 What's the one thing that just holds people back? Is it just the narrative they build in their head? That's huge. So I think we all live within narratives that we create, and those narratives really determine our experience of whatever we're doing. I think the other really, really big one is fear. We all have fears. When it comes to negotiation, the three areas where I think people are most fearful is, first of all, that they're afraid of getting hurt in a tangible way. They're afraid that if they ask the investor for more funding, they might end up with no funding at all. If I ask for too much, I might end up with nothing. Oh, that fear holds them back from asking for what they really want. This is Startup Store Foot. Today's guest is Moisha Koma. He's the founder of the negotiating table, senior lecturer at the Questrum School of Business at Boston University, and author of the book, Kali Wobbles, How to Negotiate When Negotiating Makes You Nervous. And if you've been paying attention, it should be no surprise that he's here to talk about negotiation. It's an art form that all are familiar with, yet it still evokes a sense of mystery and fear among many of us. Moisha states that this is partially due to the fear of being taken advantage of on both sides of the table. In this episode, we cover tactics you can use and new ways you can frame negotiating in your mind to quell any fear or trepidation you might have. So listen in as we cover everything from why there's nothing to lose in asking for things, how to gain more leverage when buying a car, and why talking can stress you out, and listening can calm you down. Now, back to the episode. All right, guys, welcome to the podcast on today's show, an old professor of mine, Moschko, and thanks so much for joining. Tell everybody a little bit about who you are, what you do, and this new book you wrote. So I've been teaching negotiation now for over 20 years, started off actually in the physics world, I was a physics undergrad, and then worked as an engineer for about 13 years before discovering that I liked the people side of things more than the computers and robot side of things that I was working on. I went to business school, actually got my MBA, discovered I didn't like any business jobs, and then as a result of that, I discovered that I loved the negotiation classes I took, and in particular, I loved mediation. So I became a mediator, and discovered that mediation is a wonderful thing to do, but a hard way to make a living. So I started teaching negotiation back in 1996 within my own company called the Negotiating Table, and taught in the corporate world, and then in 2000, Boston University, where I did my MBA, invited me back into teach. So since 2000, I've been teaching negotiation and then eventually leadership and other subjects in that program, and what I discovered was that people really struggle with their negotiations, and the main struggle seems to be themselves. So we can teach people techniques, we can teach people tools, we can give people skills, and ultimately, many people have a hard time using those skills in practice, because when push comes to shove, something gets in the way. And I've been thinking about that for a really long time, because my interest is always in being relevant and helpful, and if I'm teaching people things, but they're not able to use them, then I don't feel like I've done anything that useful. So over the time, I've developed some ideas and some frameworks about how to help people negotiate effectively in reality, how to help them manage their reactions, how to help them manage their emotions so they can do what they need to do when the time comes. Started putting together my ideas about seven, eight years ago, started writing a book, found out that writing a book is a really hard thing to do. In the summer, the book came out, and I'm delighted that it's out. It captures a lot of the stuff that I've taught in my classes. I'm hoping it helps a lot of people. And the book is called Collie Wobbles, and we'll get into that in a second. I wanted to share a personal story of mine. So in taking your class, I remember there's this exercise you do where effectively we're a company and we have to negotiate with another company. And we're broken up into groups of four. And so one group is in one room and the other group's in the other room. And so the idea is that, I think it's about oil. And so the idea is like, we have to come to terms on a price to sell our oil and we're competitors. And the point of the exercise is to say collaboration will actually lead you further, both in terms of profit and in terms of people liking you. And so because I knew that, right? Because a part of me was like, oh, that's really obvious. And here we are in business school in like a safe setting. I convinced my group. I said, let's lie to the other team. Let's just lie and see what happens because we're all here to learn, right? In like a safe environment. So we end up lying to the other team. And then, you know, the exercise carries out. There's no trust. We go to the second negotiation. They're angry at us. They go to the third round and it's just a mess. Everyone's unhappy. And I'm kind of like, oh, this is really tense, right? And it's the first time for me that, I've never done this in a professional setting. I've never like told a partner or a colleague, like, hey, I'm gonna give you X and then I just didn't. And so we come back to class and you start tallying the groups and who did really well and this, that and the other. And my entire team is so angry with me because it was the first time you had revealed that part of your grade is how your students, how they like respect you, almost like a trust grade, right? A reputation index. The reputation index. And I had never seen so many people turn against me in such a public setting so quickly. It was really uncomfortable. And I was like, guys, we're here to, and I kept going back to this, right? Like, hey guys, we're just here to learn and we're in a safe space and how great. We learned something that truly collaboration wins and negotiations as tense as they might be. When they work and they do, then it's a win for all parties, not just for yourself. Certainly by collaborating, you create more opportunity and negotiations always live within that tension of risk and opportunity. And a lot of times when people actually don't collaborate when they try to compete more, it's really driven by fear. It's driven by fear that the other person will take advantage of them. So they use a risk minimization strategy to try to hedge against the risk of the other person doing something bad. In doing that, they often do something bad themselves which makes it self-fulfilling. And if they can somehow mitigate that fear of the other person taking advantage of them and look for opportunities rather than look to protect themselves, they can create a lot more in terms of opportunities. I mean, having said that, all negotiations involve risk. So we're gonna have to have a certain tolerance for things occasionally going bad, but if you look at all the negotiations you're gonna have over your life, if you look for opportunities rather than look to protect yourself, overall you're gonna do so much better. And once in a while, you'll get burnt, but that's okay. That's so true. I wanna also touch on this really cool exercise that I think is great for entrepreneurs, people that are listening, anybody that's gonna start a business and do hard things like go raise money, go ask people to buy their products. You have this exercise called the no exercise and I would just love for you to touch on it and just tell us a little bit about what it is. And I'd highly recommend anyone who's listening to do this themselves in any capacity. So every class I teach, I make the class go out as individuals and over a period of several weeks start asking people for stuff with the goal of getting 10 people to say no to them and they can ask for anything. They can ask for money, discounts, favors, freebies, upgrades, special treatment, anything. And my students go out in the world and they start asking for things. And to their amazement, the hardest thing about the exercise is getting 10 people to say no to you because they're saying yes. And my students have gotten unbelievable amounts of value. And you've tallied it, right? Have you tallied it? Absolutely, I tallied it. I make them tally it. I had one student who got about $80,000 worth of value this summer by doing those exercises which covers much of his MBA when you think about it. Totally. So that was by far the biggest number but over the years, students have gotten thousands of dollars worth of benefit. What was your experience with the no exercise? No, I loved it. And for me, it was something that, your class reinforced it a tremendous amount but as an entrepreneur, it's kind of like when you go raise capital, you're quite literally getting no way more often than not. And so for us, it was just like, it was almost like we ran it like an algorithm where it was 10 nos usually equal a yes in getting capital and raising money. And so we would just collect the nos because it would mean it was kind of like a mountain, right? Where one no, two nos, three no. And then by the 10th rung, you're gonna get the yes. And so every no we got it was like, we had tricked our mind into feeling excitement over a no. And when it comes to raising capital too, I think it's sometimes just a bad fit, right? Sometimes you have an investor who might be really into biotech and you're talking about software. And so from our perspective, sometimes you're just gonna have the bad fit and sometimes they just want the meeting to learn about what's happening in other spaces. And so that was our experience but I remember in class too, I remember I think somebody was buying a car and so they had saved some money. And then I think a guy asked his wife for a threesome and he candidly shared that in class and he said it didn't go so well, which was pretty cool. I don't restrict my students as to ask for her but sometimes they amaze me with what they choose to ask for. It was really nice about this exercise is that rejection is really hard for people. And by forcing yourself to go through it over a period of few weeks, you realize it's not so bad that when someone rejects what you asked for, they're not rejecting you personally. Most of the time it has nothing to do with you and they don't hate you for it. They just either say yes, they say no or they offer you something other than what you asked for and that you're okay. And one of the beauties of the nose exercise is that if you're asking and you get what you asked for, excellent. And if you don't, you were hoping for a no because you're trying to accumulate them. So either way, you're good. It's a no use exercise. And I really recommend for everybody to go out in the world and just start asking for things and use it as a learning exercise for yourself. You'll learn a lot about yourself, about how you react to rejection, how you build up the narrative in your mind before you even go ask. And that makes it so hard for you to ask because before you approach the other person, you're already imagining how they're gonna react to you. You're imagining all the terrible things that might happen and all that is taking place entirely in your imagination. So it's much better to just ask and see what happens. And see what happens. I think that's one thing that I've learned over time and I've really developed to the point of maybe people interpret what I do as like very robotic, but as soon as I start feeling a certain way, like as soon as I say, oh, feeling, I shut that down and I just say, pick up the phone. So this happens all the time. All of us wildly have different ways of texting each other. Some people text and it sounds like a military dictator is on the, just like this militant person. Some people text and it's super fuzzy, really warm cheerleader, that's kind of my style. And so, but all these different, you can interpret things so quickly. And I think that's when a lot of people shut down. Is that what you've seen in your entire, obviously you've done mediation, you've done negotiation, you teach this. What's the one thing that just holds people back? Is it just the narrative they build in their head? That's huge. So I think we all live within narratives that we create and those narratives really determine our experience of whatever we're doing. So I think that is huge. I think the other really, really big one is fear. We all have fears. When it comes to negotiation, the three areas where I think people are most fearful is first of all, they're afraid of getting hurt in a tangible way. They're afraid that if they ask the investor for more funding, they might end up with no funding at all. If I ask for too much, I might end up with nothing. Oh, that fear holds them back from asking for what they really want. The second fear is the fear of rejection, more specifically the fear of damaging relationships. Humans are social animals. We have a big fear of getting thrown out of the herd. So we want to play nice. We wanna make sure that the other person likes us. And a need to be liked is really, really dangerous when you're negotiating. You need to realize that you can have a perfectly great relationship with someone and they can hate roughly half the stuff you say to them because it's okay for people to have differences of opinions. It's okay for people to come to the negotiation with very different needs. That doesn't mean you're gonna ruin the relationship. And the third fear is an emotional fear, the fear of feeling really bad after the negotiation. I've had people say to me, after I got turned down, I felt so bad that I'm never gonna try that again. It just hurts so much. Sometimes it's the other way. Sometimes they say, I just negotiated this deal and I got what I wanted, but I was such a jerk. I never wanna feel that way about myself again. So it can go in different ways, but if you think about tangible hurt, relationship damage and emotional hurt, we're all really scared of those things. And they play a huge part in what both motivates and holds people back when they're negotiating. The one thing I always try to do is whether I'm, and I've learned this about myself and as I'm thinking this through and talking to you about this, it almost seems like a defense mechanism. But I think one of the things I do when I'm either starting a meeting or entering like, cause we do real estate development where everything's a negotiation essentially. Everything's on the table. And I always start with, hey guys, what are we solving for? I look at it like a math equation. Are we solving for X? How do we define X? So I always say, what are we solving for? And so that answer is usually pretty straightforward. And so whether it's, I'll talk about this podcast as an example, whether it's, hey, we would like people to find us easier on let's say social media and Instagram. Okay, great. That's what we're solving for. And so now everyone has their own map, right? Everyone has their own vision of how to get there. But at least to me, it's like I framed it as a, but everyone's clear on the direction, on the end goal, the North Star, some people call it, right? But even in those cases, I mean, some people have, we have wildly different. It's like, I'll say, and this is always interesting, especially in startup in tech, developers use a language like coders. They use a language that the word seems similar, but on the sales side, the sales people have no idea what that word actually means. And so whether it's like, hey, we're going to beta or usually it's about the new product is out, but the sales people don't realize there's actually testing that has to be done before it actually gets released. And so while it might be out to the engineering team, it's certainly not out to the world. And so it's like words get super tricky in this environment. What advice might you have for people who are entering negotiation and just is it setting a North Star? Is it doing things like that that helps at the stage? Well, the first thing is know yourself better. Before you go to negotiate, you gotta remember that the one thing you bring to every negotiation is yourself. And everybody's different. Everybody reacts to negotiation differently. Everybody has a different emotional makeup. Everybody has different situations that tend to trigger their emotions. So you really need to know yourself and a great way to do that is to look back at prior negotiation of yours and especially ones that didn't go so well and ask yourself what happened right before things didn't go so well and how did I respond to that? And you're gonna learn a little bit about yourself as a negotiator. Are you super competitive? Do certain other kinds of personalities make you more competitive or maybe make you avoidant because you really don't know how to deal with them. So before you go anywhere, first a lot of self-awareness really helps when you're negotiating. And I think that, you know, thinking about you, what I'm guessing is that over the years, one of the things that's happened for you is that you do know yourself better as a negotiator. You are more self-aware to the point where you don't really have to think about it as much. But you've developed that self-awareness that now makes it easier for you to look at negotiation strategically and be less reactive because you're not taking yourself by surprise all the time. So before we were on air, you had mentioned like you do work with some entrepreneurs, what are the things that, what are like the three things that they're struggling with the most, let's say, or the three things they say, hey, Moj, can you help me out with XYZ? So, you know, a big one is about getting money. That seems to be something that causes people a lot of anxiety. For one thing, it's extremely consequential, right? They can make or break their startup. And very often they don't have a huge number of people they're talking to. They may have just one investor that is interested enough to have the conversation at this time. So that creates a lot of pressure on them. And very often they choke up before they even have that conversation. So one of the things that you need to do is change your frame of mind going into those things. Because let's think about it. At this point, you don't have any money. If this conversation doesn't go well, you'll still not have any money. You'll be no worse off than you are now. I somehow feel better just hearing this and that I'm not even raising capital. I mean, you only have an upside in a way you don't have a downside. Right. So when you have so much more opportunity than risk in a negotiation, then your challenge is to realize that this person is talking to you for a reason. And the deal is gonna happen if you have needs that they can meet and they have needs that you can meet. And your challenge is to create the kind of conversation where those needs come onto the table and can be discussed and moved around and matched. And you can see if you can come up with solutions that access both sets of needs. So that's the first thing is I would say the nervousness that happens around those funding decisions. The other thing that I would say very typically with startups is everywhere, everybody's wearing 17 hats. Everybody's overly busy. And the make or break of negotiations is often preparation. And unfortunately preparation takes a lot of time. Yeah. So one of the things that I find is that people don't have the time to prepare and therefore do kind of a sketchy preparation and try to wing it. And I gotta tell you, some of the people you're negotiating with have been negotiating for a long time. They're experienced negotiators. They have more maybe time and infrastructure than you, they have prepared and then people just get whacked in the face in the negotiation because they don't have the information they need. You need to carve out pockets of time that you can use to prepare for your negotiations. The third thing that I hear a lot is we prepared, we found the right person, things were going well, and then something happened. That something changes in the middle of the conversation. Somebody says something, somebody makes a point. Somebody asks them a question, they don't know how to answer, and then things go south. A lot of that is learning how to catch those moments when they happen and to learn to slow down time so you can respond rather than react. Being reactive in negotiations is really, really bad. Competitive negotiators you negotiate with on the other side of the table will often do things to make you reactive and they're banking on the fact that when you get reactive, you'll make mistakes, you'll make concessions you don't need to make. That's something that everybody generally regrets. When you feel one of those emotional spikes, it's like you mentioned before that feeling, when you have that feeling, but oh no, you need to catch it, you need to stop yourself, you need to slow down, you need to find whatever way works for you to buy yourself enough time in that negotiation to get to a better mental state so you can respond rather than react. A lot of what you said reminds you of Shark Tank. We've had a lot of founders on here that have been on Shark Tank and I can't say all of them enter the Shark Tank with proper preparation. And so one of the things I've learned in talking to one individual, one he, it turns out there's somebody who's been tracking every single Shark Tank appearance and tracks it in terms of what their valuation was going in, what the sharks offered and then whether the deal was made. And so at this stage, there's I think 10 years of data and basically the takeaway to this entire exercise was that if you go on Shark Tank, they're gonna cut your valuation in half, which basically means they're getting two X what you had gone in, right? And so if you said, hey, I'm gonna give you 10% of my company for a million dollars, they're gonna say, I'll give you that much for 20%. And it's something that's almost like a rule. It's so factual now. And I was, so he was prepared for that moment. He knew it was gonna happen. And so because he knew it was gonna happen, he increased his valuation to give himself some buffer. And so that preparation saved him a tremendous amount of money. And I almost, we had him on the podcast and I was like, man, I wish so many people will hear this because you can imagine that if you don't go in prepared to your point, you're gonna get frazzled, especially in a setting like that. It's quick, hey, I'll give you this for this. You have to do math in your head so quickly. While there's cameras on you, which most of these people haven't been on, they're not Hollywood actors. And so that's, they're learning on the fly in a completely different environment. It's a great point you bring up. But all of that is really hard to do. I mean, kudos to that person who did that, but coming in with an inflated demand, that's really scary for a lot of people. Thinking, oh, they're gonna laugh at me. They're gonna cut me down. I'm gonna look ridiculous. I'm gonna lose credibility. So it's very easy to talk yourself down from a high starting point. Now, I'm not saying that you should go in asking for something ridiculous that you can't justify in some way. Whatever you come in with, you need to be able to justify. But be careful not to talk yourself down just based on your fears before you even open your mouth. How do you maintain that presence of mind under all that pressure? And you can do certain things. Like if somebody asks you a question you don't know how to answer, just look at them and go, you know, that's an excellent question. And just the time you took to say that gave you an extra seven seconds to think about what you're gonna say next. Totally. And those seven seconds can make a huge difference in terms of how reactive you are, how clever your answer is gonna be. And people don't take those opportunities to slow down time. They don't take those opportunities to build in pauses into the conversation that allow them to get to that better place. I used to give, I was like a motivational speaker for a really short time. Not, don't even wanna go in there. But one of the things I would do and one of the things, so the beautiful thing about it was we would go in and they taught us like the science and like the psychology of giving speeches and the sort of the showmanship of it all. You know, it was like we had all these experts. And one of the things that was a great tip I learned was when you start to forget or get nervous or you're like, oh my God, the world is ending. I lost my speech, just do nothing. Just sit in the moment and it'll feel like forever to you. But in real time, it's very little and it almost seems like, oh, this person's very comfortable on stage. Another thing I would do is sometimes I'd type out like the speech and I would purposely at different points of the entire speech I would put double spaces between each letter. And so the word like them read like super long. And so it would force my mind to look at it and say it's slower. Like they are, you know, it was this weird trick but the pauses gave me time to not only recite the word but also to know what's coming next, right? To like, okay, this is the part of the speech I'm on and these little tricks to, but slowing down is a great tip. Is there something that people specifically ask you? Whether it's like, hey, I'm gonna go buy this car. I want it for 10,000. Where do I start the negotiation? Yeah, and unfortunately that's a really difficult question for me to answer because depending on the car, depending on the situation, I mean, if you're going to buy a car that has a six month waiting list, you're not gonna have a whole lot of negotiating power. If you're going to buy a car that's more standard, do good research and then start low. The other thing that you can do is never go into a dealership. Call up one dealership, ask them for their best price, then call up another dealership telling them, hey, listen, I've talked to a couple of dealerships. You know, if you give me your best price, I'll buy it from you and then keep shopping around and as you do that, the prices will improve and eventually you'll get to someone's bottom. That's a good tip. I actually do that for my mother's car oddly enough. She had a car, she had it all set and she's like, I really don't wanna pay this much. And she had gone in and she had met the person and they had met and talked for a long, long time. And then I said, well, what do you wanna pay? And then she told me the number and so I did exactly what you just said. I called the next dealership that sells the same car. I said, hey, do you have this car in black, this model, blah, blah, blah? Yes, I do, great. I'm gonna send my mother to go buy it, but can you meet this price? And they said, yes. And that was it. And so I just called my mom. I was in LA, she was in Massachusetts and so I called my mom and I said, hey, this place is gonna do it for exactly the amount you want. And to your point, I mean, there was reason to do it. The window between these cars was tight and this person just was on the higher end and the other person was on the lower end, but it was the same window. It was a logical move for everybody. My point was, I'm just gonna save them a lot of time. It's the easiest sell of this guy's life. Hey, I wanna purchase a car and I want this number and I'm getting this higher number from dealership two miles away. Can you do that? Yes or no? If yes, you have a deal, right? It's like so efficient. And I thought it was a huge win for him, for us. And perfect, it was like Christmas, right? What car salesman doesn't want that to happen? Right, I mean, there's a few standard things that you should think about when buying cars. One is that the whole process set up at the dealerships is not in your favor. If you can break that process in some way, once you go into the dealership and they chat you up and they put you in the car and you drive it and you start falling in love with it and then they start talking to you about payments and you've lost sight about the total amount you're paying and that whole process is really engineered to get you to say yes to something that you shouldn't be saying yes to. So what you did by making that phone call was just go around that whole process. And in doing so, you remove from the dealership a lot of the tools they have that allow them to take advantage of a lot of people. That's so true. Use your process. You don't have to use somebody else's process. Right. It's funny when I just published my book and I broke all the rules, I self-published it, I did everything myself up until the end game when it came to things like cover design and stuff like that I know I can't draw. And so I ended up hiring a designer who was fantastic. I hired one of my students to help me out in project managing the end game and doing all the research you need to do. But I've always believed that you can do things in ways that aren't the standard ways of doing them. And in doing that, you create advantages for yourself. Let's talk about your book. It's called Kali Wobbles. What does that mean? I had to Google it, but I'd love to share. You can tell everyone what it means. Kali Wobbles means fear apprehension or nervousness. It's a British slang term. It means having butterflies in your stomach or kind of having a bellyache over something. And it's the feeling that a lot of people get when they have to negotiate. And it doesn't matter whether they're negotiating with their boss, their spouse, their teenage kid, their investor, their coworker, their vendor, their customer. We get nervous. And that's the main issue that I was trying to address in this book, that we all have emotions that impinge on our negotiations. And you wanna be able to manage those in real time so they don't end up defining the negotiation. You wanna be strategic. You wanna be deliberate. You wanna be responsive. You don't wanna be reactive. And we all get reactive. I had a student once walk into my class, and mind you, she'd been through a full semester negotiation class at this point. And she walked into my class embarrassed. And I said, what happened? She said, I can't believe I did that. I'm like, what happened? She goes, I just got a job offer from an employer I really wanted to work for. And I got so excited that I said yes, and I forgot to negotiate. She got reactive. She had an emotion. It was excitement. It was a positive emotion, but it was still an emotion. And she still got reactive and therefore forgot to negotiate. And now she can't go back and call them up and say, um, I forgot to negotiate. Can we start over? Because at that point, her emotions drove her into sealing a deal that it's really hard to unseal. So the idea was having seen that over and over and over again in my classes where people were either afraid or they panicked or they got excited or for some other reason they got overwhelmed and shut down. I realized that I can teach them how to negotiate but without also teaching them how to manage their emotions at the same time they weren't gonna get the results. So the book is really a combination of negotiation and emotional intelligence woven together to help you become more aware of what you're doing more aware of what's going on with you and then giving you some tools to manage those things and also negotiate effectively. That's amazing. I really love that. And when it comes to self publishing a book what's involved in that? Tell us a little bit about how'd you do it and how are you getting the word out? So the first thing is you gotta write the book and writing the book is a really, really difficult thing. In my particular case, I started about seven and a half years ago. I wrote six chapters. I looked at them and one day I said, you know what? This is all garbage and I threw them all out. And then I started over a few months later and I wrote another three chapters and I looked at them and I said more garbage and I threw them all out. And then a few months more went by and I finally wrote one chapter and I looked at it and I said, this is good. Nice. And I just let it sit for about 10 months and then I picked it up again and I read it and I was like, this is still good. And in the next year I wrote another 11 chapters. So I had my initial manuscript and I thought, yay, I've got a good book. So then I gave it to a friend of mine who was in my field to do a technical read. And unfortunately after he read that I had to rewrite four chapters from scratch because he basically said they didn't make any sense. So it took me months to rewrite those four chapters. Rewriting is way more difficult than writing. And then I thought I had a good manuscript. I gave it back to him and he was cool with them. And I gave him to another friend of mine who has written a couple of books because of that I had to rewrite two other chapters. Then I gave him to my sister-in-law who is the editor of a literary magazine and she did the first sort of readability edit on it. And I thought it was good. At this point it had been through so many editing rounds. And then I showed it to some people and they said, it really needs a good edit. So I did this one myself in last December. I edited down from 84,000 words to 63,000 words. I took out over 20% of the book. It was a very painful process. Yeah, I can imagine. It was so much better when I finished. I took out a lot of redundancies. I tightened up the language. And then I still gave it to a few more people to edit. So finally, in May, I had a complete manuscript. So your first task as someone who writes a book is to get to the point where you have a manuscript that you're actually not embarrassed by if you wanna do this all by yourself. It's a good idea to hire publishers, sorry, to hire editors. In my case, I had enough people in my network that people did it as a favor to me, which was lovely. And then you actually have to take a manuscript and turn it into an actual book. So you need to find someone to design the covers and the layout, and that's more involved than I imagined. But my designer was amazing. She did a great job. Then you gotta figure out how to actually put it on a publishing platform. Probably the biggest, most popular publishing platform right now is KDP by Amazon. I think it's Kindle Direct Publishing, that's what it stands for. Basically, they tell you how to create templates that your book fits into. And you create those templates, you upload it to their site, and you got a book. Wow, just like that. Just like that. I mean, it's a little more involved. In order to have a book, you have to have an ISBN number. There's different ways of getting that. You can have Amazon do it for you. You can do it yourself. There's advantages to either. There's also, if you wanna get your book out through independent bookstores, then you shouldn't use Amazon exclusively. I used an organization called Ingram Sparks, which is a platform for publishing or self-publishing that the independent bookstores use. And you can do both. So I did both simultaneously. Total learning curve. Like, I had to get a library of Congress number. Who even knew I needed that? But you, yeah. But that's why Molly, who assisted me a lot in this, she helped me figure out a lot of that stuff because the research would have just taken me so much time to figure out all those things. Sure. And that's because, again, I'm independent. I wanna do things myself. There's people out there you can pay to just shepherd you through that whole process. And I think for many people, that's the smarter choice. It wasn't the choice for me just because I like doing things myself. That's awesome. And now, in terms of just getting it out there, because I'm sure there's people listening who have always wanted to write a book. And the one thing I always try to figure out is like, what's the second step? How do you get it out? Is it social media? Like, even my brain just goes, oh, it must be social media, but obviously now it could be readings that different. You can't do that, I guess, because of COVID. I don't know. I wish I knew. I mean, the book has only been out for five weeks, so I'm still learning. So what I did decided to do is start local, start with everybody I know in the world. And now in my case, that happens to be a lot of people. Yeah. I've taught in dozens of companies, I've taught thousands of people over the years. I've reached out to all of my students, I've reached out to all of my clients, I've reached out to all my friends and family members, letting them know about the book, asking them to spread the word, asking them to read it and comment on it. And it's a slow process, but it feels like it's gathering some steam. I think social media is huge. I started off with LinkedIn as the main platform that I'm pushing it on, partly because it's the one that I'm most comfortable with, most familiar with, and partly because it's a trade book. So aiming for a business audience is not a bad thing for me, but I also think that I shouldn't limit myself to that. So my next adventure is to figure out how to make better use of Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. The idea is not to do it all myself to sort of start some sparks going and hopefully have people share it and promote it from there because that's how things go viral and that's what I want. I like it. I like the honesty of that. And for people listening, what are some of the key things that you touch on in the book that obviously you told us a little bit, but if we can say a couple more things about the book or what's in the book or just some key takeaways without giving too much away? So the book is basically two halves. The first half really focuses on self-awareness, helping you understand what's important to you, what are your interests, or that North Star that you mentioned. You need to know what you're going for when you're negotiating. So learning to be more aware of that, learning to be more aware of your emotional makeup, how you respond to risk versus opportunity, what are you afraid of? Then I look at some stress factors because people think that they're afraid of conflict. For instance, you can tell, you hear a lot of people saying I'm afraid of conflict, but it turns out it's not conflict, they're really afraid of. They're afraid of the conflict impacting their relationships. They're afraid of getting hurt. They're afraid of feeling bad. So if you think about it, conflict and uncertainty and power dynamics aren't the things we're scared of. They act as stress factors that really amplify those things that we're scared of. So I look at these stress factors and how people react to them and give you some tools for managing them. The second half of the book is really more around giving you specific tools to deal with all these things that you're now aware of. So how can you use listening skills more effectively to draw out the other person's interests, to get yourself to a better place? Because listening, believe it or not, is something that actually calms you down as you negotiate. If you're talking, you're stressed out. If you're listening, that calms you down. And you're gonna learn a whole lot of interesting things in the process and the other person's gonna like you a whole lot better because you're listening. So I work on listening skills. I talk about how to sustain this over time. Negotiations are a drag. Negotiations can take a long time. They wear you out. Some negotiation processes are structured so they wear you out. So one chapter of the book is called Surviving the Grind. How to shore yourself up as you negotiate. So at the end, you're not just so tired that you're giving everything away because that happens to you, right? You start off, you've got good energy but as the negotiation drags on to its fourth week, you just want it over and you're willing to give them anything just to make it end. And that's often not good for you. So I talked a lot about managing your emotions. Sort of the four big takeaways from the book are learn how to develop greater self-awareness, especially around your emotional responses. Learn how to prepare. And I give you lots of examples of how to prepare yourself more effectively for the negotiations you have. Biggest piece of advice that I give everybody in the world is slow down. And I talk about a lot of different instances and a lot of different ways that you can slow down as you negotiate. And the fourth one is get help. A lot of times people are reluctant to bring other people into their negotiations. And that's a huge mistake because I'm sure you're really talented and you're sure you're really good. I'm also sure that there are some situations where bringing somebody else into it can be a huge help to you. So for instance, if you are a super competitive person, you might be wonderful at certain kinds of negotiation but actually cause a lot of relationship damage in others. Bringing someone else into the negotiation who is more of a collaborative person, more relationship centered and can slow you down a little bit from being too competitive for your own good, that can be enormously helpful. Conversely, if you are very emotionally reactive to be able to take a break in the middle of the negotiation and pick up the phone and call someone who is good at calming your nerves, that can be make or break for a negotiation. So learning to bring people into your preparation process to help you out, learning to have people on call or potentially even with you during the negotiation and learning to bring people after to help you debrief and learn from the negotiation because one of the things that I like to remind people is that no matter how this negotiation went, it could have been wonderful, it could have been horrible, it's not gonna be your last negotiation. It is just school for the next one. So the degree to which you can take any situation and turn it into a learning experience and take away valuable lessons that you can then apply the next time around, that's huge. And sometimes bringing someone else into that will help you understand the lessons better, really distill the important pieces from what happened and put yourself in a better position for the next time around. I love it, that's so true. I was just thinking of a scenario recently that happened with us that my wife is on HGTV now and I got in touch with the lawyer because I was like, at some point there's contracts here, let me just reach out to like a talent lawyer. And so I reach out to them and I'm like, hey, look, we're nobodies right now. Like my wife is literally just on the show, we're not, we're nobodies, but I just wanna learn what on earth these contracts might be like because I've heard horror stories of people getting locked into these talent contracts then it's like they own you for a long time. And I learned so much from that call. And so reaching out to that lawyer, I learned one, you need to negotiate exactly how much money you're gonna make per episode, which is obvious. Another one is if they have you hold a can of paint or use a certain tape measure or use a certain tool, you need to have it in your contract that you're either okay doing it for free or that they need to give you payment because sometimes these things end up being in commercials. And so a lot of people don't know this. Another one is if they fly you somewhere, they're gonna put you in a middle seat simply because it's cheaper unless you have it in your contract. They're gonna put you in a motel six unless you have it in your contract, right? And it's like all of a sudden it gave me a window into, oh my goodness, you can imagine the amount of people who just sign away because they're excited, right? Being on television is exciting. It's a big goal for a lot of people. And that emotion is gonna lead them to just go, oh, this production company is great. I love Bob over at the, he's so nice to me. And then I've signed it and that was it. And now I could be on a show for 10 years doing, hey, buy this paint and no residual income from that. And it's just a mess. And so to your point, that's one of the things I learned was even before you're ready, just get information. Just talk to a lawyer, obviously a lawyer's happy to chat. They have to grow their book of business. And so they're, in five minutes, I learned so much about something that we might deal with in a year or two. I'm also extremely grateful to that individual who just took five minutes to share a tremendous amount of wisdom that I would have never even guessed those things. And that's actually an area of the nose exercise that people often don't think about, which is to go out and ask people for wisdom or advice, right? You don't have to ask for money, right? You're asking for people's time and attention. And it turns out that people love giving free advice. People love being the wise person that somebody came to for some information. And you're right, for this attorney, it's also business development. They know that if you ever have an issue where some real expertise is required and you can't just do it on your own, they're now one of the people you'll be thinking about to go for help. So it's not completely altruistic, but it's very helpful. And I gotta tell you, it's a big piece of advice I give a lot of people is reach out, ask people. People love to help. And if you're just okay asking them, you'll get responses that you totally didn't expect. I think especially now, I mean, during COVID, there's a lot of people that are at home. And so their inclinations to just jump on a Zoom or to help are so high, right? We're all in that position. I know for me personally with real estate development, I take my deals to people that have been doing this 30 years and I just say, hey, look, this is the deal I have. I've modeled all like the pro forma and everything. And I'm like, what do you, what would you do? How would you approach this structure and almost every time I've gotten a piece of advice that I hadn't even considered, right? And it's almost one of these things that to your point of awareness, like I'm definitely still learning awareness. There's also ego where there's a part of me that has spent all this time preparing this deck, running this Excel model. And I think I have it right with a bow and I think it's perfect. And I, you know, it's great for us. It's great for the investors and I'm like, I'm good with it. But there's a part of my ego that I really, and I think I struggle with this a little bit, but I really have to, I have to realize like, hey, I'm only 34. There's been people that have been doing this for 30 years who are extremely successful. And let me, let me reach out and take, and just have them share with me how they would approach it. And never, and I'll say this honestly, it's never been exactly how I've thought it to be. They've always given me something that's better. What's interesting though is we both leave. So even though my ego in that moment can take a huge hit like, oh, blind spot, but they have always taken that meeting like, Diego, anytime you need anything, please let me know. Because what they're admiring is everything else that we've already built, but also the willingness to be wrong, right? The willingness to share your creation and get that critical feedback. It's honestly been tremendous and it's not comfortable, but it's been so helpful to me. And it takes a certain amount of courage to do that. Because one of the reasons we don't like sharing that stuff with other people is that we're afraid of exactly that. We're afraid that they'll tell us we've done everything wrong. I'll tell you, when I first started as a mediator back in 1995, the first thing I did was call up every single big name mediator in Boston and asked them to come observe the media. And every single one of them said yes. And I got to meet these huge people in the field. And some of them said to me, I'm so glad you're here because I work on my own all the time and I never get any feedback. And it's great. The conversations we had after the mediation actually gave them some insights into what they were doing because I was a neutral observer in the room and they weren't used to having that. Hardly anybody I know did that and made those phone calls and arranged for those meetings because we think, oh, this is a very busy person. This is a big name in the field. I can't bother them. Well, they're adults. If you bother them, they'll tell you that they can't meet. Right, right. I'm respectful, but you can't be shy about asking. That's totally true. I think that's one thing we can tell all the listeners. That could be the takeaway that we wrap on is, especially I think now during COVID it's so relevant. There's so many people that heroes, even if like for us on the podcast, we've reached out to celebrities that, we try to focus on not so much a celebrity but what they're doing now. And so whether it's they're moving to investing or whether it's they're starting a business and we've gotten a lot of yeses. And so we've had these really prominent guests on the show. And it's because we're one, especially during COVID, everybody is free. If you're in the art and media and production space, you're not working at all. There's no filming going on. And so these people are there. In terms of like the experts, everyone is available for a Zoom, right? It's, there's no pressure of, I have to meet this person for coffee. That's gone now. And so it costs you nothing to reach out. And if they say no, that's to your, you know, the 10 noes exercise. It's totally okay. The other thing I would like to leave people with is just this idea that negotiation is a conversation and it's a relationship. If you think of things as a negotiation, that makes them really scary and you tighten up. If you think of negotiations as a conversation, well, you've been having conversations your whole life. You're talking to someone, you're listening to them, you're finding out if there's an opportunity for you to do something that benefits both of you and you don't know where that conversation is gonna go, but it's just a conversation and that makes it a lot less stressful. The other thing is that everything's a relationship. Go out of your way to actually help other people out. First of all, it's a nice thing to do and makes you a better human being. But secondly, that comes back to you in so many ways, you know, invest a lot in those relationships. You know, we have these false dichotomies. We think it's either good outcome or good relationship. And I think that those things are just not necessarily true, often very false and don't like yourself into that kind of thinking. So look to benefit other people as you negotiate with them. Look for a way of meeting their needs while also meeting and exceeding your own needs. You'll have not just good negotiated outcomes but you'll have good outcomes that stand the test of time and that last with you for a long time. One of the things I want to close on too is, you know, I'm so thankful to you for putting a book together, right? I think so fondly about my time in business school and I still think about my professors pretty often. I think more often than maybe you as a professor would think about. And so whenever I, as soon as I got your email that you're creating a book, I just thought, oh, here's my opportunity to reconnect and thank this person for, because I've, you know, there's so many things that you taught during that class that still stick with me. And like I told you, I put the nose exercise into when I was running a sales team. I put it into the sales training. And so one, you took, you yourself took a leap of faith a risk to create something, right? That creation led you to email me. And now here we are in this podcast, you know, 10 years after business school and it's amazing. So thank you for creating. Thank you for coming on the podcast. And it's just amazing. It's kind of like a full circle moment. Well, I really, I really appreciate it and totally surprised. I mean, we connected so recently again. Yeah. It came together very quickly. So I'm really grateful about all that. And delighted to have this conversation with you. And it sounds like you're doing something really special here and it's great to be a part of it. And I hope people read the book. I hope they get a lot of benefit from it. One of the reasons I want so many people to read the book is because I think you can really help them, you know, over 20 years of observations about how people work and how people struggle and some things that have helped them in my classes into that book. And, you know, it's great if more people can benefit from that. So I'm hoping that happens as well. Collie Wobbles, we'll make sure we have a link in bio. We'll put a link in the description to the book also. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. It's a real pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.