FBI Negotiator Reveals The REAL Secret To Influence with Chris Voss

I look through the toolkit in the book is tactical empathy, really the center, really the core of it. And I say that, so I've built multiple franchise companies over the years and empathy was something like we, I talk about it in training because for us the way, the way I talk about it is we use it in inside of like our servant leadership, that value that we have. And, you know, you need to, you need to give people what they truly need, not what they say they want in the moment. So to do that, you've got to be in the pocket with people like a boxing term, like you've got to be close enough to them so that they trust you. They believe you understand what they're going against, even though in franchising, we've done it like 500 times now, and it's the same pattern of, of conversation back. Because what we're truly trying to do is make sure that we're working on the right problem. So, for example, somebody might say, well, you know, it's my market or it's the marketing or my staff. That's the problem with the business or competition or anything like that. But in the face of great validation, they're really holding themselves hostage. And, you know, and then you might dig behind and it might be like, well, I'm going through a divorce. So the real problem is their eye is off the ball because they're going through a divorce. it's not any of these other things that they kind of threw out as little landmines to not answer your question. So, you know, the way I look at it is, you know, people are arguing with themselves for their self limitations, you know, things they're uncomfortable with. I don't like to do sales. I don't like to do this. I don't like to do this other thing. So it's up to us to get close enough to them to really make them internalize and accept responsibility for the problem that they're really having. So, um, I, uh, you know, and I know you do a lot of business consulting and I don't know if any of that resonates with the things that you come across in corporate America and you're coaching today. Yeah, it all does. And it's very layered and, you know, grappling with it for you personally. I mean, everybody, they begin to understand it pretty much based on, um, their experiences up, up to that point on being understood or genuinely understanding someone. And those instances tend to be so rare in everyday life that we don't have a lot of models around us. And the vast majority of the models are really bad. The movies and TV are horrible. I mean, just absolutely horrible. And one of the first commandments of negotiation that we're teaching now is thou shalt not focus on common ground. The movies teach us that common ground is is uh the key to everything and a point of fact um it actually interferes with your ability to be empathic because if you share common ground with somebody and they're struggling with what you perceive to be the problem it's one of the few harvard studies that i ever agreed with it said that if you if you solve the problem yourself somebody else struggling with the same problem you'll either more likely to look at them go like look i solved this pick yourself up off the ground you know stop being a cry baby and fix it because i fixed it or if you were defeated by that problem your likely reaction is like oh man you're in trouble i mean yeah it's that's insurmountable i mean i came up against that and i couldn't solve it either neither one of those are empathy but the feeling of being genuinely understood if you're lucky uh it's happened to you a couple times and you remember that moment and it's it's transformative and if you can't recall in a moment what was said you might not have any idea what happened or how to duplicate it or how to do it again so you to one of your original points servant leadership you're kind of getting out of your own way to really genuinely make the other person feel understood to serve them you lose your agenda about moving forward and in that mind frame you're much more likely to be there for them to nurture them to coach them to give them the coaching and the support that they need in that moment to sort of come to grips with whatever they're struggling with internally 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 to stay 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, Zelosky, 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 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, 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, 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 the best way possible. So, and I don't know if it's, is that the core of what you do? What's a typical assignment for the Black Swan Group when you go in? 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 train and we coach, we do a lot of coaching much more than I ever thought we would. uh for everything other than divorces we don't get in the middle of divorces just because we're a threat to your attorney uh 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 the 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. Right. 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. Yeah. Big pharma is a whole separate conversation. Yeah. Um, but, uh, yeah, so we coach people, settle in insurance claims on their own. We coach, uh, business partners. We coach, um, one of our high level coaching clients, and we've got some, a few people that are extremely high level. He used the skills in, in the midst of the mediation through attorneys to the other side, not that long ago. And he knows he saved himself $8 million on the application 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 uh 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 uh on on the plane and like you hear these these uh 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 convince inconvenience us and have them be in a negative mood the entire airplane ride and get off the plane unhappy unhappy now there's some kind of way that's going to come back on me 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 we coach in every kind of negotiation there is anytime you want collaboration from somebody you're in a negotiation 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? Yeah, well, I'll tell you what I said to this guy. Big smile? Big smiles 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. Um, you know, on the same set of circumstances, somebody, you know, they got their luggage in your leg room, which happens on a regular basis. Being playful about it then is critical, um, because you got to sit next to this person the whole time. But actually what I said to this guy, um, you know, I'm in, I'm in a, uh, I'm in a bulkhead, we're both in 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. uh 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 on a plane in this section and i just look at him and i go i got a lousy proposition for it and i was not playful and his his dude just yeah you're not gonna like this yeah yeah because i'm you know i i gotta i need what i want to be a relief and i don't i don't want him to give it to me and be angry and you know you know plus he's less likely to give it to me so he stares at me and this is um a moment that we call dynamic silence i no matter what i i cannot break this silence um 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 go i've almost been like 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 You know, I don't know what I, in hindsight, I got a pretty good idea what probably went through his mind. But, you know, 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 in this one I was. People get in trouble when they let things go too fast. That's my problem. When I, like, I have deal fixation. And 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? That's a hard one because what you talked about on deal fixation, that's what people do as human beings. Compromise, we want compromise. 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 is 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 i it is what it is i think uh somebody wrote a book probably about 10 years ago at the 10 commandments of negotiation which failed miserably and one of those guys commandments was 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 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 uh 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 Yes.

FBI Negotiator Reveals The REAL Secret To Influence with Chris Voss

Get a FREE DOWNLOADABLE COPY of Jeff Dudan's Book Discernment HERE:
https://podcast.homefrontbrands.com/en-us/discernment

This is a short segment from the full episode of Unemployable with Jeff Dudan featuring former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss.

In this clip, Chris Voss and Jeff Dudan break down the real power of tactical empathy, why most people misunderstand negotiation, and how focusing on “common ground” might actually be hurting your results.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in a deal, struggled to influence others, or wondered why conversations don’t go your way… this is a must-watch.

🎯 Watch the FULL EPISODE here:
👉 https://youtu.be/bOjehkDJ9tA

📘 Jeff Dudan
Get a FREE DOWNLOADABLE COPY of Jeff Dudan's Book Discernment HERE:
https://podcast.homefrontbrands.com/en-us/discernment

Visit Jeff’s website: 👉 https://www.jeffdudan.com
Learn more about Homefront Brands: 👉 https://www.homefrontbrands.com

📘 Chris Voss
Get Chris Voss’ book (Never Split The Difference): 👉 https://www.blackswanltd.com/never-split-the-difference

Visit The Black Swan Group: 👉 https://www.blackswanltd.com

💡 What You’ll Learn:

Why empathy beats logic in negotiation
The danger of deal fixation
How to uncover the real problem people are hiding
Why you’re probably leaving money on the table
The invisible skill that top negotiators use

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