A (4:15)

Look, I just did it. I just tripped on myself. I said, I've seen it 500 times before. But to this person, that's a unique situation. Yeah, that's. You know, that's how hard it is is to stay in there with these people. We're training our coaches. We're doing the best we can. I've worked with a guy called Michael Reddington. He wrote a book called the Discipline Listening Method. And he was a loss prevention guy who would get confessions, you know, six. What, Wicklander, Zaleski. Wicklander, out of Chicago. And they would 76% confession rate when they would find, you know, corporate theft or whatever it was. And, you know, he would say that, let's see, he Would say, encouraging people to share sensitive information under vulnerable circumstances in the face of consequences, and that a person will confess when they believe a reasonable person facing similar circumstances might have behaved. Behaved the same way. So that's basically saying we have to get. You have to get to a point of understanding where they, those people feel like maybe even this person faced with these circumstances, this opportunity to take something, when is the first time you took something? You know, I meant to bring it back when things were better. I was going to pay it back. But they never did. They never got caught. So it created this pattern of, you know, justification of continuing to take, you know, we, we. I enrolled all of my coaches into one of his classes because what I was trying to get at and we haven't gotten there yet, is how can we be empathic inside of these conversations and very quickly help these business owners do what they need to do in, in the best way possible. So, and I don't know if it's it. Is that the core of what you do? What's a typical assignment for the black swan group when you go in?

B (6:05)

Well, wherever people need to communicate better to solve a problem that they're just really stuck on. Now that sounds really vague, but we end up. We, we train and we coach. We do a lot of coaching, much more than I ever thought we would. And for everything other than divorces. We don't get in the middle of divorces just because we're a threat to your attorney. Your divorce attorney does not get paid to resolve if he resolves a problem. You know, attorneys don't get paid to resolve problems. They get paid to bill. They get paid to run the bill. And if somebody comes in, who's going to shorten the process, which tactical empathy always does. Always, always, always. We're the enemy of that attorney's livelihood.

A (6:52)

Exactly. Well, it's like big pharma. They don't really get paid to cure you. They just want to make sure you're healthy enough to continue to take the medicine.

B (7:03)

Yeah, it's a big farm. Is a whole separate conversation.

A (7:06)

Yeah.

B (7:07)

But yeah, so we coach people, settle in insurance claims on their own. We coach business partners. We coach one of our high level coaching clients and we've got some, a few people that are extremely high level. He used to the skills in, in the midst of a mediation through attorneys to the other side not that long ago. And he knows he saved himself $8 million on the application of the skills because they're invisible if you're doing it really well. The other side Just thinks you're in a conversation. And then if you're not out to cut their throat, if you're not out to cheat people, then they have no reason ever to feel otherwise because you remove yourself as an enemy. So it could be anything. I'm, I negotiated a change in seats on the airplane just the other day. My girlfriend and I were separated on, on the plane. And like you hear these, these, you know, would you swap with my husband or my wife or my girlfriend? And I see about 50% success rate. And, but then the issue is not what your success rate is. How does a person feel when it's done? And that's, that's a real critical issue. I don't, I don't want somebody to have swapped seats with my girlfriend to con inconvenience us and have them be in a negative mood the entire airplane ride and get off a plane unhappy, unhappy. Now in some kind of way that's going to come back on me. I'm, I'm a big believer in the karma bank and I got the karma bank working in my direction on a regular basis. But we coach in every kind of negotiation there is. Anytime you want collaboration from somebody, you're in a negotiation.

A (8:56)

A situation like that, you just met somebody, it's going to be a 30 second negotiation. What are some keys for quickly developing rapport and then maybe disarming some disarming statements that you can make?

B (9:09)

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what I said to this guy.

A (9:12)

Big smile, big smiles.

B (9:13)

First, typically a big smile makes a big difference and it's a little bit situational. Like, you know, the playful attitude. Being playful is a superpower. It's not what you want to go with all the time. And I did not go with playful with this guy. You know, on same set of circumstances, somebody's, you know, they got their luggage in your leg room, which happens on a regular basis. Being playful about it, that then is critical because you got to sit next to this person the whole time. But actually what I said to this guy, and I'm in, I'm in a, I'm in a bulkhead with both the bulkhead seats. He's got bulkhead aisle, I got bulkhead window, which means, you know, you can't put the bags in the seat in front of you because you got to go overhead, which is really inconvenient for some people. So I wait for this, this guy to finally show up. He's one of the last people on a plane in this section. And I just look at him And I go, I got a lousy proposition for you. And I was not playful.

A (10:16)

And his dude just, yeah, you're not gonna like this.

B (10:21)

Yeah, yeah, because I'm, you know, I, I gotta, I need what I want to be relief. And I don't, I don't want him to give it to me and be angry and, you know, plus he's less likely to give it to me. So he stares at me and this is a moment that we call dynamic silence. I, no matter what, I, I cannot break this silence. So he stares at me and he goes, I'm listening. And I go, my girlfriend is four rows back on a window. Would you swap seats? And before I finish my next sentence, he has grabbed his bags and is headed in her direction. Like, I had three or four more things I wanted to say. I want to be praying here. You know, I, I go, I've almost been like, hey, hey, hey, I'm not done yet. You know, I still want to work on this. But he is back and moving towards his seat before I have even finished. So, you know, I don't, I don't know what I, I, in hindsight I got a pretty good idea what probably went through his mind. But you know, I, I got it quickly. And there was one of the few times when being playful was not my approach. I think I'm probably playful about a good 90% of the time. And this one I was,

A (11:37)

will get in trouble when they let things go too fast. That's my problem when I like, I have deal fixation. So if I was going to be really self critical, I would say I already know the deal that I want when I'm going into it. So now I've got deal fixation. I think it's a good deal for everybody, which is probably a bad way to go into it. So I'm not going to anchor somewhere, I'm not going to anchor and then I'm not going to do the work to come up with like why we're anchoring there. So now I'm already setting myself to leave something up on, leave something on the table and then I can't wait to get it done. And if you're in a hostage situation or a really important negotiation, that's probably the wrong approach, I would say. So how do you coach people to slow themselves down?

B (12:26)

That's a hard one. Because you know what you talked about on deal fixation, that's what people do as human, as human beings, compromise.

A (12:34)

We want compromise.

B (12:36)

Or you get goal focused and that gives you tunnel Vision, you get blinders on. And I'm listening to a big fan of the Andrew Huberman podcast and a couple of podcasts back. You know, he's talking to a neuroscientist, and they say, this is how people think of things. And I call this dpo, Duration, path, and outcome. You think about where you want to be, you think about how you're going to get there, and you think about how long it's going to take you to get there. Duration, path, and outcome. That has a tendency of just how we as human beings are wired. We pick out a target, we figure out how we're going to get there, we figure out how long it's going to take. And so that is one of the big challenges to teach people this stuff, because you got to let go of the target to start with, because intellectually, I can explain to you why you don't have all the information. And by and large, as a human being, you're not going to care. Like, I know where this is going. It is what it is. I think somebody wrote a book probably about 10 years ago, the Ten Commandments of Negotiation, which failed miserably. And one of this guy's commandments was, it is what it is. No, it's not. There are all sorts of variables here that you don't know, that the other side is intentionally holding back from you because they're important, and you're intentionally holding stuff back from them because it's important. So consequently, it can't be. It is what it is, because they're keeping you in the dark. And no matter how smart you are, and if you're the smartest person on Earth, you're keeping them in the dark, which has this. The opposite of synergy, you know, you're losing synergy by keeping each other in the dark. So if you get deal focused, which is hard not to be because you're wired to do that, you're leaving money on the table every time.

A (14:34)

Yes.