[MUSIC PLAYING]
The amygdala is this little organ
in the middle of your head, and it is the nerve center
of all the emotions.
There were neuroscience experiments
that were done where they put people
in fMRIs, functional magnetic resonance imaging equipment,
so they could watch the electrical activity
in people's brains.
Then they induced the negative emotion
by showing a photo to them.
The photo might make them feel sad, angry, lonely, hurt,
upset.
They knew the photo would trigger some sort
of a negative emotion.
They showed the people the photo,
and they simply said, what are you feeling?
They told them to identify it or label it.
And every time that the person self-labeled,
they saw the electrical activity in the negative part
of the amygdala decrease, every time.
Now, when we first started on labels in a hostage
negotiation, we called them emotion labels,
and we used it as a very self-defining skill.
You labeled emotions.
You heard an emotion, put a label on it.
If somebody sounded angry, you said, you sound angry.
And if that negative emotion is there,
that label will reduce that negative emotion.
So in this session, I'm going to teach you about labels.
Labels are just verbal observations.
When I first came out of hostage negotiation
into business negotiation, I actually
thought this was the least important skill on our list.
Having been involved in business negotiation for quite a while
and coaching a lot of people, we found out
that labels might be the most important skill, the most
innocuous skill, and the most MacGyver skill,
the most useful tool with the most different applications
to unwind and solve some of the trickiest problems.
Don't be fooled by their simplicity.
Their simplicity gives them elegance.
You'll enjoy learning labels.
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The steps to labeling.
The first step is you simply being
aware of the emotion or the dynamic from the other side.
Now, this is a lot easier than it sounds because you've
got a great gut instinct.
Becoming aware of what your gut instinct is picking up
is the first step.
Then the second step after that is to simply label it.
That starts out with it seems like, it sounds like, it
looks like, it feels like.
Those are the first few words of a label,
and then just fill in the blank.
If your gut instinct is to say, look,
I don't want you to be upset about this,
your gut instinct is picking up that they are upset
or they will be upset.
So take it and make it a label.
It seems like you're upset about this.
What happens in your brain is you say to yourself,
am I upset?
It triggers that contemplation.
And the mere act of triggering that contemplation
deactivates the negative.
So my labels are going to do several things simultaneously.
They're going to build the relationship,
and they're going to help me gather information.
And since both of those things are happening,
then my influence with you is going to increase.
And the great thing about this type of influence,
this approach to influence--
this is what I call trust-based influence.
It's the lowest-maintenance, most durable type of influence
there is.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
A wrong way to label something involves
the phrase "what I'm hearing."
Now, a lot of people have been taught
to say, "well, what I'm hearing is."
By starting out with "what I'm hearing is,"
I've dropped the word "I" in inappropriately,
and the message that I'm conveying
is that I'm more interested in my perspective than yours.
It's also important that you resist
the urge to explain a label or to add some follow-up
or to talk in any way, actually, after a good label.
A good label, you've got to let it sink in.
You've got to let it have its effect.
You've got to let it trigger the type of contemplation,
the type of thinking that you want to have triggered
in the other side.
You got to let it fully deactivate the negatives.
So after you've made a great label, you've got to shut up.
You gotta shut the front door.
You got to stop talking.
Even if you get another good label,
let the first one hit hard and sink
in before you follow up with the second label
or before you ask a great question.
Let your label sink in.
Don't explain them.
Don't step on them.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In a lot of circumstances, it's probably
going to take more than one label of a negative
to completely diffuse or deactivate the negative.
Labels are cumulative.
I will coach you that labeling negatives diffuses,
diminishes them every time.
The important part of that is to remember although I said it
what kind of effect it would have,
I didn't tell you the degree of impact.
I didn't tell you how much it would deactivate or diffuse
the negative.
Sometimes it's a little.
Sometimes it's a lot.
So you may label a negative emotion, and the other side,
you perceive that they don't react.
If you label a negative and you get this response,
it's not that the label didn't work.
It's actually that you're on the right track.
You just need more.
So a lack of response to a negative label
is a good sign that you're on the right track.
Just keep going.
Label it some more.
You might even say as a follow-up,
it sounds like I haven't gone far enough.
It sounds like there's more there than meets the eye.
It sounds like there's some feelings
you have about this that I haven't quite touched yet.
Those would all be appropriate observations
to a response of [STARING BLANKLY]
to your label.
It's just adding it up.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
What I've hoped I've established with you
is that labeling a negative deactivates a negative.
Now I want to talk with you about what happens
when you label a positive.
It's the opposite.
Labeling a positive reinforces it.
You may be in conversation with a customer service
person for an airline, and they're short-tempered.
They've been beaten up all day.
And you didn't call to congratulate them
on having-- doing a good job anyway.
You don't call customer service to congratulate them
on what a great job the airline's doing.
They know that.
They know you're mad in advance.
Now, here's the crazy part.
Their impatience, their empathy, their perspective on this
is that if you're lucky to be talking to them at all,
they're actually being generous with their time.
That's their bizarro worldview.
Again, empathy is not the truth.
It's not the reality.
It's the other side's point of view.
So a great positive to reinforce here
is to say to them, I appreciate you
being generous with your time.
It feels like you're being really generous with me
right now.
I've, in fact, used that with airline customer service
personnel who talked to me as if I was lucky to have them
on the phone at all, put me on hold for a long period of time.
When the woman came back on a phone, I said, look,
it really feels like you're being generous with your time.
And her tone changed instantly.
And she actually talked to me for a few more moments,
put me on hold, and went back and fixed the problem
with no charge, which was exactly what I was after.
I wanted more generosity from her.
And so since it was there, I knew it was buried,
underlying the emotions that were on the surface.
I just used a positive label to reinforce it and build it
back up.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Mirrors are a great way to dial yourself in on labels.
I can remember in my early days of teaching hostage
negotiation, we were teaching some of the FBI agents
that were on the Hostage Rescue Team, the Super SWATers.
And there was one of the guys on the HRT
in particular that I saw him--
in a negotiation scenario, he would
mirror and mirror and mirror and then come up
with a great label.
So the combination of mirrors leading into labels
will really help you if you're having trouble
getting a grasp on exactly what the dynamic or the emotion
that the other side is feeling.
Your mirrors will do a great job in teasing that out.
And a flip side is after a great label,
they may have given you a lot of information,
and there may be a part of that that you want to expand on.
So whatever their response is to the label,
you can mirror one or two or three
words out of that response and get a lot more information
afterwards.
So here's how that might play out
if you were going to mirror following a label.
I might say to you, it sounds like this deal
is making you upset.
And you'll say, well, it's not making me upset.
What it really is is we got some real implementation problems
here on the other side because we've had trouble
with this in the past.
I'll simply say, trouble in the past?
And you'll say, yeah, well, you know,
it happened to us with another company.
It was actually the vendor we had before you guys came in,
and they gave us a lot of problems.
But we're really worried that you guys
are doing the same thing.
We realize that you're different,
but, you know, we're not sure yet,
because we're still early in the relationship.
And then I might say, early in the relationship?
But any one of those selected mirrors
is going to tease a lot of information
out about exactly what I'm after.
And it also helps you think it out
loud sort that if there are contradictions
in your thinking, you're much more likely to see them
once you've articulated them than when they're banging
around inside your head.