Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan - #163: What You NEED To Negotiate With A Narcissist With Attorney Rebecca Zung Partner At Long, Murphy & Zung, & Narcissism Negotiation Expert
Episode Date: November 9, 2021In This Episode You Will Learn About: Recognizing & managing covert narcissism How to let go of seeking validation from external sources Developing strategies to feel empowered, honored, va...lued, and respected, in a way that no one can EVER infringe on Resources: Website: www.rebeccazung.com Read Negotiate Like You M.A.T.T.E.R: The Sure Fire Method To Step Up and Win & Breaking Free: A Step-by-Step Divorce Guide to Achieving Emotional, Physical, & Spiritual Freedom Listen to Negotiate Your Best Life Order the FREE ebook, Crush My Negotiation Youtube & LinkedIn: @Rebecca Zung Facebook & Twitter & Instagram: @rebeccazung Review this podcast on Apple Podcast using this LINK and when you DM me the screen shot, I buy you my $299 video course as a thank you! To pre-order Overcome Your Villains NOW and get the bonus bundle click here: https://overcomeyourvillains.com Launching on November 16th! If you haven't yet, get my first book Confidence Creator Show Notes: You and you alone define your value! People will believe what you tell them, by the way you show up, the way you speak, and the way you project yourself. The truth is you are telling people how to treat you. Take back the power and define who you are on your own terms! About The Guest: Today we are joined by Rebecca Zung, a narcissism negotiation expert, popular youtube host, and a renowned attorney recognized amongst the top 1% of all attorneys nationwide. She is the author of best selling books, Negotiate Like YOU M.A.T.T.E.R. and Breaking Free: A Step-by-Step Divorce Guide to Achieving Emotional, Physical & Spiritual Freedom. I couldn’t be more excited for her to share her journey with all of you! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
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Confidence is really, really important. And you define your value. You and you alone define your value. And
people will think what you tell them to think. You tell people what to think of you. You project that
by how you show up, by how you speak, by the words that you choose, by the body language that you choose.
When you decide that people will think what you tell them to think, that's how powerful it shows up.
I'm on this journey with me.
Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals.
We'll overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow.
I'm ready for my close-up.
Hi, and welcome back.
I am so excited for you to meet my guest today.
And I was so taken aback by one of her many bios that's out there online that I just have to give you,
a little bit of insight into who we are sitting down with today. Rebecca Zung is a narcissism negotiation
expert beyond popular YouTube channel with millions of views a month, recognizes the top 1% of attorneys
in the nation in her past life by U.S. News and World Report, Best Lawyer in America,
legal elite, trend magazine, and on and on. She's the author of bestselling books,
negotiate like you, M-A-T-E-R, Matter,
the surefire method to step up and win forward by Robert Shapiro
and breaking free a step-by-step divorce guide.
She's got so much amazing content.
She's been featured everywhere.
She is an analyst on television news programs.
Rebecca, I am so excited to have you here with us today.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm super excited to talk to you.
Oh my gosh.
I'm excited to talk to you because we were just talking
offline and it's really eye-opening how little any of us know, right, outside of our own
fields of expertise or circles we travel in. And you mentioned something to me that was really
eye-opening that you saw immediately that I'm just beginning to understand in this conversation
and that's that there's a really strong chance. The woman that fired me. So if anyone's
listening, you know the story of how I got fired four years ago, that that woman is probably a
narcissist and you being the narcissist expert, I'd love to know how you're able to identify that
because that thought never even crossed my mind. Well, I was just listening to, you know,
because after we record here, I'm going to be recording you for my podcast. And, you know,
so I was listening to a bunch of your interviews to try to get to know you and your story so I
could prepare for our interview. And I heard your story about how you had started your
own personal brand, like about a year prior to her firing you and you were starting to gain
some traction and you were really excited about it. And here you were really, really successful in the
career. You had made lots and lots of money for the company and you'd been with the company like,
I think you said 14 years or something like that. And you were doing really, really well for it.
And here she comes in and she's your boss and you're also starting this other personal brand. And
it just seemed to me that, you know, here's a person who is super insecure. She has no sense of self.
And, you know, that's what narcissists are. They're very, very insecure people. They have no sense of
self. And they don't have any sense of care or empathy for other people. And so they have to get
all of their sense of feeling of value from external sources. So it's either that, you know, that sense of
Agulation where people are telling them how great they are all the time or, you know, attaching themselves
to people who are prestigious or something like that or having the right house or the right job or,
you know, that sort of thing. Or what I call the dark underbelly of it, which is, you know, that sense
of control, devaluing people, that sort of thing. And they feel very jealous of people. They feel
entitled, that sort of thing. And it seems to me like just from listening to your story that this
person, just at first blush, person seemed very intimidated by you, jealous of you,
and probably was threatened by you. And they got a sense of control by firing you and making you feel
devalued. Here's, you know, this person who had a lot of success, who had made a lot of money for the
company and here you were potentially going to be overshadowing her. And so by getting rid of you
and firing you, what better way to devalue you, make you feel small, all of those things. So it seemed
to me like she was potentially a narcissist. That was the thought that went through my mind when
you were telling your story. Well, it seems pretty spot on now that you're explaining it to me
that way. I just never had processed it through that lens or thought about it. Right. So how did
you become an expert on narcissists to begin with? Well, first of all, I have been a lawyer for a long,
long time, and I only have practiced in the area of high net worth divorce, which I will tell you,
the high net worth divorce is a very different area than regular divorce. So, you know,
the regular divorces where you're dealing with maybe the teacher and
and the cop or the, you know, the general people who are making, you know, maybe 50,000,
100,000 a year, those divorces you can process pretty easily.
They're not super complicated.
There's not much going on with them.
I mean, to be honest with you, that's why you see a lot of lawyers who kind of dabble in
divorce and they also do criminal law and they also do wills and, you know, that sort of
thing, they're not all that difficult if you're a general practitioner lawyer. High net worth divorce is a
very, very specialized area of the law. You have to be really, really well versed at business valuation,
taxation law, estate planning. There's so much more involved with it. And I was, I don't know,
fortunate if that's the right word, but when I was hired, even back when I was still in law school,
I happened to be hired into a practice where the two lawyers who are the managing partners of the firm
happened to practice in that area. And so I came up through the ranks. You know, and I happened to live
in a very affluent community at the time. And every single person who came through our doors was
affluent. I mean, pretty much at the time, and this was more than 20 years ago when I started in 1999,
that we didn't even take any cases that had a net worth of less than $2 million.
And this was like 20-something years ago.
So, I mean, that's pretty much how I came up through the ranks.
So I will tell you that there were a lot of narcissists in the practice for sure.
So for sure, I dealt with it a lot without even realizing that they were narcissists.
I mean, at the time, we used to joke that our next book.
was going to be, my wife is crazy and my husband is controlling, because that's what they always
used to say. So those were the terms that we used to hear all the time. My wife is crazy,
my husband is controlling. And it wasn't really until maybe three, four years ago, I'm going to
just say that the word narcissist started being thrown around all the time. And so that was when I
started hearing the word a lot. But to be honest with you, it wasn't really until I personally had to
deal with it. I really was involved with a particular person who I had a very small business venture
a couple of years ago that didn't make any money. It didn't last very long, but it was
long enough to make my life a super living hell.
living hell. And I also realized at that same time that my husband and I were dealing with a family
member who was also a covert narcissist. And we had a friend, we have a friend who's a clinical
psychologist. He's a, has a doctorate in psychology, a German guy who's super smart,
probably one of the smartest people we know. And he pointed out to us that these people,
in our lives were a covert narcissist.
And I remember thinking when he said that, I was like, oh, I don't think they're a narcissist.
I mean, because to me, when he said that word, first of all, I don't know why, no reason at
all, but I thought a narcissist was always a male.
I don't know.
And to me, a narcissist was a big mouth ragging person who filled the room, told everybody how great they were.
The person who went into the restaurant, demanded the best table, held court, wherever they go.
Yeah.
That was a narcissist to me.
I don't know.
But that was the vision.
my mind. And so when he mentioned these people were a covert narcissist, I thought, what the hell is that?
You know, I had never even heard that word before. So he recommended some books. And I, the first book I read,
we happened to be on an airplane. And I was like embarrassing my husband. We were actually on our
way back to Naples. And I'm like reading this book out loud going, oh my God, oh my God. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God. My God. My husband's like, you need to be quiet. I'm like, I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. These are these people. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. And it was so eye-opening for me that I read, I ended up reading like 100 books on narcissism. And I just dove into it so much. And I realized, you know, I had already been speaking on negotiation for many years. I had been the keynote speaker for the American Bar Association.
I had already written Negotiate Like You Matter.
I had already been doing this for years and years.
And I realized, oh, I can apply when I'm learning about narcissism.
I've already seen this personality for years.
I just didn't realize what it was.
I can apply this to what I already know about negotiation.
And that's how it all came together.
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Why is it important for someone to understand they are dealing with a narcissist, even if it is,
a covert narcissist. Because it's about one in five people on the planet. And so there's nobody who's
listening to this that hasn't had to deal with it or doesn't have these people in their lives.
Whether it's a family member, whether it's a business in your career, I mean, you have had to deal
with them or you're going to have to deal with them again. And so you might as well know how to deal with
them in a way that allows you to continue to feel powerful, allows you to set yourself up so that you
continue to feel honored, valued, and respected in a way that nothing and no one can ever infringe on
that ever again. Oh, that sounds so empowering to me. I want to feel that way. What are some of
the strategies that you suggest we should employ in order to feel that way? Well, you just have to
understand that I always say this, that the not so secret secret is that they are way more afraid
of you than you are of them. Even though it does not look that way on the outside, because I'm thinking
back to my own unique experience and this woman tried to project that she was incredibly confident
and in charge of everything and flying high above everything. However, I know this person extremely well.
She was incredibly insecure, you know, eating disorders.
So many issues behind the scenes that people did not know about.
And again, I'm not, you know, going to get into that.
But there were so many issues if you knew this person well,
that it was almost comical to see how other people would view her.
Correct.
I always think of it as sort of like the Wizard of Eyes.
So you remember how the Wizard of Eyes had like built up this whole like
Emerald City, this whole thing, this big facade.
you get there and there's like this big projection of this thing, this talking, massive head,
scary looking thing. But behind the curtain, it was this feeble little, you know, man who was like
not scary at all, who was like actually super scared of everybody. That's what's really going on.
So is the first step to take when you're dealing with a narcissist to reframe
as I'm dealing with someone who's incredibly weak and insecure?
You just have to understand that what's driving them is always that they need to feed their ego.
I mean, that they have this, there's only one thing that ever motivates them, and that's what
we call narcissistic supply. I mean, for people who are not narcissists, we're motivated by
many different things. I mean, we can be motivated by.
wanting to take care of our children. We can be motivated by wanting to be healthy. We can be
motivated by wanting to take care of our families or do good in the world. Whatever it is,
right? Leave a legacy. I mean, there's many different things that motivate us. They're not motivated
by many different things. They're only motivated by narcissistic supply, feeding that ego,
making sure that it's sort of like people who would be like starving or needing air or drowning.
And the only thing they need is like that air or whatever.
I mean, it's survival for them.
They just something happened in their childhood that made them believe that they have to survive.
And for them to survive, no one else can.
And so they have to have.
and so they can't give to anyone else because they have to have.
Can't we just choose not to deal with someone like this?
Because as I'm listening to you explain this individual, I can't stand them.
Already, I want no part of them.
I want to fire them from my life.
Well, that's what you have to do.
I mean, I always just say namaste and walk away.
I mean, that's, you just have to understand that you have to have.
I mean, if they have to be in your life, you have to.
understand how to have very, very strict boundaries about them.
Because, you know, I mean, a lot of people say, can they change?
Can they change?
I mean, I've interviewed psychologists, psychiatrists.
I got to interview Dr. Bandi Lee, who wrote that book about Trump, you know,
where she interviewed the 27 different psychiatrists and psychologists.
And she's like this super expert on narcissism.
And, you know, from what I understand, I mean, I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but from what I understand in interviewing all of them, they can change.
But, you know, they have to really, really want to. They'd have to sit in a chair with one of these mental health professionals and be very, very dedicated to wanting to change.
they don't have that personality type to want to change.
I mean, so that's the problem with them.
I mean, I think the percentage of them that are reformed and changed is probably pretty small.
And so for those of you out there who are listening, who are in these relationships,
I think that your chances of happiness are probably a whole lot better by moving on
and finding somebody who's actually.
healthy than spitting in this and hoping for change with the person that you're with. I mean,
that's my take on it because I just kind of doubt that this person probably will change.
So a lot of people listening right now are wondering, whether you're thinking about a personal
relationship or you're thinking about a business relationship, they're wondering,
I wonder if my person actually is a narcissist or maybe I'm misreading this, especially when it
comes to the covert narcissist, are there specific things that you can say, okay, if this person exhibits
A, B, or C, then they definitely are a narcissist. Yeah, I mean, there's a list from the DSM-5 that the
psychiatrist and psychologists use and it, you know, it's entitlement, no boundaries. I mean,
they have like seven different things that they look at. But, you know, I look at it as kind of like
a spectrum, to be honest with you. I think that the.
probably all of us have exhibit traits of it sometimes, you know, I mean, but it's the people who
are the pathological. They're like on the end of the spectrum that they're just like that all
the time where they just have absolutely no ability to have any care or empathy for other people
ever. And they only ever care about themselves because they just, they are in that survival
mode at all times. You know, those are the people. All of us are sometimes selfish. I mean,
that doesn't mean that we're a narcissist, right? All of us as humans want to feel seeing,
hurt and know that we matter. That doesn't make us a narcissist. That just makes us a human
being. And it doesn't make you a narcissist if you say something good about yourself. If you are
proud of an accomplishment that you've had. I mean, that doesn't make you a narcissist either.
That could actually make you more confident, I would think, that if you are willing to stand up
and feel good about the things that you do that are positive. Yeah, confidence doesn't make you a
narcissist. It's when you're entitled and demanding and jealous and petty and you're lining up
the flying monkeys against people and you, you know, it's that deep.
sense of insecurity and you're really just only for yourself and never for anybody else.
If your motivation is never for anyone other than yourself, then that's, you know, really what the
narcissist is about. You just remind me your back on something so funny that, and I believe,
and you'll tell me if this is correct, that narcissists might attempt to trick people occasionally.
And so let me give you a specific example of the woman that fired me.
I remember a couple years before she fired me, she started advocating and asking me,
oh, can you introduce me to the people on the women's network or the women's this or that?
And I would, of course, she was someone I worked with, of course, I would make the introduction.
Next thing I knew, she's buying her way onto these boards.
So suddenly she's a leader of the women in media, for example, initiative and starting to show up as an advocate
for women in business. And I remember saying myself, huh, that's so funny. It doesn't seem like the
person that I know, but okay, you know, I guess this is a new initiative for her and great,
you know, and then we all know how it plays out. So almost creating this fake persona so that other
people outside in the world would see and perceive her one way that didn't align with what people
who were very close to her knew who she was. Oh, yes, absolutely. Because how they look to the world is
always that diamond level of supply. You know, I always call that the diamond level supply versus,
you know, what I call the coal level supply, these are my words, you know, which is the dark underbelly
of supply, which is controlling people, devaluing people, debasing people, which is what, you know,
they also get, that also feeds their ego, but that's not what the world necessarily sees, you know.
I mean, so there's kind of two sides of things that feed their egos.
That's the top level of what feeds their ego is what the world sees. Both feed their ego. Both sides
feed their ego. And both are important. And by the way, when it comes to negotiating with them,
that's where the leverage is going to come in. You know, so when you talk about my slay methodology,
developing strategy is number one, which is the S. And then L is that leverage. And looking at what,
what's actually motivating them, you have to look at that narcissistic supply.
That's the key to the kingdom right there because it's all driven by their supply.
So you look at the diamond level supply, the coal level supply, which is that what was
driving her, which was controlling you, making you squirm, intimidating you, making you feel
bad, devaluing you.
She got supply from that.
They enjoy that.
They get off on that.
You know what's so funny, you just gave me a visual yet again in my head.
This is so crazy.
You are so right.
And then I'm just going to say that this is like an awakening moment for me.
Again, I never thought about this.
However, the day that she actually fired me, she put two pieces of paper in front of me.
One said Heather's been fired.
The other one was a beautiful letter about how wonderful I am and how, you know,
I basically am going on to do my own things.
Then the company supports me and loves me.
And if I signed that one, I would get a big check, which she knew money drove me, right, and hope that it would.
And then I'd have to sign off on a non-disparaging agreement so I could never speak to any experience I had in the company, never say anything bad about the company once I left.
So obviously she wanted me to sign the beautiful memo, take the big check.
And she was hoping that she was going to leverage my want for cashed, you know, in order to do that.
Or maybe for ego, she thought that I'd want the beautiful memo to go out.
However, I was so sick of being bullied by this woman at this point in time in that moment.
And she was all smile.
She was so happy.
I was so sad.
I felt like I was losing everything I had worked so hard for.
I was wrong there.
But in that moment, I felt like I was at loss.
And she was so happy to be doing this.
And in my mind, I remember processing for one second and saying, don't react, respond.
No, I'm not going to take her money.
She's bullied me.
She's held me over, you know, her demands, her commands for me.
money long enough. No, I'm not going to let her anymore. This is my moment that I'm going to change
everything. And I just remember pushing the papers and saying, not signing either one. I didn't write either
one. And if you have nothing else to say to me, I'm leaving. And Rebecca, in that second,
she went from all smiles and excited to her face almost crumbled. She became beat red. It was like a
cartoon. And in that moment, I took all my confidence back. I stood up so proud of myself.
Granted, I was super scared about where do I go next and how am I going to make money? And
I'm not going to minimize that.
That was horrible feeling.
But for that one split second, when I took all the power out of that situation and room,
I just felt so proud of me.
I knew it was the right thing, even though it was super scary.
And when you were explaining the narcissistic behavior,
I could just see how in a moment I really had her there.
Yeah, you took that supply from her because she was going to be so happy that she was able to
like, you know, intimidate you with that.
There you go.
It's a perfect example.
Perfect example.
you grab that leverage from her.
But when people are dealing with a narcissist that they have to, for whatever reason,
maybe it's a short business deal or something that they have to get through,
how do you recommend people typically leverage knowing it is a narcissist to their benefit?
Well, it's always going to be tied up in narcissistic supply.
So the perfect way, there's always going to be some balance between figuring out a way
to threaten a source of narcissistic supply
that's going to be more important for them to keep or maintain
than the supply that they get from jerking you around.
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So is it around trying to make them feel important?
If you're trying to get something from them, you're going to cater to them?
Is that a strategy that you would use?
Well, that's more of a battle, not a war.
That's a battle strategy, not a war strategy.
So I call that bartering.
If you want them to do something that I give the example sometimes, like,
can you do the quick books today?
You're so much better at math than I am.
you know, something like that, you know, get them to do something you want them to do.
I call it narcissistic fluffing. You fluff up their ego to get them to do something.
So that's more of a battle strategy, not a war strategy. So but for sure, that's a great strategy.
I call it bartering. So for sure. When you are setting people up, you mentioned you've done so much
work on negotiation, becoming an expert in negotiation, even if someone's not dealing with a
narcissists, they're just going into negotiation. What are some of the basic tips that you give people
to set them up for success? Oh, gosh. There are so many. I would say the main thing for sure is mindset.
I mean, I used to say 80% of winning a negotiation is mindset. And then I interviewed Bob Proctor
and he corrected me on my own podcast. He said, it's 99%. You know, and in some
ways maybe it is 99%, but I don't want to discount, you know, research and all that sort of thing,
you know, but definitely mindset is so important. And you, you wrote a book on confidence. I mean,
and confidence is really, really important. And you define your value. You and you alone define your
value. And people will think what you tell them to think. You tell people what to think of you.
You project that by how you show up, by how you speak, by the words that you choose, by the body language that you choose.
Rebecca, will you share that story of your coach?
I love the story of your coach around how you flipped around a situation where you had been in law, you were leaving law, you were coming back to law.
So I had been in law and then I went and I did a couple of years as a financial.
planner. And then I went back to the law because a friend of mine, she was leaving her law practice. And so
she basically said, here's my law practice. It was a very small law practice. And she kind of dumped it
at my lap. And I was like, okay, no one else is ever going to dump a law practice in my lap. Like,
this is really great. I get to have like, it was like 12 clients. It was a small practice,
but it was enough for me to like have a runway to get started with a practice. And so,
I thought, okay, I'm going to do it. But then, you know, it was in Naples, Florida, which you were
familiar with. And, you know, it's a small community, but it's like a few hundred thousand people.
It's not like small, small, small, I mean, but it's small enough that, and it's a very affluent
community and everybody pretty much knows each other. And I just thought, oh, my God, the people around here
are just going to think I'm a super flake. Like she was in law, now she's, you know, was a financial planner,
and now she's back to law again. Everybody's going to think I'm such a flake. And I remember my business
coach, who's still one of my very best friends, and I still go back to her when I need, you know,
to get my head like readjusted. And she said, people will think what you tell them to think.
And I looked at her and she said, well, you can tell them to think that you're a flake or you can
tell them to think that you're the only family law attorney that has a financial background,
so you're actually more qualified than any of the other family law attorneys. So which story
do you want to tell? Oh, that's so powerful. Yeah. And I was like, oh, okay, I'll tell that story.
And so that's how I decided to show up.
And I ended up creating a business plan for myself.
And not only did I crush my numbers, I did way better than my numbers.
And I ended up creating the largest family law practice in Naples.
And I mean, it was so busy that, I mean, I literally didn't need to even step outside my doors to do any networking.
By the time I decided to merge my practice four years ago, I had people showing up in my office to, like, hand me $25,000 checks to my receptionist to say, I'm retaining Rebecca.
Here's the check.
And my receptionist came back and said, this guy just dropped out of this check and said, he's retaining you.
And I was like, no, I get a say.
Like, people don't just get to retain me.
I get to choose.
Like it was that unbelievable.
So when you decide that people will think what you tell them to think, that's how powerful
it shows up.
That is such an amazing example of going from feeling flighty and flaky and discouraged
and doubting success to literally flipping it on its head, completely reframing it,
and leveraging that to be your unique value proposition.
Absolutely.
I mean, and becoming, you know, top 1% attorney, which means, you know, and how that gets measured, by the way, is best lawyers in America by U.S. News and top 1% by National Association of Distinguished Council and legal elite by trend magazine. You know, if you look at all of those, it's the top 1% of the attorneys in the country. And these are federated magazine. I mean, these are not like fly by night things that you pay. You don't pay US News to like choose.
you or anything like that. No, but it's good that you differentiate because these days, and I actually
did a post recently about this, there are opportunities in certain outlets that you can buy your way in.
So I'm glad that you said that sometimes media can be misleading. However, somewhere in the
article, it is disclosed that it is a paid opportunity. And yes, the articles that you're mentioning
are no one can get in there. No one can buy their way in there. It's not happening. It's only from
hard work and success. So congrats on that recognition because that's massive. Thank you.
Thank you. Well, Rebecca, I know everyone's wanting to find out more about you. They're going
to want to get more information. And I know you have a free e-book that you're going to be offering
everybody as well. Can you tell us about it? Yes, absolutely. So I have a free thing. Go to win my
negotiation.com. It's a free e-book. It's my crush my negotiation, prep worksheet. It's 15 pages.
It's super cool. And you can just
download it. Win my negotiation.com is the URL that you go to, grab it. I've had literally
thousands and thousands of people get it and win their entire negotiations on it. So definitely
make sure you get that. And check out my YouTube channel for sure. I mean, if you go in and you
just type, negotiate with a narcissist, you will most definitely find me. But the URL for it is
YouTube.com forward slash Rebecca Zung-E-S-Q, if you want to find it directly. But for sure, I am the only
attorney on the planet that's teaching people how to negotiate with narcissists. So it's easy to find me.
And thank goodness you are. I had no idea I had been dealing with one for years. I could have used
all this information, Rebecca, back then, but so grateful to have it now. I will put links to
everything in the show notes. Rebecca, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Next week, keep creating your confidence.
