- Hi, friends. Thanks for joining me for another insightful discussion on the Cerebrations podcast.

- In episode 15, we will talk about Creating Value Through Negotiation. This is a topic I have wanted to cover in an episode ever since I started this podcast. I've been looking for an opportunity to invite, as guest, someone I respect immensely, both as a person and as an academic.

- My guest today is Professor Falcao from my MBA alma mater, INSEAD. A former lawyer by training, he has participated in high-stakes negotiations on the international stage. He is the author of a book called Value Negotiation: How to Finally Get The Win-Win Right. Value Negotiation is his trademark and is going to be the central topic of today's discussion.

- I'm extremely honored to have Professor Falcao on today's episode. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to invite Professor Falcao to the virtual stage.

- Hi, Professor Falcao, how are you?

- Hi, Emil. I'm doing fine; thanks for inviting me over.

- Absolutely. I'm so glad to host you today. It's been almost a year since we started talking about this episode, and I really appreciate you fitting me into your busy schedule. I just wanted to add a little bit of a words before we get started here, pre-words of what we plan to do today. There is no way we can do justice to the topic of negotiation in a short 30-minutes interview. I know that we will be barely scratching the surface, and my goal is for my podcast audience is to just get either an initial introduction or refresher on the subject. Many probably have studied some class on negotiation in business school or in law school. Others may be seasoned sales folks, and they've negotiated large deals, and they think that they know about negotiation, and I appreciate that. Yet, there's always something new to learn, and as you put it in your book on Value Negotiation, there has been so much written on the subject over the past 30 or 40 years, and yet, it's decentralized in hundreds of books, articles, white papers, and it's sometimes even the authors seem to contradict themselves. It's really hard for everyone to make sense of the whole topic, so that's partially what I plan to do here, just to kind of get initial introduction to the latest in negotiation. And when I took your class at INSEAD 16 years ago, I felt you unpeeled the onion for me and my peers so we could see through all the noise. I remember so many moments from the class, and reading your book, I can see how you have made a huge effort to distill the subject to the most important, most practical parts. So, I'm hoping we can accomplish a little bit of that on this episodes, and those who are interested in learning more can check out your book and take it from there. I have a little call to action at the bottom of the screen here. People can go to Cerebrations.com. They can learn more about you, find out about your book, and they can also see what other podcast guests I've hosted over the past year or so and watch the other episodes if they're interested. So, with that in mind, I wanted to start with just a little bit about your journey to Value Negotiation. You trained to become a lawyer, and you're now a professor at INSEAD, which I consider the best business school in the world. You have published a book and co-founded two companies, yet Value Negotiation is perhaps what defines you the best. So, we'll focus on the actual definition of Value Negotiation a little bit later in this episode, but before that, can you please tell me and our audience about your journey to here, to negotiation?

- A pleasure, thank you. So where to start? The journey for Value Negotiation happened as I was studying law, and I realized that, in law, it was me trying to solve other people's problems as a lawyer, either corporate or litigator. And I came across this course from Roger Fisher, and he was the author of the book, co-author, but main co-author of the book Getting to Yes. And I was lucky enough to be his student, and I found doing that master's in law course that I could, instead of be helping others with their problems, I could be helping people help themselves. And I thought that this was much more empowering to generate healthy democracies, happy relationships, create more value, because there's just so many places I can be at any one time. But if I can empower hundreds, thousands of people or hopefully hundreds and thousands of people to help themselves and then help others by being there with them and being part of teams and on the likes, I felt like I would have a much stronger impact in the world, and then also, at the same time, that's when I was exposed to Win-Win negotiation theories, and I realized, oh, my God, the world doesn't have to be a dog-eat-dog kind of world. There is a way for us to get together, and even when we disagree and somewhat fight, because we always will, at least we can do that in a productive fashion and a respectful fashion and generate superior outcomes. So, the combination of these two, I didn't see anything similar to that in law or as a lawyer, wonderful profession. I, myself, wanted to be one. My wife was one for a while as well, and I have ultimate respect, but I thought that in my life mission in what I wanted to accomplish was different, and so, that's why I started veering towards the negotiation field. It did help that Roger Fisher had a boutique negotiation firm, and I managed to negotiate myself into working for him for a few years right after I finished my master's.

- Great, oh, thank you. Thank you for telling us about your story up to here. And I'm sure that when you worked as a practitioner of negotiation, you've come across a lot of interesting situations and stories. So, just to warm up a little bit here, let's get started with some of the fundamentals.

- Sure.

- What are the most common myths and pitfalls of negotiation? Let's clear this out, and then we'll start digging in a little bit more into Value Negotiation.

- Yeah, well, that's a big one; there are many, because as you were saying, and well, saying before, there's so much material, so many authors saying so many different things, and there's a wide variety of myths and pitfalls. So, let me take one or two at first. So, the first one is Win-Win takes too long, and that's not true, meaning Win-Win can be actually significantly faster and more efficient than doing Win-Lose. Win-Win, I mean, not the outcome being Win-Win, but the choice of not using power when you negotiate as opposed to Win-Lose, again, not being the outcome, but the choice of using power. A lot of people believe that using power, one, is a must; you have no choice, which is not true. You always have a choice. So, that's one. But that Win-Lose is faster, it's easier. You just go there and grab it. Well, if it were that easy, right? Why are we having so many wars? Why are we having so much conflict? It's because people come from that assumption of, I'll just go there and grab it, but they only visualize the best case scenario, is that when it works, and they fail to appreciate the risks; so that's another pitfall. Many people just think about, what do I need to do to get what I want? And then don't think about and what if that move fails? What's the cost? And so, a great negotiator will constantly be thinking, what are some of the things I could do, things, not thing, to get what I want? And then, what is the cost that each of those have if they don't work? Will they backfire? Will they actually make me worse off than before? Will they create negative consequences, or it will just be a meh, it didn't work, which then it's kind of okay, meaning it's kind of a low risk move. So, great negotiators, they will not think about what works, what doesn't work. They will think about what is likely to work and at what risk, and so, we're constantly thinking in terms of rewards, potential rewards we get from our moves, and then the potential risks as well. And so, I think that this combination of people thinking that Win-Lose is a must when it's not is a choice. That Win-Win takes too long and, therefore, it's too complicated; we shouldn't do it. That's also a myth. And then, finally, that you just think in terms of very absolute deterministic ways. That's another one that we need to improve towards risk reward. And if I were to add a fourth one just to get out of the rule of three, I would argue that a lot of people think they have to come to a negotiation knowing what they want in specifics. They want to know what's the outcome. The problem is that if you think you know the outcome of negotiation, then what's there to negotiate? It's just a matter of you putting pressure on the other to accept what you want. What I will invite people to consider is to go in knowing what you want, generically speaking, but not too specific, so that when you are in the negotiation, there's enough room for you to learn from the other person what's possible or not from their perspective, and, therefore, take the new learnings and opportunities and risks to craft something even superior to what you could have conceived before. So, it's okay to imagine scenarios before, but getting married to a single one and say, "This is what I want," and to the details of the numbers and all, that usually backfires and doesn't work as well. So having a broader, so summarizing, having a broader view and making it concrete and specific as you negotiate, although it might feel a little bit more loose and uncertain, has proven to generate significantly better results and with higher consistency as well. So I think there's a sum. We could do the whole podcast on that one, but let me stop here because I know you have a few more questions.

- No, thank you, thank you. That's very good synthesis of, I mean, you wanted to do three, but then you added the fourth one and it's even better because we heard more. And I think, well, it was something you mentioned in the very beginning and also it was in your book, but, you know, people just assume that if they have power, why not? I mean, it's an obvious choice. Why don't you abuse your power? But you have an example in your book in the very beginning, about the caveman, prehistoric caveman and, you know, one of them is much stronger than the other one, and they get into a fight for food and the stronger one wins, but at what cost? I mean, he still gets some injuries. These injuries may be life-threatening, and animals realize that, too, in the wild, so it's important to keep that in mind because, otherwise, yeah, I mean, you can assume that you're gonna be stronger, but that's not always gonna be the case. So, I appreciate everything you've said so far, but let's get to some of the meat of what we wanted to discuss today, so, you've written a best-selling book on Value Negotiation, both your advisory company and your SaaS startup folks on Value Negotiation. How do define Value Negotiation? How does it differ from Win-Win negotiation? Because I feel like this is a term that most of our target audience may have heard from more often.

- That's right, that's right, that makes sense. So, let me give you, like, the little academic definition of it, and then, let me make the differentiation that you ask from Win-Win. And so, Value Negotiation is a system. So, it's not a strategy. It's a system within which there are many strategies. And so, it's a system that helps you understand that the focus should always be value, not just power. Power is just a tool for value. And so, you should be thinking very clear, carefully, if you think about power in that negotiation has to have this risk reward component that I mentioned before as a guiding tool for your decision making and that you should have a decision making that is much more probabilistic than deterministic. So these are three pillars of Value Negotiation. Now, what is the definition, and then I'll the differentiation? The definition is Value Negotiation is the negotiation system that aims to provide the negotiator with the ability to make the choice at any given moment in the process that will provide you the highest possible reward for the lowest possible risk in the widest range of situations. So, in other words, it's a system that helps you make good decisions again and again and again because in any negotiation, the problem of just following a few tips is that you may make some great decisions, but in a few moments, and then all the other decisions, if you make them poorly, your negotiation will still go down because unbalanced, you make more bad decisions than good decisions. The idea of the Value Negotiation system is that it guides your every decision. It doesn't give you tricks. It might give you a couple of best practices, but it doesn't give you tricks because the idea is to hold your decision making at a very high level so that every decision you entertain and in decision making just about everything you say is a decision, is a choice. Then every time you're saying something, you're saying it from a position of I am having the best choices of words to get the best possible outcome with the least cost or risk, and even if the person in front of me is different, I'm still doing something that is resilient and likely to succeed, so you're going for high percentage shots, meaning every time you hit, you have a high percentage of winning and a low percentage of losing. So, that's kind of like in a very broad frame with the little sentence there that I said, the definition and the understanding of the Value Negotiation system. Now, how's it different from Win-Win? Win-Win is the default and favored approach or strategy with the Value Negotiation, and Value Negotiation can also guide you to make better decisions in Win-Lose. So, while we spend much more time, for example, in the book or the classroom, when we teach Value Negotiation teaching Win-Win is because Win-Win is much more sophisticated, and therefore, requires much more higher level thinking than the more blunt use of power in Win-Lose. Because if you can do the sophisticated, then it becomes easier for you to do the less. And that's why we spend more time on Win-Win, but we're constantly also considering that, "Hey, how about Win-Lose?" So, we're constantly thinking Win-Win, but how about Win-Lose? The beauty is that, more often than not, especially for someone who is well-versed on Value Negotiation, Win-Win will dominate as a default strategy almost always, but not always. And so I, that's one of the things that Value Negotiation is different than a pure Win-Win. Win-Win is just one category, albeit a very dominant one.

- I see, okay. Actually, this is a really good segue to my next question, and I wanted to ask you if there are any situations that justify Win-Loss negotiation? I've seen an older video of yours where you talk about looking at Win-Win and Win-Lose as a choice on how to address a situation.

- That's right.

- And you choose how you want to approach the situation, and this more or less determines the outcomes. So, for the sake of playing devil's advocate, when may we be well justified to choose a Win-Lose?

- So notice that, are there situations where you justify but, like, you can choose to play Win-Lose anytime you want, right? In other words, remember, because the definition for me of Win-Lose is whenever you choose to use power in negotiation, so I can use it with my kids when I'm sending them to bed, go to bed now, why? Because I'm your daddy, I'm telling you, so just go. Or because if you don't go, then in the weekend, you're not going to the beach or doing the thing you find fun. That's me using my daddy power that I have to force them in, but then what will they do? They'll go to bed, and then, I will go to back to work or chat or read a book, and they probably they will go under the bed and turn their flashlights and be reading comics until late at night, beating the purpose of going to bed early. So that's the problem of going Win-Lose. Even when you have more power, and clearly, a father with a son, especially a small one, five, six years, you have significantly physical power and authority power and even moral power anyway. It doesn't mean you can abuse of it, but you do have it. It doesn't mean that the little boy or girl doesn't have their own ways of, they're using their little power to try to resist you. And so, the first thing that I wanna just put forward is it is a choice. It's not a situation, and you don't have to justify. The point is, are you making the best choice at that moment? And so, if I learned that my kids are cheating and going under the bed turning on a flashlight and reading their comics, that actually means no. I'm not being successful unless my point is just get them into the room because I want peace and quiet. But if my point is to try to get them in bed early to sleep early so that they sleep healthy and they wake up well in the next day, I'm not getting my goal satisfied. And so, that's what the negotiator has to be thinking. Is my strategy delivering on my desirable outcomes? And if Win-Lose is doing that, one, and if Win-Lose is doing that better than Win-Win, two, and if I have the power advantage over my counterparty to ensure or enhance the odds that I'll be successful, three, and if the power difference is not so small that they can resist to the point that it will hurt me back, four, and if in the process of choosing Win-Lose, I don't start to believe that the end justified the means and, therefore, I start using power in unethical ways, five, then I would argue that if you cross these five, you're good to choose Win-Lose, meaning, actually, you probably even should choose Win-Lose over Win-Win.

- I see. Interesting, very interesting. So, another thing that I read in your book was how we must be positive but not naive. And I wanted to ask you, in situations where we feel that the other parties has chosen to pursue a Win-Loss option, how can we avoid being taken advantage of? How do we retain control of the negotiation? Is that even, like, the right approach?

- No, it, sorry, yes, it is the right approach. You could think about it that way. So, let me just do one step back to talk about the positive non-naive very briefly, and that question's a really big one, meaning there's, I can give a whole day on how to manage others who are doing Win-Lose, which you actually, if were to think about, pretty much my whole MBA class is teaching my MBA students on how to handle others who are doing Win-Lose when you still wanna do Win-Win, because it is very difficult in many ways. You're trying to dance a certain rhythm while the other one is dancing a completely different rhythm. It will look awkward sometimes, but hey, you know what? You can; you can actually both have fun dancing your own rhythms. It's just a little bit more complicated. Now, okay, so let me do the step back. So positive, non-naive, what do I mean by that? One of the things that I found out being a majority Win-Win advocate, right? Well, that negotiation predominantly Win-Win. So, I would argue that a lot of people who advocate for Win-Win, they make a big mistake. And the mistake they make, and the one that they're actually very criticized for by many people, not just me, is that they start to believe that Win-Win is like friends getting together in a party to hold hands and walk and watch the beautiful sunset as if everyone was just pure beauty, pure goodness. And I don't believe on that, and I think most people don't either. I also don't believe in the opposite, that people are pure evil, and they're just out there to get you, and they're only selfish. I don't think that people are only selfish. I think they have selfishness in them, and they have generosity in them. I think people can behave in ways that look evil, and they can behave in ways that are very elevated and good. And so, I believe that we both have all of those in us. And so, what I suggest negotiators to do is to try to invite the good stuff to come out from the counterparty and make it harder for the bad stuff to come out. So, you basically nudge the person to bring their best behavior to the room, but you need to then bring yours as well. Now the problem is that when you bring your good behavior, you start going, okay, so I have to be generous trusting it. No, you don't, because that means you're just being naive as well. You're just putting a lot of the good stuff on the table before you start knowing if the other side will or not. But then that create another conundrum, which is, well, but if I don't start, and they don't start, then no one starts then and, therefore, we have a problem. And so, the idea is to start, but start small and slow. So start, but start small and slow. So, basically, what do you do? If you're gonna start singing opera, you first, you warm your voice; you start getting up to the point where you can hit the high notes. If I can use that as a metaphor, it's a little bit similar. If you're gonna swim in very cold waters, you first may put your little toe in and then your foot and then, eventually, you might do the dive. In other words, you collect data, and you get used to it. And so, what I'm trying to say is you start doing some Win-Win moves early on, but you make them small. You make them ones that, if they don't reciprocate, you don't lose money, or you don't put yourself at a significant disadvantage. That's being positive. I'm promoting the positivity, but I'm not being naive to what? Expect that just by being positive, the other side will immediately flip and be positive as well. That is unlikely to happen, actually. If it does, good. Maybe not even so good, but good. More likely than not, people are gonna be guarded. They're not gonna necessarily trust your first moves. Maybe gonna be suspicious. Maybe some people are just inclined to do and lose because that's how they like to negotiate. And so, by doing some early below cost, low risk Win-Win moves, you are showing to the other person, come, we can do this together. We can be Win-Win together. And if they don't, you can always decide, okay, do I insist on Win-Win a bit more? Do I go to Win-Lose if I want to, as I described last time, in the previous question? And so, what I'm trying to put forward is you start that way, and then, how do you continue? You kinda continue that way. You continue slow and steady. You continue and you only build up the risk as you see that they are also engaging with you. So one of the things that I try to tell my students a lot is slow down. You wanna do Win-Win? Slow down. Slow down to go fast, because if you rush, there will be bumps in the road, then you're gonna trip and fall and hurt yourself or maybe even break to the point you can't stand up again. So Win-Win is all about slow and steady. If you think about the turtle and the hare, it's the turtle, is you go and you don't stop, and you keep going, but you go slow; why? Because if the moment you jump, the moment you rush, that's when you trip, you fall, you hurt yourself. And similarly, then, goes for Win-Win. You make small moves. You make procedural moves first. Those don't hurt. Then you make relationship moves, and you see where they are, and you see if you are aligning, and it's giving time for the other person also to see what's your wavelength. Once they start understanding your pattern, and once you start seeing that they are mirroring your pattern, then it start time to start getting bigger. Because now, they know the game is just about increasing the volume. So hopefully, that gives you a sense there of the positive, not naive. That was probably a bit longer than I wanted, but let's get back to your question now.

- As you were describing this, I was thinking in corporate terms, you know. A lot of times when you reach certain level of seniority in the corporate world, there's politics. I mean, there's politics everywhere, right? But at the top, there's even stronger politics, and sometimes, there's a counterpart that you may feel like they're being unreasonable and they're attacking you, and they're coming stronger to you, and I feel like most of the times, you feel compelled to react and show your power because you don't want to be seen as the weak leader in the organization by your own teams or whatever. So, I think there's something to be learned there, too, because the knee-jerk reaction will be, you hit me hard, I'm gonna hit you even harder. But like you described, that may not necessarily be the most optimal choice.

- And if I didn't just add a little bit more on the corporate spin, building on what you said quite correctly, by the way, is that if someone were to do Win-Lose towards you, usually they're doing that because they believe that using their power is the best way to get what they want. If I can show to them there are better ways to get what you want, or at least engage with me in a conversation because what you're doing is actually making it worse, 'cause now I don't want to give you what you want because you are actually not helping me out, so why should I help you out? And even now, as you well described, tempted to use my power against you, but I'm gonna try to refrain myself as hard as this might be and give us an opportunity to redefine how we deal with one another. Sometimes you go, oh, okay, so you're telling me that I can get what I want, but it's just not this way. Possible, I can't promise you. It depends on what you're willing to give in return, et cetera, but it is possible. And then, in that sense, then, then you increase dramatically the odds that people might actually shift their approach from Win-Lose, because you're just used to it, to something else because they actually might see that there's a higher potential of getting what they want.

- Yeah, yeah, and I was thinking also, you know, in a corporate world, at the end of the day, what the success is. Success is if your enterprise, if your business, is successful, so if you keep sabotaging each other, you're not gonna see that success. So, you will see

- True as well.

- personally, there's the satisfaction of showing the other person that you were, you know, stronger or that you shouldn't be messed up with. But on the other hand, your business is suffering from that. So I don't know if that's the most optimal choice for it.

- There you go.

- Great. Well, that's another good segue to one of my next questions, and this podcast audience is mostly, at least I'm targeting mostly, sales and marketing executives, because I come from that background, so how can we translate what we talked about here, some of the key ideas, to the world of sales and marketing and what can help sales and marketing sectors become better negotiators?

- Yeah, Okay, well, the easy answer is take a course, meaning seriously. It doesn't need to be mine. I mean, of course I would prefer if it's mine , but take a course for several reasons. One, there is science to the art of negotiation. And so, science means what? There's best practice that are replicable and that enhance your odds of being successful. So, I would say that's one. Two, it helps you become more self-aware of what you do already well, but you're just not so conscious of it. And so, it helps you really kinda grasp, like, your strengths and allow you to leverage that more conscientiously and proactively next time. And it makes you a little bit more aware as well of where you might not be as good and, who knows, maybe even a few solutions and ideas on how you can overcome that, so you become a much more well-rounded negotiator and one that also develops a system, an internal system, that happens to learn more from experience because you learn how to decode the language of negotiation in a way that becomes easier for you to converse with yourself. And so every time you succeed, you learn more why you succeeded. Every time you fail, you learn more why you failed. And so, you are always getting better for the next round. So, I know this might sound a little bit on the obvious side and I think that's still the best thing because I see way too many negotiators, good and bad, because some people have an inclination towards it. There's still an art to it. Some people have a innate talent of sorts and some people don't. But I've seen the people who don't become significantly better than even those talented ones because of the course. So now, the science is at the level where it can make a difference and bring people from a very low, let's say, talent, innate skill, to a level that is significantly high performance. And so, that's my number one advice. My number two advice, if you don't have the time, the money, or the patience to do a course is take notes. I know this might sound simple, but take notes, and then revise your notes. And when I say take notes, it's not necessarily just the fact of you getting a pen and hitting the paper or writing the computer. Now, there are AI softwares. They're automatically translating the audio of a conversation into notes. And so, look at those. I know of one very good one. I'm not an investor, but that CEO is a friend of mine, called Bloks; he's an INSEAD alum as well. It's based in Canada. He's a SEER entrepreneur, so whatever he puts his hand is usually gold, and the reason why I think about notes is because you read what you have because when you are in the negotiation, you are in action mode. Great negotiators, they develop a action reflection mode. And so, basically, is what you're doing, you are also thinking about what you're doing at the same time as if you were watching two screens, right? The screen of your first person experience and then a screen of the side view, which is as if you were watching yourself in action. And so, by having the notes and reading them, you start remembering moments that happen in the negotiation, and you start developing the mind view, that second screen, where you then become much more aware of what's going on as it's going on. You become much more aware by reading it. Wow, that sounded good. I should repeat that. Ooh, that didn't sound great. Even if it was something done by the other side or a teammate of yours and you start incorporating those into your repertoire. Remember, negotiation is a skill at the end of the day. There's knowledge, but there's skill, and the more you start getting those little things, and you start putting them together in modules, oh, if I do this and then that and then this, that works better. So you will start building your own algorithms of what works and doesn't, your own modules, and so, it would actually start burning less energy, and you're starting to going to flow more and negotiate. And then, when you get to the difficult and unknown moments that you haven't experienced before, then you have more energy saved to actually take care of those moments because your performance is still gonna be fresh 'cause you're not tired from what came before that you could have already pre-digested from other negotiations. So I would argue right, all right, that these three things, if I may, yeah? Take a course if you can. Take notes, and then revise the notes with the mindset of incorporating new ideas and frameworks and tips and modules and algorithms into your repertoire, so the next time you have that two screens going on in front of you and you see much more of what's going on.

- Very interesting; I actually was thinking as you were talking about taking notes how sometimes it's difficult because you are, maybe you feel like you're not paying attention to the conversation if you get distracted taking notes or maybe you don't want to signal to the other party what you consider to be an important moment. Why is that an important moment? Are you disclosing too much there? But in one of my previous episodes, I hosted the founders of a company that actually does conversation or NOP for sales calls. So they, you know, it just adds one of these bullets that you mentioned to the call does the work for you. You provide certain keywords that are important for you from a sales perspective, it structures the notes after that; that way, you can easily, after that, review everything and learn from that and train yourself, so very, you know, very interesting point here. So we're we getting to--

- Just a real quick one, sorry, not to interrupt you. I'm not saying take just notes on the important stuff. What I'm thinking is literally take notes. It's, like, be extensive. Bring someone into your meeting that can take those notes for you, use those softwares, because it's the comprehensiveness of it. And then, mention to the other side, I am taking notes 'cause I wanna learn from it so I can do better next time with you. And if you're doing Win-Win, they will appreciate that. So, it is hopefully all consistent.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah, thank you.

- No, that's a very good point, yeah 'cause basically, you wouldn't know at the moment what's important for you to learn, but if you take the notes throughout the whole conversation, you find this out later when you analyze it. Great; so we're getting close to the end of this podcast episode. Thank you very much; it's been a very interesting discussion. Just as a final kind of word of advice, you know, I know you already provided some suggestions for improvement, but what's your final recommendation for the podcast audience?

- Woof, cha cha cha cha cha cha cha. Think negotiation as a science. I think that's the first thing. I already hinted at that, but I wanna say it. Think negotiation is something that is learnable, not just by doing, but by reading and studying. Get books, hopefully mine, but others as well. Go read about it because then you start developing understanding of, ah, this is important in negotiation and this is important. Oh, I didn't know that was important. Everyone knows trust is important, but did you know that the process is actually maybe even more important than trust, right? Maybe you didn't know that. Maybe you did. Should you make the first offer; should you not? What, the first offer matters? It matters, but how much it matter? Some people say it matters a lot, some people say it doesn't matter that much, but it matters some, and should you be the first one doing it or not? And so, there's so many little questions in negotiation, so many moves, so many sentence, so many questions you can ask that it becomes a little bit of a life journey. Now, most people are not like me who are dedicated just for that, but let me put it this way. Every relationship you have happens through negotiation. In every relationship. With your husband, wife, with your parents, with your kids, with your brothers and sisters, with your boss, colleagues, clients, everyone. At some point someone is trying to persuade the other. Sometimes for their benefit, even. I'm trying to help you do something that is good for your health. You're like, it doesn't mean you're just trying to get stuff, but you are always trying to persuade. And so, if you appreciate that negotiation and persuasion are pretty much the same thing, negotiation is how persuasion happens many times. Then think about it in the way that I embraced it is that if you get better at negotiation, you're gonna get better everywhere else. And so, if you are finding it hard to invest time in studying negotiation, maybe this will help you think about, okay, much like exercising help my whole body get healthier, not just my finger or my arm or my legs or my heart. It's the whole body. Negotiation help all my relationships get better because the better I get at negotiation, the better I get a persuasion, the better I get at communication, the better I will establish and manage the relationships around me. So I think that will be, then, read more about it and think about it as something that will have an enormous knock-on effect that will improve your lives dramatically. And that's what I wish for you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you; I really appreciate all your advice and being on this podcast episode, and I hope that one day, we'll may have another conversation again. Thank you very much.

- Will be a pleasure. Emil, thank you so much, yeah?

- Thank you, bye-bye.

- Bye.