[MUSIC PLAYING]
I've got a technique that I absolutely love,
and I want you to come to love it as well.
It's called the accusations audit.
An accusations audit is taking a step back, and taking
an inventory, doing an audit of all the possible negatives,
names, accusations, slanderous things
that the other side might be thinking about me
based on the circumstances, or the environment,
or their own paranoia.
All the things, that if I had the chance, I would say,
I don't want you to feel.
What happens when you do this is you start digging
out all the negatives that the other side may be harboring
based on past experiences, maybe based on past lives.
Who knows?
You know, it's the old phrase about the elephant in the room.
First of all, the elephant in the room
doesn't go away by pretending it's not there.
The elephant in the room doesn't go away by you saying,
there's not an elephant a room.
The elephant in the room is diminished, and eventually goes
away, by you saying, hey, there's
an elephant in the room.
And then people go, yeah, that's not that bad.
So conduct an inventory, do an audit
of all the possible negative names, negative feelings,
slanderous accusations that the other side might have.
Make a list, and go after them early on and quickly,
fearlessly.
Unexpressed negative emotions never die.
They fester like an infection, and they become cancerous.
And this is an approach to go after these,
and even get out in front of them,
and trigger the working collaborative relationship
from the very beginning.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So you can frame the accusations audits
a couple of different ways.
If you've been in the relationship for a while,
just the straight label.
Now, it seems like you're not getting all the information out
of us that you want.
It probably feels like we're holding back on you.
It probably feels like we're wasting your time.
It feels like that we're not being honest with you.
At the very beginning, you can be a little more speculative,
a little more tentative with it, a little more just
recognizing what might probably happened.
So at the beginning, you might say,
you're probably going to ask yourself
why you're taking this meeting.
It probably feels like it might seem
like everybody else is in this line of work
and that there is no difference between me and anybody else.
You may even think like that the people
on your side of the table are going to think
you're getting pushed around.
You can be a little more speculative
in those observations because you're
conveying to the other side that you're being attentive,
and you're being speculative, but you're being careful
about it the entire time, and they're going
to appreciate your approach.
This gets back to being a straight shooter.
You're telling the truth.
You're calling things out.
You're recognizing things.
But you've taken responsibility for how the statements
you make land.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So is this tactic applicable to everyday negotiations?
Well, it's only applicable when humans are involved.
One of my favorite interactions to get a late checkout,
and the use of the accusations audit, and understand,
I like to be concise.
I like to go after it.
I like to deactivate it as much as possible along the way.
And I have literally done this when
I've called them from my room and asked for a late checkout.
And I'm just honest, I need a check out.
No, we can't give it to you.
You've got to check out at 11, or whatever it is.
So I'll get up out of my room, and I'll walk down
to the front, desk and I may get the same person
that I had on the phone.
Enough time has transpired from when I left my room
to get down to the front desk.
And I'll walk up to the hotel clerk, and I'll say,
I'm getting ready to make your day ridiculously difficult.
And you can just watch stuff go through their brains.
Now, a front desk hotel clerk, god knows what they face.
You know, somebody comes out of a room,
I'm getting ready to make your day ridiculously difficult.
The stuff they've seen up to that point in time, what's
going through their mind is, you know,
did you have diarrhea all over the room?
were you part of a satanic cult, and you
just sacrificed one of our laundry people in your room
and are there pentagrams all over the wall?
You know, they've probably seen it all,
and they're going to think horrible thoughts for just
a moment, just a moment, just a dynamic silence of a pause.
And then you shut up until they look at you
and give you permission to go on.
And they give you permission to go on by saying, what is it?
And you say, I need a late checkout.
And they go, oh, my god.
Okay, sure.
What do you need?
2:00, 3:00, 4:00?
What do you need?
And they give it to you.
Now, this works, I'd like to say, every time.
There may have been a time when that didn't work,
but it works 999 times out of 1,000.
It works enough that I go down, and I use it,
and I get late checkouts all the time.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
How exhaustive should you be in your list of accusations
that you're compiling?
I'm here to tell you, if you don't
feel like you're laying it on thick,
you're not laying it on thick enough.
We have coached people time after time and run
people through exercises where we've had them make lists.
And nearly every time, they leave stuff out.
It really takes a fearless and courageous brainstorming effect
on your part to really go after everything.
And it's rare that you're going to overdo it.
So be as forward thinking as possible.
And a great way to test that is, as you're laying out
your accusations audits, read the other side's reaction
all along the way.
If you've got a list of 15 things,
and you've gone through the first three,
and they say, oh, you're being too hard on yourself,
you know you've done your job.
Actually, where you want to get to is when the other side says,
you know, you know, you're being too hard on yourself.
Because when somebody says that, they
have stepped to your side of the table.
You have forced empathy into this situation,
and that's exactly what your objective is.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So here's what I'm asking you to do.
I'm asking you to be willing to test drive it.
Pick some low stakes conversations
where if they go bad on you, no harm, no foul.
It doesn't matter what it is.
You're not going to play a high stakes negotiation with a skill
that you haven't test-driven in a low stakes
conversation any way.
Nobody performs in a championship with something
they've never tried before.
They've done it in practice.
So practice on your low stakes skills, try it out a few times,
see what you think.