Hi, there. My name is Avil Beckford, and I founded the One Problem Podcast. Now, most of the people who are on this show I’ve had some prior relationship with. And that's the case with my very special guest today, Lucia. So, we all know that there are tons of problems in the world, but we don't want to get overwhelmed. We're going to attack them one problem at a time. So our guest today recently published a book, For the Forces of Good: The Superpower of Everyday Negotiation.

 It's about everyday negotiation. Whether you realize it, every day you negotiate. You negotiate on the job; you negotiate with your spouse, and you negotiate with your children. So this is very important. So I'd like to tell you a bit about my guest. Her name is Lucia Kanter St. Amour. She is the Vice President for the United Nations Women in San Francisco. She's a practicing attorney, and she is a former law professor.

And I love this part – turned everyday negotiation superhero. Who doesn't want a headline like that? As the author of the most inclusive and comprehensive 21st century negotiation guide you'll ever need, For the Forces of Good, the Superpower of Everyday Negotiation, Lucia knows that negotiation isn't just for business. It's everybody's business. And I know that for a fact. Over to you, Lucia.

Lucia Kanter St. Amour

So here's the problem. How many times have you been in a conversation where the other person repeats themselves over and over again, like a playlist on a free Spotify plan? Now, why do you think that happens? They don't feel they've been heard. But I've been Listening to them. You might insist I don't interrupt. I let them rant. And I nod and I say, I understand. Sorry to break it to you, but that's not listening. Listening isn't waiting quietly and nodding.

Listening isn't waiting quietly for your turn to talk. It isn't waiting quietly and then saying generic things like, that's really frustrating. Or, wow, that's crazy. I'm talking about listening to people like they've never been listened to before. It is an incredibly transformative power. And the good news is that you already know how to do it. But you probably have not been practicing it.

Lucia Kanter St. Amour #1 Best-Selling Author

Listening is truly the quiet superpower of everyday negotiation. Like everything else, it takes practice. If you don't practice, you're probably not really listening. So now what we're going to talk about is three steps, which create a loop. And Step One is setting an intention. An intention to do what?

To pay attention. And this step has two subparts. Subpart One is choosing to listen instead of fading in and out. With a purpose of understanding what the other person is saying and what makes it important to them. So this means being curious. And you're listening for two categories: the content, the words, and the emotion, also known as the meta message.

Lucia Kanter St. Amour

So not just the what, but the why it matters to them. And choosing to listen means managing distractions. So this brings us to subpart two of step one. It's paying attention. Now, what gets in the way of this? Noise. We're going to talk more about this in Step Two. And I'm not talking about external ambient noise like sirens or a barking dog, but your internal noise. Errands, work, a pinging phone and social media alerts, trying to remember the actor's name from that movie where they colonize Mars, or even just I'm getting hungry.

Setting an intention is a powerful anchor. If you do not set an intention to listen, you won't be listening effectively. You'll get bits and pieces. You might get most of what the other person is sharing. What the speaker is sharing, but you won't get all of it. Step Two, you're going to manage your noise. And I'm defining noise as anything that distracts you. And I list about 10 common types of internal noise in chapter five of my book. So I won't go through them here. Paying attention means tracking the speaker and tracking yourself.

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Now, you can't eliminate your noise. You can learn to manage it. So you notice the noise, and then you refocus on your intention to listen. This is the listening loop. You will navigate this loop a few times while listening to someone for even just five minutes. Set the intention, focus, notice the noise creeping in, manage the noise, reset the intention, etc. And remember, when you pay attention, you're listening for two things: the content as words, and the feelings.

Lucia Kanter St. Amour

Consider feelings, another category of facts. Noise pulls you away from their story and focuses on your story. Like thinking about what you want to say next. Step Three, reflect back. So remaining quiet as the other person gushes while you nod your head. And then finally say, “I understand” is not really listening. How do you know you understand? How do they know you understand? Maybe you misunderstood something.

Maybe their thoughts aren't organized. And they haven't expressed themselves accurately. So at natural pauses, you break in and you recap what they said, including both surface facts and the emotions beneath them. Well, Lucia, what if I can't keep track of it all? Or I don't know what to say to reflect back?

Do not panic. You almost cannot do this wrong. Don't worry about remembering it all, even if all you do is repeat back the last one to three words of what they said. You'd be surprised at how effective that can be. And I discuss this more in my book. So, the job of a skilled listener could be described as helping the talker talk.

And by reflecting back, that is, summarizing both words and emotions, you accomplish a few things: Empathy, clarification. No, that's not what I meant. Verification. Yes, that's right. You got it. Encouragement, de-escalation, and slowing down the excretion of cortisol in the speaker's brain.

Cortisol is a stress hormone that the brain cranks out and can really derail things. And here's some great news. It's okay if you reflect back and you get it wrong. For one thing, you've already shown the speaker that you're listening.

Lucia Kanter St. Amour

Also, reflecting back helps them be more clear in communicating, and it's an opportunity for them to clarify. They will not get mad at you. Now, notice what is not included in the three-step loop, with an exception that I'm about to share – asking questions. Wanting to ask questions actually qualifies as a type of noise that distracts you from the speaker and requires you to reset your initial intention. But when it seems like the speaker is done, and after you've gone through a few cycles of reflecting back and getting clarification or verification, then ask what I call a super stealth question.

And it's this. Is there anything else? So often this one little question, strategically posed at what seems like it may be the end of a listening and speaking cycle, reveals some rich little nugget that may have otherwise remained incognito. So it feels a little clunky at first, and like anything else, you need to be awkward at it before it becomes so second nature that neither you nor the speaker even notices.

That you’re employing a technique. And here's the best part, you concede nothing by doing this. Understanding somebody does not mean you agree with them. And just watch how that repeated Spotify playlist moves on to something new. Back to you, Avil.

Avil Beckford

This is interesting because what you said has a lot of good information. But I just wanted to comment on a couple. A lot of it is being emotionally intelligent when you're describing your thing. I do a lot of interviews, so I usually ask people. I ask them, is there anything else? And something I learned in computer science is you always reinterpret what the person says to you so that there's no communication gap. So thank you so much.

Lucia Kanter St. Amour

It's my pleasure Avil.

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