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Executive Summary

Welcome back to the NEGOTIATEx podcast! This week your hosts welcome Moshe Cohen, a senior lecturer at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Moshe has been teaching negotiation and conflict resolution since 1995 and has also authored two books on the subject:

Collywobbles, How To Negotiate When Negotiating Makes You Nervous and Optimism Is A Choice And Other Timeless Ideas.

Given his background, it might surprise you to learn that Moshe was not always interested in negotiations. In fact, his academic career started with a degree in physics; from which he pivoted over to electrical engineering and robotics! Now there may not be a physics/robotics prerequisite for all you budding negotiators out there but for Moshe, his science background made him curious to explore the human side of things, especially management. So while studying again, (this time for an MBA) Moshe fell in love with the mediation and organizational behavior courses. He completed his MBA, trained in mediation and became a full time mediation and negotiation professor. 

During his time spent teaching, Moshe observed a phenomenon that many aspiring negotiators struggle with. He realized that books can only go so far as to provide tips and strategies to employ; when it comes to putting them into practice, more often than not his students would choke. Nerves are the biggest obstacle in the way of success. That inspired him to write Collywobbles. An archaic British term referring to a nervous tummy ache, Moshe felt that the field was already saturated with books on “how” to negotiate. Instead, he wanted to focus on the mental blocks and other hurdles that frequently crop up during a negotiation.

Getting To Yes” is a seminal textbook for all negotiators. One of its key tenets is to separate the people from the problem. But in the real world, negotiations can involve counterparts who are near and dear to one: a romantic partner, a boss, a client one’s close to. In such cases, it is almost impossible to separate the person from the problem at hand. This is where Collywobbles comes in, providing a practical framework of solutions for theoretical strategies that have been described in other negotiation books.

Moshe’s goal with the book was to bridge the gap between academia and application. As a young man, he was a four-time CPR-trained lifeguard. But during a dinner incident, where an individual was choking and needed help, Moshe found himself frozen to his seat. Thankfully, the person was alright in the end but the incident showed that even after his extensive training with the Heimlich maneuver, when faced with a high-stress situation Moshe failed to apply it in practice. This analogy can be applied to his negotiations career as well.

Experience has taught him that there are two kinds of negotiation experts working in the field. The first breed are the naturals. Negotiating comes easily to them and they are held up as the perfect examples of what can be achieved if their methods are followed. The second group are more like Moshe: they have struggled with certain aspects of negotiating, made mistakes and learned along the way to become the experts they are now. It is for these people that Collywobbles was written. The book is designed to help people identify the areas within the subject they struggle with through emotional intelligence, and mitigate those holdbacks by being self aware. 

Fears play a big role in preventing people from finding success during negotiations. Fear of tangible hurt, fear of retaliation and fear of emotional pain/embarrassment are all frequently observed and have to be overcome. Now Moshe is not a child psychologist, but his experience from raising four children and being an ex-child himself has taught him that children and adolescents are a lot less susceptible to these fears than adults. The process of growing older makes one more sensitive to how they may be perceived by others and this can have a cascading effect on their confidence. This is where narratives can help. Moshe is a strong believer in being the author of one’s own narrative, not its victim.  

Moshe, Aram and Nolan discuss more about Collywobbles on this episode of the NEGOTIATEx podcast. Please write to us if you have any experience with negotiations-related nervous tummy aches of your own and we’d love to discuss it in the future. Thank you for tuning in.

Key Takeaways:

  • A theoretical understanding of negotiation can only take you so far. It is only when you put it into practice that you can test your understanding of the subject
  • Emotional Intelligence and self awareness go a long way to helping identify problem areas within one’s learning and help to overcome them over time. 
  • It is absolutely normal to feel nervousness or fear when sitting at a negotiation table and “failures” are only failures if you do not use those experiences to learn from and grow.

Transcript

Nolan Martin : Hey everyone. Welcome to today's episode. Glad to bring on Moshe today and we still have Aram, my good friend, he decided to stick around. So I'm gonna turn it over to Aram. We're gonna kick this thing off immediately. Let's go.

Aram Donigian : Thanks Nolan that was, that was a great vote of confidence from you always appreciate that. Hey folks, it's my, uh, pleasure to, uh, welcome today. Moshe Cohen as our guest, Mohas been teaching negotiation, leadership and conflict resolution, as well as organizational behavior as a founder of The Negotiating Table since 1995 and as a senior lecturer at Boston University's Questrom School of Business since 2000. He has worked with thousands of students and companies worldwide as a mediator, Moshe has worked to resolve hundreds of matters and also coaches executives, managers, and individuals on leading others in negotiating effectively. He has two books: Collywobbles, How to Negotiate When Negotiating Makes You Nervous and Optimism Is A Choice and other timeless ideas. He has also written numerous articles and cases and appears in podcasts, videos, and interviews. Moshe studied physics at Cornell and has a Master's in electrical engineering for McGill University specializing in robotics. After a dozen years in robotics, he completed his MBA at BU fell in love with negotiation, mediation and leadership, and joins us here today. Moshe, welcome!

Moshe Cohen : Thank you so much for inviting me.

AD : So Moshe, I wanna hear your story. I think it's so interesting. How does someone who has a degree in physics and electrically engineering end up in the negotiation, mediation, conflict resolution field?

Moshe’s Journey From Robotics To Mediation [2:57]

MC : So, I thought most negotiators have degrees in physics

AD : 😀Well, listen, maybe after talking, we'll find out that they should. Maybe there's a reason that the negotiator should have that background.

MC : So you, you know, when I was in high school, I was good at science and I thought physics would be an interesting thing to study in college. And it turns out that physics in college is a completely different animal than physics in high school. And I found it very, very hard. And after I've graduated with my degree in physics, I realized I couldn't possibly stay in physics. So I went into what seemed easier at the time I went into electrical engineering and I worked as an engineer for a couple of years thinking that if I was gonna stay in engineering, I should have a degree in it. And that's when I went to McGill and got a master's in electrical engineering. I loved working in robotics. I worked in it for about a 11 years. I worked in the space tele robotics field.

MC : So I worked on the shuttle arm and the station arm and other things that moved in space and, uh, and, and had moving parts. But over time I found myself moving more towards the people side of things, not so much the computers and robot side of things. So I decided to go into management, knowing nothing about management. I went back to school and I went to got out my MBA. And after doing my MBA, I realized that I don't like managing anything. So yeah, that was money well spent. But I also realized that I loved my negotiation class. In fact, I loved all my organizational behavior classes and leadership, but particularly negotiation. And we did one segment on mediation and I fell in love. And as a result of that, I went to my profess. So I said, how do I get into this? And I eventually got a basic mediation training and started volunteer mediating. And over time, this became my career and became a mediator in ‘95. And then in ‘96, people started asking me to teach. So I started teaching classes first in mediation, then negotiation, and then expand to other subjects like leadership and communication. And then in 2000, BU invited me back in. So since 2000, I've been at BU, but I split my time between teaching at BU and running The Negotiating Table where I do a lot of corporate training and coaching and those kinda things.

AD : So Moshe, Nolan and I before talked about instructors we've had, who've been influential on us, who was this professor at BU that must have taught an engaging negotiations course to kinda capture you this way?

MC : So his name was Dave Brown and he's since retired, but I'm very grateful. And then I had a whole bunch of other amazing professors there. There was an Israeli professor been name of Yahel who was wonderful. She taught me organizational behavior and leadership, and really turned me onto the field. In fact, I can say that from her, not only did I learn the material I learned how to teach and a lot of the ways I teach today or influenced by her.

AD : Yeah. Yeah. That's a great tribute. I always like to, I've been heavily impacted by my previous teachers too.

Negotiating Your Way Out Of Nervous Tummy Aches [6:15]

NM : So, jumping in here, Moshe for the title of the book “Collywobbles How to Negotiate When Negotiating…”, what on earth are collywobbles where did that come from? And just dive right in to, to where on earth did this come from?

MC : So, it's an archaic British term that literally means tummy ache

AD : 😀

MC : And is specifically used to mean the kind of tummy ache you get when you're nervous, nervous, or anxious, you can see it, it shows up in some Disney movies, in the original 101 Dalmatians and in the movie Brave, they both refer to collywobbles and it's referred to in one of the Harry Potter books. So it's a real term. Most people have never heard it before. It wasn't my working title. My original title was something like how to get over yourself and negotiate effectively. But people said that's a little harsh.

NM : 😀

MC : But I remember, I heard the term for the first time John Stewart used it on his show like 15 years ago and it stuck in my mind and ever since then I've had it in my mind. And I remember I was looking for a title when people told me that my original title was too harsh and all of a sudden, this word popped into my mind. And I said, that's perfect because the way I'm thinking of it is someone says, “I wanna negotiate with my boss for a raise, but I've got the collywobbles” because that's what people feel.

AD : Yeah. Well, right. So I gotta, I gotta ask: one, read the book and we're gonna talk a little bit about it. I gotta point up though, my friend, my dear friend Nolan though, had to get the audio book. And he said, you actually do your own reading on the audio book. And he said, you're fantastic.

NM : Yes. I was actually pretty impressed because most of the times, authors, at least in my opinion, when I listen to an audio book, when the author choose to read his own book or her own book, it's not always the best quality compared to a professional reader. And I do wanna say that you did an awesome job, narrating your book, and definitely sounded just as good as professional reader. So it was enjoyable to listen, I'll say that much.

MC : Well, thank you. You know, I was debating because I'm not a professional reader and reading the book took a quite a bit of time, but too many people told me that when they read the book, they heard my voice. So I figured that when people hear the book, it has to be my voice. So two of my sons- I have four kids- two of my sons are into music and they set up a recording studio for me in one of our spare bedrooms. They have a professional mic that they used. And then my 16 year old son actually did the initial producing of the audio book. And then I gave it to a professional sound editor to do the final product, but it was, it was a real family affair. We all, we all got together and did this.

AD : That's very cool. Wow. What a, what? That's pretty amazing. All right. So why, why this book, there's so many books on negotiation out there. You talked a little bit about what it convers and we're gonna dig, continue to dig more into that, but what was the Mo what was your motivation Mo for, for writing a, a book called collywobbles?

MC : So, you know, I've been teaching negotiation for over two decades. And what I've observed is that we are really good at teaching people skills and strategies, and then they go to use them and they choke. Something happens between learning the skills and using the skills. Something gets in the way and more often than not, what gets in the way is their emotions. I can't tell you how many of my students have come to me and said,  “I negotiate every day for my boss, with clients, with vendors, but I can't negotiate with my boss when it comes to my own career”. And I ask them what's different, it's the same skills? And what's different is that when it's them, all of their emotions come in, they feel stressed and they shut down. So I looked at all the stuff that was written before, and there are many, many good negotiation books out there, and they all give skills.

They all give strategies. They all give you things to think about, but what they didn't address was the fact that stuff gets in the way. And what I wanted to write about was something that no one else has written about, because I didn't feel like the world needs another negotiation book to teach more skills and strategies. I think that's pretty well covered. So, that was the thinking behind it. And the more I got into it, the more I realized that there's many things that get in the way, and it was a fun project to look at because what I really want to do is make an impact. I want people, you know, as I always tell people and I teach, I don't care what happens in class. I want, I care what happens the day after, when you go to try to use this stuff. So that, that's what,

NM : Yeah. And I think what I liked so much about the book is you, you even clearly address in like the second chapter, it's like, “Hey, here, if you could do all these things right now, you'd be one of the greatest negotiators”, but what happens and what your book addresses is like the actual application of academia. And so I think you're right at the bridge between application and academia. And that's what I think I liked most about the book is, everyone knows the right answer, but actually practicing or implementing, the techniques that we're about to address I'm assuming in this podcast, that's really the science behind the book.

MC : I tried to do something practical. Look, you know, I read a lot of the books in the field. I mean, you take a classic book in the field: Getting To Yes, we've all read it. And one of the great lines from getting, getting T yes is separate the people from the problem. All of my students can recite that line by heart. But then again, how do you do that? Hmm. Right. I can do that fine when I don't care. But what if it's my wife that I'm negotiating with and all of a sudden separating the people from the problem is not something I know how to do. Right. What happens if it's my boss? What happens if it's one of my direct reports? What happens if it's one of my closest clients, you know when it becomes important, all of a sudden people can't separate the people from the problem. Yeah. So what I wanted to do is give them practical ways of doing those things.

AD : And so you talk, you know, one of the things you talk about and see is the, that we are getting, we're kind of our own worst enemies we get in the way. That's gotta be hard for people to realize and acknowledge and understand. Was it hard for you to kinda get to that revelation in for your own negotiation path?

MC : I don't think so for me, because I think I’ve always known that I'm in the way.

AD : 😀I have some people in my life who remind me of that Moshe, which is helpful. It's good to have those folks.

Bridging The Gap Between Theoretical And Practical Negotiations [12:42]

MC : I was actually really alerted to this in, in a completely different way. So I was a lifeguard when I was younger. I've been trained in CPR four times, but one time my wife and I were at a restaurant and the guy behind us started choking and I froze, and my wife ended up doing the Heimlich. And I realized that it's not that I didn't know how to do the Heimlich, I was trained four times. It's when push comes to shove, I froze. Right. And that's what happens to people when they negotiate too. And I know that's happened to me, right. I think there's two kinds of people in the world that teach negotiations, right? This is just, you know, me talking, I think there are experts who are really good at this and say, “Watch what I do and you can do it too.” And then there's people like me, who've struggled with many aspects of negotiations, learned some things along the way that have been helpful and wanna share those with other people. I mean, when I took my first negotiation class back in 1994, I took it because I thought I was a bad negotiator, turns out I wasn't a bad negotiator, but I felt like a bad negotiator.

MC : And I think a lot of my students come to my classes because they feel like bad negotiators. And I wanna share with them some of the things that helped me in getting from where I was to where I am.

AD : Yeah. I would say we, I would say Nolan and I probably come from the perspective of that, that you do too. We've struggled. We've had some great folks who've come alongside us and been able to show us kind of where those struggles originate from. And then there's a genuine desire to, to help other people and share some of those tips. So you're in, I think you're in, you're in the family here, Moshe or we’re in your family.

MC : And I think many people struggle. And I think that one of the things I try to do with the book is to try to help people identify where exactly their struggles come from, cuz different of us, different ones of us struggle with different things, right? Somebody might get so angry in a negotiation that they become very stubborn and positional, someone else might become so overwhelmed that they freeze and don't know how to speak. So different ones of us have different, different situations that affect us and we get affected in different ways. You know, the cornerstone of emotional intelligence is self-awareness. And what I tried to do with the first half of the book is really elevate people's self-awareness as they're negotiating. And once you have that self-awareness then you can use tools to try to manage some of those things that are happening to you.

NM : Well, let's dig in into that a little bit Moshe. Like how does someone become more self-aware? Do you have any good tips for 'em?

MC : Yeah, so self-awareness is something that didn't come naturally to me, I believe my wife used to refer to me as oblivious and occasionally still does. So, I think it can be learned and you can do a few things to do that. One is you need to slow down, you need to slow down and give yourself some time to reflect. Because very often we rush so much from one thing to the next, we have no time to think about what we're doing. And without that we have no chance of being self-aware. The second thing I really recommend for people to do is to write things down. You know, if you come out of a negotiation and no matter what happened, good, bad, take a moment, write down a few sentences about what happened, what you did, that you were happy with. What the other side did that you could learn from what you did that you weren't so happy with.

Why you think things happened as they were it'll take 10, 10 minutes to do that, but do that over time and you learn an awful lot about yourself. You know, there's been a lot of studies that show that adults learn by reflection and the journaling is something that really helps. Now. I'm a terrible journalist/ a journaler. I have like a stack of like, you know, journals that have four pages written in them and then I gave up. But to do a small thing like that and write down a few words after your negotiations, that's gonna be enormously beneficial. The other thing is we see ourselves better when we have a mirror. Talk to other people. If you have a chance to let's say negotiate with somebody else in the room, you have a work colleague, a mentor, a boss, even, you know, someone who just took notes, ask them for feedback after. You're gonna learn tremendously from, from what you did, you're gonna learn about habits that you had, that you didn't even know you did. And things that you did that had impact on the other party, good or bad. And you'll be able to learn from that. So those are just like three things that you can do to, to increase your self-awareness. Self-awareness is kind of a lifelong journey, but it's not on or off, you improve over time and you learn things.

AD : Yeah. Moshe, I really appreciate all three of those. Do you integrate that into your course at BU, when you work with clients, are there ways that you integrate the reflection, the journaling, the feedback?

MC : So, this week my students have to hand me their reflection journals for their negotiation class. And I'm not the only one in this. I have other colleagues at the school who I know do something similar. It's good for me to see what they've learned, but it's actually even more, I don't even care what they wrote. I mean, what what's important to me is that they wrote it and the process of writing it down really cements the learning, really increases their awareness of what they're doing. So yeah, I do that a lot. In my corporate classes, it's a little harder because they tend to be short. And you know, if you have a one-time engagement with a client or a two-time, there's not that much opportunity. They'll encourage people to do that on their own.

AD : Yeah, I can appreciate, I can appreciate that challenge very much. All right. So in your book, you qualify negotiation, risks and fears. Can you tell us a little bit about how you do that and why is again, why is maybe that important as we, as we build our self awareness to kind of acknowledge some of the risks or fears around, around negotiating.

Getting Over The Fear To Negotiate Effectively [18:23]

MC : So, you know, I think fears figure into negotiations quite a bit. I think people are so scared to negotiate that they often avoid negotiating altogether. How many times have you had to negotiate with someone and just kept putting it off because it was gonna be an uncomfortable conversation and you didn't want to get into it? So, I think the more aware you are of what you're afraid of and what's causing your behavior, the more you can then manage it. If you're not aware, you're just gonna act on those fears. Now, when it comes to negotiation, I've identified three areas of fear that tend to have a lot of impact. The first one is fear of tangible hurt. Think of one of my students applying for a job, if I ask for too much money, they'll resend the offer, right? So it's something bad will happen when I try to negotiate. The second one is fear of retaliation. I can't tell you how many times people have told me. I wanna ask my boss for a raise, but I'm afraid of damaging the relationship. I gotta tell you, if you can damage your relationship by asking for a raise,

AD : Right?

MC : You probably need a new boss.

AD : 😀

MC : Because your relationship should be more robust. And you asking for something. I mean, your boss can say yes, can say no, can offer something else, but they're not gonna hate you for asking. And the third area is emotional pain. People don't like rejection. People feel rejection, very personally and very painfully. And they're afraid of asking cuz they're afraid of getting no. And what I remind my students is that if you don't ask, that's a guaranteed no. I mean, Wayne Greski said that you missed every shot you don't take. And the same thing is true about negotiation. However, those fears are so powerful that they prevent people from negotiating. They make people rush through their negotiations. They make people back off at the first sign of resistance. And if you're aware that that's going on, then you can manage it. One of the things that I ask people when I, you know, when I coach them in their negotiation is what are you afraid might happen if you ask for this, what's actually gonna happen? I say, how likely is it that you're gonna ask your boss for a raise and your boss is gonna say “Leave and never come back.”

MC : Right? It's not like, right. And even if that happened, what are you gonna do then? You'll find another job.

AD : Right.

MC : This isn't the only place you can work. So once people can start thinking through their fears, they become a lot more manageable. They can get their arms around them.

AD : Do you find that any of those three are more predominant than another? Or is it just, is it more person to person, situation to situation? Is context playing a factor here?

MC : I think it's both personal and circumstantial. So for instance, there might be a situation where I don't have any real, tangible hurt that's gonna happen, but I do care about the relationship or I have other situations where it's just the emotional pain, the discomfort. You know, I've heard of people saying, “I'm afraid to send back this food at the restaurant because I don't want the waiter to spit in my meal”. That's tangible hurt. But I've also heard people say, I'm afraid of asking the store clerk to let me return this item because I don't wanna make this person uncomfortable. Well, now you're in the emotional pain kind of realm. So different circumstances bring it up differently for different people. And I think different people are more driven by one or the other. I think relationship is huge. You know, humans are social animals and none of us want to be driven out of the herd. None of us want to be ostracized or to be seen as somehow ridiculous or unreasonable or greedy. And because of that we hold back. So I think, you know, that that's a big one, but they're all big.

NM : No, I think one thing that you brought out in your book is that seems like kids, for whatever reason, don't have any of these things that hold them back, that they're able to do, do and ask whatever they want. And then when we come adults, it seems like all that goes away, that we do have all these fears. And so why is that? What kind of insights do you have for us?

MC : So we'll start off by saying, I'm not a child psychologist I don't have,

AD : But you stayed at a holiday in express last night. So, you're more than qualified to go ahead. Sorry.😀

MC : But you know, I do have four kids and I didn't used to be a child myself. So I can tell you that. One of the things that you see with kids is that they don't have any notion of a downside, right? A kid could to throw themselves down in a mall and have a tantrum and they know their parents are, you know, they're, they're still gonna love them and they don't have the same restraints because they're also not as aware or self-conscious about the impact that they're having on other people or how other people view them. So, you know, I think one of the things that becomes, that happens as we grow older is we become a lot more sensitive to how we interact with others and how we're seen by the people around us. The other thing that happens, I think is that we start imagining scenarios, right? And in chapter six, I talk a lot about narratives. We start to telling ourselves stories about what might happen. And I think those stories develop as we get older and we start thinking, okay, if I do this, then this thing might happen because, and we're starting to tell ourselves these stories and that makes it harder for, for us to negotiate. I think as kids, you're not thinking as far ahead, you're more in the moment and you're not weaving those big stories that, that drive your behavior.

Why Are Narratives So Important In Negotiation And Mediation? [24:18]

AD : So that was one of my big, my favorite parts of your book was chapter six, discussing the narratives, the narratives that we encounter. And it's not just ours, but, but the person we're negotiating with has a narrative. We have a narrative about their narrative. How do you manage that? I mean, so how do you encourage folks to recognize it? And then, and then what, what's the processing piece or, or the management technique there around these, this idea called narratives.

MC : So I think there's two parts, right? There's your narrative. And there's the other person's narratives that you'd think about separately. So in terms of your own narratives, we come back to self-awareness, right? You need to know what you're telling yourself. You know, I really believe that the stories we tell ourselves define our experience. If I tell myself I'm a bad negotiator, I just put myself on the back foot. If I tell myself that this person I'm negotiating with is 10 feet tall, and they've got decades of experience and they're gonna clean up. Well, again, I put myself on the back foot. So our stories define our experience, and we need to be aware of what we're telling ourselves. Again, when I'm coaching people, question I ask them very frequently is stop, what are you telling yourself right now?

And once they know what they're telling themselves, they can start managing their stories. Because the thing to remember about these narratives is at least our own narratives we made up, they don't list. We created those and therefore we need to realize that whatever narrative we have, isn't the only possible narrative. I own a small business. I there's one person in my business, me. And some of my clients are 300,000 person companies. If I walk in there and I'm thinking, oh I have to negotiate a contract with them, but they're a huge company and they're just gonna dictate to me. Well, it's self-fulfilling. But if I walk in there and I think, okay, we're here to do business, they've got something I need, I've got something they need. And we need to find something that works for both of us or it doesn't make sense to do business. And all of a sudden that's a completely different narrative describing the same exact situation. But now I'm negotiating as an equal. And that puts me in a different mindset. So to realize that your narrative, whatever it is, isn't the only possible narrative allows you to then rewrite the narrative.

And one of my favorite things to say is that you wanna be the author of your narrative, not its victim. Cause very often become the victims of our narratives. So that's on our side. On their side, different people are gonna have different narratives about you, but that gives you some opportunity to shape the narratives that they have. So you can ask them questions to find out what their narrative is. That's a really important thing to do. I'm a mediator. And one of the things that happens in mediations is that people get an opportunity to, to tell their narratives to each other. And a lot of times they hear each other's narratives in a completely different way. And that allows 'em to come to agreements that they weren't able to come to before. Because if I don't know what your narrative is, I'm gonna impose a narrative on you.

I'm gonna say, okay, you know, this is what Nolan's thinking about me. But when you actually tell me what you're thinking or what you're experiencing, what you're thinking about yourself, what you're thinking about the situation, what you're thinking about me, then I get to see you in a completely different way. So, learning to ask the other person question is a great way to create collaboration and empathy that leads to agreement. The other thing is we tell people narratives and those narratives shape their expectations. And we have a lot of opportunity to include narrative in how we communicate with people.

AD : Do I have to create space for that discussion? I, I can imagine how do I create the dynamic that they want to they're able to, to share that like their perspective, but also my level of comfort with maybe hearing something that I'd prefer not to hear.

MC : So that can be tough. Right? And there's two aspects for that. One is to develop your listening skills. Two words that I talk about a lot are curiosity and empathy. If somebody says something to you, you wanna find out more, you wanna understand where they're coming from. You wanna realize that even though you have a very different perspective, their perspective is valid from their point of view, you don't have to agree with it. You wanna understand it. So that's the theory of what you're trying to do. That's very, very difficult to do when you feel threatened by that or when you feel offended by what they're saying. So then in chapter two, I talk about the emotional response group or this idea that anything that happens to you creates this emotional spike, that subsides over time and that your cognitive ability actually takes time to catch up to that.

And that is such a key thing because you need to learn to slow yourself down. When someone says something to you and you get upset by it, you need to slow yourself down to the point where you can respond to it, get curious and then ask open-ended questions and find out what's going on, listen with empathy. But those two things, you know, work hand in hand. The two things that I probably to teach the most are actually chapter two and chapter nine, which is chapter two is about this emotional response curve and learning to slow down and manage your emotions in real time. And chapter nine is about listening and using open-ended questions and reflective listening to understand what's going on with the other party. You know, the listening is what gives you power when you're negotiating. But the emotional self-management is what creates the space that you can then listen. And those two things really have to work hand in hand.

AD : This reminds me of Ted Lasso. I don't know of any of either of you watched Ted lasso, but he'll say get curious, not judgmental. And to me that captures both those points, right? The idea of curiosity. Did I say that right? Get curious. Yeah. Not judgemental, you know, the power of curiosity. And then, and then what I loved is the empathy creates the space and it's the two hand in hand. Thanks. Yeah, that's great.

NM : Hey, it's Nolan. I need to jump in right here. This is gonna conclude today's episode, but join us next week as we continue our conversation with Moshe.

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