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, and welcome to our sparring session.

Nancy is back for the sparring session. We were ready to go. So let me set the stage. This one's

going to be a bit difference because you are going to get two sparring sessions for the price of one,

just like those classic infomercials. Two for one, could it get any better?

This is great.

So the first sparring session is going to be me acting as Nancy's client.

And so it will be a conversation that she would have with the client.

She's going to set the stage and give us an idea of some of the challenges that might

come up in the conversation that she has to

use, she has to work through as a coach. So we're going to see how those negotiation skills

operate as a coach working with a client. So I'm going to try to be difficult in different ways

for that sparring session. Then we're going to do a breakdown. We're going to talk about what happened.

And then we're going to have the sparring session that you have been waiting for,

where Nancy acts as the client would in the difficult conversation that they're prepping for.

So the conversation that we're prepping for is a difficult conversation where the person continues to get interrupted.

...