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, listeners, I'm excited for this one. If you

haven't listened to the last one, make sure you do because Lindsay told a really fun slash

disturbing story about something that she encountered when she was trying to close a deal. And so I am

going to be that guy. And so disclaimer,

if this happens to be the first episode that you're listening to, don't pay attention to what I'm

doing. Lindsay is the expert. I'm intentionally behaving badly. I am not this jerk that I'm going to

be. He is not. He's a very nice man. Thank you.

So we're doing this just for the sake of example. Okay. Sound good? Yep. Perfection. All right. Lindsay, Kwami, nice to meet you. So great to meet you. Glad we were able to get together. Yeah, me too. I've heard a lot about you, but I have a quick question. Is your dad coming to this meeting?

Hmm.

You know, my dad is not coming today.

Is your dad coming to the meeting today?

What? but I have a quick question. Is your dad coming to this meeting? Hmm. You know, my dad is not coming today. Is your dad coming to the meeting today?

What do you mean by that? Well, what do you mean if my dad's coming to the meeting?

Oh, I was just, I was just making a joke. My dad's been dead for 25 years. That's really, that's

really inappropriate. Well, I mean, I'm sorry to hear that your father passed away all those years ago, but it's also inappropriate if you make a joke and ask if my dad's coming to the meeting. So how about this? How about we skip over, all of this kind of fun talk, and let's just get down to business. We're here to do a deal. Let's go ahead and negotiate that through and see if we can get something done.

Well, I'm not just going to just pass over this. I mean, here's the thing. I invited you to my office. You got on a plane you got here. I'm just trying to lighten the mood and tell a joke. And then you jump on me in my office. And I don't understand how we got to this point. Well, you know, sometimes when people are trying to make jokes and they think that they're

being lighthearted, sometimes it doesn't come across that way.

So quite honestly, you know, just as you maybe feel that it was upsetting to you for me to

ask you if your dad was coming, maybe it was borderline upsetting to me.

...