 I don't think you have to sacrifice your relationship to have a great outcome, and I don't think you have to sacrifice your outcome to have a great relationship. I think if I use the right strategy, I can achieve both, but I don't think people focus enough on the right strategies, putting the right issues on the table, leaving myself enough room to maneuver and concede in the discussion. What's up, everybody, and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week, and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified, and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell, and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. So imagine that I am purchasing something and I'm just negotiating on price, or I'm selling you something, and I'm only negotiating price. That would be an example of the wrong issues, but probably an expert would know not just to negotiate price, but I see a lot of expert negotiators in professional service firms negotiate fee scope and staffing. That's all they talk about, fee scope and staffing. That's also the wrong deal, because that doesn't take into account that one of their objectives is to differentiate themselves, and I can't in any way differentiate myself if I only talk about fee scope and staffing. Another objective is to ensure that I'm addressing their pressing business needs, and maybe my scope does that to some extent, but what about all the other issues I could put on the table to address their needs? So that's what I mean by the first trap. We don't think hard enough about what we're trying to achieve, and I would say I always want to address the other side's pressing business needs. I always want to have an objective of building the relationship, and I always want to have an objective of differentiating myself, my product, my service, my company, and then I also have an objective of maximizing my outcome. Those four objectives are the big four that are in my head all the time. I have others in other situations, but those big four are driving me as I'm going into that situation to think about putting the right issues on the table. And part of what I'm hearing in all of this is the level of creativity that we have to bring. You know, much of what we're talking about here is a lack of creativity, is just following what's been done in the past, assuming that it's just gonna work in the future. And as we know in business, everyone's objectives are changing and shifting. We just went through a major shift with a pandemic. And if you stuck with your negotiating strategy, the same deals that were working in 2019 aren't working today. So how do you work to bring that creativity to the table to become an expert negotiator? So I think that what I would say is that the strategy remains the same, but the objectives vary. So the other sides pressing business needs have changed recently. So for example, if you think about many companies, they lost supply in the midst of the pandemic. They didn't have the right relationships with their suppliers. They didn't have enough options on their suppliers. And so I would say that their objectives have changed. They now want to increase the security of their supply chain. They wanna make sure they build redundancy into their supply chain. They want to ensure that they have multiple options. They have a different set of objectives, but I would still have the same strategies of putting the right issues on the table, ensuring that I'm building my power, setting an ambitious goal. Those would remain constant, but the objectives would be different. Being able to see in scope what other companies need in order to run, in order to maximize their profits and to order and to run fluently through whatever it's going to be. And there's several things that are gonna need to be there. They're gonna need a constant supply of customers. So promotion and publicity and testimonials of their services will certainly benefit them. Certainly, as you mentioned, supply lines keeping whatever they need in order to do their job coming in fully and then being able to also be exposed to other people who need those services as well. I agree, and I think that goes back to what we were talking about when AJ and I were discussing making sure that we're really thinking about the other side, taking off this focus on ourselves, focusing on them instead and their needs, and then ensuring that we're having the right discussion. And a lot of those issues that you just identified, Johnny, would actually go into in our issue matrix, what we refer to as the storytelling quadrant. Those are quadrant that's a set of issues that are super important to the other side and easy for me to offer up or easy for me to provide. And I wanna use those storytelling issues to get more of what I want on what we often refer to as the contentious issues, things that are important to both of us. Too often when people approach a negotiation, they're fixated only on contentious issues, like the price, and they're not thinking about those storytelling issues. And I would argue you can't get as much on those contentious issues if you don't have the storytelling issues on the table, because you have nothing to use to get what you want. But you also are more likely to damage the relationship because you have no ability to focus your story on the other side if you're just focused on things that you want. I think that's important to remember that we're just not looking to get over on the other person and get the best deal for ourselves. We're looking to build and continue a relationship so that we can refer other businesses and work together to do the things that we need. And it's unfortunate because when you watch certain shows maybe like Shark Tank or something from television, well, they're gonna ham it up to make it contentious, to make it more dramatic than a healthy negotiation actually is. So we get this burn into our brain of this attitude and stubbornness and we need to be stiff here, we can't lose here and things of like the art of the deal and all of this stuff that gives a false sense of the whole negotiation in itself, the practice of it. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. And that's why in my book, I tried to share lots of stories. I'm hundreds of stories in my book about companies and CEOs and other senior leaders, but also everyday people negotiating in all kinds of situations to give you some real life examples of how to be effective in those situations, what it looks like and how to ensure that you are really negotiating in a way that allows you to build the relationship at the same time that you're maximizing your outcome. I don't think you have to sacrifice your relationship to have a great outcome and I don't think you have to sacrifice your outcome to have a great relationship. I think if I use the right strategy, I can achieve both, but I don't think people focus enough on the right strategies, putting the right issues on the table, leaving myself enough room to maneuver and concede in the discussion, making that first offer and giving you multiple options rather than a single one. All of those are strategies that allow me to build the relationship and get what I want. One of the strategies that I enjoyed reading in the book was you were negotiating, putting a pool in the backyard. And so as we're talking about supply lines and all this other stuff, this gives the listener an idea that you have an inner workings of other people's businesses, but I would guess you don't know much about masonry and hard-scaping and building a pool, but you use their competition to gather the information that you needed to go into negotiations. And I thought that was just brilliant. Well, thank you, Johnny. And I have to tell you, I enjoy swimming in that pool, especially in the middle of the park. But one of the things I would say is I really believe that you can build strategy and skill and that it's actually important to practice it in the everyday world. There's one example of negotiating in a bakery. There's an example of negotiating with the pool suppliers. There's an example of negotiating in a department store. I think it's important to encourage your listeners to negotiate in the everyday world, to practice so that they're more equipped and confident when they go into a high-stakes negotiation, like negotiating for themselves at work. And in fact, I know that's one of the things people fear the most. So in the book, in every content chapter, there's at least one section and sometimes two or three sections that focus on applying the strategies to negotiate for yourself, because that's an area where people have a lot of fear. But I also will apply the strategies to high-stakes business transactions, buying a company, selling a company, negotiating with the customer. We apply them in all of those places, but I think the best place to practice them is in the everyday world. So I love that you liked my pool example because it's one of those great examples of using the strategy and practicing it, but also getting a great pool. Well, another cognitive distortion that I think trips people up a lot is they believe that negotiations are just logical and analytical and they don't realize how much emotion and storytelling play a role in negotiating. We will use logic and analysis after the fact to rationalize the emotional decisions we're making in our life. We may not believe that that decision was made on emotion, but that is what the science and psychology show. So how do you see storytelling playing a role in negotiation? Because I'm sure for many of our listeners, that's one that's a little unique and they may not have heard of before. I definitely think storytelling plays a role. I believe that negotiation is about emotion and rationality and I think you would be foolish to believe that rationality supersedes emotion. Every single day, people walk away from perfectly rational deals. They walk away because they're angry, they walk away because they wanna get back at the other side. They walk away for emotional reasons. So I think it's really, really important that when we prepare to negotiate, we think about managing emotion. And I believe that that occurs at two levels. First, I have to think about managing my own emotion, my own emotion, right? Because emotions are contagious. There's something called emotional contagion. So if I'm calm, you're more likely to be calm. And if I get angry, you're gonna get angry. And if I raise my voice, you'll raise your voice. So I wanna recognize that I need to control my own emotion to help the other side and control theirs. But the second thing I have to do is to really think about managing the other side's emotional reaction. And one of the ways I manage their reaction is by creating a story that focuses on them. A second thing I do is leave my self-room to concede because people like to see me concede and they feel better about it. A third thing I do is give them multiple offers because people love choice and they feel like they're in control when they have choice. But a fourth thing I think is really critical in managing their emotional reactions is to deploy storytelling. So I can tell good stories to provoke that availability bias is the name, but that reaction that's gonna lead you to believe that these things are likely to occur and I can use that to drive your reaction. So I do believe negotiation is about emotion and rationality. And then we gotta learn to control our own emotion and manage the other side's emotion.