. Perhaps we could just start there and define that.
Yeah, what's interesting is it is an unusual word and even most native English speakers have never heard it, which really begs the question of why did I pick it? And I think I picked it just because I really liked it. So, collywobbles literally means tummy ache, but it's used more commonly to mean that feeling of anxiety or nervous you have before you have to do, And the reason I picked that word is because.

[5:30] When you look at how people feel going into negotiations very often they have that hit in their stomach those butterflies because it is a very anxiety provoking nerve wracking kind of process and.
They have the callie wobbles going into it so when i pick the name for the book i call the callie wobbles how to negotiate negotiating makes you nervous and the reason i wrote the book, Was because i realize that we're spending a lot of time teaching people skills and strategies and then they go to use them and something would get in the way and usually what would get in the way of themselves so i figured unless we can help people get over their cali wobbles and learn how to manage their emotions in real time while they're negotiating we're not really doing anything useful.


The Importance of Internal Conversations and Self-Confidence in Negotiation


[6:12] And that's why I want to jump into you because you know, when we had this pre-meeting, you actually mentioned you wrote the book for yourself in a way of maybe articulating your own thoughts and emotions around your own challenges and such, or to some extent writing the book.
For me, and I think from what I also listened and read in your book, is that we have to have two conversations when it's a difficult conversation or a negotiation or mediation, whatever word we want to use.
The major one is the one we have to have with the other person on the other side of the table and in the room. But the first one is with yourself, is trying to find the self-confidence and the courage to actually have these difficult conversations. And perhaps we could spend some time sort of exploring that and understanding sort of the internal weather system, the internal mechanisms that go on in our own head and try to get on top of that through the practice of what we can call it self-awareness or being in the here and now with our thinking and in our emotions and our behavior.

[7:12] So I completely agree with you. I don't know if I would even say that the primary conversation is the one across the table.
I think too often, the.

[7:24] Thoughts that we have and the process to go through in our own minds dominates and actually prevents us from having that conversation across the table if you think about you know someone going to negotiate for something that makes me anxious let's say i'm going to approach my manager for a promotion or a raise or i'm going to approach my landlord to ask for a rent reduction Those conversations that I have in my head before I even approach the other person are sometimes so pervasive that they prevent me from even getting to the table.
So if I think, oh, my manager is going to get angry with me for asking for this now, or my manager is not going to like me, or somehow I might get punished for this, or maybe I'm just not ready yet, maybe I'm not good enough, maybe everybody else doesn't think that I'm as good as I think I am.
So many conversation like this in our own minds, prevent us from even approaching our manager. So we never have that primary negotiation to begin with. So it's really important for us to become more aware of what we're saying to ourselves, as we start even thinking about going to negotiate and to manage those internal conversations. So not only can we start negotiating, but so we don't sabotage ourselves as we do it.

[8:43] And you know, when people going into a difficult conversation, a lot of their times, their focus, their attention is wrapped up sort of sometimes externally, like where they're cognizant, they're, they're wrapped up externally as to, okay, I want to be honest, and I want to be benevolent. And how do I balance these two sort of moral imperatives. But sometimes, from my experience, people, they lose track of actually what, as you called it in the book, the narrative, the narrative that's running in the background of our heads, that's driving our emotions that are driving our behavior. Is this something that you experience people are so occupied with the conversation or how to deal with the conversation, they don't even realize the internal narrative that's driving their emotions and their behavior?
Yeah, I think you hit on something huge, as prevalent and as important those internal narratives are, we're often not aware of. We are telling ourselves a lot of these things subconsciously, because we are so focused externally. But in the background, they're undermining our ability to be effective. So for example, if I think of myself as a nice person, but I'm also a manager and I have to give one of my direct reports a difficult performance review, where I have to tell this person that they've done some things poorly and they need to up their game, If the whole time I'm thinking.

[10:13] I'm a nice person, and I don't want to hurt this person's feelings, I might not be aware of that, but it might cause me to, for instance, not say some things I should say, or soften what I say in a way that the other person doesn't even understand that I'm criticizing them, or at the first sign of emotional reaction from them back off and not press my point.
And I might not be aware that I'm driven really by these internal narratives, but they're there and they're running the show a lot more than my conscious brain is.
So, I guess that begs the question, how does one become cognizant or aware of their own narrative?
I mean, where do we start to sort of, I don't know, unwind things, to unpack this thing we call the narrative?
Maybe could we start describing what actually a narrative is in our head and how it shows up from your experience?
Yes, so I think as human beings we tell ourselves stories all the time, human beings tell themselves stories all the time, we tell ourselves stories about ourselves, we tell ourselves stories about the other party, and we tell ourselves stories about the situation.
So, for example, if I'm negotiating with a vendor, I might be saying to myself, we are a big company, this vendor is lucky to do business with us.


The Power of Narratives in Negotiation


[11:41] That might cause me to be very arrogant or hardline in this negotiation.
I might be saying, oh, you know, this vendor has a really hot commodity, and they're not going to negotiate their price.
And now I might be talking myself out of even trying to negotiate the price.
I might be talking about the situation. I might say, well, there's a shortage in the market for this vendor's goods, and I might be lucky to even get the goods, let alone be able to negotiate favorable terms.
So, we tell ourselves these stories all the time, and these stories have a profound impact on how we feel, what we do, and how we interact with other people.
And the way to get a handle on our narratives, because I'm not naturally very self-aware.
I wish I could tell you that I came from this incredibly emotionally self-aware kind of place, but I didn't. The word my wife used to describe me for a long time was oblivious, and if she were here She probably would still use that word, but you know, she's downstairs.
So the way you need to do it is you need to find opportunities to stop and slow down during, and in the middle of the process, because what I find is, for example, when I'm coaching people in their negotiations, a lot of times I'll say, right, let's stop.
What are you telling yourself right now?

[13:10] Now in that case they have the luxury of having someone like me actually telling them to stop and asking them that question but theoretically there's no reason why we can't do that to ourselves.
So one of the things that helps is if you promise yourself and schedule breaks during the negotiation where you can step away from the table.
And actually think about things like, what am I doing, why am I doing it, what am I telling myself right now?
And then once you become more aware of your narrative, more aware of the stories you tell yourself, then you put yourself in a position where you can start managing those stories.
You say to yourself, what is the impact of what I'm telling myself?
What do I actually know? What data do I have? That's become one of my favorite questions lately.
So when someone tells me their story they say all this person will never agree to blah blah blah i'm like alright what do you actually know and it turns out most times we actually know very little.

[14:17] And we take little bits of data that we have. We connect the dots with a whole lot of assumptions and imagination, and then we build our stories on top of those assumptions.
And when you stop and ask yourself, what do I actually know?
Very often, you realize that a lot of the story you told yourself was just pure fiction.
And then the last part is, it's your narrative.
These stories exist entirely in your own mind. So, that's actually a good thing, because since you own them, you get to change them.

[14:54] So, for example, if I go to negotiate with a very large company, some of my clients where I do training are, you know, 30, 40, 50,000 person companies. I'm a company of one person.
And I could very easily go into that negotiation thinking, I'm just a little guy, I'm going to have to accept whatever contract they send me.
Well, if that's my story, I'm done. I have no ability to negotiate anything.
But I could also approach that situation saying, there's thousands of negotiation teachers in the world.
And of all of those teachers, they picked me.
And that must mean they want me. Which gives me some leverage here.
And it's okay for me to negotiate terms that are favorable.
And in fact, if I don't do that, they shouldn't have any respect for me.
Because I'm teaching them negotiation.
And with that narrative in mind, I'm now really motivated to try to negotiate favorable terms.
Nothing's changed except the narrative.

[16:04] That's interesting because you if we rewind back what I hear is it's almost the to be form it's a label at the heart of the story that we are relating to ourselves to the world around us or to the negotiation whether it's power dynamics or whatever it is what I hear is to be I am dot.

[16:24] Dot dot that sounds like what we label ourselves from what you're saying that will trigger our our emotions. For example, that will trigger self-confidence or self-doubt, that will trigger us as powerless or being in power or having some influence. And then that in itself triggers the behavior. So the I guess the head leads to the heart, which leads to the hand. And so is this what you're saying part of the narrative is sometimes understanding how we finish the sentence I am in a particular situation, if we're going into a difficult conversation?
Absolutely. As I say, I think it's a little broader than that because I think it's I am, but we also have stories about the other person and we have a story about the situation.


The Impact of Other Person and Situational Narratives


[17:05] So it's not just I am, it's this person is and the situation is. Because when you think about it, sometimes it's not I am, it's a seller's market.
Right? That's not about me, that's just about the market. It's still a narrative that impacts my behavior.
So yeah, very much so. I think the biggest part of the story is the I am, which I really like that you brought that up.
But you shouldn't neglect those other stories, because sometimes we're so focused on this person.

[17:35] Oh, you know, my boss is a tough negotiator. Well, you know, you just psyched yourself out, but it's not about you, it's about them.

[17:45] Yeah, because those narratives actually become the rules of engagement we set up for ourselves.
And as you said at the top of this conversation, if we're not cognizant to the narratives we're telling ourselves or the rules we're setting up, then we will play by those rules, whether it enables us or disempowers us.
And so what I hear you saying, Moshe, is there's sort of almost, if I get nuts and bolts, just to sort of be a little reductionist here, is there's the I am story, the labels we give to ourselves.
Is the this person is story. Again, another to be form on the third story, maybe the situation, the situation is manageable, the situation is unattainable, or whatever it is. So these are almost three stories. And so when you are working as a coach or as a professor or as a sparring partner, as a negotiation professional, is this part of the DNA, you help people to kind of stop up and say, Okay, wait, what's the meaning you're giving to the situation?
Or what's the labels?
Is this how you break it down?
Sort of piecemeal? Yeah, it's one of the tools that we talk about, because...

[18:50] You know people in order to negotiate effectively you need to prepare you need to come into the negotiation knowledgeable you need to have skills.
But you can't use the information you prepared and you can't use your skills if you're constantly undermining yourself by.
Responding more to the stories in your head than to what the other person is saying or doing.
So yeah, a lot of what I talk about with people is understanding what is going on in their minds on their side of the table, so it doesn't become an obstacle, and then they can use all of their skills and preparation to negotiate as effectively as possible across the table.
So, you know, negotiation, like many things for humans, is actually a very highly emotional process. We don't like to say that. Like, we like to think, okay, yeah, it's a rational process. And we have arguments that we've built and we have, you know, alternatives that we've set up. And all that's true. There is a lot of rational thinking around negotiation. But humans are emotional. For example, we bring a lot of fear into our negotiations.


Fear as a Negotiating Factor


[20:07] So many people negotiate out of fear, and having fears isn't bad. I mean, all creatures have fears, right? It's what keeps us from running into the street. It's what keeps us often from doing really silly things.
It's letting the fears dominate and define our behavior.
That's when things get bad. And very often you find that the fears and the narratives are very closely related because the fears come from what we're telling ourselves.
And when we're negotiating, we very often will have three categories of fear.
One of them is a fear of tangible hurt.
If I push to raise my fees, I'll lose the client. Something bad will happen.
If I don't agree to take this action, the other side will retaliate against me.
The second fear is a fear of relationship damage. I can't tell you how many people have said to me, I want to ask my boss for a raise but I'm afraid of damaging the relationship.
And the first thing that comes to mind is, if you can damage the relationship with your boss by asking for a raise, there's already a problem with that relationship.
You.


Overcoming Fear of Damaging Relationships in Negotiations


[21:28] And the likelihood of you damaging the relationship with your boss by asking for a raise is minuscule.

[21:39] Either your boss will say yes, or your boss will say no, or your boss will suggest something else.
But will your boss hate you for asking for a raise?
If that's the case, you should start looking for a new boss.
This is not a healthy relationship. But our fear, our fear of damaging relationships is huge.
And completely disproportionate to the likelihood of it happening.
And the third category of fears is a fear of emotional pain.

[22:08] I ask people, okay, tell me about a negotiation that you did where you felt bad after.
And everybody has stories.
Oh, I gave in too quickly, I left a lot of value on the table, I never negotiated my starting salary, I got taken to the cleaners by the car dealer.
Everybody has stories about negotiations that made them feel bad.
We don't like feeling bad.
Or I was negotiating with this person and they yelled at me, I was negotiating with this person and they started to cry.
There's lots of ways in which we can feel bad about our negotiations.
And it turns out we tend to move away from pain. We don't like feeling bad, we don't want to damage relationships, and we're afraid of something bad happening.
And when we let those fears dominate us, they drive our behavior in a number of ways.
Probably the number one way they drive us is they make us avoidant.

[23:11] I'm afraid of doing something there's a good chance i'll avoid doing it so i see that a window office opened up on my floor i want to ask my manager if i can have that window office.

[23:27] But i'm afraid that my boss will see me as arrogant or somehow unworthy so i dilly dally and i avoid it and i postpone it and somebody else gets that office and now i have regrets.
Or, you know, I need to have a difficult conversation with someone, but difficult conversations are uncomfortable, right?
And difficult conversations are really a subset of negotiations.
And I avoid having that conversation.
And what doesn't get better tends to get worse over time. And whatever behavior I should be trying to address isn't being addressed.
And bad things happen. So avoidant behavior is very prevalent, and it's driven by our fears.
The second thing that happens is, because we're uncomfortable, even if we engage the other party, we rush through the negotiation.
It's like if we're doing something we don't like, we try to rush through it to get it over quicker.
And speed is never your friend when you're negotiating. Well, I shouldn't say never.
Mostly, it's not your friend.
And when we rush, we make mistakes. When we rush, we don't notice what's going on around us.
When we rush, we miss opportunities.
We don't observe the other party.

[24:47] So very often, rushing through things driven by our fears will cause us to be a lot less effective.


How Fear Causes Avoidance, Rushing, and Giving In


[24:56] And the third thing that happens as a result of our fears is we give in too much.

[25:01] We're afraid of damaging the relationship so we make concessions that we may not have needed to make to make the other person happy when they would have been perfectly happy without those concessions or we give away value in order to prevent the other person from retaliating when they were never going to retaliate to begin with.
So, our fears can actually cause real damage to us in negotiating by making us avoidant, by making us rush, by making us give in.
And very often when you ask people, where do your fears come from?
It comes from a narrative.

[25:41] I went kayaking the other day, and it was kayaking in the ocean, and there was one segment that, from what I'd looked, I went with a friend of mine and we looked at this, the maps, it looked very scary. I mean, it looked like there were going to be all sorts of weird currents, and like, there are shipwrecks have happened over there. And I had built this up in my mind to be just, you know, the kraken coming out of the ocean and swallowing me alive. And with a lot of help from my friend, we kind of pushed through that. And it was fine. It was just.

[26:21] Ocean and we kayak through the waves. It was fine. But the degree to which I'd built that up in my mind was by, you know telling myself over and over again all these stories about the shipwrecks and the, And the currents and and the waves crashing onto the rocks and what's gonna happen if that happens to us So we tell ourselves these things and then we repeat them over and over again They become a reality and then they drive our fears and that in turn drives our behavior So, it's kind of what you were saying about the head eventually driving the hand.
Yeah, from the head to heart to hand. You know, because what I hear you saying, Marsha, like just in that kayaking tour is that you had some sort of narrative that you're building, you're stressing yourself out, feeling whatever concern, anxiety, overwhelm, whatever the emotion is.
But I think what was really good was that experience. She is a good teacher, because what it does, it allows us to see the before, I mean, like afterwards, you're thinking there as you're putting away the kayaks or what have you.
Okay, before I was fearful to whatever extent, but this was the actual experience.
And so that experience, that can color and that can help correct our assumptions for the next time.
So we come in with even more experience.

[27:41] And I just want to trace back, because you said there are three major fears you've talked about, the tangible hurts, the relationship damage, and emotional pain.
And all of these for me reside under something we call in neuroscience, social pain.
And this social pain shows up in the insula, and it's actually linked to the physical pain.
And when we feel that social pain, when we talk about the cohesion or the bonding we we have with other human beings, when we feel that as being wounded or we burn bridges a little, that actually shows up as physical pain because if study after study shows, if I take an aspirin or a Paracet or something like that to dampen down the pain, the social pain disappears.
But unless the underlying...

[28:26] Or the undercurrent of animosity is addressed, it will pop up.
And I think it'll pop up even stronger. And that comes back to another point you said, sort of these avoidance strategies, right?
Where we will give in too much or we will push through, we will just try to get it done just to rip off the bandaid instead of sort of pacing ourselves, maybe giving away too much you also said.
But what I've also found from like my clinical psychology days is that when I worked with trauma, when I found people didn't address their emotions and they pushed aside or avoided it in the short term, great. But in the long term, it comes back with even more intensity with even more ferocity. Is this something that you see sometimes when people are using avoidance strategies in their negotiations or in their constructive conflicts?

[29:17] So it does, but you know, you have to sort of separate out those short-term effects and long-term effects.
Because negotiation is often a short-term process. I'm negotiating a transaction, or I'm negotiating a particular outcome that I'm trying to achieve.
Now, if I engage in these avoidance strategies, that might mean that my next negotiation is going to be even worse.
But that doesn't necessarily impact this one. So it's weird, because yes, what you're saying is absolutely right, but my next negotiation might be with a completely different person.
So they don't have any experience of me in the way I was today.
So it's not so much of a continuum, but more discrete events, because we negotiate all day, every day, but we negotiate with different people in different circumstances.
So our experience of that situation and their experience of us in that situation doesn't necessarily see the whole context that came before it. So, yes, and, um...

[30:19] I tend to focus on the here and now a lot because that's very often when I get called in.
We need to do this and this isn't going well.
For training, that's when I look at the longer term effects.
How do you become more aware of what you're doing so you can make different choices?
A lot of times I tell people, I don't care what you do so long as you do it on purpose.

[30:46] And that's not entirely true, I guess, within some limits. I do care what they do.
But the point is, I want to make people make deliberate choices.
If you decide not to pursue that extra 20% and you do it for reasons that you've articulated to yourself and that make sense under the circumstances, I have no problem with that.

[31:09] If you decide not to pursue the 20% because you're afraid of damaging the relationship and you're not aware that you're doing that, that's where the problem happens.
So I want people to be more aware of what they're doing and the way to do that is to have these experiences over and over again and to pause after and think about what they're doing.
Yeah, adults learn a lot by reflection. So we do stuff.
If we pause and actually think about what we're doing, I encourage people to actually keep negotiation diaries.
So to write a sentence or two about what happened, I think you get an awful lot of value and development from that. Too often, though, we're so busy.
We finish one thing, we just move on to the next thing. And we never pause to actually think about what we're doing, what happened, What did we do that was effective?
What wasn't so effective? Why we made the choices we made, what we were telling ourselves at the time, what we were afraid of.
And if we do that, we can actually say, okay, I stopped myself from doing this for some reason that I don't really totally understand, but I think I'm afraid of my manager.
What would I prefer to do?


Coaching People to Negotiate Like They Would Advise a Friend


[32:23] Sometimes when I coach people in negotiations, I asked them, what would you advise a friend to do?
Because when you take it out of them and you ask them what they would advise a friend to do, all of a sudden, it sifts away a lot of that emotional dynamic.
Because I might be afraid of asking my vendor for a discount.
But if I'm talking to my buddy, of course I'm going to tell my buddy to go ask for the discount.
And the question is, why is that different?
And the difference is, when I'm thinking of my buddy, imposing on my buddy all of my fears.


Making sense of trauma and shifting perspectives


[33:01] That's interesting because you know, when I used to work with trauma, you know, when we had to help people deal to make sense of what has happened to them, because if they could make sense of it and not saying this, what has happened to me, this is part of my identity or this identifies me, but they understand this is just part of their ongoing life narrative.
You know, what you're saying there, what would you say to a friend, this allows someone to I think it's such a great technique you've just spoken to because you move from the subjective storm to an objective perspective.
And that dissociation allows you to take much more of the emotional weight or the gravity of that emotion.
And you find that distance. Because one of the things we sometimes used to say is like, okay, let's walk through it.
But I want you to use like whatever event had happened to them.
Use third person pronouns. And imagine you see it up on a screen.
Tell me what you see, right?
So they would visualize it and just by sort of in the theater of the mind, that allows them to dissociate and by using third person, maybe they just use their name, oh, there goes Jason, there goes Tina, there goes Jack.
And this is what's happening to them right now.
I think in a sense, it's along the same spectrum of that tool to move from an objective state.
I really like what you said.
What would you advise a friend or maybe what would you advise your kid if he or she was in your place, whatever, 20 years from now. Right? And I really like that. It's a really That's a good strategy.

[34:31] Yeah, it's funny because sometimes when we uncover people's stories, those stories are pretty awful, right? People will say to themselves, oh, I'm such an idiot, or they'll say to themselves, oh, I'm a terrible negotiator, or oh, I'm an imposter, I really am not as good as people think.
Then I stopped them and I said, would you tell this to your kid?
Would you say if your kid went to negotiate over something, would you say to them, you're an idiot, you're an imposter?
I haven't met anyone who said, yeah, I'll tell my kid that.
We would never tell another person those things, but we take license to tell ourselves those things, and that's awful.
Sometimes stepping outside ourselves and imagining what we would say to someone else makes it clear to us what we're telling ourselves that we really shouldn't be telling ourselves and that's undermining our ability to do what we do. You know, the other thing that comes up though is that some.

[35:35] Situations add stress that amplifies all of these factors, all these fears. So for example, conflict is something that a lot of people are really uncomfortable with. I can't tell you how many people have said to me, I hate conflict, I avoid conflict, I'm uncomfortable with conflict. And then, as you dig a little bit, and you ask them, okay, so what, what about conflict is so uncomfortable for you? Very often, it comes to down to tangible hurt, emotional, you know, emotional pain, or relationship damage.
If we get into conflict, he's going to hit me.
If we get into conflict, he's not going to like me.
If we get into conflict, he's going to make me feel bad. So, you know.

[36:27] We associate conflict with a lot of negative things and as you know there are as many positives and conflict as there are negatives from conflict we get learning we get growth we get the ability to to resolve things and make up we get new ideas without conflict or kind of nowhere.
And you know if you look at you know when she's model for the five dysfunctions of a team one of the.
One of the dysfunctions is a discomfort with conflict. If teams can't have conflict, very often they don't work very well.
So, there's a lot of positives in conflict, but if you ask people what they associate with conflicts, most of people's initial associations are negative.
So, what happens is, when people enter conflict, that conflict amplifies all of their fears that they bring into it.
Again, driven by many of their narratives about what conflict's about and what happens there.
And all negotiations involve conflict.

[37:34] Conflict as in disagreement. If we don't disagree, there's nothing to negotiate.
So, all negotiations involve conflict, and if you can't deal with conflict, then you can't negotiate.


Dealing with uncertainty in negotiations


[37:47] Another huge stress factor for people is uncertainty.
And do you ever wonder why almost every kid in the world is afraid of the dark?
It's because we can't see what's there.
And what we can't see, we can imagine. And we imagine some pretty scary things.
Kids are always imagining monsters under the bed, not puppies.
So we tend to go to the scary when we start imagining things, and all negotiations are by their nature uncertain.
You never know what's going to happen when you start. You never know what the other person's going to be like, what kind of information they have, what kind of skills they have, what kind of tricks they're going to pull, what kind of attitude, what kind of tactics they know, how you're going to behave.

[38:34] I think people have this huge fear about, I'm going to go into the negotiation and then.

[38:38] I'm going to forget everything that I prepared, or I'm not going to be able to breathe, or I'm going to start to cry.
There's so many uncertainties, and those uncertainties increase people's anxieties.
And whatever fears you have of tangible hurt, relationship damage, or emotional pain get amplified.
And I think, as you said, fear is a good thing because fear awakens us. It makes us frosty to particular dangers and threats. But what I think what is very important to understand for the brain is that for people, they're thinking, why can't I be like other people in negotiation? But I think the whole idea, Moshe, that we're having this conversation is to normalize that most people do feel one level of fear or another. It takes a different form or not. And that is driven by the the brain. I mean, the brain is a survival, you know, it's wired for survival. So it has a negativity bias. So it will look. Its default is to look for threats and dangers, potential hazards. And so uncertainty, well, that's a potential hazard from a survival or evolutionary point of view. Conflict, well, that could create damage to you or to the social bonds.
So these are natural things that, you know, the listeners or anybody should understand that these are normal, but we don't have to be, they're not instructions as to what to do.
I think you said at the top of this conversation, you said it's data, it's information.
What did you say?

[40:06] What do you actually know, right? You actually look at it, you call out on the fear and see it, okay, this is the emotions, I don't have to push it away, I don't have to avoid it.
It's chemical messengers coming up, but what are these emotions telling me? What is the data?
If it's misinformation, then I don't have to make a call on that.
But if I feel it's pretty solid, then I can make a decision based on it.
Because I see two things, if we just rewind, understanding your narrative as you've articulated, that's self-awareness, understanding the rules.
You know, I am, they are, the situation is.
But another thing that I think is so important what you talked about, you said, what would you say to your kid?
What would you say to your, a friend or a colleague?

[40:51] Well, that I think is a very important skill of self-compassion, because we are so good at showing compassion and turning on the faucet for everyone else.
But when it comes to ourselves, and I speak, even though I help people every day with this, you know, we go into self-flagellation mode. We, you know, we're whipping ourselves.
So I really like what you're saying, because I hear self-awareness is the step one, and then self-compassion to understand, to learn, grow, and develop is what you just said.


Self-compassion and self-management for personal growth


[41:19] Understand, okay, how can I learn from this? Is that am I kind of in the same ballpark as you?
Oh, very much so. And I think the third leg of the stool is self management. So, you know, there's what I think what I feel but there's also what what do I do and you know the the, what I feel and what I think are fundamental for us to understand.
And I like the self-compassion idea there.
And then ultimately, what determines our success is what we do.
I was really scared to go kayaking on Sunday. People have died in this area where we kayaked.


Preparedness and Monitoring for Survival


[42:04] But what did we do? We monitored the tides. We monitored the weather conditions. We prepared for the equipment we needed. We had drive-backs with the materials we needed to survive a capsize. What we did was instrumental in us, being able to get through it. The fears were there, but they didn't drive our behavior.
They just made us sharper in preparing for some eventualities.

[42:39] Music.


The Curious Concept of Kaliwobbles


[42:47] In the first part, we explored the curious term known as Kaliwobbles.
This intriguing concept revolves around anxiety and nervousness that tend to precede our entry into conflicts and challenging conversations.
We also delved deep into the intricate landscape of managing our emotions to navigate these collywobbles.

[43:07] One prominent revelation was the profound impact of the internal dialogues we gauge in.
These conversations within our own minds often prove pervasive and can hinder us from initiating, difficult conversations.
Recognizing this, we learn the paramount importance of self-awareness, the key to understanding what we tell ourselves before we gauge in challenging conversations.
Our nervousness, though significant, often operates in the background subtly undermining, our effectiveness as we remain externally focused.
The nerves we create within ourselves are revealed as potent drivers of behavior and our reactions, influencing how we perceive and interact with others.
To counteract these narratives, we've learned the value of slowing down during crucial moments by asking introspective questions, such as, what am I telling myself right now?
We also discovered the benefits of scheduling breaks during negotiations to enhance self-awareness, and more importantly to also regain our composure.
Understanding the true impact of our internal stories, we come to appreciate the power of data over assumptions and our imagination. By recognizing that stories we tell ourselves exist only in our minds, we realize our capacity to change them and reshape our narratives.
The heart of these narratives often takes the form of I am, becoming the rules of engagement that either empower or disempower us in negotiation scenarios. We explored the.

[44:36] Highly emotional nature of negotiations and how fear, if allowed to dominate, can shape our behaviors. And as Moshe described, there are three categories of fear, the fear of tangible loss, the fear of relationship damage, and the fear of emotional pain. And as Moshe said, when we allow these fears to govern our actions, they manifest in various ways. We can be avoidant, we can be too hasty, or we can give excessive concessions in the negotiation process. These patterns originate from our narratives, and we learn that experience can help us confront and improve those narratives.
One of the ways we can improve our stories is through keeping a negotiation diary.
Moshe recommends that we write one or two sentences after a difficult conversation, after a negotiation just to collect our fresh and raw reflections. And these reflections can help us the next time we move into such a conversation. So now let's slip back into the stream and continue my fascinating conversation with Moshe Kodesh.

[45:36] Music.


Negotiation as part of being human and self-acceptance


[45:47] The compassion thing. You know, you did allude to this early on. I wrote Kali Wobbles as a self-help book for me. You know, I have very good negotiation skills. I've been in this field for 28 years. I'm good at what I do. At my core, I'm a conflict-averse people pleaser. I don't like conflict. I want to make people like me. I want to make people happy. And I'm always managing that part of me in trying to also advocate effectively for myself. So, you know, the thing that everybody needs to remember is that all of this is just part of being human. And even the toughest negotiator, the people who you think, oh, these people are amazing, I could never be like them. They win every negotiation they get into. Very often, they struggle with their personal lives in their personal negotiations. We all have areas where we struggle. So, this is just part of being human. The second part of this is, I think success in life comes from learning to work with who you are, not against who you are.
So, for example...

[47:12] I don't have the best attention span. I think if I were born later, I'd be diagnosed with something, but I was born long enough ago that nobody diagnosed anybody with anything.
I've turned that into one of my superpowers. Because I can't focus on anything, I'm always working on 10 different things at the same time.
So, learning to work with who you are is what makes you successful. Now, if you happen to be extroverted, you're going to communicate more when you're negotiating.
If you happen to be introverted, you're going to listen more when you're negotiating.
So, don't aspire to be a negotiator like some other negotiator you've seen or like somebody else.
Figure out who you are, what your strengths are. Learn to play to those strengths.
Shore up those areas where you're not as strong so they attain some sort of minimum standard.
But, so many people come to me and they say, oh, I'm a bad negotiator.
I'm like you seem to be very successful in your career you have you know a lovely family you live in a nice house how'd you get all that by being a bad negotiator.

[48:19] And it turns out there are fine negotiator in like eighty five percent of their lives there's fifteen percent of their interactions where they feel they left value on the table.
Or there are certain negotiations where they feel uncomfortable, and they define themselves entirely by those areas.
Oh yes, my friend negotiated 20% lower price on a car than I did, so I'm a bad negotiator.
Well yeah, but you have a much better job than your friend does because you've managed to use your relationship skills to negotiate yourself into an amazing position.
We define ourselves in ways that are completely counterproductive.
So, you know, I think we need to be a lot more charitable to ourselves and not try to be like someone else to figure out what makes us good, to figure out how to build on that.
And then look at those areas where we struggle and say, okay, what can we do to get better enough in those areas so they don't hold us back and then use our strengths to get ahead?


Building self-efficacy and focusing on what you can control


[49:22] It's interesting what you're saying. You're making so many salient points. Like back to your kayaking, right? You know, people have died on this particular course of the waterway or what have you. But you said we self-manage. We looked at the weather conditions, tide conditions, whatever conditions. And so for me, it sounds like you've moved to self-efficacy.
So you've talked about self-awareness as one tool and self-compassion to learn and grow and develop. But the third is when you're facing with conflict or uncertainty, what, What I hear is self-efficacy, looking at what you can control, looking at the facts, looking at what you may be able to influence to make calls based on whatever data, such as tides or weather or what have you.
But also back to some of your clients, you said, where they're saying, oh, I'm such a poor negotiator.
But what I hear you all saying, Moshe, is that, you know what, Jason, you know, you have a decent job, you've got a decent home, what have you, you've obviously negotiated.
And sometimes what I hear you saying is that people, part of their narrative is like, I'm not a good negotiator to be, I am not.
And then that influences their emotions, their behavior. But what you're saying from your coaching or your sparring is saying, look, Jason, you're compartmentalizing, you're just looking at one slice.

[50:36] Let's broaden it out. Maybe you can learn from other slices of your life where you have been successful negotiation.
So Jason private or Jason's hobby or Jason's sport or Jason's social, maybe you can pull from aspects of that to help with Jason, whatever, negotiation problem at work or something.
So what I hear is you're, please forgive me if I've misread this, but it sounds like it's about self-efficacy. What do you control?
Where do you have certainty and where can you just start working on efforts and actions and not always worried about how it may play out the outcomes because there's too many.

[51:15] Variables in play that there could be multiple permutations. But here and now you said to be presence, this is what I can work on.
So, yeah, I agree that it's unfortunately so difficult to do, right? I would love to be more present than I am. But I worry about stuff, right? I wrote a book about negotiation anxiety because I'm a very anxious person.
And if I don't monitor myself, that anxiety keeps me from being present.
But you can manage that anxiety. You can, first of all, by being aware of it, you tend to have less of it.
By slowing down, you can manage it. By getting support from other people, you can get help managing it.
By writing down what's in your mind, sometimes you get it out of your head and onto the paper, and it's less in your mind, by realizing what you're afraid of and then deciding what to do anyway and then trying things, taking small risks. You know, I always tell people that confidence or self-confidence builds through two processes. One, successes that build up over time and two, failures that don't kill you.

[52:34] If i've fallen and i'm still here to talk about it i'm still here and now i know that i can survive a fall so.
By taking small and increasing risks you.

[52:48] Learn both from the successes and from the failures and that builds your confidence over time i make my students go out and ask for stuff.
With the goal of getting 10 people to say no to them.
And they have to keep asking. This takes three weeks.
They have to keep asking, and they can ask for anything.
And the degree of anxiety that creates for my students is really fun to watch, but it's also very instructive.
People talk to me about this exercise decades after they've been in my classes, because they go to ask for really mundane things, like more guacamole on their taco, And they break into a sweat the first time they do that.
And then over time, they're asking for thousands of dollars worth of discounts or benefits or freebies or upgrades or whatever it is.
And they're a lot bolder about doing it. And the reason is they realize that the person either said yes to the guacamole or they said no to the guacamole, but they weren't thrown out of the restaurant and nobody yelled at them.
And even if someone did yell at them, they're still here to talk about it.
So a certain amount of exposure therapy does help you build your confidence, and I encourage people to, once you're aware of some of the things that you're afraid might happen, to.

[54:09] Take small risks in that direction and build up your tolerance over time.
Because so long as you've survived it, you're here, and that means that you are tougher than you thought you were.
You know, that speaks a lot to what you're saying. You know, my father used to say, Jason, anytime you move into a situation, you succeed or you learn, right? You can feel bad for a day, bad for two, whatever. Your emotions are okay, but what are you going to learn from this? How do you apply it? And what you're talking about, Moshe, what I understand, it's pretty much the recipe for resilience and equanimity. You know, slowly build your tolerance over time, systematic like this desensitization or exposure therapy.
I think that's so important.
And you know, what came to mind is that, I think when you're saying like, when the person is gonna ask for more guacamole on their taco, they're getting all stressed out, they're feeling anxiety.
But again, I think it comes back to what you're talking about is perspective, because they are seeing it in the short term, right?
It's the immediate, it's here and now.

[55:17] But if someone takes sort of a long game perspective, thinking, you know what, it's going to feel uncomfortable.
I'm going to feel an anxiety, but it will build my courage. It will build my confidence, using your vernacular, right?
This will build me. This will strengthen me. And so if someone takes the long-term perspective and is able to deal with the short-term discomfort, I think they can grow.
But a lot of us, I think, get so present in the here and now sometimes with the emotions, because we think the emotions, these are instructions. I should back off.
I should avoid, right?
But I think if you're talking about what saying about the self-awareness and self-compassion, if we can pull out that objectivity, like You're saying, what would you say to a friend?

[55:56] Then having that long term perspective me make us a little more bold to take that chance low hanging fruit maybe.
Yeah yeah and and it's still very difficult to do and i think whatever motivation we can add yourselves to help us take those steps you know so.


Practice and repetition to overcome fear of failure


[56:19] Taking a class. One of my colleagues and friend, Phil Brown, works a lot with students just on practicing over and over and over again.
And he has these cards he uses to engage them in very short negotiations that give them the opportunity to try and fail, try and learn, try and succeed, try and fail.
Through this repetition and thinking about just what happened, their skills grow, but also their ability to deal with whatever happens, and the successes, the learning, the failures, it helps build them to the point where they become more capable.
So, you know, we need to keep trying things. If we don't try, what happens is we kind of retreat into ourselves, we retreat into our minds.
We start building up these stories about how scary it is. I mean, again, with the kayaking, we've been building up to that trip all summer.

[57:21] And I've had all summer to stew on it and build scenarios of, you know, you know, my wife standing on the rocks, throwing flowers into the water for because because I drowned and in that cove.

[57:36] So I don't mean to laugh at your death. But you know, you build the if we don't do we start thinking and when we start thinking we overthink and we really build these things in our minds.
You know, one thing that you said made me think of something else that's really important to talk about, and that's with the whole guacamole thing.

[57:55] I mean imagine that you asked for the guacamole and the restaurant manager did start yelling at you and how you deal with that moment or imagine that you approach someone to negotiate and you get hit in the face with a hard no.
One of the things that we need to do is learn how to manage ourselves and manage our emotions in the moment.
Because life fundamentally happens in moments. We could have a great negotiation and then you could do something unexpected that will completely throw me off my game.
My game and cause me to give in or give up or walk away or say something inappropriate in anger.
So in addition to managing these long-term effects, which is our narratives and our fears, we also need to learn how to manage moments.
One of the key things that I teach people and I coach people on is learning how to catch, Watch yourself and slow down.

[59:12] Because very often what happens is there's some triggering event and that trigger sends us into momentary emotional overload and in that moment of emotional overload we make a concession to the other party that we don't want to make or we make you know we do something of significance.
So, let's pretend that I tell my client that we need to raise my fee by 20% and my client starts yelling, 20%?! What are you doing?!
That might create emotional overload in me, at which point I say, okay, you know what, maybe not this year, maybe we'll talk about the fee next year.
In that moment of emotional overload, I made a move in the negotiation that ultimately becomes permanent and hurts me.


Catching and slowing down emotional responses in negotiation


[1:00:05] Now, our cognitive brain, as you know, and you probably know this better than I do, our cognitive brain is very powerful, but it takes a while for it to catch up to our emotional brain.
So we need to learn how to catch ourselves in these moments and slow ourselves down enough so we can respond to situations rather than react to them.

[1:00:26] And this is something I call the emotional response curve, and it's actually chapter two of Kali Wobbles.
And the idea there is that we need to, first of all, get a sense for what are some of the things that tend to trigger us.
Different people have different triggers.
For some people, it's things like time pressure or authority figures.
For other people, it's more like surprises or it could be a subject matter where people ask me questions I don't know how to answer or certain behaviors or personalities by the other side.
And then we need to understand what happens to us when we get triggered.
There's actually physical responses to this, right? Our heart rate goes up, our breathing changes, our muscles tense. And we need to become more attuned to those things.
Because if my heart starts racing when I'm negotiating.

[1:01:10] All of the blood has now gone to the part of my brain that isn't thinking anymore.
And I need to learn how to slow myself down to get myself to a place where I'm thinking straight again.
And you can slow yourself down in a negotiation in a number of ways.
You can just stay silent. By not saying anything, you prevent yourself from saying stuff you regret.
You can disengage. That's one of the best things you can do.
I often tell people that some of the most powerful words in a negotiation are, thank you, let me get back to you.
If you're in a position where you can't deal, getting away from the table and coming back is often the smartest thing you can do.
Instead of responding to the other person, acknowledge what they've said, and then ask them more questions to put the floor to them while they're talking.
You're not saying anything of your own. And, you know, that actually segues into another very important piece, and probably one of the most important pieces in negotiation, which is really learning how to listen.
Because listening functions as both an opportunity for us to learn things, but also a very important way for us to both regulate our emotions and de-escalate other people.

[1:02:29] So, if your reaction to a situation that's overwhelming is primarily to slow down and stop and use your listening skills to uncover what's going on from the other person, to put yourself in a situation where you have to do less talking.

[1:02:50] It becomes a very important tool, both on the emotional side and on the tangible side of your negotiation.
A lot of what I work on with my students is honing their listening skills and honing their awareness of when to talk and, even more importantly, when not to talk.
I like the saying that we have two ears and one mouth and we should use them in proportion. Well said.
Well, we talk so much when we're negotiating. We love what we're saying.
We hate what the other person's saying. We get nervous, so we get into nervous talking.
And we think we're really persuasive, and we are to ourselves, not so much to the other party. Especially if they're using silence on the other side.
People feel they've got to fill the silence. In clinical psychology, we use silence as a tool, right?
It's like, shut up, Jason.
Let them process, even though they're thinking and stuff. But for them, time hasn't stopped still, it's going on.
But for the person sitting there in the silence, if you're not used to it, that awkward, you feel like, okay, I gotta jump in and throw in something, right?
And so people talk too much sometimes. So I agree with you there.
So if I may just come back, I'd like to come back to the listening skills in a second, but you said to learn to manage moments, you have to catch yourself and then slow down.
And slow down might be a pause, it may be to listen, It may be to have a natural break, what have you.

[1:04:16] My challenge to you is when someone's emotionally overwhelmed, they're emotionally engaged in some sort of tumultuous conversation, and they're kind of lost in their default way of thinking, how does someone from your experience, Moshe, how does someone catch themselves?
One thing is to slow down, because then I'm attentive, I got to slow down, because I'm cognizant of that.
But how do I become cognizant? How do I catch myself from your experience?
What are some nuts and bolts techniques people can use to kind of stop everything and not go into the pattern of their narrative or their default behavior.

[1:04:57] You know, I'm going to talk about some ideas relating to this, and I want to preface this with that if this were a solved problem, no one would need me.
Because humans struggle with this, we all have times when we know we should have kept quiet and we spoke anyway, or when we know that we needed to not let our emotions run the show but they got away from us.
So, I'm going to give some thoughts on this and say that we're all a work in progress and you try these things and sometimes you're going to be more successful and sometimes less and whatever happened, try to learn from it for the next time.
So be forgiving to yourself if you tried to slow down and weren't successful.
So the first thing is ahead of time, the more you know yourself, the more likely you are to be able to get control of yourself in those moments.
So with my students, for example, I try to help them identify what their triggers are.

[1:06:06] What are some things that typically are harder for you to deal with or that send you into overload?
Because if I've thought about them in advance, I'm more likely to notice them in the moment.
And the way I help people identify their triggers is I ask them to think of situations in the past, where they were negotiating or interacting with someone and did something they regretted, did or said something they regretted.

[1:06:33] And then I asked them, what happened just before that? And chances are that that thing that happened just before that was one of their triggers.
So for example, one of my triggers might be someone raising their voice at me.

[1:06:53] And that's because i grew up in a very quiet house nobody raise their voice so when somebody does raise the voice tends to throw me off.
Or somebody else's trigger might be that you know the person you're negotiating with is your births into tears.
I can't deal with somebody crying so the more you think ahead of time about what some of your triggers are.
The more you might be able to recognize them when they happen and catch yourself before you go into a full overload.


Recognizing triggers and becoming more self-aware


[1:07:23] So for example, one of my triggers is when someone takes an arrogant attitude with me, that tends to really push your buttons.
Yeah. And it tends to make me a lot more competitive in return.
But I'm aware of it. So, when someone does take an arrogant attitude with me, my first reaction now is this is happening and I know I don't like this.
And so, do I still get triggered? Sometimes, but not as much because I'm more aware of it.
The second thing is to really focus on the physical clues, right?
We can notice that our heart rate is higher. We can notice when we break into sweat or when we feel hot. We can notice when our muscles tense. And to become more attuned to that will help us catch ourselves.
It's not foolproof. There are times when things are going to happen so quickly that I won't have caught myself.
But look, if I catch myself 0% of the time now, and I manage to catch myself 10% of the time by focusing on this, I'm 10% off better.
So again, it's a work in progress. You're not going to get this perfect, but can you get it better? I think so.

[1:08:47] And then to really identify what techniques work for you to slow down.
You know, for some people it's going to be more to disengage from the situation.
For other people, like for me, it's very much about, If I can't think of what to say, I reflect back what the other person said, and I ask a question.
That's kind of how I train myself. That's my reflex. And that slows things down.
So, you know, practice. Practice those reflexive techniques for yourself that allow you to feel reactive but not act reactive.


Verbal martial arts and the importance of training and habits


[1:09:30] You know, in negotiations for me, it's almost like a verbal martial arts, right?
You know, what did Tyson say?
You can have a plan until you get hit and then everything goes out the window.
But you know, with martial arts, the idea is to constantly, to train, create a habit, a defense or attack response based on some sort of movement coming at you.
And what I hear in a sense is almost a verbal or emotional martial arts. So you prepare yourself through experience through training, then you have a default habit to fall back on as part of that, as you said, you become more cognizant over time, that arrogance really triggers you. But and most sometimes you're able to dampen down your your own, your raw response, and you take a more diplomatic tone, for example. I find that for me, that's very important. Because one of the things I do when I'm trying to work for myself, or I'm working with clients is that I think all those things you said are so salient and astute. And these are tools that anyone can use.
For me also, sometimes it's to take it like a post-it note, a blank post-it note, nothing on it, because I have all the paraphernalia in front of me when I'm going into some sort of conversation, difficult conversation. But I just have it there. It's indistinct, it's subtle, nobody sees it. Or sometimes I recommend my clients go down to their local brook or river, find a little rock, a little pebble, just.

[1:10:56] Stick it on the table in front of you. And with your phone, your pad, your phone, computer, whatever other paraphernalia, they're not really going to notice it. But for you, it's a, physical anchor. So every time you look down it, maybe that triggers you to think, okay, as you said.

[1:11:12] Catch yourself, slow it down. Look, Jason, learn to manage the moment. And for me, that sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't, but it can be a little bit of a safety net for myself or my clients have said it works most of the time, not all the time. It depends how emotionally enraged or fearful they are. But a lot of the times it can have that physical anchor, can be a a way to kind of awaken me to, as you said, it was it catch myself and slow down. And then I can regulate.
I love that. I mean, those little those little touchstones right that that help you refocus. I mean, I've seen people do that more explicitly where they have a post-it note in front of them just just says, slow down, or count to 10, or breathe. Right. So sometimes people go do the same thing only slightly more explicitly and that helps them.
So I also believe that nothing will work all of the time and that we are very clever about going around any mechanism we build to help ourselves.
So we constantly have to invent new ones. For example, with time management, I have one system I use to manage my time.
But after a while, I kind of know how to game that system. So I have to invent a new system to manage my time.
Yeah.


The art of listening and asking open-ended questions


[1:12:39] Well, what I'd like to do is I'd like to sort of change and go back to listening.
You know, everyone can listen, but not everyone can listen. Right.
I mean, what are some specific techniques or specific skill sets or how do we need to be cognizant to have more reflective listening, to truly listen and not have some sort of rebuttal forming in our head as a person's talking to us?
So, you know, everything starts with intention. And I think, once again, you need to ask yourself, why am I asking this question? Why am I talking to this person? And in the negotiation field, we very often talk about this concept of curiosity. You want to listen from a curious point of of view. A lot of times I'm thinking, huh, I wonder what's there. I'm just curious.
This person said something that I could find offensive, but I also could find just unfathomable and I want to find out more about what's there. So if we approach people with curiosity rather than judgment, with empathy rather than looking to use what they're saying to our advantage.

[1:14:05] Are going to listen a lot more effectively now that doesn't mean we don't ultimately use some of what came out in the conversation negotiating after all but you want to separate those things.
You want you don't wanna listen with that intention to refute or that intention to win you wanna listen with the intention of.
Finding out, of understanding. And then, once you've found out and understood, then you have the information you need to decide what to do with it. So, once again, it first comes down to our conversation with ourselves. What is it that I want to focus on in this conversation?
And the curiosity, just trying to learn something I don't know.
And there's so much I don't know.
I'm talking to you now, and there's so much I don't know.

[1:15:02] So that's the first thing, is really getting yourself into that curious mindset and trying to be as honest with yourself about what you're doing.
And some ways to keep an eye on yourself on that is to notice that if you tend to jump in right after the other person said something, chances are you had an agenda.
You didn't really, you weren't really listening. Whereas if you tend to ask follow-on questions, then you're probably more curious.
So by monitoring some of the things that you do, you might be able to be more honest with yourself about what you're trying to do.
And then listening for all the, you know, from the moment we start talking, we get told to listen.
We're actually generally not that good at it.

[1:15:54] And we can all improve, right? I certainly can. And there's a technique that I teach my students called the listening triangle, which looks very simple.
And in theory it's very simple. It's really just a structured form of active listening.
But every point on that triangle is a moment to learn and a lifetime to master.
Answer. Everything we do about listening is difficult. So I work with my students on asking very short, open-ended questions. Questions like, what's going on? What happened? What.

[1:16:32] Else? What would you like? Tell me more. Like, what? So now what? And you ask these very open-ended questions, and the other party can go anywhere with them. And they're going to lead you to whatever is really important to them, whatever is driving them in the negotiation.
And that's actually the golden nuggets that you discover by letting them talk about what they care about is what leads you to be successful in your negotiations with them. Because ultimately everybody's trying to meet some sort of needs through their negotiations. And if you can find out what's driving the other person, that allows you to figure out how to meet their needs in a way that you can also meet your own. But if your questions are closed-ended, you're driving in a certain direction. So your questions have to be open-ended. And if your questions are long, there's a very good chance that your opinions and judgements are embedded in your questions. Whereas if your questions are really short, it's really hard to, I mean, you can still judge somebody in two words, but it's harder. So keep your, questions really short, really open-ended, and then once you ask them, the next thing you need to do is suffer through the uncomfortable silence that follows.

[1:17:51] We ask a question, and too often the other person doesn't answer very quickly, and as you said before, we become very uncomfortable with that silence.
And in being uncomfortable with that silence, we ask another question, which means they never have to answer our first question, we embellish our question so it's no longer as effective, We actually start talking, so now they don't have to answer any question, and you need to learn how to build up your tolerance for that silence.
And this is something I actually work with my students on. I make them go home and practice.
Practice the silence. How do they do that?
So after you ask a question, count slowly in your head.

[1:18:39] When someone asks you a question, count slowly to five in your head before you respond.
Very often the other person will get so uncomfortable, they'll start talking, you'll never have to answer their question.
What I find is a great place to practice is on the phone, because on the phone you can distract yourself without the other person seeing you.
I don't mean distract yourself as in check your email, but for example, I have little model airplanes on my desk, so I'll be on the phone with someone, I'll ask them a question, And then I'll pick up one of my planes and I'll start flying it or landing it on my desk.
That works better on the phone, don't do that in person. In person, I find the counting thing works well, just don't verbalize.
That doesn't work well either.
But it's just something you need to be aware of and need to keep practicing the silence.


The Power of Silence in Communication


[1:19:24] Just see how long you can last.
And you don't have to be infinitely comfortable with silence, you just have to be a teeny bit more comfortable than the other person.
If they can tolerate 8 seconds of silence but you can tolerate 8.1 seconds, they're going to talk first.
So this is just one of those things that practice, practice, practice.
And then once they do start talking, the next thing you need to do is really listen.
And that's really hard to do, because very often we're thinking about our response.
We're thinking about our next question. We're judging and filtering what they said before, which means we can't hear them now.
We're actually talking.
And we're just distracted. I mean, how often, especially nowadays that we spend so much time working remotely, are we talking to someone while also multitasking, which, as you know, isn't really a thing?
And you miss all of the important stuff. miss, especially understanding the other person's interests when you're negotiating with them.
Because you're either not listening or listening with an agenda or completely distracted.
And then even hearing someone's interests is so difficult to do because people don't tell you what's really driving them.
They yell at you, they whine to you, they tell you irrelevant stories, they lie to you.
And somehow in all that mess are the things they really care about.

[1:20:49] And learning how to pick out those bits is really, really difficult and takes a lot of practice.
Experience is everything. Oh, and I've got to tell you, when I started mediating, I was miserable at it.
People would say something and I'd go, oh, so you mean this?
And they'd be like, nope. And I'd have to do it over and over again.
It took me, like, it was a horrible, irritating process.
Mediations now take me, like, a third as long as they used to because I hear interest correctly on the first try. But, you know, it was just a miserable experience for me.
Now, again, remember, I was an engineer before. Nothing in my prior training had anything to do with listening. Notes and bolts.
Yeah, I had a big learning curve.
And then the final part of the triangle is that once you've heard whatever it is you think you've heard, you need to reflect it back to the other party.
And you need to do that for a bunch of reasons. One, you need to confirm your understanding.
You need to acknowledge them, let them know you're listening.
But it also buys you time.
So if what they said freaked you out by reflecting back what they said, you also don't have to say something of your own. It lets them hear themselves.
So they get a different perspective on what they said. But my favorite reason to reflect back is actually because you can't reflect back if you didn't listen.
And knowing I'm going to reflect back gives me greater discipline to listen.
And then in reflecting back, there's three ways I talk about in negotiation.
One is to parrot back the other person's exact words.
And.

[1:22:09] You know, the advantage of parroting is that if you're trying to change their perspective on what they said, using their exact words can actually be the most effective way of doing that. It's also very easy to do.
The disadvantage of parroting is that, first of all, it doesn't confirm understanding, right? If I can repeat what you said without having any idea what you meant.
And secondly, doing it more than a couple of times is really annoying, and the other person will catch on that you're doing something. So you don't want to, you know, you don't want to parrot too much.
Most of the time we paraphrase.
We just change the words, not the meaning. And that has the advantage of both confirming understanding and being a lot more conversational.
And the third way, which I'm sure you're familiar with from your background, is reframing.
So we reflect back with a purpose. And the main purpose we use reframing for in the world of negotiation is reframing positions to interests.
We hear what people are saying.
We take an educated guess at the underlying needs behind it.
And all we reflect back is those underlying needs. So if somebody says to me, oh, Moshe, you're too expensive, I could parrot that back. I'm too expensive.
Or I could paraphrase it. I cost too much.
Or I could reframe it to their interest and say, so you're looking for a service that you can afford.
And that shifts the focus to them and to their underlying need.
And then you need to ask another open-ended question that follows on from whatever they said last.
So that's a listening triangle, and you go around it over and over again.

[1:23:39] It is really simple to teach. I can teach it in 10 minutes.
It is very difficult to get good at all of those points because every single one of them is difficult.
Staying open-ended is hard. Keeping your questions short is hard.
Staying silent is hard. Hearing the interest, actually listening, is very hard.
Remembering to reflect back, and especially reframing, is a very, very difficult skill.
And this just takes practice. and you practice over and over and over again, and eventually you get good at it.

[1:24:09] You know, I think that's a very eloquent way you've described it.
It's very tool-based, it's very pragmatic, and it's just, again, it comes back to practice and letting experience teach you, right?
You know, and learn and to develop. And I think, as you said, it comes back to the narrative.
If I'm saying I am a curious person, then I want to try to crack the code behind what the other person's means.
And so that curiosity that I have an investigative mind, that will, again, the head will shape the heart and the heart will shape the hand. It'll change my behavior.
And I think curiosity is a really great mindset.
You know, one of the things that I learned clinical practice was.
You know, the brain can only focus on one thing at a time. I mean, we can't multitask. We're kidding ourselves if we believe that, unless it's a habit we're executing. And, you know, one of the things is that since the brain can only focus on one thing at a time, it's either listening or I'm coming up with some sort of rebuttal. And so we were taught a technique over and over and over called echoing. So when, Moshe, you're saying something like, like, I like this cup, or whatever. I'm repeating the same words I'm using my in my head. I'm not repeating.

[1:25:21] Verbatim what you're saying out loud. But I'm repeating verbatim what you're saying in my head. So it echoes. So my brain actually hears the words twice. And since my brain can only focus on one thing at a time, I'm not thinking about a rebuttal. I'm really truly reflectively listening or active listening, whatever, you know, adverb adjectives you want to use. But for me, that was always something that was I thought was one of the best techniques was just echoing things in my head, because I don't have time to think and I truly try to understand and everything else you said using silence, using short questions, but open ended. What else you said, paraphrase or reframe any of these, it all takes practice.

[1:26:06] But you can choose any one of them at any conversation, you know, talking to the wife over dinner, talking to the kids about what happened today, or whatever, friends over beer, you can use them all the time. And I think it's a really pragmatic book, your book is what I really liked about it. And I don't say this to compliment you. But as an observation, I like books that talk about the theory, but it's translated into nuts and bolts, things that I can do, I guess that comes from your, your your background in engineering and robotics, right? It's very tool based and that's I really like I'm a very pragmatic guy I really enjoyed your book in that sense. Thank you. Moshe, our time is almost coming to an end I was wondering was there any last tips or advice or suggestions you would like to leave with our listeners today? People often ask me like what kind of things.

[1:27:00] You know if you had three things you could leave with people and I would say first of all, prepare. Come into the negotiation as prepared as you can. Very often it's the information you don't have or the thing you didn't think about that's gonna get you. Second thing is slow down. Use all of those various techniques we talked about to manage your emotions in real time. Slow things down so you can respond rather than react. And the third, if you don't know what to do, listen. Listen, you get into trouble by talking, you don't get into trouble by listening. And you can use your listening skills to get information, to manage your emotions, to de-escalate the other party, and to to really become a much more effective negotiator.

[1:27:50] Well, I think that's a great period at the end of this conversation, Moshe. I will leave all your contact information and I recommend and highly suggest if you're anyone who has to have a difficult conversation, negotiation, mediate, difficult, challenging conversation, whatever, pick up Kali Wobbles because it's a brilliant book and I don't say that lightly. I don't recommend a lot of books but this one I definitely do. Moshe Cohen, Moshe, thank you very much for for your time and sharing your thoughts and your experience and your stories of kayaking.
Thank you, Jason.

[1:28:27] Music.


Success through self-awareness and self-compassion


[1:28:36] For me, one of the most salient takeaways with my brilliant conversation with Moshe is the realization that success hinges on learning to work with who we are rather than against ourselves.
Moshe encourages us to dive into self-awareness, to understand our strengths and areas where we may not be as strong.
He highlights the importance of self-compassion, urging us to be more charitable to ourselves in those moments when we falter.
It's also by monitoring our emotions and our narratives we can prevent anxiety from running away with us.
Slowing down, seeking support from others, and putting our thoughts on paper all contribute to managing and reducing our anxieties.
As we navigate the path of self-improvement, we learn that small successes build confidence, and failures, if survived, become valuable lessons. It's akin to exposure therapy, gradually building our tolerance to discomfort and taking calculated risk.
That sense of equanimity, that sense of resilience.
In the short term, Moshe advises us to manage moments by catching ourselves and slowing down.
Recognizing our triggers is crucial as it prevents us from reacting impulsively to situations we might later regret. Understanding the interplay between our cognitive and emotional brains, Moshe underscores the importance of pausing to respond rather than react.

[1:30:01] This self-awareness allows us to regulate our physiological reactions and to also make more informed decisions. Another critical skill was listening, a vital skill in negotiations.
It takes center stage as we wrap up. Moshe emphasizes the significance of approaching it with curiosity, empathy, and a genuine desire to learn. Effective listening is complemented by asking open-ended questions that encourage others to express themselves.
But along with listening is the parallel skill of reflecting. And this may take the shape of parroting, paraphrasing, or reframing. And these techniques help us to bridge gaps, confirm understanding, and to uncover the underlying needs of others.
I mean, there's so much more I could include in the summary, but I think this is the kind of episode that you'll want to play again, pause, take some notes, rewind, play again, because there's just so much in each of the sentences that Moshe shared with us.
My advice to you, dear listener, if you want more of Moshe Cohen, is to follow the link in the show notes and get the book, Kali Wobbles.
It's a brilliant read and it's very pragmatic and very tool-based.
As we come close to the tail end of this episode, I'd like just to send you a personal thank you, Moshe. It was a brilliant conversation.
I hope one of these days that we can sit down in Boston Commons and talk over a cup of coffee.
Well anyways, folks, here we are at the finishing line of another episode.
I appreciate you showing up and allowing me to be part of your week.
Until next time, keep well, keep strong.



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Jason Birkevold Liem

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