Mari, what’s your show about this morning? Well, Lloyd, today is about getting to yes with yourself, and this is very exciting for me because we have on my very favorite guest of all times. He’s been on before, William Ury. He is fantastic, and he’s the author of this new book called Getting to Yes with Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents by William Ury, and he is the co-author, which everyone has heard of the Bible of negotiation, Getting to Yes, and he’s also co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, where I actually had the very wonderful privilege of having him as my professor, and he also wrote several other books that I have used in my negotiation classes to teach much better than any other kind of textbook ever. I’ve, you know, Getting to Yes, who he wrote that with Roger Fisher, who also was there when I studied there, Getting Past No, Getting Together, and The Power of a Positive No, which is another great one that we talked about on this show, and this, like I said, is my very favorite because this is one that revealed much more about the inner Bill Ury, but let me tell you a little bit about his bio because I want to really get in to talk to him, but he has so much. He’s done so many incredible things in peacemaking. He, Bill Ury, is the co-founder of the Harvard Program on Negotiation, and he is one of the world’s best known and most influential experts on negotiation. He’s the co-author of Getting to Yes, the best-selling negotiation book in the world, and he has taught negotiation to tens of thousands of people around the world, including me. He’s served as a mediator in conflicts ranging from the boardroom battle to labor strikes and from family feuds to civil wars all over the world. His newest book, which is by Harper One, that came out just in January of last year, is Getting to Yes with Yourself, and I am just so thrilled that you are here with us, Bill, from Colorado. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s my great pleasure, Mari, really. Well, this book is a little bit different from your other books. Why don’t you tell us how this one, I know I read in your book that it took, you know, you had kind of been thinking about it for seven years, so tell us a little bit how you kind of decided to finally do this book. Well, my passion, as you know, is helping people get to yes, whether it’s in their families or in their workplaces or in the world, helping whole societies get to yes and prevent wars, and so I’m always asking myself the question of what makes it hard for us to get to yes? What makes it hard for us to get what we really want? And the most frequent answer I would get after Roger and I worked on Getting to Yes was, I’m a difficult person. You know, those people are really difficult. That was the subject of my follow-on book, which was, you know, getting past negotiating with difficult people. But over the years, it’s often struck me that, in fact, the most difficult person we ever have to encounter, you know, it’s true, there are lots of difficult people out there, but the most difficult one, the one who really gets in the way of what we truly want is none other than the person sitting on this side of the table, not the other side. It’s the person we look at in the mirror every morning. It’s ourselves. It’s our own very human, very understandable tendency to react, which is to act without thinking. As the old saying goes, when angry, you will make the best speech you’ll ever regret. And so my question was, how can we turn that inner opponent into an inner ally, into an inner friend? Because that’s the greatest opportunity that we have. And so what I found is really that Getting to Yes is an inside job. It’s a job that starts within Getting to Yes with ourselves, which then helps us get to Yes with all the others we want to get to Yes with in our lives at in the family at work and so on. And that’s the key. Basically, it starts from the inside out. Yep. And you have this great quote by President Theodore Roosevelt, when he said, if you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t be able to sit for a month. So that goes exactly with what you’re saying. And I know for myself, and I’ve been working on this too, as I told you before we started is that I have to get really clear before I go into a mediation, I have to kind of clear everything from me, so that I can just be present and in the moment and be mindful. And you know, it’s hard to do. And it’s hard to even recognize a lot of times, when you’re upset about something to even go and figure out, what am I really feeling? What am I really thinking? Where did this come from? You know, that is that, you know, we ask those questions. In mediation, we always ask the people that we’re negotiating with, we ask them, you know, so what are you thinking? You know, what’s important to you? And we don’t often ask ourselves that, right? That’s it. That’s exactly it’s like, it’s like, negotiations, like an iceberg. And there’s all the stuff that you see on the surface. But most of it, that icebergs under the surface. And, you know, most of the things we do as mediators or as negotiators is on the surface, you know, we’re engaged in behaviors. But in fact, look, you know, if we don’t understand what’s going on underneath the water, we can’t really fully bring our full power to bear in in helping the situation move to a constructive resolution. Like, for example, you know, mediator, what’s, what’s the prime task of a mediator is to listen, right? And, you know, we see, you know, how important listening is. And yet, it’s not easy for us to listen. And what I found when I looked at that was, what makes it hard for us to listen is all the stuff that’s going on inside of our own minds, like you were mentioning all the emotions, all the feelings, all the distraction, which is compounded these days by all these, you know, emails and texts and tweets and phone calls. And what I found is that actually the first task is for us to listen to ourselves. And if we can listen to ourselves the way we would listen to, you know, we, a good friend would listen or a mediator would listen, then we can clear our minds and then we can listen to others. But it all starts within. Yeah. And you know, one thing I was thinking about as I was reading your book, and you were talking about that, and I have, I made it many, many years ago, I started doing transcendental meditation. And I did it twice a day for, you know, 20 minutes for 10 years. And then I got away from it when my kids were little and waking me up. And then last year, a year ago, I decided I was going to not miss one morning, no matter what. And so I’ve been doing that. And I think one of the things that we don’t do about listening to ourselves is we just never sit down and get quiet to do that. You know, we’re so busy. And so it’s been helping me to meditate. I know you climb mountains, which is a lot more risky than sitting down to meditate. But I think people have to start being getting into some kind of mindful meditation or something mindful that they can get away from all of that technology. I know you talk about that a little bit in your book, too, don’t you? For sure. Absolutely. No, because you’re right. I mean, the only the only place where you can influence the situation, whatever you’re facing the conflict, the issue, the potential dispute, the potential deal, the only place you can bring constructive influence is in the present. Yeah. You know, Roger Fisher taught me that long ago when I showed up in his office. And, you know, he was different from all the other professors because they were focused either on understanding the past of a conflict, the history and so on, which is enormously important. Or they were trying to prognosticate about the future. You know, what’s going to happen in the Middle East? Right. And what Roger was asking was, who can do what today to try to move this conflict, let’s say, the Middle East or South Africa or the Soviet Union in those days, you know, in a positive direction? It was focused on the present. But in order to in order to influence the present, we have to be present. We have to bring our full potential. And that’s helped enormously by whatever practice you have for mindfulness, which could be going for a walk or could be sitting and meditating. It could be listening to music, listening to music, contemplation, whatever that helps you come into the flow where you’re going to be at your best. And we’re interesting enough, you’re going to feel your best. The flow is when you’re the happiest, you’re the most satisfying, where kind of time sort of disappears a little bit and you can bring your full potential to bear because conflicts are difficult. Yes, we need all of our best tools. And so why, why negotiate with one arm tied behind your back? Exactly. You know, you were talking a few minutes ago about not reacting. And you say here in the book, you say when we react, we are in effect saying no to our interests, and no to ourselves. And I wish you’d tell a little bit about the story about when you were, when you were called in by Carter to go to Hugo Chavez when they had the civil war in Venezuela. Could you tell a little bit about that? Because you had to take a lot of beating there. I did. I did. Well, I, it was about 12, 13 years ago, Venezuela, there were a million people on the streets of the of the capital city, Caracas, demanding the immediate resignation of President Hugo Chavez. And there were a million people on the street supporting him. And there was people were arming themselves. And there were widespread rumors of, you know, massive violence and there were talks of a coup d’etat. And at the invitation of President Carter in the UN, I, I went there and, and I had, I had a number of meetings, including a number of meetings with President Chavez. And one where you’re talking where I got a little bit of a beating was the meeting was set for 9pm at night. And my colleague Francisco and I were waiting there patiently at 10, 11 midnight, and finally were ushered in to see the president. And, you know, I was expecting to find him alone at that hour. But in fact, he had his entire cabinet arrayed behind him. And, and he motioned me to a chair and said, Bill, have a seat. And now tell me how are things here in Venezuela? What are your views? And I said, Mr. President, I’ve been talking to some of your ministers here. And I’ve been talking to the leaders of the opposition. And I believe there’s been a little bit of progress. As soon as he heard the word progress, he got triggered. He said, what do you mean progress? Are you a fool? What kind of third party are you? You’re not seeing that dirty tricks those traitors on the other side are up to. He got livid and he leaned in very close to my face and proceeded to shout for I would say approximately 30 minutes. And I was there thinking, oh, all this months of work here, a year and a half or whatever, all down the drain. And I was feeling a little embarrassed in front of the cabinet. And, and I was thinking, I’m not naive and thinking of all the comebacks. You know, that’s what’s going on in your mind all the time. And you’re probably thinking, why did I say that? Exactly. You know, that the inner critic is extremely strong. Then, you know, I remembered to go to the balcony for a moment, in other words, and not react. And instead just listen and pay attention, you know, mindfully to, okay, there’s a feeling a little embarrassed right now, there’s a feeling of embarrassment or whatever. Just listen to myself a little bit, which then allowed those emotions and thoughts to quiet themselves a little bit so that I could then ask myself the important question, which is, what do I really want in this situation? Do I really want to get into an argument with the president of Venezuela? Is that really going to advance my objective of trying to bring a little bit of calm and peace to the situation? Right. And having gotten the answer, no, that would not be the right course, I decided to listen. And because I’d listened to myself, I could then listen to him. And so I listened. And he was the man who was famous for giving eight hour speeches. And if I had argued with him, we could have gone all night. And in fact, to much destructive effect, I might mention. But because I had listened to him, and I was just kind of nodding and, you know, bothering, trying to figure out, asking myself, what’s upsetting him so much? And what’s going on? Here’s just a piece of theater in front of his cabinet or what? And after, you know, I was just observing him. And after 30 minutes, I was watching his body language and his shoulders slowly sank. And in a very kind of weary tone of voice, he said to me, okay, Bill, what should I do? That is the faint sound of a human mind opening. Because if before then, when he was angry, I tried to counter it with reason or whatever, he had no capacity to listen. It would have been like beating your head against the stone wall. But at that moment, he was ready to listen. So I said, you know, Mr. President, it’s December, it’s almost Christmas time. Last Christmas last year, all the festivities were canceled around the country because of a conflict. And the same thing is going to happen this year. Why not just declare a truce, let the whole country go to the balcony for three weeks, and in January, we can resume the conversation. And he said, you know, that’s a great idea. I’m going to propose that in my next speech. His mood had completely shifted to the extent that he said, you know, I’m going to be traveling around the country over Christmas, and I think you ought to come with me because you, you know, get to know the country and get to know what’s going on. Then he thought for a moment, he said, you know, maybe that wouldn’t be so good because you’re a mediator and you’d be all we see to my presence. But then he thought again, he said, no worries, I’ll give you a disguise. His mood had completely shifted. Why? Because I had listened to him, he was now ready to listen to me. And I was able to listen to him because I had listened to myself. I’d gotten to yes with myself, and therefore I was able to get to yes with him. Yeah. You know, what I learned from you about going to the balcony, one of the things that I added to that going to the balcony was to put up golden shields. So that when someone would yell at me, which you know, as mediators, we often get yelled at, because it’s displaced anger or whatever. And, and that seems to help too, then I can really listen because I’m behind these golden shields that protect me. Yeah. So I just added to your balcony. I like that golden shield. Yeah. That couldn’t, you know, it couldn’t penetrate, it couldn’t hurt me. And then, you know, I mean, yeah, it reminded me of a client that screamed and yelled at me to work for a very big company and was like a CEO and felt like he could say anything he wanted to this woman mediator, you know, and I just, I just let him do it and let him do it till it because I had remembered about what happened with you. And I thought, okay, you know, I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna sit here, I’m not gonna look tense, I’m just gonna breathe. And, and then finally, when he got all of that out, I said, So what would you like to do now? And that turned it also just asking that question, what you know, it just allowed them to be heard. And I think that’s, that’s so important. But I love your another, I love how you have steps. And you have those kind of frameworks, because that always helps me. And then I take your frameworks, and I put them into acronyms, because that’s the only way I can remember them. But let’s talk about, because I thought they were very, very powerful, you outline six essential steps to improve our outcomes in our negotiation, really with ourselves, you know, each of them, talk about first, with our internal challenges. And then, you know, obviously, when we’ve got it internally, then it kind of how I see it, you know, from your book, I read it that then it’s easier to do it with the others. But I also thought it sets up an energy. If my energy is that I’m calm, that I’m collaborative, that I’m doing all this, it kind of in I know what’s important. It kind of is contagious, don’t you think? That’s it, for sure. I mean, it’s like, each one of us is like an instrument. And if you can, you know, your best way of being able to influence the other is to influence yourself. How can we possibly expect to influence the other if we can’t even influence ourselves? So if we can tune our own instrument, and set it to a certain, you know, tone or vibration, you know, that’s going to have an effect on the other when I was, you know, the fact that I was listening and calm and positive with President Chavez, made it easier for him to kind of calm down and and get into the same frequency. Yeah, and I think there’s a lot to do with energy. You know, when we set an ambience, and I know you do this as well with how you’re going to, you know, actually negotiate it whenever you possibly can, and just set up that ambience of a soothing energy. You know, I even have an Asian bell in my mediations. And, you know, it helps, you know, if things get… Well, there’s a reason why, you know, for example, you know, when like some tough negotiations, they go to Camp David, you know, someplace out in the countryside, away from the media, away from the fluorescent lit conference rooms, where you can take walks, you’re closer to nature, and you can focus on what’s truly important. And, and it’s calming, and we need that. That’s why often, you know, negotiations, they talk about a walk in the woods, you know, walk together, I mean, get out. You know, when you walk, you set a different ambience. I mean, whoever fights while they’re walking. And walking, it’s interesting. There’s something about as you talk, as you walk, you’re walking in the same direction. You’re side by side. You know, your shoulders can be touching. I mean, if you were face to face, you couldn’t get that close. But you can get closer, side by side, you’re walking in a common direction. Even if you notice that there’s even some studies of this, of how walking leads to better creativity. There’s a way in which your breathing tends to get paced, you know, your pace starts to go with each other. And so there’s all kinds of ways in which, you know, the ambience, the environment, and the activity can actually help people when it comes to dealing with the extremely difficult emotional issues that we all have to deal with, whether it’s in our personal or work lives or in our political world. Yeah. Well, I just love these six steps. So I want to make sure that we go through them now. And so let’s go. Okay, well, the first one, you know, like the basis of any negotiation, you know, is to put yourself in the other side’s shoes. Well, in this case, it’s to put yourself in your own shoes first. And that might seem very funny, because after all, we’re not our own shoes. But how many of us can truly say that we, you know, that we listen to ourselves the way that a good friend really would listen to us? Instead, what we have often is we have this inner critic, this inner judge, always saying, you did that wrong, or, you know, like, I shouldn’t have said that, that was a mistake. And, you know, you know, psychologists estimate that we have anywhere between, I don’t know, like 60,000 thoughts a day. And they estimate that, like, 80% of them are negative thoughts. So, you know, we need to learn to, and this is part of going to the balcony, we need to learn to show some empathy to ourselves, to listen to ourselves, to understand what those, it’s not about suppressing those thoughts, those negative thoughts, but just observing them. That’s where mindfulness comes in, observing the emotions that come up and go away. And then to see those as signals to, what do I really need here? What’s my deepest intention? What do I truly want? You know, what are my deepest motivations here? So you can find out what you truly want. Because that’s the thing I find so often in negotiation, is we go into negotiation, and we know our position, of course, we want this for a certain sum of money, or we want that, but have we truly thought through our interests, and not just our superficial interests, but what are our deepest interests? I gave the example in the book of a very, you know, wealthy businessman who was, you know, founded Brazil’s largest, Latin America’s largest retailer, 150,000 people working for this company, and he was involved in this boardroom battle with a French businessman, who, and they were kind of, I mean, they had gone, had been in the courts for two and a half years, count lawsuits, arbitrations, money, I mean, dozens and dozens and dozens of law firms, and lawyers, and, you know, character assassination in the newspapers, you know, the Financial Times called it the biggest cross-continental boardroom dispute in recent history, and they were blacking each other’s names, and so he asked me for my help, and I came and sat with him in his living room, and I said, Abelio, what do you really want? You know, and like a good, intelligent business person, you know, I’ll tell you what I want, I want to knock back at a certain price, and I want my, you know, I want the elimination of the non-compete clause, and I want this piece of real estate, and he had like six or seven. Yeah, all the points. Yeah, all the points, but I said, yeah, but you’ve got everything, you know, you, you know, your man has got, you know, he’s, you know, he had everything. I said, well, what do you really want? Yeah. What do you most want in life? You know, he was 76 at the time. Yeah. And, you know, and he paused, because no one had kind of pressed him behind that to find out, you know, what does he really want? His underlying interests, yeah. Yeah, he said, you know what I want? Freedom. That’s what I want. I want my freedom, and I said, well, so that’s great. So what does freedom mean to you? It means freedom to spend time with my family, which is the most important thing in my life, and freedom to make deals, which is what I love to do. And so I said, okay, Abelio, uh, I’m going to work, I’m going to help you get, you get your freedom. That’s, that, that’s going to be my, my, my objective if I, if I work to help you here. Once we understood that, that it was freedom, then I said, I asked him the follow-up question, which leads to actually the second point in the method is, who can give you the freedom? Who can give you what you really want? Is it, is it just your, your enemy, as it were, your opponent, uh, yeah, your earthwild business partner? Are you his hostage, or can you yourself, to some extent, give yourself your own psychological freedom? And he realized, you know, it’s me. You know, in negotiation, we talk about your BATNA, you know, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. What’s your best alternative? This was, in a sense, his inner BATNA. In other words, what could he do for himself, regardless of what the other side, uh, whether the other side agreed or not. And by doing that, by, you know, exercising that freedom, getting himself an office outside of the company, spending holidays with his family, beginning to study other business deals. Psychologically, he freed himself from that, which, paradoxically, made it a lot easier for us to settle the dispute. Yeah, yeah. He already had his freedom, actually. And when, you know, it’s, it’s about, you know, when you free yourself, you know, when you don’t, you know, you, of course, you want a solution. But if you’re, if you’re not totally dependent on the other side, right, when you’re dependent on the other side, you give your power away. Exactly. And by, by developing your, what I call your inner BATNA, which is your ability to take care of your deepest needs yourself, you then give yourself the power that allows you to actually make a good agreement, settle a difficult dispute, and, uh, and, and take care of your own needs for happiness, rather than delegating them to the other side. Perfect. Well, you know what? We are out of time. So it’s just, people are going to have to read the book to get to all six of them. At least you got to, you know, put in your shoes, your own shoes, and put yourself there, and then your BATNA. And he actually reframed. So they have to read this book to get there. So that’s great. Bill, you are wonderful. Just give your website and it’s time to go. Sure. My website is William, is WilliamUry, U-R-Y dot com, www.WilliamUry.com. Or my Twitter or Facebook or William, William Ury, G-T-Y. Okay. Well, this is a fabulous book. I love it. Getting to yes with yourself and other worthy opponents. William Ury, Bill, you’re my hero. Oh, Mari, you’re a gem. And I wish you and all your listeners much, much success in getting to yes with yourself first, and then with others. Thank you so much. We will have you back again. Thanks. Bye-bye. Thanks, Mari. Bye-bye.