Philip
Welcome to the negotiation podcast. This is where we talk to experts, practitioners and other trainers, really, to pick their brains and find out a technique or a tactic that they have either used in negotiations or perhaps it's something that's really important for us to be able to practice ourselves. Now today, I'm hugely excited to welcome Moshe to the show. Moshe, do you just give a little explanation as to who you are, where you come from, and your I guess your love of negotiation as well.
Moshe
So thank you, first of all, Phil, for inviting me. I've been in the negotiation field now since 1995 I started off as a mediator in 95 started teaching negotiation in 96 and have been doing this, both in private practice, through my company, the negotiating table, and since 2000 at Boston University, where I teach in the business school teach negotiation and other topics, mostly to graduate students.
Philip
That's brilliant. And I'm very envious of you. For those of you who are listening, you don't get to see this, but Moshe sat outside on the most beautiful veranda. But as he's explaining to me, I'm recording this on a Monday. There are a few garbage trucks I can't bath, but it looks spectacular. It really, really does. Now, Moshe, you've written a book, and I've read your book, I think it's entitled Collywobbles, and it's all about one particular or certain aspects of negotiation and the impact of negotiations. Do you want to just give us a quick brief as to to the book and what it covers, perhaps absolutely
Moshe
The full title is Collie wobbles how to negotiate when negotiating makes you nervous. And what motivated me to write the book was the idea that, as I was teaching people skills and strategies, I noticed that very often they would understand them in theory, but when they went to implement them in their real lives, something would go off the rails. They would get overwhelmed, they would get excited, they would get angry, they would get frustrated, and those emotional spikes that they'd encountered as they negotiated would cause them to lose sight of their strategy and be less able to use the skills that they'd acquired. Now my thinking was that having skills is good. Being able to use them when you need them is actually better. And my thinking that it's not that they don't have the skills, it's that there's something in the way, and the thing that's in the way is usually themselves, their own reactions, their own emotions, prevent them from from accessing those and I realized that unless we teach people to manage their emotions actively as they negotiate, we're actually not doing anything significant.
Philip
Yeah, I love that. That point there. It's great to have the skills, but you also need to know how and when to apply them, and you're absolutely right when it comes to negotiations, I think most people find it very uncomfortable. I often frame it in the sense that negotiations involves a lot of rejection. You know, you're either being rejected or have to reject others, and that means it gets quite personal on a personal level. So for you, is that different to the mediation side to being in a negotiation.
Moshe
So Phil, I'm wondering if I could ask you to repeat that, because you didn't hear the garbage truck. But all I heard was the garbage truck
Philip
I could see in the background now thinking. So what you were saying there basically is that negotiations can be quite emotional. There's a lot of emotions in negotiations. And the way that I have seen this, and the way of I express this people, is that negotiation involves a lot of rejection. Either you are rejecting one party or you're being rejected. And that's not something that we're we're comfortable with. We don't always like that. But of course, the more you can practice it, the more you can become more comfortable with it. So would I be right in thinking that your book is providing you know various techniques, various approaches to being able to deal with that emotional
Moshe
Absolutely, and it looks at it in two different ways. One is, how do you deal with those emotions in the moment. Because, as you know, negotiations happen in moments, life happens in moments, and you can have a perfectly great negotiation and lose it in a moment. So you have to learn how to manage moments. The other thing is longer term effects. There are some things that are more pervasive to me and how I negotiate, and those are going to impact my negotiations, not just in the moment, but in how I prepare, how I engage with the other party, the narrative I bring into that negotiation that impacts how I think and what I do. So you have to be able to do both. But the first thing is you need to learn how to manage. Moments, because moments happen, and if we don't manage them, we just lose it.
Philip
Well, you know, again, I can't disagree with that at all, because the whole premise of what we do at the negotiation club is to try and practice those moments. I always refer to them as the micro moments. So for something for us to practice or to be focused on. Is there a technique, or is there something that you think we should as practitioners, as club members or audience? Should we? We should try?
Moshe
So the first thing I would say is that anything that happens to you, anything anybody says or does, any situation you walk into, impacts you first on the emotional level, and emotions hit you very, very hard and very fast, and then they start subsiding. And meanwhile, your cognitive brain, the part that's going to figure out how to deal with the situation, is slowly catching up. So one of the things that you need to do is learn how to identify those moments faster, to catch yourself in those moments of peak emotional response before you do or say something that you're going to regret. And fortunately, your body gives you some clues. Your heart rate goes up, your breathing changes, your muscles tense, some people tremble, some people feel hot. Some people feel it in their stomachs, which is, by the way, called having the collie wobbles right, and a very British word as well.
Moshe
It's an archaic British word, but I really like it. So the point is, if you can become more aware and attuned to those things when they happen, you can stop yourself faster. And then what you want to do is slow down time so you can respond rather than react in the situation. So for example, I'm negotiating with you, and then your boss walks into the room, and all of a sudden my heart is racing, and your boss says, You have to give us a 20% discount or the deal is off. Now in that moment of my heart racing, I might be panicked. I might be thinking, I'm about to lose the deal, and then either I will say, Sure, no problem, or I will say, you know, no way and lose the deal. Or I will say, Well, how about, you know, 10% and now I've compromised unnecessarily. Or I can notice that my heart is racing and then slow things down so I don't respond until I'm in a better state of mind. And some things you can do to slow down are, first of all, just say nothing. I think you call it pause, right? If you're not saying anything at all, you're also not saying anything you're going to regret. I can think of so many times when I spoke in haste and regretted it. I can think of no times when I paused and regretted pausing. So take a beat. Don't say anything, because I guarantee you what whatever you say 10 seconds later will be smarter than what you would have said right now.
Philip
I love everything you're saying that. The curious thing is, is there's a couple of words you're picking out there. I mean, you're talking about speed faster to respond, but slowing down, you know, 10 seconds immediately. So it's all around the the ability to manage the time in a negotiation, but the time in your head,
Moshe
yeah, and we get so reactive in that part of our brain, the the emotional part of our brain, the amygdala, is so powerful and so quick that we need to cognitively try to get ahead of it, so to catch it before it catches us off guard. And you know, we all can think of many times when we got caught off guard, something triggered us, and we did or said something that we regretted. And if we can prevent that, even some of the time, we're already doing better than we had done before. Right now, this is something that we can practice.
Moshe
Oh, absolutely,
Philip
I'm thinking here, literally, what you've kind of said there, which is, is the card, the negotiation card that we can use to practice is just titled, slow down, abs. So it's a reminder. So again, when we have the card, we have the cards. We put them out, we have this one which is to slow down. And the idea here is that we're not slowing down just because it says to slow down. It's to slow down with a purpose, which is to recognise your emotions at those moments. So we know, because negotiations very much involve, that we know that we are going to get proposals, suggestions. We know that we're going to like some we are not going to like others. We know we're going to get rejections. We know we're going to have to reject the others, and each time this is going to possibly raise our heart. Rates make us go down some particular tangles. So for me, the the card here is literally a note, slow down and possibly just internally. Organise it internally, visualise it internally, understand what's going on here, because of the collie wobbles, right.
Moshe
You know how some email systems these days don't actually send out your email until 30 seconds after you hit Send right to give you time to say, whoa, whoa. That's not what I really meant. This is what we're trying to do in our minds. We're trying to separate what's in our minds from what comes out of our mouth. So if my first reaction is very powerful and emotional, and by the way, it doesn't have to be bad. It doesn't have to be, you know, rejection. One time, one of my students walked into class and she said, I'm so embarrassed. I'm like, what happened? She goes. I got a job offer from a company I really liked, and I got so excited. I said yes, and I forgot to negotiate. She was planning to negotiate, but she got so excited in the moment, she just said, Yes, that's a positive one.
Philip
That's like the positive excitement. I mean, we always can talk about the negative, but we can suddenly think, oh, that's brilliant. Yeah, I love that.
Moshe
Yeah, right. And she could, and probably should have done better in that negotiation, had she slowed down and said, Thank you so much for the offer. Paused and then said, Well, would you consider the following improvements in the offer? And then they probably would have talked to her. They probably would have addressed but she she reacted too quickly, and she did get her give herself that opportunity.
Philip
Well, I like this on a number of levels, because by purposely slowing down and just trying to take that pause, you're doing a self diagnostic. Okay, what's the emotions? What have I just heard? What am I going through here? Then you can think about the the response. The other thing that you're doing, though, is you're creating a moment of silence, which often comes across as being particularly a confident person, somebody who's in a negotiation, and they can pause and they can take their time. The other party really is thinking, You know what, they know what they're doing here. So that slowing down actually does a an external factor. It really can actually give a very credible appearance on the other side, so long as you're not crying, I suppose, or you know you're you're not panicking, as such. But it also allows you, if you're purposely doing it also allows you to be listening more, absolutely actively listening.
Moshe
And active listening is one of the main tools we can use to slow down and, you know, in Collie wobbles, you know, chapter nine, I talk about the listening triangle, which is a tool for active listening and negotiation to draw out the other party's interests. But one of the things it does is it also slows down time. So if you said something that upset me in the negotiation. You said, No, we can absolutely not agree to this term. And it's a term that's very important to me. I can pause and I can say, so it sounds like this term doesn't work for you. Tell me more about why that is. And now you're talking, not me. While you're talking, I'm calming down, plus I'm learning useful information. And I just keep going doing that. Whatever you say, I listen to it, I reflect it back, I ask you another open ended question, and by the time I've done that for a few minutes, I'm back to steady state in terms of my emotions, I've learned some things that are useful for me going forward, and now I can devise a strategy and how to move the negotiation in my direction.
Philip
So the activity itself of slowing down buys you time, gives you that confidence. I also think what's interesting there is that at the beginning of our conversation, you talked about moments, and I referred to them as micro moments. But the important thing here is that you slow down, and it gives you a chance to think, what do I do next? What do I say? What technique should I use? Now, of course, some of those techniques are time driven, so you might need to use it very, very quickly. But the point is, is, by purposely practicing, you are literally thinking, not the immediate response, the emotional response is driving us. You're slowing down to pick the right response. And therefore slowing down is a really good technique to have before any other tactic. Before you use any other tactic, you slow down.
Moshe
You know, not everything will trigger you. There are times when someone says something and you have the perfect strategic response, and you can respond very quickly. There's no There's no categorical thing that says you shouldn't do that. The issue is that if you find yourself free. Active. Pretty much anything you do is likely to be regrettable, and that's what you're trying to prevent.
Philip
Some people can't help themselves, but bit of practice, it can actually make a difference.
Moshe
And here's my point, if they can help themselves, 5% of the time, they're doing 5% better than they would have done before they started practicing this. And you know what? That's better than they they would have gotten otherwise. I'm a mentalist when it comes to these things, like you don't fix yourself entirely. You do better than you did before, and that gives you the opportunity to keep working on it, keep getting better.
Philip
Yeah, I think it's the first equalizer where he says progress, not perfection. The security guard is pulling on the progress, not perfection. That's all we want. Is progress, progress, progress. You know, you're not going to get perfection necessarily. Uh, I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna draw it to an end here. But first of all, I want to say a massive thank you. Okay. I mean, you know, you've been in this game for almost 30 odd years, from 1995 96 which puts me to shame, fantastic book. I've read your book several times, and we'll probably do a few more bits with it as well. So for our listeners, for our listeners, slow down. This is going to be our negotiation card. This is going to be something that we can purposely practice. I would highly recommend you actually have a look, get hold of the book Collie wobbles as well, because I believe chapter two, chapter nine, covid in those chapters,
Moshe
chapter two about slowing down. Chapter Nine is about listening brilliant.
Philip
So it really is all there, already a lot of information out there, but the fact is that when you get the card, you now know what you need to try and do in your practices, and the more you practice it, the better you will get. So for those of you who are listening, if you do like this, give us a like and do follow for more interesting techniques and tactics, and in the meantime, final words, Marshall,
Moshe
well, yeah, you know, you read the book, you get some good information, and at the end of the day, doing something with it will involve practice, and that's where the cards come in. And I hope you enjoy both.
Philip
Thank you very much. With that, I say goodbye to everybody and keep on practicing.
