In Search Of Excellence - Chris Voss: Better Every Day | E11

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

You probably know Chris Voss as the FBI Hostage Negotiator that wrote the best-selling book Never Split the Difference. What you probably don’t know about Chris is that he grew up an average kid in the Midwest.  There was nothing extraordinary about him, he claims.  He wasn’t popular, academically gifted, or notably athletic. But there is one thing that sets Chris apart from the rest, and he is well aware of what it is – a commitment to getting better every day.No matter where you are in life, Chris has tools to help you unlock your potential.In this episode, Randall Kaplan and Chris Voss talk about reframing setbacks as setups that lead to something better.  They discuss the two caveats for taking advice from someone, the three techniques to a safe resolution, and the exponential benefits of incremental improvement.  Chris shares how his experience in hostage negotiation has transferred to business and provides actionable techniques for negotiating in both our personal and professional lives.Topics Include:Post-traumatic growth.Victim mentality and bullies.Negligible shifts that can result in major differences in outcome.The “win or learn” mindset.Ways to unofficially recruit a mentor.Mirroring, labeling, and delivery in negotiations.Lessons from hostage negotiation that taught Chris about preparation and making mistakes.The art of listening.The ability to say no and protect your time.The value of kindness.The ways to lead a team.The most valuable investment you can make.And other topics...Chris Voss spent 24 years working for the FBI in their crisis negotiation unit.  He was the FBI's chief international hostage and kidnapping negotiator where worked on more than 150 cases, including the 1993 world trade bombing and the 1996 TWA flight 800 explosion.  He is the recipient of the Attorney General's Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement and the FBI Agents Association Award for Distinguished and Exemplary Service.  Today, he is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University School of Business and a lecturer at USC Marshall School of Business.  He's the CEO of the Black Swan Group, which provides training, negotiation, and leadership skills for executives. He is also the author of the bestselling book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It.Resources Mentioned:Chris’ WebsiteSign Up For Chris’ Weekly NewsletterBook: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss Beyond Board WebsiteSarah Zapp’s WebsiteSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

You shouldn't be humiliated by losing. You should be humiliated if you don't learn from it. The only real sin is to not learn. You're not going to be perfect. So when that instance comes along where you get kicked in the teeth, decide to get up. Welcome to In Search of Excellence, which is about our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be. To learn, educate, and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential.

It's about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication, and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face on our way there. Achieving excellence is our goal, and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings, and we all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there. Today, my guest is the incredible Chris Voss. Chris spent 24 years working for the FBI in their crisis negotiation unit. From 2003 through 2007, Chris was the FBI's chief international hostage and kidnapping negotiator, where he worked on more than 150 hostage cases from around the

world. He spent three years investigating the 1993 World Trade Bombing and was the co-case agent for the 1996 TWA Flight 800 explosion, which killed 230 people. He is the recipient of the Attorney General's Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement, as well as the FBI Agents Association Award for Distinguished and Exemplary Service. Chris is a regular commentator on CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and many other networks. He's been featured in Forbes, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and hundreds of other publications. He's an adjunct professor at Georgetown University School of Business and is a lecturer at USC's Marshall School of Business. He's also currently the CEO of the Black Swan Group, which provides training, negotiation, and leadership skills for executives. He's also the author of the awesome

bestselling book, Behind Me, Never Split the Difference, Negotiating As If Your Life Depended on It. Chris, welcome to In Search of Excellence. Hey, man, I am happy to be here. Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure. Chris, I always start my podcast with our family because from the moment we're born, our family helps shape our personality, our values, and the preparation for our future. You grew up in an entrepreneurial family in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, a small town of 9,000 people. Can you tell us about your parents and how they influenced you as a young child when you were growing up? Yeah, very blue collar, hardworking. My father had his own business, was a sole proprietor, entrepreneur, fuel oil jobber, which is a wholesaler,

guy between the big oil company and the end user. But just a very Midwestern, pitch in, be willing to roll up your sleeves and get birdie and get the job done environment. And figure it out, too. I mean, a lot of emphasis on here's a task, figure it out. And that was kind of the environment that I grew up in. What were you like as a kid? Were you popular? Were you a leader? And what did you do for fun?

I was eminently average. I was just an average kid. Average athletic ability, average size, average intelligence. Nothing extraordinary about me. Ran around outside. My parents kind of would kick me out of the house and say, be back at dinnertime. And if I wasn't working for my dad, I mean, all of the kids, I got an older sister, two younger. He figured he was paying for our room and board. He'd get a return on his investment

by putting us to work. So average kid, Midwestern US. Was there a point early in your life where you said to yourself, I want to be great, be the best at whatever I do and be extremely successful when I grow up? I don't know that I ever thought specifically in those terms. I've always thought about getting better, working hard, figuring stuff out, and the relentless pursuit of incremental improvement, to put it in today's terms. I found myself very driven to get better pretty much when I started college, but maybe even more so after I got out because my grades were, I'm basically a B student, B plus in high school, B minus in college. But in hindsight,

if you just try to get better incrementally, you'll be shocked at how much ground you can cover. And I think that was pretty much the way that I lived my life. So many successful people that I know have had many negative experiences or one or two as a child, which has a profound influence on them in their lives. I stuttered as a child. I was bullied and made fun of for most of my childhood. Can you tell us about an experience you had when you were nine years old and how it affected you for the rest of your life? Yeah. And that wasn't the only traumatic experience. Some of the reading I'm doing these days includes a book called Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Tyler, who also wrote The Black Swan, which inspired the name

of my company. But he talks about post-traumatic stress growth, not post-traumatic stress disorder, but post-traumatic stress growth. And this is not a learning methodology that you can employ. I mean, you can't intentionally kick people in the face or punch them in the gut to make them better, but life is going to do that to you. And the more you work on thriving after that, the better your life is going to be. So when I was about nine years old, this bully cornered me and terrified me. I mean, just horrified me. And it was the most afraid I was in my life the first time. And then he cornered me again sometime later. I remember that being the most afraid I was my entire life. And I have sort of, especially in law enforcement as an FBI agent, kidnapping negotiator as a way of being. I got to admit, I target bullies. I go after bullies. As a kidnapping negotiator, it was a

way not just to free the hostage, but to get at the bad guys and defend people from someone who was predatory when they had no other defense. And I think that's sort of been very much undercurrent themes in my entire life. This kid, he's nine years old and he made up a story that you broke the law and you'd go to jail and would be executed and killed. I mean, who does that? Yeah, a coward does that, which is ultimately what a bully is. He was much bigger than me. We were playing on a parking lot, not a block away from my home. For whatever reason, I think he just decided that he was going to horrify me and terrify me. So then not only did he outline all this horrible thing,

the time, the way my mother let us know that it was time to come home for dinner, she blew a whistle. We were in the neighborhood. We could hear the whistle. And if the whistle blew, it was time to get home. And I can remember my mom blowing a whistle to go home and a guy wouldn't let me go. And he just ignored it. And the feeling that I couldn't escape at that time was horrifying.

I didn't think I was going to get away. So, yeah, I look back at my life and what triggered me, I mean, I hate bullies. And so defending people from bullies has really been, as I said, kind of a thing. When I'd come home crying, my mom would say, bullies at the end, people who made fun of you when they grow up, the most popular kids, if they're even popular. I mean, today, it's not cool to be a bully. You could get in trouble for it. Back then, no one got in trouble for it. No one complained about it really either. So it was a different time. But my mom said, wait till you get older and let's see where the bullies are at

that point in time. Do you have any idea what happened to the bully? I think I saw him again a few years later. I'm sure that he lived an anonymous, useless life. There's a couple of things that guarantee that you will be mediocre or complete failure. To be a bully, I mean, you will ultimately be mediocre. You know, the flip side of it is to never pick yourself up, to live as a victim. And there's a lot in today's society where it's a contest to see who can be the biggest victim. Like, yeah, you've been hurt, but you don't improve your life by wallowing in being a victim. You improve your life by saying, yeah, I get kicked in the face, and it was brutal,

and it was unfair, and it was wrong, and I got to pick me up. So neither formula is a formula for success as a human being, either being a bully or being a victim. Let's talk about the value of education. You touched upon it briefly about what kind of student you were and what kind of grades. You graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in industrial... Iowa State. Iowa. Iowa. Sorry. Iowa State. Yeah, come on. You offended both the people in Ohio and in Iowa with that one. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Ohio State. Oh my God, shoot me because I went to Michigan. And then you earned a Master's of Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy

School of Government. When you graduated Kennedy School of Government. Much later. Much later. When you graduated college, did you know what you wanted to do? And why did you end up getting a master's degree years later? Yeah, I wanted to be a cop from about age 16 on. I saw a movie when I was 16 called The Super Cops about a true story of two cops in New York City. And they were wildly innovative. And they did a lot of good. And they were working in a really tough part of town, Bed-Stuy, back when Bed-Stuy was

dangerous. And they were white cops in a black neighborhood. And it didn't matter because they were about doing the right thing. So the community loved them. The community didn't care what color they were, as long as they were about doing the right thing. And color falls away really fast when core values line up, particularly around doing the right thing. So I was inspired by these guys. The other thing I didn't realize was they were mavericks. They didn't do what they were told. So that's kind of a deal with my father. He told all his kids, I'll pay for four years of college, period. You can graduate or not in those four years, but the money runs out after four years, and

then you're on your own. And so then I went to school, planning on being a cop, studied business as a backup, and then went down and joined the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department pretty much as soon as I got out of college. You were a street cop there walking the beat. Can you tell us about that? And can you tell us about the most interesting experience you had on the beat, either a crazy arrest or a time where you felt like you were in a lot of danger or something else you were doing? Yeah, you know, all right.

So, you know, we didn't have full patrol. We drove in one-man cars, one-man car patrol. Occasionally, we'd have two people in a car, but mostly it was by car. I started out in a commercial area, which is a lot of activity on the street. And then there was a section of Kansas City called the West Bottoms, which was all warehouses. And that was in the first district that I had, that I owned, that was given to me. And I do remember that most of Kansas City is really well laid out, KCMO, nice grid system, very well organized. But the West Bottoms was a maze. And cops go down there and get lost all

the time. And my sergeant said, look, man, it's easy to get lost down there. So I made it a point to go down there and find my way around. I learned that maze. I loved it. And then there was a bar that was right on the state line, State Line Road, which was a literal street that separated Kansas from Missouri. And it was a bar down there called Tony's Corner. And if you were wanted in either state, that's where you went to drink because all you had to do was cross the street

to get away from the police, you know, be in another state. And I loved working down there. I loved the challenge down there. And it was a little bit of shooting fish in a barrel. Chances are if bad guys were down there, they either wanted or thought they were. So it was a high percentage shot to go down there and patrol. And then I loved the fact that I was one of the few cops that really knew his way around the area. Did you ever have any life or death situations when you were in that job? Yeah. You got to see trouble coming. Life or death. If you thought you were going to die,

you put on a sissy officer, which is where I need help now. I don't ever remember asking for an assist the officer. I'd like to see things coming. Now, as a uniformed police officer, you're going to stick your neck out a little bit, but whether or not it gets bad really depends upon a lot more on your ability to interact with the community. Are they going to gang up on you because you're a jerk, or are they going to be supportive of you because you're trying to do the right thing? So I had my gun out a couple of times, never fired it, never got fired at. I always like seeing things come. Then you're going to switch from being a street cop to being on the Kansas City SWAT team. And then the FBI hired you for their SWAT team in their Pittsburgh office

where you worked for two years. You had some local training, then you went to Quantico and then you transferred to New York. It's not an easy transition or it doesn't seem like one. Can you tell us about that? And did you ultimately, as a kid, did you want to work for the FBI? Yeah. The FBI came up just sort of out of the blue. My father started to encourage me to go federal law enforcement because he wanted me to excel. And he saw federal as being a step up from local, which is not necessarily the case, but that's how a lot of people saw it. He introduced me to Secret Service agent. And at the time, I had no idea what the difference was between ATF, FBI, CIA, Secret Service. I had no idea. I'm talking to

the Secret Service guy and he said, I travel all over the world with the service. And I thought, now that sounds interesting. Somebody else is going to pay for you to go around the service. And I thought, now that sounds interesting. Somebody else is going to pay for you to go around the world. I want to find out some more. Secret Service wasn't hiring, but DFBI was. It was a big hiring push with a relatively mediocre resume at that point in time, but I scored very high on their tests. I got into Quantico and then the academy training at Quantico was phenomenal. I mean, I was really impressed with the training, which was both law enforcement, smarts, book training, classroom training, physical fitness, firearms, and defensive tactics. 16 weeks of awesomeness if you want to work hard. And then they transferred me to Pittsburgh,

got on the SWAT team there. That was an amazing experience. And then I got transferred to New York and became part of the terrorist task force and life changed again. It was great. I spent my junior summer before my senior year, I went to Michigan and I did an internship at the National Crime Prevention Council. We went to the FBI one day for the tour, and I said, I want to work for the FBI, but I'm an entrepreneur by gene. I just have the bug. So for years, as I was thinking about what I wanted to do, I went to law school. I thought about the FBI, which seemed really cool. I would have loved that. But I also thought I wanted to make a little more money than the FBI agents make. But I still have this somewhat fascination with one day going back to law enforcement. Ali Mayorkas. This was after 9-11, three months later. And he set up a tour with me

with the SAC and the Chicago office, Jim DiSarno, who gave me full access. I mean, he put a couple of people in charge. They walked me through the whole thing. And I just think it was incredibly fascinating. I mean, it said to me again, one day, I don't know if I ever retire and I probably would be too old to work there, but I've always been fascinated with the FBI. If I could add in, the cool thing about the Bureau was, which was different than any other federal law enforcement agency, because if you're a Secret Service, you're doing counterfeiting and protection. That's it. DEA, you're working drugs, ATF, guns, bombs, moonshiners. The FBI does everything. So whatever you're into,

if you're enthusiastic about art history, the FBI works art fraud. So whatever you're into, the Bureau's got a spot for you, which was a cool thing about being there. It's very hard to get a job there today. I don't know. They hire me. Yeah, it was easier before, right? Yeah. I mean, I hear from some of my mentees in college who want to go into law enforcement. Secret service, incredibly tough.

The FBI, very, very tough. On our path to excellence, we have a number of setbacks and challenges that we need to overcome. We don't give up. We don't quit. You get transferred to the FBI's New York office, and then you go into the office of the head of the negotiations team, and she summarily rejects you. At some point, when we're working our way up, you have a boss or a mentor who gives you incredible advice. Can you tell us what she told you?

Yeah. And let me put two caveats on whether or not you should listen to somebody's advice. And they're real close, but there's subtleties to both. Never take advice from somebody you wouldn't trade places with. Don't take direction from somebody who hasn't been where you're going. So she summarily rejected me. I was eminently unqualified. But the real qualification is really persistence and can you take direction? So I said, look, there's got to be something I

could do. I don't believe in passively accepting things. I've always believed that there's some action that can be taken. I'm not good at inaction, unless it's dynamic inaction, but that's almost another topic. But so I said, look, there's got to be something I could do. And she said, there is. Volunteer on a suicide hotline. So I did. I mean, to me at the time, that just seemed like blatantly obvious. She was in charge. She was somebody in hindsight that I'd trade places with. Running the team. She must know what she's talking about.

Also, are they going to be accountable for your success or failure? Is this subtle nuance. If somebody has given you advice and if you fail, it's no skin off them. You might want to think about whether or not you need to take that advice because they're not going to care if you fail. And if you succeed, are they going to look out for you? It's how to recruit a mentor unofficially. So it just seemed obvious to me. So I went, I volunteered and I came back to her five months later and I said, look, I want you to know I've been volunteering on the suicide highlight for several months

now. And she was shocked. Now I was shocked that she was shocked. She said, you know, I tell everybody to do this. Nobody does it. Because of that, it moved me instantly up the rankings of who's going to take the next position because I listened and I acted on the advice. And it just seems so obvious and so few people do it. And maybe it's

because people get advice all the time from people who have no business giving them advice. There's no reason to think they know what they're talking about. And because they like you is not a reason. Like a lot of friends and family will give you utterly useless advice, very well-intentioned. They like you, they love you, they're supportive of you, but they don't know what they're talking about. You got to have reason to believe that person knows what they're talking about. So that's your first experience where you're talking to people. What you're saying in real time can make the difference between life and death. Yeah. So that was really what I learned on Suicide Hotline. Not only did I learn that on the hotline, but I learned that empathy is an accelerator. Like I, you know, you have all these visions of what being on a suicide hotline is. And by the

way, it's just a masterclass in emotional intelligence is all it is. Now, I didn't know that at the time. Nobody knew that. I thought it was confined to that environment. It's not. It's everything. So you get there for the training and you envision that you might be on the phone for hours talking to somebody off a ledge. And right off the bat, they say, look, every call is limited to 20 minutes.

You got a 20-minute time limit. And if you apply the skills properly, it's not going to take 20 minutes. You got a 20 minute time limit. And if you apply the skills properly, it's not going to take 20 minutes anyway. And I remember being shocked thinking like, no, wait a minute. What about all the movies and TV? You're telling me movies and TV are wrong. And lo and behold, you get on and you apply empathy, applied empathy, tactical empathy, what we refer to now. And it accelerates the interaction in ways that will astound you. And I learned that way back when on the Suicide Hotline. You moved to a new location for work. And before we talk about how you became a hostage

negotiator, I want to talk about planning for our future and doing whatever it takes to advance our careers. FBI has 56 field offices around the country, many of which are in major cities where there's a lot to do when you're not working. You moved to New York, which is exciting to a lot of people. What if the FBI wanted you to move to Anchorage, Alaska, which is a great place to live for many, but maybe the last place that someone would want to live? Would you have gone there? And what's your advice to people on this front? When your employer asks you to move to a new location that isn't where you want to live or worse, it seems terrible to you. Do you go? Yeah. Well, what's your agreement up front? First of all, Anchorage and the FBI is a tough get. I mean, a lot of people anchor there and a

lot of openings there. And the people that want to be there, there's a line to get into Anchorage. But basically, I didn't want to go to New York. I mean, I was not interested for a variety of reasons. Principle one being cost of living. At the time, there was no cost of living increase to go to New York. And it was taking a step, a significant step back financially. Pittsburgh to New York, housing prices were triple what they were in Pittsburgh. But what was my understanding going in? Fortunately, I had honest and candid people, and my integrity is important to me. What does that mean? The recruiter said, don't take this job if you can't go to New York. Just don't do it. And I remember thinking like,

all right, cool. I'll accept that. Now I'm in Pittsburgh and it looks like it's lining up for me to go to New York. And I did everything I could within the rules to steer my career in another direction. Who could I legitimately influence within the rules? What cards do I have to play here? And tried to play them, wrote a memo. I had family in Chicago. I mean, if you've got to send me to a big city, send me to Chicago. I ended up in New York, did not want to be in New York. But first of all, my understanding was it was a possibility and I had agreed to accept that.

And secondly, it was fascinating. If you're being sent someplace you don't want to go, will it advance your career? Was that part of the agreement to begin with? Have you been double-crossed in any way by being sent there? But did you already tacitly agree and now you change your mind? Well, if you already agreed, you got a problem. And in most cases, if you agreed to something, stick it out for a year, see what happens. I was not interested in being in New York and I loved it. Not only was it so great for me, I stayed almost triple the amount of time I needed to be there. I could have been out of New York in six years. I stayed for 14 because I had such a great time working with high quality people in a challenging environment. I was so happy in my

time in New York. It's one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. You mentioned the hotline, great experience there, but you were originally on the spa team. So sometimes we need to be flexible in terms of, we think our career is going this way. Our career is then going that way. You were into martial arts at some point in your life. So can you tell us about how you became a hostage negotiator and how it ultimately happened? And it ain't a straight line. A lot of the net steps forward come from a lateral move or I've heard people in companies talk about they didn't just take a lateral move. It was a lateral and a step back to get to someplace even higher.

So I was on a SWAT team in Pittsburgh, went out on a few operations, SWAT train, and then got sent to New York and wasn't on the SWAT team in New York, but thought about trying out for the Bureau's hostage rescue team, which was the next level up, Bureau's version of the Navy SEALs, the HRT, and plenty of former SEALs on that team. And re-injured my knee and then had it rebuilt again and then thought, all right, so I want to stay in crisis response. What else is here other than being on the SWAT team? Because eventually my knee is going to break and not get fixed again. And we had negotiators and I thought like so many things that look easy, it's because the people that make it look easy have worked

really hard at it and are still working really hard at it. But that's why I switched over to negotiations. And then when I got into it, for me, for the way I'm wired, it was far more satisfying than SWAT ever was. So it was a circuitous route, which was filled with setbacks. I use the analogy sometimes, it's not a U-turn, it's an S-curve. However you need to look at it, very rarely are what's perceived as setbacks anything but a path to something better. Let's talk about bank robberies for a few minutes. And I want to start with a few stats on this. In 2019, there were 2,060 bank robberies. Banks lost $400 million as a result of them. It's a lot of money, but the crazy thing is the average robbery is only $4,000. The penalty for bank robberies is 10 to 25 years in prison, which basically means

if you rob a bank, you're going to serve 10 years in prison for what amounts to $400 a year. I don't get it, but it's kind of crazy math. And then it's also crazy, only 60% of bank robbery cases are solved. Let's talk about bank robberies with hostages. They're extremely rare, one in 20 years, but the one in 20 was your first case. It's 1993 and there's a robbery at the Chase Manhattan branch. It's 7th and Carroll in Brooklyn. Can you walk us through that and what happened? Yeah. And the whole reason why you rob banks is a whole different thing. And I love that you brought that up.

I'll bring it up real quickly because I always wondered that myself. Like robbing a bank is a stupid idea. You don't get that much money and you're going to get your picture taken. I mean, you're going to walk into an environment where they got cameras everywhere. Why do that? I was at a landmark training a couple of years ago in LA. I'm always looking for ways to get better. And there's this kid talking there, kid is in his mid thirties. He went down for bank robbery three times. It took him three times to figure out this was a bad idea, but he had in his head that it was thrilling. So it wasn't for the money. It was for the thrill and what people see in their head.

Vision drives decision. That's how people do dumb stuff. Human beings on a regular basis do dumb stuff on a regular because of what they see in their head. It's not a spank robbery you asked me about in Brooklyn. Yeah, the guy saw in his head that he was going to get in and get out before the police showed up. And he saw in his head how they were going to get in. They were going to threaten their way into the vault. They're going to get past the tellers by forcing the tellers to let him come in.

And the way he did it, when he came in the bank, he had a gun that looked like a.357. And he put it in one of the female tellers' mouth before the bank was open. He knew the exact timing. Put the barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber, which, as expected, would horrify. And you would open a vault if you could. So he's got this all mapped out on his head. Problem is, somebody sees him on the inside.

Bank alarm goes out. I'm in a New York office. The FBI, it's 8.30 in the morning. My buddy Charlie walks up, says, there's a bank robbery in Brooklyn with hostages. Let's go. Yeah, the vast majority of bank robbers get out, and team, another hour to get set up. So two hours after the bank alarm has gone out, we're ringing into the bank, trying to offer them, we're cold calling salesmen who are selling jail time. That's what a hostage negotiator does. He sells jail time. Let's talk about mirroring, laboring, and mastering delivery.

Those are three techniques you use to come to a safe resolution there, which you use in every other negotiation, whether it's a criminal case or in business. The first technique is mirroring, the second is labeling, and the third is delivering the right voice and the tone of your voice. And my favorite here is the late night DJ voice. There you go. I've been practicing that in advance of the podcast. So let's start with mirroring first. What is it? Well, mirroring is just repeating the last three words of what somebody's just said. Now, our bank robber at the Chase Bank, I didn't know it at the time.

I learned it later. He exhibited all the attributes of a great CEO negotiator. So what is that? A great executive, a great business negotiator has a massive amount of power and influence. He's going to appear powerless at the table. I learned this much later when I was at Harvard. One of the guys says, yeah, that's blaming the people that aren't in the room. If you're a CEO, you got to say like, I got a board. My board is crazy. I don't know what they're going to do. I can't agree to this.

My board's going to fire me. What did this bank robber do? He said, I got to tell you, these other guys that went there are more dangerous than I am. I'm scared of them. I don't know what they're going to do. I'm talking to you. Oh, here comes one now. Let me hang up the phone.

He was blaming people who weren't there, and he was completely in charge. He was totally in control, which is he envisioned outsmarting us. I was the second hostage negotiator. The first guy on a phone, he literally said to that negotiator, I'm the calmest one here. And he was. So they put me on a phone a couple hours into this after five hours of stalemate, and I'm going to confront them, but gently. There's nothing wrong with confrontation. It's how you do it. You script it in advance.

You use the late night FM DJ voice. You know, not the accusatory voice where your voice says, you know, you're wrong. You're bad. You're evil. you're a jerk. Your inner voice is going to betray your outer voice. So have a soothing voice. It puts you in a position to tell people the truth. And the truth was, at this point in time, was we were sure that we had his car and we voice ID'd him.

He was concealing from us what his real name was because he figured he would get away. And giving us his real name was because he figured he would get away and giving us his real name would be a stupid idea you know giving up that closely held piece of information so i confront him over the van which catches him off guard i'm doing it with a late night fm dj voice and he starts babbling about how many vans he had and i he says, we have more than one van. That didn't make sense to me. So I mirrored. So you got more than one van?

He goes, yeah, well, when the police showed up, you chased my driver away. Now, I got no idea what this dude is talking about. None. Which is a great thing about mirror as a skill, just repeating the last couple words that somebody just said. Takes no real brain power, which is why it's a great skill when you're really caught off guard. And it gets the other people, the other person to say stuff they probably shouldn't say.

So I said, we chase your driver away? He says, yeah. And when he saw the police, he cut and run. Now, he just gave up his getaway driver with that statement that we had no clue about, none. He threw this guy under the bus while working really hard to avoid saying anything to compromise this position. And the next thing he knows, he's babbling, telling stuff that he should not tell us, which is a great skill about a mirror, repeating the last three words, not the body language

mirror, the tone of voice words, not the body language mirror, the tone of voice mirror. All that's nonsense. A hostage negotiator's mirror is just repeating the last couple of words. And the other side, it's shocking how it keeps them talking. And that's exactly what happened in this case. So let's talk about the second technique. What is labeling? And can you talk about the neuroscience here? Yeah, labeling is just, it's meant to be self-defining. Label the affect or the dynamic, not the words, but the affect or the dynamic that you hear. You sound angry, you sound upset, you sound frustrated.

And just, it's a verbal observation. And verbalizing your observation of the tone or dynamic, how you perceive them to feel, especially if it's negative and especially if it's against you. Now, the neuroscience is labeling negatives is the most effective way to get rid of them, not denying them. If you sense that the other side is frustrated with you, your gut's going to say, I don't want you to be frustrated. Wrong. Wrong way to do it. You need to say, you sound like you're frustrated. That two millimeter shift is the most effective way to dissipate the negative. Diffuse it.

Diffuse it or diffuse it, depending upon which version of that word you want to use. Nothing more effective than simply calling out the elephant in the room, calling out the negative dynamic in the room, especially if it's pointed at you. Not the stuff you have pointed at them, the stuff that's pointed at you. It's shocking. Again, maybe I like the word. It accelerates your progress instead of delaying. And the only way you come to learn it is to try it. It's magic. It's really, really effective.

So we've talked about mirroring and labeling. Let's talk about the delivery now. The right voice, the tone of your voice, and the three options here. Well, the delivery is principally hostage negotiators delivery. 90% of the time is a downward inflecting, something we call a late night FM DJ. Now your voice doesn't have to be low or deep voice to downward inflect. We get a lot of questions from women frequently. I don't sound like Morgan Freeman. How do I do late night FM DJ voice? You can do it. You tuck your chin when you talk. That automatically helps you downward inflect. It's a physical amplifier of trying to get the

late night FM DJ voice. Sandy Hine, who teaches our women's only stuff, women's power hour. She teaches our negotiation nine, but but she also does stuff especially for women in our programs, the Black Swan Group, BlackSwanLTD.com. And if you're a woman, Sandy really understands the nuances to help women get better. And she's the one who pointed the chin tucked out to me because I'd always done it. She said, for women, what do you do? And she'd tuck your chin. You'll downward inflect. Now that calms the other person down and makes you look and feel to the other side is more self-assured. The great news anchors have mastered it because they need you to believe in them. So the downward inflection is really great at telegraphing, promoting, displaying confidence without being arrogant.

People have faith in you and calm down at the same time. Kind of a double benefit of using. When we think about our future, we're in the workforce or in our personal lives, there are times where we all experience extreme pressure. You're a new employee. You spent three weeks preparing a presentation. Senior executives are there you've never met before. It's going to make a big influence on your career at that company. You may kill it. You may bomb it. Or you've never met before. It's going to make a big

influence on your career at that company. You may kill it, you may bomb it. Or you're an ER doctor and someone comes in with a gunshot wound, a heart attack, COVID, something else. You may be the best ER doctor in the planet, but you know a fair number of your patients are going to die. Let's talk about the extreme pressure of being a hostage negotiator, which is different than being a doctor because these life-threatening situations are much less frequent. Even though you don't the extreme pressure of being a hostage negotiator, which is different than being a doctor because these life-threatening situations are much less frequent. Even though you don't experience them on a daily basis, what you do in the next minute or a few hours can determine if whether people live or die. You have a lot of experience, you're armed with all these techniques,

but is your heart pounding inside your chest when someone's life is on the line and a bad guy has a gun pointed at someone's head or has explosives and is threatening to detonate a bomb? Well, it is if you haven't prepared. You don't rise to the occasion, you fall to your highest level of preparation. Suicide hotline time was great preparation. Then I understood preparation and the process. Then you lean into the process and also realize two things. There's never a guarantee of success. With the best process, it's the best chance of success. Like some stuff is just never going to work out.

So when you realize you've got the best chance of success, then you're beginning to have faith in a process and you relieve the pressure of having to be perfect because nothing is perfect. And the other thing when you got a good process is the straw that broke the camel's back never broke the camel's back by itself. There's never any one mistake that causes a catastrophe. It's an accumulation of straws. It's an accumulation of mistakes, which means when you've worked on a good process, you also have the latitude to make an occasional mistake because your process is stuck. So I had come to learn that by the time I got ready to get on the phone at Chase. I'd been working the process. I had my preparation.

I knew that the late night FM DJ voice, which I'd practiced in small stakes interactions, was probably going to carry the day. And it was going to give me all the latitude I needed to make mistakes. Because when I was on the phone with the bank robber, they did surrender to me personally. He agreed to meet me outside the bank. I can remember one point in time, he got mad at me. He was like, hey, look, don't try and school me. And I got latitude. This guy can get mad at me. That was a straw. But my accumulation of straws at that point in time wasn't an issue. So I didn't get rattled by making a single mistake. And throughout the duration of that, the negotiator that followed me on the phone, Dominic Messino, Dominic was a star. The bank robber almost went ballistic on him several hours later into the siege because they were trying to put a mic in a bank.

And I tried to saw through the wall and the spot that they picked on the wall to cut through was right next to where this guy was standing and he starts screaming at dominic over the phone and that's probably multiple strokes but dominic was a calm guy and he didn't get rattled and he knew that as long as he as long as he didn't get rattled situation probably wasn't going to get out of control. So as a hostage negotiator, what you really learn is you got latitude if you got a good process and there's no guarantee of success.

Let's talk about success rate in baseball. You bat 300, you're in the Hall of Fame. Clearly in the FBI hostage negotiation, if you're batting 300, you're not doing very well and you're probably three and done at that point. No one bats the thousand,

like you said, but what is the success rate? And have you had people die on your watch? And let's also transition into the Jill Carroll case. And can you tell us about that case? Yeah, well,

success rate's about 93%, which means 7% of the time it's going to go bad. And whether it's domestic or whether international kidnapping, it was my gut instinct that any hostage negotiator, once they were kidnapping is that we're climbing north of double digits. Something was getting ready to go bad. I mean, just the nature of things. And then my real test was, if you hit the iceberg, if you were the Titanic and the whole thing sunk, how'd you bounce back? And I look for the negotiators that bounce back after somebody getting killed. And I would specifically recruit them and tell them that I was recruiting them because they were in a siege where somebody died and they didn't quit. They hung in there instead of giving up. Those were the people that

I was after. So yeah, it is going to go bad. And I had the first time that somebody ever got killed on a case that I had my hands in directly was a Burnham-Sargaro case in the Philippines. My second time through the Philippines, I talk about it in the book, Never Split the Difference. And when that train wreck was finally over and two out of three of the Americans were dead, we reviewed everything we did and we decided that we did everything we could. And I'm like, all right, so then that means we have to learn. Quote the great Irish philosopher Colin McGregor, right? I win or I learn. And so, yeah, you shouldn't be humiliated by losing. You should

be humiliated if you don't learn from it. The only real sin is to not learn. But I said, we got to learn. We got to get better. And if we did everything we know how to do, that means that we don't know enough and we got to go outside. That's when I went to Harvard, started to collaborate with them. But you win or you learn learn and you're not going to be perfect. So when that instance comes along where you get kicked right in the teeth, you could curl up and die or you could curl up

but then decide to get up. And the people that decide to get up are the people that I like to be around. So the Jill Carroll case comes around. You have Al-Qaeda, three people standing over her with what looks like AK-47s, one behind her. point in time. And so what do we do? We tell the truth. They tried to pretend like they were negotiating and we called them out globally. Two things. It didn't look like a good faith negotiation. They want to convince the world they negotiated, which then was further justification for killing

a hostage because we didn't negotiate good faith. And we said, you guys aren't negotiating. Not only that, the thing that I think that really got them was we called them out for breaking their own rules. And the rules that they broke when they displayed her was they displayed her with her hair uncovered. Now they had complete control of how she was depicted in that video. So they chose not to cover her hair, which means they chose to be disrespectful to a woman. And that's exactly what we pointed out, not accusatory way, but officially and unofficially

through a lot of third party intermediaries. We said, you guys disrespected her. You allowed her, you caused her to be videotaped and displayed to the world with her hair uncovered. And then it was dead silence from the other side. We didn't call them out on our rules. We called them out on their rules. I got a colleague of mine who used to like to say, I can live by your rules, can you? So we called them out on their rules.

Dead silence from the other side, trying to decide what to do. We put her father in the media. Carefully orchestrated statements. Next time they put her on video, there are no executioners standing around her. She's in there by herself and her hair is covered. The secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is to give the other side the illusion of control. We told them they were in control.

Because they were, they screwed it up. And ultimately, one of the very few kidnappings that I, no ransom to my knowledge, was paid or even implied. About 88 days after they snatched her off the street, she suddenly appeared back on the street in pretty much the same location she was kidnapped from. Amazing story. Let's talk about the value of saying no. This one, counterintuitive to most people. Last week, I had lunch with one of my

best friends. He's the founder of $2 billion companies. He runs a very successful venture capital firm. He's one of the nicest guys that you'll meet in your life. So we're sitting there at lunch, talking about how hard we work, including very late nights after we have dinner with our families and put our kids to bed. He shows me his calendar that day. There's 10 back-to-back Zoom meetings. There's five in the morning and five in the afternoon. The only break is our lunch. And I show him my calendar. He says, does yours look like that? And I only had eight. I'm not quite at 10. We're talking because he's such a nice guy and people always want meetings for him. These aren't random people, by the way. These are people or referrals from friends or business

people. And he says to me, I have to start saying no to people. I don't want to piss anybody off, but I just can't be doing this anymore. And I'm sitting there and I nod my head and say, I have the same problem. It's really hard. So here's the question. Do we need to take meetings when somebody says, do you have a few minutes to talk? Never. No. First of all, if somebody wants to talk in terms of meetings or they got a proposition, they can probably put it in an email. Like even now, take a meeting with an agenda. Know why you're taking the meeting. Know why you're trying to get stuff done. A lot of people say, let's talk. And my response is, what do you want to talk about? Well, we got an opportunity. I'm like, all right, so lay the opportunity out. Let me get an assessment of

whether or not you know what you're talking about. They don't like it, by the way. They don't like it when you send an email like that i can can tell you now they think it's insulting cool i got no problem with that uh because we got an access that we work off of now which is we don't do business with people that are and this is a joe polish genius network phrase half hard annoying lame and frustrating because execution is bad. Implementation is bad. This is just going to go down bad. Now, it doesn't mean they're bad people. It just means they're a bad pick for us. So if I ask you to lay your stuff out in an email and you get mad, we're bad fit. I don't need to go any farther. Now, you might not want to lay it out in an email because you don't have a clear picture of what you're doing, which also means you're a bad fit.

Or you might just have a great idea and not realize it, but you want me to do all the work, which is why you don't want to put it into an email, which also means we're a bad fit. If you have a game plan, which is more important than an idea. Lay the game plan out. And if it looks like something we can execute, then we'll continue. If it doesn't, I could say no right away and you can move on to somebody who's a better fit. So if I want you to lay something out in an email and you don't want to lay it out in an email, you get offended. That ain't my problem.

It's your problem. This is a bad fit and we are not into bad fit these days. So if we take a meeting, and every now and then I break this rule, and I always get punished for it, and it ends up being a waste of my time, everybody's most precious commodity is time. So protect your time, and it will accelerate your success. Let's talk about success. That's one of the goals of my podcast, inspire, motivate people on their path to greatness and excellence. What are the three most important ingredients of success on that path to excellence? I think the biggest one is really just focus on getting a little bit better every day. You'd be surprised at how quickly you get, how far you get quickly

by getting a tiny little bit every day. Plus, the other fringe benefit, if you have a day you didn't get better, you don't feel this great sense of loss. Like, oh my God, I'm never going to recover that. Feeling of loss probably impacts us more than anything else. So focusing on getting just a little bit better each day. Also, success. You want to go fast, go alone. You want to go far, go as a team. Be a better team player versus a team leader. That's been a real struggle for me because I always led. Diva, you guys support me. Flipping around, how do you support the other team? How do you start putting the team in front of yourself? That also seems counterintuitive. Again, you'll be surprised at how far you get in six months.

If you go as a team, you want to go far, go as a team. And then third is probably hear people out. I mean, people are dying to have their say. You'll also accelerate all your relationships and all your outcomes by hearing people out rather than given direction, which is you want them to listen to you. So hear people out to really strengthen your relationship, strengthen your team, learn and work better, more cohesively. My motto is anything is possible. I give talks about this at colleges and business schools. And it's one of the goals of this podcast to motivate people to believe in themselves,

to achieve excellence in their life, in all facets of their life. Tell us about Black Swans and let's go back to the 16th century in Australia. Yeah, well, you know, the name of the company, the Black Swan Group, our negotiation approach, the Black Swan Method. So Black Swan, again, Talib's book from 2007, The Impact of the Highly Improbable. And where did that really come from? In the 16th century Europe, people thought that there were only white swans. There could never

be a black swan. And then lo and behold, black swans were discovered in Australia. What are the tiny little things that'll massively change everything? Can you look for them? Should you look for them? That's the whole point. And what do you do? What are the tiny little things that you could do that will massively change the outcome? One of those things is instead of denying negatives, labeling. The other side thinks you're being disrespectful and you want to say, I don't want it to seem like I'm disrespectful. Tiny little shift that'll make all the difference in the world. I'm sure I seem

disrespectful. Calling it out versus denying it. That's what really the idea of black swans are. And they're everywhere. There's always little things that don't take a lot of effort to do that will make a massive amount of difference. Before we finish today, I want to play a game that I do in all my podcasts where I ask you a few questions, I start the sentence, and you finish it. Ready to play? Do I get a prize here? What's the prize? It sounds like I should get a prize. Jeez. I'm going to send you a copy of my coffee table beach drone photography book called Bliss, which since it was released on Amazon in June, it's been the number one bestseller in four different photography categories. I'm going to be sending-

Congratulations. Thank you. I'll be sending you the book. I would dig that. Okay. Copyright behind me right there. Yes, that's very cool. Thank you. When I started my career, I wish I had known- To be just a little nicer. That doesn't mean be more of a pushover. Just take a couple of miles an hour off the fastball. Just be a little gentler in how you deliver

information. That's something I wish I had learned as well. That's something I've been working on in my career throughout the years. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is? Yeah, setbacks or setups. I mean, the best things that have come to me have come to me through really negative things. So, you know, don't get rattled over setbacks. It's taking you someplace better. Going forward, my professional goal is? Wow, just to get better.

Just to get better, to continue to learn. And then I'll see where that takes me. My biggest personal goal is? Pretty much the same thing. I mean, like I got some bucket list stuff that are personal accomplishments that I want to do almost, you know, I want to climb Everest. I want to hike the South pole. I want to swim the English channel. I mean, why not? And I'm going to try and do it at an advanced age to make it, make it a big deal. Anybody could do that if you're in your 30s. Let's talk about doing it 60 plus. I have a bucket list too.

I look at it every year. I've checked a few of them off my list, but I've got a long way to go. Hopefully I'll stay healthy and I'll be able to do them. My biggest regret is? I don't have a lot of regrets. I have very few, as a matter of fact. And they would be intensely personal in nature, and I'm not going to show them. If President Biden were standing in front of me, I would tell him.

You're doing a good job. The person in the world that I admire the most is. Wow, there are a lot of people that I admire. Probably Bono from YouTube. Bono's on my top three list of people to meet in the world. Done so much. Love the music. Humanitarian. He's on my top three. His humanitarian achievements are phenomenal. Incredible. I want to give a huge shout out to my great friend, the incredible Sarah Zapp. Two years ago, you were a guest speaker at a lunch at an incredible organization called Beyond Board.

His mission is to help women get into public and private company boards. We met there for the first time and she reconnected us for this podcast. So I'm grateful to Sarah. I want to finish, Chris, by thanking you and telling you that you made a huge difference to my life. You made a difference after that talk with Sarah. I went back and I said, I really need to recalibrate some of the things that I think and some of the ways that I do. You've no doubt made a difference in tens of thousands of people's lives. As I mentioned, I've been using your techniques since I heard you at the lunch. And they've been reinforced after reading your awesome book, listening to your masterclass,

which as I heard is one of the most popular, if not the most popular masterclass I'm reading, which is fantastic. So Chris, I'm very grateful to you. Thanks for being here and thanks for sharing your story today. Thanks. And I like to tell people how to follow up with me and my company. Please do. Just subscribe to the newsletter. I mean, the newsletter is free. That doesn't matter. The fact is actionable is concise. It's usable. I mean, the newsletter is free. That doesn't matter. The fact is actionable is concise. It's usable. I mean, it's not so much to digest that you can't use it. Subscribe to the newsletter. Go to our website, blackswanltd.com, B-L-A-C-K-S-W-A-N-L-T-D.com. Upper right-hand corner, click on the tab for the blog, sign up. It's delivered to your email inbox every Tuesday

morning, concise, perfect time for you to integrate some negotiation skills and get better that day. A lot of people get a long, long way with the book and the newsletter alone. It's also the gateway to our website, which has tons of free stuff on it. The Black Swan Method will help you get a long way. So let us help you as much as we possibly can. And for those who don't know, what kind of companies or people should come to you and how do they just contact you through the website? These are people who want to improve their negotiating skills and really some of their people skills. Yeah.

If you're curious and you're ambitious and you're willing to put in some work, we cater to what we refer to as the top 1%. And anybody can be in the 1%. It doesn't matter what you do for a living. It does not matter. If you're curious, you're ambitious, you want to get better, you think that you can make your life better and that you like investing in you. Those are the people that we help the most. There's no greater investment in the world

than you can make in yourself. Right. Amen. Amen. You've been awesome. Again, Chris, thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you again at one of your talks. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Thank you.