Alright ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another SLD Meetup. Today we're here in Vegas with the one and only Chris Boss, former FBA negotiation agent and also known for the famous book Never Split the Difference, which if you haven't seen it or read it, listen to it, must, it's a recommendation for sure. And he's the founder and owner of the Black Swan Group where they teach you how to improve your negotiation skills. So thank you for being here my friend.
It is my pleasure, thank you. For those that don't know much about you, you were an FBA negotiator. Right. And the thing that you've had to do from hostage negotiations talking about life and death, does it get more real than that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kidnappings and work-kidnappings around the world contained sieges if you will, bank robbery with hostages. Yeah, so life run around. Wow.
Now you developed an amount of skillset when it comes to the negotiation, right? You have to develop in such circumstances and now through your company you're applying it to all the real case scenarios that apply to any industry. So tell us a little bit about the company and how you apply those negotiation skills into life. Yeah, you know, basically it's just the emotional intelligence of hostage negotiation.
You know, and there's a phrase how you do something, it's how you do everything. So people pretty much make up their mind their decisions under pressure the same way they do in real life. And then of course they're saying your biggest problem is your biggest problem. So people constantly act like almost any deal is the end of the world.
They're like might not be in line, but they feel like the livelihood is. So when I left the FBI I had a pretty good indicator that the negotiation skills applied across the board from a time volunteering on a suicide hotline. I've been using that in my daily life and then I went to Harvard Law School's negotiation course and instructed us there and said look, you're doing the same things. We are the stakes are different, but the dynamics are the same.
So I left the FBI started teaching at Georgetown's, McDonough School of Business teaching how to use hostage negotiation in everyday life in the negotiation course in the MBA program, part time students, which went ahead full time jobs. And so what I was teaching them was take these skills, put them in your full time job, put them in your personal life and see how I'm telling you they work. If you do it in the way that I show you how to do it. That's a lot of the never split the difference.
I had my students write up their real life negotiations with the book. So then the book came out after I've been teaching in business school for a couple years and a book she's done well. Of course I was done and it has impact millions of lives. Myself personally, I've been listening to it over and over.
In fact, when I go for a run, I love it because you are sharing certain nuggets, right? That is just so important. I love the concept of the win-win. Everybody thinks that a win-win is the perfect scenario, but you say otherwise.
Well, you've got to be careful. And there's a difference between both sides win and if somebody calls for win-win. And it's actually if your goal is the other side wins also, you've got to be careful the emotional vulnerability because the takers can really take advantage of you if you're unguarded in your spirit. And so because of that, the takers know they can take advantage of you.
They know say win right off the bat because they're checking you for vulnerability. They're testing you. If you're like, oh yeah, I'd love to do a win-win. They're probably going to hurt you.
And so it's a behavior to watch out for. It's a verb it's a watch out for when you open a conversation. Whenever anybody says right off the bat to me, look, I got a great opportunity for you. It's a real win-win.
Those are two triggers that bring my guard up. I got a great opportunity for you. Usually means the other person wants you to do all the work. Here's a pot of gold over here.
You're going to have to build the bridge yourself to get to the pot of gold. And I'm not entirely sure that it's there, but I think it is. And then when win is they're trying to test to see if I'll drop my guard. Got you.
Very important point. That's really important. Now, everybody thinks that the word no is so negative, right? But every no gets you closer to a yes.
So tell us the power of the word no. Well, and you bring up a great point because people think that yes is successfully automatically thinking no is fair. And yes is not necessarily a success. Yes, most of the time is counterfeit.
People just want you to go on because you give them more information before they walk away before they choose to not agree. And so the flip side of that is when people say no, the difference is you say it or do you hear it? People hate hearing it. But when you say it, you feel safe, you feel protected.
And great negotiations is how you make it in the other side feel. Empathy is about how the other side sees it. So I want you to feel safe and protected. And I know that getting you to say no is going to make you feel that way.
So tiny little things. Nobody in my company ever says to anybody do you have a few minutes to talk. We always say it's not a bad time to talk. Even the tiniest little things we want people to feel safe with us so that if your guard doesn't go up, you think more clearly.
If I try to get you to say yes, would you like to make more money? Would you like to stay in five star hotel, travel or war for free? Like I'm trapping you. And as soon as I say that, would you like to make more money?
Where's this going? Well that means that if your guard is up, you're filtering, you're not actually listening. But if I say are you against making more money? You'll be like no, I'm willing to hear you out.
But since you just said no, then your defense mechanisms are not going off in the same way. So you talk a lot about the tone. How to mirror also people. How can you develop that?
It's practice. There's a mental warsong that was in a movie made a lot of years ago, which I love and I've used for a lot of examples. And he says there's only trains that I've never been in. I will never be simply tall.
So there's certain physical attributes that I'm never going to have. But emotional intelligence, anybody can develop that that chooses to. It's harder after age 25 because you're no real plasticity, your ability to learn new things goes dormant. But it doesn't go away.
Dormant means it's going to sleep. You can intentionally wake it back up. And so you can learn negotiation. You can learn emotional intelligence.
You can learn tone of voice. Just by practicing it. I always say that curiosity expands your mind. And you're a thousand percent right.
And I like that because it's something that when people approach any type of conversation, right? Because negotiation is life. That's a matter. You want to choose where you're going for dinner?
You want to choose what kind of choose to wear? But there's something that a lot of people don't talk about, which is the negotiation with yourself. Because sometimes we're having questions and we're having this inner conversation. How do you deal with that?
Yeah, one of the biggest challenges out there, because what you're really trying to do is separate your gut from your amygdala, your fear centers in your brain. Most people have heard of your amygdala. It's this tiny little thing in a brain that we rarely show for our defensive reactions, our negative reactions. If we're experiencing something new that we have never encountered before, they're like, I can see others going to go bad.
Or I can just see them saying no. I can see them not agreeing. That's a non-starter. Whatever your fear center of your brain is kicking into your head.
It's very debilitating. It stops you from doing stuff. Versus your gut. Your gut's really accurate.
So the hard part is which one of those is sense in your decision making. And many times I'll just say to myself, what's my gut? I'll openly ask myself, what's my gut telling me to get away from the fear center of my brain? No matter who you are, your gut is really accurate.
I like that. Sometimes we are afraid of even going that route. Because we want us to always have the path given to us. What's exactly what we need to do?
And that's why we ask a lot of those questions rather than asking ourselves. And sometimes that gut is what's going to indicate the actual decision that needs to be made. Yeah, and you bring up a great point on path. I heard on one of my other favorite podcasts, Andrew Huberman, a couple episodes back.
He says, people think of things in duration path and outcome. What do I want to be? How am I going to get there? How long is it going to take me to get there?
Path being a critical aspect of that. And we kid ourselves. The path is never what we imagined. But we think we know the path.
So then, all right, I'm good. I'm going to get there and work out. It never does. That way it's usually more secure.
It's more like this or more roller coaster. But thinking that we know the path ahead is critical for most people's performance. Interesting. Now, we talk a lot about different elements in the luxury space, including real estate.
But the word luxury has so many definitions. Everybody when they envision the word luxury, whatever that meaning might be, they're trying to go towards that path. To get that luxury. It could be the piece.
It could be the life set. It could be the time. It's just an explanation, isn't it? I was going to ask you.
So you just gave me your answer. What's the luxury for you? Wow. All right.
So for me is just relaxing into what it is that I do for a living. I mean, where I'm living now is telling my girlfriend, Wendy, yesterday. Like, I got a pool in my backyard. I grew up in a small town in Iowa.
Not 10 million years that I ever think I was going to be someplace where I had a pool in the backyard that I could go dip into it, you know, 11 out of 12 months. It ain't a big pool. You know, this is not 5,000 square foot house with five bedrooms and five bathrooms. You know, this is this a modest sized place with this small pool with a couple of palm trees where hummingbirds come in the morning and I can sit there and sit my coffee and look at the blue sky and watch hummingbirds.
People with, you know, multiple millions of dollars, you know, that's where they're putting their housekeeper. But to me, it's Nirvana. I love it. And so to me, that's luxury.
Someplace I can have a cup of coffee in the morning and just enjoy being alive. So deep and so beautiful, right? Because luxury, like what is it, right? And I love that answer.
Now, you're working on a lot of different new projects, but there's one in particular that you're super excited about. So tell us about that. Yeah, the fireside network. A fireside is a new Web3 app that you can get on your phone or whichever, whether you got iPhone, Android, whatever you got.
It's a fireside and it was originally pitched to us as an interactive podcast, which sounds kind of cool. But what it really is is negotiation coaching. Now, we do one session a week for about an hour at a time. And what you get if you subscribe is you get coaching in a group of your peers.
If you're in the transformation journey of how do I make myself my life better by being collaborative? One of our coaching clients once told me not long ago that he's making more money being collaborative than he ever made being cut through. Wow. I talked to a man that if you're less cut through, you make more money.
And so what this has turned out to more than an interactive podcast, it's group coaching, which we don't provide to individuals at this price. Like if you bought some coaching sessions for my company, a month worth of coaching sessions for you by yourself is going to be fine brand for the month. And if you if your company bought group coaching at this scale, it cost your company $25,000. This is $1,000 for the year, for the entire year.
And it's group coaching on and you get a topic, actionable topic of the day. Then you get asked questions either about that topic or if you got questions on a negotiation year in the middle of not the other day I did this. We sign on people, sign on from all over the world and I'm asking them where you, where you, where you, and are all the same like minded people, innovative, ambitious, who want to be around innovative, ambitious people. And this is part of their journey.
So Scott comes on and it's completely black where he's at. And I'm giving him a hard time. I'm like, what do you hide in somebody's face, man, or your future from justice? He goes, no matter if I'm on a mountaintop in Nepal.
And I got a negotiation after the sun comes up with my boss. And I need you to give me some coaching on the negotiation. Wow. He couldn't have called me and got that.
Right. He got it in the moment from the other side of the world. Oh, that's beautiful. That's beautiful.
That's amazing. And it's very powerful. So definitely one of the things that we're going to do, which is just something that we agreed on, we're going to do a second part of this interview where we're going to focus more in real scenarios of negotiation where Chris is going to give some examples on how can be implemented into your daily life. So if you have any questions, write them down, send them to us ahead of time and we'll be going over that Instagram life.
So outside from that, it's been a pleasure, my friend, for those that are watching or listening, please follow Chris. What he's doing is fantastic. Check out the business, check out the new project. And thank you for being here.
I'm looking forward to the Instagram Live. It's going to be fun. Thank you guys. And thanks again for everybody tuning in today.
We hope you enjoyed it. And remember, embrace it beautiful, success in life. My name is Alvaro and I'll see you next time.