Lessons - Crisis Communication Lessons & Negotiation | Lt. Scott Tillema, FBI Trained Hostage Negotiator

Welcome to the lessons episodes of Success Story. These lessons episodes will be shorter clips from past guests, accomplished value community members, and myself. In each short episode, we'll feature concise and insightful, actionable conversations and tactics, providing you with real-world strategies and tips to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. If you're seeking a no-nonsense approach to growth and progress, you've come to the right spot. Settle in, take notes, and enjoy. I absolutely love this. So, hostage negotiation, that's your background, and the communication that takes place during a hostage negotiation, a lot of stress, a lot of confrontation, but a lot of these lessons that you pull out of your background and hostage negotiation, if you learn how to communicate effectively in that environment, can definitely translate into a high stress business negotiation or even just some sort of fight or disagreement where you have to communicate at an effective level, but you're stressed out. It's not a normal circumstance. So what are the lessons that you've learned in hostage negotiation that parlay into day to day, high stress, high conflict communication? And how do you have that productive conversation when you're not understanding, you're not on the same wavelength, same level? And that's the first principle I talk about, understand. And we've become really adverse to listening to someone else. And this starts with having the mindset that you are willing to tolerate and listen to a point that's different from your own. And when I mean listen to it, I mean thoughtfully working to understand what they believe by asking questions and exploring what they're saying and how they're saying it to have an appreciation for who they are. And I think that we as a society have really become afraid of this to say, I'm not going to listen to your point of view, because if I listen to it, I'm afraid that I might have to believe it or accept it. We have this fear that we might have to change, that we might have to break out of what we know and what we believe. So to have an open mind and come in with a blank slate to say, you know what, help me understand you and make it not about yourself, make it, it's not about me, it's about you to be thoughtful and asking these engaging questions. And then at maybe a higher level, studying their expressions, micro expressions, body language, so you can do some behavioral analysis to see, you know, do we have some deception in here, or is this all legit is everything pretty consistent? So the very first step that not under pressure is, let's take time, the number one, give someone our attention, put down your phone, put down the computer, quit multitasking and give them your complete attention and be interested in that. And rarely, rarely do we see this in society anymore. Why, outside, like, why is there such an aversion to, because I think the root cause of this, like you mentioned, is for people to not want to accept or fear of having to open up their mind to other opinions, I don't know the answer to this is probably a much more deeper, you know, higher level philosophical conversation, but you have an opinion as to why people have such an aversion to that. I think it's because people don't want to admit that we don't know as much as we think we do. It's much more comfortable to have a certain base level knowledge about something and say, well, I believe this and I formed an opinion based on a very small amount of knowledge. And it's really a lot more easy to feel something than it is to truly think about something and learn and analyze and come up with a thoughtful, opinion and position on whatever issue it is. And people don't like to be challenged, we don't like to feel that uncertainty, we're afraid of being embarrassed, we're afraid of, you know, saying, you know what, I just don't know the answer to this, I'm not sure why I feel like this. I'm not sure where I learned this piece of information. So none of us really want to have to defend what we know or what we believe. So I think that that's a big piece in why we're not willing to really engage someone in a thoughtful conversation. We don't want to say, you know what, I don't know that. And you know, what you're saying does make sense. I don't necessarily have to agree with it, but what you're saying has a lot of merit and maybe that's something that I need to consider. Now it's funny because that's essentially saying the key to winning an argument if, you know, winning, I put that term in quotations and air quotes, the key to winning an argument is actually allowing yourself to know that you could be wrong because you cannot understand someone. If that's the case, if you aren't willing to open up to them and you're saying that's the basic, that's the basic premise of getting what you'd like. You have to be able to understand someone and make them feel heard. Right. Absolutely. And from a negotiation standpoint, how can I solve a problem if I don't know what it is? I think one of the killer minds in any discussion is, well, I understand, no, you don't understand. And even if you think you understand by saying, well, I understand, you're really invalidating that person. It's an insensitive thing to say and really is going to get them to shut down and say, how can you possibly understand? I just share with you a couple sentences about my life. How can you come back to me and say, well, I understand your situation. Now, if you have some similarities, if you have something that you can share with them, then try and figure out that timing piece and figure out, you know, at what point would it be right for me to say, you know what, I've had a similar experience. Let me share this with you. So the second, the second big piece of timing is trying to get right of when it is your time to share with them that maybe you have an understanding or at least an interest in what they have to say. So how do you, how do you map out when that, so the first piece is understand. So that's, that's one that we just sort of went into. So the second piece is timing you're saying. So how do we, how do we understand when that timing is, what's the threshold for understanding unknown? Well, for me, timing, like this is a strategy piece for me and it's, it's not always about tactics at the table. I think that your power and negotiation comes from information and options. So I'm trying to grow the information that I have and in a conversation with somebody that could be, you know, just listening one on one, but when we're doing a high level police negotiation, I'm working with an entire team. So I've got people behind me behind the scenes that are digging every piece of information they can on this person and that should absolutely be happening in business negotiations as well to get information because that's going to put you in a stronger position. The same with options, the more options I can roll on my side and the more options that I can take away from the other side is really going to put me in a much more powerful position to say, now I'm going to introduce an idea or a thought for your consideration. So I think that it's, it's really kind of a balance of, once I've gathered a good amount of information about the situation, I've asked a number of questions and my open ended questions are not really yielding a whole lot of new information, anything that I can inquire from expressions that I see, anything that I can inquire from body language that I might be able to, you know, dip my toe into a question about, hey, I get the sense that you're a little bit uncomfortable when you talk about this particular area. And I'm not, I'm not sure that you can ever run out of good questions to ask, but the questions, they become more narrow, they, I think they should work from open ended questions and become a little bit more focused as you go on, but I think that it's, it's really going to come from the experience of understanding that I've gotten some good information. I have a number of different options that I can use and, and now I'm in a good position to start implementing a good strategy of when I'm going to deliver my message.