4

Be strong

4.1 Build your strength so you don’t have to use it

Let’s be clear here: many persuasion contexts don’t need strength and often it is downright counter-productive.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll know the whole premise of the book is that it is generally something you want to avoid. If you’re a boss and demand your team member stay late (‘Why?’ ‘Because I’m your boss and I say so’), it might work once, but that relationship is going to go south rapidly. You’ve just lost a lot of relationship capital.

Let’s be clear, too, that we aren’t saying build your strength to use it.

In the world of negotiation, there is a big myth that it is all about power. But if you try to push something through just because you can – the other side may agree because they have to but they will quietly find a way to even things up. They will put their juniors on the job; they will use cheaper materials; they will cut corners; they will follow the letter of the agreement rather than the spirit; they will put horse-meat in the burger instead of beef. Win–lose rapidly becomes lose–lose.

Nor are we saying bully the other person into your political views or threaten them into changing their mind: it simply doesn’t work.

So why be strong?

Strength, though, has its place. It gives you the psychological safety you might need to take the approach outlined in the previous chapter, which isn’t always easy in a disagreement. To give them psychological safety, you need it yourself.

Operation Journeyman, below, is a brilliant example of this. This secret naval deployment enabled the British negotiators to be very clear in their communication that the government was willing to defend the Falkland Islanders’ interests and enabled them to be very confident in holding that position. As a result, a military confrontation (in 1977, at least) was avoided.

Being strong helps avoid a fight. As I said in the introduction, it’s amazing how collaborative the other person will be if you have a bigger army than them. If they are now being collaborative that, in turn, enables you to be less defensive and more generous.

So here is the nub: we are not saying use your strength; we are saying build your strength precisely so you don’t have to use it.

The Falklands War averted

4.2 And strength can mean many things

When we’re talking strength, we’re not saying force or the threat of physical violence.

Professor Ivan Arreguín-Toft,1 a Fellow at Harvard, is a military historian. He studied 200 wars where one army was at least ten times stronger than the other. Not surprisingly, he found that in most cases the larger power won.

However, he delved deeper. He saw that in many examples, the weaker party recognised the imbalance and chose an unconventional strategy in response. In these situations, the weaker party won nearly two-thirds of the time, despite the massive power stacked against them.

So the lesson is to be creative in terms of your power source.

It can mean so many things. I worked with one lawyer with a client involved in a family will dispute. There were seven claimants and his client was ready for a battle in court but this would have been costly and she had a very weak legal case so was unlikely to win.

However, the facts of the matter did suggest she had a strong moral position. So they drew on this power source instead. She appealed to the other side’s benevolence and wrote a very personal letter from the heart, without any legal references, and in this way she was able to persuade all six other claimants to agree to her claim.

Power is more a creative process than a violent one.

How much personal strength do you have?

Much of it is personal. As a trainer in the field, I spend a lot of my time telling ‘nice’ people to toughen up (and an equal amount of time, by the way, telling others to soften up). The niceys needn’t worry about being too tough: their own conscience would never let that happen.

Too many people ask for their pay-rise but the boss growls without even looking up so they run quickly back to the safety of their own desk and that’s that for another year.

Stand up for yourself! What’s the worst that could happen?

• ■Project strength. Not aggression, but a quiet confidence that communicates there is no point in trying anything on.
• ■Project credibility, whatever credibility might mean in your world. I knew one person who built a business as an interior designer to the world’s elite. She learnt how to fly a helicopter because it signalled she was at home in that world. ‘Meet you on your yacht? Does your yacht have a helipad? Great, I’ll see you there.’
• ■Project the right status. You don’t want to be over-bearing but you do want to project enough.

  Human beings are pack animals and status is important, so important that we evaluate it in approximately 40 milliseconds (about one tenth of the time needed for the fastest conscious decision).

  The attributes of status will depend on your culture (what’s considered high status in a law firm might be different to a football team) so you might want to consider if there’s anything you need to boost your perceived status, however you might do that in your particular context.

• ■Know your stuff. The more you have done your preparation and know the situation inside out, the less likely they will try anything on.

Get James Bond on your side

4.3 Be strong on the outcome, soft on the approach

Hostage negotiators work in extreme circumstances: often a life-or-death situation, emotions running 11 out of 10 and polar-opposite demands.

And yet they get very good results. How?

The first thing to point out is they never actually negotiate. They never say, ‘Kill all ten hostages? Let’s split it 50–50, you can kill five and release the rest’.

The second surprising thing is the softness of their approach. Most crisis negotiators use a standard model called the Behavioural Change Stairway, a simple five-step model developed in the 1990s by Gary Noesner, later Chief of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit.2

It does exactly what it says on the tin: it is a stairway, a step-by-step process, to behavioural change. The five steps are:

1. 1.Listen
2. 2.Show empathy
3. 3.Build rapport
4. 4.Persuade
5. 5.Behavioural change.

That’s pretty soft. Whenever I run a workshop with hostage negotiation in the title, everyone gets really excited: ‘Great, I’m going to be like Denzel and Bruce, cool!’ And then I talk about listening and showing empathy and they are surprised. Hostage negotiators get their great results by being very strong on the outcome but being surprisingly soft on the approach.

The model, in fact, is almost identical to the Motivational Interviewing we’ve seen in counselling. Both models are based fundamentally on deep listening, unconditional positive regard and building as much psychological safety as possible, so that the other party can own the solution themselves. And both models get great results in extreme circumstances.

Now, of course, hostage negotiators have a SWAT team in place and that helps. But it is exactly this that allows the negotiator to use a more sympathetic method. Similarly, it’s your strength that enables you to take the soft approach which is most likely to bring about a sustainable result you are after. Speak softly and carry a big stick, said Roosevelt, and it is the big stick that allows you to speak softly.

What if I don’t have a SWAT team?

But you might well be thinking, ‘What if I don’t have a SWAT team?’

Well, we saw in the previous section that strength and power are creative processes, so maybe you do have a SWAT team but you just haven’t recognised it yet. Maybe you can find a SWAT team from somewhere.

Maybe it’s even your lack of power which is your source of power; this was something Nelson Mandela used to his advantage. In the last weeks of his imprisonment, the South African government wanted to release him but he refused to leave until he had been granted all his requests because he knew his very imprisonment provided much of his negotiation leverage.

But what if you’ve racked your brain as much as you can and you really don’t have any obvious power? It’s possible.

Then double-down on everything else. We’ve devoted a few paragraphs to the SWAT team, there are 200 other pages in this book focused on the rest. If you have enough strength, you don’t have to use it; but equally, if you use all the other tools outlined in the book well enough, you won’t need the strength either.

And maybe these are your sources of power. Maybe it’s your ability to listen, your ability to build rapport, your ability to provide psychological safety in a world where the other person has rarely felt it which is your strength.

We spent a lot of pages in the last chapter talking about Motivational Interviewing and there was never any talk of strength or SWAT teams.

The last source of power

But maybe even the Motivational Interviewer does have a SWAT team. Maybe the status quo is their SWAT team – the addiction, the return to jail, the threat of a wasted life.

So as long as you are willing to walk away, you too have a source of power. If you aren’t, and they are, you have zero power and you have to accept any terms they demand.

• ■If your boss is categorically saying no pay-rise this year, perhaps it is time to look around for better paid jobs elsewhere.
• ■If your dispute with your neighbour is getting nowhere, perhaps a signalled willingness to consult a lawyer can make them more amenable to an agreed solution.
• ■If the vendor of your dream house simply isn’t budging on their asking price and it’s a figure you really can’t afford, perhaps you go back to the market and look for another dream house.

Just the very fact you are considering the alternative might be what makes the other person take you seriously and start negotiating. And if not, fine, go ahead and walk away – again, to emphasise, if and only if it really is going to help you achieve your ‘Why?’ outcome better than what is currently on the table.

And in a political conversation? Being robust on your outcome doesn’t mean sticking to your opinion and desperately insisting they change theirs, stopping only once they’ve agreed you’re right in everything you say about everything. You can agree to disagree and this will keep the relationship open for further discussion later.

And being robust on your outcome doesn’t mean you can’t change your own mind either. In a political conversation, your outcome should be the truth, not vindication of your opinion.

Have a strong ‘no’

Now being strong on your outcome means being able to say ‘no’.

If you are very clear on what you want, as discussed in Chapter 1, it makes it easier to distinguish between what you can say ‘yes’ to and what you need to say ‘no’ to.

But you still have to be able to actually voice it.

I worked with one client who told me she ‘needed to get her life back’. When I pressed for more details, she said she had stayed at work until 3am twice that week and until 10pm the other nights: 3am wasn’t normal, she said, but 10pm was.

It turned out her problem was her inability to say ‘no’. She was in-house legal counsel for an investment bank and was very good at her job and very conscientious. People would ask her to do tasks that really weren’t within her role but because she couldn’t say ‘no’ she would take them on. And because she was conscientious, she would stay until 3am to get them finished.

She had to learn to say ‘no’. Her homework was to practise in front of the mirror, pointing her finger and saying sternly, ‘No, no, no!’. She said ‘no’ to this and I was pleased she was making progress.

Now, contrast her example with that of an ex-colleague of mine who ran the internal IT Helpdesk for a large insurance firm. The phone would ring, he’d pick it up, growl a little, then say ‘no’ and put the phone down. I asked him if he was the Helpdesk, where specifically was the help in that conversation and he said people had to learn to do their own job themselves.

He told me when he first joined the company, everyone called the Helpdesk about everything and obviously the previous incumbent had said ‘yes’ to everything. ‘Fluff on your screen? Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll come down and wipe it off.’ My colleague knew he had to re-train people to call him only when it really was a problem for him to deal with. And to be fair to him, everyone knew his bark was worse than his bite and when it did come under his remit, he would growl a bit more but then he would fix it.

But by having a strong ‘no’, he was one of the most productive people I’d ever met. He single-handedly did the support and development for a massive computer system and when he left, he was replaced by a team of twelve.

Being strong on the outcome and soft on the approach does require the ability to say ‘no’ – although maybe in a more diplomatic way than growling.

Killing with kindness

4.4 Dealing with difficult people

Being strong on the outcome also requires you to be able to deal with difficult people, otherwise you might burst into tears at their slightest snarl and you’ve just lost your outcome.

I’m sure you don’t have any difficult people in your world but in that hypothetical instance that you did, what should you do?

It’s worth understanding where the difficult behaviour comes from and people often employ such behaviours tactically because they have found it’s worked for them in the past. If you show it won’t work on you, there is no point in them continuing it.

As an example, I once had a very tall, physically imposing delegate on my course. When he was asked what he wanted from the course, he said he would like some negotiation skills. He said, ‘I think I’m quite a good negotiator already. If anyone ever disagrees with me, I lean forward and then they agree with me!’.

‘But’, he continued, ‘that doesn’t always work and then I don’t know what to do.’

And here is the lesson: if someone is rude or aggressive or manipulative or anything like this, it is usually because they have found it works for them. If you don’t let it work on you, they’ll have to do something different.

Stay in control of our behaviour and do anything we can think of that could get us our outcome. Behavioural flexibility is crucial because we can never predict with certainty the best approach; but the greater the range of behaviours we have available to us, the more likely we will succeed.

Managing your reaction

Of course, this isn’t always easy. When they do that thing that presses our deepest buttons, it is easier to get offended, outraged, upset, scared, any kind of deeply wired emotional reaction. But we need to make sure we don’t go down that route because if we do, we are no longer in control of our behaviours.

We can use emotions but make sure we are in control of them. As John Lydon said, ‘Anger is an energy’; but equally, as Aristotle said, ‘Anybody can become angry – that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy’.

Two great philosophers we can learn a lot from.

So how do we stay in control of our reaction? Let’s be clear. Yes, it’s hard, but it is something we can learn to do. Sometimes we can even see it happening in slow motion and one part of us is telling ourselves not to respond in the way we always do but another part goes ahead and responds anyway. Don’t get frustrated here: this is the learning process in operation, and you have just moved one step closer to mastering it.

Awareness is key. Awareness that it happens and, specifically, how it happens with you. We all have our own triggers and our own unhelpful responses, and the better we understand them, the slowed-down split-second-by-split-second process of them, the more effectively we can intervene to prevent it happening.

We can label our reaction (our funk, our ego, our chimp, our inner child, our defensiveness), and it then becomes a solvable entity and we can even bring it up with the other person which will enable both of us to work together around it.

And always, always, always we need to stay in touch with our main outcome and ask ourself which behaviour is most likely to help achieve it.

It helps when we remember that their behaviour is not personal. It might seem as if it’s personal but it is actually driven by the situation and their desire to get their outcome. You are simply the person in the way of them getting that outcome (as they see it) and this is why it seems to be aimed at you. It is just a tactic that they have found has worked for them before.

Time, the great healer

Time also helps, so managing your reaction when you’re communicating via email is easier. Don’t respond instantly: let your mood calm down before you hit send.

Personally, I’ve noticed I go through multiple stages of de-escalation of my mood. I might be furious at first and my initial draft will probably include swear-words but my second draft removes them, replacing them with sarcasm. The third might be ice-cold logic but then my last draft will bring a bit of warmth back in and it is only this version that has any chance of persuading.

Learning from lobsters

Perhaps the best way, though, is to pre-empt the behaviour and this way you don’t actually have difficult people in your world. And if we do everything we’ve discussed to date – we aim high for both parties at the ‘Why?’ level, we know our stuff inside and out, we are showing unconditional positive regard, we are listening deeply to their points, and at the same time we have our own personal strength and robustness – we are reducing the likelihood of any difficult behaviour.

In this respect, we can actually learn a lot from lobsters; in fact we can learn a lot from their sex lives. Lobsters, we know, have a very hard and knobbly shell to protect them and there is a problem with this: it stops them having sex. It’s a bit like humans trying to have sex while wearing a deep-sea diving suit. It’s not easy. Apparently.

So to get around this, the female sheds her shell when she is ready to reproduce. However, this has its own complications – now she is no longer protected and we all know unprotected sex is dangerous. For female lobsters, unprotected sex can mean being eaten by her lover. Doesn’t usually happen with humans; does with lobsters.

So how does the safe-sex-minded lobster get around this? Well, she uses chemical weapons: she sprays a pheromone into the male lobster’s cave which makes him less aggressive. She can now get out of her shell and do the do, safe in the knowledge he won’t attack her before she grows another shell.

That chemical is the lobster version of oxytocin.

Professor Paul Zak3 is one of the founders of the field of neuro-economics and one of the first people to recognise the importance of oxytocin in the process of trust. Sometimes known as ‘the bonding chemical’, it is perhaps best known as the factor that makes the mother bond with her new-born baby. It’s also the chemical that goes through the roof when two people meet and fall in love. And tails off over a five-to-seven-year period. Which explains a lot in my life.

Oxytocin, it turns out, is the biological substrate for trust.

Zak’s experiments showed a direct correlation between levels of oxytocin and levels of both trust and generosity. It is contextual, of course, and nuanced – neurochemicals are highly complicated. But in economics games based around trust, Zak showed generosity increased by 80 per cent under the influence of oxytocin.

So what causes its levels to go up or down and is there anything we can do to increase it in the other person so we can trust them more?

Firstly, some things have a negative impact. Zak conducted an experiment at a wedding where he baselined everyone’s oxytocin levels beforehand and then again on the day and he found everyone’s oxytocin went up in direct proportion to how close they were to the bride. That is, the bride’s went up the most, the bride’s mother the next and so on. With one exception.

The groom!

Now, to be fair to the groom their oxytocin levels did increase, just not as much as we would expect from our model. And the reason was that their testosterone also increased, after all they were the man for the day, and testosterone is an oxytocin inhibitor. So anything which boosts testosterone will impair trust – competitive behaviour, macho behaviour, too many men around!

But if you want to increase levels of oxytocin in someone else, it turns out that one of the simplest ways is to act trustingly towards them.

One economics game Zak studied was the Trust Game. In this, Person A is given $10 and is told they can give some of that to Person B. Anything they give will get tripled in value and Person B can then decide to keep it all or give some back. Person A has to trust Person B’s generosity.

When Person B was shown trust, they returned 50 per cent more than when simply given money randomly by a computer. What’s more it was a linear correlation. The more money given (i.e., the more they were trusted), the higher the oxytocin surge in the recipient.

Harvard Business School Professor Leslie John, in her work on detecting lies, also found that pro-social behaviour on our part leads to better behaviour on theirs.4 For example, she found people are less likely to lie to those they like and trust and if someone shares sensitive information (i.e., shows trust), the other person is less likely to lie here too.

Increase oxytocin, increase trust, decrease difficult behaviour.

4.5 Physician, heal thyself

But before we start labelling everyone as problematic, maybe the problem is with ourself. I have a friend who is very sensitive to people who eat loudly and everywhere she goes she finds them; I’ll be in the same place and I just won’t notice.

If you are particularly sensitive to difficult people, you will find them.

We often go into the conversation expecting an argument and then, surprise, surprise, we get one. Perhaps if we expected a good conversation, that’s what we’d get instead.

In my early 20s I had a relationship that was quite fiery. We would spend most evenings arguing: I would say something, she would say something cutting back, I would say something equally cutting and so on. I’m sure you know the script.

Then one Friday I went around to her apartment, bracing myself for another combustible night. In my mind I ran through all the arguments we were going to have and I was angry even before I arrived.

But I noticed this is what I was doing and I decided to behave differently this time. I decided she couldn’t touch me, that I was going to be in a good mood all the time no matter what she said. I was going to ignore any barbed remark and if (and, as I expected, when) it got too much, I would just walk out and that would be that. I wouldn’t even say anything as I left, I would simply smile and take my coat. End of.

I knocked on the door. She answered it with a big smile, really pleased to see me. We both said some really nice things about how the other person looked, we both laughed a lot about different things and we had a lovely evening. No argument. I learnt a powerful lesson.

Their behaviour is partly a function of what you bring to the relationship – if you bring difficult behaviour yourself (I know, unlikely), you will get more of it. But if you bring a positivity to it, that too is what you will get.

So if our boss hates us and gives us more work than the laws of physics allow, if our colleague blocks everything we do or even think of doing, if our finance director slashes our budget out of spite, while smiling and increasing everyone else’s at the same time, instead of coming out all guns blazing or hiding in the toilet, perhaps it is wise to consider a different strategy and bring a more positive energy to it ourselves.

Steven Spielberg recounts the story of how he was bullied when he was 13 years old by an older kid at school. His response was not to run away or fight back. Instead, he invited the bully to play a role as a war hero in a film he was making. They became friends.

We need to be psychologically safe too

This isn’t easy and, as we’ve seen, our brain gets hijacked by unhelpful emotions and we revert to fight or flight, a strategy developed several hundred million years ago and, to be honest, needs updating.

But if your behaviour comes from fight or flight, they are unlikely to feel psychologically safe and so are unlikely to be in a place where they are open to changing their mind.

And what’s important here? Is it showing them how angry you are? Is it getting revenge? Of course not, it’s about getting your outcome and the emotional hijack is almost certainly going to sabotage this.

So you must make sure you feel psychologically safe too so you can bring that positive energy. Look after your own well-being and your own self-esteem.

Here, again, we are saying our strength is important – not to use against the other person but to use for them (and, indeed, therefore for us too). Our strength provides us with a sense of security that will engender magnanimity rather than a fear-based aggression.

And in moving from fear to magnanimity, from blame to support, we are also moving from effect to cause. While blame often feels very pleasurable, it diminishes our power.

With blame, we are on the effect side of the equation: we still have a problem on our hands and it is dependent on the other person’s limited capability (from the perspective of our blame) to resolve it. If we drop the blame, it allows us to move to the cause side of the equation: we can now take responsibility for getting the outcome we want.

Dropping blame increases our power in the world.

Should I apologise?

Magnanimity is not weakness, it is strength. Similarly, apologising can seem a weakness but in actual fact it can come from strength.

In the commercial world it is often considered a dangerous practice because it indicates admission of responsibility and therefore likely to lead to a legal claim against you. But it is more complicated than that. A 2004 study5 by Fiona Lee and colleagues at the University of Michigan found that companies who apologised after a mistake performed better in the stock market than those that didn’t. Another study by Ben Ho and Elaine Liu found that doctors were sued less if they apologised.6

The apologies need to be full, however. In one experiment, identical scenarios and settlements were presented with either no apology, a partial apology (expressing sympathy but not admitting responsibility) or a full apology admitting full responsibility.

When no apology was issued, 52 per cent accepted the offer but when a partial apology was offered, the number accepting went down to 35 per cent. However, 73 per cent accepted the full apology. Uber found similar results when they conducted a big data experiment on apologies.7 Led by their chief economist, Professor John List, they sent out various types of apology emails to a dataset of 1.6 million passengers who arrived late. The partial apology, not taking any responsibility, made no difference when compared to the control. However, a full apology with a $5 coupon to make up actually led to more Uber use than before the error.

I once worked with some lawyers with high-net-worth clients. They were involved in a divorce case where one side was demanding $100m, the other side was offering zero. My guess was an apology would have been worth $50m straight off.

If it gets you the outcome you want, why not? Sometimes you have to get over yourself first before you can win them over.

The strength of humility

Which all points to one thing: humility, intellectual humility. After all, we could be wrong. I used to believe in Santa Claus, you probably did too; I suspect you don’t anymore. Even as an adult, I’ve changed my views on many things. I may have to change my opinion on this current belief that I am right now shouting from my soapbox and banging the table over.

As Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman said about Hollywood, ‘Nobody knows anything’.

Now you might be thinking your three PhDs qualify you to disregard humility but, interestingly, the ‘I’m not biased’ bias tends to be more common among intelligent people than others. Plus, there is always Dunning–Kruger.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a treasure among cognitive biases and says people with low ability tend to overestimate their competency at a task. In meaner terms, stupid people are too stupid to know they are stupid.

But before we start laughing and pointing fingers at others, the first rule of Dunning–Kruger Club is that no one knows they are in Dunning–Kruger Club. The second rule is that everyone is in it.

Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, identifies two key obstacles that prevent us achieving better results and he describes them in his excellent book, Principles: Life and Work.8

The first is the blind spot which we all have because we can never study a topic enough to know it completely. Despite all our experience and certainty, none of us can know. The second is the ego which, again, we all have, driven by very deep processes in our brain that want us to feel safe.

His answer to both is the same: radical open-mindedness. Always be conscious you might be wrong, that despite the certifications and diplomas coming out of your ears, other people can show you things you did not know, whatever their pay-grade. Replace your need to be right with the joy of learning what’s actually true, knowing this process of learning is never ending.

Humility doesn’t mean soft, it doesn’t mean unambitious, it doesn’t mean shy. It simply means being aware that what we think is true may not be after all. This is empowering, it enables you to find real solutions which you wouldn’t look for otherwise.

Philip Tetlock found in his research on superforecasters9 that success in predicting future outcomes was less a function of intelligence or subject-matter knowledge and more a function of your willingness to accept you are wrong and update your beliefs.

The biggest and brightest of us. . . 

. . . is really not that big or bright.

A typical person involved in a conflict is less than seven feet tall and they live on a planet which is 25,000 miles around its circumference, receiving all its energy from the sun which is 93 million miles away. That is an awful lot of arguers laid head-to-toe.

And there are 200 billion similar stars in our galaxy and there are 125 billion galaxies in the known universe. As Powell and Pressburger put it, ‘This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?’.

Oh, and some physicists suspect there are an infinite number of universes. And that is really big.

So be humble. The world is bigger than you. An overly-sensitive ego comes from weakness; it is strength which enables humility and humility, in turn, is a strength.

Ending A Civil War

In summary

Strength can be helpful when it comes to changing minds because it provides you with the psychological safety you need to be magnanimous to them.

• ■Build your strength

  Not to use it but precisely so you don’t have to use it. The stronger you are, the more collaborative the other side is likely to be.

• ■Strength can mean many things

  Be creative with your sources of strength and remember it is about personal strength as much as anything.

• ■Be strong on the outcome, soft on the approach

  Always stay focused on your goal and be flexible in achieving it. It may mean you have to have a confident no and it may mean you have to be willing to walk away from the deal. If the latter, don’t walk away too quickly – evaluate if the alternative is better than the current deal in terms of your ‘Why?’ outcome.

• ■Dealing with difficult people

  Don’t take their behaviour personally. Difficult behaviour is just information; revisit your outcome and consider, in the light of the behaviour, what is your best way of achieving it and have a range of options available to you.

  Pre-empting difficult behaviour is better than dealing with it so build the relationship and trust and the problem won’t arise.

• ■Their behaviour is often a function of our behaviour

  Consider how we are contributing to any contrary behaviour of theirs and try to bring a more positive input. It will likely bring a more positive change on their side too.

• ■Deal with the emotional hijack

  Our brain easily gets emotionally hijacked and while there can be a pleasure in our indignation, it doesn’t get us our goal. Instead, always stay focused on what we’re trying to achieve and that will help us manage our response most effectively.

• ■There is strength in humility

  We don’t know everything; humility is our best way to understand a world much bigger than us. This may mean generosity; this may mean an apology. Both come from strength and both are strengths in their own right.

And from this position of strength, you can now be confident in working together with the other person to find a solution that suits everyone.