Jeffrey Shaw:

Whether you’ve been in business for years or are just a startup trying to find success in the world as it is and what it will be in the future, we’re finding new ways of thinking you can apply to the rest of your life. Welcome to Creative Warriors. This is more than career goals. This is business with a soul. Now prepare to create, serve, and be prosperous with your host, Jeffrey Shaw.

Hey, Warriors. I am very excited to have William Ury with us today. Ask almost anyone what their greatest obstacle is, and they are likely to say themselves. What we can learn, and you will learn to do so in this episode, is to get to yes within yourself, to let go of the inner battle, look at your most worthy opponent in the eye, which is yourself, and negotiate a win-win deal. Warriors, the easiest way I know to get inspired when reading is not an option is with audible books.

They help you regain time and transform your commute, workout, or chores into fun, productive me time. Audible books are offering a free audio book. Try it, like it, and stay or cancel and keep your free audible book. Visit creativewarriorsunite.com forward slash audible for this special offer or click on the link in the show notes. So, hey, William, welcome.

It’s really great to have you here with us today.

William Ury:

It’s my great pleasure, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Shaw:

Thank you. Before we dive in, though, I want to let everyone know what makes you a creative warrior. William Ury is the co-founder of Harvard’s program on negotiation.

He’s one of the world’s best known and most influential experts on negotiation. He is the co-author of Getting to Yes, the best-selling negotiation book in the world, and has taught negotiation to tens of thousands of people around the world. He has served as a mediator in conflicts ranging from boardroom battles to labor strikes and from family feuds to civil wars. His newest book is Getting to Yes with Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents. So, William, before we dive into your book, here in Creative Warriors, we’re all about the handing down of wisdom.

So perhaps you can start us off by sharing with us a meaningful quote, perhaps the best advice you ever received, or even a favorite book, but something that you would offer to inspire us and let us know why.

William Ury:

Well, let’s see. It’s a good question. The first thing that came to my mind is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that I haven’t heard in years, which was, always do what you’re afraid to do. In other words, use fear as your greatest teacher.

If you’re afraid of something, it might be a clue that that’s the direction you need to go in, to engage as a warrior, to move into the situation rather than to flee from it.

Jeffrey Shaw:

I love that. Either on the show or in other coaching opportunities, I’ve brought up the point that I think maybe it’s as we get older or when we’re young, it seems like fear is an indicator of safety in a way. But as we get older, fear is, I think, more often an indication of exactly where we need to go. It’s exactly what we need to walk into to stretch further. So I love that quote.

I’m not familiar with it. So I’m curious. Here you are, you’re a serious negotiator in some of the most, truly the most dangerous situations in the world. And here you are offering suggestions on how to negotiate with one of our greatest opponents ourselves. So why was writing this book important to you?

William Ury:

You know, my great passion, Jeffrey, has always been, is how to help people get to yes. And I had the good fortune to co-author a book about that many, many years ago. And I would say that probably the most frequent question I got in the years after writing that book was, okay, I want to get to yes, but how do I get to yes with that difficult person? You know, that difficult partner, that difficult client, that difficult board member, that difficult enemy, basically. And how do you negotiate when other people don’t want to negotiate?

So about 10 years after the first book, I wrote another book called Getting Past No, which is how to negotiate with difficult people. But then over the years, what’s really struck me, maybe the most important lesson I’ve learned is that the biggest opponent that we ever have to deal with in negotiation, the most difficult person we ever have to deal with is not the person on the other side of the table, however difficult that person might be. It’s the person we look at in the mirror every morning. That’s the person. It’s our human, very natural tendency to react.

In other words, to act without thinking, to act oftentimes contrary to what we really want to achieve. As the old saying goes, when angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret. And that is more true than not. To me, that’s the key, is that if we can turn that internal opponent, the way in which we get in our own way, if we can turn that own internal opponent into an internal friend and ally, that’s what I mean by getting to yes with yourself. If we can get to yes with ourselves, we have a much better chance to get to yes with others.

Jeffrey Shaw:

As I mentioned in the intro, as a coach, I ask people, what are your greatest obstacles? Most people will identify that, yeah, I’m at my biggest obstacle. It’s interesting that we know this on some level, but is it that we haven’t been trained in a methodology to get to yes, or is it all just pure emotional baggage that prevents us from getting to the yes, do you think?

William Ury:

I think there are ways in which our own kind of natural kind of emotions in stressful situations like anger and fear and distress can get in our own way. But I do think that could we take the same tools that we use to negotiate external conflicts and apply them to the internal conflict?

Can we change our own inner game in order to change the outer game?

Jeffrey Shaw:

Is there a survival instinct, you think, here as to why there’s a certain amount of resistance?

William Ury:

For sure. No, it’s almost like we have two modalities in life. Survival, as you mentioned, which is the modality we get to when we’re under stress, when we’re under threat, which often happens in conflictual situations.

And then there’s another modality we might call a relational modality, which is where we’re more open, we’re more engaged, we’re listening, we’re trying to understand. The question is, how do we move out of that survival modality into the relational modality in order to be able to reach an agreement, settle a difficult dispute, reach an important agreement?

Jeffrey Shaw:

The goal here is, as you said, to kind of get to a yes within ourselves. There’s a certain agreement with ourselves we’re going for, but what’s the result of that and of your work that you most want for people?

William Ury:

I think what I want is for, first of all, that people get what they truly want. That’s basically it.

I mean, negotiation is a tool for getting what you truly want. Not what you think you want sometimes, but what you truly want. And if I, could I give you an example?

Jeffrey Shaw:

Yeah, please do. You can actually, I was saying, this is a part of the book that I actually really liked where you kind of, yeah, you help people identify what it is that they really want.

William Ury:

Yeah. I’ll give you an example. There was an entrepreneur that I mentioned in the book who I was working with who was involved in a huge dispute with his former business partner over the control over a very large company. And this dispute had been going on for two years, lawyers, arbitrators, you know, millions of dollars being spent on fighting each other. And it was disrupting the company, which had 150,000 employees.

It was creating a mess, a real mess for everyone. And when I sat down with him, I asked him, what do you want? I mean, what is it that you really want here? And like a good businessman, you know, he had all the answers. He said, okay, I want an end to the non-compete clause.

I want my stock back at a certain price. I want the company headquarters. He had like five, six things. Those were what he wanted. Those in negotiation are what we call your positions.

Those are the objective things that you want, like the price, the money, the concrete things. But then I said, but, you know, you’re a man who seems to have everything. You know, you’re very, you know, you’ve got everything in life and you’re already well into his 70s. I mean, what do you really want? I mean, what do you really want?

What’s behind all of that? And that’s to get at the level of interests, of underlying needs, of aspirations, of what’s your real dream here? And he looked at me for a long time and finally he said, you know what I really want? I want my freedom is what I want. And for him, that actually had a particular resonance since he had, like 20 years earlier, he’d been kidnapped actually and held in a coffin for about a week.

I mean, here’s a guy who loved to control things and he thought it may be, you know, he obviously thought he wasn’t going to survive. So he wanted his freedom. Well, as soon as I heard that word freedom, then I knew, okay, maybe I could help him get, once he clarified, because there was a lot of times when he felt like, no, I really want to defeat the other guy. I want to beat him. I want, you know, I want to get my vengeance in some ways.

But underneath what was the deeper, deeper need was freedom. He wanted freedom and freedom for what I said, freedom, what does that mean, freedom? And that’s something we can all ask ourselves is what’s the equivalent of freedom for ourselves? And I said, freedom for what? And he said, well, freedom to spend time with my family, which is the most important thing in my life and freedom to pursue business deals, which is what I love to do.

So then we set about trying to get him his freedom and within that little shift allowed us in four short days to reach an agreement that he was highly satisfied with that gave him freedom, but was also gave the other side freedom. So it was that was the clue was to really get to what you really want to that deeper level of what it is, which for him was freedom.

Jeffrey Shaw:

I think that’s so important that the whole point of getting to what you really wanted years ago, I was involved in a real estate negotiations on a board of a private school and we were looking to take over a building and the building had previously been a privately owned company that had closed and there was a lot of emotions attached to the actual building for this family. And at the end of the day, what became apparent, what was really important to them was acknowledgement. So part of the school name became named after the family that we’re negotiating the real estate deal from, which is actually ultimately what closed the deal, right?

Because it seemed like on the surface, that was all financial negotiation. But at the end of the day, this was a family who owned a company that had to let it go and what they’re most challenged with letting go is their name, right? So when the school was named that it got underneath that. That’s so powerful. I’d have to say, to this point, what struck me reading your book was some of the incredible stories of negotiating between world leaders and ultimately how soulful your work is.

It’s a far more personal process, even when you’re negotiating deals between world leaders. It’s not just the strategic negotiation that we think of it as being. I would imagine then, so this idea of negotiating with ourselves, getting to a yes, this is really inside work more than anything.

William Ury:

It is. It is.

Getting to yes turns out to be an inside job. It’s an inside job that then allows you to do a good outside job.

Jeffrey Shaw:

And as I said, that’s what struck me reading that. I mean, you were dealing with world leaders, feuds between countries, and at the end of the day, you’re having incredibly personal and soulful conversations with world leaders, getting to, even like the gentleman, the entrepreneur you’re just talking about, that really getting to the heart of the matter, which seems to be a lot more important even at an international level than the feuding that’s going on, it seems.

William Ury:

That’s it.

If I could tell you just one story, this is actually not in the book, but I was working in the country of Venezuela about 15 years ago, and Venezuela was on the verge of what many international observers feared was a civil war because the country was totally polarized. Half the people supported the president, Hugo Chavez, half the people wanted him to resign, and there were millions of people in the streets. And in one of my meetings with him, I could tell one story or two stories here, but I’ll tell you the second story because I developed a connection with him, as you were mentioning. But one of the stories was I had a meeting with him and he was scheduled for like nine o’clock at night, and I went to the presidential palace with a friend, Francisco, and we waited very patiently and 9.30, 10, 10.30, 11, 11.30, midnight, finally we were ushered in to see the president and expecting if I’m alone, in fact, he was in front of his entire cabinet and he motioned me to a chair and he said, so William, he said, tell me, what’s your impression of how things are going here in Venezuela? And I said, well, Mr. President, I’ve been meeting with your, some of your ministers and I’ve been meeting with the opposition leaders and it seems to me we’re making some progress.

At that point, as soon as he heard the word progress, he got triggered. He said, what do you mean progress? Are you not seeing the dirty tricks those traitors on the other side are up to? And he proceeded to lean into my face and shout at me for approximately, I would say 30 minutes. And I’m there kind of like thinking, oh, all this work over the last year and a half down the drain, I’m feeling, I could feel my cheeks reddening and, but I was able to, in that moment to kind of go to the balcony as, I felt like reacting, I felt like defending myself, but then I was able to go to the balcony, which is a term I use for like getting, going to a place of clarity, of perspective.

And I asked myself the question, which is what you always have to ask yourself on the balcony, which is what am I really trying to achieve here? What’s my goal? What’s my objective? And I said, well, my objective is to try and calm the situation down. So is it really going to advance the situation if I get into an argument with the president of Venezuela?

So I, so instead I just bit my tongue and I listened and I truly tried to listen to him and understand where he was coming from, why he was so upset. And finally, at the end of 30 minutes, I, you know, without reacting, if I had reacted, you know, the conversation could have gone for hours in a very negative way. But by not reacting, by simply listening, you know, he began to run a little bit out of steam. And after about 30 minutes, I saw his body language, his shoulders sank a little bit. And in a kind of weary tone of voice, he said, so Yuri, what should I do?

Now that is the sign of a human mind opening. If I tried to reason with him before that, argue with him, you know, when you’re dealing with someone who’s in a very irate, angry state of mind, you can get nowhere. It’s like hitting your head against a wall. But that was a sign. So I said, well, Mr. President, with all respect, I think the entire country of Venezuela needs to go to the balcony because it’s almost Christmas time.

Last year, the previous year, all the festivities were canceled because of this confrontation. Why not just call a truce and give everyone a break, enjoy the holidays with their families. And when we come back in January, you know, then maybe everyone will be in a better mood to listen. He said, that’s an excellent idea. I think I’m going to announce that in my next speech.

His mood had entirely shifted. Why? Because I hadn’t reacted, because I had listened to him. In fact, he said to me, he said, you know, over Christmas, you should travel around the country with me. I’d like to show you the country.

And then he thought for a moment, he said, but you’re a neutral, you’re a mediator. Maybe it wouldn’t be so good for you to be seen in my company all the time. And then he said, well, no problem, I’ll give you a disguise. His mood had entirely shifted. And what I learned from that, again, was this internal lesson was that if I can get to yes with myself, if I can learn to influence my own natural reactions in this particular case, then that opened the door for me to be able to get to yes with him.

And so it’s, again, the inside-outside game that turns out to be key.

Jeffrey Shaw:

So there’s a couple of things I don’t want to gloss over here. I mean, this is what’s so powerful about your book. Like, the situations you have been in for negotiations is just off the charts. Like, you know, you’re someone who’s sitting down with the president of Venezuela and many, many other stories, you know, world leaders.

And this is who – these are the deals you’re used to negotiating. And I just want to stress for our warriors listening, like, that’s – and you were saying our biggest opponent is ourselves, which is why we have to get to a yes within ourselves. I mean, we couldn’t have more qualifications in this category. I mean, it’s kind of phenomenal. I also don’t want to gloss over the fact that you refer to the balcony, because I know this is going to be valuable for people.

And you defined it a little bit, but let’s hear more about that, about this whole idea of going to the balcony, because it really is key to getting to a yes within ourselves.

William Ury:

Yeah, the balcony, it’s – imagine that you’re negotiating, you’re dealing, you’re talking, you’re having the conflict, you’re negotiating with someone, and you’re on a stage. And part of you goes to a mental or emotional balcony overlooking that stage. In other words, a place of perspective, a place of clarity, a place of calm, a place of self-control, a place where you can ask yourself the all-important question of, what do I really want here? What’s my objective in this conversation?

We’re a place where you can keep your eyes on the prize. To me, the key – that’s the foundation of successful negotiation. Is that ability to go to the balcony, because if we’re not able to influence ourselves, we don’t have a whisper of a hope of being able to influence the others. So going to the balcony is the foundation, and all of us have our simple ways of doing it. I mean, for me, it might be simply to take a deep breath, or it might be to go for a walk or a workout or go have coffee with a friend.

But to cultivate in this busy world of the internet, the ability to go to the balcony to me is kind of the key fundamental competence for success.

Jeffrey Shaw:

And I would imagine, as I imagine myself in these situations, that it is easier to go to the balcony for others. I would think it’s harder to do so for ourselves.

William Ury:

It is. It is.

Because there’s so much going on right now. We live in such highly-charged times, where the phone is ringing off the hook, emails, texts, everything. So much going on, that what’s in such short supply is time on the balcony. Time to think for a moment. Time to hit the pause button.

Time to reflect and ask ourselves, are we going in the direction we want to be going in?

Jeffrey Shaw:

I also want to talk to you about the idea of a win-lose, because you say that—and I totally agree with this—that the unspoken premise in every conflict is that it’s a win-lose. One person will win, and one person will lose. Now in regards to negotiating with ourselves, does that same win-lose premise exist? Are we in our own internal battle?

Are we dealing with a win-lose even within ourselves?

William Ury:

Yeah. So much is framed inside of ourselves, and we’re torn as either-or. Either I can go this way, either I’ll listen to this internal voice, I’ll listen to that internal voice. And to me, the whole secret of negotiation is to change that either-or choice to both hand.

How do we listen to both voices? How do we find an integrative solution that takes into account both voices so that there’s an internal win-win that allows us then to go out in the world and do the same thing with conflicts around us to look for those external win-wins?

Jeffrey Shaw:

You know, I’m perhaps related to Going to the Balcony, but although maybe different. In the book, you mention this term participant observation. So tell us about that and how it can help us understand ourselves, this idea of participant observation.

William Ury:

Yeah, Jeffrey, I was trained actually originally as an anthropologist, and participant observation is the basic methodology that I learned, that all anthropologists learn, which is how do you simultaneously observe a culture that’s different than your own? Because you go off and you do this field work. How can you observe them and have a little bit of objective detachment? But at the same time, you have to participate, you have to immerse yourself in that culture, because it’s not enough to study a different culture like you’re studying a beetle. You have to know what it feels like to be a beetle.

And it’s that ability, that double ability that we need in our lives, which is the ability to observe, which is the ability to go to the balcony, but also the ability to go on the stage and engage with the other side. So you’re constantly going back and forth between the balcony and the stage. You’re constantly participating, engaging, moving in the direction of fear, moving in the direction of conflict, engaging the differences in a constructive way, of course, while you’re also observing and catching yourself and taking breaks and asking yourself, is this going in the right direction? What am I missing? And if you look, for example, I’ve had the pleasure of training, I’d say, professional hostage negotiators, who like in big cities, you know, there are hostage situations and you see, it’s the same thing all the time.

They bring a team in, a squad, and one or two people or three people are engaging in the negotiation with the hostage taker, but the other ones are on the balcony. They’re trying to think, what do we do next? Who do we get a hold of? What’s the next thing we need to think of? And we need to combine both.

We need to combine both balcony and stage. Participation and observation is the key.

Jeffrey Shaw:

How does that relate to ourselves, like getting to a yes in ourselves? How do we, what might that look like?

William Ury:

Well, it might look like, well, for one thing, if we go to the balcony and observe, for example, going back to, just take an example, that example of that interaction between President Chavez and myself, I was observing, I went to the balcony, you know, for a moment, and I was observing, what’s going on here?

It’s interesting, you know, what is it that I want to achieve? I went to the balcony, I was observing, you know, asking myself curiously, why is the president yelling at me and all of that? So there was part of me that was observing, and part of me was deeply participating in the situation, leaning in, you know, talking to him, listening to him, engaging with the situation. We need to observe our emotions, for example, but we also need to feel those emotions, you know, that’s the participation part. It’s not about suppressing your emotions, your emotions actually give you very valuable feedback.

Anger is fuel for action. Fear may be giving you feedback about maybe some threat in the situation, so you want to participate, you want to feel those things. At the same time, part of us needs to observe them if we’re not going to be taken over by them. So the observation allows us to control them rather than to be controlled by them, but we also need to feel, to live our lives, it’s not about just detaching altogether.

Jeffrey Shaw:

Yeah, I guess it’s not unlike the entrepreneur experience, that it’s not, you know, we all very often are told to work on our business more than in it, and while that’s true, that’s good, only with your balcony view, it also takes the action, right, it takes the everyday steps to actually end up with the results you want, so I guess it’s not unlike that at all.

I do want to quote something directly from the book and ask you to explain it further, because this is super powerful, so this is quoted directly from the book. Self-understanding without self-responsibility runs the risk of dissolving into self-pity. Self-responsibility without self-understanding can deteriorate into self-blame. To get to yes with yourself, you need both. That’s just such a big statement, so can you unpack that for us a little bit?

William Ury:

Yeah, you know, the thing I find so often when we get into conflictual situations is we start pointing fingers, we start blaming, and when we blame, what are we doing? We’re giving our power away, because we’re saying, you, the other person, are responsible, and in fact, where power comes from is in taking self-responsibility, in saying, I am responsible for my experience, I’m responsible for the situation, I’m responsible for everything that goes on. There’s huge power in that, in taking that responsibility. The trouble is most of us, when we hear the word responsibility, we hear the word blame, like we’re blaming ourselves. Oh, that means I’m blaming myself, and that’s where the prior step to self-responsibility is self-understanding.

Because if we can understand why we do what we do and bring that kind of internal compassion, then we can take responsibility without blaming ourselves, which is what gives us true power to change the situation.

Jeffrey Shaw:

So you do offer in the book kind of a six-step process for us to get out of our own way and get to a yes within ourselves. So I’d love to go through these six and just kind of skim over them. Of course, for the deep, rich content, you have to read the book, but we can’t possibly cover them deeply. But let’s just, if you could, just give us a quick synopsis of each of these six steps.

The first is to put yourself in your shoes. Tell us what you mean by that.

William Ury:

We always hear about putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. It turns out, for example, in negotiation, listening to the other is key. Showing them respect, listening to them, that’s absolutely key.

But what I found is the biggest barrier to that is that we haven’t fully listened to ourselves first. If we don’t listen to ourselves first, if we don’t put ourselves in our own shoes, if we don’t understand ourselves, if you’re going to respect the other, it starts with self-respect. Put yourself in your own shoes. Really understand what you want. You know, the equivalent of finding out, for example, that what you want is freedom.

What is your deepest need? It starts with that kind of self-understanding. That’s the first fundamental step.

Jeffrey Shaw:

And the second step is to develop your inner BATNA, B-A-T-N-A. Going to have to explain that one.

William Ury:

Right. Yeah, this is lingo from negotiation that actually comes from Getting the Yes. But BATNA is a term that has everything to do with power in negotiation, which is it’s an acronym which stands for your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. It’s your walkaway option. What are you going to do if for some reason you’re not able to reach agreement, if you’re not able to reach that deal?

What are you going to do to satisfy your interests? Are you going to try and find another deal? If you can’t reach agreement with one supplier, is there another supplier? If you can’t find one customer, is there another customer? In other words, it’s always knowing that BATNA.

That’s where power comes from in negotiation. To the extent that you have a strong BATNA, a strong alternative, then that gives you power and confidence in that negotiation. And what I’ve found is that what we’ve overlooked is there’s an inner BATNA. And the inner BATNA is our own ability, our own commitment to ourselves to take care of our basic interests, of our basic needs, no matter what. And a good example, going back to my friend, the entrepreneur who wanted freedom, I asked him, okay, so who can give you that freedom?

Is it only your arch enemy who can free you? Or to some extent, can you free yourself? And then once he got that, you know what? I don’t have to give my adversary in this conflict power over me. I can take care of my own freedom.

If I want to spend time with my family, I can choose to do that. I don’t have to get distracted by this conflict. If I want to make other deals, I can do that. Once he realized that, he freed himself. And paradoxically, once he was able to free himself, it became a lot easier to reach an agreement with the other side, because he wasn’t so dependent on the other side.

And so inner BATNA is your own inner freedom, knowing that no matter what, you’ll be okay, and then you’re much more likely to be able to reach a good agreement with the other side.

Jeffrey Shaw:

Well, to your point, I can see how that kind of releases you of this dependence issue. So the third is to reframe your picture.

William Ury:

Yeah, again, as we talked about before, one of the key powers in negotiation is to be able to reframe from a confrontational win-lose situation to a win-win. But how do you do that?

And oftentimes what I find what gets in the way is our own inner assumptions, our own picture of reality. Because if we have a picture of reality, which a lot of us do, particularly in times of stress that there’s not enough to go around, there’s scarcity. Then if there’s scarcity, if that’s our own assumption of reality, if the universe is basically hostile and people are out to get me, then you’re naturally going to treat the other side as a potential adversary, and you’re much more likely to end up in a win-lose battle with them. If, however, we can look at our own inner picture and answer, you know, Einstein had this question, which he said, the most important question that any one of us ever has to decide is whether or not the universe is friendly. Now who knows whether, objectively, whether the universe is friendly, but if we decide to answer that, yes, in the end the universe is friendly, then we’re likely to think, oh, there’s possible abundance.

We’re more likely to cooperate with others. We’re more likely to get to win-wins. If we think the universe is basically unfriendly, we’re more likely to go to a win-lose situation. So the key is to go inside of ourselves and see if we can answer that question positively, that the universe is friendly. That’s reframing your inner picture.

Jeffrey Shaw:

I love that. It’s actually a very key component to abundance that I teach, so that’s wonderful. I wasn’t familiar with the Einstein quote, but it’s perfectly said. So the next then, the fourth step, is to stay in the zone. Tell us what that means.

William Ury:

Yeah, the zone is, you know, athletes know this, it’s like, it’s that zone of peak performance. And it’s also the zone of highest satisfaction. And just like when we’re negotiating, why not cultivate that zone of peak performance, which means the ability to focus on the present. Because so much in conflict in negotiation is we’re accusing each other about things that happened in the past. We have all this baggage.

This happened, you did that, you did that. The ability to free ourselves from the past, to let go of the past by forgiving, for example, which doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting. But you see, like Nelson Mandela is a great, perhaps one of the greatest negotiators in the last century. His ability to let go of everything that had been done to him, spending 29 years in jail, everything that had been done to his people, be able to forgive, to be able to move into that zone where he could be the best leader he could possibly be. So the key is to get in that zone is really being able to let go, let go of the past, let go of your fears about the future so that you can be in the present moment, which is the only place of power where you can change the situation for the better.

That’s the zone.

Jeffrey Shaw:

Fantastic. Fifth is respect them even if.

William Ury:

Yeah. So having done this inner work on yourself now, now the question is how do you change the game?

In a difficult situation, there’s a tendency if they disrespect you, of course you disrespect them. They attack you, you attack them. That’s the nature of conflict. It only takes one person to change that cycle of reaction, and that could be you. If you can learn to give respect to the other irrespective of whether they give you respect, for example, in those hostage negotiations I was telling you about, what they learn, what these police hostage negotiators learn is they get a lot of attacks and stuff from verbal attacks and threats and so on from the hostage taker.

One New York police negotiator I was telling you, he summed it up, he said, what’s the secret? He said, be nice. Be respectful. That person may have done crimes or whatever, just speak to the human being there. Respect the human being.

Respect the inherent dignity of that human being. That’s what allows them to take these cases that used to be settled by bullets where people would die, and in 99% of the cases, even higher, what happens? The hostage taker surrenders because of the power of respect. That’s the cheapest concession you can make in a negotiation. It costs you nothing.

It means everything to the other side because it’s their dignity is if you can respect the other side, even if, at first, they’re not respecting you. And then last is to give and receive. And yeah, that’s another thing, which is there’s a tendency, again, with that scarcity model to think, I’ve got to take, I’ve got to claim, I’ve got to grab this, I’ve got to grab that, and we see that in negotiation all the time, and each side is trying to take from the other. Going back to that negotiation I mentioned with the entrepreneur who wanted freedom, they were each trying to take and attack from the other. Once we reframed it as, okay, what could you give the other?

How can you satisfy the other side’s interests, the client’s interests, the partner’s interests? What can you give them? It totally changes the negotiation. Okay, I can give them their freedom. I can give them something that they value.

And then you change the cycle, so it becomes a cycle of give. You give, they give, you give, they give, you give, and you receive. And you break that cycle of take, take, because it’s only really through cooperation, through that courageous first step of taking the first step of offering something to the other side that you can change the game to one in which everyone benefits.

Jeffrey Shaw:

Fantastic. That’s great stuff, William.

Thank you so much for that. But in a moment, I’m going to ask you our Discovery Round questions. So while you’re preparing yourself for these thought-provoking questions, we’re going to hear a brief message, and we’ll be right back. Warriors, do you know the rule in business that 80% of your income comes from 20% of your clients? What that’s really saying is that 80% of your clients are the wrong clients.

Imagine what it would be like to have almost 100% of your income come from almost all your clients because you are working only with your right clients. Well I have a new masterclass that will show you how to do just that. Learn how knowing their secret language will attract your right clients, people who value what you do and are eager to pay you what you’re worth. To register for my masterclass, just go to yourrightclients.com and register today. That’s yourrightclients.com.

See you in the masterclass. All right, William, it is time for our Discovery Round questions. Question number one, what drives you crazy?

William Ury:

What drives me crazy is war, is when people just kill each other and impose this enormous suffering on everyone.

Jeffrey Shaw:

Understandably.

Looking back, what’s something that you can’t believe you did for your career?

William Ury:

I think it was taking a chance of, for example, I wanted to learn how to negotiate. So I was looking for any opportunity. So one opportunity came along, which was to work at a coal mine as a mediator. And I did that.

That was what gave me my initial experience.

Jeffrey Shaw:

Wow. Wow. Third question, is there something in common in everything that inspires you?

William Ury:

I think it’s hope, actually, that inspires me.

It’s that spirit hope, not just as optimism about the future, but also as a kind of state of spirit that there’s a better world that is inherent here that we can bring out.

Jeffrey Shaw:

Love that. Last question is, imagine you’re sitting around a campfire and out of the darkness appears your greatest enemy, which does not have to be a person. What inner warrior inside yourself do you call upon and why?

William Ury:

That’s a really good question, too.

Inner warrior, I would say the inner warrior is spirit, is that feeling of being connected with nature. That’s why, for me, going for a walk, I can call upon that spirit because I kind of realize the beauty of nature and I call upon that to help give me sustenance in facing my greatest inner enemies.

Jeffrey Shaw:

All right. Awesome. So the spirit warrior.

I get it. So everyone’s going to want to hop on over to Creative Warriors Unite for links to everything that was mentioned today. And while you’re there, be sure to join our Creative Warriors Facebook group. You’ll also find all of William’s contact information. And if you want to take the first step to unleash the creative warrior in you, sign up for my free seven-day mini course, Week of the Warrior.

Simply text CWQUIZ to the number 33444 or go to weekofthewarrior.com. Of course, there’s a link to all of this information, again, as well as all of William’s contact information in the show notes. So William, again, thank you so much for being here.

William Ury:

It’s my great pleasure, Jeffrey, and I wish you and all of your listeners much success in getting to yes with yourselves and with others around you.

Jeffrey Shaw:

Ah, wonderfully.

So that’s it for now, warriors. Let’s go out, create, serve, and be prosperous. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Creative Warriors. Make sure you visit our website, creativewarriorsunite.com, for more information on our online coaching program, The Creative Warrior Unleashed, to provide you with practical action steps to achieve your goals. We look forward to seeing you next time.

So until then, create, serve, and be prosperous.