[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan we were in a workshop recently together and you brought up a term that just had everyone kind of sit up really straight in their seats and go oh that's been me and that was about entrepreneurial hostage taking so can you explain your context behind that because it's a fun circumstance that set this up I'm going to tell two stories here so the purpose of strategic coach first of all strategic coach is only for entrepreneurs who are talented successful and ambitious already so it's not a place to begin your entrepreneurial career it's actually that you have become very successful and you've kind of almost reached the ceiling of your previous best goals and now you'd like to take a big big jump with a knowledge you have but almost with the energy and freshness and motivation that you had when you first started as an entrepreneur and that's what we're about and we've been just for that for 30 years we're in our 31st year and that's what we do and the most important thing is that these individuals that what they're looking for now is an Ever expansion of Four Freedoms and this would be both in their business life and their personal life but greater freedom of their time greater freedom of their money the quality of the money the quantity of the money freedom of relationship both inside and outside their business and freedom of purpose you know what's all this about what does this do and they have the money they're already in like close to the top 1% of income earners before they can even qualify for a strategic coach so they've come in they know how to make money the money isn't the problem is that they've gotten themselves trapped and I said it's like a lot of you have been taken hostage you're trapped by a hostage taker okay and that was the term and everybody said oh that's so true and I said you know and each of you has different things that when you look at a sense of frustration or a sense you know of almost being angry that basically it would be the same that someone had someone or something has taken you hostage but the reason I brought up that word is I just had the benefit of being introduced to someone who has signed up for strategic coach during 2019 his name is Chris Voss he's written a marvelous book never split the difference and he is a coach member in Los Angeles his son is also in the program and he was a guest at Joe polish's really really marvelous big conference every November called genius Network and Chris is a veteran I think probably a 30-year veteran of the f bi where he was a chief negotiator in hostage taking situations and I highly recommend his book brilliant never split the difference but anyway he just showed the whole psychology the whole approach the whole communication approach the whole process that he would set up to stack the odds in his favor that eventually the hostage would be freed from the hostage taker without violence being needed and he has just developed an amazingly interesting totally counterintuitive kind of communication approach to this so much so that Chris and I have agreed to actually combine our understanding of creating free zones where you're free from competition with the concept of freeing yourself from hostage situations but we'll identify what entrepreneurs want to get free of as that they're held hostage it's really very very very exciting it's just one of those terms that is so vivid your mind immediately goes to movies to books to real life situations but it's very very easy to say you know I've had this problem I've had this problem I haven't made a decision you know I know I have to stop being here but I haven't made the decision I said well that must be how a hostage feels when someone else has complete power over them so I think Chris has a whole logic of how you un hostage yourself so Dan what are some examples of things that entrepreneurs feel Hostage to and I know it can be both people and things but what are some examples that people can relate to yeah well I would say right off the bat and this probably applies to almost all entrepreneurs Shannon is being Hostage to price cutting competition in the marketplace for your product and service in other words that every year you go awn it's almost like the profitability of your product is being taken down and the amount of competition or regulation or complexity to actually do your business keeps going up and you feel hostage and you say if it's this way what's it going to be like five years from now and you've been trained to do this you're very good at it you've been very successful it was far more profitable you know a short time ago but now it's getting unprofitable and you feel there's forces aspiring against you but you don't really know what they are and you had projected in your own mind a constant increase in success and increase of you know of profitability and productivity and now you're not experiencing and you feel totally trapped you know one of the big things we do very very early is just show people how to escape from Price cutting and it's not anything that you would ever learn at business school it's not anything that you would ever learn at an industry meeting it's completely Shifting the emphasis away from you and your conditions and saying yeah but who do you really want to be a hero to I mean you got into this industry but they're not sticking with you they're not buying with you because of the product or service or if they are you know they're just part of the price cutting then you really don't want to be a hero to people who want to pay you less for your best efforts and for your best product and service I mean that's kind of a hostage taking just from the customer standpoint but what you want to do is get your attention on how do I create value for my customer we call it dos dangerous opportunities strengths what are the dangerous opportunities of strengths that my best clients are facing right now that through talking to them through problem solving with them through helping them make changes they can actually eliminate the dangers capture the opportunities and maximize their strength so what that does is it suddenly shifts the context and you realize I'm not held hostage by this particular product or so I can change product I can change service I can even change careers I can change marketplaces but you don't see that as long as it's about you and the competition and the price and you're just trapped but the moment you shift the context you say oh oh wow you know and then there's lots of other people who also want to create value for the same I call it a hero Target you have the same hero Target and then you say hey I can cooperate with them and we'll start doing things that nobody has ever done before and then you become Innovative so that's a prime example but the other thing you know I mean these are very frequent complaints I just can't find good people to hire anymore and you're held hostage you know I could really grow if I had good people but I can't find good people so I'll say to them well let me ask you a question what if this is true that there's actually great people out there but they're not looking for you because you're not someone yet who great people would look for because every time they look at you you don't have any excitement you have a lot of worry well I'll have to tell you there's many things that great people are looking for but a worried harassed entrepreneur isn't one of them and it's always a mind shift see in hostage taking situations actually it's a very fine line that a superb expert like Chris Voss has to take because there's the possibility of violence there's possibility of death even for the hostage taker you know I mean if it comes personal I mean usually it's not face Toof face and the other thing is that there's forces on the hostage negotiator's own side that would like to kill the hostage taker The Negotiator so you know the hostage taker can either negotiate and free or there's a team that's the team that comes in to end it doesn't ask questions they just deliver answers called SWAT so the whole point about this is that entrepreneurism if you're really leading a really great entrepreneurial life you're identifying how you have allowed yourself to be taken hostage by situations in your life I had a client several years ago I worked from quarter to quarter with him and it was clear to me that very easily if he just made certain decisions that he could probably jump his revenues by 20 25% within the next 5 years but he wasn't doing it and one quarter would go by and I said you know your thinking was really really clear and it just seemed to me that it was about three quick steps and all the conditions were in place for you to do this and he said yeah but he said if I went 25% I'd have to divide that 25% in a divorce court and I don't don't want to increase my success by 25 times then give 12.5 times it away so it was held hostage by a divorce situation okay and I said well before the three steps that you talked about then there's a first step that comes before them and he says yeah but he says it's really really tough and I said oh you're looking for the easy way to end a marriage oh oh why didn't you tell me you were looking for the simple p less way of ending a a marriage that you've had for 20 years I said oh why didn't you tell me oh here I've got one right here there's you know I said you've already divorced her and I says but you're trying to have no suffering on anyone's part I said that's not possible it's not possible but there is longsuffering and quicks suffering and which would you rather have long suffering or short suffering and you know there weren't children at home or anything like this they hadn't been friends friends for a long time they weren't supportive of each other for a long time but he was holding his own personal progress and actually her personal progress but it was just frozen and I said I've really supported you but I want to tell you that there's not going to be any more coaching for my part until you make a decision and take action here and within about two weeks he initiated it and it was painful but it was painful for both of them extremely painful and she would is as taken hostage by the situation as he was so lots of times being held hostage is because your brain is frozen your emotions are frozen and it's because you've locked yourself that there's only one future that can happen here there's no other future and the moment in coaching as we show you immediately within 15 minutes you can come up with an alternative future you can come up with five alternative Futures and the moment you have yeah yeah this is bad but I could do this I could do this and then you get that flexibility that made you a good entrepreneur in the first place it comes back to you and then you start making decisions it's all about tough decisions and committing yourself to things that scare you but knowing that the capability will come about so it's a really interesting but I'm so fascinated with this hostage taking because there's cash flow hostage taking there's Partners hostage taking there's Industries with regulations that take you hostages there's the market that you're in you know that it's going to be worse five years from now hostage taking and we have you know in the United States and we have clients from around the world and they're in a geographic area where their best skills and talents in the world isn't going to produce a great results simply because of the market that they're being an entrepreneur in and we have lots of immigrants in the program who have made a shift from Halfway Around the World they said with my dreams my talents my skills it wasn't going to happen there so I had to move someplace else so these are all kinds of Hostage taking situations but I have to tell you one thing that the entrepreneur when they feel like they're held hostage that they're a co-conspirator with the hostage in other words they've agreed to something and so they've actually set up the conditions and they have to take full responsibility that they're the ones who set up the hostage taking situation where they feel like the victim is that like a stockh syndrome yeah it's even worse than a Stockholm situation you know those who don't know the term it was a hostage taking that took place in Stockholm Sweden decades ago what happened is that the victims began empathizing with the people who were holding their life at risk and they were more helpful and sympathetic to the hostage takers than they were to the police they take it and it was just that human beings form relationships and even a bad relationship they'll form relationships with bad people but the whole point is there's part of you that's you're favoring the least capable part of you over the most capable part of you so you as a great Problem Solver you as a great innovator you're actually disliking that person and kind of freezing him and another part of you is sympathizing with the situation the hostage taking situation you know yeah I mean it's just a weird thing that happens and I've had it happen throughout my life and the only thing I would say is that I've gotten a lot better of recognizing almost within the first 24 hours when it happens but I just get stuck and I said okay how am I freezing myself here so I say I know it's me it's some part of me that's causing this problem what part rather than blaming it to externals and I think that and every time when you move a responsibility in inside in a situation like this I'm the only one that can really give the goad to solve this problem then immediately you get through it very very quickly but as long as you attribute it to an outside condition over which you have no control it's endless you can't get out of it so then you're a true victim yeah you're a victim but you're also the perpetrator it's your own thinking that turned you into a victim fascinating or said it was okay to feel like a victim right so Dan you've talked about in terms of taking action number one is to take responsibility for how you're thinking about something the point where you've got yourself in a jam yeah we've met the enemy and it's me okay what next what next do you do in your thinking process to unfreeze yourself well the biggest thing I do is I give a clear goal of what it looks like when I'm completely free of it with numbers and with deadlines because our brain gets fully functional again when you give it real measurements of change you know and that's why I'm a total you know I insist that there's no goal that doesn't have a number to measure it or it has an event a clearout event to measure it and there's a deadline and I know that the brain only take seriously thoughts that have measurable goals attached to them where there's an improvement in the future and when it happens you'll be able to measure the Improvement so that's what I do so first of all I'm the one that has to solve this and I'm committed to do so even though I don't have evidence yet that will work but when it does work it looks like this and I'm completely free from this situation and you know a lot of entrepreneurs they've grown their own lives upward simply by constantly confronting and getting themselves out of their to a certain extel their own self-created hostage taking and you also tap into other people's strengths and talents but until you make the commitment that you're the one responsible you don't have access to any resources you know nobody can help you because you haven't given the go-ahead that you're committed to a solution I love every second of this this is great well huge shout out and thanks to Chris for you ever been in a situation like that oh gee never damn well actually I kind of starting to jump up and down because I'm like okay there's one situation right now that I'm feeling a little stuck and you know we also talk about when people are feeling confused they get isolated and they feel powerless but that whole deciding to take responsibility then set a goal and immediately the goal popped into my head and now I'm like okay now I know how to get out of this situation and what's interesting is we can hold ourselves hostage for a really short period of time or for a long time until we actually take that step of taking responsibility and setting that goal so that's very very useful I love that thought so just to wrap up a huge shout out and thanks to Chris V cuz I cannot recommend this book highly enough the first five negotiations I did using his communication and thinking process worked and I've looking forward to my next five because it's kind of spectacular but really Dan drilling down into how entrepreneurs get themselves into hostage situations of their own making I think is a really interesting way to look at it and the coach program is you know how you can free up your thinking and make those commitment make those decisions that otherwise are Challen ing in an awesome community of other Risk Takers yeah yeah well thanks a lot you know one of the hostage taking situations that I got myself out of that I had a lot of great Workshop ideas that people said oh you should write a book about this and this is in the days before we had technology like podcasts and you know very very fast videos and everything like that but you've been one of the great problem solvers for me because I realized that my main way of communicating is simply being asked questions and then having them recorded either sent out in audio form or in video form or in book form so you've been there every time I decided that I would no longer be taken hostage you were there to be a capability that I could use so thanks a lot sh and by the way our Podcast manager who's a fanatic for measurement of the impact of our podcast Gord vicman alerted us that inside strategic coach is in the top 2% of all podcasts in the world and there are close to 800,000 podcast series and this particular series is in the top 2% and we were also listed on iTunes as one of the top 100 business and marketing podcast Series so it's been a great collaboration and thank you very much well thank you Dan I love every second of it thank you