Influencing with Tactical Empathy: A Glimpse into our Negotiation Seminars

You’ve read the book. You keep tabs on our blog. Now, in an effort to sharpen your negotiation skills even further, you’re thinking about attending one of our live events. But maybe you don’t know what to expect—which is why you should continue reading. 

An Overview of Our Negotiation Seminars

First things first: At a Black Swan live event, intimacy takes center stage. We limit how many people are in the room because we want the experience to be powerful—and not full of distractions. 

This approach helps us create a collaborative setting where we all learn from one another. It’s not uncommon for the bulk of the 50 or so negotiators in attendance to have one-on-one conversations with all four of our trainers over the course of the day. We try to make ourselves as accessible as possible to the folks in the room.

As we move across the day, we break the audience down into smaller groups so that we can provide as much individual personal attention as we can. Following an event, participants can hop on three hour-long group coaching calls in which we cover topics we missed during the live event and discuss strategies for individual negotiation scenarios for folks on the phone.

When you attend one of our seminars, you can also count on sharpening your tactical empathy skills. At a very basic level, tactical empathy is the process of making a conscious effort to verbalize the counterparts vision and connected emotion, no matter how crazy it may be, which in turn informs your approach to the negotiation.

Many negotiators often focus a lot on the empathy part of the phrase. But the tactical part—which simply refers to getting ready and having a strategic plan for your communication—is just as important.

Tactical empathy is about being very precise—not flying by the seat of your pants. It’s making a conscious choice to be situationally aware. It’s going in with a plan—but also being able to adapt on the fly.

In addition to learning the ins and outs of tactical empathy and how you can use these skills to enjoy better outcomes, here are three other things you can expect from our negotiation seminars.

1. You get to learn from four different perspectives.

Perhaps the biggest thing about our live events is the fact that the four of us—Chris Voss, Derek Gaunt, Brandon Voss, and Isaac Betancourt—are all in the room at the same time.

Not only does this mean that you get to hear advice from four different perspectives—think here’s what a former FBI hostage negotiator thinks and here’s what a former sales guy with no law enforcement training thinks—you also get to see each of the three negotiator types in action (i.e., assertive, analyst, and accommodator).

No matter which way you slice it, you’re getting exposure to several different ways of looking at a situation—and you’ll have a better understanding of how each type of negotiator thinks and acts.

2. It’s a prime opportunity for networking.

At a Black Swan live event, you are in a room full of people who are in the same place as you are. They’re the best at what they do—just like you—but they want to get better.

If you do nothing else at one of our negotiation seminars, you will have met at least seven people in the room due to the way we structure our events. Think of it as “structured networking” if you will.

Like anything else, our events are all what you make of them. We’ve had some go-getter attendees build strong relationships with one another—holding each other accountable and supporting one another’s career development moving forward.

3. You’ll learn how to respond instead of react.

We strive to make sure all of our event attendees become more cognizant of themselves in the moment of a negotiation.

For many of us, when we hear someone else talk, we react. At our events, we try to teach the importance of responding instead of simply reacting. We will help you develop a list of communication phrases and techniques to use in your high stakes conversations.  

In general, we’re ignorant of how often we react versus how often we respond. Most of us have simply reacted our whole lives. That doesn’t mean deals can’t get done that way, but is there a higher percentage shot?

Attend one of our negotiation seminars and you can expect to have a much better feel for this mental hurdle. Together, we’ll turn you into the negotiator that gets called to solve the hard issues—creating very specific emotional moments of influence and guidelines for what it takes to make your counterpart the problem solver,  

If all of the above sounds appealing, we hope to see you at an event in your neck of the woods in the near future! 

For more information on our live events and our upcoming schedule, check this out.