Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / Negotiation's Missing Peace: Finding Humanity in High Conflict with Michèle Huff
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:04): Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most challenging human interactions, those involving high conflict situations, and those involved in them. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm here with my co-host, bill Eddie. Speaker 2 (00:24): Hi everybody. Speaker 1 (00:25): We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute in Arizona where we focus on training and consulting, coaching and educational programs and methods all to do with high conflict. Today we are very happy to be joined by a very special guest who I've been waiting for over 10 years to meet in person and today's the day. So I am pleased to welcome Michelle Huff, who is the author of the Transformative Negotiator Changing the Way We Come to Agreement, which is going to be released in May, 2025. So we're just a little over a month out from release of this very special book. I want to share with you listeners a little bit about Michelle, and then she's going to fill us in more about herself and the book. Michelle is a transactional lawyer who is negotiated on behalf of companies including Oracle Corporation, sun Microsystems, and others higher education institutions including the University of California, Berkeley and University of New Mexico. Speaker 1 (01:35): And on behalf of hundreds of individual clients as well. She's currently the executive director of the Office of Business Contracts and Brand Protection at the University of California Berkeley, where she negotiates revenue generating contracts. We all love revenue generation, don't we? And licenses and all sorts of things there at the university. Copyrights, trademarks protects the campus brand and manages a team of legal professionals. She's taught lots of courses. She's a real pro in this field and has developed her own method of negotiating, and I find it really fascinating. And when she first brought the idea to me as a publisher that she had this book idea, I was really excited for many reasons, number one, because she's kind of a big deal, and number two, she's very much in alignment with the way we do things at High Conflict Institute and understanding humanity and doing our best to meet humanity wherever it is. So I don't know if that's a great way to say that, Michelle or not, but welcome. Thank you for being with us. Speaker 3 (02:49): Thank you, Megan. It's wonderful to be here. And Bill, Speaker 1 (02:52): Yeah, so you're up in the Bay Area, which for our listeners outside of the US can you tell a little bit more about where that is and what you do? Speaker 3 (03:02): Yeah, so I actually work at uc, Berkeley on the Berkeley campus, but I've been actually working remotely for most of the time since Covid. So I live in Walnut Creek, which is in the East Bay. It's just east of San Francisco over the Bay Bridge and across under the tunnel. It's actually really been wonderful not having to commute every day into an office. I'm sure there are many people who can resonate with that. It saves me a lot of time and energy that I can devote to actually working. So it's been wonderful to be able to just get up and go into my little office and get started and stop when I'm done and still have time to do other things, which is a wonderful work-life balance. Speaker 1 (03:51): Isn't that nice? Just Bill and I have both been working remotely for, I don't know, close to 17, 18 years now, and my commute used to be about 30 to 45 minutes one way every day and you get used to it. But yeah, it's great to get to a place of one day I actually counted the steps between my bedroom to my desk Speaker 3 (04:16): And the desk. Speaker 1 (04:17): It was about 60 or 90, I don't remember. And that's my commute. So it is nice, it opens some space in our life so we can have more balance. And that's really, your book is about, in a way, is bringing balance into our lives in terms of negotiation. So let's talk about the book first. I'm interested in how you got into the field of law in the first place. And what's funny is here I am in Arizona and you went to law school in Arizona, so we're kind of full circle right now. Speaker 3 (04:48): Yes, we are. I went to the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, which when I was there was just called a SU College of Law. It was actually really interesting how I got into law. I think I backed into it because I always loved law When I was a kid, my curfew wouldn't let me watch Perry Mason because it was on at 11 o'clock, but I would sneak my television under the covers and watch episodes of Perry Mason and I just thought, I want to be a lawyer. And I had no lawyers in my family, so I didn't have a role model necessarily. Then I kind of sort of dropped it. I was in college, I was graduating from college. I thought I wanted to be an archeologist. And I remember very, my parents were on the phone with me when we were talking about this right before I graduated, and my mother said, well, we didn't send you to college so you could go out in the desert and dig pots and things, and that's not why you got a college education, so you need to do something with your college education. Speaker 3 (05:53): I majored in romance languages, so I didn't know what do. My father then got on the phone, he said, I know you always argue with me. Why don't you just go to law school? And I was like, oh, I really did not want to go back to school. But it sort of stuck when he said, why don't you just be a lawyer? I took the lsat and then as you said, I got into a SU and really loved the law. I'm one of the few people, if you talk to a lot of lawyers, they will tell you they did not have a good time in law school. I actually really had a wonderful, wonderful time in law school. Speaker 1 (06:26): Interesting. How about you, bill? Speaker 2 (06:28): I did too, and I didn't go to law school to be a lawyer. I went to law school to be a mediator, and I actually discovered I liked the practice of law, and so to me it was an exciting new universe, but I can relate to that. It was not in the plan until right before I did it. So that's a great lead up I think, to in many ways bringing a more holistic approach to the practice of law, which is part of what you talk about. Speaker 1 (07:05): So over time, it seems you transitioned into finding a new path to help people in negotiation, and I imagine that came out of your own experiences, negotiating contracts and anything you were in negotiation. So how did it come about? I think of myself when I didn't have a very intentional career path. I majored in business because I didn't know what else to do, and then I got a job doing child support for a county attorney in Nebraska, a little tiny office, and I think it was there that I fell in love with bringing people to agreement. And I think some of us just naturally have that in us and obviously you do. So what was it that took you down that path? Speaker 3 (07:53): Yeah, that's a great question. Unlike you, my career was very intentional once I started in the law and I realized in law school I was fascinated with technology, and so I pursued sort of a path in Silicon Valley being a technology lawyer, I started in a litigation firm and quickly, quickly decided I did not have the killer instinct that I needed that everybody kept telling me I needed to be a good litigator. So I thought, well, maybe I can help companies, and they didn't have a corporate practice in my firm. So I looked elsewhere. I started to look at companies. The path then was sort of set for me as a technology lawyer. I worked at Oracle for a little bit, then I worked at Sun for about nine years, and I did a lot of negotiating. I have a lot of stories about negotiations from my days at Sun in the book, but what I realized was that I didn't want to be on that path. Speaker 3 (08:56): I didn't want to be on the technology path, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to stay on the legal path. So in the middle of everything, I just retired and I moved to Taos, New Mexico, which is a wonderful place to do absolutely nothing. And that's exactly what I did. I took a lot of time for myself. I started writing, I deepened my Buddhist practice. I took a lot of trips, but I didn't do any law or technology. And I think that was the beginning of when I started to see how to bring the, as Bill said, the holistic aspects of negotiation into commercial interactions. A lot of negotiations are just transactional. I know that word has a weird connotation now, but it definitely was more about helping companies or helping individuals with their commercial types of needs. So one of the things that I noticed was that people kept telling me, well, you're not like other lawyers. You're different. And I kept thinking, what are they talking about? I don't understand. But as I was taking time for myself and then as I started to write more, it felt like I was trying to write what I knew about negotiation and how my practice had changed over time to become more holistic. Speaker 1 (10:27): So in that vein, the title of the original book, the first edition was The Transformative Negotiator Changing How We Come to Agreement from the Inside Out. So I'm really interested, and I know our readers will be interested in learning more about that. How did that come about and what does that really mean? Speaker 3 (10:46): I think what it really means is that I felt like people viewed negotiation as something outside themselves. So they start with a negotiation with an idea about something that they want to get or that they need another person to change in order to give them something. I felt like people were not connected to themselves in the beginning of negotiation. So a lot of what the first addition of the book did was to lay out some really foundational skills. And most of the skills are, if you look at them and think about them, they're based somewhat on Buddhist practice. So the art of really truly deeply listening, the fact that you need to clearly articulate when you're speaking and be mindful about the words you're using and the tone and your emotional content and things like watching your breath and posture, those were all things that I think people forget about in context of negotiations. And so what I was trying to do from the inside out was to ground people first in themselves and in learning about who they're negotiating with in that same way, in a grounded way, and then to be able to proceed with the negotiation from that place, which really does transform how you negotiate. Speaker 2 (12:14): Some people talk about different cultures and negotiating, and I think the comparison is a high context culture and a low context culture, something like that where the relationship needs to get established and you need to pay attention to everything except the issue. You came to negotiate first, and if you're operating in the wrong culture or it's not a good fit, and I didn't know if that concept fits in how you approach it seems like you've found a really good way to straddle that. Some people would say you're talking about soft skills and they kind of put it down ppo, that, and yet you've been in a negotiation settings with businesses, big businesses where everyone has a picture of hard negotiations and tough guy approach, and that soft skills just wouldn't fit in that kind of setting. So if you can say why you think it does, Speaker 3 (13:22): Lemme start with your first comment, bill. I think you're absolutely right that there are part of understanding your negotiating partner, which is of course the second part of coming to agreement from the inside out. So first you ground yourself and then you ground your negotiating partner by learning who they are and how they negotiate. So culture does matter. I speak in the book about going to Japan and negotiating a very high level deal with a Japanese company on behalf of Sun Microsystems. But before they sent us out, they made us go through a class and taught us how to understand Japanese culture and the Japanese way of negotiating, the Japanese way of understanding when they say no and to ask several times because the first no is not the ultimate no. They taught us also about humility and how Japanese negotiators tend, of course I'm generalizing, tend to be very humble about their skills. Speaker 3 (14:34): And on the other side were I was negotiating behalf of a very successful high-tech company, not maybe so humble. So there were many opportunities to, once you find the gaps in the cultural context, I think it's easier to narrow them. So one of the other things that made it very complicated was from a legal standpoint, the Japanese don't necessarily believe in contracts. They will sign a contract, but what's important to them is the relationship, not the contract. So they will agree to things in a contract that you might be thinking, why would you agree to that? That's really bad for you. They only want to know whether you will be a good partner to them a hundred years from now. So the context of American companies versus Japanese companies in negotiation, to my mind, it was actually surprising when we could come to agreement with that when we were so far apart. But on your second point, soft skills. Speaker 3 (15:43): I talk in the book about labeling hard and soft versus I feel like it's difficult to convince people that these things are useful in negotiation and I'm only speaking from my own experience. And partly these skills allow me to see things that maybe other people don't see. And that I think is truly a valuable skill, whether you call it hard or soft, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that you're really engaged and you are really observant and paying attention to more than just what's going on in the contract or the document or whatever it is that is going to represent the successful negotiation at some point. Speaker 2 (16:35): Do you see transferring the same set of skills to say an individual negotiating the price of a new car or something negotiating with your spouse over where the child's going to go to kindergarten, things like that? Would the same approach apply, would you say? Speaker 3 (16:59): Yeah, I think the approach is universal. So in some way, well, buying a car used to be hard. It's not as hard now because everything is transparent. But in the old days it was very hard, and I specifically wrote a chapter about a friend who wanted to go buy a car, and her instinct was just, let's just get this over with. I'll just pay whatever they want. I'll just pay whatever. And I was like, no, no, no, we don't do that. We want to make sure we're getting a good price. Now again, those were the times when the car auto dealers were marking up their costs quite a bit, and if you negotiated properly, could get the car almost at cost at their cost. So that was always my plan, but I had to tell my friend slash client to just let me do the talking because she wanted to pay. Speaker 3 (17:53): She just wanted, I said, and not only do I need to do the talking, but you need to be patient because the whole model of negotiation for a car in the old days was wear the customer down, put them in a little cubicle, don't let them eat anything or drink anything. Keep going back to your manager to try to get approval for all these things. And then at the end, the customer finally says, fine, I'll just sign whatever you put in front of me. So I said, it's very simple. You just change the dynamic. You make the salesperson drive you around in a number of different cars. You make the salesperson invest their time and energy, and then when you're ready, they don't want to let you go. And they'll keep telling you, what do I have to do to get you to take this car today? Speaker 3 (18:40): Well, I'll tell you what you have to do. You have to basically sell it to me at a fair price. So it's interesting in terms of changing the dynamic. Now, I will admit I am not a parent. I do not know what a conversation between parents trying to figure out where to send their kid for kindergarten would go. But I'm assuming that the same type of skills, the deep listening, the understanding of the position and perspective of the other person, why they're saying what they're saying, I don't think people ask why enough. But it's something I do very frequently because I think it really helps the other party. Sometimes they don't know why, and it's useful to be able to engage with them in a discussion about why are they taking this position or why do they have an aversion to a different position. So all of these skills are useful in any, I mean, we negotiate every day. I think the goal of the book for me was to remind people that you don't have to be a lawyer to be a negotiator and you don't have these skills are ordinary skills for every day type of negotiations. Speaker 1 (19:54): I'm curious what you would consider are what you've experienced either in yourself in negotiating over time and those across the table from you, what mistakes have been made in negotiating? Speaker 3 (20:08): Ooh, that's a good one Speaker 1 (20:10): And kind of big. Speaker 3 (20:12): That's a big one. I'll give you two examples. One example was a mistake I made early on in my career, and I do write about this in the book. I was not paying attention to the environment in a negotiation. And so I spend a lot of time in the book talking about becoming more aware of where you are, how you're feeling, what's happening in your body. I was negotiating with a European company, it was a late night negotiation. I am not good late at night. I am a morning person. It was the early days of sun, so I was still wearing my law kind of attire, even though I should have been dressed like an engineer, I couldn't change that. I had to wear a suit with hose and heels and all that. So all of the team from Europe, there were about six or seven men, all men, they all smoked. Speaker 3 (21:12): So they would go out for their smoke breaks, but they would come back smelling like smoke. We had dinner really late. All of these things started adding up, and I just felt like by three o'clock in the morning, which is when we called it, I thought it was the worst negotiation I had ever done. And my boss called me and said, this was the best negotiation that we've ever done. I can't believe you got them to agree to all of these things. And I thought, wow, okay. It ruined me personally, and I think I slept the entire next day. I didn't even come into work. So that was a mistake for me not being able to stand up and say, what can we just stop now? It's midnight, maybe we can come back fresh in the morning. I feel like I make more mistakes when it's late, and so my thinking isn't as clear. And then also I just felt like my body was sort of breaking down in a number of different ways. So that was my mistake, my negotiating mistake, Speaker 1 (22:16): And that makes a lot of sense. And you wouldn't know that if you hadn't had the experience. I've had a similar experience just recently where there was an urgent matter that came up just a few minutes before I was going to help some parties facilitate an agreement. And so that was on my mind. There was this pressure that I needed to go help someone else and they were waiting for me. And it was kind of a critical thing. It's tough to push a negotiation or mediation more quickly than the parties are ready to do. I learned too. Maybe you just call it and say, let's wait for another day, even if it's an inconvenience for some. So yeah. Interesting. Bill, what's your take on that? I mean, what we teach at High Conflict Institute is we're training professionals how to deal with the more challenging parties in a mediation or really any type of coming to agreement. So in your experience, what's the positioning like of the parties? What's a best environment for maybe a high conflict situation? Speaker 2 (23:23): I like what Michelle's saying, and in many ways, I think in most negotiations and certainly as a mediator helping people mediate, I try to create an environment where people will feel more relaxed, more connected, and that's a word I really like in your book and know you started off your first chapter with that. And so I really think the connecting piece that you have to put more effort into it with high conflict people, that they see the world as adversarial and all relationships as adversarial to some more severe for some less so for others, but to kind of reassure them that my role is not to decide or take sides, having to work harder at that. So I think in many ways, in mediating and negotiating high conflict, we have to put extra effort into that. And something I'm getting out of what Michelle's saying is do that with everybody. Speaker 2 (24:32): And since we don't try to diagnose who we're dealing with, we just, if we notice difficult behavior, we do more empathy, attention and respect, things like that. So I think it's along the same lines, but it also leads into a question. There's that the small percent of high conflict people who were unable to calm and create a softer environment and a more empathetic environment, and they see negotiations or transactions as win lose no matter what, and I'm going to win. Whereas I think we look at things as win-win and our goal is to create an environment for win-win, but what do you do with the person who's absolutely committed to win-lose? To me, that's not transactional, that's a dominance. And that's like the bullies that I write about most recently is what do you do with the bullies who are just unwilling and probably unable to have empathy, to really want to just not want to care about your needs and wants? It's a question I have not answered. Speaker 3 (25:59): Yeah, I'm not sure there is an answer for that question, bill. I mean, I think you're absolutely right. There are people who, they're stuck in a paradigm and unless you can help them see that they're stuck in that paradigm and maybe move them from that even slightly, and it's not easy. It's clear that it's coming from a different place. So what always fascinates me so much is that it's not always about the subject of the negotiation or the mediation. So you're in there for a particular reason, but what the person is, how the person is feeling, or whether they're feeling defensive or bullish or whatever, they're posturing is coming from a different place usually now we're not therapists, I'm not a therapist. So it's difficult to in the moment to be able to say, you really have some issues. You need to work. You shouldn't even be in this mediation right now because you've got some underlying things that then you can come. Speaker 3 (27:06): But we do that though as mediators, don't we set the stage and say, if you can't follow these basic rules about civility and giving the other party a chance to speak and really listening and deeply listening and then having your chance to speak while the other party is deeply, if we don't set the stage for that openness and mutuality, if one of the parties or any of the parties can't agree to those terms, they shouldn't be in the mediation, right? I mean, you almost like Megan said, there has to be a place where you say, we can't move forward. If this is the behavior that you're going to exhibit, you probably won't change them, but you also don't have to enable them to be the bully in the context of mediation or negotiation. Speaker 2 (27:57): I totally agree. It's reassuring because it fits my experience and when I have had to set limits because at a certain point in my mind it shift into setting limits and imposing consequences. Like I cannot work with you two in the same room. You're going to have to talk to lawyers, have your lawyers call each other and help you negotiate this at a bit more of a distance because it appears to me that they're unable. It's not so much unwilling, but people that are unable to listen to sit still. I've had people storm out of mediations saying to the other party, if you even just think that way, then there's no way I can agree with you and storm out of the room. It's like I keep telling people we can't control what people think. What matters is what they do. Let's negotiate what people do. Speaker 2 (28:56): We can't negotiate what people think. But yeah, there is a limit. But I also like the idea, and I think that's why we're really successful at training so many people is to really make your best efforts to create an environment, make your best efforts to interact with people with empathy, attention, and respect so that they can relax into a win-win approach where they can really acknowledge the other person's existence and needs and wants. And I think our techniques have been able to, in a way, shift people from coming in adversarial to being to a win-win situation. Speaker 3 (29:43): It's interesting because you just sort of sparked something in my brain, I was thinking about voir dire in jury selection about asking questions of the people who are going to be sitting on a jury. Is there anything that would prevent you from being open-minded or what is it in your background that might create a barrier or in some way sabotage this mediation or negotiation? I guess more about making the party really do some soul searching. And as you said, there are some who don't want to do that and won't, but there might be some who would find that set of questions that they would need to answer for themselves, maybe open a slight crack if somebody really cared about finding out what it was that was causing the person to be acting out or acting the bully or shouting and storming and all of those behaviors. Speaker 2 (30:54): I like that. And I think I agree, and it makes me think about what I learned to do was taught to do maybe 10, 12 years ago in terms of pre-mediation, meeting with each party in potential domestic violence cases and in divorce cases, eventually learning, we should really do the pre-screening for violence in all of our divorce mediation cases. But what I found with that, and I had people even the court refer to, had a restraining order because of a domestic violence incident. And what I found was kind of doing without knowing it what you're talking about and saying, can you picture being in the same room with the other person? What's that going to be like for you? Is that going to be safe? Is there a signal you can give If you don't feel safe? Should we do shuttle mediation? And I'll go back and forth between rooms or breakout rooms on Zoom. Speaker 2 (31:56): And I think by walking people through, they didn't feel understood, and then they felt understood. It's like this is why I reacted. I was tired, this and that, and this is why I reacted. And I can empathize with them, usually easier not in front of the other person because they resent that, but I can help calm them and help them look at what some of their proposals might be so that dealing with each other, they can negotiate whether it's in person or a shuttle situation. So I like that. And it's interesting, I think that really fits. People think of domestic violence as evil people and the behavior's terrible, but there's real people behind it. And in divorce cases they're going to have to deal with, they have kids together. And so helping them kind of get in the same direction, which of course is a chance for me to put in a plug for our new ways for family skills training because we train both parents in the same set of skills so that they can negotiate and communicate. So anyway, I'm liking what you're saying and seeing it as widely applicable. The thought went through my mind, of course, that all mediators should read your book. Speaker 1 (33:20): Yes, yes, please do. And we'll have the link in the show notes, of course. And it's available anywhere books are sold. So both of you are saying you have to care as the person, as the professional in the room, or maybe there's more than one professional, whatever, whoever the parties are. If you truly care and bring authenticity to the table, I find that that's the winner, right? To truly care about what's happening within yourself, just like you write about Michelle and also what's happening in the other person. When you have a genuine care about the situation, the issues and the people involved, I think that just really gets you into a space where you can have some success. But we teach a lot about connection and using ear statements and body language and eye contact where culturally appropriate, things like that. People go away and try to practice these skills in their mediations and negotiations and just their conversations and they will use ear statements, something like, tell me more. They come back and they say, well, it really didn't work. And I say, well, how did you say it? Did you say tell me more? Or did you say, Hey, tell me more. And that's the difference. It shows that care and concern, and it's the human connection. I think that human connection is so much of leading to the success, and I think that's really, if we nutshell your book, that's it. It's compassion, it's humanity, it's empathy, and it's human connection to lead into agreements. Speaker 3 (35:08): Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely right. And I think one of the things that is so concerning is that people have tended the very difficult conflicts that we deal with sort of on a macro level. There's an element of dehumanizing that happens. And so in the course of a normal negotiation, you don't probably feel that maybe more so in the high conflict situations, but basically it, we've gotten to a place where there's dehumanizing and also the incredible solar polarization of, if you're not with me, you're against me. It's more than just the win-lose paradigm. We've entered into a whole new paradigm where the other party doesn't see any humanity in the person that they're negotiating with or conversing with even. And that's very troubling. And also it goes again to the premise of the book, which is you really, and as you said, bill, there may be bad behaviors, but there's a human being there that you need to connect with and you need to try to understand, try to get them to explain to you why they hold these views. Speaker 3 (36:27): I mean, lots of research has been coming out about being able to get the other party who may hold these beliefs that they've held for a really long time, to get them to break the cycle of those beliefs by just small questions, small little things that seem innocuous, but all of a sudden we'll open something up in somebody and they have a whole new way of thinking. And I feel like in negotiations, especially the transactional ones, the commercial ones, people, they don't think they need to spend any time with the other party. They don't need to know anything about the other party. They just need to hammer out the terms of the contract. And that's all that's necessary. And I always felt, even when I was working at Sun Microsystems that no, you're negotiating with a person. You're not negotiating with a piece of paper. Speaker 3 (37:27): There's a person there or multiple people. If you have to negotiate with different levels of people to get things approved or come back and have other pieces of the contract reviewed by other people, I mean, it's all about people. So if you can create that connective tissue somehow and in any way, shape, or form, and there are a lot of methods that are being proposed now about doing these kinds of conversations with people you don't agree with, people you're opposed who have opposing views. And so there's more and more of that happening. I think more and more nonprofit entities that are working with people to try to get them to understand points of views that are not the same as theirs, which is hard because I think we all have a tendency to only listen to the point of view that reinforces our own point of that confirmation bias. We're all in our own little bubbles, and we don't get out to talk to people who don't see things the same way we do. Speaker 1 (38:32): We should all travel more, we should all have more conversations and do it in person and Speaker 3 (38:39): Do it in Speaker 1 (38:39): Person. That human connection is so much, and I think it just breaks down a lot of walls and a lot of barriers. And you've coined this phrase, transformative negotiation, not changing who we are, but maybe thinking about who we are and who we're talking to and how we can and the impact we have on them. I think in a lot of conversations now where we are so diametrically opposed, maybe in political beliefs or religious beliefs or anything wars, conflicts, if we just kind of put our foot down and say, I can't talk to you. I'm not going to listen to you. How are you going to get anywhere? And maybe some of those small questions you're talking about can be the little pieces that help us have some understanding of where someone else is coming from instead of just being dismissive and checking 'em out. Off, off. Yeah. Speaker 2 (39:36): I've got a couple nuts and bolts questions. I want to make sure we've done big picture talking, but also in your book, and I've just read the beginning of it really the first chapter introduction, but in the table of contents, there's two that kind of stood out to me. One is finding your anchors and what does that mean? And the other is keep deadlines at bay and deadlines. I've always known as a mediator in negotiating occasionally as a really helpful tool to get to the point and to move people forward who really want to drag their feet. And I'm very curious what you mean by that because there's times I also wish I could change some deadlines. So what do you mean by anchors and how do you keep your deadlines at bay? Speaker 3 (40:33): Yeah, I'll start with deadlines. I think what I write about in that chapter is more about the deadlines that are almost self-imposed and that force you to maybe make decisions that you haven't completely thought through. So the one example was the one where I was negotiating and my body was falling apart, and they claimed that we had to sign something by midnight, which was completely untrue because we ended up not signing something till three o'clock in the morning, which wasn't any better. But self-imposed deadlines here I'm talking about, so not so much deadlines that impose a structure on the negotiation. We'd like to have this done, the court wants us to have this done by a certain day. I mean, obviously you can't really do anything about those types of deadlines. I was thinking more about the ones that we put on ourselves to get something done and something where it's definitely flexible, but we fixed it somehow, and so it gets fixed. Speaker 3 (41:38): And then we do things that we probably shouldn't do in order to meet the deadline that maybe was not necessarily a real deadline in the first place. So the chapter on anchors is a little different. I know people talk about anchors in negotiation. It's come to mean, what's your bottom line? What number won't you go below or above? I'm talking about the things that you can use in a negotiation if things start going sideways, like your breath, like anchoring on your breath. In Buddhist practice, breathing is sort of fundamental. It's the fundamental thing. It's the essence really, of doing meditation. And so it's always helped me to be able to use the breath at times when maybe I feel like I'm getting a little out of control and I don't want to respond out of anger, or I don't want to raise my voice, which is very difficult for me. Speaker 3 (42:40): I grew up in a family where we were all very loud and sitting at the dining room table talking over each other, and so my raised voice is just almost normal. But it's interesting because my partner said to me at one point, you do realize that in my world, a raised voice was someone is mad at you. Someone was saying something and was angry. And so I had to modulate because obviously what my partner was hearing was not just my loud voice from being a New Yorker who sat at the table and just talked fast and loud so that she could be heard. But in terms of knowing yourself, when you start feeling those feelings of, oh, I'm going to get mad at this person, or I'm going to raise my voice, or I'm not going to, that's when I talk about anchoring yourself with your breath, feeling grounded and being able then to proceed from a place that's much as you said, bill, much calmer, much clearer in your thinking. Speaker 1 (43:51): I do. I love the anchor concept, and it's something, it occurred to me one day when I was trying to teach some folks in my class who are struggling in high conflict situations, and it just seems like everyone's kind of fluttering when we're off balance. We just kind of flutter around and I said, look, you're the anchor. Let other people flutter around you and spiral or whatever they want to do, but you are your own anchor. And I like, I'll probably add the breathing piece on now as well to take that deep breath and it will remind you to be an anchor because in some situations we'll start doubting ourselves. And that's I think what the anchor can help us remember that. Okay, common sense is common sense. I know who I am and no matter what someone else is saying or doing or pushing, I don't have to doubt that I am an anchor. I really like that everything you write about in this book, I see it being useful in so many areas of life. We started this whole conversation talking about, so do you anticipate any resistance from any say in the business community or legal community who are really stuck on just a hardcore negotiation and not paying attention to these types of really beautiful aspects of negotiation? Speaker 3 (45:19): It's interesting because I think what I point to for those hard liners is what my experiences with what happens when the hard line negotiate. There have been several situations where I was sort of a mediator in one case for two parties who were trying to come to agreement. One was my client sort of, I mean, they were my client. So I was trying to facilitate a deal between my client and a company in Denver, Colorado. And my client was French, a French technology company. And so they're back to the cultural context Bill. Very different cultural context there. But what was more interesting to me was at the end of the negotiation, it was very contentious. So we really went back and forth, back and forth. The other side did not want to give in. My client finally accepted a contract that I thought was incredibly one sided. Speaker 3 (46:23): I mean, we didn't really accomplish what I had hoped to accomplish for my client. So we took a step back, I said, can we just have a conference, just us? And I said to them, I just want you to know that I don't do this often, but I'm going to advise you not to sign this contract. I know we spent seven months negotiating it. I know it was really hard. I know you need a US company to get your business kick started, but I just don't feel like this is the right company. And I had been dropping little hints all along about the other party's behavior, what were they doing as opposed to what they were saying and what they were. And I said, I feel like you're going to have difficulty. This contract is going to be almost impossible for you to live up to these terms. Speaker 3 (47:12): It's going to be. And they have shown themselves to be very demanding. Well, my clients said, don't worry. That's just posturing. That's just hard line negotiation. That's what we all do. We expect that as soon as we sign the deal, they'll be fine and we'll be able to work with them. And I thought, no, I don't think that's what's going to happen, and I don't like being right about these things. But the client signed the deal and within six months they were in litigation over the contract. And it's happened enough times to me that to your point, Megan, I don't try to get people to sort of adopt this style of negotiation or this way of thinking about negotiation. But if they ask, I will point out the times when I felt that not looking at the broader picture, not realizing and recognizing what else was going on as far as the client was concerned that was a win. But is it a win really, if you're giving so much up and then in return you're walking into a lawsuit? And that's happened to me several times during my career where the win-lose concept is. That's why I say I don't like labels, because this was clearly a win, just like the win that almost killed me from that first negotiation where I wasn't paying attention. Those were not ultimately wins in the contractual sense or the legal sense, because who wants to be in litigation? That's awful. Speaker 1 (48:51): No one ever. No one ever. Speaker 2 (48:56): Well, I think that's to your credit, that you would tell someone that you don't think this is a good deal, even though been negotiating for that. I think that honesty, hopefully occasionally that gets through and people go, oh, and now you have that story to tell. Speaker 1 (49:14): Yes. Yep. And there are lots of good, wonderful stories and experiences that you've written about in the book, which I think makes it just even that much more interesting. So there's one thing I have to say before the last question. For those of you that are under 30 listening to this or watching this podcast episode, the term hose is something we used to have to wear back in the day. It's called pantyhose. Oh, that's right. Speaker 3 (49:42): Yeah. Speaker 1 (49:43): I've kind of forgotten about wearing those. But we wore skirts with pantyhose, and they were Speaker 3 (49:50): Different Speaker 1 (49:50): Colors and opaque and tan and all those things, and then we'd get a run, and they were not comfortable. They were not. And then Speaker 3 (49:57): We get a run and they were not comfortable, Speaker 1 (49:58): And they'd always get a run right before the most important meeting every time. Every time. Yeah. It was hard to be us back then. Anyway. Well, one of my favorite parts of the book is the dedication you wrote, and I'd like to read that. I dedicate this book to my father, Paul Huff, who started me in the deep end of the pool to teach me to be fearless. And to my grandmother, Bertha Baron. Hopefully I've said that correctly, is that whose love and unconditional acceptance kept me afloat long after that first swim lesson. So it sounds like you've had some pretty special people in your life who led you to become who you are as a person and in your career and how you help others, and now expanding that help with the writing of this book. So anything to add about those special people in your life. Speaker 3 (50:50): Yeah, there are so many special people. It's difficult. And a lot of what I realized is my father, obviously, I learned so much from him, and mostly I learned how to be independent, how to take care of myself. And it's actually, I also credit my father. He was an avid reader. He read so much all the time. Our bookshelves were filled with books, and I think that's where I learned my love of reading. Also, I just would go to the bookshelves as I got older in my teenage years and just pick something. And he had all kinds of books about all different types of subjects, including on Buddhism, which is where I first learned and read about Buddhist thought. So that my dad definitely, and of course the swim lesson really was, I said, were you going to come in? And I think I was seven, six or seven. Speaker 3 (51:50): I mean, I wasn't that old, but I wasn't terribly young. But he said, no, just jump in. And then he literally threw me into the deep end, and then he said, just swim. And I was like, what? No. What do you mean? I mean, I'm doggy paddling all the way to the other side, and I get there. I'm breathing hard, I'm wet, but I made it. So I learned a lesson from that. My grandmother was someone who I was very close to and always just so incredibly supportive. She was a Holocaust survivor who came to this country with my mother as a young child who they were in hiding in the south of France during the war. And I learned so much resilience from my grandmother and also just felt incredibly seen by her. And that's something that when it's happening and you really appreciate it because it doesn't happen all the time, even in families. It doesn't happen all the time. Speaker 1 (52:55): And I think that's very special because being seen by her obviously has informed what you do and who you've become. Speaker 3 (53:06): Absolutely. Speaker 1 (53:07): And seeing that person across the table. So I love that. I really do. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Michelle. This has been a true pleasure. Listeners, thank you for taking the time with us today. I know you've enjoyed listening to Michelle, and I encourage you to go out and buy her book whether you're a negotiator or not, because you are. Everyone's a negotiator in some way. My little grandson's a master negotiator and he's five. So we'll put the link to the book in the show notes. It'll be available in print, copy, paperback, and digital, and maybe audio at some point. So don't wait to order it. You can order it now, even though it doesn't come out till May 7th. So please do that. Speaker 1 (53:59): In the next episode, we're going to be joined by Kara Rubinstein from an organization called Right to Know. We'll be talking to her about something called DNA surprises, such as misattributed, parentage, donor conceptions, adoptions, and other surprises that are happening a lot more now in the world where babies come from different sources these days, it's opened up a whole new interesting area of conflict. In the meantime, send your questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or submit them to high conflict institute.com/podcast. Until next time, keep learning, keep practicing, be kind to yourself and others while we all try to keep the conflict small and find the missing piece. It's All Your Fault is a protection of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts at True Story fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. 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