Transcript of How to Negotiate, Lead, and Win in Any Situation with Chris Voss

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What is the right mindset to use in a year like 2026?

If you can switch to gratitude at all, you know, there's an old phrase, this is not happening to me, it's happening for me. There's gonna come a point in my life, I'm gonna look back at this moment and realize it was a turning point to a better life. You're unhappy about the moment because of where you think it's taking you. And when you've lost your job and you're staring at what looks like a dark place and you don't know what's gonna happen, and it's horrifying, it's the inner chatter in your mind which is gonna make all the difference in the world. And that's easy to say and hard to do. It takes practice. Starts with, okay, if you just say to yourself, this is not happening to me, it's happening for me. That exercise begins to get you in the right sheet of music.

Come on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. Faster, no secrets.

I'm ready for my closeup.

Okay, well, get excited, my people, because very rarely do we have a guest multiple times. But you are gonna be so hyped for this one. Chris is a former lead FBI negotiator and dynamic speaker who debunks the biggest myths of negotiation. Chris engages all groups with captivating stories, insights, useful tips for business and life, and interactive audience participation. He has lectured on negotiation at business schools across the country and been on ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, Forbes. He's everywhere. His keynotes are based on the most incredible book, Never Split the Difference. Chris Voss, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Well, hello, it's my pleasure. And, and all the stuff that you mentioned that I've appeared on, the one that's always mattered most to me is your podcast.

I love that. I, I don't know how much based in truth that is, but I will receive it and accept it today. Thank you, my friend. Okay. So I haven't had you on the show in a couple of years, and it was funny, I was prepping for the show today and thinking to myself, I wonder if Chris, since writing literally the most iconic negotiation book ever, have you helped to unlearn anything in negotiation to adapt to our new world? Or have you learned something important since you've written the book that you could share with us today? Oh, wow.

I mean, between me and my team, I think we're evolving what we're talking about. Monthly because we're all into it and there's always new stuff to be discovered. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff that we've learned that we think about that we weren't thinking about 10 years ago, even a year ago. And now one of the things we talk about is the agreement graveyard. Well, so when you enter into a negotiation with anybody on the other side, The first issue was, are you the favorite or the fool? And there's the old phrase, if you don't know who the fool in the game is, it's you. So the crazy thing we discovered a number of years ago is that about 20% of the time when you're in a negotiation, the other side never has any intention of making the deal with you at all. You are due diligence, you're competing bid, the gathering information, what they used to call the rabbit. You're there to run the other dogs into the ground. Um, somebody's checking with you on price because they want to drive the price down on somebody else, their favorite. So the favorite of the fool— we got turned on to that a couple years into our training, and we call that proof of life from hostage negotiation days.

Uh, do the bad guys have the hostage and are they gonna give them to you? And in business, is there— are they going to make a deal at all? And are they going to make a deal with you? And again, somebody that was teaching sales, we talked to this, he said, you know, if somebody's calling you on a phone and they're really after a price, you got a live client. If they need a price, they are a buyer. Yeah, but they're not buying from you. They're just trying to get you to drive the price down. On the favorite. All right, so after the favor of the fool, then there's a problem— is can the person who's a point of contact that you're dealing with actually get it past his team on the other side? Is somebody going to knock it down? Is— or is your deal going to go into the agreement graveyard? Do you get killed in terms and conditions? And who on the other side is looking to snipe your deal As soon as your point of contact brings it back. Now, your point of contact meant to make a deal with you, so they're not playing you for the fool.

But they got people on the other side that are going to tear the deal apart and try to stop it out of jealousy. What kind of jealousy could there be? If the other side has in-house counsel that was not involved in a negotiation, in-house counsel's gotta prove that since they weren't there, the deal's horrible and they're going to tear it apart. So who's the team on the other side? The agreement graveyard. How do you deal with that? Now, I can't talk to those people, but what I can do is I can prep you to get it through that obstacle course. And we teach people how to do that.

Bringing up the GC is hilarious to me because I had a terrible GC when I was in corporate America. And right to your point, full of insecurity, wanted to justify the job, justify the role all the time. So no matter what you brought forward, No matter how incredible it was for the company, when you got it to the finish line, she would come in and weigh in and say, no, and here's why I have to protect the company. No, we're not gonna do, you know, and, and justify, justify, justify. But it would become this complete problem because what you're bringing forward was to help the company accelerate revenue, be more efficient, whatever it may be. How can you negotiate in a style with someone who is just so headstrong, no, no, no, they're not even willing to hear you?

Well, and what you do is you start involve them earlier in the process. Now, the point of contact for the company is gonna be reassured across the board, yeah, go ahead, make the deal, you know, everything's gonna be fine, you are a rep. And the general counsel is gonna get on board with that on the surface. But inside, you know, they're poor. You know, it's gonna, it's gonna sound horrible, but they're poor little child, insecure. They feel left out, you know, they feel bad. So what you do is you get the point of contact to engage them earlier with what or how questions. 'Cause asking somebody what or how does two things. It feels deferential. People love to tell you what to do or how to do it. So they feel large and in charge. It's also fatiguing. So if I ask you, you know, what are the obstacles here? You know, what's the biggest challenge? What are we trying to solve? I ask the GC that, they're gonna feel like they're really engaged. And also it's gonna require a lot of mental brainpower to answer. And they're gonna feel they were involved depend upon how much effort they put into the answer.

So the idea is to make them feel very involved, make them work really hard to think about it. Now they feel like they're guiding and counseling the point of contact. They're engaged earlier. Then when a point of contact comes back after have been guided by this person, they now feel ownership. Oh, you know, I, I wasn't left out. I mentored this person through the process. Now instead of blocking them at the finish line, these people on the other side, they feel involved. They want to get it across the finish line simply because they were engaged earlier in a very precise way. A what or how question. What are we trying to do? How do you see this? How do you see this affecting the company's future? As soon as they weigh in early on, now you got their investment and they're not as much of an obstacle at the end. So that's how you avoid the agreement graveyard.

I love that. One thing that I had success with, because I did not have your advice earlier on, but one thing that I did have success with was one time I was always trying to beat her to the punch, get the deal approved before she would get involved. Again, obviously not the right approach or not the best, most efficient approach, but on a times I would get the deal approved at the end, I would praise her like crazy after and do it publicly. Knowing what we are saying, that little inner child was struggling with wanting some feedback. And when I would really glorify her in front of people, I'd notice she'd be a little bit easier on me that next time. However, she would have much preferred, I'm sure, being involved in it throughout the process. But sometimes, people are too scared. You see that person almost as an enemy that they're always trying to block you. So how do you have that faith to say, I'm going to even put more cards in front of them and give them more power.

Well, and what I love about the strategy that you were just talking about is it also plays to what we refer to as the Oprah rule, which is a last impression is a lasting impression. You're creating an impression at the end of a deal that, you know, is going to carry over into the next interaction. And that's a great strategy. And so some of your approach overall is to just do that. And, you know, that becomes a philosophical approach in a lot of ways. And a phrase that I learned from somebody not that long ago, a guy who was in YPO, Orange County, Southern California, and I'm in talking to the group and he sits down with me and he says, you know what I say to every customer, and I mean it, is that it's a privilege to serve you. And if on balance, you know, we live in a privileged environment in the US. If I have a job, I'm living a privileged lifestyle. I wasn't born in a third world. I wasn't born in Iran where the government is trying to murder me because I'm not a sheep and I don't comply to the regime.

I wasn't born under a totalitarian regime. I wasn't born in someplace where they don't have hot and cold. Running water, where they don't have electricity. I remember I was in Africa a number of years ago. We're being, we're being toured around. I'm still with the FBI, and law enforcement guy's taking us around. He wants to stop by his house on the way to show us some of the rest of the country. We go by this dude's house. He's living in a concrete structure with no electricity and no running water. Like, I wasn't born there. Like, I really— where, where I am, I'm in a privileged— I, I'm, I'm privileged. It's American privilege. It's the free world privilege. I mean, there's no stack of things for me to be grateful for. So I can genuinely say to anybody, you know, it's a privilege to be working here with you. If you can get yourself to that mindset, if you've got a job in the US and you're getting paid and you don't have to worry about whether or not somebody's going to shoot you overnight, you can genuinely say to anybody that you're working with, look, it's a privilege to work with you.

And it's a larger philosophical issue. I believe in saying things that are genuinely flattering but also completely true. And can I be grateful for working with a small, narrow-minded, jealous bureaucrat? If I put it in context, I probably can. And you start to see them as a human being and start to soften them up from the very beginning. So it's a larger philosophical question, but you're gonna be more successful with the deal-killing general counsel or whoever the deal killer is on the other side of the table to be genuinely grateful for the opportunity to interact with them. And a lot of walls are gonna come down. Now that's, that requires a fair amount of self-talk on your part, your inner chatter. Uh, you want to sit down and talk numbers and reality of the difficult nature of the third world, the developing world on the other side. Would you have rather woke up in Tehran this morning or in Las Vegas where I woke up? I'd take Vegas any day of the week.

It's such a good point. And when you say that the privilege to do business with you, the privilege to work with you, it reminds me of dealing with difficult clients. And everybody's had a difficult client along the way that you weren't ready to walk away from, that you did wanna keep that business. Kill 'em with kindness. And, and like you said, of course it is a privilege. It's a privilege to cash that check at the end of the day and, you know, to, to walk away from that deal knowing you delivered for, for those people. But I have found in business, which is exactly what you're saying right now, the more you treat people from a place of gratitude, the more they start treating you different than they treat everybody else. And then you start hearing the stories of so-and-so's so difficult to deal with. How do you do that, Heather? And I, I think to myself, they're actually not— I don't see them as so difficult to deal with. And they said, that's because it's you. But then when you step back from and say, what am I doing differently? And this is, I've learned as I've gotten older, cuz I certainly didn't approach it this way when I was younger, that the more I can be grateful to people, the more I can catch them doing something right and, and share that with them, share that in front of their employees, and then thank them for working with them, the nicer they begin treating you, even though it might be difficult in the beginning to suck it up and just do the right thing.

I agree completely. I think there are 4 emotional mindsets that if you could master, you're completely bulletproof. And gratitude is one of those 4. It's phenomenal.

What are the other ones?

I, you know what, that was a lead-in, right? We're going someplace with that.

You're happy with that one.

Gratitude, curiosity, Playfulness. I think of the fourth the other day. I kept telling people there were three and I wasn't including curiosity. Playfulness is a superpower. It will— um, uh, these are emotions that keep you in the moment. Because one of the, uh, the things— I'll think of the fourth, and forgive me, I should have written them down.

Is it being present?

Well, it's— though they force you to be present. And so the issue is once we get past 23, 24, 25, our ability to predict and calculate the future based on our past, we have more past, we have more information to reflect on. So we spend more and more time reflecting on the past and coming up with assessments and then mapping out the future. Which means less time in now, less time in being present. And so curiosity forces you to be present in the moment in a positive frame of mind. And if you look for curiosity, Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about in his book Antifragile, which is a term that he coined. And he says things that gain from disorder, there's post-traumatic stress and there's post-traumatic growth. And curiosity— he writes in his book, uh, Antifragile— curiosity makes you gain. The more curious you are, the more you can survive the stress. And you never reach the heights of what you could be without massive amounts of stress. A lot of people, that also crushes them, so it's not a good teaching methodology. But you start looking for curiosity, and I'm reading Man's Search for Meaning which is on the list of books to read if you want to become, I don't know, an enlightened human being, become spiritual wisdom, whether or not it's religion-based, to be the best you could be.

Man's Search for Meaning is on your list. Anybody that you're talking to that's reading to try to be the best they could be, Man's Search for Meaning. I finally read the book. I don't know what it's about. I just know it's on a list. So it's about surviving the Holocaust, Nazi concentration camps. Psychologist that wrote about his experience that survived the camp. So number one, now I realize why everybody that lived through those camps refuses to talk about them, because it was beyond horrific. It's detailed in this book. But number two, he notices that the people that survived psychologically just became curious. They were so flummoxed, confused by the immensity of the horror that they faced that at some point in time, they just went, sat back and go, "I wonder what the hell is gonna happen next?" And curiosity caused people to survive the Holocaust if they survived physically. Now, if you can get through the Holocaust with curiosity, You get through anything. There ain't nothing on your list. So that, that's why curiosity is a superpower. It keeps you— you can't be angry and curious at the same time. You see patterns more quickly.

You engage with people when you're genuinely curious about somebody. If I get completely curious about you, I'm going to get stuff out of you that you haven't told anybody else. And that to me, that, that is a superpower. It's an irresistible thing that you can't resist. And that's, that's a long list of why curiosity is phenomenal.

Meet a different guest each week. Hey, I'm Andrew Tate, confidence creator.

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I ask you to try to find your passion. You know what's interesting is the character traits that you're listing off— curiosity, being present, playfulness, empathy, understanding— all of those are femininity that are typically found in more of a feminine nature or more organically. Would you agree or disagree with that?

Probably. Probably. And I think it has more to do with nurture than nature, you know, because the nature thing, it's hard to isolate variables in a scientific experiment. We don't have the ability to give a questionnaire to an unborn child and say, hey, your gender hasn't formed yet. What do you think? And then now that you have your gender form, what are you thinking now? And now that you've come through that canal that brings you to reality, what are you thinking? We don't have the ability to isolate that stuff. So I tend to agree with— I do agree with you completely. Who has a head start? Now, how we got a head start, you know, that's a tough scientific question.

Yeah, so these are skills that you believe people, no matter who you are, can learn, develop. And get much better at.

1,000%. We have seen that these combination of traits, which fold very neatly into what we refer to as tactical empathy— I don't know if I told you this last time we talked— women pick it up faster than men do. Now, that doesn't mean that they're any better at it at the top-performing end. We're completely— I completely believe it's gender agnostic. But we have seen no shortage of data that women pick up emotional intelligence-based negotiation faster than men do.

And so what are you seeing them do differently or seeing them learn faster?

Well, first of all, they don't have their fear of soft skills, which are emotional intelligence-based. Empathy, being able to state the other side's perspective without agreeing. Demonstrating comprehension, showing that you comprehend and showing someone what you comprehend. Women seem to be comfortable with that faster. Women seem to be more willing to experiment with it faster. Now, once people start to catch on, then it's like, this is great. Like, this is astonishing. I've got a couple brand new salespeople on my team. I'm training both of them. They're working out of my house, so they're seeing me on a daily basis. One of the guys, or both guys, has been reluctant to use the skills because they're very different, and he wants to make sure he gets it right. I don't know if it's a male trait that he wants to be sure it's right before he tries it. So he's frustrating me so much. I grab him yesterday, I go, "We're going on a field trip." And so I'm taking it to the grocery store because I keep telling them small stakes practice. Well, I don't have small stakes opportunities. Yes, you do. They're right in front of you.

So here's what you're going to say to the cashier who's checking us out at the grocery store, because one of our magic wand phrases is, what do you love about either where you work or where you live? And it has to be that word for word. What do you love about where you work or where you live. Not what do you do for a living, not where do you live. What do you love about it? Now, you— and I tell him, you're going to do this with the cashier because you're going to feel like she's busy, she's in line, you don't have an opportunity. You're using this 'I don't have opportunities' to small interactions. I say, you go to the grocery store, you got a chance to talk to somebody. So I tee him up, and I'm in line behind him. She doesn't know that we're together, but she knows somebody's waiting. And he looks at her, and I'm happy to say the store, because her reaction was phenomenal. He says, what do you love about working at Albertsons? And she stops, and she goes, you know, the benefits here are phenomenal. I mean, we're only paying $7 a week, and our health benefits are through the roof, and we got this benefit and that benefit.

And to be able to tap into these kind of benefits working here for Albertsons, like you only got to work 20 hours a week. You don't even have to go in full time. She said, but I've been working here for 20 years and I've worked at other grocery stores and this place is well run and it's really clean and the benefit. And she's going on and on. Now he doesn't expect this deluge. He thinks she's going to blow him off. I got another customer to deal with. He didn't see it as an opportunity, but I'm standing right there, and he knows that I'm going to figuratively beat him with a baseball bat if he doesn't do this. And the look on his face as she's gushing about all this information, and finally she kind of looks back at me, she's like, I'm sorry, you know, are you guys together? And I go like, no, no, no, it's cool, it's cool. Nobody gets a chance to talk this much. And she goes on and on and on. And then, you know, we pay and we move on and we're walking out. And he goes like, I had no idea.

And I said, yeah, man, I've been trying to get you to do it. You felt like you didn't have an opportunity. You think you gotta be in a conversation to throw it out. And I said, you just made her day better. She feels 10 times better than she did when we were in line before. And she didn't mind talking to you because the other advantage of these skills are nobody talks to anybody. She hasn't had that kind of a gushing conversation with anybody today, let alone this week. So how do I get a man to do that? I would be willing to bet that I wouldn't have had this much trouble getting a female. Drag a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. I don't think dragging the female to the water is It's that hard for her to drink. She's been educated in soft skills since she was 5 years old. But the men haven't been hit with this, this much in this, and overall they're scared of 'em to start out with.

Well, I just wanna mirror you for a second and pair it back what I just saw. So one, you, and for everyone listening, if you're a leader in sales and business, this is such a, it's so important. Well done, Chris Voss. So when you saw somebody on your team struggling with a situation, you declare pattern interrupt. This is so powerful for anyone learning, for anyone. When you're speaking to an audience, pattern interrupts are incredibly powerful because it completely takes you out of whatever struggle you're in physically, mentally, emotionally, and, and breaks that loop entirely. Then the next thing you did was you lowered the stakes of the game and people perform at such a better level when they take pressure off themselves. The reality is the pressure was only that this guy was putting on himself anyway. You just wanted him to try it. So now we lower that, we pattern interrupt him, get him out of his environment, put him in another situation, take all the pressure off, low stakes game. And then you, he does the thing that you've already taught him to do. And one thing I want everyone to know, when you allow or encourage someone to speak about themselves and how they feel about things, especially things they feel good about, to your point, what do you love about what you do?

What do you love about where you live? It, people begin to elicit dopamine in their brain. They don't know they're doing this. It's happening genetically in their body, biologically. This is not something they're aware of, and it induces happiness. It induces a connection to the person they're speaking with. This is one of the reasons why podcasting is super interesting. When you're interviewing somebody and they're getting the opportunity to teach and speak about themselves, they are listening to dopamine. It improves their day. It improves how they feel overall. And I just, I love that you just laid out those unbelievable lessons for everybody right here in real time. But I have an important question for you. To you, Chris. You mentioned that women would be more prone to do that. I have a, a question for you. Women are told often in business, especially in male-dominated businesses— I was in, uh, the radio business for a long time and it was incredibly male-dominated. Here's what I was told. Emotion is for the weak. Empathy for the weak. Heather, don't show your emotion. Don't, don't ask so much about the other person. I was almost taught the opposite of what you're teaching, the opposite of what I felt inclined just to do from a connection standpoint to connect with somebody.

So when women are being told, hide your emotion, put up a mask, I used to listen to that and I did it. How do you help them to understand you shouldn't always take the advice that a man in business could potentially be giving you?

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, because it's an enduring problem. It's not as bad as it was. What I love about today's day and age is I'm delighted to meet enough really successful women executives like you who didn't become guys. And last century, you know, and even in somewhat into this, they were all encouraged to become one of the guys and it destroyed them and they lost their femininity and they lost who they were. In today's day and age, you got no shortage of women that are great examples of being completely feminine, not being one of the guys, and being ridiculously successful. So we're starting to get out of that. But that counseling was there previously. They didn't know any better. The men didn't know any better, and they didn't realize they were mediocre. I mean, the highly intelligent guys were keeping it to themselves. And a lot of empathy is invisible unless you're the recipient of it. Now, I can use empathy on someone, and on that person I will open them up, and they will, they will get a hit of all the neurochemicals that I want them to get a hit of— the ones you just mentioned: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, um, principally.

The people watching don't get those hits, so The magic happened in front of them and they were like, yeah, a minute ago we were in this, hearing this conversation and 3 minutes later we're here and I didn't see it happen. So it blows right by them. I had a moment a number of years ago where I got Jack Welch. I connected with Jack Welch based on one sentence. And the guy that was standing there with me watched me do it. I mentioned it to him a couple years later and I go, you remember that moment with Jack Welch? And he's like, yeah, I still don't know what happened. I don't know how you got there. So if we learn by seeing it done, empathy is so invisible, most people don't pick it up when it happens in front of them. So many people in business unless they're specifically counseled, the men and even the women to some degree, if somebody didn't tell you what they just did, it blew right past you. And so to figure it out in the school of hard knocks of experience, how observant are you? How curious are you? You see it 1,000 times and you're never going to get it once because you don't learn and because you're not someone who's mentored.

So you get a lot of bad behavior being reinforced among the guys, if you will. Because they want to feel like a club. They all want to be mediocre at the same time. They compare themselves to each other. And, you know, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm batting— I'm not an A-player, but I'm pretty good here. They have no idea how much better they could be. That's, that's the problem with being competitive. You're limited by the abilities of your competition. You don't know how good you could be. And I think that's held men back in their advice, well-intentioned as it may have been. Here's how I succeeded. You gotta do what I did. Well, the point of fact, you're a C player. And so if I do what you did, I'm a C player too. How do I pick up how to be an A player? It's a little more difficult.

Oh, that's so good. I love that you just brought that up. Who you were competing against is everything. Okay, wait, get back to the Jack Welch story. And for anyone listening right now that does not know who Jack Welch is CEO of GE, chairman of GE, incredible author. What else am I missing?

He was one of the first real rock stars of business. And Jack has since passed, but he ran GE at the height of what they were doing. Based on his leadership, they were a global force. And so when he retired, there was a series of business books because he was a business rock star. The book Jack, the book Winning, and then finally he and his wife Susie put out a book called The Real-Life MBA. And so they're rolling through Los Angeles and they are promoting the book. And although Susie didn't get credit, she originally, I think, wrote for Harvard Business Review, phenomenally talented writer. I think she was very involved in the writing of every one of Jack's books. There's no way she wasn't. She's finally getting full credit, the real-life MBA. They're doing a book signing. I'm walking up to him at the book signing, pitch him cold, come speak at class I teach at USC. Now you have no time. You have no 7 seconds to make this pitch. He doesn't know who I am. I'm just some other schmuck standing in line trying to get his book signed. Everybody's got an ask.

Jack, come to my house for dinner. My wife's a great cook. Jack, take a picture with this fishing rod I developed. That's a fishing rod and a water cooler and a beer holder all in one and a shotgun. That kind of crazy stuff, right? So I'm trying to pitch Jack to come and speak at a class I'm teaching at USC at the time. Now, there ain't no value there. And most people would want to say, hey, Jack, would you like to come speak at USC Marshall School of Business in the MBA program? Now for the ordinary human being, that's a good opportunity. For a business global rockstar, that's a waste of time, even if it's promoting his book. Like, I ain't got time for that. So I can't pitch the positive to Jack. And I got the— and I can't introduce myself because that burns up my 7 seconds. I can't ask him how he is. That burns up my 7 seconds. I got one shot. And I know that people feel safe and protected when they say no instead of yes. I don't try to get people to say yes. So I walk up to Jack Welch and I say, is it a ridiculous idea for you to come and speak at the negotiation class I teach at USC?

And first he glares at me and he starts to frown. And so you gotta be careful on assuming body language, 'cause anger is just one of three possibilities. But when somebody looks angry, you think they're angry. Now Jack is not angry, but I don't know that. I think he's furious. And then he looks up and to the left and he gets this hideous scowl on his face and he doesn't move for what seems like an eternity with this hideous scowl on his face. And I think I just gave the poor guy a stroke 'cause he's so furious and his head exploded on the inside and he's gonna fall over dead. So he doesn't fall over dead. I'm relieved, but he still looks furious. And I think he's gonna have me thrown out. And after the eternity, he looks back at me and he says, "Okay, this is my personal assistant's name. This is a special Twitter account we have set up to communicate with her. I will call her and tell her who you are. I think we're gonna be in Los Angeles in the fall. If we are, we'll come in and speak at your class." Because I went, my question to get what I wanted to move forward, the answer was no.

And when people say no, it's a Pavlovian response. You feel safe and protected. When you say yes, you feel like you're letting them yourself in. There's a trap. There's always a hook. It's a micro-agreement. It's a tie-down. They're going to trap me. But when you say no, you think you've saved yourself from the trap. And if you trigger that emotional response, reaction of safety in someone, while he's scowling, that's his thinking face. He's thinking through the steps. And then he looks back at me and gives me implementation. And that's emotional intelligence. If I try to get you to say yes, you're gonna be worried about what you're letting yourself in for. Saying yes and hearing yes are two vastly different experiences. Saying no and hearing no are two vastly different experiences. I mean, I like to hear no, but I love to say it. I know every human being loves to say no. And that's how I got through the move to Process Forward with Jack Welch.

Oh, that's incredible. And major props on that one. That was such a win. Meet a different guest each week.

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Okay, so you said when people give that scowl— that happens to me when I'm speaking, Chris. I know it happens to you too, because when you see— you catch eyes with someone in your audience and they've got that crazy weird upset looking like they can't stand you face. I've learned since then, and I don't know how you label it cuz you said there's 3, 3 different options, but sometimes after the fact when I talk to people in the audience, that's a person something landed with and resonated with the most and they started running back through their memory of something in their life. What are the 3 different reasons why someone would look at you like that?

Well, first of all, you know, I, I've been accused of having a resting serial killer face. So I'm sitting listening to a speaker myself a couple years ago, Terri Hawkins. She's a phenomenal public speaker. She's a superstar. And she doesn't know me. And I'm so engaged in her talk that I walk up to her and speak to her afterwards. And it was a small group. So she says, you were scaring me. I mean, you looked at me like you wanted to chop me up and feed me to your dog. I was like, no, no, that's how I look when I'm thinking. All right, so your intense thinking face looks angry. Your angry face looks angry. And when you have gas.

So you had decided Jack Welch was having one of those three moments rather than you were anticipating he was actually gonna say no to you.

I had no— I looked angry. I'm reading anger. But the other two are so vastly different from anger that you got to be careful on this whole body language stuff, reading something out of context. And I didn't know that that's what Jack looked like when he was thinking through how he wanted to implement what he wanted to do. And I got to some degree the same face. If I'm listening to you intently, you think I'm thinking about chopping you up in a backyard. I got a resting serial killer face.

Yeah. And for women, they call it the RBF, resting bitch face. So yeah.

Yeah.

It is a real thing. And to your point, coming from a place of curiosity and understanding and giving people that chance to articulate what it is that they're feeling or what it is that they're thinking.

Okay.

So earlier you were talking about the privilege to be in the United States, the privilege to have a job. I wanna get to that right now because I've read a stat that's 6 out of 10 companies are considering layoffs in 2026. A number of major companies have, have already implemented some layoffs for people. And I get tons of DMs about this. I'm sure you do too. For people going through now needing to find a new job, maybe they were senior level and suddenly they're scared to ask for the raise. Suddenly they're starting over and going into new companies and trying to negotiate for a job. How to set people up mentally for the best success walking in when they're thinking, I should just be grateful to get anything. I should not push back. I should not negotiate. What is the right mindset to use in a, a year like 2026?

Well, first of all, yeah, if you can switch to gratitude at all, like, you know, there's an old phrase, this is not happening to me, it's happening for me. You know, there's gonna, there's gonna come a point in my life in 10 years now that I'm gonna, I'm gonna look back at this moment and realize it was a turning point to a better life. Because you're unhappy about the moment because of where you think it's taking you. And when you've lost your job, whatever you thought reality was in front of you, all this vision of the future is now gone, and you're staring at what looks like a dark place. And you don't know what's going to happen. And it's horrifying because you had this whole vision of the future mapped out. And so you think it's happened to you. You feel this— you feel a tremendous sense of loss of things that never happened. So it's the inner chatter in your mind which is going to make all the difference in the world. And that's easy to say and hard to do. It takes practice. Yes. And it starts with, okay, you— if you just say to yourself, this is not happening to me, it's happening for me, you know, that, that exercise begins to get you in a right sheet of music.

Um, and then you begin to see it show up in really successful people, and they use that 2mm mind shift to begin to change the momentum of their life. Now, if you got laid off, it was either the company's fault or it was your fault. Let's go with it was the company's fault. You weren't in a great place. You could be a superstar and still get laid off. I mean, that happens. So you just left a sinking ship. You just left a company whose senior executives created a bloated enterprise. They were drunk on their stock price. They were drunk on success. They got drunk on the amount of money that was being thrown at them at some point in time, and they created this bloated operation that wasn't doing you any good personally. Ask yourself, do I really want to have a more enjoyable life? I just, I just left a bad job where I wasn't growing. It's like, it's like, did you leave a bad relationship? If you're in a bad abusive relationship with somebody fat, overweight, doesn't work out, eats too much, doesn't appreciate you, takes you for granted. You don't fix them.

You find a good relationship where that person levels you up. So you didn't want it to happen, but you just got cut loose from a sinking ship, a place where you couldn't grow as a human being. Let's go with that as being the fault of the company. I love Bob Iger's book, The Ride of a Lifetime, detailing his a success journey to first-time CEO of Disney. Then he retired. He came back for a few years and he's recently retired again. The ride of a lifetime is phenomenal. Now, Iger happens to be one of these guys that survives takeover after takeover after takeover. And most of these people are shown the door. So why does Iger survive? Here's the other hard part about being in a company that's bought. Taken over by another company. You were just forcefully put in another job that you didn't ask for and you didn't apply for. You get taken hostage. You were hired in one culture, they get bought, they're probably going to start cutting people back, showing people the door. You are now in a culture that you didn't ask for. And if this new culture either doesn't fit you or the shift, like you're better off without it.

Now, Iger's response in time after time in the companies that were taken over is like, okay, you guys are in charge. And whether I like it or not, there's a new sheriff in town, and we're going to go by your rules. You know, one of the classic examples is he's working with ABC Sports, as I recall, in the Roone Arledge days. And they developed some of the most phenomenal, extravagant sporting events. I mean, they redefined how sports were being covered. And with iconic clips. And there was a couple songs, "The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat." That was ABC Sports under Roone Arledge. They show the agony of defeat, the ski jumper coming down the ramp and just wiping out before he goes off. I mean, just iconic stuff. And they created so much value for ABC, they were having money thrown at them. By the, by, by the truckload. Disney comes in, buys them, and slashes their budget. They don't care how successful they were. They don't care about any of the previous, that they redefine sports reporting globally, and they immediately slash the budget. Now they got a bunch of people that were successful business executives that could have said, leave us alone.

We are the rock stars. We got you at the top of the entertainment heap. Do not mess with this system. Those people all got shown the door. I just said, okay, you guys are in charge. You're cutting the checks, you're making the rules. And he was— it was the exercise of empathy. This is how you guys want to have things done now. It's on me to either do it that way, quit, or get shown the door. And he had the ability to respect the people that were in charge and say, here's what you want, and we're not breaking the law, and you guys are in charge, so we're going to do it. And he's in company after company that got taken over, survived every takeover, and ended up with a career, in my view, that's— and cut deals with Apple, 'cause the Apple-Pixar deal, Pixar-Disney deal was his handiwork. One of the best deals in the history of business. That's how you begin to survive. So if you were to ask Iger, he would've said, these changes are happening for me and not to me.

Huge, huge mindset change. And as someone who was fired 7 years ago because I outgrew the company, I hated it in the moment. And I love it today. So your future, don't future cast negatively. You never know. It could be the turning point or jump off point of a lifetime cuz it was for your girl. Okay. I have one last question.

And, and if you, if you let me throw one more in on top of that, cuz what I love about that example, guy, a guy named Harvey McKay wrote a book last century called Fired Up. And all these phenomenally successful people that their success journey started when they got fired. And that's what you were just talking about now.

I'm gonna go find that book and I'm gonna write myself into the last chapter. So thank you for mentioning that, Chris. Okay. I have one last question before I wanna get to how people can actually immerse themselves in your work and become a part and really advance themselves and be around that next level competitor, which is your team and your peeps. How do you respond to people saying, oh, Chris, I'm using AI now to help me negotiate. What could the AI be missing if somebody's just going to AI to say, okay, how do I negotiate? Is— what do I write? Is AI nailing it or is there, is there a gap between AI and actual human negotiation?

The human touch is still necessary. Now we're all using AI simultaneously in my company. And I was talking about it with my head of coaching yesterday. And the truism is you're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by somebody who's using AI. And what we're finding in our negotiations, we filter this stuff. I know people out there are feeding my book into ChatGPT and using it to help their negotiations. It's a great idea, but you have to then have the fundamental understanding of finding out when your AI is on the target and when it's missed. Or when it's close and it needs your slight adjustment to get it right. So we're using AI all over the place. I love it. Look at it as a great augmentation so that you can focus your thinking on a precise thing that you as a human bring, as a human being bring to the equation that in my view, AI will never duplicate.

Well, I just like to use the real-time example that you gave us, which was You are mentoring and leading this person on your team. You're sitting there giving him all the information that's in— don't split the difference, never split the difference. Well, you got to a point where he still wasn't applying it in real time. You had to jump in and pattern interrupt. You had to jump in and say, I can see he's putting too much pressure on himself. Sometimes what we have to understand is it takes a human-trained eye that only has seen through experience of things going wrong, not just going by the book, which we all know life does not always do. So if people do wanna learn, Chris, it, you know, in real time from pros like you and your team, how can they work with you?

All right. So the best thing to do is first of all, go to our website, blackswanltd.com. Now we have a, a brand new environment, product, community that we just started a year ago. It's a Black Swan Negotiation Community. Now you can go in there and sign in for free and start to get interaction with other people that are getting better at negotiation right now, as soon as you sign in. And our top performing people that spend a lot of money on us with coaching are in there a couple times a week practicing because you have to do it and practice it to be as good as you possibly can. I use the Tiger Woods analogy all the time. While Tiger Woods was winning the Masters regularly, he was still practicing more than he was playing for real. So you want to— if you want to— and he never compared himself to his competitors. He'd win the Masters and they'd say, what do you think? And he says, well, I could get better. He loved getting better. And so you got to practice to get better. And you can join the community for free and start practicing with people in your profession or with your same struggles.

Right now. That'll get you ready. And our next upcoming training, our Professional Deal Maker Days, coming up in Las Vegas, May 15th. Now, these are not cheap. And if you are ready and you're making more than minimum wage, then you're going to make your money back the same day. Now, if the, the deals that you've got going right now are not at the level where you can afford a deal maker, a professional deal maker, they join a community. And a year from now, not only will you be having a lot of fun with this stuff— we all talk about how much fun this is— you will have made enough money that our training events are going to, are going to be very cheap to you. And so give yourself a chance to get up to the level where you continue to invest in yourself. The secondary benefit is that you're going to make more money. The primary benefit is you're going to have delightful conversations every day if you want to.

I love that. I love how you apply it to— this works for parenting teens, as we were talking about before we got on air, right? Just normal relationships. Better your relationships, better yourself. And Chris, that's what I appreciate so much about you. You take all this wisdom that you learned through FBI hostage negotiation and apply it into being a parent, into being a spouse, into being a boss, a friend. A leader, a salesperson, whatever it may be. And we can all get better. Like you said, it's all about the level of the people we're surrounding ourselves with. So thank you for this opportunity for people to join the community, to meet you in Vegas, May 15th at your event, to learn firsthand from you and your team and for all the work that you're doing. I will link everything in the show notes so that you can meet up with Chris in Vegas. You can join the community and you can take yourself to the next level. Chris Voss. Thank you so much for being here today.

Heather, you're wonderful. Thanks for having me on.

All right, guys, until next week, keep creating your confidence. You know I will be. I'm going to make it my own. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Come on this journey with me.