Pro negotiator on body language and the “power of nice” | with Andres Lares

Say somebody was asking you to come up with a 100-hour training on negotiations, what percentage of the time would you actually include reading body language in the training? I would guess zero, but I'm curious what you would say to that. Well, I mean, 100 hours is a long time, so I'd probably put a two to five hours type of thing. Oh, yeah? Okay. And so very, very minor amount. You know the biggest factor being how much we do that? I think it's an amazing question because it's opportunity cost, right? If I'm covering behavior in body language, I'm not covering something else. So I like that where you're forced to kind of make the tradeoffs. So the one other thing I would say is if this was a class for a very entry level, zero. Absolute zero. If this was a class for very advanced, it would grow. That was Andres Louris, a professional negotiator and the CEO of Shapiro Negotiations Institute. He's also the co-author of a book titled Persuade, the four-step process to influence people and decisions. As you may know, if you've listened to this podcast in the past, I'm interested in practical applications of reading and using behavior. And I'm also interested in conflict dynamics, having written a couple books on political polarization. Negotiation is an area that involves both of these topics. So I've been interested in talking to a professional negotiator for quite a while. I'll also say that next week I'll be talking to the well-known FBI hostage negotiator Gary Nesner, author of Stalling for Time, also known for being one of the lead hostage negotiators at Waco during the Waco siege. So that interview with Gary will be another episode focused on negotiations and obviously more volatile, chaotic situations. If you appreciate the work I do with this podcast, please give me a subscribe on YouTube or Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. The more subscribes and listens and episode shares I get, the more I am motivated to keep working on this podcast. Topics Andres and I discuss in this talk include the role of reading body language in negotiations, the role of adjusting one's own behavior to influence others, the downsides and self-harm that can result from highly aggressive, when-at-all-costs approaches to negotiation, the so-called power of nice in negotiations, a principle which Shapiro Negotiations Institute is founded upon, sports contracts and negotiations, how realistic the movie Jerry Maguire was, lesser-known tactics in negotiations, the benefits of negotiating away from the public eye, the optimal amount of eye contact, and other topics. Along the way, Andres includes some negotiation examples and anecdotes from his career. If you're interested in jumping to the behavior-related discussion, that starts at about 30 minutes into this episode. A bit more about Andres' career taken from the Shapiro Negotiations Institute website. Andres' expertise is in deal coaching live negotiations, and is focused on sports clients such as the San Antonio Spurs, Cleveland Indians, Cleveland Browns, Milwaukee Brewers, Oklahoma City Thunder, and Brooklyn Nets. He also works in several capacities with clients across a wide range of industries. Andreas has guest lectured on the topic of negotiation and influencing at various universities and conferences, including Ohio University, University of Baltimore, University of Maryland, Queens University, University of Iowa, and the National Sports Forum. He annually teaches a highly sought-after course on sports negotiation at Johns Hopkins University. Okay, here's the talk with Andres Lares. Hi, Andres. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. Excited to chat today. So maybe we could talk first about what the day-to-day work is like at SNI. What kind of projects do you all generally work on, if you'd care to share that? Yeah, for sure. So we are a global negotiation influence training company. So this is a little bit of everything, but I would say most projects for us are a usually kind of Fortune 5000 type of company. a larger enterprise company comes to us and says, hey, whether it's our sales team or procurement team or project managers or leaders need to improve their negotiation influencing skills or there's a specific challenge around negotiations or influencing. And so that's really what we're trying to address. Sometimes it's at the leadership level and it's kind of small scale, very deep. Sometimes it's sales or procurement that can be very large organizations within a company. And so that's really kind of, for the most part, the work that we're doing. And it's typically global. So the global work is we train in seven languages. And so I think that's one of the reasons we've gravitated towards more the enterprise. Not that that's all we train, but the enterprise is because we are typically able to kind of complement those needs. I know Ron Shapiro, the founder of SNI, got his start with a focus in sports athlete negotiations. Is that still a big focus or not so much these days? It is. So what's interesting about it, so Ron is still with us and kind of an advisor to the firm. So he ran the company for the first 23 years. and then about seven eight years ago uh we took over uh so uh my partner jeff and i have been there already for many years in my case seven or eight in his case probably 15 and we took over and so it's continued very much in the same way it was functioning for the first 22 or 23 years it's become a little more global that piece of it has expanded some but but the sports i mean a couple things one is the um kind of power and nice mentality and we could talk more about that today is still very much the case. And then the other piece of it is the sports kind of evolution and, you know, kind of that aspect is still very much involved in that we will help teams negotiate player contracts and large sponsorship negotiations across mainly the four major sports in the U.S. We're doing a little bit now in soccer, or as the rest of the world calls it, football, but the biggest and really kind of the focus of the four major sports. And so that still remains. But the one thing I find very interesting is, you know, we think of sports teams, they sell for a lot of money. I mean, the Lakers are valued at $10 billion recently in a sale, but they're actually really kind of small businesses in terms of revenues, right? And so the valuations are very large for lots of reasons, but, and we can talk about supply and demand and why that's the case, but in terms of business size and sheer, you know, straight revenues and P&L, they're not really, you know, anywhere near the size of a Fortune 500 might be. So interestingly enough, the bigger growth comes from the non-sports side because those companies are so much bigger. Besides sports athletes, do you deal with a lot of other personal contract, career contract assignments in general? So not really, because we are exclusively really a B2B company. And so as a matter of fact, what makes us unique is that we are not doing the agreement, The negotiation is only happening from the team side. We're advising them. We are not representing players. So in my background and certainly Ron's background, he was a very, very successful sports agent for many years. And I did a little bit of a stint working at a few different agencies as well. But this is all on the team side. And so it's all entirely B2B. So we're coming into a company to train them, helping a team do these. But we're never kind of doing the one-off, hey, can you help me with this agreement or that agreement? The closest we'll come is might be an M&A, for example. where someone's buying a company and it's a very large transaction, we may advise on that project, but that's realistically closer to the B2B than it is the B2C. How realistic was Jerry Maguire? So I think there's some pieces realistic. I think so. I was just saying this the other day. So I worked with and for three or four agents in my time before kind of doing this and transitioning to the team side and this kind of work. And they were very, very good people. that cared about their clients, that, in my opinion, negotiated the right way. Like, they really were staying up in many ways. And so I think, you know, Jerry Maguire, I don't think positions agents necessarily as bad people and they have kind of a bad reputation. But I think, so that piece of it, if anything, the fact that he cares so much, I think that's a really good representation because I think the best agents really are like that. And the wheeling and dealing, I think, is pretty accurate in the sense that, you know, if you're working in a space, if you think about it, you know, an athlete that you might be representing if you're an agent is 19 years old and signs a 50 100 million dollar contract i mean that's more money than most people know what to do with and if you're 17 18 19 20 years old you know that's life-changing and you know all of those things i think are pretty accurately portrayed in the sense that you know it there's just so much going on beyond just kind of the on the field performance right these are people right it's not like you're making a manufacturing a widget and that's what the product is in this case it's people and so whether they, you know, break up with their spouse or having trouble with their dad or sister passed away or whatever it may be, all these things affect them. And so I think some of those things are captured very well in Jerry Maguire for both the agent and the players. Yeah, I imagine it's like a lot of movies are probably over exaggerated. The, you know, it kind of painted him as like the only person that cares and everybody else is, you know, out for, you know, very pessimistic, cynical reasons. And I imagine it's not nearly that cynical as a whole industry. Probably not bad, but I would say it's a little bit like used car sales, I think, fits in that category. People think of kind of these areas where – and I think part of that is because there's not a ton of regulation. I mean there's more and more independent leagues, right? The NFL has more regulation than others, for example. So being an NFL agent, I believe you have to have a graduate degree and there's some kind of restrictions. So the more regulation there is, the harder it is to get into. I think that typically will filter out some of the less serious people. But the part that you can't strip away, and there's a little bit of this in the movie that is really kind of so unique to it, is that the constant poaching of their athletes. And so if Zach is representing Player X, and Player X is a great player, and he's up for a contract renewal extension, it's those kind of things that really, it's like it's nonstop. It's in the locker room, and it's indirect. And then it's then you've got, you know, it's essentially tampering of all sorts happening throughout the life of the contract. And so that's constant. So you never know if you're going to keep your athlete. And so then that also means the agent is sometimes incentivized to do things to keep the client more than what's best for the client. And so that's the one thing I would say that I bring that up because that's from an economics perspective. I think the incentives are not always aligned. And that's just the realities of the business. And that's the piece that I think makes it very complicated. But one of the pieces. Yeah, thanks for that. Do you have certain stories, anecdotes that stand out from negotiations you've worked on that you're especially proud of or that stood out as being especially interesting you care to share? So I'm proud of, I think, you know, I think the we talked a little bit about how the power of Mace. So the power of Mace is the is the book that's really kind of the basis for this company. So the first version was written by Ron, you know, 25 years ago. There's been a couple of editions ever since. But really, that's the core of kind of the philosophy that we teach. And so I think for us, any of the proud stories are based around coming to an agreement that's maximizing the objectives that you have, but at least satisfying the other party. And so I think one memorable for me is the first thing that I did when I came to SNI, actually the reason I came to SNI about 15, 16 years ago, was that so Ron was the agent for Joe Maurer. And Joe Maurer is an incredible person, an incredible athlete. I mean, he was the Gatorade All-American football player, and he was the number one pick in the Major League Baseball draft. So that tells you what kind of athlete he is. And what made him, I think, really special was he was a Minnesota kid who got drafted first overall by the Minnesota Twins. And so Ron represented him, and so that's kind of why I came to assist. That was my first project, really. and it was about how unique he wanted to stay in Minnesota and would be willing to take less and wanted to kind of leave the Twins as much room as possible to build the championship team around him, but he also wanted to be paid fairly. And so that negotiation where it was about maximizing what his total compensation was, but it was trying to do it in a way that was not the only objective. Very important to him was staying there if he could. He could have gotten more from going to Boston or going to New York, for example. And so I think that was very successful in the sense that, you know, his many generations set up. So he ended up doing an eight-year, $184 million contract. That's a lot of money. I think it was the second largest or third largest at the time. But he stayed in Minnesota in a way that was feasible for the club to continue to function, right? It didn't destroy the club and make them totally not competitive. And unfortunately, he ended up having some injury trouble, in particular being a catcher. I guess, sadly, kind of what happens. But that's just one example for me. And that was one that kicked things off here where it was so refreshing to see an athlete that wasn't just like, I want to get paid the absolute most amount of money. And the reality is that's pretty common. I think they want to make as much money as possible. That's usually not the only thing they care about. I read The Power of Nice and I really like the points about coming up with creative solutions that meet both sides' desires and goals. goals. And I think Ron made very good case in there for how often we instinctively see a negotiation situation or a conflict situation as, you know, somebody is going to win it and somebody is going to lose it. And that's kind of an instinctual and an instinctual way to see things often. And he made some good points about how so many times there's more creative ways to look at things and parse who gets what and including, you know, non-financial aspects of the agreement. Would you care to talk more about that? Because I think that's such an important point, not just for negotiations, but for, you know, any kind of conflict situation in general. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, I think that's very much kind of in that power of nice philosophy in that you've really got to be, I mean, it comes from an emotional intelligence perspective, right? It's, you've got understand what the asset cares about. And part of your objective would be to do that. And so earlier when I said we're really a B2B company, B2B negotiations, and that means out of sports, right? If you a procurement agent at a large aerospace company or you a salesperson at a tech company I mean the selling of something or the buying of something or all of these deals are the beginning or the extension of a relationship So it just doesn't go away, right? If you land a $100 million deal, if you're selling for a tech company or you land an airplane part that you're buying $50 million worth of for the next five years, that's the beginning of the extension of a relationship. And so this concept that you're going to do whatever it takes to maximize at all costs doesn't set you up well for the life of the deal and then certainly not the renewal. And I think that kind of mentality. And so one of the best examples, I think a very simple one, and Ron talks about it in one of his books, is he was brought in to help settle a dispute and mediate a little bit. So I mentioned, we typically don't do that, but there's some exception, and this was one of them, that for pro bono, he was helping settle a dispute where a concert master, who I didn't know this at the time, is kind of the second position in an orchestra, right? So the concert master was world class, and he wanted an increase in pay because his pay was relatively not kind of up to par with other concert masters and other similar orchestras. And so they were at an impasse because there's a pay scale that you have with an orchestra that's collective, you know, It's almost a quote of a CBA at the time. This was some years ago. And so it's collectively bound. You can't, or collectively bargainably bound. And so you can't really just pay whatever you want. There's kind of maxes and minimums and things like that. And so they were at an impasse because the orchestra would have been willing to pay more but couldn't pay more. But they really weren't providing anything to the concept master. And so what I loved about it is really the way that Ron found a solution was that he kind of pulled away from it all. and met first with the concertmaster and then met second with the orchestra leader completely separately. And it was not about the negotiation. It was not about the pay. It was not about the precedence. It was just about what they're looking to accomplish. And when he realized very quickly that the concertmaster loves the orchestra, wants to continue to be a part of it, but just wants to be really appreciated. And once you realize the orchestra really appreciated the concertmaster and they thought it would have been worth the increase in pay, but just couldn't do it because of the restrictions, the solution was easy. Anyone would come up with it, right? The solution was they could use points on the credit card to upgrade into first class when they travel. They could give them a bigger office there. They could do a piece in every one of the shows that would give appreciation and recognition to the concert master. And really, you could kind of separate them in a way where it still didn't kind of break the rules. And so the solution itself is very simple that anyone would come up with. But the way he got there where he just kind of pulled everything away for a second and said, okay, why is this happening? Right? Like, why aren't you paying him more? Oh, we're trying to, you know, and all those explanations are really getting at the root interest. And so to me, that's the win-win, right? You can, that overused cliche, that's where it's at its core. That's really understanding what are you trying to accomplish? What am I? And then finding a way to make it work. And that changes the perspective when you're actually genuinely thinking about the other party. And you touched on this briefly. I really liked in Ron's book also the, yeah focusing on uh the long-term aspect of of doing these kinds of working on these kinds of agreements and negotiations because uh so many people it seems like so many people have this uh sense that you need to be really hard-edged and when it all costs to be a strong negotiator but as ron you know makes the points in his book doing that too much taking that approach will really burn so many bridges and then people won't want to deal with you. And, you know, nobody wants to nobody wants to make a deal with you. And but in some of these people's people's mind. And he uses the example from the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko kind of mentality. And he makes it, you know, Ron makes a good case that in the real world, if you're going to be doing these things for a long time, there's very big downsides to taking that kind of, you know, I'm going to win. Everybody's going to lose approach. And I'm curious if any examples of that stand out for you in your career. Yeah, I mean, a couple quick ones. So one is in sports. I think I like the sports example here because it's a closed system. So if you look at the NBA, there's only a certain number of teams. It's called 30 teams. And so that means there's only 30 general managers making decisions. And so what happens is you get general managers that there is trust. So they're trusted general managers in the sense that if you have a conversation with them, it will not get out. In the sense that you could talk about trade opportunities and you could have confidence that it won't be leaked. And you have somewhere that's not the case. And so what's interesting is I like that close system because there are teams that I can say, you know, based on experience with certainty, that do not get called for trade opportunities, even when they would have a very good matching set of assets that would work for a trade. because the other general managers in the league simply don't trust them. And that can be because they're very difficult to work with. It would take forever to get a deal done, or that because they leaked the news. And so what's interesting is I love that example because it is very clearly detrimental that your being difficult to deal with is costing you a potential trade opportunity. So that's one. And then kind of the non-sports world, if I think of companies that we haven't done work with because it's not a match, but for example, Walmart is known for really, really pressing its partners. We've had some clients that work with Walmart and struggle with some of those negotiations. And they struggle with them because Walmart is, you know, to be able to provide a very low cost to their clients, they need to really squeeze every dollar they can and maximize on the purchasing side. And so we have some clients that just will not sell through Walmart, even though that would be a massive account. Versus, for example, you look at the same clients, and again, this is kind of secondhand more than anything, but with clients we work with closely, there'll be some that Costco, for example, is not like that. They sell at very large scale, but they partner and they truly care about it. And Costco has that reputation about caring about their partners or employees, but everybody. And so they really care about it. So they're not the type to say, okay, Zach, show me your P and L and I'm going to drive you down. So you're making 5% profit on my deal. And if you don't do that, I'm not going to work with you. The exact opposite. It's, Hey, we want to partner with you. We want this to work for you. We want this to work for us. And so and then, you know, if you go further down the chain, there is a there are a couple of negotiation training companies that still train that way. And so do we think it works? No. But in a good way, the market decides for itself. Those companies train companies that we potentially would not be a good fit for because we just don't believe in that philosophy. And equally, there's quite a few, especially over the last few years, have come to us saying, look, that's the way we negotiated. That's the way we were trained, but we just don't believe in this anymore. We want to move over to this more emotionally intelligent kind of relationship-based approach. And so it's been very successful for us. But I can say, you know, not everyone does it that way. So we don't believe in it, but it's, you know, it's tough to say objectively it doesn't work. But certainly that would be our opinion on it. And you touched on this a couple of times already, but the, uh, Ron also talks about in his book, the power of nice. he talks about the strength of talking away from the public eye and having more private conversations, because often when you do something in public, people need to posture and need to try to win public favor and win the argument in the public eye. So stepping out of the public eye can be very valuable. And he had some really good anecdotes about that in there. And I'm curious, you know, do you have any stories to share on that front? Well, so sometimes we get asked to do a little PR and interview on negotiations with Major League Baseball when they're doing their last CBN negotiation or, you know, steel workers or, you know, auto workers, any of those kind of big unions as they do it. And one of the things we talk about is always that if it's going to the public, then typically you're in real trouble. because if it's going to the public, it's signaling that there's kind of a loss in confidence, right? And so if Zach and I could work through it together, then we would work through it together just easier. You start adding things outside of your control, these externalities, if you start bringing in public opinion. And so I think if you're playing those games, now, I get it, right? If Zach thinks that he can get very significant public support and so he decides to play the game publicly, then all of a sudden there's some levers change but the question is does that outweigh the loss and trust from the other party and and that's you know that's really the kind of the the lubricant that makes it work right if a negotiation there's there's a lack of trust there's less sharing if there's less sharing you're able to reach less optimal agreements that and that's that's the one other thing about this too is that it isn't necessarily black when people think oh the power of nice guys so it's you know we share everything we hope they share back the reality is there's some things that we talk about in our training is that understanding you're kind of prodding and you're trying to share some information to see if the other side will share back. And if you're in one of these collaborative negotiations, which are optimal, you're going to get to the best place because you both share. So now you're looking at a bigger pie that you can divide. But if the other side's not playing along, then you can still be nice about it, but you're certainly sharing less information. You're adjusting your approach. And so then you're really trying to focus more on how, where you divide the pie, not where you first grow the pie, then divide it, if that makes sense. So it isn't to say that you're just kind of sharing information at all times and being, you know, kind of negligent in that way or being unrealistic in that way. You do need to there's some things you do to feel out the other negotiator and decide how much you share and when to share and how much to collaborate. Yeah, that reminds me of I was reading Gary Nesner's book, Stalling for Time, which is he's an ex-FBI hostage negotiator. And he talks about the power paradox or the paradox of power or something about when you push other people, that can result in them pushing you back. And I think it seems like in a lot of negotiations, people don't understand how that conflict can, you know, if they don't manage the relationship, that can really end up hurting them in ways that they don't foresee. Well, one quick thing I would say about a real life example that I think I'll say generally, just because I'm not sure if I have the approval to say Xacoable company, but it's a very large aerospace company that reached out just many years ago, maybe 70 years ago. And they were able to do that. They were able to really leverage and press hard all of their suppliers because they were such a big buyer, essentially. Right. They really had the economies of scale there. And so everybody wanted to work with them because they're buying so much. and what they said years ago is they decided seven eight years ago when they reached out you know things start to change if what we've noticed is if um if things change a little bit in one small situation like you know you're buying a lighting system for your airplanes and all of a sudden a couple of the other suppliers of lighting systems are no longer in business we have to buy from them and then they get leverage they really are aggressive with us because they're kind of trying to make up for all the leverage you've had over the years and so which I give a lot of credit, the leadership for the procurement team said, we can't have that long term, it's going to be a liability. So before any major issues came up, they ended up changing the way they negotiate where they're much more thoughtful about what the other side needs to get out of it. And they really changed the way they negotiate. Now, it's not that all of a sudden, you know, they started paying 20% more across the board for products, but they would be thoughtful more about if it's a tiny company, are you really going to press them on net 120 days? or do you want to make a net 30 so their business is in a better shape and so they're able to supply you more effectively because you know net 120 for a tiny company you can afford it while they can't and you know there's many examples of that and so what i felt was incredible and this could be one of the other rewarding ones when covid hit and there was a lot of shortages they had now for three plus years been kind of adjusting the way they were perceived the market and their relationships with partners. And so they, in many cases, in most cases, were not getting squeezed back out of that payback for all the leverage, but other way around. And so I think that was the test case where two or three years later, you know, something completely outside of expectation that anyone's control tested whether they had advanced there or not. And the answer was an absolute yes. And so I think that was, that was definitely kind of another proud example of this really working and being put to the test. So you're the co-author of a book called persuade the four-step process to influence people in decisions. Would you care to talk about any principles from there or principles outside of that book that you think might be lesser known that apply to negotiations? So I think the one that makes the most sense is talk about kind of the four-step process that we really outlined in the book. That's kind of the basis for the book. And I would say this is not completely novel. And actually, very openly, we talk about how this comes from Aristotle. And so I will, you know, it's impossible not to give Aristotle credit for this. So he in 350 BC taught ethos, pathos, logos, and that's at the root of the first three of our four-step process. A quick note here to shorten the length of the episode a bit, I'll summarize the points that Andreas talked about. Drawing on Aristotle's classic framework of ethos, pathos, and logos, Andreas explains persuasion as a four-step process. First is credibility. If people don't see you as credible, nothing else matters. Second is emotion. People make decisions emotionally and only later justify them with logic, which is why factors like scarcity, reciprocity, and obligation are so powerful. Third comes logic, which helps people rationalize and defend a decision, often most effectively through clear stories rather than abstract arguments. Finally, Andres and his co-authors add a fourth step that Aristotle didn't formalize, facilitating action. This means reducing friction and perceived risk through guarantees, options, or flexibility, so that saying yes feels safer and easier. Together, these four steps explain how influence actually works in real-world decisions. Okay, back to the talk. For this podcast, I sometimes get into behavior, reading people type topics. And one of my goals with this podcast, occasional goals is to focus on real world practical impacts of reading and understanding behavior, whether that's nonverbal behavior, verbal patterns, what have you. So I'm curious to ask you, you know, obviously there's a lot of exaggerated and just plain false information about behavior out there, including running the spectrum from very irresponsible and just plain deceptive kind of behavior expert stuff to more credible applications And so I curious in the realm of negotiation how do you view reading behavior Do you see it as a highly important thing when it comes to reading nonverbal or facial expression things Do you see it as a kind of a side thing that is occasionally useful? Maybe you could talk about your view of that realm. Yeah. So it's a fascinating area and one that we have spent a lot of time, especially more recently over the last few years, investigating. So I think we lightly touched on that and maybe five, six, seven years ago, we started doing more and more. And certainly we published the book. It's a full chapter in the book and we've invested a lot of time. It's a continued research because there's just so much there. So, you know, our stance on it is that it is definitely a tool in the sense that there's lots of tools you're using when you're influencing and negotiating and reading body language and behavior is important. I think what we find and certainly we find the same thing. There's a lot of, you know, I would say kind of nonsense out there. It's hard to separate the signal from the noise, but really it's about consistency. And so what I mean by that is generally, you know, there's some behavior. For example, I think the average person would be able to look at a picture of me crossing my arms like this and say that probably is a bad sign. Right. In the sense that it's either neutral or negative, let's say they would say. And if we were having if we're having a conversation in a networking event and I went from staring directly at you with my body position at you and I turned 45 degrees, and I was continuing to talk, but I had my body now shifted away from you, also probably either neutral or negative. And then if my hands were open and then my hands started to go towards kind of more of a clenched fist, so those are objectively, typically, likely, neutral or negative. But the concept that I have crossed my arms when we're in a conversation does not mean, and is actually very low probability, it means I don't like what Zach's talking about. I am displeased with the question that he asked. If now you are doing multiple things together, if the rate of my voice, the tone of my voice, those could be two potential, or I'm combining the clenched fist and the crossed arms and the 45 degree away or looking away more, whatever it may be. When there's consistent multiple aspects that are doing the same thing, then you can read more into it. And so the idea is, I think, ironically, while we have a chapter on it, and we're talking about some of these things, the arms crossed, the fists, all these things, it's not so much about looking out for those, because I think naturally we see those. It's more about being thoughtful about you need to see multiple things coming together, because I could be crossing my arms because I'm cold. And you overreact and change the subject and now start getting really sensitive about whether you think this is not resonating with me. But the reality is there's nothing there. not to mention that if you typically were a very strong communicator you could ask something that would help you know give them a chance and an out to change the topic of conversation for example and see if they take it or not so it's really kind of the you want to see the full body of work what they're saying what they're doing and one last thing i would say you know curious to your take as well is that this also falls under so dr moravian at ucla uh former professor there um We had something called the Moravian law, that a lot of people call it, which is that 93% of what you communicate is not the words that you say. So it's the body language or the tone. Now, we've done quite a bit of research on this, and I'm not sure that we're finding the same 93%. But whether that is or is not, I think it is absolutely the case that what you say is a small part of, whether it's 7% or 20%, And, you know, how you say it, your body language, all of those things are very, very important. So even just shedding light on that is super, super important, I think, for kind of the behavior, body language, modeling, predicting, reading, all those things. A quick note here. You've likely seen this kind of statistic that Andreas is talking about. You can find so many people repeat this idea that communication is anywhere from 70-something percent to 90-something percent nonverbal. and this is just a pretty egregious misapplication and misinterpretation of what Moravian had researched and what he was talking about. Also even the work he did could be criticized in various ways. Clearly our words convey a huge amount of meaning. If they didn't you wouldn't be able to get much meaning from the words I'm speaking now. If you want to learn more about that claim and the often repeated bad interpretations of that one good resource is to check out the wikipedia for albert morabian and to look at the sections about misinterpretations and criticisms of his work okay back to the talk these things can be hard to talk about in nuanced ways because it's like a you've got the uh i mean obviously there are obvious examples of people's body language and facial expressions, communicating information, right? Like that's, that's true. We're all aware of that every day ways that happen, that happens. And then B, you've got the two separate areas of, you know, reading other people and making use of behavior. And then the area of like finessing and manipulating your own presentation to other people, which, you know, those can be seen as entirely different topics because you could be, you know, adjusting your presentation, even if you know that the things you do don't necessarily mean much, but they might have an impact on other people. And then, yeah, so as I've told you, you know, to be transparent, people who listen to this, my podcast, and I've told you, my view is, it's actually when you look at, try to look at practical, real world examples of making use of other people, reading other people's behavior, I find that it's really hard to find really practical examples of how this plays out in, say, law enforcement or negotiation. Because, for example, I think a lot of examples say you were in negotiation or similar situations. I think a lot of the examples you would find of, say, people like, you know, you reading someone for them being upset about something somebody said. I think in a lot of those examples, they're not actually trying to hide that, right? Like they're assuming they're like pretty decent, you know, fairly skilled people. I think a lot of the examples of them say, you know, rolling their eyes or getting a tensed face. If they're upset about something in a negotiation, they're probably gonna say something about that. So when it comes to like the practical uses of like when reading someone might actually sway your approach or decision. I think it's hard to find many of those practical examples. And that's not to say that it doesn't happen because I think I think I'm pretty good at, you know, getting a sense of whether, you know, some someone might be reacting in a certain way to something somebody said. But I think and maybe maybe there's value to getting a sense of that earlier rather than later. Right. But I'm curious, you know, are there examples you can think of where reading somebody actually changed a major decision about how you approached a negotiation or tax you took? So this will be a kind of a crazy two very short stories that deviate us, but hopefully are interesting to think about for both us and for listeners. So one is, if I look at, so we've got a deep edge of facilitators that are world-class. So I do very limited facilitation because we have better than me, right? So just that's the reality. You've got to be self-aware of what you're particularly good at. So I do more of the advising and run the company, but we have so many very skilled facilitators. So what I like to do from time to time is I'll kind of, if I'm anywhere near them, I'll go watch them do the training programs. And it can be training programs of six people in a boardroom or it could be a hundred people in a big conference for a couple hours or it could be a keynote for 2,000 people. And what I will find is that our best facilitators are able to make some adjustments that the audience doesn't realize took place, but I do because I know what the plan content was and what the plan was. And they make the adjustments based on reading the audience. They may cut a little bit of content because they didn't think it was resonating. They may speed something up or add something no one will ever know and that is done entirely on kind of reading the room and that is and read the room and that is 100 behavior like our body language because you know while a few people may chime in even our keynotes tend to be pretty interactive but that's getting a sampling of one two three four five people i don't could be twenty a hundred five hundred a thousand and so that is now in their case i think there's some of it is natural and i think a lot of it is experience-based. They've done a thousand presentations. Right. They get a sense when people are like, you know, starting to look at their watch or shuffling a bit more than usual or like looking away. And they catch it early. And that's the difference, right? I think, you know, so someone who's not skilled would catch it towards the end. It's kind of too late to shift. They are so skilled, they can catch it early, make the adjustment and do it so smoothly. No one even knows they made an adjustment. So I would say there is definitely and if you look at very very good presenters like in front of a boardroom they're able to engage like i think zach's going to be a problem and so they'll engage zach before he has shown almost anybody else in the room that he's going to be a problem that might be because of some reactions that you've had so i i do think there's some of it there but again i think generally it's overplayed and then the other one there's a map over to you know when i interviewed a jury uh consultant there was some map over to that you know reading jury's reactions and which I totally, you know, I agree these things can play a role, yeah. And those are natural, right? I mean, if you think about, I can plan, yes, I think something you said earlier, I think is so important and we just, it has to be talked about again, is that a good negotiator, a sophisticated negotiator, will be responding with both what he says and his tone and his body language, right? So we talk about a tactic, maybe the wince. This is now an extreme, but I think it's a good example. that if we're working through and I'm expecting you to make a pitch and I'm hoping you pitch something at $100,000, right? Let's say you're selling me something and I'm hoping the pitch will be at $100,000. If you come in at $120,000, if I'm a sophisticated negotiator, not only will I say, well, that's too high right in the moment, I'm probably going to flinch and be like, ooh, $120,000. And, you know, there may be authentic. Exactly. Eyebrows will raise and my head will go backwards some and my hands will open some and my eyes will open up. And so, and that, now part of some of that is natural, right? You were hoping for a hundred and it's 120. It's more than you thought, but you exaggerated some because you're sophisticated and you thought about beforehand. If they do, you know, if it's more than 120, if it was more than 150, I might say, there's just no deal to be had here and walk away. Now that might've been pre-planned. And if you're sophisticated, you may do that. And so, you know, then you're reading into something, but that body language is really kind of the body of the work. It would have been the same if they had no body language, if you were just on a phone call and they said, wow, that's crazy, right? Because you can't see the body language in a phone call. But because they're aware of all that's being communicated, they're thoughtful about the body language along with the tone along with what they say. So that's that one. And then the last kind of crazy thought, if it's worth thinking about, is there was a former classmate of mine from many, many years ago. And they're doing a bunch of research. And I came across it some years later when they were doing, I think their master's or PhD, around DJs. And they would also do the same thing. There's some DJs that are particularly in tune with the audience and can change the beats per minute, the BPM of the songs they're playing and adjust the style in order to engage more dancing. So they would literally have cameras, would track how much dancing was occurring, and he could track alcohol sales, these two factors that would say people were having a good time. And they did a bunch of kind of experimentation and research. And there was clearly some DJs that were more capable of adjusting to kind of that going downhill and then picking it back up and vice versa and things that they would be doing outside of the set that was predetermined. And so, again, I think – and I know that is totally outside of the space we're talking about in some ways, but I think exactly in this space we're talking about others where that does have an impact. But the Millandar question is how much of it is nature versus nurture, how much can be trained, how much is natural. So that opens up a whole can of worms. But I think it's worth kind of being open to the fact that it can influence and it can be improved. But I think we should be realistic with both of those. Yeah, it's tough to talk about because some people, you know, in a lot of discussions, there can be this kind of like binary sense of like, you think it's meaningful or it's not. And the thing I try to focus on is like, well, no, I think it does play a role. But I also think like the amount of there's also really exaggerated, a lot of exaggerated information about how big a role it plays. And I guess, you know, one way to ask the question to you is, say you somebody was asking you to come up with a a training like a hundred hour training on negotiations you know what what percentage of the time would you actually uh include like reading body language in the in the training because i i would guess like zero but i'm i'm curious what you would say well i mean a hundred hours a long time so i'd probably put a you know two to five hours type of thing um okay and you know so very very minor amount the you know the biggest factor would be and how much we do that? I think it's an amazing question because it's opportunity cost, right? If I'm covering behavior and body language, I'm not covering something else. So I like that where you're forced to kind of make the trade-offs. So the one other thing I would say is if this was a class for a very entry level, zero, absolute zero. If this was a class for very advanced, it would grow. And I think it would grow because what I have found is when we do this type of work, the mere modules on body language are i find increase the emotional intelligence of the participants so i it's and one of the things that we've done and actually is if i force you to try to look very carefully at what you're doing with your eyebrows and your arms and your legs and but in subtle things you may never remember that and use that again but i have seen for sure with confidence that you will always be more thoughtful what the other side's doing and there's this level of authentic interest and what the other side is saying and how they're saying it, that that in itself actually improves performance. Certainly, I can say that with confidence. Right. Just becoming aware of it more. Yeah. Knowing it's a dimension of something. Exactly. What's the, it's like the, what was the factory experiment where they said, hey, we're going to watch you and the performance went up. And just because the mirror, we're going to watch you, the performance went up. It had to do with like the lighting that they were doing. And I forget the famous experiment that had that. And that's kind of the example of that. A note here, Andre's response here was interesting to me. It got me thinking about how I would answer that question when it comes to poker If you didn already know I the author of some respected books on poker tells and behavior That work is actually why I ended up creating this podcast in the first place And my own stance is that reading behaviors in game scenarios is entirely different and much more productive than reading behaviors in non-game real-world scenarios. Simply due to non-game scenarios being so much more complex and ambiguous. and due to games involving discrete granular goals and actions and such. But if someone asked me the same question, asked me to create a 100-hour training on teaching people poker and to decide how much I devote to teaching how to read people, I would say something similar here. I would say if it was an entirely amateur, never played poker before audience, I would devote almost no time to reading behavior. I would probably devote maybe one or two hours to the concept, and I would mainly focus it on trying to make players more stoic and not give anything away. Because trying to get beginner players to avoid common behavior leaks is much easier and more useful and more productive than it is to try to get them to successfully read and exploit other players' behavior. There'd be too much opportunity cost to spending much time studying behavior, in other words. The focus for beginning players would be almost entirely strategy if I were doing it. I think Andres might say something similar about this. If it were a class for people entirely new to negotiation, maybe you devote an hour or something to trying to get people to realize the importance of being stoic and to avoid the more obvious leaks of thought and emotion. Making people aware of that dimension of information leakage would on its own make them more stoic and less likely to leak obvious info. And similar to what Andreas says here, if it were more a sophisticated, experienced class of poker players, I would devote a good amount more time to reading people and making use of tells. Maybe that would be like five hours of the 100-hour training, maybe a little more or a little less depending on how experienced they were. For example, if they were highly experienced, that's when I'd start devoting a good amount more hours because there's less opportunity cost to not focusing on strategy, and also more experienced players will be in a better position to understand and make use of tells and so on. This goes along with my recommendations in my own poker tells books and videos where I make it clear to people they should really only be thinking much about poker tells if they are already a strategically strong and quite experienced player. Okay, back to the talk. Yeah, I think another aspect that makes it hard to talk about you briefly touched on is is like some people are just I mean, maybe even most people are pretty good at picking up such things. But then I think you have a certain number of people that are just very bad at such things, which and those are the people that are most likely to be like, oh, I found that training hugely valuable because they're the people that are, you know, maybe maybe even the minor percentage of people that are that are just like wouldn't pick up cues that people are getting impatient in a room. Whereas most people would pick that up pretty easily. So I think that also like muddies the field of like, it can help explain why some people will write reviews of such trainings or such books and be like, I found this all to be entirely common sense. And then other people would perceive the same training and be like, it helped me a lot. Right. So it helps explain that that range. And I somebody pointed out to me recently, a hedge fund, a person who works in hedge funds in New York who was saying, you know, we were talking about I was giving my usual spiel of like, you know, when people ask me about reading behavior and the best, you know, best ways to use that in non-game real world scenarios, I tend to say like, oh, I would I wouldn't focus on that. I would focus on logical deductions about what people say and things like this and actual logical approaches. But he was saying, well, maybe you undervalue behavior because it's more intuitive to you. So you see a lot of the stuff as common sense that other people wouldn't see as common sense. And I thought that was a good point. And I think that helps explain those very different perceptions of the trainings in that area. Yeah. I mean, I think for all these soft skills and it gets exactly spot on where you know you may pick up on things that people don't and vice versa they're going to pick up maybe it's you know the tone or the approach or and i think you know we can all think about that if you know a spouse or a friend where you might leave a party and that certainly happened where it's really interesting if my wife and i are on the ride back and we might talk about conversations that we are both in she'll picked up on something like oh i wonder if this person is doing okay because they seem like they were struggling i didn't pick up on that and and i'm like well you know do you feel like he really likes his job because of this and she's like oh like i didn't get that sense either it's incredible that we're in the same party potentially having in some of this exact same conversations but what we picked up on was was different and so i think that's um and that's you know that's human nature and that's i think that's what makes us all very interesting right if you know because if you're robots then this all goes away right you just say what you mean and it's very direct and there's none of this comes to play. So that's what makes it interesting. Yeah, there are, there are such different skills we have, because I mean, sometimes I'll be completely blind to something and somebody will cue me into some behavior related thing. And I'm like, oh yeah, you're right. How did I miss that? That, that, that was some information. And then other times, you know, other people are blind to things that I thought were very pertinent pieces of information, but yeah, so it is very interesting, the different experiences and skills we all bring to the table. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious in your book, you talked about eye contact and how to approach it. And I'll be transparent. And I've talked on this podcast about how I might be, you know, a bit on the autistic side. I struggled with, I've always struggled with eye contact. It always seemed like something that came very naturally to other people that I had to really think about, like how much is too much, how much is too little. And you talk about that in your book. And I'm curious, is that something you train people on is thinking about eye contact and do some people have a, you know, are some people maybe more like me and need more conscious thought about how to approach those things when it comes to negotiations? This fits into that category where we're, we are trying to push them to think about it more than we are training them to do it. Because I think there's got to be a level of authenticity that if you're feeling very uncomfortable eye contact, we're gonna have to push you somewhat outside of your comfort zone where you're gonna have to do some of it. Otherwise, I mean, there's definitely research to indicate. So this could open up a can of worms, but there's a lot of AI systems that do a lot of analysis of everything we just talked about. Right. So like you're doing a video role play and the system will or could be a real sales call was recorded and they'll analyze everything. And I love it because it brings attention to this. I hate it because we have so much research to indicate that we've done firsthand or secondhand that there's absolutely you cannot say, Zach, 70 percent eye contact is best at all time. You should do that. I mean, that's. Yeah. So you're saying you're saying these people might not know. There are these programs that are analyzing behavior, including eye contact and eye direction and such. And it would tell you after the fact. So, for example, you know, and what happens is what I love about it is we'll come into an organization that says, OK, we want you to train our salespeople to negotiate. And there'll be 500 sellers. And they're using some of these programs that review all of their video calls they have with clients and they'll give them coaching. So what I love about it is you're getting objective coaching in the sense that it is data driven, right? It'll say, for example, definitely if I were to review, so after we do training, sometimes we'll do kind of coaching in small groups. And if I were to review one and I said, Zach, you talk 77% of the time on the sales call. I can say with 99% certainty without looking even more into the sales call, that's probably not good. You should not be doing all the talking if you're a seller. And if you're negotiating on something, that's counterproductive, right? You're missing on so much information, engagement, all these things. And then I would look, how many questions did you ask? And the answer is two. Again, two in 45 minutes, probably not good either. So there's objectivity there. And what I like about it is the application does, or many of them, because there's quite a few, do a very good job of that. What I don't like is they go a lot of stuff further and they say, well, Zach, your eye contact on the screen in the sense that like where you were looking away or whatever maybe was 25% and you really got to get it to 75% when you're talking. And so conceptually, I appreciate the value of eye contact in that again, objectively, eye contact is important. If you totally don't look at someone in the eyes at all, they're going to think you're lying. There's plenty of evidence that they keep looking away and looking down. Right. There's a perception even if it's not true. Yeah. Exactly. You have to think about perceptions even if it's not true. Exactly. And so, yes, being aware of that. But to say that on every sales call, you should be looking 70%, that is such an overgeneralization without kind of understanding context. And that's a bit of a concerning part for me where it's like we're just kind of telling people this is a fact when it's not. And so that's the eye contact for me so people can understand. And so we might show them a video or I might do it with them in a role play up front where they don't know I'm doing this, but I'd be talking to them and I'd say, you know. And so I'd say, what's your confidence in me right now? I'm looking down the entire time. I looked it up at you for two seconds out of the 45-second role play. What's your confidence? And everyone in the room is naturally, it just comes out. They're going to say, you know, two out of ten, they're going to rate it. Yeah, you're shady. Okay, now the next one, I'm going to look at you quite a bit, not ridiculous, not 100%, but most of the time. I'm going to increase the confidence in my tone and my voice. Now what's your confidence in me? They're going to say, okay, eight out of ten. Okay, well, so eye contact matters. But to say that it's got to be 70% when you're talking, I think it's kind of like listening. I mean, there's got to be a genuine. Yeah, authenticity. It's got to be authentic to you. Exactly. It's got to be authenticity. And there's going to be a general interest. And yeah, you might have to remind someone they have to look at it a little bit more. But that's really kind of the box in which we operate. Well, now you've got me. This is opening up a whole new area of interest. Can you name a few of the products that do this kind of analysis? I wasn't really aware of these things. Yeah, yeah. So a couple. So Gong. It's Gong.io. And then Chorus is another one. There's quite a few. so and what's interesting is so for us this is we've got a bunch of patents pending in this space because we have our own video role play apps and that's what we differ from almost everyone i've seen in the market which is i want the objective things like i want your speech pace because i want to be able to talk about that i want your tone because there's some aspects of that that are completely objective i want how much you spoke how many questions you asked all of those things how long were the times you spoke in a row versus interruptions from the other party all of those closing, how many ums you used. Okay, those are all objectives that you can review and potentially you could, with a coach or by yourself, improve on. What we don't want to do and stay away from is some of these things that are just, like I said, it's got to be 70% eye contact. You have to ask five questions per hour. And so that depends. This is a first call, a discovery call. You should probably ask 10. If this is a closing conversation, it's 10 minutes, you may not want to ask any because you want to come off as like, It depends on your strategy. I can't tell you how many questions you should ask if I don't know your strategy. And so that's kind of where I've become hesitant to recommend that question. I mean, that's what gets me about some of the behavior experts who try to coach people on presentations. I understand it is important. As you say, there's nuance in terms of adjusting. trying to manipulate perceptions is important because whether it's whether the presentations are true or or not the perceptions are real but then if you yeah like you say if you if you lean too much into do this do that do this but in some sort of rote way you end up creating you know like an army of all the same people who might come across as inauthentic because they're just like doing these behavioral things that uh you know there's there's there's like the risk of coming across like some, you know, the stereotypical used car salesman, like full of confidence and, you know, trying to, trying to manage you and people can shy away from that. So you want to, you want to have some level of authenticity and comfort in your shoes and not come across as somebody who's managing perceptions too much. And one last thing I would say about this and a little bit related is that one of the favorite programs that I have, and I mentioned, I don't typically teach much but there's a two person so there's two facilitators we do for kind of the larger advisory accounting you know the big four type of of companies and so we're the partner or director they're they're very seasoned and we do some role playing with them on camera and then they get coached and one of the reasons we we i i particularly enjoy this one so time to time i'll just do it to kind of stay sharp is that the coaching isn't you know zach why'd you do this Zach, why did you do that? The coaching is entirely based on what was your intent and did you accomplish it? And it changes the way they see it, right? Like they'll start off a meeting with something negative or positive. And so then the question is, why did you do that? What was your intent there? Now, sometimes they'll say, here's why. And so whether it worked or didn't work, then it's about execution. But sometimes it's, I didn't have an intent there. I just kind of came up naturally. It's like, well, then probably we should think about how we start our meetings because you kind of directed down this path that you never got away from in the entire meeting in this role play and you went down that path so if you did it intentionally and then whether it worked or didn't work is one thing but if you didn't do it intentionally you just it just was happening then that is the first learning is there's got to be a you know you have to understand that this has an impact or the way you open a meeting right if I were to say you know Zach these are the three things we disagree on I want to meet with you today to make sure we can figure out all three that is a very different tone if i were to say hey zach i love that we're on the same page we're working together and out of the 57 things we've agreed on all but three which is awesome and so what i want to do is just work on these last three things that is a completely different opening that will lead to a complete different meeting and i can tell you that for sure being advising a lot of these and doing role plays with you know real these negotiations that are kind of based on real negotiations that occurred and so that's the piece that i find very interesting is so with them it's about intent and execution of the intent. And so that's why some of these apps can't tell you whether that's right or wrong, because it doesn't know what you were trying to do. It can tell you whether it was effectively done, but the reality is you don't know what the intent was. So that's the context of which I think has to be seen. Now, obviously, some things are totally wrong, right? And we could go into those, but those are typically, especially at a partner director level of the big four, they're not going to be that common. They're not making atrocious, you know, obvious mistakes generally. That was a talk with Andres Laris, the CEO and managing partner of Shapiro Negotiations Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. He's also the co-author of the book, Persuade, the Four-Step Process to Influence People and Decisions. This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn more about this podcast at behavior-podcast.com. Thanks for listening. Music by Small Skies.