Skot Waldron:
Unlocked is brought to you by Invincible, the program designed to unlock the potential of people and teams inside your organization. Join companies like Pfizer, Delta, the CDC, Google, and Chick-fil-A and others in over 116 countries that are currently using this program to increase productivity and develop healthy cultures. Access hundreds of hours of content that is accessible anytime, anywhere. And finally, use real-time data to understand the health of every team inside your organization, which teams are performing, and which ones aren't. Then understand the why behind that performance. Get free access to Invincible for 30 days by visiting www.giant.tv/30days.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Unlocked, where we talk about unlocking the potential of people so we can unlock the potential of organizations. And today, I got Fotini Iconomopoulos on the call. That's right, I just said the name and it was clear. The way she told me to remember, Fotini, it sounds like a pasta, and then Iconomopoulos, she said, "Just think about, I cannot mop this, Iconomopoulos." Anyway, that's a little tip for you. There you go. You're welcome. She's awesome. Author, speaker, and she's a negotiation advisor. So she's negotiated and helped corporations, executives negotiate giant deals.
She's done her own negotiation, she teaches negotiation. And she just dropped her first book, Say Less, Get More. And she talks about unconventional ways to negotiate inside there. She calls herself the ethical negotiator. That's all based on principles of people and values and who we are and our reputations, and I call that your personal brand. We want to make sure that we're elevating ourselves always. We don't want to be one of those negotiators that is using manipulation tactics. And we talk about that in this interview. So I'm super excited to have her on the show today. You're going to get a ton of value out of this, I know I did. We talked for a very long time before and after the interview. Good luck, have fun. Let's get on with it.
Fotini, what is up? How're you doing?
Fotini Iconomopoulo:
I am doing fantastic. I'm happy to be talking to you.
SKOT WALDRON:
Oh, I'm so excited. I hope that our conversation today is going to help me get a better deal on whatever my next thing, my next purchase is. That's really the reason why I'm doing this interview.
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
I think where it's actually going to help you most is dealing with your kids. I promise it's going to come in handy there.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. Perfect, because I definitely need help with that. So fantastic. Now, seriously, you just finished a book, Say Less, Get More, and it's all about the art of unconventional negotiation. And so I'm interested in that, this term, unconventional negotiation, but let's start off first by telling us how you got into this world of negotiation. Where did that come from? Did it stem from childhood? What happened?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
Yeah. I tell some people I was born into it because, if you've ever seen the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, I know I'm dating myself here a little bit, but that is how I grew up. So I had to negotiate my way out of the freaking house. When you have a Big Fat Greek dad like me and he actually gave me the nickname negotiator when I was really little. It was the type of thing where I would always be advocating either for myself or my sister or somebody, and he'd be going, "We don't need to hear from you, negotiator. We already know what you're going to say." And then that translated into a sales career where I ended up doing an MBA in organization behavior because I knew the subject of people was going to be the common thread no matter what career I found myself in.
And I was recruited by L'Oreal and I started negotiating with Walmart on a regular basis, so one of the toughest negotiators, some would say, in the world. And then I did a few more years in manufacturing for various companies, and a company was hired to train me and my team to be more effective negotiators. And by the end of the workshop that they were hired to do, they said, "You should really be doing what we do." And I was like, "Yeah, sure. Someday when I have more experience." And they said, "No, seriously, you should be doing what we do." So they poached me and they recruited me into this job where I started to train CEOs and everybody from the top people in the executive suite, down to the junior account managers on how to be more effective negotiators.
And I loved it. I was in my 20s when I started doing it. And then they would say, "It's great that you trained our team, but we have 100 million on the line or we have a billion on the line. What do we do? What did we say?" And so I kept working in my own previous world of negotiating these deals and consulting with them and holding their hand through these high stakes negotiations. So I got to do the teaching bit and the practical bit at the same time. And then a few years after doing that, my alma mater called me up and said, "Hey, do you want to teach your MBA negotiations class here at Schulich?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure."
So I got to go back into the academic world and get exposed to a whole new set of textbooks and research and a lot of studies around psychology and the things that drive our behavior. So I got this really great, well-rounded mentality around, what makes people do what they do? What have I seen in the boardroom myself? What patterns am I sitting in my workshops? And it's all come together now in the book as well as in my speaking career where I can tell audiences something like my top tips that I love to see people using out in the wild. So it's been an interesting journey
SKOT WALDRON:
That is quite the journey. Can I just refer to you as the negotiator throughout the entire interview now? Is that cool?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
Go for it.
SKOT WALDRON:
Awesome. Awesome. So let's expand a little bit, let's talk about the book. And what's this unconventional word in there for? Why did you throw that in there?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
Well, there's a connotation attached to negotiation. Most people, when they hear the word negotiation, will get very defensive or feel like, "I don't know how to do this. That's not for me." There's a handful of people who get very excited about it and go, "Great. Let's go. It's win, lose." But the reality is, it's actually quite different. It can be quite collaborative. It's not all going to be rosy and wonderful, but there can be ways to get it a lot closer to that, but it's not necessarily in the way that people think. So the title of the book is, Say Less, Get More, and there's two intentions for that title. The first is literally to say fewer words, because there is an assumption that people who are great negotiators are like those people that we see in pop culture, the slick Wall Street kind of guys, the fast talking kind of people.
And the reality is, that's not the best negotiators. They're not necessarily the ones that get the best deals. It's those people who actually say fewer words, who look much more confident, who are taking in everything that is happening in the room, those are the ones who actually get ahead the most. So I ask people to clean up their language a little bit, to think before speaking, and to make sure that they're there considering the context and the person across from them when they are having those conversations. But the second meaning behind it is to actually take a mental pause, to actually take a moment to collect your thoughts, to allow the adrenaline to come back down a little bit.
Because what happens is, we end up doing this thinking and talking thing at the same time. And so many people in my audience's tell me, they're like, "I'm an introvert," or, "I'm not good at thinking on my feet." And I'm going, "Great. You can rejoice because that means you're going to be a much more effective negotiator. This is going to be easier for you than for others." Taking that time to find your mental pause button and allowing the rational thought to come back in, allowing yourself to reframe this moment and go, "Oh, this isn't a fight, this isn't two people who are going to beat each other up until they're black and blue. It's an opportunity for me to find an interesting solution that could move us forward. It's an opportunity for me to have a conversation with somebody."
And so that pause moment to reframe, to stay less for a second will get you a lot more in each and every one of those conversations without question.
SKOT WALDRON:
So are you telling me that not every negotiation has to be a confrontation?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
That's exactly what I'm saying. It doesn't have to feel like an active battle. It can actually feel like just two people hanging out, having a conversation, learning a little bit more about each other. Now, what you do with that information is it up to you, what they do is up to them as well. So you may want to be more careful about how much you share and what kind of questions you're asking, but it's just two people having a conversation, it's not combat. And that's the mentality I want people to make sure they shift when they open up their eyes and read this book.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. So maybe that's one of these new principles that you're bringing to this idea of the art of negotiation, right? But what are some other, I guess I would say new, maybe new and maybe exciting things that you're bringing to the art and science of negotiation? What are some of those principles you can share with us?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
One of them is actually likeability. Most people assume when they hear the Art Of The Deal and things like that, they just assume that, "Okay, the best negotiator is going to be the one that goes in there, pounding their chest or banging their fist on a table. I need to have all the power in the world and demonstrate that." The truth of the matter is, it's those more stealth negotiators that end up getting what they want. You can't be a one-trick pony and assume you're going to have all of the results. We can actually use likability to our advantage. The mistake that I often see people making when it comes to likeability is them assuming, "Well, I'm just going to give them what they want, because I want them to like me. I don't want to ruin the relationship, so I'm going to give into that concession."
And that ends up costing you so much more. It's the equivalent of saying, "I want my kid to like me, so I'm going to give them everything that they want." All you end up with is a spoiled brat of a kid. And the same is happening in the boardroom all the time. I see temper tantrums much worse from executives than I do from two year olds. But the fact is, you can still use like ability to your advantage, it just looks a little different. Robert Cialdini is like the godfather of all things persuasion and influence. And I was actually on a podcast with him recently, which was the most mind blowing experience. And I quote him all the time in my book and I quote him in my lectures constantly.
And he talks about likability specifically. There was one negotiation study that he cites where they took a group of Ivy League MBA students and they put them into two separate groups. And they told the first group, "I want you to get started right away, start negotiating immediately." And they told the second group, "Spend a few minutes getting to know each other first." In the first group that got down to business right away, 55% of them closed the deal." So that's pretty good. In the second group, however, the ones that spent a few minutes getting to know each other, 90, 90% ended up closing deals. And so some people might think, "Oh, sure, they got to know each other, so they gave into the other person's demands." That's not true.
The reason I know that is because those who did close deals in that 90% group also managed to close deals that were 12% greater in value. So they closed more deals and they closed better deals. You don't close better deals by giving them everything that they want and spoiling them., you close them by those few minutes at the very beginning of the negotiation, by building up that rapport with people. So he talks about likability coming in the forms of having things in common, or paying compliments, or being co-operative. That's not stuff that people think about when it comes to negotiation practice.
And so, rather than being abused by wanting to be liked, because we all want to be liked, that's some part of our cellular makeup. It's, how do you use likability to your advantage? How do you use that upfront and build some rapport with people and then make them want to find a way to work with you instead of against you? So it's not something that people go to automatically, but there are opportunities to use collaboration and relationships and so on to get much better results, even in tiny little ways.
SKOT WALDRON:
Let me ask you this. If I'm on one side and I'm like, "Okay, so I've heard Fotini, I need to go into this likability part, I need to generate some common ground, or I need to just get to know each other a little bit more," but I'm dealing with somebody in maybe procurement for something that they don't even care about, they've just been tasked with getting a price for a certain thing that you negotiate at a certain time because they need to get three competitive bids or whatever needs to happen, and they don't really care about you in any way, shape or form, they're just doing their job. Does it still play a role in that relationship?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
It does. I talk about a spectrum in negotiation when I reference the book. And what I see as the spectrum is there's the competitive side, in the book, I referenced it as the dark side, where it's just about cash, there's very little relationship, it's very short-term. And then there's a more collaborative side where it's much more complex, we're talking about more than just cash. You hear words like growing the pie or win-win, that's where you need to have much more trust, much more of a long-term focus because you're going to have to deal with the repercussions of this for a very long time and so on.
So it's a spectrum because it's not a hard, here's the stopping point where it's now competitive versus collaborative. So if you're dealing with somebody who in procurement, and when people hear the words procurement, they should be thinking, "These people are very narrowly focused. They're worried about margin. They're not looking at complex creativity, value propositions." But can you get them to think a little bit more value focused? You can. So it's even there, it's a degree of things. So I'm not asking people to focus on likabilities such that you're going to be planning your next vacation together or you're going out for a beer after work.
They just need to like you enough and have enough of a relationship with you to want to deal with you over others. An example I often tell people is, years ago when I was working in the food industry, and I was again, negotiating with Walmart on a regular basis, they created this procurement scenario where instead of having your regular buyers where you have regular meetings and you talk about new launches and things like that, they went, "Okay, we're going to go to an e-auction scenario." So the buyers basically put their out of office on for three weeks and said, "We're not available."
They brought in a third party to make sure there was no relationship. They brought in a third and said, "Here's how this is all going to go down. Here's a 50-page document on how the process is going to work. If you want to have your product on shelf, you're going to have to make sure that you come down to the lowest price. Only this price and lower will be accepted or even considered," and so on and so forth. There's all these rules. "If you have questions, ask us these questions, not the buyers." And so of course, I had loads of questions and they went, "I don't know the answer to that, the buyer has to answer that." So there's like this runaround of, no, one's now talking to me, there is no relationship to speak of.
But instead of just taking no for an answer, I was leaving voicemails, I was leaving emails, I was telling the buyers, "Hey, I understand you want to do this. Totally get it. I want to make sure that your business is excelling as well because that serves me when it serves you. This doesn't make much sense to me, the investment behind this particular product, I'd rather this to be on other products, we can find a way to grow the business in other ways, of course, that requires a conversation." All of that was ignored. And we went into this process and I didn't actually drop my price any further than where it was.
This is Game Theory at play. And anybody who knows what Game Theory is, it's basically, you're doing a negotiation, you know somebody else's negotiating against you in another part of the world, but you don't talk to each other because you don't know who they are or where they are. And so you're now anticipating, "Are they going to go lower? Should I go lower just in case they do go lower?" It's creating all of this doubt. And they've created this environment to make sure that you are making irrational decisions and going lower than you thought you would. But we held our ground, because I said, "We came to these stats, these numbers, it's not going any further."
So I knew that they were going to be really upset with me because I wasn't dropping my price any further. And they had said in the outset, "Those who don't go any lower are not even going to get a meeting." Three weeks later, I was invited in for a meeting. It started with them yelling at me for a bit about, "Why didn't you do this? And why didn't you do that?" But then we continued the conversation that I had left on voicemails and emails and so on and so forth. All of that worked because it was just enough of a relationship where they went, "I'm interested to hear more about what this person has to say. She's tapped into something of interest to me."
She's tapped into, I understand you want to grow your business, I have a better way to grow your business, that of course also served me better than their previous way of doing it. But it's just enough to go, "What do I have in common with this person? How do I find something that's of interest to them? How do I find some cooperative behavior that's going to compel them to want to cooperate with me too?" So it's not about assuming we're going to be all sitting in a room, holding hands and singing together, that's not what likability has to look like, but just enough likability that they want to call you back. And there are ways to do that.
SKOT WALDRON:
Is there a common phrase or a simple tip you give to help people become more likable in a negotiation?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
Yeah, I'd say I lean on the three tips that Cialdini gives. So the first is, find something in common. And it could be something quite simple. It could be, "Oh, you know Todd? I know Todd," and that's enough to spark a conversation. Now, you're a little bit more familiar to me and I'm a little bit more comfortable with you and I'm finding reasons to work with you versus against you. The second one is paying genuine compliments. And it could be as simple as, "Oh, I really love that microphone you're using. What is it?" And that's now a compliment to you because it's saying you have great taste in these things. So even just asking you a question about something that we might have in common is building another additional bridge and making those bonds a little bit stronger.
And the third thing that he talks about is cooperative behavior. Asking questions is one of the tips that I tell people to lean on heavily for all sorts of scenarios and for all sorts of reasons. But when you're asking somebody a question, you're asking them to talk about themselves, and that's a great compliment to the ego as well. Everybody loves to hear the sound of their own voice, so asking a clever question will get the conversation going, but you're still in charge of the conversation. So you're steering the conversation in the direction that you want it to go, versus allowing them to talk about some other subject matter that's not going to help you in any way, shape or form.
So asking those questions make you look super interested, make you look much more empathetic, and can build that interest on their end as well, because it's a compliment just to want to hear the sound of my own voice. There's certain ways, like the questioning stuff for me is one of the heaviest I would say that I lean on. It's particularly important for women, and I don't know how many of your listeners are women, but it's one of those tools that I encourage them to continuously lean on because women, when it comes to likeability, have a much harder climb than men do. It's much easier for us to be lumped into bitchy or aggressive or greedy categories, whereas men aren't necessarily given that same connotation in negotiation.
So asking questions instead of making demands is another great way to get people on board instead of saying something like, "The client's never going to go for that." It's, "How do you think the client would respond?" I'd had great experience with this in my previous world, "Which elements of that strategy do you think would serve this one best?" Instead of forcing it on you, you now feel like you're part of the process of creating in this solution-oriented conversation.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. I'm going to practice for a second. Are you ready?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
Okay.
SKOT WALDRON:
Number one, establish a common ground. I've been in Toronto one time, to be honest straight. It was very, very nice. So there you go. I like your firm in the background, that's very nice plan you have, it's very nice big plan.
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
Thank you. It's great.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, I think. That's a nice big plan. That's very nice. Now, next, I'm going to ask you a very interesting question, negotiation versus manipulation. What's the difference? Are they one and the same? Because in a way, I sit there and go, you say genuine compliments and I go, "Oh, I like your firm, your big firm plant." Or, "Oh, I've been Toronto once." And some people are just like, "Ugh. Okay, great. That's very nice of you. Now what's the price?" Where does that line blur?? What does manipulation have to do with negotiation? How do you keep manipulation out of negotiation?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
I can't recall the dictionary definition of manipulation, but my interpretation is that it starts with intention. And so intention is, I'm trying to find a way to bond with you, I want to find something in common with you. I want to make this experience between us more enjoyable. I wouldn't see that as manipulation personally. And I'd say, is there maliciousness attached to it? And if the answer is no, great, then we're in this, I'm just trying to find a cooperative scenario
I do tell people all the time, I caution you to use these powers for good instead of evil, because I do think that there's a temptation to use this for manipulation without question. And I say very carefully and I think Cialdini does the same, he uses the word genuine compliments because generally we can smell a rat. We can suss out some of those things. And so we don't want to be that person first and foremost, but we can also make sure that we sniff those things out. And I think that's where it feels quite contrived. It's almost like...
One of the tips that's often given in business is to mirror the other party. So if you lean forward, I lean forward, if you put your hand to your face, I put my hand to your face. If you change the sound of your voice, I'll change the sound of my voice. I don't like that tip because we intuitively at a subconscious level so many of us can actually feel like it's contrived. And so if you're doing that, there's something in my spidey sense that's going off and going, "What do you want from me?" I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And so you've got to be going in with a genuine curiosity and a genuine want to find something in common with somebody, and that intention will drive so much of it. When it comes to the mirroring bit, I actually tell people, I encourage you to be the mirror instead of mirroring the other person. Because if the other person raises their voice and starts yelling at you, your best response is not to be yelling back. That's not mirroring serving you well, but what if you slowed down your pacing and you started breathing a little bit more calm, or you showed a lot of really excitement, that kind of excitement is contagious.
So you can actually set the tone. And if you set the tone with that curiosity and that genuine desire to get to know somebody, that will actually create that reciprocity and people will want to do the same. If you go in there with the intention of manipulation, at some point, maybe not right away, but at some point the spidey sense will go off and people are going to start to get really defensive, and you won't necessarily get to your end result. You may in the short term, but when you stretch out the horizon long enough, you'll see that it doesn't actually work.
And where I get my faith in that is Adam Grant wrote a fantastic book called Give and Take. I don't know if you've read that one.
SKOT WALDRON:
I haven't. That's on my reading list for sure.
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
Okay. I highly recommend it because it gave me faith in humanity again, because he looks at it, and people ask him, they go, "Why do the guys from Enron and all of these people who do terrible things and the Bernie Madoff's of the world, how did they end up the head? How do they end up rich and powerful and all those things?" So he said, "You just have to extend the timeline a little bit." The Enron guy went to jail, Bernie Madoff went to jail. So in the short-term it might look that way, but what he says is the meek shall inherit the earth, the givers shall inherit the earth.
So the takers, the manipulators out there, if you give them long enough, they're going to create their own rope and hang themselves with it. So I do believe that manipulation won't work in the long-term. It may short-term, but I certainly don't encourage it. I encouraged genuine curiosity about how can you solve this problem together.
SKOT WALDRON:
Genuine curiosity. I love that. Very cool. I'm writing it down. Let's talk about the other contents of your book. So what kind of book is this? Is this a book where I'm going to go in and I'm going to learn the top 10 tips to negotiate a billion dollars for our next contract? Tell me about the context of the book, tell me how it's structured. You've talked about likability as one of the core concepts in there. Do you go through concepts for each chapter? How's that built out?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
The origin of the book, Harper Collins came to me and saw some stuff, some of my stuff online, and they went, "We think you have a book in you. We've heard great things about you from some of our network." And I was like, "Okay, what do I do? How do I structure it?" And I actually structured it around my own workshops. So I run workshops for large corporations, and I started running them for the public pre-pandemic, and I'm coming up with some virtual options for the public very soon as well. But I basically took my model of negotiation and put it out in book form.
So in the very beginning of it, we lay the foundations, like, what are the basics you need to understand? How do you understand the context of your next negotiation? How do you figure out if it's competitive versus collaborative? Then we build on that and we go, okay, what power are you bringing? Where does your power come from? How do you build up more power? When do you need more power? If you're going to go into a competitive negotiation, you better have lots of power ready. If you need a collaborative one, you don't necessarily need that much power. If you have a ton of it, you may not want to use it all, you might want to save some for later.
So we layer in that stuff. Then we start talking about the mechanics, like, what do you do? What do you say? We start with the competitive stuff, which is, I know people get really intimidated by the sound of win-lose negotiations. Those are the ones that cause the most anxiety for people, but the truth is they're the simplest ones. If all you're doing is planning around price, I'm going to make a move, they're going to make a move, it's going to be like this tennis match back and forth, that's pretty simple stuff to plan out. So I give you a roadmap for that stuff.
But then we layer on, okay, how do we get more creative? How do we get more complex? How does your language have to change? To the point where I even have an entire section near the end on communication and a section that's called Scripts That Work. And we break down how to use this likeability stuff. How do you build in questions? And how do you structure your questions more effectively? What language do you need to eliminate from your vocabulary and simplified? And what words are going to help you?
And sprinkled throughout the book are examples of all of these different types of negotiations and how these tools work. So I pull in everything from the $100 million deals in some of the corporations that I work with to negotiations with my godchildren, there's a negotiation for everybody in there. So the purpose is, it's not just boardroom stuff, it's stuff that you can use at home with your partner, with your spouse, with your children, with your siblings, with your friends, with your peers at work, with your manager, with your employees.
So we interact in all the time and we're having negotiations constantly. We may not necessarily see them as negotiations, but my hope is that people start to go, "Oh, this is a negotiation opportunity. This is opportunity for us to come up for a solution and for a stress-free interaction that can actually serve more than one person." So it's a whole suite of tools to help you in every different type of negotiation.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's awesome. That's fantastic.
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
Thank you.
SKOT WALDRON:
Talking about that, you mention the art of pauses. It's in your title, say less, this idea of pausing which some of us, like you said, can do, some of us on the other hand are just very good at talking and sucking up all the oxygen in the room, and the other person won't say a word. So the art of the pause, talk about that.
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
It came up because years ago, I was working with a client down in Arkansas and I would go into Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart's had offices. I worked with a lot of suppliers around there. And I would go on in a regular basis and see this one client in particular. And I'd drop in and see all the account managers and we'd have coaching sessions and things of that nature. And there was this one woman who was so talented, she was so good, her analytical skills were through the roof and she could see a strategy.
And when we talked about things, I'd see her mapping out her plan and it was great. And she would just fall apart the second she got into a high stress scenario, all the plans went out the window. And so I would, "You just need to pause for a second. I want you to just take a breath every single time you're about to pick up the phone," because most of their negotiations were done on the phone. She was in supply chain at the time. And I said, "Before you pick up the phone, I want you to promise me, you're going to take a breath, and you're just going to take a deep breath and breathe out. And you're going to feel much better when you go into that call."
And I literally Googled the word pause, and I found a pause button, an image, and I printed it out and she stuck it on her bulletin board. And she started to see that image. She's like, "I still have it." Many years later, she sent me a picture of it. It was still there. And I actually now have the pause button on the back of my business cards. And every time I go to a live event where I'm speaking, every single audience member gets a little pause button to take with them that fits in their wallet. But it's that moment to go... What happens is we go into our primitive brain and we all freak out the second we see a stressor.
In our cave-person time, it was a saber tooth tiger, and all the rational energy would leave your brain and your heart would start to pump and your palms would start to get sweaty. But that's what gave the cave person that superhuman strength to run like hell to survive getting away from the saber tooth tiger. And today those same stressors come in different forms. They're not physical threats, they're intellectual threats, but our response, our physiological response is exactly the same. So what if you could just take a breath to allow that moment to pass?
What if you could go, "I'm going to reflect on for a second. Wait a second, I did the preparation for this. I can access my mental pause button a lot easier, or I'm going to do a power pause." A power pause is something that Amy Cuddy introduced us to. Dr. Amy Cuddy wrote a fantastic book called Presence. She had a viral Ted Talk about how your body language shapes who you are. And undisputed parts of her studies where that when people did a power pause for two minutes, they felt much more confident. And when you feel much more confident, other studies tell us you get much better results.
You take yourself from a fear mindset into an opportunity mindset, and literally change your cognitive abilities, better performance on tests of all sorts. So if you can take a moment to pause and do a power pause, or pause, or repeat your positive mantra or pause to go, "Yeah, I prepared for this. What am I freaking out about?" That in itself can be one of the most powerful things that you can do to set yourself up for success. So I see it working for my clients of the past. When I introduce it to my MBA classes, I have so many of my students who asked me for multiple copies of my business card, and they'd tell me like, "I have it on my night table, and I have it on my mirror, and I have it next to my phone."
"Why do you have it on your night table?" They say, "It's because I don't get into fights with my spouse anymore. So it reminds me to pause before I speak to my wife or whatever it is." It's been so beautiful to watch people embrace that and really change the way they approach conversations instead of being reactive, they can now be a little bit more proactive by planning to pause as well. You can even insert a question because you go, "Okay, I know I'm going to freak out when they say something, so I'm going to have this question ready so that I don't say something I'm going to regret."
There's so many ways to set yourself up for success and build in pause moments during your conversations,
SKOT WALDRON:
The word reactive, that principle of being reactive is the act of giving over all of our power. As soon as we become proactive, then we are empowered. We've empowered ourselves with the tools, with the language, with the pause button, those other things that are going to give us the confidence that I'm in control of me, I'm not in control of you, but I'm in control of me. And that I will have more power in the situation. So I love that principle, that just sparked that thought in me for that. That's really, really cool. I love how you bring that up.
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
There's so many bullies that will try to push your buttons to take that power back. Imagine if you had the ability to resist that temptation, because that's why they're doing it. The second you lose control and become reactive, they're sucking up all the power. They're charging their battery, is the language I use, and they're draining yours. So how can you make sure that you can conserve your power and perhaps even grow it by not allowing that to get to you?
SKOT WALDRON:
So is that a negotiation tactic on their side, to just push, push, push, push, and stress you out, and freak you out until you give up all your power? And is it effective?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
It is definitely a tactic. Now how effective it is depends on the person that they're doing it too. But even if you think of that game theory I mentioned, when you think of like a TV show, a cop-type TV show, and they have two suspects and they put them in different rooms and then they shine a light on them. And somebody comes in banging their fist on the table and asking these questions, "Now your buddy over there," they're going, "Oh, crap. I don't know what my buddy is saying. What if..."
It's creating that doubt, it's keeping you in a bare room like that, where you don't have the ability to talk to anybody. I've seen similar tactics play out even in the board room where the chairs are all lowered, or I'm leaving you there waiting for me in the lobby for an extremely long time so that you're going to be freaking out that you're going to be late for your next meeting. All of those things are coming in and they're flooding your brain now and you're becoming on edge. When you're on edge, you have no filter. You say things you regret, you agree to things that you weren't expecting to agree to.
And that's exactly where those moments when you walk out and you go, "Oh God, why didn't I do that? I should've done this instead." They're trying to create those moments for you. They're trying to put you on edge so that you are not necessarily using your most common sensical brain in that moment. So absolutely, it's a tactic. When you can anticipate those things, it actually makes it much easier for you to have more self-control. So as a young woman in the negotiation world, I tell stories in the book about going deep into the heart of Texas where I've been called a lot of names.
And even one gentleman said to me, "What are you going to teach me little girl?" That would have been enough for somebody else to freak out and go, "I don't know, what do I say?" But it was like, "Oh, that's the worst you've got for me? I was expecting you to say much dumber things than that." And all I said was, "Sit tight and you'll find out." So, he wasn't going to get a reaction out of me to make me look silly or foolish or lose their respect. And the fact that I was so controlled actually charged my battery even further in that moment.
SKOT WALDRON:
And it probably established a little bit of competence and confidence, I guess you could say as well for that person to go, "Okay." Maybe they were testing you, poking the bear a little bit and see what would happen, and staying cool and calm was part of that. Your book is more like, you're like the good negotiator versus the bad negotiator. Bad negotiator, not in the fact that they're bad negotiators, the fact that they're like that. They're really powerful and they're really good at what they do, but they're just do it in a dirty way.
You're like, "I'm going to teach you how to combat this evil. We're going to do this in a way that's going to empower you and give you the strength to not fall prey to people like this."
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
I like to think of myself as an ethical negotiator. So I am extremely principled, I don't encourage anybody to lie or to manipulate. If you do it with the right intentions, I think everybody can get something out of it. I always tell people too who are really worried about, "But I don't want to push them too hard." And I tell them, you're not forcing anybody into bankruptcy. You're not asking them to do something that they can't do. They'll tell you that they can't if they can't do it." That's the mentality I want people to take in.
If they want to do business with you, they will. If they want to go to their next alternative, to their BATNA, that we call in the business, then they'll do that as well. But I adhere to a strict set of ethics and principles that I'd say most of the people in my world do, maybe not everybody in the universe does, but most of the people who do what I do for a living, who teach others, will adhere to those. There's the odd bunch who don't, there's the odd role model who's not necessarily the role model. I'd like to see people modeling themselves after in the universe.
I don't want to name names, but some of them are pretty darn famous. And we'll see what happens when the New York attorney's office gets their hands on them. So we'll see.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's right. That's right. Hey, this has been awesome. Where can people get ahold of this book?
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
They can find it anywhere, it's in all major retailers, including on Amazon. It's ebook, audio book, hardcover, you name it. And there's lots of information on my Instagram accounts @fotiniicon, on my Twitter, on my website, fotiniicon.com. And on LinkedIn, I'm always giving out advice on all of those channels with free extra little nuggets that may not be in the book as well.
SKOT WALDRON:
Very cool. I love it. I love it. I'm going to go negotiate with my kids right now about lunch. So I'm going to put these practices in play here. So thanks a lot for sharing the insights. This has been really, really good. I appreciate you.
FOTINI ICONOMOPOULO:
It's been my absolute pleasure.
SKOT WALDRON:
I hope you were able to gather some information from that interview that you can go ahead and apply today. That principle of likeability was huge. And we talked about that for quite a bit of time, building common ground, making sure that there's genuine interest. Okay, genuine. Authenticity is a huge thing right now, and there's a lot of inauthenticity around us, whether it's in the workplace, whether it's in our personal life, whether it's just on social media, we see it every day. There's those things that are going to create some distrust, and that ingenuine attitude is going to hurt us in the long run. Let's be genuine and let's be authentic and the way we deal with people.
Common ground. Build common ground. Hey, compliments that are real. Hey, don't just like fluff me up, straight up, compliments that are real. And cooperative behaviors, making sure that we're involving them in the process, asking questions, hearing ideas, understanding principles coming from the other side. This is not only going to help us in negotiating big deals, big contracts, it's going to help us in negotiating conversations and principles and ideas with our spouse, with our kids, with people that we lead at work. So when we're sharing ideas, they may have ideas.
Negotiation. This is what's going to happen in life, and it's so important that we do it in an authentic way that is also genuine. So I'm really, really appreciative of the insights we got here. Go on and get her book, it's going to add a different perspective. It sounds like it's a little bit more workshop format, which is super, super cool. A lot of you learn that way, or just want those valuable insights, go check it out. If you want to find out more about me, go to skotwaldron.com, and look through more interviews. You can look through more, there's some freebies on there as well.
My YouTube channel has a ton of free content for you. So go check that out. Like, comment, subscribe, share, all those things. And that's about it. I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn, so find me there. And I'll see you next time on another episode of Unlocked.
Want to make your culture and team invincible?
You can create a culture of empowerment and liberation through better communication and alignment. We call these invincible teams. Make your team invincible through a data-driven approach that is used by Google, the CDC, the Air Force, Pfizer, and Chick-fil-A. Click here or the image below to learn more.
