The Game with Alex Hormozi - Anger. Neutrality. Empathy. | Ep 208

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

You can't use your reason… it's just gonna escalate the situation. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about an instance wherein a vendor got extremely angry with him, how he dealt with the situation, and the advice his friend gave on how to combat these kinds of situations with empathy.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(2:21) - Anger is weakness. Neutrality is strength. Empathy is strongest.(3:19) - In business, empathy wins wars. Show genuine empathy, win.(4:14) - Goal: be empathetic to someone with strong emotions.(5:31) - Step into their shoes, understand their reasoning, remove filters.(6:32) - Offense is not about us. It's about them.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Anger is weakness. Neutrality is strength. Empathy is the strongest. Welcome to the Jim Secrets podcast where you talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer and how to keep them longer. And the many failures and lessons that we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. What's going on? Everyone, I have you guys are having a phenomenal Friday.

I wanted to make a little video for you, a podcast for you, about a conflict that I recently encountered. And it was something that was really interesting for me to go through, you know, in retrospect. And I wanted to give you kind of the result of the conversation I had with a friend of mine, an old friend of mine, who's a PhD in psychology. He spent two years or three years being the front line suicide hotline pickup person. And when I say this guy just says, like, skin thick as, you know, bulletproof, whatever something, you know, Kevlar, I mean it. And it's the kind of person that like if you were to point a gun at him, he would probably just like light a cigarette and be like, so what about this makes you feel powerful? And like, you know what I mean?

He's that kind of guy. He's G. So anyways, I was having this conversation and I had a longtime vendor call up enraged. I mean, belligerent with rage. And I had truly no idea what they were talking about. And they thought that we had stole some sort of IP from them and it was something that it was literally free on the internet that they were giving away. And so I was like, what is going on? Like I had no idea why they were calling.

We couldn't even get a word in edgewise. Like literally, like shouting at the top of their voice, just calling us like, I'm going to finish you. And you're like, wow. Okay. There's some things that you need to deal with. Now, what was interesting for me was to see how I looked back on how I handled that. So I called my friend up. And I was like, what do you say in these things?

situations like how do you deal with this and I figure this is just an extreme example of kind of how we encounter conflict in in a conversation with employees and sometimes even conversations with prospects right because sometimes like whenever you have this like feeling this pit in your stomach a lot of times it's just adrenaline right cortisol that's like kicking in and so he said something to me that was really simple and profound he's like if you have a gun pointed at you this is the frame he's like is that what was going on and I was like no he's like oh

It was like he was like laughing. He was like oh you know I pointed edge. He was like that's like the easy stuff right. It was just hilarious and so he's like there's three frames right he's like anger is weakness. He's like neutrality is strength. empathy is the strongest. And I was incredibly proud of myself because I tend to be an escalator. I'm not, I'm usually, like if someone gets in my face, like I usually escalate. And so I was actually super proud of myself for like not escalating this conversation and trying to maintain neutrality and ask questions like, what do you mean by that? I don't understand. Rather than being like, you know, well, I won't even say what I would have said back.

But it's okay. Point is that has been really helpful. for me having that conversation with him in thinking about how I deal with employees and how I deal with a prospect and it kind of reverts back to what we talked about in sales where I mean you've heard me say rapport wins wars number one you've probably also heard me say that I think one or two podcasts ago and this has been repeated in our community the person who cares the most about the buyer's interest wins the frame right which is another way of saying if you can

truly empathize empathize care about the other person understand where they are coming from. You have the strongest frame. You will always win. Hey guys, love that you're listening to the podcast. If you ever want to have the video version of this, which usually has more effects, more visuals, more graphs, you know, drawn out stuff.

Sometimes it can help hit the brain centers in different ways. You can check on my YouTube channel. It's absolutely free. Go check that out if that's what you are into. And if not, keep enjoying the show. Right. And so when I think about that in conflict, if I, like, and I'm trying to rewire my brain with this.

So maybe this will be useful for you, but I'm just sharing what I'm like actively working on in my own head is if someone comes at me and they're upset or I have somebody on the phone and they get angry or they seem offended. To instead, because my goal was to be neutral. Like my life goal in conflict was just to remain neutral. But he just like escalated the game for me. He was like, oh no, like empathy is the strongest frame. And I was like, God, I hadn't even thought about caring about what they thought. Like I'm trying to just not be angry. You know what I mean?

but it's just been like it's been really interesting for me to think about it from that perspective and you can probably think of times right now in your life where you were maybe angry or or lashback and maybe neutrality was like the only thing you could get to but you can imagine the strongest version of yourself when this person calls you belligerent with rage for no apparent reason can just think let me think why this person might be angry right and And let me put myself in their shoes with their experiences, their background, the things that they're projecting onto the situation. And let me put those glasses on so that I can approach this. Because the thing is, you can't use your own level of reason, especially when someone's being unreasonable.

You can't use your reason. It's just going to escalate the situation. So it's like you kind of have to step into their shoes and look through their distorted lens of the world to try and understand their reasoning. and then kind of step by step remove layers of filters to that lens to hopefully bring them back to reality. And this is just kind of like the summarized short version of the conversation that I had with my friend and the PhD, the doctor. Dr. T. West, if you're listening, I know you sometimes do. So that's my shout-up. And this guy's a G.

And so anyways, listening to how he resolves conflict. who are suicidal, people who want to jump off bridges. Like he did that literally, like 40 hours a week for two years. Like it was just talking people off bridges, talking people who are drunk, who have no, you know, like reasoning power. And I think if we can approach prospects like that and not be offended and think, no, this is, like, I think at the base level, we get offended because we make it about us. I think that's real. Like we get offended because we think it's about us. We think what they're saying is a reflection of us.

And that's just not reality. It's about them. And if we can kind of live in their little world, then we can ultimately win the frame by having the highest amount of care for them and care even more for them than they do. And so I think that that whole concept of caring more about the buyer really applies to everything, not just sales, but when you're talking to a vendor, when you're talking to your spouse, when you're talking to it, like, whoever it is, I think I think I'm taking sales ideology and applying it to the real world and it works.

But anyways, maybe that was useful for you. For me, it was incredibly enlightening, just remembering that anger is weakness. So whenever you express anger, you lose the frame automatically, right? Unless you have a gun, right? But you lose the frame. If you can just be neutral, you are much stronger than somebody who's angry. And if you can truly empathize with the person, then you always win the customer. conversation. And so I thought that was really powerful for me. I thought I would share it with you.

I hope you guys have a phenomenal Friday and you're closing sales and have an amazing day. I'll catch you guys soon. Bye.