Hello, my friends, and welcome to our practice session. In our practice sessions, we invite our featured

guests to show off their negotiation and conflict resolution skills in a realistic scenario. In this

session, I want you to pay attention to what our guest does and not to what I do, because while

they are trying to show off their skills and teach you, I'm trying to frustrate their efforts in different

ways through things like aggression, annoyance, emotionality, or awkwardness. And then after the

practice session, we debrief and talk about what worked, what didn't work, and what you can

use in your next difficult conversation. All right, everybody. So welcome to the practice session.

Again, our guest is Dan Oblinger. He was our previous guest on the last episode. So if you

haven't checked that out, make sure you do. This practice session has been inspired by, not inspired,

completely written by our friend Alan Sang. Okay, so here it is. I'm

going to read it out loud. I will be the husband in this situation and Dan will be Dan, the

hostage negotiator. A husband takes his wife hostage thinking that she's been unfaithful, fully

believing that. He has a knife to her throat when police show up. The wife

is barely able to talk or move because the mentally unstable husband has been beating her, so she

is unable to comply with police or fight back or run. The husband demands her or the police

to bring the person she's been allegedly cheating with.

The problem is, there is nobody.

So, Dan, you are the lead negotiator in this case, and you have to negotiate with this man

who is behind the door and unwilling to come out.

Any wrong move, and he will do the unthinkable.

Well, this is going to be a test of my acting chops.

You ready to go?

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