Okay, hello everyone and welcome. It is great to have you with us and to welcome my friend and one of the foremost authorities on the art of negotiations, and I can be biased here. Bill Ury, I guess 35 years ago, along with the late, great Roger Fisher, gave birth to the Getting to Yes movement. And it has not, I think it’s picked up more momentum since.You have, Bill has gone on to co-found Harvard’s program on negotiations. It’s well documented.

He has written nine books with the latest perhaps being, in his eyes, the most critical, Getting to Yes with yourself. So it’s great to be with you again. It’s a real pleasure, Mo. This is as much of a learning experience for me as anybody else. So I’m like a little kid here. So am I. 

Well, listening to you and watching you work, you know, and I probably in 1994 is when I got my first copy of Getting to Yes. You make this thing of negotiations, which is so damn difficult, you make it look so easy. What makes you so good at it? Well, you know, I think what I do is, everyone has their own talents or whatever.

My particular talent is to try to simplify things and to really, really get to their essence. And, you know, negotiations are a very complicated process. There’s a lot of moving parts. And what Roger Fisher and I tried to do in Getting to Yes was to get to the essence of how can we negotiate in a way that meets our interests, gets us what we most need, and at the same time addresses the other side’s interests. 

And it was at a time when we wrote that book at a time when kind of the bestsellers on the list were books that went by the titles of Looking Out for Number One or Winning by Intimidation. Yeah, winning, period. So we were looking for, you know, what’s a set of dance steps, simple dance steps that you can go through, be it with your spouse or your partner or be it with your business colleague or your boss or your customer or your supplier or in the larger world.

What are a set of dance steps that you can go through that can take you through a difficult negotiation, a difficult issue, but in a way that actually is optimal and efficient and is satisfying ultimately for both sides?

Well, and that’s I think the key is satisfying for both sides. But if there’s ever been any truth to the 10,000 hour rule, you exemplify it. So I’m curious, every day your negotiations are very high stake. What are the most important rituals or heuristics that kind of guide your effort? I know we’ll get into them when we talk about the new book, but just in general.

Well, it’s true. You know, I’ve had my 10,000 hours. And I guess what I’ve tried to work on, Mo, is starting for the realization that basically we human beings, starting with myself, we’re reaction machines. We tend to react. You know, as the old saying goes, when angry, you will make the best speech you’ll ever regret. And so I go into very high stakes situations where emotions are often very high, and where, you know, there’s a lot of animosity and enmity.

And so what I found the key, the foundation to successful negotiation that I’ve tried to train myself in, and that I try to help others do, is I like to use a simple metaphor of going to the balcony. It’s almost like you’re negotiating on a stage, and part of your mind goes to a mental or an emotional balcony overlooking that stage, which is, the balcony is a place of perspective. It’s a place of clarity and calm. It’s a place of self-control. It’s a place where instead of reacting, you can act proactively in pursuit of your own, of what is it really important to you, because it’s a place where you can keep your eyes on the prize.

And so what I’ve tried to train myself in high stakes situations, whether it’s dealing with President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, or now working in Colombia or in the Middle East, where I’ve just gotten back from, is the ability to keep on going to that balcony and keep our eyes on the prize, because that’s what I find in negotiation is so often when there’s so much going on, we can get engaged in point scoring, that we lose sight of what’s most important to us. But you go to the balcony.

What about the other party that you’re negotiating with that doesn’t go to the balcony, right? So I mean, that’s got to present some conflict. Yeah, it does. But what I find, that if I can go to the balcony first, there’s a chance that I can help them go to the … Can I give you an example? Please do.

So a number of years ago, I’d been asked by President Carter to go to the country of Venezuela. At that time, there were like a million people on the streets of Caracas demanding the immediate resignation of President Hugo Chavez. And there were a million people on the streets supporting him, and there was some violence, and there was real fear in the country and fear internationally that this could tip into widespread civil violence, even possibly a civil war.

Anyway, I had a number of meetings with President Chavez, but I remember just one of them in particular was at 9 o’clock at night in his presidential office. I was there with my colleague Francisco Diaz, and we waited patiently, and 10 o’clock went by, 11 o’clock, finally it’s midnight,we’re ushered in to see the president, whom we expect to find alone. Instead, he’s got his entire cabinet arrayed behind him.

And so he pulls up a chair, he says, so Bill, have a seat. Tell me, what’s your impression? How are we doing here in Venezuela? And I said, well, Mr. President, I’ve been talking to some of your government ministers here, and I’ve been talking to the opposition. It seems to me there’s some progress. I was trying to give a positive frame, and when he heard that word progress, he got triggered.

He said, what do you mean progress? Are you crazy? Are you naive? Are you foolish? You’re not seeing the dirty tricks those traitors on the other side are up to? And he proceeded to lean very close into my face and yell at me for approximately 30 minutes. And so there you go. If you put yourself in my shoes, I’m saying, well, I’m not foolish. I’m not naive. I want to respond and react and so on and get defensive.

But then I remembered a friend of mine had once said to me, Bill, if you’re ever in a tough situation, he said, pinch the palm of your hand. Yeah, you told me that before. Did I tell you that one? No, just the palm of your hand. So I’ve got some scars to show for it, but go ahead. So whatever reason I remembered that, that was my way of going to the balcony and just saying, wait a minute, is it really in my interest to get into an argument with the president of Venezuela? 

And I said, no. So I just kind of, you know, I was able to kind of go to the balcony, just watch my own natural thoughts and feelings, but, you know, in a detached way. And then so then I was then able to listen to him and listen to the president of Venezuela. And I, you know, just by listening to him for 30 minutes now, he was a guy who could go on for eight hours easily, give an eight hour speech, but without any fuel for the fire, not no reaction from me, just kind of positive kind of listening to him.

Now, he began to kind of run out of steam. And after about 30 minutes, I saw his shoulders kind of go down a little bit. And in a kind of weary tone of voice, he said to me, so Bill, what should I do now? That is the sound of a human mind opening. You know, that is when, that is, before that, he was nowhere near the balcony.

But at that point, you know, he was, okay, by listening to him, he was more now willing to listen to me. And so I said, you know, Mr. President, I think the entire country of Venezuela needs to go to the balcony. I mean, you know, it is almost December, last Christmas, all the festivities were canceled because of the conflict. Why not give everyone a truce? Why not just declare a truce? Give everyone a few weeks to enjoy the holidays with their families. We will come back in January, and maybe everybody will be in a better mood to listen.

He said, you know, that is a great idea. I am going to actually propose that in my next speech. His mood had completely shifted. How? Because I had been able to go to the balcony. I had been able to listen to him. If we can take that self-leadership, if we can take that leadership first, we can break that cycle. He was now ready to listen to me. In fact, his mood so shifted, he said to me, and you know, over Christmas, I would like you to come travel with me and see the country, he said.

But then he thought for a moment, he said, well, wait a minute, you are neutral, maybe it would not be right for you to be seen in my company all the time. But he said, no problem, I will give you a disguise. So did you do that? No, I had other plans with my family. That was another negotiation, more important.

But in that, I am just giving that as an example that sometimes the greatest power we have is the power not to react, the power to go to the balcony instead and keep our eyes on what is most important. And that takes unbelievable discipline. It does.

And in today’s day and age, it is even harder because, you know, we have got the cell phone going off and the texts and the tweets and all this stuff going on. There is so much distraction that it is harder and harder to kind of pull back. But that, you know, you can pull back. It just takes a few seconds.

We are not talking about a lot of time. In just a few seconds, you can kind of like pause, take a breath. Everyone has their favorite technique for going to the balcony, you know, but it might just be, you know, just count to 10 or pause or just say, hey, let me call you back in a minute and, you know, get a cup of coffee.

You just take, you know, 30 seconds and just calm down for a moment. Let your physiology calm down. Ask yourself, what is most important here? This is the client. This is a long-term relationship. This is my spouse. These are my kids or whatever it is. And you can get yourself going in a more positive direction. And to me, this is the age when all of us need to learn, whether as parents, as business people, as a society, we need to learn this essential skill, this foundational skill of being able to go to the balcony.

So, Bill, when you meet with somebody like that for the first time, and he is in the middle, obviously, of an incredibly challenging ordeal, what are you asking him? What is the goal of that first meeting with you? Well, that was not my first meeting, but I’ll tell you, that’s exactly when I had the first meeting with him. You know, I had a first meeting with him and I was thinking, it might be 10 minutes. I mean, how does he want to talk to me?

I’m a Yankee. You know, he doesn’t like Yankees. I’m a, you know, I’m a, you know, academic, you know, so I was, you know, I was thinking, I first went to, okay, what do I want to say to him? Because here he is, he has a chance to prevent a civil war. So, I was thinking, what’s the most intelligent advice I could give him?

And then, when I was going for a walk beforehand, which is another way, my favorite way of going to the balcony is often go for a walk in nature and I kind of get clarity there. You know, I suddenly thought to myself, you know what? That’s the exact wrong approach. If I go in and try to give him advice, he’s going to resist it.

Why not just take a risk and go in and don’t try to give him any advice. Just listen to him. Just listen to him. Be present. Look for the present opportunity in the conversation. You know, have in mind that what I’m trying to do is, you know, try to look for an opportunity to steer the situation in a more peaceful direction. And so, I thought, okay, that’s crazy. You know, you only have 10 minutes. You know, you may lose your chance. You may not have another chance to talk to him.

You know, you have that voice going on. But I decided, no, I’m going to listen to, you know, the deeper voice there. So, I went in there with him in that first meeting and I just listened to him. You know, we talked a little bit. You know, I’d done my research on him. We had daughters the same age and gave him President Carter’s regards. And then, he started talking to me about how he’d gotten into politics because he’d started off in the military. And there was a long line of people waiting for him outside. But he basically took an hour to talk to me about his life story. And then, at the end of that hour, he turned to me and said, so, what do you think I should do?

So, in other words, I took the risk of not giving him advice, but I waited for him to ask me to see if there’s an opening. And then, I said to him, you know, you have an incredible opportunity here, which is to prevent a civil war. Why don’t you open up a dialogue with the opposition? And then, he got triggered. He said, what do you mean? These guys are traitors. They tried to overthrow me in a coup d’etat right here in this room.

And so, you know,that was clearly off course. And then, I thought, okay, just go with the flow here. I said, so, so you don’t trust them, right? He said, absolutely right. I don’t trust them. I said, okay, I understand. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t trust them either. What if we do this? What if without meeting with them, you, we construct a list of like three or four things that they could do tomorrow morning, signals that they could, any actions you think they could take tomorrow morning that would send you a signal that they were ready, you know, they turned the page and were ready to try a different approach.

And then, maybe I would ask them the same thing. And he said, signals, you mean, construct kind of some signals of how do you rebuild trust where there’s no trust? And he liked that idea. So, he turned to his right-hand man who was the Minister of Interior and said, you work with him and come back and report to me tomorrow.

So, two and a half hours had gone by. So, all because I hadn’t tried to just, you know, step in there, show how smart I was, give him my ideas and so on. But take a step back, listen to him, look for where the opportunity is, be in the moment. And then, you know, we came up with an approach that actually started to move the situation, you know, to diffuse the crisis a little bit. Well, we’re going to have links with this conversation to the talk you gave here in San Diego last year, because that was a whole premise of it. And you took 17 or 18 minutes to talk about not only listening, but how you listen.

Not a lot of people get into that. So, I really appreciate you sharing that. But is that kind of your approach in approaching something for the first time? You just go in with an open mind. I’m here to just listen. And from there, pick it up? Yeah. I would have, I mean, obviously, I do a lot of preparation. I try to think through, you know, I try to understand the interests of both all the sides.

In the case of President Chavez, I read extensively about him and get read his speeches, tried to understand his psychology and everything. But in the end, you got to put that all aside and go in there and your opportunity is right there in the moment. If I go in with just, I’m going to go in like, you know, I’ve got my whole script prepared. In the end, it’s like, how do I make a connection with this human being who probably doesn’t trust me? How do I build some kind of rapport with him? And I’ve got to do that in the moment.

And Bill, what are you listening for? So, when you’re sitting there with somebody like that or a heated conversation, what are you actually listening for? Well, I’m listening for what does this person really most want? What do they really need? Where are they coming from? What are their deepest values? 

You know, and listening, for example, to Chavez, for example, you know, he really, you know, underneath all his complications and complexity and everything like that, you know, he kind of, he saw himself almost as a kind of the reincarnation of Simon Bolivar, who was the kind of the George Washington of Latin America. He wanted to somehow unite thatcontinent and he wanted to, you know, he might have gone about it all kinds of wrong ways, but that was his dream.

So, I was trying to connect into what his dream was, to then use that motivation to see if we could deescalate the situation, which was getting, which was veering towards civil war. So, here’s something that I learned from you over the years, and obviously it’s culminated in this most recent book, but when I hear you speak, when I hear you kind of talk about examples like you’ve just shared, one of the things that really connected with me is that it seems like the best negotiators have a really good sense of who they are. They’ve got a very stable sense of self-worth.

So, it’s really not about me always winning or somebody always losing it. It seems like they’re very content, they’ve mastered their essence of self-worth. Is that true or am I off guard? That’s true for me and that’s true for the, you know, I’ve had a chance to see and talk with some of the best negotiators in the world, you know, whether it’s in politics or business or sports or whatever, and the thing they most value is, you know, we think of negotiation as some kind of being trickery, you know, it’s kind of like a little manipulation here and there, but actually, interestingly, the thing I find the best negotiators value most is their sense of self and their integrity and their reputation for, believe it or not, for honesty and fair dealing.

Why is that? Because even though, sure, in any one particular deal, you could probably gain a temporary advantage by,you know, lying or manipulation, you know, negotiators know that we’re going to, you’re going to have a thousand, you’re going to have 10,000, you’re going to have 100,000 negotiations in your life every single day.

And if you have that reputation, if you have that anchor that you’re talking about, then people are going to be more willing to trust you, they’re going to be more willing to tell you what they really want, and you’re going to be more likely to reach an agreement that actually satisfies your interests and satisfies theirs.

You’ll be much more likely to reach a creative solution, not just a split the difference compromise, not just kind of shaving a cent off here and a cent there, but a genuine solve the problem, because that’s what negotiation at its best is, it’s kind of joint problem solving. So your big epiphany most recently is to discover that what we’ve been missing, as you said, is that we’ve been negotiating with one arm tied behind our back because we haven’t mastered the art of convincing ourselves, getting to yes with ourselves.

Why is that so hard? It’s true. Well, you know, when I started, when Roger Fischer and I wrote that book, Getting to Yes, perhaps the most frequent question I got for the ensuing 10 years was, how do you deal with difficult people, people who don’t want to get to yes? You know, so I wrote a book about how to do that. And I kind of dealt with very difficult situations, whether it was coal mine strikes or family feuds or boardroom battles or wars.

But, you know, over the years, it gradually dawned on me that actually perhaps the most difficult person we have to deal with, the biggest obstacle to us getting what we really want in life is not the person on the other side of the table. It’s the person on this side of the table. It’s right here. It’s ourselves. It’s our own human tendency to react, to act without thinking. 

And so that’s the genesis of my latest book, which is about if what I’ve learned is that if we can get to yes with ourselves, if we can resolve our own inner conflicts, then we’re going to be much happier, first of all, but then we’re much better at getting to yes with others. It’s almost as if we’ve been negotiating, I realize, I’ve been negotiating all my life with, you know, one hand, arm tied behind my back, because I’ve just been focused on influencing the other.

But actually, if I can influence myself first, then I’m much better to influence the other. If I can marry the inner and the outer, that’s when I’m most effective. And nowadays, when, you know, conflicts are more complicated, there’s more, you know, there’s more negotiation, you know, we need to get to yes more than ever before. We need all the tools we can get. And that’s why I’ve written the latest book about getting to yes with yourself and other worthy opponents. And I want to get to, I want to just go quickly through the principles.

But before we do that really quickly, what’s the, what is it that holds us from getting to yes with ourselves? I mean, is it just the whole notion of us kind of wanting to be accepted? Is it an insecurity piece? Is it me? What is the essence of the difficulty of this? Well, I think what it is, is, is that we are often, you know, I think it was Teddy Roosevelt, who once said, you know, if you could kick, give a kick in the pants of the person who’s most responsible for your troubles, you wouldn’t sit down.

And, but that’s the thing is that is what happens is we are quick to react, you know, as Ambrose Pierce once said, when angry, you will make the best speech you ever regret. Either we, we react out of anger, which is very common in conflicts, because we’re frustrated,we’re irritated, we’re, you know, with the other side, or we react out of fear, you know, I can’t lose that customer, I can’t, you know, whatever it is, and so we give in. Or, you know, or we avoid, you know, we simply, a lot of us just avoid conflict, we don’t want to deal with it.

And, and, and so we don’t, we don’t actually engage. And so to me, there’s, you know, there’s, you know, there’s also a kind of a voice is in the back of our heads, you know, the inner critic, the inner judge, it’s always saying, you did that wrong, and that’s not going to work, whatever, you know, psychologists tell us that we may have, like, as many as 60,000 thoughts in the course of the day. The great majority of which maybe 80% of which are negative, you know, it’s that voice. And that never stops, right?

That undermines us all the time. You know, there’s a, there’s another saying that if you, if you talked to your friends, the way you talk to yourself, you wouldn’t have any. And so the ability to take a step back and become your own best ally, instead of judging yourself, just observe, accept yourself, you know, you’re going to be much more effective in getting what you want, but you’re going to be much more effective in dealing with others as well. 

Now, you know, you’ve been doing that unconsciously, you know, in the past 30 years, or, because obviously, you’re pretty darn successful at what you do. And I assume that that kind of that whole inner, inner conflict with yourself, you had to deal with but you dealt with it. Right? Yeah, I think it’s things that I learned slowly over time. And, you know, about seven years ago, I sat down and I realized, you know, just, I’m trying to understand myself, I wanted to understand what were the principles of getting yes with myself? Were they the same principles?

And which were often the very same principles in getting to yes, but turned inward rather than outward. And but yeah, it is something that I’ve learned slowly over time. You know, oftentimes, the most difficult ones, of course, are, you know, we may be effective, for example, I might be effective in, you know, at work and professional, but then you come back home, right? And you find that, okay, you’re the experts outside, but you come inside and definitely like the expert there, right? Absolutely. So that then I, okay, it’s humbling. 

And it’s in a good way, because you realize that, okay, I still have work to do, you know, where I’m always learning. So let me go through the next five principles. We’ve touched on the first one, we go through two to three, six, and just ask you to briefly demonstrate. So everyone knows. So principle two is develop your inner BATNA, which is best alternative to a negotiated agreement, which is another acronym that you coined. Right.

So in the, you know, the first thing is to put yourself in your shoes, understand your own interests, understand what you really want, go to the balcony, all of that. Now, how do you satisfy those interests? In negotiation, where’s the source of power? And Roger Fish and I coined this term BATNA, which is just an acronym, meaning best alternative to a negotiated agreement. It’s your walkaway alternative. 

If you can’t, you know, get one job, you’re not going to get in one job interview, you know, what’s your alternative, you might have another job lined up as another job interview lined up. If you can’t reach agreement with one customer, you may have another customer. Knowing your BATNA turns out to give you kind of a sense of confidence, a sense of, okay, I’ve got an alternative. It levels the playing field.

Now, what I’ve found is that actually in teaching people this over many years is a lot of us still find it very difficult as a matter, just to think through our BATNA. Absolutely. We don’t go there. We just, because we’re just focused on, I got to get this agreement. You know, we’re not thinking about what’s going to happen if we don’t reach agreement. You know, your BATNA is your best course of action for satisfying your interests if you don’t reach agreement. So, what I come to mind is what’s in the way. It’s here.

It’s that there’s an inner BATNA, which is that our ability to basically, once we know our interests, to be able to basically make a commitment to ourselves that no matter what happens with the other side, we’re going to take care of ourselves. We’re going to take care of our interests.

If we can develop that inner BATNA, that inner self-confidence by giving ourselves that reassurance, then, and a lot of it is by taking responsibility, essentially taking responsibility for meeting our own needs rather than saying, you know, it’s our spouse who has to meet our needs. It’s the customer who has to meet our needs. It’s the boss who has to meet our needs. 

If we take responsibility for meeting our own needs, then paradoxically, it’s going to be a lot easier to negotiate with the other side. And it is. It is. And I’ll give you an example. I had a, about a year and a half ago, I was, got a call from a friend who said, can you help my father? You know, he’s one of, he was one of Brazil’s leading businessmen. He’s enmeshed in a terrible legal battle with his business partner who’s in France. And, you know, they’ve been going at it and two and a half years, lawsuits, arbitrations.

I mean, dozens of lawyers, it’s all over the newspapers. Can you help him? And I said, well, I don’t know if I can help him, but at least, you know, next time I’m in Brazil, I’d be happy to meet with him. So when I was in Brazil, I met with him and his family. His name was Abelio. And, and so I asked him, you know, Abelio, you’re a very, you know, very successful business guy.

What do you really want here? What do you really want? And he said, well, I, he knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted, you know, the stock at a certain price. He wanted the elimination of the non-compete clause for three years. There were about six or seven things. But as I listened to him, you know, those are positions in my language, you know, but Abelio, what do you really want? I mean, you’re a man who seems to have everything. I mean, you’ve got everything you possibly want.

What do you really want behind those things? What are those things going to actually give you? He thought about it for a minute. He finally said, freedom. That’s what I really want. I want my freedom. And so then I knew, okay, that’s the human being there. And so then I, then I asked him a follow-up question, which has to do with your inner Batman. I said, so Abelio, I got that. You really want your freedom. Who can really give you that freedom?

I mean, is it only your arch enemy, your former business partner who can give you your freedom? Or at least to some extent, are you able to give yourself your own freedoms, irrespective of whether we reach an agreement with him? That was the kind of light bulb went on. And he, and he, he then took very concrete steps to give himself that freedom. You know, I said, you know, what’s the freedom for you? Well, I want to spend time with my family.

I want to pursue other business deals. Well, he began to pursue other business deals. He began to spend more time with his family, went on a nice vacation. He got a separate office. He did, he became chairman of another company. Paradoxically, by exercising his inner Batman in that way, he, by being less dependent on theother side, it made it much easier than to reach an agreement with the other side. And we were able to reach an agreement when it came to meeting with the other side in four days.

I mean, we’ve gone on for two and a half years. In four days, from the first time I met with a representative of the other side, that was on a Monday, by Friday, both men were in a law office in Sao Paulo, signing an agreement, shaking hands, joint press statement, wishing each other well, making a joint speech to their, to the company’s executives. How did that shift? It shifted because Abilio was able to get to yes with himself, was able to put himself in his own shoes, develop his own inner Batman. But I want to ask you a tough question. Could he have done that without you? Because obviously he didn’t for the two and a half years that they’ve been battling, right? I mean, is it the perspective that you brought that opened up this different window for him, which is obviously the next principle of reframing your picture? 

Yeah, I would say I certainly, I think I played a key, helpful role there in helping him get to yes with himself. And the other party. And the other party, for sure, for sure, I did. But, and that’s the case. I mean, you know, not all of us are going to have like, you know, a negotiation advisor, consultant, and then we have to do the work ourselves. But it’s hard work. It’s hard work. It was hard work for him, because, you know, in a situation like that, he felt he’d felt sodisrespected. And, you know, he was kind of emotional guy.

And it was kind of like, you know, he’d been a boxer, you know, and so he wanted to go in and, you know, but he had to kind of step back, go to the balcony. But he had help from me, from his wife, from his daughter, from his even his therapist, you know, to kind of help him remember what was in his own best interests. 

And then once he’d done that, he later said to me, you know, it wasn’t just a split the difference compromise in the end, he said, he said to me, you know, I got everything I wanted. I got everything I wanted. The other guy was satisfied, too. That’s the amazing thing. He said, I got everything I wanted. But most important, I got my life back. And now he’s free and he’s going off doing his own things.

And so it’s like, it’s it just reminded me again of how much we trap ourselves, you know, we our own worst opponent. And with a little bit of help, maybe we can become our own best. How could he have reframed his own picture? Right? How could he have gone through this process with himself? Well, what he could have done is, as any of us can do anytime is to go to the balcony, put yourself in your own shoes, try and understand what you most want, right?

Strengthen your inner BATNA, in other words, give yourself that inner commitment. So, you know, we can do that work. You know, any of us can do that work. And then reframe, which is, you know, one of the greatest powers that we have as a negotiator is to is to reframe. That’s the way you can change the game. You can reframe it from an adversarial kind of win lose battle into, you know, a situation, an exercise in joint problem solving where both sides can benefit. 

You can expand the pie. So just fighting over fixed pie, you can expand the pie. And and so that ability to reframe and underneath that, of course, is, you know, a question that Albert Einstein once posed to everyone. He said, you know, the most important question most important question that any one of us can ask ourselves is, is the universe friendly? Now, why would Einstein ask that question? Because Einstein reasoned here he was, you know, the foremost scientist of his age.

This was right after World War Two and the advent of nuclear weapons. And he reasoned that if we answered that, you know, who knows what the universe is friendly, but we can choose. If we choose to see the universe as friendly, then then we’re more likely to treat the other side as if they’re a potential partner. If we choose to see the universe as unfriendly, then at least on a collective level, we’re going to arm ourselves to the teeth. We’re going to react to the first provocation. And with nuclear weapons, you know, we’re going to put an end to life on Earth.

So for him, that was the most important question. And I realized that that’s a choice that any of us can make, is that ability to take the situation, frame it the way we like, you know, we can either frame life as being essentially on our side, even in the midst of adversity. Or we can see life as our foe. And if we see life as our foe, we’re going to see everyone as our adversaries. And it’ll become a self confirming prophecy.And you have to approach almost every negotiations with that it is very friendly, it is an ally.

It is what I’ll give you an example from another conflict where I was working with civil war, trying to get a negotiation going on. And, and to do that, this colleague of mine who worked for the government had to had to rent a helicopter, fly in the middle of jungle, pick up the guerrilla commander and fly him out to a place where they could talk where they could negotiate. Well, he, he, he gets in the helicopter, you know, the Red Cross person gives the secret codes where the coordinates are, because, you know, the guerrillas, of course, are very afraid there’s gonna be a military attack.

He lands in the middle of the jungle. And then suddenly, slowly hundreds of AK-47 toting insurgents, guerrillas come out of the jungle, all aimed at the helicopter. So my friend, my friend, my friend there, you know, life would seem veryunfriendly at that point, right? To say the least. Right. He had the presence of mind to kind of go to the balcony for a moment, say, well, there’s no use me being in this helicopter.

So he opened the door of the helicopter, he got out, he strode up to the commander, and he said, Comandante, I am now placing you under the personal protection of the president. So he, that’s, that’s a reframe, you know, he just, you know, all these guns named after him, and he’s putting this guy under his personal, under the personal protection of the president. Well, the commander kind of blinked for a moment, and, and said, okay, and said goodbye to his comrades and got in the helicopter, and they flew away. And that’s how the negotiations began.

Now, I asked him, later, my friend, you know, how did you have the presence of mind to be able to do that? And he said, well, I just had this kind of underlying trust, you know, that, you know, things, you know, that life somehow, you know, this underlying faith. So to me, that ability to answer that question for ourselves, that life is on our side, which is our choice, then predisposes us, he predisposed him to then see the commander as his partner, not just as his enemy. And that allowed him to change the game, change the situation. Which is just, it’s brilliant. Really quickly, now, principle number four is staying in the zone. How do you personally stay in the zone? 

Well, the zone is really being on the balcony. I mean, it’s the zone is being in the present moment. It’s not, in negotiation, in conflict, there’s always the past, there’s, we get lost in resentment of the past, we get caught up in anxiety about the future. The only place where we can change the situation for the better is right now in this place of power, the present. And so for me, it’s about going to the balcony beforehand.

It’s about going to the balcony during, you know, just to keep focused on this particular moment, asking myself, what can I do right now to improve the situation, to turn the situation towards a constructive resolution? And it just requires that unrelenting focus, that discipline. Which adds principle number five, respect. Right, exactly. Well, you’ve got them all. What that does is it opens the way to break the cycle that you see in every conflict, which is they reject you, you reject them back.

They disrespect you, you disrespect them back, and then you’re off to the races. Someone has to break that cycle, and it could be you. And if you can give them respect, like I gave President Chavez when he was not respecting me by shouting at me, then I was able to change the situation. And, you know, that’s what people like Gandhi or King or Mandela, that’s what they were masters at. In fact, they were all masters. This is all the stuff they did, which is they were able to respect their adversaries, even when their adversaries didn’t respect them at first, and then they changed it.

Because then once you respect the other side, eventually the other side is much more likely to respect you, and then you’ve got a chance to change the situation. And then lastly, give and receive, which is in that order. Right, absolutely. Which is, again, a cycle, which is in a conflict we tend to come from scarcity, and we think, okay, I’ve got to take, take, take, take. But if I take and the other side takes, and then, you know, then we’re just in a battle. The ability to break that cycle and say, how can I help you?

You know, how can you help? You’re asking your boss for a raise. How can you help your boss solve their problem? How can you maybe get some more business, free up the budget? Then your boss is much more likely to help you. So if you give, you’re much more likely to receive. And then you end everything by saying, hey, if you do this, the three biggest wins are really the most important, right? You win within yourself, you win with the other party, and then everybody wins.

That’s a dream scenario, Bill. That’s it. It’s a dream scenario, but that’s a scenario we need to aim for, which is a win, you know, a win for ourselves that we really satisfy our interests, you know, that we get along with the other. You know, it’s not always in every situation. You know, it may just be that we do better than the alternative,and the alternative sometimes could be war, could be going to court, it could be losing the deal. But there’s something that’s better for us than that alternative. 

And ultimately, it’s something that’s a win for the family, for the workplace, for the world. And to me, that’s what we have to aim for. Well, our biggest win is having you on our program and listening to you with all the work that you do.

For the people out there who want to get a little deeper, best place to go, your website? Yeah, it’s, yeah, if you want to get deeper, there are a lot of tips and videos on my website. It’s williamyury.com.

And, you know, my book is available in bookstores on Amazon. Your nine books. My nine books, right? Nine books are available, and the first one is as relevant today as it’s ever been. Bill, thank you for your time. A real pleasure, Mo.