Forty Colombian farmers sat looking at her, completely unimpressed, when the cartel boss in the back of the room opened a case and a drone flew up out of it.

In this episode, I sit down with Attia Qureshi, the negotiation teacher who learned her craft running State Department conflict-resolution work in cartel-controlled coca regions of Colombia, and who now teaches at the University of Michigan after a stint at MIT Sloan. Her new book Never Settle, with a foreword by Sheila Heen and endorsements from Daniel Pink, Robert Cialdini, and Chris Voss, hits shelves next week. The thing I love about her work is that she does not treat negotiation as a boardroom sport. She treats it as a daily relationship skill, the kind you practice with your barista so it is already in your hands when something hard comes up at home.

In This Episode

The four-step sequence Attia used to reset a room of 40 unimpressed farmers and a cartel boss with a drone, and how the same four steps work in your kitchen tonight
Why "take out the trash" is the position and not the actual ask, and the one-sentence reframe that changes how you fight about household chores
The fifth-grade bullying story that produced the hard shell most of us are still wearing into adulthood
The seven-word test that tells you whether you are influencing someone or manipulating them
Why the freeze you feel when you try to speak up is physiology, not personality, and what to do about it in real time
How to know when you are giving too much to a taker, and the experiment Attia recommends before you decide to cut losses
The literal glass of lemonade that turned a hostile next-door neighbor into a friendly one, and the Cialdini-backed science underneath it

Why This Matters

This episode is for anyone who knows what they want and goes quiet when it is time to ask. For anyone stuck in a loop with a difficult coworker or in-law that has been the same loop for three years. For anyone who has tried the assertive thing once and the people-pleasing thing once and is exhausted by both, and who wants a path that does not require a personality transplant.

Episode Breakdown

0:30 How to Get What You Want: Without Fighting or Folding

2:52 Bethany and the Exoskeleton: Where the People-Pleaser-or-Hardener Split Begins

7:18 Why You Freeze When You Try to Ask for What You Want

14:19 A Drone, a Drug Cartel, and How to Negotiate Without Being Aggressive

28:39 Self-Negotiation: Emotional Regulation Before the Conversation Starts

33:22 Positions vs Interests: What You Are Really Asking For

36:01 The Lemonade Story: Reciprocity, Reset, and the Long Game

46:21 Givers, Takers, Matchers, and the Difference Between Influence and Manipulation

Resources

Free Communication Training (workbook plus two-part video)
Schedule a free consultation with our team
Relationship coaching at Growing Self

If something in this conversation landed somewhere specific for you, the most generous thing you can do is share it with the friend who came to mind while you were listening. And if you are ready to stop having this same conversation in your head and start having a different one out loud, my free Communication Training is at growingself.com/communication. It is the workbook and video series I built for exactly the kind of conversation Attia and I were just having.

xoxo,

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

Growing Self

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