Communication Archives - Page 8 of 26 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Vicky, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Victoria Medvec
Thank you, Pete. I’m so excited to be with you today.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. Well, I’d love it if we could jump right in, and you maybe kick us off with a story of maybe the most intense, or interesting, or surprising, or creative, or high stakes, or, in some way, noteworthy negotiation that you participated in, either personally or as an advisor, consultant, teacher?

Victoria Medvec
Well, that’s a great question. I include many stories of negotiations in my new book Negotiate Without Fear, because I am someone who enjoys negotiating myself, and I negotiate all the time in the everyday world, but I also advise clients on deals. So, I do a lot of advice on mergers and acquisitions, and partnership agreements, and customer contracts, so I literally am negotiating every single day.

But out of all of those negotiations, there’s one I really remember, and it’s a negotiation that was a very high-stakes field, it was very large. It was involving an international company, and the company was doing a big transaction, and we were doing a great job in the negotiation, and everything was going fantastic. And I kept saying to the CEO, “We need to land the plane,” and he would say, “I think we could just get a little bit more.” And I am super aggressive and I always push my clients to be really aggressive, but at some point, you have to close the deal. Land the plane. Finish the deal.

And I would say, “We have to land the plane,” and he would say, “I just think we can ink out a little bit more.” And I’d say, “We got to land this. We should land this today.” And then, in the midst of that, a regulatory change happened, and the deal fell apart. And that taught me a very critical lesson, Pete, which is I think you should go into negotiations and I think you should always be focused on the other side, and you should always be focused on how your differentiators address the other side’s pressing business needs. And I think you should always be aggressive in setting your goal by thinking about the weaknesses of the other side’s alternatives.

And I want you to have a really clear compelling message about how your differentiators address their needs, convey that message with your offer, but, at some point, no matter how aggressive you are, no matter how well it’s going, you’ve got to know when to close the deal. And I think that’s a key lesson I learned in that negotiation that tempers the fact that I’m always trying to get my clients to be aggressive, be willing to ask, be willing to push in the negotiation. I think it’s also important to know at what point you need to close it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, in this example, so your client was trying to sell and then it’s just no sale because of the regulatory change.

Victoria Medvec
Because of the regulatory change. And it was a situation where he was a great negotiator, and we had worked together many, many times on a bunch of transactions, and he was ambitious, and he was very, very willing to ask, and those are all things I prize and treasure. But I always say everybody pays a price for certainty, and some people pay a really high price for certainty. They don’t like conflict, they don’t want to get involved in the exchange, they pay a super high price for certainty. Those are the people who see a house listed and pay list price so they can get the house and be sure that they have it. Or, they go to buy a car, and they see the car with the sticker, and they buy that sticker because they want to get the deal closed.

Some people pay a very high price for certainty. I’m a person who pays a low price for certainty. I am willing to engage in the discussion. I don’t mind the uncertainty of the interaction. I understand that if I’m using the right channel of communication, I can get a great deal while building the relationship with the other side and minimizing my risks. But some people pay almost nothing for certainty. They want to ink out every single piece of the deal, and that’s the situation we were in with that CEO, and we ended up losing that deal.

And it’s one of the only times I’ve ever had a deal fall apart, and so it’s very memorable because, in the sea of success, it’s the one challenge that I vividly recall, and I learned a really valuable lesson in it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. That is an excellent kickstarter story. And I’m so excited to dig into the how, hence, How to be Awesome at Your Job. But, first, maybe let’s talk about the why. I think some of our listeners might say, “Well, you know, that’s cool but I don’t really negotiate that much at work.” What would you tell them, Vicky?

Victoria Medvec
So, I would tell them that everyone needs to negotiate because we need to negotiate to get things done at work. We need to negotiate to get resources, to get staffing. We need to negotiate to get our ideas accepted, so we’re all negotiating.

I also talk a lot about how to negotiate in the everyday world, and I encourage people to actually negotiate in the everyday world because I think that if you never practice, if you only are doing high-stakes deals at work where the stakes are really high, or negotiating for yourself in your employment situation where the impact is incredibly important, I think, then, you become somewhat risk-averse and you’re afraid to try a new strategy.

So, I always encourage people to negotiate in their daily lives, to negotiate at the store, negotiate in a hotel, negotiate with the credit card company, negotiate every day. And it allows you to practice your skills, practice your strategies, and become more confident as a negotiator. So, for those say, “I never negotiate,” I would say you often negotiate. You might just not see yourself as a negotiator.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Case made. Well, so the book is called Negotiate Without Fear, tell us, what are some of the top fears people have when it comes to negotiating, and what do we do with them?

Victoria Medvec
Right. And you know what’s interesting, Pete, is that these fears are experienced by amateur negotiators as well as expert negotiators, so it’s not as though experience reduces the fear. The fears are just different. I think a lot of people fear conflict. I think a lot of novices fear conflict, so they have a lot of fear over the exchange, over getting involved, over having the conversation. But I think experts often fear damaging the relationship, leaving money on the table, losing the deal. Those are all fears that are pervasive that prevent us from maximizing our success when we’re in these negotiations.

And so, what I try to do in the book is to give you strategies that can help you to mitigate those fears. By using these strategies, you can maximize your success, take the fear out of the negotiation, and be more confident in the interaction.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, with these strategies, are they matched as specific strategy to a specific fear? Or, are they sort of overarching or universal strategies that hit whatever fear you happen to have?

Victoria Medvec
Right. So, it depends on the fear and the strategy itself. So, if you think about a fear like losing the deal, that’s a huge fear that people have, that if I ask, I might lose the deal, they might walk away. Well, if I were to think about the strategies that would relate to that, there’s one set of strategies that’s about having the right conversation by putting the right issues on the table. And that is absolutely going to reduce your fear of losing the deal because you’re going to engage the other side in the interaction.

In the same way, there’s a second strategy that’s talked about, which is seek the right communication channel. So, I talk a lot about seeking synchronicity in negotiation, that you want to say it, not send it, and see them when you say it. I’d love to be face-to-face in person in their office, across the desk from them, but given the current times, and given some of the challenge of that, if I can’t be face-to-face in person, I want to be face-to-face on my favorite platform, whether that’s Zoom, or WebEx, or Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet. I want to be able to see the other side, so I want to say it, don’t send it, and see them when I say it. That also reduces the likelihood that I will lose the deal.

And then there’s another strategy which is to go in and deliver multiple offers rather than a single offer, and that also reduces the fear of losing the deal. It ensures that you engage the other side. And, finally, the strategy of leaving myself room to concede also reduces the fear of losing the deal. So, all of those strategies help to mitigate that one fear. And throughout the book, it talks about a lot of strategies to eliminate all of the different fears.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so, boy, I think we need to dig into all of those. So, let’s hear just a couple. When it comes to giving yourself room to concede, what does that look and sound and feel like in practice?

Victoria Medvec
So, it’s so interesting because some people are afraid to really think about the weaknesses of the other side’s best outside alternative, or their back, the weaknesses of the other side’s best outside option, and set their goal based on the weaknesses of the other side’s options. So, they’re afraid to set an ambitious goal. They’re afraid that if they go in, and they push too hard, that they’ll lose the deal or offend the other side or damage the relationship.

And I would actually argue that, in fact, you’re more likely to damage the relationship and lose the deal if you go in too close to your own bottom line to start the negotiation. So, if I come in and I don’t leave myself room to concede, I’m negotiating right around my own bottom line, I don’t have room to adjust, I can’t look concessionary, I can’t modify, I think I start to look stubborn, I look inflexible.

If I go in, on the other hand, with a super ambitious goal, and I actually make my first offer beyond that goal, I have lots of room to adjust, lots of ability to modify, I have lots of room to concede, and I’m going to do two things. I’m going to build the relationship because I look flexible and cooperative, but I’m also more likely to maximize my outcome. So, I think that using the right strategies, like leaving myself room to concede, can help me to overcome a number of fears in the negotiation.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you do that conceding, is there a way to do that with more grace, and you say, “Yeah, we’re going to need 15,000,” and they say, “Hmm, our budget is only 10,000,” and you say, “Okay.” Is there a more finesse to it than that?

Victoria Medvec
There would certainly be more finesse because if I did that, people would be like, “Well, geez, I could’ve gotten it for 10,000 all the time,” and I’d lose credibility. So, I would say that the key to making concessions is to have multiple issues on the table, and to really avoid single-issue discussions. So, I will always tell people that you don’t want to talk about one single thing.

For example, Pete, when people are negotiating something around their employment package, they should not be having a salary negotiation. Salary is one issue in a package that’s about your responsibilities. It’s about the timeline for getting things done. It’s about addressing the employer’s pressing business needs. It’s about showing confidence in what you can do and having some performance metric that might be tied to it. It’s a bunch of issues. It’s not just one issue of salary.

If I avoid single-issue discussions, it’s much easier to create a rationale for concessions. If I’m in and I’m talking about only one thing, it’s very hard to concede in a credible way because if I do say 15,000, and then you push back, and I say, “Okay, how about 10?” the other side is thinking, “Why didn’t you just offer me 10 in the beginning?” and I’d lost all of my credibility. So, you do want to have lots of issues on the table so that you can create a rationale for concessions that you make.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot, and I’m thinking about negotiations in which people are hiring me to speak. And so, in a way, it seems like, “Okay. Well, hey, there’s just the number.” But, no, there are so many things, like, “Hey, is it one keynote or one keynote with several breakouts? Will there be videotaping? And what are the rights associated with the videotaping? And, hey, could you do a high-end videotaping and it’s available to me forever and to the group for a limited time?” That’s interesting.

Or, “Oh, I don’t have to get on a plane? We could do this remote? Okay. Well, that genuinely saves a ton of hours.” So, that warrants…

Victoria Medvec
Right. No, it’s multiple issues. It’s lot of issues. And one of the things that I also would encourage you to think about when you’re thinking through that are I know you have many differentiators. You have a lot of unique skills and competencies that could probably solve problems or address the challenges of the people that you’re speaking for. Like, you have a huge audience. You have a lot of followers. There’s a lot of interesting you. What you do with social media might actually help them. So, that would also add issues to the table.

And this discussion about putting the right issues on the table is actually something that I cover in depth in Chapter 2. And the reason is that a lot of negotiators, even expert negotiators, will often negotiate the wrong deal. They have a tendency to negotiate what is standard, what is typical, what always gets discussed, and they don’t necessarily put the right issues on the table. And so, I always say that you should begin by making a list of your objectives, and that your objectives are going to drive your negotiable issues.

And in your set of objectives, I would argue there are a big four objectives. These are always objectives when I care about the relationship with the other side. So, the first objective should always be to address the other side’s pressing business needs. And the second objective should always be to build the relationship. And I would say, more specifically, build the relationship with whom in what time period, what are you trying to do.

The third objective is essential, which is to differentiate yourself. And the fourth objective is to maximize your outcome whatever that looks like in the particular situation you’re in. But if you want to maximize your outcome, you have to think about the first three objectives and, in particular, you want to think about differentiating yourself and addressing the other side’s pressing business needs because you want to create a rationale for your offer that’s about how you’re a differentiator, so address their needs.

And that’s going to give you a focus on them rather than yourself. It’s going to allow you to focus on a package of issues rather than a single issue. It’s going to give you the ability to craft a really good story that will be compelling to them and engage them in the discussion. And that’s what we cover in Chapter 2.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. And I also wanted to follow up on you mentioned multiple offers, and you’ve even got an acronym, multiple equivalent simultaneous offers.

Victoria Medvec
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Vicky, I don’t know, did you invent that acronym? Is that yours?

Victoria Medvec
I did not, no. So, I am not the person who came up with the idea of MESOs. I’m the person who’s the biggest fan of them in the world. So, I love using multiple equivalent simultaneous offers. And while I didn’t create the concept of going in and giving the other side three options rather than one, I did create a lot of the ideas around how to do that effectively.

So, it starts out by thinking about the issues that I’ve got on the table. And I actually encourage people to lay out their issues on an issue matrix where you think about sort of a two-by-two table where the X-axis, that horizontal axis, is about what’s important to you, and that really goes from “Easy for me to give up,” to “Very important to me.” And that Y-axis, the vertical axis, is what’s important to the other side, and that goes from “Easy for the other side to give up,” to “Very important to the other side.”

So, you would end up with four quadrants. And that quadrant that is really, really highly important to you and highly important to them is the quadrant we call contentious issues. And there are always contentious issues on the table. You’re never in a negotiation where there’s not a contentious thing to be discussed, but the key is to not only have contentious issues on the table. In fact, the quadrant that matters the most is that quadrant that is high on Y and low on X. It’s really, really important to the other side, and it’s easy for you to offer up. Those we call storytelling issues.

And you want to have more storytelling issues on the table than anything else. You want lots and lots and lots of storytelling issues, because when I have more storytelling issues, two things happen. I can make the story focused on them rather than myself, which is a huge advantage, and, in addition, I have more fodder to use to get what I want on contentious and tradeoff issues.

Tradeoff issues are those things that are super important to me and easy for the other side to offer up. So, I want to lay out that issue matrix. Because when I lay out an issue matrix, and I think about my differentiators, and I’ve got a differentiation chart, I have the two ingredients I need to use to make a multiple offer in a very effective way.

And while I didn’t create the concept of going to the table with three options, I did create the format of how to structure the multiple offers to really be the most compelling at communicating your message to the other side. And that’s laid out in Chapter 7 in the book. In fact, I always tell my students to read Chapter 7 twice because using multiple offers is a strategy that’s going to give you huge advantage in your everyday negotiations, and your negotiations at work, and your negotiations on behalf of yourself. And in that chapter, there are examples of all types of multiple offers being used and being communicated to the other side.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us perhaps one of the quickest and simplest examples that come to mind for doing the multiple equivalent simultaneous offers and a storytelling issue within that?

Victoria Medvec
Yes, sure. So, let’s take an example we can all relate to, which is a situation where we might be negotiating for ourselves. In the current environment of what’s sometimes called The Great Resignation or, otherwise called The Great Reshuffle, you see a lot of people that are negotiating with their employers, and you also see a lot of people that are negotiating with new employers.

The first thing I would say to all of your listeners is never ever leave your job without negotiating. So, so many people, Pete, leave because they’re frustrated by something and they don’t negotiate before they depart. And that is a huge mistake because they might be able to modify something that they dislike. They might be able to get something that they really wanted in terms of a role or responsibility or flexibility. So, it’s always important to ask before you leave and to recognize that, “I can absolutely ask.”

In fact, if you think about it, Pete, in a situation where I am working with my current employer, and I want to think about my goal in the negotiation with my current employer versus a new employer, remember the way I come up with my goal is to think about the weaknesses of the other side’s options, it’s far more likely that my current employer has weaker options than a new employer does, because my current employer is relying upon me right now. I’m certain, I’m known, they understand what I’m capable of doing. They would have to do that work themselves.

So, when you think about it, I can have a more ambitious goal with my current employer, and I should take the opportunity to go in and make an ask, but I should never start that conversation without a plan. And in that plan, I want to think about addressing the employer’s pressing business needs, I want to think about differentiating myself, I want to think about continuing to build the relationship, and I definitely want to think about maximizing my outcome. Whatever that looks like in terms of salary, or bonus, or flexibility in my work, or anything that maximizing looks like.

So, from that list of objectives, I’m going to come up with a lot of issues. Salary will be a contentious issue. It’s really, really important to you, and it’s really, really important to me. It’s in that contentious quadrant. But a storytelling issue might be something that I’m uniquely positioned to do. So, maybe some responsibility that I could take on that I’m really qualified to do.

In the book, I have an example of a woman who works in Boston in a company where she is in a marketing role, and she’s very interested in becoming a VP for sales. And she has a long history of doing sales when she lived in South America. She has lots of experience in sales but is currently working in marketing. But the company needs revenue and they’re interested in getting some South American business and moving into some South American markets. Well, she’s perfectly positioned to help the company to do that.

She speaks Spanish and she’s one of the only people in the Boston office that speaks Spanish to help do the interviews and bring the team on board to help expand business into South America. She has the knowledge about those markets and could do briefings for the senior leaders on those different markets and what markets might be most attractive. She could even do updates for the team on some of the cross-cultural differences to be aware of as you move into South America. And she’s really confident that if she was the VP leading the business there, they would be able to generate revenue very rapidly, and she’s willing to put a bet on her ability to generate that revenue.

If you think about that situation, her salary will be a contentious issue. The updates, the briefings, and the bet on her performance would all be in the storytelling quadrant. Doing the hiring in Spanish would also be a storytelling issue. So, you’ve got all those responsibilities are in that storytelling quadrant.

And then the tradeoff issue in that situation would be probably her title. She wants to be a VP, and that title might be a tradeoff issue. And sometimes, title is more contentious, and maybe the internal title would be contentious, but maybe her external title, so she would have the credibility and the ability to get things done in South America would be a tradeoff issue.

So, she would go into that negotiation, and using that matrix, she would develop three offers. And in those three offers, she would vary the responsibilities across what she’s going to do in North America versus South America. And in one of those offers, she would put a bet on her ability to generate revenue within a year in South America.

Pete Mockaitis
Like a contingent bonus.

Victoria Medvec
She would have a contingent bonus, exactly. I recommend people, when they’re negotiating for themselves, that they always use a contingent bonus based on performance in one of their three options. I don’t think you’re always going to end up with employers who want to do that, but I think it’s always important that you put it in there because, Pete, as you probably picked up, that shows that I’m confident in what I can do. I’m confident in what I can contribute. I’m awesome at my job. I’m willing to show that I’m confident in what I can deliver. And that’s a very important message in that employment situation.

So, that’s how you would curate the multiple offer and that’s how you would think about the issue matrix leading to that multiple offer.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Okay, that’s clear.

Victoria Medvec
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, you’ve got a nice little framework, the five Fs of fearless negotiation. Could you walk us through them?

Victoria Medvec
Sure. So, I always talk about getting ready, getting prepared up front, and I have lots of steps on how to get ready. And then I talk about the five Fs when you go to the table. So, the five Fs are that you want to go first. You get a huge advantage from leading the negotiation. So, I want to go first. I want to focus on them. I should always focus on the other side, not myself. I actually tell people to be a pronoun checker. If I’m talking about I, me, we, us, I’m talking about the wrong side. I would say if your first line in your negotiation includes your name, you’re talking about the wrong side. You want to focus on them. So, I want to go first. I want to focus on them.

I want to frame my offer correctly. So, when I want to get people to do something new, change and do something new, I’m generally going to highlight loss words to get them to move off that status quo. And when I want them to maintain the status quo, I’m probably going to highlight gain words. So, I use a framing piece. So, go first, focus on them, frame the offer correctly. Be flexible. Leave yourself room to concede and use multiple offers.

And then the fifth and final F is no feeble offers. And this is a key one because people make feeble offers all the time. People will walk into a store and they’ll see a shirt sitting there with a snag and they might take it up to the department clerk, and say, “Could you take something off?” That’s a feeble offer. People will go to a customer and they’ll say, “Could you give me more business?” That’s a feeble offer. People will go into a company where their products are displayed on shelves, and they’ll say, “Could you give us better shelf space?” That’s a feeble offer.

You want to make a clear specific ask. So, in that story, you don’t want to say, “Could you take something off?” You want to say, “Gosh, look at this snag. I feel bad you’re not going to be able to sell this. And I bet you, even work on commission, and you won’t be able to sell it. I would take it off your hands if you give me a 35% discount.” That’s a clear specific ask. Leaving myself room to concede but with a clear specific ask.

And in all those cases, I want to go first, I want to focus on them, I want to frame my offer correctly, I want to make sure I’m being flexible, leaving myself room to concede and using multiple offers, and I want to remember always no feeble offers.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that snag T-shirt example because we went through those five Fs right there. And focus on the other side, it could be just that quick, “Oh, you probably aren’t going to be able to sell this.”

Victoria Medvec
Right. That’s exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, boom, less than a sentence.

Victoria Medvec
That’s exactly right. “And you won’t be able to sell it. You’re going to lose the sale,” is exactly a frame of a loss frame.” That’s exactly right. So, it uses all five of the Fs.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so now, it’s funny. I was just having a conversation with a business partner of mine who’s doing some business development with a cold email outreach sequence, and I was intrigued that in it he had, it’s like, “Would you be available for 15 minutes at 2:00 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday?” And I thought, “That’s really interesting.” Like, I don’t how I’d feel about that but it is not a feeble request; it’s a clear ask.

Victoria Medvec
It’s not feeble. And, in fact, I might even say that he might have wanted to say, “I know that this challenge is confronting you, and I want to provide some information to help. Would you be available at 2:00 o’clock on Wednesday, 3:00 o’clock on Thursday, or 4:00 o’clock on Friday? Let me know which of the three times would be most convenient for you.” Think about that, that’s a multiple offer.

And what you just did is changed the frame of the discussion. You just framed it from, “When are we going to meet?” to “Are we going to meet?” You’re not talking about, “Are we going to meet?” anymore. You’re talking about “When are we going to meet?” So, you literally changed the frame to “When are we going to meet?” instead of “Are we going to?” And that assumptiveness that comes with multiple offers really helps people to get better outcomes.

We know from research that people who use multiple offers get better outcomes than people who use the single offer. But not only do they get better outcomes, they also create stronger relationships. Using multiple offers helps you to build the relationship at the same time that you’re maximizing your outcome. And so, it’s a great strategy to use.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. And let’s talk about that assumptiveness. So, sometimes, I guess, when I’ve been on the receiving end of it, I don’t know, I guess sometimes I don’t like it. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe it’s like, “Okay, you’re disqualified and we’re moving on to the next project.”

Victoria Medvec
No, I think that’s right. I think sometimes we don’t like it, but I would say when we don’t like it, it’s usually because it’s done poorly. And what I mean by that is sometimes people are assumptive but they talk about themselves, not you. So, I think that people like it better if I am assumptive but focused on them rather than focused on myself. And it’s also better if when I’m being assumptive, I don’t make the statement as though I know all about your life or I know what’s going on with you.

But, instead, that I may be assumptive using some third-party data, like, “I know from the last analyst call that you were really worried about this. I understand that you’re challenged with this. Your CEO has mentioned concerns about this. I would love to help with those things.” And, in reality, I don’t think that the cold email is going to be the most effective strategy because, remember, I say, “Say it, don’t send it. And see them when you say it.” So, I’m not a big proponent of the cold email no matter.

But I think that when I’m in a conversation with you and I’m focused on you and being assumptive, and my entire offer is focused on how my differentiators can address your needs, you’re going to find a presumptiveness to be less problematic than if I’m focused on what I want to do or why I want to do it or why it’s important to me, and talking about myself.

And that’s a huge factor in negotiation. I would say that that’s a big switching factor that a lot of people who go into negotiations are very ego-centric. They’re very, very focused on themselves and what they want to get. And when you can switch that to focus in on the other side, their problems, their challenges, their needs, you’re going to be far more effective in every one of those interactions.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And so, now, for your go first point, I know this is hotly debated and studied in negotiation circles. Can we hear your hot take? You are in the go first camp?

Victoria Medvec
I am squarely in the go first camp, very broadly in the go first camp. But I would argue that people who are not in the go first camp are banking that on a lot of information that came out many, many years ago where some people would say, “He who speaks first loses.” But that advice wasn’t based on any research. The research on this is abundantly clear that people who make first offers get better outcomes than people who follow.

When I lead, I get four advantages. When I lead, I get to create the starting point and I get to create an anchoring effect from that. People get anchored by numbers and they insufficiently adjust off of those initial estimates. When I lead, I get that anchoring advantage. But when I lead, I also get to set the table with the issues we’re going to discuss, so I get to ensure that we’re not just talking about salary, we’re not just talking about price. I get to set the table with, “What are we talking about?”

So, if I’m going to talk to a customer, I’m not just talking about the price. I’m talking about the security of their supply chain and how it was threatened during COVID, and I need to ensure that they never run out of product in the future. So, I want to create redundancy in the supply chain and ship them product from multiple locations because I want them to always be able to have the product they need. That’s the topic of the conversation. I just framed that. I framed it by setting the right issues on the table and framing the conversation around loss rather than gain. So, when I go first, I get to get that anchoring advantage, I get to set the table, I get to frame the conversation, and I’m in the relationship-enhancing position.

Think about it for a minute, Pete. If I go first, I come in, I make an offer. You have to react. You have to respond. You have to critique. You have to criticize. If you go first, I have to critique. I have to criticize. I have to tell you what’s wrong. I don’t want to start by telling you what’s wrong with your offer. I want to start by coming in, making that first offer, building the rationale, and having you react to that offer instead.

So, when I go first, I get a lot of advantages, and research has really revealed that. That research is not that old. It’s probably been done in the past 15 years but it shows very clearly that you get a big advantage from going first, but that you have to get prepared so that you can effectively go first. Because if I don’t know enough about the weaknesses of the other side’s alternatives, if I haven’t thought hard enough about, “What would they do if they didn’t do this deal with me?” if I haven’t thought through that, I might make a first offer that actually isn’t ambitious enough and leaves money on the table. So, I want to be careful about that.

And there is exception to this rule. So, I want to make sure that I talk about the exception. And that is in job negotiations. So, in employment situations, you often do not get to lead. And the reason you don’t get to lead is because you can never start to negotiate until they’ve said they want to hire you. So, you have to have the offer of employment on the table before you start the negotiation. And often, as you know, Pete, the offer of employment contains the terms of that offer. And because of that, the employer often leads.

Now, as you become more senior, it’s more likely that they’ll say something like, “We want to hire you. Let’s sit down and talk about what it would take,” and then you can lead. But when you’re young, and I know many of your listeners are young and starting out in their careers, or midway through their careers, they may not be able to lead in the negotiation because unless the other side has said, “I want to hire you,” you can’t start to negotiate, so you have to wait for that offer of employment before you start to negotiate.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Thank you. Okay. Well, so now I’d love it if we could get into some specific words and phrases that you really love and you really don’t in the course of having a negotiation conversation. So, what are some things that are pet peeves of yours or you recommend we avoid like the plague versus words and phrases that seem…I know there’s no such magical word that’s going to just make everyone immediately comply, but, nonetheless, there are things that help and things that hurt and I want to hear them.

Victoria Medvec
I want to tell you some. So, today, actually, I was helping one of my clients with a negotiation, and I was listening to them, and they said, “Well, like Vicky says, this is my best and final offer.” And I literally was like jumping to take myself off mute and get in there and I said, “I would never ever, ever, ever, never ever say ‘That’s my final offer,’ or ‘That’s my best and final offer,’ or ‘Take it or leave it.’” So, those are all words that I hate.

I think those are words in negotiation that puts you in a corner, and you want to remain flexible. You want to be able to get the agreement so you don’t want to get backed into a corner. So, I always say don’t use the words best and final. Don’t say, “This is my final offer.” Don’t say “Take it or leave it.” And I would also say don’t push the other side into a corner. Don’t ask them for their best and final. Don’t say to them, “Is that your final offer?” Don’t say to them things like, “I thought you said you couldn’t do that.” You want them to remain flexible. You want to remain flexible, so you want to stay out of that corner. And so, those are some of my least favorite words.

Another least favorite word is “I’ll send it to you.” Because, remember, I say, “Say it, don’t send it. And see them when you say it.” I want to be in a synchronous channel, face-to-face is best in person, face-to-face on a platform is second best. I want to make sure that I’m saying it and seeing them when I’m saying it. So, that would be another least favorite word is “I’ll send it to you.”

And then I would say, in terms of the favorite camp, what do I really like? I love a story about how my differentiators address your needs. So, I love a story that highlights some differentiator you have addressing a problem the other side has, a challenge that they’re confronting, a situation that they’re struggling with. I love those phrases. I like to use words like, “I think there are multiple ways that we could come at this.” And that gets me into my multiple offers.

So, I love focusing on them, I love giving options, and I love signaling flexibility by talking about the different ways that we could do this, and how I want to be flexible in figuring out what would work best for them. Those are some of my favorite words.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, Vicky, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Victoria Medvec
Well, I hope that, as people look at the book, they think about the examples as being there for a purpose, which is to give you vivid examples of how you can use the strategies. It’s not a book that just dumps a bunch of strategies on people, and there are hundreds of stories of everyday people using the strategies, of business executives using the strategies, of newcomers in business using the strategies, and of people using the strategies to negotiate for themselves. So, I hope they take a look at the book so that they can find those stories, see the examples, and really get a sense of how they can use those ideas to improve their negotiation success.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Well, now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Victoria Medvec
So, I have this quote that I love. It’s from Eleanor Roosevelt, and it says, “Never allow a person to tell you no, who doesn’t have the power to say yes.” And I think that is a perfect negotiation quote by Eleanor Roosevelt. I will always think about that one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Victoria Medvec
So, my favorite research is probably the research by Kahneman and Tversky on prospect theory. So, this research was done in the 1970s, and prospect theory is the theory that highlights that people are risk-averse in gains, and risk-seeking in losses. And it’s what leads to my advice that if you want to maintain the status quo, you highlight gain in your rationale. And if you want to move off the status quo, you highlight loss.

And Danny Kahneman is one of my co-authors. He’s one of my two Noble Prize-winning co-authors. He’s an amazing individual and I think that this research is fantastic. And I really would say to people, it is one of the most important things you can understand is how to use framing as an influence tactic. I think it’s incredibly important for everyday interaction, time at work, time with family. I think it’s a really important thing to understand. So, I would take a look at prospect theory.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And a favorite book?

Victoria Medvec
I would say my own book Negotiate Without Fear. It’s certainly one of my favorites right now because I just finished writing it. Prior to that, there’s a book by Robert Cialdini called Influence that I absolutely love. And I also really like a book by my academic advisor for my PhD, Thomas Gilovich, and it’s called How We Know What Isn’t So.

And when you think about it, is the How We Know What Isn’t So book focuses on decision-making. And I have to understand decision-making and decision biases to understand what Cialdini was talking about in Influence. And then I use both those decision-making pieces of information and influence to negotiate well. And that’s what I cover in Negotiate Without Fear. So, those are my top three books.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Victoria Medvec
So, I use the issue matrix all the time. And I mentioned it to your listeners today, and I really find it to be a very helpful tool. I lay out all my issues before I start a conversation to make sure that I’m actually going to have the right conversation. And I find this tool is really, really helpful to me getting ready for a discussion, but I also find that the tool is incredibly helpful to people who are coaching others. Because, I think so often, when we’re coaching someone to go into a negotiation, or go into a discussion with a customer, we often have a conversation with them, and we spend a long time trying to figure out what are they going to say.

I have a chief revenue officer who likes to say that her team spends a lot of time auditing what people are going to do rather than coaching on what they should do. And I think a part of why they’re auditing what they’re going to do is they’re literally spending 45 minutes of the one-hour meeting figuring out what are they going to say. And I find that the issue matrix is a coach’s dream tool because if I have people lay out those issues, and I can look at what they’re planning to talk about, I immediately know if they’re going to have the right discussion.

And so, I can revert from auditing for 45 minutes to coaching for 45 minutes instead. So, I think it’s a powerful tool for me as an individual and a powerful tool for me as a coach.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Victoria Medvec
Exercise. So, I have found that getting some exercise every day is a really helpful thing for my performance. And I have to be honest with you, I was not an exercise person before. And I realized that the reason I was never exercising is because I never found time in my schedule to do it. So, I started to book exercise appointments, and during the pandemic, I booked them virtually. So, as soon as we get off this call, I’m going to have my virtual barre class with a trainer who’s going to hold me accountable to being there at that exact moment in time, and doing my workout. And I find that is a habit that has really paid off both in terms of better health and a lot more energy.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And is there a key nugget you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Victoria Medvec
So, there is a line I use all the time, which relates actually to the title of my book, and that line is “Always be fearless.” So, I want people to go in and be fearless as they approach negotiation, but also to be fearless as they approach everyday situations, to be fearless and confident, and I say it all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Victoria Medvec
I would point them to my email which is victoriamedvec@medvecandassociates.com, or to my website. So, I think my website and my email are both great ways to get in touch with me. And I would be delighted to hear from your listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Victoria Medvec
So, my final challenge for people being awesome in their jobs is to encourage them to go out and negotiate. Don’t be afraid to ask. Ask on behalf of your company, and ask on behalf of yourself. Many people do not negotiate for themselves, and I know from looking at your demographics of your listeners that a lot of your listeners are female. I think 73% or something are female. And one of the things I would say is a lot of women don’t ask. Women are far less likely to negotiate for themselves than their male colleagues are.

And that’s wildly known but what’s often not known is that while lots of women don’t ask, many men don’t ask either. This is a problem that crosses gender. People don’t negotiate for themselves. And so, I would encourage them to go in, always be fearless, and be willing to ask. And ask for themselves with the right issues on the table and the right strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Vicky, this has been a treat. I wish you many fearless negotiations and fun times in the future.

Victoria Medvec
Thank you so much, Pete. It was an absolute delight to spend time with you and your listeners today. And I hope that they find some tools and strategies that will help them to be awesome at their job.

Pete Mockaitis
Suneel, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Suneel Gupta
Pete, it’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear your wisdom. And, first, you got to tell us the story about you being the face of failure from New York Times.

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, I got a call a few years ago from an organizer of an event, and it was cool for me because at that time I had just started public speaking. Just trying to get up in front of audiences. I really enjoy that type of work. And I get a call and this event organizer says, “Hey, you’ve been nominated twice to speak at this conference.” And I said, “Hey, that’s fantastic. What’s the name of the conference?” And she says, “It’s FailCon,” which stands for Failure Conference.

And let me tell you, Pete, it’s a humbling experience when somebody calls you and says, “Look, we’re doing a conference on failure and we would love for you to be the keynote speaker.” And to make matters worse, I’m up on stage and I didn’t realize this at that time but there was a reporter from the New York Times in the audience, and this reporter decides to do a full-length story on failure, and uses my face as the cover of this article, and the article goes viral. It goes so viral that you could literally have Googled failure at the time and my face would’ve been one of your top search results.

And so, funny enough, I always tell people this, when it comes to writing a book, people tend to come from either the point of view of having a solution or having a problem. And, for me, at that time, I definitely had a problem. And my problem was that when I was inside companies, when I was trying to get jobs, at that time when I was trying to raise funding for my own company, I just wasn’t having any luck. I wasn’t getting people to listen to my ideas. And even when I got inside a room, I was having a very difficult time winning people over.

And that article turned out to be a real gift for me because it opened the door to all these conversations with people who I consider to be the top of their game, extraordinary people from Oscar-winning filmmakers, to celebrity chefs, to CEOs of big companies. And what I learned through the conversations was that coming up with an idea is really only half of sort of the dynamic of being innovative. The other half is really getting people bought into it, and that is much more learned than anything else.

Usually, backable people who I studied were not naturals at this. There was a series of steps that they learned how to take in order to get people excited about their ideas. And once I started to put these practices into play, it really changed everything for me, and I said, “Gosh, I got to put this on paper and share this with other people.” And that formed the basis for the book.

Pete Mockaitis
And, indeed, you put it on paper in the book Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You. And so, I’d love to go through each of the seven steps and get a little bit of a demo in terms of what does okay look like versus great look like inside these worlds. But could you kick us off by sharing perhaps the most surprising or counterintuitive piece of your approach?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, one of the things I really expected to find is that backable people were going to be just generally charismatic. And as I started to sort of broaden the spectrum and I looked at backable people everywhere from all different fields, I thought they were going to have a certain style of communication. They were going to be people who had great eye contact, and great hand gestures, and just did all the sort of things we think about when it comes to great speakers, but more and more, I found that to not be the case.

And I would venture to say, Pete, that probably the majority of backable people that I was able to study did not have the classic communication styles that we might expect. But what I did find is a common denominator, is that it wasn’t charisma. It was conviction. Backable people took the time to convince themselves of their own ideas, and then they let that conviction shine through in whatever communication style it is that feels most natural to them.

And so, just a couple of examples. One is you just go back and watch the original launch of the iPhone. So, this is the 2007 Steve Jobs product launch. And what you might be surprised to find is that it doesn’t come off as charismatic or at least classically charismatic as we might remember. He uses the word “uh” over 80 times in that speech, he’s staring down at his feet quite a bit, and he kind of sort of almost wanders a little bit here and there. And, again, it’s not a crisp sort of TED-style presentation.

Or, let’s take another example from TED itself. If you look at the number one most popular TED Talk of all time right now, what you’ll find is…

Pete Mockaitis
How to get some creativity?

Suneel Gupta
Sir Ken Robinson, exactly. Sir Ken Robinson, it’s a brilliant, brilliant talk but what we might be surprised by is that it’s just not sort of a classic TED-style presentation. Sir Ken Robinson, he has one hand in his pocket, he sort of meanders on and off script, he naturally walked with a bit of a hunch and so he’s got a bit of a slouch as he stands up there on stage, but it’s an amazing presentation.

And, again, the reason that I bring that up is because, oftentimes, when we think about winning people over, when we think about sort of being inside a room, we focus on these classic communication styles – make direct eye contact, use specific hand gestures – but I didn’t find that to be the case at all. I found more to be the case of figure out what your natural style is, but then build conviction around that. Take the time to convince yourself first because if you don’t believe in what you’re saying, then they can’t believe.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Well, so that is step one, convince yourself. And so, let’s kind of walk through all seven of those. But while we’re talking about convince yourself, I think I look back on my own entrepreneurial journey. I think I’ve been too good at convincing myself. I talked myself into some things. I had some natural enthusiasm and passion for the thing, but I think I talked myself into pursuing initiatives that, on second thought, probably should’ve done a better job validating the value proposition upfront and maybe gone in another direction. So, how do we think about convincing ourselves versus not deluding ourselves, shall we say?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it is a balance. One of the ways I try to think about this is you don’t want to share your idea too early. And so, when we talk about convincing ourselves first, we want to build enough conviction where we feel comfortable getting into a room and people can poke holes at our ideas and we don’t immediately get deflated.

Because here’s the thing, what we found is that, especially if you look inside big companies and the way that ideas are shared, most ideas actually don’t get killed inside the conference room, they don’t get killed inside formal meetings. They get killed inside casual conversations around the water cooler, or through side conversations, or in the parking lot. That’s where the vast majority of great ideas end up sort of finding their stop.

Why is that? Well, typically, it’s because when we come up with something, we tend to sort of blurt out the idea right as it comes up, and we get really excited about it but then we look around the room, or we look on the screen the way you and I are right now, and we see that the other person isn’t quite as excited about the idea as we are. And when that happens, it can be a very deflating experience.

And so, when we think about convincing ourselves, it’s not saying, “Hey, I’m no matter what wedded to this idea,” but it’s building up enough conviction where we feel like we can walk into a room and not be afraid of the possibilities and sort of the challenges that will come up. So, one fun way to think about it is when you are in that moment when you get excited about an idea, just asking yourself, “Is this a chocolate M&M or is this a peanut M&M?”

A chocolate M&M, if you squeeze a chocolate M&M, it cracks immediately. A peanut M&M is not a piece of steel but you can squeeze it, other people can squeeze it, and it’s not going to break immediately. Again, you’re not looking for it to be bullet-proof but you’re looking to put a peanut inside. And so, one of the things we talk about in the book is backable people have sort of learned to kind of ask themselves that question in the heat of moment, right before they are about to share an idea. They sort of ask themselves that question, “Chocolate M&M versus peanut M&M.”

If it’s chocolate M&M, they’ll resist the temptation to share in that moment and go take, what we call in the book, incubation time to put peanut inside. And that can be done through all forms of things. It could be through drawing out your idea, it could be through taking long walks and thinking about the idea, it could be journaling. I know, Pete, that’s something you like to do as well. And so, there are many ways to do that, but, again, it really comes back to that moment of resisting the temptation to share an idea too early because, oftentimes, that can be the death knell of some really creative things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you convince yourself first, you take some time before putting it out there because if you put it out there too early, they might deflate you before you’re able to take a hard look at the stuff in advance and kind of get inoculated, you’re like, “Oh.” It’s so funny. I had an idea for…it was basically Airbnb. I had this with a couple of my friends, actually.

And then I think we talked to a consulting friend of ours who worked at Hyatt, he moved on, he said, “Oh, my gosh, you could have some crazy liabilities. Say, a crime happens or someone’s stuff gets stolen,” and we’re like, “Oh, yeah. Yeah, you’re right. That sounds really risky.” We just let it go. And he’s like, “And, oh, Couchsurfing is already a thing, and that’s not a really big deal, and people do it for free. It’s kind of a fun vibe.” It was like, “Okay, there’s Couchsurfing and there’s liability, oh, never mind. Oops.”

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, exactly. And I think that it’s so much better when…By the way, all those things your friends brought up, they’re all valid. They weren’t invalid objections, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Liabilities, for sure.

Suneel Gupta
All that stuff is real, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a reason not to do it. And what ends up happening is that when someone points out an objection that we haven’t thought of ourselves, what that tends to have is a lot more charge to it. It just tends to have much more of a deflating effect versus if you’ve gone through, then you’ve actually thought through some of these objections yourself, and you walk into the room knowing that, “Hey, this, this, and this may come up.”

They probably will come up but they’re not going to have as much of a charge to them. You’re going to have thought through, “Hey, yeah, that is a thing. Maybe here are a couple of things that we need to consider as a result of that.” And, again, you’re able to walk in and have a discussion rather than the sort of, again, crossing your fingers, hoping they’re not going to point out something that you haven’t thought of yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is great, and the answer to liability is insurance, that insurance writers love to take that on for a price. And so, it’s not a deal killer; it’s just, “Oh, that’s a new thing.” And you’re right, well-said in terms of having less charge when you think about it yourself as opposed to, “Oh, the super smart guy who was a director at Hyatt thinks that this is a big thing, then it must be a really big thing.” Yeah, well-said.

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, and I think, also, gosh, the curse of knowledge is just so important to factor in here because, oftentimes, and what we mean by that is, look, the deeper we go into a subject matter, we are going to be more resistant to innovative ideas in that matter because we know how hard it is. I was talking to somebody the other day, who was an investor, and he comes from a financial tech background, really knocked it out of the park in that space, actually started a company, in one of the sorts of original fintech companies, had a massive exit.

And then I was talking to him about what it’s like to be an investor, and he said, “Look, you know what, I’ve passed on every single great fintech deal. I passed on PayPal, I passed on Square, I passed on Stripe because I had this knowledge of how hard it really is to do a fintech company that that sort of got in my way from taking a risk on these other ideas.”

And the point here is that, look, oftentimes, when we come up with something, you come up with an idea in the housing space, you came up with an idea for Airbnb, you went immediately, as most people would, to somebody who kind of knows that space, you went to a friend at Hyatt. And that person is going to tell you what they have discovered, which, in most cases, is going to be reasons not to do something because they’ve spent a lot of time.

And, Pete, it all comes back to something I know that is probably obvious but worth restating, which is that the fresher an idea, the newer an idea, the less obvious it’s going to be. And that’s the trap that I think we sort of fall into whether we’re an entrepreneur or whether we work inside a big company and we’re trying to do things that are unique and cool and different, is that those tend to be the ideas that make the biggest difference, but they also tend to be the hardest ideas to sell.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. That’s great. Well, we’re just on step one here. So, we talked about convincing yourself. Could you maybe give us a quick overview of steps two through seven? And then we’ll spend a couple minutes hearing a bit of detail for each.

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, sure. So, step one was to convince yourself first. Step two is to cast a central character. So, what we mean by that is who is the person you’re trying to serve, and sort of bringing them into the story and making them the hero of your story. The third is to find an earned secret. So, this is something that you have gone out and you’ve learned that most people probably don’t know. And there’s lots of examples of how to do that, and we can get into that.

The next is to make it feel inevitable. So, instead of just making a new idea feel fresh and exciting, you also want to make it feel inevitable, that we’re inevitably heading in a certain direction. The fifth is that we want to flip outsiders into insiders. So, how do we actually make people feel like they are a part of the idea. Another way to think about this is, “How do we make people feel like they’re builders instead of buyers?”

The sixth is to play exhibition matches, and these are practice sessions before you walk into the final event, playing lots and lots of these exhibition matches, and there are specific ways on how to do this effectively. Then the final is to let go of your ego. So, the ego can very much get in the way when it comes to creating new ideas, and we really unpack that and talk about how to get around it. So, those are the seven.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, could you maybe give us a demonstration then in terms of how an abbreviated pitch might go, and then kind of annotate it for us, like, “Hey, see, that was step two, we cast a central character. Oh, and that was step three. See that earned secret?” so we kind of see it in action?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah. I’ll give you sort of the Michael Dubin Dollar Shave Club pitch. And for those of you who aren’t familiar, Dollar Shave Club was an online razor blade company that sort of expanded from there, sold for a billion dollars to Gillette, but it’s sort of a folklore story in a startup world. I think the thing that isn’t well known is that Michael Dubin struggled quite a bit to get a lot of funding for his company, to get investors to care at all.

And one of the ways that Michael Dubin sort of thought about this, and one of the ways that he was able to flip investors who didn’t care to saying yes – and, by the way, I think this is important whoever you are, you don’t have to be an entrepreneur – is he took people through the storyboard of what happens to his target customer.

So, one of the first things that he did was he went out and he built conviction behind this idea by actually thinking about, “What is it that my customer actually goes through?” And he literally storyboarded this at home. And then he would go to the stores and he would watch people in action, and then when he was in front of investors, he sort of walked them through the storyboard of, “Hey, my average customer is a 20-something male, who cares a lot more about his health than his father ever did, and that includes what he puts in his body, that includes what he puts on his body. And he’s used to a certain level of convenience when it comes to buying products.”

“But all of that sort of goes out the door the moment that he sort of thinks about buying razor blades because, now, he goes to this sort of pharmacy or grocery store, he has to locate the aisle that these are in. When he finally locates the product, he realizes that, in many cases, it’s behind a locked security case. He has to push a button in order to get somebody’s attention. He waits there until an annoyed worker sort of shows up, unlocks the security case, and, by the way, everybody is sort of watching, and behind that case isn’t just razor blades but there’s condoms and there’s laxatives, and nobody knows exactly what you’re there to buy, but now all attention is sort of on you.”

“He unlocks the case and then sort of watches over your shoulder as you make this purchasing decision.” And that is so fundamentally different than the way that this generation, the way that his target customer was used to buying products. And so, when we he went in with the pitch of, “Hey, we want to disrupt a multi-billion-dollar industry through an online platform,” it didn’t do very well.

But when he shifted that to, “This is the moment-by-moment experience, and here’s how we’re going to change that,” it really shifted the way that investors sort of looked at him. Because, as it turns out, stories sort of bring us in, and then substance sort of keeps us there. So, if he were to stop there in that pitch and just ended it, it wouldn’t have gone anywhere. But when he went from there, it’s like, “Look, there are millions of young men who are going through this experience every single week, and that’s translating to this number of dollars and this amount of market share, and this is what we can pick up.”

And so, he’s bringing them in with story, he’s keeping them there with substance. Convincing himself first, casting a central character, and let’s go through some of the other…we’ll go through some of the other principles too, and we can show how this story relates.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it, yeah. And so then, that earned secret. So, you highlight some information that goes beyond Google or what just about everybody would know. And, in a way, that story, in and of itself, has you thinking, like, “Yeah, you know what, you’re right. It does kind of take a lot to get these razors. Haven’t thought about it.” So, I don’t know if that counts quite…well, you tell me. Is that earned enough or do we have some more juicy insider info to go for there?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, I think the key thing with an earned secret is I would underline the word earned. And the reason for that is you want to show, when you walk into a room, whether that be for an interview, whether that be for a product presentation, team presentation, whatever it is, that you had sort of put yourself into the story in a way that most people have not because that counts for a lot.

I was talking to somebody, this was shortly before I published my book, so her story is not in the book, but she was talking about how she was returning to the workforce. She was a single mom and returning to the workforce and ready to sort of get a job, and she’d found a role at a company that sounded perfect for her except for one thing. And that is that she wasn’t really a user of the product but the role itself was perfect, and she was very excited about this.

Most people in that situation would do the following. They would research the company, they would maybe download the product onto their phone, start playing with it a little bit, and then they would go into the interview and start asking some questions, and be prepared as much as they possibly can be. She did something unique, which is that she talked to every single one of her daughters’ friends because this is very much like a Gen-Z social product, and she talked to every single one of their friends. She interviewed them about what they liked, about what they didn’t like, she took careful notes.

And then when she walked into this interview, she walked in with all these observations, all these sorts of insights. And this hiring manager that was talking to her was so impressed that not only did she get the job, but right in the middle of the interview, he ended up patching in one of their UX designers because a couple of the things that she had found and discovered through these interviews were things that actually were not on top of their mind, and it was coming from a very fresh voice, and she was able to sort of come in with this earned sense of information.

And, by the way, these don’t need to be sort of big monumental things. They can, oftentimes, be small. But I think the key is that asking yourself when you go into a situation, “What’s the sort of typical level of research that people would do to prepare for this moment?” Again, whether it’s an interview, or a pitch, or a presentation, it’s figure out how to go one step further. It could be test driving a competitor’s product, it could be talking to customers, but just doing something that ordinarily most people wouldn’t do.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. I’m reminded we interviewed Ramit Sethi, and he calls this the briefcase technique because you, like, dramatically remove slides, or research, or something. You sort of have like a deliverable inside your bag, and most people don’t, and they’re just like, “Wow, this person…we’re impressed.” And it can often lead to great opportunities opening up there. That’s good.

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, one of the people that I talked to for the book is a guy named Jonathan Karp, who was a publisher, and he really wanted Howard Stern to write a book, but Howard Stern had no interest in writing another book. He had already written a couple of bestsellers, and he was like, “It’s a lot of work. I really don’t want to do this.” And Karp kept asking him, he was year after year, he continued to be on Howard Stern’s tail about the idea of, like, “You got to write a book.”

And, finally, Karp decides to do something really clever and unique, which is that he thought to himself, “Most of what Howard Stern would end up writing is already kind of out there. It’s going to be sort of a summation of a lot of the interviews that he’s done. So, why don’t we take the transcripts of those interviews, then why don’t we actually sort of extract what we think could be really good content for a book, then we’ll actually create the book?”

And so, the next time that he actually goes and pitches to Howard Stern on the idea of writing a book, which Howard Stern is prepared again to say, “Gosh, I’ve told you many times I don’t want to write a book,” right in that moment, Jonathan Karp literally pulls out a finished book, a leather-bound book, and says, “Look, Howard, I know one of your objections to all these is that you don’t want to write a book, but we’ve kind of just taken the liberty of writing 90% of it for you.”

“All you got to do is write an opener, write some the language around some of these interviews, and you got yourself a book,” which, of course, it ended up being a lot more work than that, but what Howard Stern said was, “Look, I was so in that moment, I was so intoxicated by the effort, so intoxicated by effort that Jonathan Karp had put into this process that I could not say no.”

And that’s kind of, in some ways, how you want people to feel inside the room, which is like, again, you have intoxicated them with effort. You’ve gone out and done things that most people wouldn’t do, then you’ve taken insights from that experience and you’ve brought that into the room.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, let’s hear about step four, make it feel inevitable.

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, this is a big one because I think that, oftentimes, when we think about new ideas, we get excited about how shiny it is, and we want to talk about why it’s exciting. But the thing that is important I think to realize is that, as human beings, we tend not to be risk takers. We don’t like to take risks. And that’s true even, I have found, Pete, for people who take risk for a living. You look at venture capitalists, you look at Hollywood producers, people who are betting on uncertainty, they don’t like to take risks either. It’s really, in the vast majority of the cases, it’s just something that they sort of accept as part of their job but they’ll do whatever they can to sort of de-risk a project.

And so, this sort of, I think, gets to a Noble Prize-winning theory around loss aversion, that the pain that we get from making a bad decision is twice as powerful as the pleasure that we get from making the right decision. And if you keep that in mind when you walk into a room to pitch someone anything new, we’re not just trying to sell them on why an idea is good. We’re also trying to make sure that we cover sort of why an idea might be bad, and making sure that we can sort of minimize that risk. And one of the ways that we can do that is by talking about why an idea is inevitable. Not why it’s new but why it’s inevitably going to happen.

There was an executive that I talked to at Comcast who talked about this idea of having Comcast not be just a service that’s inside the home but outside the home as well, connected over mobile, which, today, is like one of those, yeah, that’s sort of a passe sort of idea. But ten years ago, when he was sort of inside Comcast trying to get people behind the idea, it was actually very hard because there were a lot of people who were sort of wedded to the idea, they’re like, “Look, we’re an in-home business and we don’t want to dilute ourselves, we don’t want to focus on anything else.”

And he continued to sort of pound the table on the idea of, like, “Look, this is new, this is exciting,” and he wasn’t getting anywhere. But when he re-jiggered the presentation to show a couple of things, everything changed. And those couple of things were, “Here’s what’s happening in Europe. And Europe tends to be a few years ahead of us when it comes to mobile, and they’ve started to have these integrated services, which tell us that, look, if history continues to repeat itself, we’re going to be heading in that direction.”

The second thing was there were certain sort of plays that some competitors were making that were starting to hint at the idea that they were going to have an integrated service as well. And when he combined that in his presentation, he showed, “Hey, look, this isn’t where I think the world is going. This is where the world is going, and I think we need to get ahead of it or we’re going to get left behind.” That’s when executives started to change their minds, that’s when people started to get bought into this idea of, “Look, we don’t want to miss out,” because we all sort of have that fear.

I think if you believe that fear is one of the biggest things that we need to sort of face when we’re trying to sell people on anything new, well, then we can’t neutralize fear with excitement. We sort of, in some ways, have to neutralize fear with fear, and, in this case, it’s the fear of missing out.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in making it feel inevitable, it’s not just a matter of saying, “Hey, here’s the trend,” but rather, “Hey, here is overwhelmingly the trend, and woe to us if we don’t get on board with that.”

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, and I don’t think it necessarily need to be overwhelming either. I think that it gets easier if it’s overwhelming, and you can point to, “Hey, this is obviously going to happen,” but a lot of times it’s not obvious but there are indicators that things are going to happen, that you start to see little signals of that.

You look at sort of Zappos, for example, as a company. There wasn’t a lot that they could show at that time in terms of trends but there were little datapoints, like there was the notion that Amazon was expanding beyond just books, and they were expanding to get at products. That wasn’t necessarily at the time.

Today, again, that sounds obvious. At the time, it didn’t but there were little datapoints that were showing, to say, “Look, not only is this growing in a certain category, not only are we selling books online, we’re going to be selling other things online. There are all these sorts of niches out there.” Or, back to your example about Airbnb. When Airbnb went into the room, they didn’t really have another Airbnb to point to but they had Couchsurfing.

Couchsurfing was starting to pick up and there were 600,00 or so listings on Couchsurfing, and there was a lot of activity around sort of Airbnb-like offerings happening on Craigslist. Again, these aren’t necessarily overwhelming datapoints but they collected enough of these datapoints to show that, like, in combination, there’s something happening here.

In the book, we talk about putting on your anthropologist hat because that’s effectively what you’re doing at this stage. You are sort of looking at the direction the world is heading, and that can be hard sometimes for people because whenever we get excited about an idea, we want to just stay focused on that idea, and we want to say, “Our idea is going to change the world.” Whereas, I think what backable people are doing is they’re saying, “Well, here’s the way the world is changing through these datapoints, and then here’s how my idea would fit into that change.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Thank you. Well, let’s hear about step five, flip outsiders into insiders.

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, this is one of my favorites because we, oftentimes, think that when we go into a room, we need to have sort of a bullet-proof presentation, and the more bullet-proof our presentation, the more backable it’s going to be. But the more and more I look at sort of the way that backable people were operating, what I realized is that they didn’t have that at all. They would walk in with a pretty clear vision of what they wanted to do but they wouldn’t have every single detail necessarily sorted out, and that was on purpose.

And the reason for that is because you want to bring people in when you’re inside a room. You want people to feel like they are part of it as well. And one my favorite stories from the book is the story of Betty Crocker, and how in the 1940s, they came up with the idea of cake mix. And they had done all the focused group testing, and the believed that cake mixes were just going to be like this hot sensational product. And so, they were shocked, like all the executives at Betty Crocker were shocked when they found out that cake mix was just not selling, and they couldn’t figure out why.

And so, they hired this psychologist named Ernest Dichter to go out into the field and start interviewing homemakers. And what Dichter founds out, what he comes back with was, “I think you have made the process of making a cake too simple, too easy, because you have basically removed the customer from the creative process. All they have to do is pour water into a mix and then they pop it into the oven, and the cake comes out of the oven, and they don’t really feel like it’s theirs. They don’t really feel ownership over it.”

So, Dichter has a recommendation, and the recommendation is, “Why don’t you remove one key ingredient and see what happens?” And so, they do, they removed the egg. And so, now, if you are a customer, you have to go out and you have to buy fresh eggs, you have to crack them into the mix, and you stir it in, and then you pop it into the oven, and sales completely take off. Because, now, when the cake comes out of the oven, people actually felt like ownership of the cake. They felt like it was theirs too.

And researchers have unpacked this over and over again. There’s a group out of Harvard that calls this the IKEA effect. And the IKEA effect basically tells us that we place up to five times the amount of value on something that we help build than something that we simply buy off the shelf, because we made it ourselves. So, what does this have anything to do with innovation or ideas?

I think, Pete, we kind of have been told that innovation is a two-step formula. You come up with a great idea and then you execute on it well, but there’s this hidden step in between. And this hidden step is where we get other people, we get fellow employees, we get bosses, we get investors, we get shareholders, we get other people involved before it reaches execution stage where the idea is still imperfect, where they get to crack their own egg into the mix and be part of it so that way, when we show up to execution phase, we actually show up together.

And I believe you can trace, literally, every product, every successful product, every successful business, every successful political movement, back to this hidden step, where we know it wasn’t just one person, we know it wasn’t just the person that came up with the idea. It was a group of people who felt founder-level ownership over that idea even though they didn’t come up with the idea itself because they were able to be a part of it from the earliest stages.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, in the Betty Crocker example, you let them crack an egg into it, and so, likewise, if you’re putting forward a proposal to folks, you don’t want to have everything nailed down. So, let’s just say, someone brought up, like, “Hey, what about liability?” It’s like, “Hey, you’re right. That’s going to be a key issue we need to solve, and we’d love your expertise to help.” Is that kind of the vibe that you’re going for?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, and I think you can go one step beyond that, which is like, Pete, if I’m coming to pitch you on an idea, and you are an expert at taking content, great content, at creating great content and distributing it. And maybe I have an idea for something that requires that, ultimately is going to require that. I would come into the room and to say, “Look, we’ve got a few details figured out here. But, Pete, one thing actually we don’t have figured out is how are we actually going to craft this in a way that people are going to listen, that people are actually going to watch. And I know that that’s something you’ve been focused on. We’d love to get your thoughts on that.”

Now, a couple things to keep in mind. That does not mean that I haven’t spent my own time thinking about what the answer might be. It takes a lot more preparation to have a discussion than to give a presentation because I have to ask you the right questions, I have to pull you in the right way, I have to be able to go back and forth with you, you’re going to say something, you’re going to have an answer to that question, and I’m going to want to ask follow-up questions.

And so, there’s a lot more preparation that goes into the details that you don’t know than the details you know, which I know it sounds counterintuitive but it’s really important to know, which is you’re not sort of shrugging your shoulders or hand-waving at sort of these unknowns. You’re actually spending real time thinking about that, uncovering the possibilities, thinking through pros and cons, but the difference is you’re not coming to the room, saying, “I absolutely believe that this is the right way to go for every single detail.” You’re saying, “I think I have these details figured out, but I don’t have these details figured out. Let’s talk through them.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how do you recommend we do the step six, play exhibition matches?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, exhibition matches, I think, were surprising for me because, again, I look at backable people and I felt like, originally, these are people who are just, off the cuff, who were just naturally great communicators. And what I found is that people who tend to be off the cuff, people who come off with more of sort of an improvisational style, they actually tend to be the product of lots and lots and lots of practice. And it’s that lots of practice that actually lets them be off the cuff, which I know sounds a little bit weird but let me share what I learned.

When we practice something enough, what it allows us to do is it allows us to sort of loosen the grip on our script. Because, oftentimes, when we walk into a room, we walk in with a script. We have a sense of what we want to say and we kind of sort of almost follow that script. But the problem with that is that there’s always something that’s going to come up, a question that we didn’t expect, or an interruption, or something’s going to happen, and it’s really our ability to adapt to those moments. It’s really our ability to adapt to those moments that create these sorts of backable situations where a tough question is answered, and where we sort of go off script and we start having a discussion about something else. Then that’s really when we start to win audiences over.

The other thing is this. Like, I thought if you practice something, by the way, the average person that I talk to for this book, practice something 21 times before they got into a room, that could be for an interview, that could be for a pitch, but 21 practice sessions. Then there were a couple of things to keep in mind when they were doing these practice sessions. The first thing is that, really, no venue is too small.

Like, you can ask anyone for a practice session. That could be a friend, that could be a family member, but the key is that when you’re doing this practice session, you want to deliver it as if it’s the real thing. You don’t want to give sort of editorial or commentary, and say like, “So, hey, what I’m planning on doing is I’m planning on walking them through this and then I was going to go through that.” You actually want to give it as if it’s the real thing because you’re building the muscle memory that you want inside the room.

The second thing is it’s really important to be able to get good feedback. So, when you’re finished with the practice sessions, say, you’re pitching like a colleague, a friendly colleague, before you walk into the room to talk to somebody who’s leading the team. When you’re getting that feedback, what we typically tend to ask is the question, “Hey, so what did you think?” That’s the typical question we ask. And when we ask that question, we very rarely get the kind of feedback we need to make ourselves better. It’s kind of an imprecise question, people may want to be nice so they may not give you the feedback that you need.

A better question to ask is, “What stood out to you the most? Of what you just heard, what stood out to you the most?” Now, they have to sort of think through the highlights of the moments that really resonated or landed. But the question I like even more is, “How would you describe what you just heard to someone else? Like, what would be the headline of what you just heard?” And what I find is when I ask people to do that, the description that they have, in a lot of cases, is actually better than what I had.

Like, I’ll learn a new way of how to describe my own idea. Like, when I was coming up with the idea for Backable I went to Daniel Pink, another author who’s written a few great books that I really like, and I shared my idea, and it was pretty half-baked at the time. But then I asked him, like, “How would you describe this to someone else?” And one of the things he said was, “I would say that the most exceptional people aren’t just brilliant, they’re backable.” And that ended up becoming sort of one of the taglines of the book, and literally is on the back cover of my book. So, I really appreciate the idea of asking people, “How would you describe this to someone else?”

The final thing I’ll say about this, Pete, about exhibition matches and practicing over and over again, is one of my big hiccups, one of the reasons I was skeptical about this, is because I felt like, “Well, if you practice something 21 times, isn’t that going to make you robotic? Isn’t that going to make you sound too sort of planned or scripted?” But what I found is that the opposite tends to happen. Because when you’ve mastered your material at that level, you really understand what you want to communicate, what you want to say, and sort of the ways you want to get there.

What that allows you to do is it allows you to sort of drop the script when you’re inside the room. You’d be fully tuned in, be fully present with the other people who are there. And when you’re fully present at that level, it allows you to pick up on cues that you may not otherwise pick up on. Oftentimes, you see people who walk into a room and they have a set of slides to get through, and they just sort of get through those slides.

But when you’re fully tuned into what’s happening inside the room, you can pick up on little gestures, like little, “Oh, I’m pretty sure they did not get that part, so I’m going to spend a little longer on that,” or, “I’m pretty sure that’s an area where they’re really excited about, so I’m going to double-down on that or maybe come back to it later on.” And being tuned into that level is really what tends to create these backable moments.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And then with 21 practice sessions, that’s plenty, and I think that’s encouraging. It’s funny, it’s both daunting and encouraging in terms of, “Oh, you don’t think you’re polished quite yet? Well, how many practice runs have you done? Oh, three. Well, to be expected. There’s a long way to go.” I find that oddly comforting.

Suneel Gupta
Yeah. Well, look, 21 does seem daunting, for sure. And the way that I sort of like to think about it is, the other way that somebody pointed out to me, I still remember the first time I started to hear about exhibition matches is the former chief technology officer of Pixar, and spent 20 years at the company, and so he spent a good amount of his time sort of bringing together all these disparate groups – technology, and business, and storytelling, and creative, and design.

So, he’s telling me about the idea of practicing 21 times, and I told him about the time that I went in to interview for a role at Square, the company Square, and my interview was with Jack Dorsey. And I told him about how I just bombed that interview, completely bombed it, completely tanked it.

And even though I kind of knew the answers to all of Dorsey’s questions, the role was for a product role, I’d spent a bunch of time working in product development, I kind of just knew the content but I bombed the interview. And I asked him why, “Like, why did that happen? Tell me, Oren, why did that happen?” And he said, “Well, how much time did you spend preparing for that?” And I said, “Well, I wrote out some questions for him. I spent a bunch of time researching the company.”

And he’s like, “Yeah, but preparing, like that was preparing. But how much time did you spend practicing, actually practicing what you’re going to say?” And I said, “None. I didn’t practice what I was going to say. I didn’t do any mock interviews or anything like that.” And he’s like, “Let me ask you a question. When you were in law school,” because he knew I went to law school, “how much time would you spend preparing for a test?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I would do practice tests. I would do probably spend at least 10, 20 hours preparing for a law school examination.”

And he’s like, “So, let me get this straight. You spent all that time preparing for a law school test, for a single law school test, that may or may not have had a true influence on your career. But for an interview with Jack Dorsey, you didn’t spend any time actually practicing before that interview.” And it was like sort of this punch in the gut moment where I was like, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” So, yeah, we spend a lot of time, I think, preparing for these moments, but we don’t spend enough time practicing for these moments, 21 times.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And the final step, let go of your ego.

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, let go of your ego is about making it about somebody else. Like, who are you there to serve? How is this about somebody else? One of the best pieces of advice that I think about all the time before I walk into a room, and I think as I talk to different audiences now, I always get really positive sort of feedback on like, “Wow, that one thing really changed things for me.” It was like when you walk into a room to give a pitch or a presentation or an interview, whatever it might be, you’re going to feel like the spotlight is on you, normally. You are the person delivering the content.

Find a way to take that spotlight and to put it on something else. Put it on someone else, ideally. That could be the person you’re there to serve, that could be the primary customer of the company. But how do you take sort of everything you’re talking about and make it about someone else? So, if it’s an interview, it could be knowing who the customer is, like knowing deeply who that customer is, and then walking in as somebody who’s looking to serve that customer. Every question you’re answering, everything you’re doing is about the service to that customer.

If you’re there to pitch an idea for a company, again, who is the person you’re trying to serve, who is the central character, and making it about that person. It’s taking the spotlight that’s on you and putting it on someone else.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Suneel, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear a couple of your favorite things?

Suneel Gupta
I will say that one of the things I continue to hear is that, especially as we’re coming out of the pandemic now, is so many people are looking to start new ventures. They’re looking to do something new. And that doesn’t necessarily, by the way, means starting a company, leaving a company, and starting a new one. It could be starting a new venture inside the company as well.

But one of the things I hear often are three words, which is, “I’m not ready for that just yet. I’m not ready.” Three common words. And the thing that I would leave you with is as I went and studied all of these people, backable people from all different fields, none of them were really ready. None of them were really ready to do what they did.

Three friends from design school were not ready to start Airbnb. A mid-level talent manager wasn’t ready to start SoulCycle. A 15-year-old from Stockholm, Sweden wasn’t ready to build an environmental movement but today, Greta Thunberg, is Time magazine’s youngest ever person of the year. And, sure, there were setbacks and there were failures and there were mistakes along the way, but I think the mantra that they all tended to adopt in their own way, which I try to remember as well, is that the opposite of success is not failure; it’s boredom.

So, let’s run with the things that make us come alive and let’s bring good people along the way to join us along the path, because, if there’s anything that I’ve learned, wherever you are listening to this, you are ready.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, how about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Suneel Gupta
Long-term success often comes from short-term setbacks.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, there was a great experiment that was done in the 1980s at Dartmouth University, and it was called The Scar Experiment. Well, basically, what they did is they asked people to come into a room, a group of people, and, one by one, they would put a scar, an artificial scar, on their face. And then they would send them into another room where they would interact with other folks.

But there was a trick, which was right before they walked into the other room, they would say to the person, “Hey, can we get the makeup artist in here just to touch up your scar, just to do a little touchup?” But instead of doing a touchup, they would actually wipe the scar off completely. So, you walked into the room believing that you still had this scar on your face, but you didn’t. And then they had you come back into sort of the study room where you sat down with the researcher, and the researcher say, “How did that go? What happened?”

And nearly everybody was like, “They couldn’t stop staring at my scar. Everybody was completely obsessed with my scar.” And I just love that. I just love, love, love that because it just shows what we believe in ourselves internally is what we believe the world is looking at us for externally, and the power of that connection. So, look it up, The Scar Experiment.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s something to think about, for sure. And a favorite book?

Suneel Gupta
The Alchemist Paulo Coelho, one of my all-time favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Suneel Gupta
I would just say my whiteboard. I know people can’t see this right now but I’m staring at it right now. Just a simple whiteboard has just changed everything for me. One of my favorite things to do in the morning is when I have my cup of coffee, sometimes I just stare at my whiteboard and I’ll just see what comes up. Sometimes it’s nothing. Most of the times it’s gibberish. But, every once in a while, the things that that whiteboard pulls out of me is amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Suneel Gupta
Come to SuneelGupta.com. There’s a bunch of free stuff out there, some new thoughts, and a way for us to keep in touch.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Suneel Gupta
I would say, as we think about sort of how to be backable, which I think nearly all of us are, let’s also think about how to make other people backable. Like, I’ll leave you with one story, which is about a woman named Damyanti Hingorani, she was a refugee on the border of India and Pakistan, under dire conditions, impoverished conditions, had this unlikely dream, which was that she wanted to become an engineer with Ford Motor Company, and this was the 1950s, and Ford Motor Company was in its heyday. And Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the world at the time.

And so, her parents get behind the dream. They saved every penny they have. She’s able to get on a boat to the United States. She gets a scholarship to Oklahoma State University. The day after she graduated, she grabs a train to Detroit, Michigan and finds her way to get into a room with a hiring manager to apply for her dream job.

But when this hiring manager looks at her application, he looks at her resume, he says, “Wait a second. Are you applying for the job of an engineer?” And she says, “Yeah.” And he says, “Well, look, I’m sorry. We actually don’t have any female engineers working here right now,” which is crazy, right? Ford Motor Company, at that time, had thousands and thousands of engineers on staff but not a single one of them was a woman.

And so, Damyanti Hingorani is really deflated in this moment, and she gets up, and she picks up her purse, and she picks up her resume, and she starts to walk out of the room. And then, almost in this last minute of courage, she turns around, she summons all of the grit that she possibly can, she looks this guy in the eye, and she tells him her story about all the struggle and sacrifice that it took for her to get to this country, to get to Detroit, to get to this very room. And then she says to him, “Look, if you don’t have any female engineers on staff, do yourself a favor and hire me now because things are changing.”

And this hiring manager, so inspired by that conversation, that he goes out and he fights with everybody around him, fights with his colleagues, fights with his superiors, and eventually he gets her the job. And in 1967, Damyanti Hingorani becomes Ford Motor Company’s first ever female engineer. It was a great story, honored in Time magazine pretty recently because it inspires people. It inspired other immigrants. It inspired women in the workforce. And it’s the story that has inspired me the most because Damyanti Hingorani is my mom. And had a middle manager from suburban Michigan had not taken a chance on a refugee from the other side of the world, then, Pete, I wouldn’t be here right now chatting with you. I wouldn’t be able to share any of this with you.

So, my final message to anybody who’s listening is, hey, as we get out into the world now, let’s think about how to make ourselves backable but let’s also think about how to find good people and help them become backable.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Suneel, what a beautiful closing note. Powerful stuff. Thank you so much for spending the time and sharing the goods. I wish you lots of luck in your backable adventures.

Suneel Gupta
Well, thanks so much, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Vanessa, thanks for joining us here on How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Vanessa Bohns
Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. And I’m curious, so you’re a social psychologist, and that’s one of my favorite types of guests. And I’m curious, how did growing up on a farm influence that world? Because I think of farms, I think of not so many people and more so animals. Did that provide any insights or background for you to enter into social psychology?

Vanessa Bohns
Unbelievably, it actually did. So, I grew up on a bird farm, and we had all sorts of birds – pheasants and quail and peacocks and geese and chickens – and I would spend my time kind of sitting with my notebook, very Jane Goodall style, and just watching the birds and recording them, and kind of watching their birdy behavior.

And so, yes, they weren’t humans that I was observing but I was taking the sort of the meticulous approach of studying behavior that is kind of funny, now that I look back at these documents that I had of just all these bird behaviors that I would categorize.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a bird behavior most of us don’t know about but maybe would find interesting?

Vanessa Bohns
Well, I will say, if you didn’t grow up on a farm, and I feel like anyone who did or grew up with chickens and roosters will understand this, roosters can be very protective. And so, I spent a lot of my high school years with my friends and I running from the door to the car before the rooster saw us and started coming up, started pecking at our ankles. So, yeah, running away from roosters, and their territorial behavior is definitely a bird behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good to know. Thank you. Well, that comes in handy maybe in the future. And so, let’s talk about your book here You Have More Influence Than You Think: How We Underestimate Our Power of Persuasion, and Why It Matters. I’m curious, could you kick us off by sharing maybe one of the most surprising discoveries you’ve made about influence across your career studying it?

Vanessa Bohns
I think this whole book is really a catalogue of all the things that I found surprising in my own research and in other people’s research, and there are actually pieces of research that are the things that people have been surprised at when they try to influence other people. So, for example, my research is on asking people for things, and what I find is that when people go out and they ask people for things, they think they’re more likely to be rejected than they actually are.

And so, what we do is we have participants in our studies make guesses about how many people they’re going to have to ask to get someone to do a particular task. And then they go out and they ask people, and we compare what they predicted to what actually happens. And what we find again and again is that people think it’s going to be a lot harder to get people to do things than it actually is.

And the thing that’s been most surprising in that work is how far you can kind of push the effect. So, for example, we started small, so when people went out and asked people to do things, they would ask people to fill out a survey. Then we had them ask to borrow people’s cellphones. Then we had them ask for charitable donations.

And then we started designing studies that we were sure could never work, like we had them go out and ask people to vandalize library books, by walking into a library, and saying, “Hey, I’m playing a prank on my friend. With your own handwriting, will you just write the word pickle and pen on this library book?” And even in those extreme cases, where you’re asking people to do things they actually find pretty uncomfortable, they are more willing to agree to do those things than we expect.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy, there’s so much here. Well, can you give us some numbers here in terms of writing pickle on a library book, for example? Just how many people, what percent of people would do that just for my own edification? I might need to draw on this knowledge someday. What proportion of people will write pickle on a library book if I ask them to?

Vanessa Bohns
Okay. So, our participants, before they went out and made this request, they thought they’d have to ask about 11 people before three people would agree to vandalize a library book. In fact, they only had to ask fewer than five people to get three people to agree. So, basically, more than half of the people they approached agreed to do this thing even though they actually didn’t really want to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, this is fascinating. And so then, I’d like to frame up some additional numbers if you could. I remember I experienced some of this firsthand once when someone randomly reached out to me on LinkedIn and wanted to talk about a career in consulting, and I thought, “Well, I got some time. Let’s go. Why not?” and so I chatted with him.

And then, to my surprise, he had this very detailed notebook about all the people he contacted and how many people responded and all these things, he said, “Can you tell me?” because we had like no connection. It might’ve been in a LinkedIn Group which isn’t the strongest of bonds in most groups. And he went ahead and pulled the data or tabulated data for me from his notebook, and like the number was 28% of the time, total strangers were willing to give him career advice when he asked, and I was blown away by how high that was, and you may not be because you’ve seen it again and again that we do have more influence than you think.

I’d like to get your take on those figures and how they compare with other kinds of compliance rates you’ve bumped into for different kinds of requests?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, I’m impressed. That’s not a bad number for a form like LinkedIn where it’s all text-based because one of the things we looked at is the difference between asking people face-to-face and asking people through like email or through some sort of messaging app, and we usually find that people are much less likely to agree over text requests. So, that’s really not a bad number, the 28%. It might’ve been because there was already this connection through LinkedIn, it’s not just sort of a random email.

But when we looked face-to-face, so we have people ask other people to do favors, like the donation to charity, or a survey, or, for example, walk them to a place they can’t find at a location that’s a few blocks away. And in those cases, we see compliance rates of about 50% on average. So, really, every other person that our participants asked is agreeing, and it’s twice as many as they expect to be agreeing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. Well, can you unpack that then? So, that is quite an interesting finding, we do have more influence than we think. When we ask, we’ll get yeses more than we think we will. So, then what are the implications of that? Like, in terms of career, should we just ask a whole lot more or how shall we think about this?

Vanessa Bohns
Yes, so it’s interesting. There’s a lot of implications but you kind of, first, have to step back and think, “Okay, what’s going on here?” to be able to decide, “Should I just use this sort of superpower to ask people and get what I want all the time?” And so, what we find is, I’ll start sort of the context that when we bring participants into the lab to do this, they hate it, they don’t want to go out and ask people for things because we all hate asking. And so, they have this sort of just intense fear about it.

They go out and they do it, and they find it much easier than they expect. And then they come back into the lab and they’re like bound back in and they’re so happy. And their takeaway is, “People are just so nice, they’re so much nicer than I thought.” And I’ll say there is research that shows that, that we underestimate other people’s sort of pro-social inclinations and how helpful they’ll be.

But what we don’t really tell our participants at that point in time is that what we find is that the reason people agree more than we expect is that it’s really hard for someone to say no. It’s not necessarily that people are super excited to agree, although they quickly sort of reframe the situation to feel good about themselves. It’s that when someone is standing in front of you, asking for something, it’s really awkward and uncomfortable and you have to come up with the words and excuse to say no, and it’s often just easier to go ahead and agree.

And so, once you sort of know that that’s what’s going on, you can think about sort of how do you use this, again, sort of latent superpower that when you ask for things, people are more likely to do them for you than you think. Do you really want to use it all the time if people are complying, in part because they feel uncomfortable saying no? Or, do you want to sort of think about when it would be most useful and then use it best in that way?

And so, I’m happy to talk about some ways in which it makes asking easier and then some other ways in which it might make us want to double-check and kind of reconsider what we’re really asking for.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, yes, I’d love to hear all your perspectives in terms of how to think about the ask in terms of, “When should we ask? And how should we ask optimally?” Lay it on us.

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, sure. So, when we sort of think about the ask, many of us, again, it’s a pretty anxiety-provoking thing to have to ask someone for something, and we often think that we’re sort of in an uphill battle, that the other person is sort of inclined to say no, and we’re fighting that tendency. But, in fact, as I said, it’s actually hard for people to say no. People’s defaults, research show, like when we mindlessly just comply with a request, people’s default is actually to say yes not no. The easier thing to do is just to go along with what we’re being asked.

And because of that, when we ask for things, we often don’t have to put the kind of sort of extraordinary effort we put into making those requests. So, for example, people will write out this long-winded email, laying out all these rationales for why they’re asking someone for a favor, and apologize a thousand times, and have their friends re-read it a thousand times, and then get back a quick response, it’s like, “Sure.” Or, come up with the exact way to ask in person, and someone is like, “Okay.” And we don’t really have to put all that sort of exorbitant effort into these things because people are actually inclined to say yes.

Another sort of piece of this is that, because we think that people are less likely to agree than they actually are, we kind of negotiate ourselves down before we ask for something. We think that, “Okay. Well, if I ask for something just a little bit smaller, maybe they’ll be more likely to agree and I won’t be rejected.” But we actually find in our studies that the size of the request doesn’t make as big of a difference as we think.

And so, asking for something bigger or smaller, it’s still hard to say no, it still makes someone feel guilty saying no, it’s still hard to find the words. And so, instead of sort of negotiating ourselves down before we ask for something, we should really assume, “There’s a good chance I’m going to get what I actually need or want, so I should ask for that before I start asking for less before I even do the first ask.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I’m curious, with all these things, is there a different kind of like mode our brains go into in terms of like, well, tell me if this is accurate, are we talking about favor mode as distinct from sales mode? I think in some ways we feel readily comfortable if someone is asking us for money for a product or service, I think we feel great about saying no. I don’t know, it seems like there’s less remorse or guilt or discomfort associated with saying, “No, I don’t want that,” then that’s that. What’s your take here?

Vanessa Bohns
I think, in some cases, when people ask us for a favor, sure, there’s this extra element that, “I feel like a jerk if I say no because it’s going to reflect on sort of whether I’m a good person or not.” So, there is this like added layer of this inclination to say yes. So, it’s not just because it’s hard to say no, it’s also, “Because I want to look and feel like a good person, and I want to help this other person out who’s in a bind.”

But, at the same time, even with like a sales pitch, for example, imagine – this happens to us all the time – you get a knock on the door when you’re home, and someone’s like asking you to sign a petition or sign up for something, and you open that door and they’re making that request, and it’s not that easy to say no. Like, you’re trying to find the words, it’s such an awkward interaction, you feel really awkward and guilty, and you might get to that no eventually but it’s a lot harder than we tend to think in the abstract.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. You know, it’s funny, and this happened a couple of times with, I think, there’s electricity deregulation. I don’t know, these guys really came out again and again. And, I don’t know, that might be legitimate, it may not be, but like, “Hey, can you show me your electricity bill because, well, actually there’s the transmission fee but there’s also this fee, and we can get this fee down to…” And I was like, “I never have even read my electricity bill. I just give them the money they say they need from me. I don’t know who you are and this kind of sounds like a scam,” so I’m thinking these things.

But, you’re right, I won’t say that. I won’t say, “I think you’re lying to me, and I want you to go immediately,” even though that’s what I’m feeling and thinking inside. And maybe they’re not. I don’t know the details of their company. But, so, you’re right, I am not delivering the full candid blunt truth of my thoughts and feelings on the matter to this person who I don’t even know.

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah. And if you have the chance to avoid that awkward interaction or not have to say no, research also shows that people really jump on that.

Pete Mockaitis
We try to hide, yeah.

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, exactly. Right. So, there’s research actually showing that if you give someone a head’s up before they show up at your door that people are less likely to open the door because they don’t want to even have the interaction where they have to say no.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. So, this is just kind of mind-bending. All right. So, keep talking here. So, we don’t need to plan a whole lot with regard to perfectly structuring the request in order to get compliance because sort of the wind is at our backs, and we can sort of feel a dose of confidence, just given these psychological facts on the ground. So, then is there anything you do recommend that we do in order to make our requests optimally?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah. As you said, I think that’s a great way to say it. The wind really is on our backs. The stars are kind of aligned for the yes, so I think you want to reframe things that way, but there are still things that you kind of do wrong to disrupt that sort of state of affairs. So, one of them is not asking directly. So, it’s interesting, when we ask people what they think is going to be the most effective way to ask, we often find that people think that hinting or sort of beating around the bush, like, “I can really use help with this thing,” is the better way to ask. I think they think it’s the more polite way.

But what we find is that, of course, not surprisingly, people are much less likely to agree if you’re not actually asking them a question, if you’re just kind of hinting and hoping that they’ll volunteer. And so, actually making that request direct, and saying, “Will you do this thing?” makes it harder for them to say no, and also clear in what you want. And so, that’s one thing, is to be direct when you’re making a request even if you don’t have this huge speech that you’re delivering, but just make it clear, like, “Will you do this thing?”

And the other one goes back to asking in person. So, again, I think we think that crafting the perfect email so we can put all our arguments out there and say it exactly right so someone can’t say no, it’s actually pretty easy to say no to an email no matter how perfectly crafted it is.

Pete Mockaitis
You can ignore it. Just don’t look at it anymore.

Vanessa Bohns
Exactly. It’s a lot harder to ignore or say no to someone who’s standing in front of you, and I think that we often forget that. We forget that our presence matters more than the specific words we’re saying half the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. Well, so that’s super. And then tell us then about the implications of people saying yes even though their heart isn’t into it. How does that mean we should play the asking game optimally in a professional environment?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, this is a really important sort of aspect of understanding that mechanism, that reason that people say yes, and that it’s not always enthusiastic, sometimes it’s because it’s so hard to say no. And that really means that instead of focusing so much on exactly how to get people to say yes, we should kind of assume that there’s a good chance they’re going to say yes, and make sure we’re asking for things that are okay and appropriate and things that we don’t want someone to feel obligated to agree to.

So, for example, we started with these favor requests and we had people make requests, and then we moved onto things like the vandalism study, and that was to kind of show it’s not just about asking for favors. It’s also asking for anything, including things that people don’t really want to do or make them uncomfortable. We sort of extended that research to making romantic advances at work.

And so, we’ve also shown that when people ask someone out on a date, for example, at work, who isn’t interested in them, we tend to underestimate how hard it is for that person to say no to us, and we underestimate how uncomfortable of a situation that creates for that person that they then have to sort of cope with.

So, we think, for example, when we ask people who had been rejected by someone at work, they thought it was pretty easy for them to reject them, and that they didn’t really do anything different afterwards. But when we asked people who rejected someone they weren’t interested in at work, they said that it was really uncomfortable to say no, and then they started avoiding that person, they did things differently, they avoided that person’s contacts, and they kind of did adjust their behavior in all these potentially meaningful ways.

And so, sort of knowing that asking for things directly does put people sort of on the spot, and sometimes it’s okay if we’re asking for something good that makes them really feel good, but you also want to kind of think twice about the things you’re asking for because if you’re asking, for example, a subordinate to do something that could be a little bit sketchy or inappropriate, or even a colleague for those things, it’s actually a lot harder for them to come out and say, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t feel comfortable with that,” than we tend to think.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Okay. Excellent. Well, I’m also intrigued as you talked about these studies where you say, “Okay, guys, you’re going to go ask people to vandalize library books,” and they go, “Oh, no, I don’t want to.” So, I guess you’ve seen this cycle many, many, many times, of folks feeling the nerves, the apprehension, associated with just doing the asking. So, tell us, what are some of the patterns or best practices associated with if we’ve got the case of the nerves and some reluctance to do some asking, how do we get over it?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, and you’re right, I’ve seen this so many times. The last time I calculated, our participants had asked 15,000 people different requests, so we see it all the time. And I’d say, first of all, that just asking more makes you more comfortable with asking, and it does sort of help you to see that people don’t get as upset as we think they will, people don’t judge us as harshly as we think they will, and they’re even more likely to say yes than we think they will be.

And so, getting that practice, particularly when we’re asking for things, again, that are beneficial to everybody, like favor requests and things that bring people closer together, can really help you get more comfortable with asking. So, in the book, I talk about this thing called rejection therapy that was started by Jason Comely and then Jia Jiang got into it and sort of made it a bigger thing. But it’s basically, the idea is that you’re supposed to try to get rejected every day. And Jason Comely came up with all these kinds of random things that you go out and you ask people.

So, for example, ask somebody to race you down the street, just a random stranger; go up to random strangers and ask them to give you a compliment; ask a police officer if you can sit in their car, just all sorts of random requests. And the thinking is that these requests are supposed to be chances to get rejected so that you aren’t so worried about rejection.

But Jia Jiang, who kind of documented his experience with rejection therapy on his blog, showed that actually when he asked a lot of these things, a lot of people were agreeing. And so, he partly was getting over rejection, he partly was learning that rejection is less likely than you think. And he really kind of saw this as a major intervention and really an exposure therapy of getting over this kind of fear of asking.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Okay, that sounds like that’ll do it. And then, I’m guessing it might be prudent to start small and get more challenging as you go down the path. Any starter asks that are great for people if they’re really feeling skittish?

Vanessa Bohns
Sure, I mean, simple things. Right now, I don’t know how people feel about asking someone for like a piece of gum or something little like that, directions, just anything where you kind of have to interrupt someone and actually make that ask. And so, for example, just to give you another sort of sense of how hard people find that, and another set of studies I talk about in the book, which gets away from the asking piece, we also have people go up to strangers and give them compliments.

And so, in some ways, it’s a similar setup. They come into the lab, they go out onto campus, and they go up to people and say, “Excuse me, I really like your shirt,” and we tell them what to compliment the person on. But there’s this same sort of hesitation to go up to a stranger, interrupt whatever they’re doing, make them interact with you, and our participants actually think that complimenting someone, literally making them feel good with a compliment, is going to annoy them.

And so, there is a lot of sorts of tension that we feel and anxiety we feel about just going up to strangers and initiating a conversation or a request or even a compliment. And so, I’d say you could even start, if you’re not just asking for things, you could ask for, as I said, directions, something small, a piece of gum. You could even start by going up and giving random strangers compliments and sort of exercise that muscle of just interacting with people more.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent.

Vanessa Bohns
Especially, as we come out of the pandemic and we forget what it’s like to interact with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess I’m also curious, if you’ve gained a deep understanding of our tendency to not want to say no, saying no is a completely different skill but it sounds like you know a lot about it so I’ve got to ask. How can we say no better given that you have an understanding of these psychological forces within us?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, absolutely. So, I get asked this a lot because so much of my research is about how hard it is to say no and how hard it is for other people to say no to us, but, of course, we also experience that. And so, I basically give the opposite instructions for people who want to say no as I give to people who want to ask and get a yes.

So, for one, it’s really hard to say no in person. And so, if someone is asking you for something in person, you can ask them to follow up over email or some sort of way that makes it easier for you to say no. So, for example, if someone is like, “Oh, I’d really like you to be part of this committee that no one wants to be part of,” you can say, “Okay, I’ll think about it. Can you just follow up with me over email and I’ll get back to you?”

And what that does is it buys you the space so that you have time to think of what to say. A lot of it is in the moment, “What am I even going to say? Do I have a good excuse? It might not be a particularly strong excuse, and I’d like to come up with a better one?” But, also, it’s just really hard in that moment to say no to someone’s face. And so, you buy yourself that space if you kind of create that distance through the email so you can think of what to say, you have time to formulate your words and whatever excuse you want to use, and you don’t have to say no to somebody’s face.

Another sort of recommendation I often give is to blame somebody else. So, often, we hate rejecting people and saying no because we feel like it looks bad on us and that we’re somehow conveying something about our relationship to that other person. And the more that you can sort of put the pressure off of you and the relationship with that person asking, the better. So, if you say, “I can’t do that because I have this other obligation, the sort of external attribution, because somebody else wouldn’t be happy if I was doing that. Someone else asked me to do something else,” anything that sort of points your reason for saying no away from that immediate relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, Vanessa, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Vanessa Bohns
I would say the one thing, I kind of focus on experience as a way to learn about asking. But one thing I do talk about in the book is that we also need to sort of reflect on those experiences. So, just asking a bunch of people is not the end-all-be-all. We also have to sort of think about what those people are really truly feeling and get their perspective, and sort of get out of our own heads and be able to recognize the impact we’re having on them and on the situation.

And so, as much as I love these sorts of experiential sort of challenges that we give people, it also takes a little bit more than that to sort of integrate the knowledge and really sort of learn to recognize your influence.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to that world of empathy and recognizing what someone else is feeling and how that maps to our own influence, do you have any particular pro tips on, I don’t know if it’s like categorizing or gathering intel on what are the hot buttons for somebody? How do you think about knowing your persuasive target all the more such that you are asking well while not going overboard with the thousands of revisions like we talked about before?

Vanessa Bohns
Yeah. So, Nick Epley and his colleagues have looked at the difference between taking perspective and getting perspective. So, one thing that people try to do when they’re trying to figure out, like, “What can I really do that will resonate with this other person? How can I influence someone? What impact am I having on them?” we try to take their perspective. And what that really means is we try to figure out what’s going on in their head, but we do it by searching our own heads, we’re like, “What would that person think?” and we base it on stereotypes of that person or what we’ve seen that person do in the past.

And what I talk about is that, actually, instructing people to try to take someone else’s perspective isn’t actually a way to make people more accurate at understanding what someone else is thinking and feeling, and, instead, you need to what they called get perspective. And it’s actually pretty simple to get someone’s perspective, and that is actually asking them, so actually talking to them and saying, “What do you care about? What do you want?” And often we forget how easy it is to just actually come out and ask someone, and how open someone is likely to be, and how the things they’re likely to tell us, that then we can sort of play off.

So, for example, one thing we talk about in my negotiation class is you can ask people, “What do you really care about here? What are your values?” And then when you actually make an ask during the negotiation, you mirror those values, “You told me that this is what you cared about, so this is a way to meet those values,” for example.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Perfect. Well, now, can you tell me a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Vanessa Bohns
Sure. Actually, this fits really well with what we were just talking about. So, my colleague recently reminded of a famous quote by Kurt Lewin who was a big psychologist back in his day, “Experience alone does not create knowledge.” And so, it really gets at what we were just talking about, that we kind of hold up experiences as this pinnacle, that once you experience something, you’ve learned something profound, and now you understand it in this way that people who only imagine it couldn’t possibly understand.

But, in fact, lots of times when we have an experience, we have our own very specific experience that might not match other people’s. We still need to understand what other people are experiencing. We still need to try to reflect on that experience and how it might be different from somebody else, and gather information about other people’s experiences.

For example, there’s research showing that people who got divorced assume that other people who are getting divorced are having the same experience that they did, but that’s not always true. Other people have a totally different experience with the same sort of life event. And so, it’s basically this idea that experience is great but you have to integrate your experiences with knowledge and with an understanding of the rest of the world.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study?

Vanessa Bohns
Sure. actually, this is not a study but it’s a re-interpretation of a bunch of famous studies. So, I have this favorite paper, it’s been my favorite paper for almost 20 years, by Sabini, Siepmann, and Stein, called “The really fundamental attribution error.” And what it does is it revisits these classic social psychology studies, like the Milgram study, where an experimenter is asking someone to shock another person; the bystander intervention studies, where people don’t want to get up and tell the experimenter that smoke is rising in the room because everyone else in the room is sitting calmly.

And so, these have been classically taught in any intro psych class or social psychology class that someone has taken. They’re usually taught as displaying the power of the situation, that we basically underestimate how powerful situations are and how whatever we want to do as individuals, it’s kind of washed away by the power of the situation. We underestimate that.

But this paper reinterprets all that as the power of embarrassment, that, in fact, people sat there, shocking this other person because they felt too uncomfortable and embarrassed to challenge the experimenter who was standing right there; and people sat there, letting a room fill up with a smoke and didn’t say anything because everyone else was sitting there looking calm, and they didn’t want to look like fools by standing up and making a big deal out of it. And so, I just have always been fascinated by this idea that embarrassment can play this huge role in so many of our behaviors.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Vanessa Bohns
I only read it this past year but it’s quickly become my favorite book, it’s Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. It’s ostensibly a book about writing but it’s really more of a book about life, but also writing. And it’s just so funny and just emotionally resonant, and, actually, a really great book about writing as well.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Vanessa Bohns
I’d say just a pen and a notebook. I am constantly on a walk and coming up with an idea, or in the middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep, I come up with an idea, and just having a notebook nearby to jot things down is the best thing, the best tool, I think, for me.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Vanessa Bohns
Going on long thinking walks. I try to go for a walk every night. After the kids go to bed, I try to walk around for like an hour and just think, and it’s very calming, and I come up with a lot of ideas that way as well.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that seems to resonate and get quoted back to you often?

Vanessa Bohns
It’s this piece about asking in person that I think usually resonates with people the most, because I think that a lot of people struggle with how to ask, the best way to ask, “Should I write an email?” And a lot of us gravitate towards that because it’s kind of easier to be rejected over email, if you’re going to be rejected. But people find it really helpful when I talk about the fact that asking in person makes such a big difference.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Vanessa Bohns
So, I have my website which is VanessaBohns.com, and I’m also at @profbohns at Twitter.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Vanessa Bohns
I think you hear this phrase “Start from a place of yes all the time,” and I kind of like the idea of a play on that, which assumes that other people are starting from a place of yes. So, instead of assuming that other people are immediately going to say no or reject the things that you ask for or arguments you make, assume they actually are going to be pretty receptive, and then sort of reframe whatever you’re going to pitch or ask for accordingly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Vanessa, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck in all your influencing ways.

Vanessa Bohns
Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.