#you can make tools that help people. it's just that it's less monetarily effective. it doesn't commodify your users as well

[neverendingford]

.

[stevemoffett]

A Hard Nap, The Fall of Math, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Disco Point, and There You Are

In January last year, I noticed a sign in myself of the same cancer my dad had back in 2008. Unlike the usual symptoms that set off my paranoia, it wasn’t some vague feeling, it wasn’t an intermittent pain, and it wasn’t a general ill feeling—it was clear and unambiguous, out of the ordinary and one of those symptoms that, if you google it, is under the list of “call your doctor if you experience any of the following.”

It was also nonspecific: this symptom could mean cancer, but it could also mean about five other cancer-unrelated conditions. I called for an appointment that morning with my general practitioner, who said that the earliest available date was about two weeks later.

I knew that the only way my fear would be effectively relieved was with the one sure-fire diagnostic tool for this type of cancer, one that’s recommended for everyone, but not until about age 50: a colonoscopy.

For the two weeks before my GP appointment, I mentally prepared for death. For the record, I do this every time I interpret my body’s signals as cancerous, but the mental preparation usually stops after a few days when the symptom either goes away or when a clear alternative cause presents itself. This time, I didn’t get that kind of relief and, in fact, the symptom repeated more than once between setting the appointment and going to it. Each time, it was like an intrusive thought come to life: you’re going to die. You’re going to go through surgery and chemotherapy like Dad and you’re either going to die early, or find out like he did that the cure is worse than the disease, or maybe you’ll hang on just long enough to experience both.

Winter mornings in Texas can sometimes be surprisingly cold. While stepping out the door on a midsummer morning is like walking into someone’s hot exhale, as you might expect, a 33-degree morning is more like a slap in the face. When I packed everything I figured I’d need to move here a couple of years ago, I threw away my winter coat, thinking, I won’t be needing this anymore. (The coat was also about ten years old at that point.)

My first winter in Texas, I layered a bunch of shirts underneath a light jacket and wore a scarf on freezing days. The second winter, I decided that I’d had enough of being cold. After all, I rationalized, here in Texas it was monetarily possible to never have to feel cold again if you really don’t want to. So I bought the warmest coat I could find, an unstylish, bulky parka made by Caterpillar, the company that makes construction vehicles. No more layering, no more checking the weather before leaving in the morning. I could just put this coat on and not worry about it.

But now, under the shadow of a cancer scare these January mornings, wearing the big coat made me feel less like I was smarter than the weather and more like I was trying to smuggle a terminal disease wherever I went. Under my coat, tie, button-down shirt, undershirt, skin, fat, and muscle, something was growing silently in the dark. While maybe it had slipped up and showed some of its handiwork to me, it was already too late to do much about it now.

Since it has affected my life several times before, and since it is such an exquisite mixture of dread and uncertainty, cancer is one of my mind’s biggest bogeymen. I feel personally insulted by the idea of it. I treat you so well, body—why would you betray me? Was I not nice enough? Is this poetic justice for my vanity? Is it, as the old anecdotal saying goes, due to my worrying?

Not only did I feel like I was smuggling cancer under the big coat, I was also warming it up by drinking my coffee. I was feeding it directly when I ate something too sugary. And I was probably even giving it an evil sense of satisfaction when I got stressed out about it. If I was able to keep my mind off it by working in the lab, mixing and pipetting, using kits, and doing arithmetic in my head, it would come crashing back into focus when I was pulling my gloves off to wash my hands.

I pulled up incognito mode on my phone’s browser during my breaks, googling “5-year survival rate colon cancer age 35.” “Cancer staging colon prognosis.” “Colon cancer smoking.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack in college.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack 18 years ago.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack after seeing Luke Wilson smoking in The Royal Tenenbaums.”

At home, I suddenly started noticing the expiration dates on my nonperishables. What will last longer, I thought, the freshness of this baking soda, or me.

I knew I wasn’t going to be comforted by the first GP visit. After all, they’re usually the first stop to a specialist, unless you have a PPO insurance plan, which I don’t. The doctor listened to my symptoms and family history. “Well,” he said, “Given your history, it’s a good idea to refer you to a GI. But, you seem like you lead a healthy lifestyle otherwise, with none of the other risk factors, so we’ll see what he says.”

I made the GI appointment and had to wait two more weeks for it, with the same circular worrying and googling. At the GI appointment, I sat in the waiting room, the youngest patient there by a few decades, and I felt a little bit ridiculous. On the other hand, I’d also just read a harrowing story about a woman in her late 20s who had colon cancer and died from it. That was a real person, I thought, who at the first phase of it probably went through all the same feelings I was now, the I’m-being-ridiculous and is-this-worth-the-time-and-vacation-days, all the way up until her diagnosis. Not just because I was scared, I felt a pang of sympathy. A disease of the old picking a victim from the young is terrible luck.

And I figured, if it could be her, it could be anyone. But most of all, it could be me.

That last bit, I think, is one of—one of—my greatest flaws, the vanity of always thinking that the worst things will happen to you, in spite of the odds. It’s a way of making yourself feel special, but it has no upside. You don’t feel confidence with this type of special-feeling. In fact, you’re more likely to be timid and self-centered, and you just come across as weird to the outside observer. They might think, There’s only a few steps between that guy and Howard Hughes. Somewhere, deep in your mind, they think: Wires are crossed.

Shortly before I went in, another patient arrived, a man around my age or maybe younger who, despite a dozen or so free seats, declined to sit down. My name was called, and I passed a sign on the way to the back that said, “If you have recently traveled to China and have a fever you must let our staff know.”

This doctor’s exam rooms had floor-to-ceiling windows, the kind you’d see in a movie, instead of the usual dull and bulby, off-white plastic exam room interior. A Spanish medical student came in to give a pre-appointment questionnaire and to take my vitals. He asked, in much better English than I could have mustered in Spanish, “So. There is some blood in they crep?”

When he came in, the GI repeated what my GP had said, and since he was also the person who would be performing a colonoscopy, he said I should set an appointment for one with him. I managed to get a date three weeks later.

From other people’s stories, I knew two things about colonoscopies: they are no fun, especially the night before, but the general anesthesia on the day of the procedure, on the other hand, is fun. I was nervous enough on the day before that I actually asked someone at the pharmacy for help finding the items I was looking for: Polyethylene Glycol (or PEG, which we use all the time for lab experiments, and which I was going to have to drink 2 liters of), Gatorade, and laxative pills. I had to take about 800% of their recommended dosages, each.

The bodily effect of those chemicals was dramatic, and I will spare the details. The worst parts of it, I found, were the generally exhausting physical toll it took, and the feeling by the end that I had some kind of dangerous sodium imbalance: I was sweating between my fingers, for example, but the rest of me felt as dry as paper. At 10PM, I was too tired to do anything, but too nervous to sleep for more than a few hours.

One smaller worry that I felt the next morning, as I took a selfie in my hospital gown to send to a friend back home, making a backward peace sign to show off the IV sticking into my hand and also how brave I was being, was that I might just die right there on the table from the general anesthesia. Part of my grad school research was on Propofol, the most-used general anesthesia nowadays (which, incidentally, also killed Michael Jackson). This was the same drug I was to be given.

I’d never been fully put under anesthesia before. It was astronomically improbable that I’d have an adverse reaction to it and die (and by the way, Michael Jackson abused it, using it far outside of medical praxis—if you’re afraid to get a colonoscopy yourself, don’t be, it could save your life), but keep in mind what I said about my vanity.

“Hey, I’m really scared,” I told the anesthesiologist. He said something, muffled by his mask, that sounded like, “It’ll be all right.” Then he busied himself with a syringe, connecting it to my IV. He depressed it about a third of the way. “This should help you,” he said.

The last thing I said was, “Whoa…I feel it.”

After what felt like a hard, late-afternoon nap, I said, “Hello?”

My head was wrapped with something. When I touched my face, I could feel that there were cotton pads underneath the wrapping, holding my eyes shut. I guess that at some point either mid-procedure or after, my eyes had opened, unseeing, and they’d done this to keep them from drying out. “Hang on, sir,” I heard a nurse say, and my head was unwrapped.

“It’s over?” I asked.

“You’re all done,” he said.

“Gimme a minute, please,” I said, my South Jersey accent peeking out. “I feel a little weird.”

Eventually, I sat up. Two of the nurses helped me stand, and I pumped my arms like I was lifting light, invisible dumbbells. As I put my glasses on and looked around, I thought that they all seemed like they were fighting to not smirk. What did I say while I was blacked out? I wondered, with a twinge of panic, before deciding that it would be worthless to speculate. It could have been anything. There are literally millions of possibilities. Again—it would be worthless to speculate, I told myself, firmly.

An Uber driver, I had been told by hospital staff during a consultation, was not a legally strong enough party to take responsibility for me at discharge. Someone I knew would have to escort me to my apartment. Also, they said, they really would do that thing where you’re back in your own clothes, and they push you to the exit in a wheelchair when you’re all finished. After my procedure, my co-worker stood waiting in the discharge zone with his car as an orderly wheeled me out of the hospital exit. I stood up from the wheelchair and got into the passenger seat of his car, for some reason more aware than usual of the heat coming from the vent and the smell of the car’s leather upholstery. “I still feel weird from the anesthesia,” I said to my friend.

“I’ll bet you do,” he replied.

It was about lunch time, and I had taken the rest of the day off from work. When I got home, I ordered a pizza and lay on my bed. I ate the pizza and watched Star Wars. I had not felt any euphoria when I woke up, I thought hollowly. And my first solid meal in almost forty hours tasted unremarkable. I was still groggy, but not in a pleasant way. I felt cheated.

The hospital staff had put a manilla envelope into my hands as I left. It contained sheets of images the doctor had taken during the procedure. Once lucid, I leafed through them and compared the thumbnail-sized images on printer paper with googled images of cancerous tumors viewed through a colonoscope, trying to diagnose myself.

A couple of the images on the papers had shapes that looked weird, with what seemed like variations in the texture or color of my colon wall that to me, at least, appeared one hundred percent fatal. It was another two weeks before I had a follow-up appointment to go over them with the surgeon.

“See this?” The GI said, two weeks later, pointing to one of the images that had seemed completely normal to me, unlike other ones I had thought were much more scary and unusual-looking. “That’s a low-risk polyp. Of course, now it’s a no-risk polyp, ‘cause it’s gone.”

This medical episode ended only three or so weeks before the whole world changed, but I was all the more grateful for that. If I’d waited to be checked out, then I would have been weighing whether it was worth getting tested against the possibility of being infected with COVID.

The doctor recommended that I get a colonoscopy every five years from now on, but added, “If you want, you can go earlier than that.” I told him thanks, but once every five years sounded fine.

*

I wrote about the first seven weeks of the pandemic in my last entry. After that, May and June passed in the same way as March and April had. I went back to work in mid-June for two weeks before the first summer COVID spike closed things back up. I continued to play Quake, and I continued to fret about my family.

I had a job interview for a position in northern Maryland in April. I didn’t get it, but I had a good idea why I’d been turned down: the position wanted people with proven math skills. Which makes sense—for the last few years I’d said repeatedly that I wanted to have a job that involves less lab work and more data analysis. This was one of those jobs.

My graduate program gave me a degree in “Computational and Integrative Biology.” Sometimes I shorten it to “Integrative Biology,” or “Computational Biology,” but I always feel sort of dishonest when I tell people my degree. (Apparently this feeling is common among grad students). My own reason for feeling dishonest was because, in any other college, the work I was doing would probably just fall under normal old “Biology.” While it was true I had done course work that reflected “Computational and Integrative” Biology, they were courses taught in a remedial way.

When I say remedial, I mean that they were courses designed to get biologists up to speed on how to do higher-level data analyses with their experiments. For instance, in my “Biomath” course, we went over ordinary differential equations and graph theory. Those are both intermediate-level math types, ones you’d encounter in the later part of an undergraduate math degree program. Throughout that course, there was a lot of handwaving whenever I asked questions.

“Eh…,” the professor might have responded to something I had asked, “that requires a lot of background explanation we don’t need right now to handle the problem here. Just take it as a given for what we’re working on.”

In grad school, it’s common to be well-versed in only your narrow little research tunnel that leads outward to the edge of “known” biology. But a few times each month, several of us students would head to the bar down at the city’s waterfront after work to talk about our research. It usually began with a complaint—“This is the third time this kit wouldn’t work this week and it takes twelve fucking hours to run it each time,”—but to give us a more context for their problem, whoever was griping would have to go back and start at the beginning, recounting all the steps leading to their experiment’s failure.

This was a useful exercise, since a pair of new eyes on your work meant that at least you could get feedback on how to better relate the subject matter when you talked to a non-science audience, and at most, you might get a real solution for the problem you were bumping up against.

But I would sometimes get privately upset, as I sipped my beer and glanced out the window at the river, when a math-centered Computational and Integrative Biology student would start talking about their research. As someone who feels an unpleasant, TV static-like anxiety in my chest the moment I see letters in italics, or one of those big, orphan sorority sigmas following an equal sign during a math seminar, this upset feeling was directed at myself. Because, as a result of my insecurity, I would start listening to the beginning of the math student’s explanation of their research, trip over the first unfamiliar term I heard, lose the thread of what they were talking about, give up, and zone out. The math students, overall, just seemed light years ahead of me.

A critical vocabulary word that I began to mentally tie to the situation—slumming, these math types were slumming when talking to us biologists—was the grain of sand to my insecurity’s oyster. By the time I got my diploma a few years later, it had developed into a little pearl; now I had the feeling that I was, relative to those who’d come from a math background, a fake computational biologist.

Unhelpfully, the people in charge of hiring for the jobs I want nowadays seemed to agree. All the job listings I was interested in applying for made me feel the same panic that advanced math symbols on powerpoint slides did. The subjects they wanted their applicants to have experience in—machine learning, deep learning, regression analyses—were all frightening, impregnable terms, reminding me either of some kind of giant machine made up of endless tubes and valves, all spitting dangerously hot steam, or of a highly secure, underground bomb shelter that requires fingerprints or eyeball scans to get into. I knew from my previous learning experiences that if I didn’t understand the fundamentals and learned only the higher-level, applied stuff, it was just going to make me feel unworthy, and I’d forget it at once.

But summer had come—it was midsummer now, in fact. The pandemic wasn’t going anywhere, so what was I going to do if I didn’t start learning something? I ended up registering for three classes at a community college back home, which offered their fall semester online. For two thousand dollars, including textbooks, I got a spot in Introductory Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Calculus III.

Calculus III was a risk. I’d taken Calc I and II in undergrad, now about seventeen years ago, and I had earned Bs back then. I didn’t remember much of the material from either class. I’d tried watching Khan Academy videos at various points in the meantime, but could never stick with it. I’d watch several videos in a row, feel like I understood things, try a practice problem, get it wrong, and forget about it after a day or two. But now, I had put actual money into it and, in a few months, a grade would be spit back out, so this time I had real skin in the game.

But I had misgivings that I was too old to learn new stuff, or that I would be one of those students I remember when I was in undergrad, the older students who would grind class to a halt with their endless questions. Or maybe I would get worse grades than I had in undergrad, despite taking things more seriously now.

Two of the classes were taught asynchronously, meaning each lecture was a video that you could pause or replay at your leisure, and all tests were take-home, but the other class, Statistics, was done over Zoom. You might think a Zoom class could be a better way to learn—clarifying questions can be asked immediately, for instance—but for me, at least, it was not. Instead of focusing on the material being taught, the whole time I’d be thinking, “They can see me. Everyone here can see me. I can see me, and I have a dumbass expression on my face. Can they tell that I have a bedsheet instead of a curtain over my window blinds?”

My mind wandered during class just as much as it had while sitting in a lecture hall when I was eighteen, but now, these classes were held later at night, after I’d been working all day and had eaten dinner. As a result of this, and the fact that I find Statistics to be boring when it’s taught as a series of don’t-worry-about-how-we-derived-it formulas to plug numbers into, I did the worst in Statistics.

But Calc and Linear Algebra were more interesting. When I watched the class videos, I got familiar with the disembodied voices of the teachers, who each seemed to be trying to do an impression of Khan Academy videos. My Calc teacher, with his strong Vietnamese accent, would punctuate every few lines of derivation or proof with, “So what does that mean then?” Every time—new topic, new chapter, new problem, exactly the same tone of voice: “So what does that mean then?”

Eventually, in my head, his cadence merged with the tones of Woody Woodpecker’s laugh, and I began saying it to myself as I did chores around my apartment. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d half-sing at my garbage can liner as I cinched it shut. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to a wrinkled button-down shirt, enjoying the pepper shaker-y smell of my iron when it’s turned up to its hottest setting. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to the window blinds, when considering whether I should replace the bedsheet I’d hung there with an actual curtain, before answering myself that No, this apartment is too temporary for something as tony as curtains.

Sometimes I’d say it three times in a row, like Woody Woodpecker himself:

“So what does that mean, then?”

“So what does that mean, then?”

“So what does that mean, then?”

I kept a Google Sheet of how much time I spent doing work for each class, and found that I averaged about 20 hours a week total. That broke down to approximately an hour and a half each weekday, and on Saturday and Sunday I would go for about six or seven hours each. I’d get up at 7:30 those weekend mornings and brew a pot of coffee, then sit taking notes and working through every part of each assigned homework, not moving on from a problem until I understood everything about it.

I think that those Saturday and Sunday mornings may have been the happiest I felt during the year 2020. In the middle of a difficult Calc problem, not having the answer yet but certain I was on the right track, while also buzzing on caffeine, as a beam of early horizontal sunlight hit my kitchen backsplash and filled the apartment with more brightness than all my lightbulbs put together, I for once did not feel worried. I was unworried about my parents, my sisters, my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and nephew, and all the pets. Unworried about COVID, or cancer, or the work stresses of the week. Unworried about getting older, about being alone still, or about enjoying being alone too much; unworried about letting all of this time go by and still feeling like real life hasn’t started; unworried about my dad having another stroke, or about my mom just suddenly up and dying out of nowhere, or cancer, or whether my hairline is changing, or the fact that my heart has been skipping a beat sometimes lately, or whether my friends who I speak to on the phone were getting sick of me, or whether I am too graphic when I describe symptoms I am afraid mean I might have cancer, or whether my apartment neighbors will keep me up with their noise again tonight, or whether the tooth sensitivity I feel drinking cold water lately means I need to risk a dentist visit during a pandemic, or whether I will be able to have healthier boundaries with my parents whenever I return to the northeast, or whether I’ll ever feel truly satisfied and content, or whether I’ll ever feel actual joy some day, or whether my hang-ups, and anxieties, and fears, and regrets about my personal and professional choices will end up all ganging up on me at once, or, of course, whether at any given moment, I might have cancer.

My attitude going into the classes was that I would disregard whatever grades I got and simply aim for as much comprehension as possible. But about halfway through the semester, I lost my nerve and began to think of my grades as a direct indicator of my level of understanding. So I started fretting about my grades, and on days of Calc III exams during the second half of the semester, I took vacation time so I could spend the whole day working on them.

It got a little crazy toward the end, but finally, it was over, and I managed to get all As. That made me happy, even if I knew that that kind of satisfaction is a bit immature. But I felt like I was making up for some of the sins I had committed as a college student, my laziness and my previous lack of appreciation for education finally, in a small way, absolved.

*

I spent Christmas here in Texas. When I think back on Christmases from previous years I find that I can remember the past two years very well because I flew home and packed a lot of family and friend time into a few short days. Before 2018, though, I can’t remember any specific Christmas well enough to recount anything that happened on the day.

But when I was a little kid, I remembered each Christmas perfectly, mainly due to the gifts I got and the room where we put the Christmas tree—where “Christmas happened”: in 1990, it was in the back room and we got a magic set, and also my brother pretended to faint when he saw he’d gotten Reebok Pumps. In 1991, it was in the family room, and my brother and I got the Nintendo game “Base Wars.” In 1992, it was in the living room and we got a Sega Genesis along with the game “Sonic 2.” In 1993, it was in the family room again, and I got a Hot Wheels Key Force car, and my brother got the Genesis game “Hard Ball 3 With Al Michaels.”

In 1994, my grandfather died a few weeks before Christmas, and we got a Sega CD. That was the year I became aware that the Christmas spirit was vulnerable to external forces, one’s first experience with death being the most offensive of those forces, and after a few months I also became aware that a hot new gaming console like the Sega CD could “fail,” slipping into obscurity with a small and unremarkable library of games. As a result, the indestructible-seeming sheen of Christmas fell away, leaving behind a better idea of what Christmas really is: a bare, thin-glassed lightbulb plugged into the middle of the year’s darkest period. After 1994, I can’t really remember what happened each Christmas.

This past Christmas will always be memorable, though, because I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day pretty much doing one of three things: playing Quake (yes, that hobby still refuses to die), watching something Star Wars-related, or video chatting with my family. At any time when I wasn’t speaking to family, I had Christmas music playing in the background, including while Star Wars was on. I turned the heat up in my apartment to 75 degrees and enjoyed how money-wastingly hot it was getting, until my nose started to bleed from the dry air.

I want to take this opportunity to say that I much prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is generally all anticipation and guest arrivals, buoying the mood long into the falling night. From the viewpoint of Christmas Eve, any miracle might happen the following morning. But then after a late, over-buttered breakfast on Christmas Day, there’s nothing much else to do except think about cleaning up and regret how much you’ve eaten. The “anything could happen” feeling is now all gone, collapsed from a dazzling infinity’s worth of possibilities down to one homely outcome.

I hadn’t put up any decorations for my apartment, unless the Christmas music can be considered a decoration. This ended up being a good thing, though, since I didn’t have to take anything down once the holiday was over.

*

I started taking walks pretty early in the pandemic, my first walk happening after about one week of lockdown. That day there was a surprisingly large amount of people also walking. We all stayed far away from one another, since none of us were wearing masks—the width of even a modest suburban Texas street is still impressively wide, so there was no safety issue. I always took the initiative to be the one who crossed the street if I saw someone, exaggeratedly swinging my arms as I crossed so the person walking toward me could see my intentions even from far away. I did this because I figured it would be harder for the dog-walkers to wrangle their dog across the street and get out of my way, and the people without dogs were either old or were walking in a group.

In the beginning I was walking maybe twice a week, which then became three times, which became five. It held at five times a week during the fall semester because I’d have to be on Zoom from 6:30-8:30 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays, which took up the whole span of time in which I would usually walk. Nowadays, no longer taking classes, I walk every night.

For a while, I tried to get home before sunset, because I’m afraid of being hit by a car in the dark. After the clocks shifted back, I had to choose between walking earlier, during rush hour when everyone was arriving back at their houses from work, or waiting to walk until after the sun has set. I ended up buying one of those reflective construction worker’s vests for $8 on Amazon and waiting for nighttime. I feel like a dork when I wear the vest, but most of the people walking at night who I see are also wearing reflective clothes. Theirs are more chic than my vest, though, looking like they were ordered through an expensive fitness-wear catalogue. I’d buy the same type, but to me, walking is a meditative, solitary act, and I don’t want to feel that I’m catering to externalities like looking stylish while I’m trying to feel solitary. It also acts as a tacit acknowledgement that I’m not a criminal: “I’m making myself as visible as possible! I’m not casing your houses to break into them later on!”

Even though the focus of COVID is on the transmission of disease through shared, respired air, I still pay a lot of attention to contaminated surfaces. When I go out anywhere, I have a routine: first, I put on my going-out clothes (newly clean), then my shoes, which are possibly dirty, since I have to re-tie them sometimes with unwashed hands, so before I touch anything else after tying my shoes, I wash my hands. Then, I put on a mask, turn off all the lights except the one at the front door, pick up my keys with my right hand, slip my phone into my left pocket, and walk to the door. I put my keys in my right pocket (my wallet is already there), open the door with my right hand, turn out the light, step out the door, and take the keys out of my pocket to lock the door with, again, only my right hand.

I use my right hand pretty much everywhere outside—to push or pull open doors, to open my car to retrieve something from it, to open my mailbox and carry my mail in—because I know that if I use my left hand, my phone-operating hand, I’m going to have to put the phone into a little UV light phone-sterilizing box that I bought when I get home. And for some reason, I feel like it’s a small moral failure to have to use that UV box, so I try to keep my left hand from touching anything except for the phone. But I know that if I drive anywhere, all bets are off—both my hands touch the steering wheel, my left hand touches the car door handle while getting out, and I push open doors with both hands whenever I get somewhere. I’m sure that my left hand ends up touching something that may have SARS-CoV-2 on it as I carry out an errand, and therefore into the UV box my phone must go when I get home. But, when I go out to walk, there’s a good chance that I won’t need to touch anything with my left hand between leaving the apartment and coming back. If that’s the case, I can use my phone freely while walking if I want to, but when I get home, I can still just take it from my pocket and place it on my desk, no ultraviolet sterilizing waves needed. But of course then I still have to wash my right hand.

The walk is the same route every night now. It’s a vaguely circular, level 2.7 miles, starting northbound, bearing west, south, then east. It takes about forty minutes for me to walk the whole thing, plus or minus four minutes, depending on how warmed up I get while walking. My heart rate generally goes up to about 115 beats per minute for most of the walk, according to my watch, then spikes to 135 as I climb the stairs to my fourth floor apartment at the end.

Insulated by the sound of music or an audiobook on my headphones, and with my hands stuck in my pockets, actually holding onto the cloth pocket linings themselves, I feel less like a person on a walk and more like someone steering a large, inertia-filled thing—a sailboat that I have to tack against an unfavorable wind, or a bobsled whose blades I have to turn out of deep ruts on the ice. But despite feeling bodily awkward, I find suburbia to be a soothing place to move through. I really don’t understand how some people think of the suburbs as some kind of dystopia, to be honest. My neighborhood has wide streets, as I mentioned, and the houses are almost all ranch-style. The trees, like the houses, are shorter than they are in the northeast. Some of the trees look more like very tall shrubbery. As for the ground, the blades of grass are wider, and the soil is just a bit sandier. Sometimes, I see two-inch-long cockroaches, what people back home would call “water bugs,” creeping across the sidewalks.

I can’t remember the names of the streets on the walk, except for Forrest Street, which I noticed once when I saw the street sign while I was running and it made me think of “Run, Forrest, run!” and Kenilworth Street, which has the same name as a street back at home. Other than those, I only know points along the route by the informal names I’ve assigned to them. There’s a road where it changes direction from heading north to heading east, and it looks over a little park. The lack of houses there gives an unobstructed view of the western horizon. For that reason, I call that part of the route “Sunset Bend.” At another point on the route there is a house where, in the beginning of lockdown last spring, a family was always outside, the parents sitting motionless in Adirondack chairs while their kids all went nuts on the front lawn, playing with the sprinkler, or doing hopscotch, or sitting at one of those tiny plastic picnic tables, playing some board game. That part of the walk I called “Kidville.”

There were other houses that were always so inactive, so abandoned-seeming—the blinds were always closed and there wasn’t a car in the driveway—that I started to wonder if anyone lived there at all, and whether maybe the neighborhood association was mowing its lawn to stave off the shabbiness. But after the switch from walking in daylight to nighttime, I saw that some of those houses, while still shut up and silent, had lights on inside in rooms not facing the street. Looking at those houses is like staring into the vents of a space heater in a dark room.

Eventually I started thinking about how the walk is exactly 2.7 miles. Then, idly, I realized that if you multiply 2.7 by 30, you get 81. That number of years, eighty-one, seems like a decent amount of years to hope to live—it’s not greedy, you’re not asking for a hundred years, for example—but also, maybe when I get closer to 81, there will be better medical treatments and 81 will seem younger. Assuming that doesn’t happen, though, I think of 81 years as more or less “a complete life.” It is very sad, but not exactly a tragedy, to die at 81.

With this in mind, I started translating the distance along my walk to human ages. For instance, 1.0 miles into the walk, times 30, would equal 30 years. And 1.2 miles times 30 would equal 36 years, which is how old I am now. Since by the time I’d discovered this “conversion formula,” the walk was already so familiar to me that I had a very good perspective on how far into the walk any given point felt—the precise moment when I sense that I’m transitioning from the middle to the end phase of the walk, for example. So when I came up with the multiply-by-30 conversion formula, I was interested to see exactly what part of the walk 1.2 miles, or 36 years old, corresponded to.

The answer is that it was later in the walk than I’d hoped. The moment I reach 1.2 miles is long past the most scenic parts of the route; it’s just after a left turn that puts me on a long straightaway of modest houses leading to an arterial road, known to me as the hook-around part of the circuit where in past walks, I had thought, “Now I’m on my way back home.”

Over the next few evenings, I noted other points, ones that had come before the 1.2 mile marker, and compared them to parts of my already-lived life: I graduated high school at 0.6 miles into the walk, which was the beginning of Sunset Bend. I got my master’s degree in a spot where, at nighttime, a streetlight shines through the leaves on a tree, giving the street a dance hall, disco-ball kind of lighting (hence, “Disco Point”). That friendly, lighted patch of street, with a jaunty-looking house standing next to it, makes it my favorite part of the walk. As for points I have not yet reached: still ahead of my current age distance, at around 1.5 miles, is Kidville, but I haven’t seen anyone in the front yard there in months now.

Toward the end, almost back home, there’s a large school property. I’ve never seen anyone on the grounds, except for the occasional person who sneaks onto the running track to jog it. Along one of the fences that borders the school, in springtime last year, someone started zip-tying laminated sheets of paper with jokes written on them to the chain links. The jokes are all clean, and pretty lame—these days it seems like almost all kid-friendly jokes are just puns, like “How did the farmer find his wife? He tractor down!”

One time, I saw a kid about ten years old on his bike, riding along the sidewalk and stopping to read each joke. The fence ends at a small park for toddlers. There’s a big plastic sign at the entrance of the park, faded but still legible, that has a boy’s name displayed on it. Below his name is written a tragically short span of years, and below that, a message: “This park is dedicated to the memory of (the boy’s name), and to all of the little tykes of (the neighborhood).” Whoever it was putting up jokes on the schoolyard fence stopped replacing them with new ones some time during the fall, and I walk too late to ever see anyone playing at the playground. Well, that’s not quite true: very rarely, around 9 PM on warm nights, I might see what appears to be a young mother scrutinizing her phone as her kid swings in the dark.

*

I haven’t been to the gym to lift any weights since lockdown started. I’ve been able to do cardio in my apartment, but the result of all the cardio and all the walking is that I’ve lost a decent amount of lifting strength, as well as about ten pounds. This is consistent with how life in general has evolved: I have also reduced the list of spaces I travel to, leaving my apartment only to go to work, to pick up groceries, and to walk through my neighborhood. My body, and the edges of my life, have gone through a great miniaturization, but my perspective has adapted with it—each feature within this smaller space seems more detailed, and the day’s moments are of a finer grain. Inside my apartment, I have realized how much the lighting affects the atmosphere, and as a result the mood, so I can change which lights are on when to reflect the mood of each time of day. When I walk at night, sometimes I have the same feeling I did the week before I moved here from New Jersey, a sort of farewell feeling. That feeling started in the fall as a dessert-like flipside to my happy mornings spent doing math homework. Those evenings, I also felt like I was saying goodbye, to a more insecure, more ignorant version of myself, I guess. Nowadays, I get the feeling that I’m saying goodbye to the person who had, until now, always feared that he was missing out on things.

There will be a time, closer to now than now is to the beginning of the pandemic, when I will leave Texas. I will be happy and relieved to return home, whenever that is. But at the same time, there’s a new feeling that is starting to take root, and it’s a weird one: for all the hardship that the pandemic has presented to me, the anxiety for my family and the limitations it’s put on my mobility, social life, and career, for more than ten months now, its most memorable effect, unless I’m affected by the illness itself, will be that it made me love my neighborhood. I have walked more than 500 miles of it over the months, and scores of miles remain to be walked before I move away. I’ve walked during steaming afternoons, during cloudy sunsets, in pre-dawn twilight on cool mornings, and during soft, breezy evenings. It’s always picturesque, pleasant, very green. The houses look inviting, and the dog-walkers wave to me. I listen to music that suits my mood and do the geographical equivalent of palm reading. That’s all, really.

Can a person love a place? Feel gratitude toward landscaping, houses, parked cars, and people viewed only from a distance? Can someone feel affinity to a fox seen in a churchyard and streetlights shining through leaves in the night? Affection for lawn mower exhaust, for the noise of an approaching SUV slowly carving out a bend? Love for landmarks that correspond to moments in one’s past, or to moments that one might encounter in the future?

There will be a time, I hope, when my years in Texas are far in the past. But some day, I will hear a song, or see a house with a certain architecture, or smell a variety of grass, and Texas will return to me. At the same time, I also hope that it isn’t too overwhelming. I’ve found that I can never tell how potent a memory of a particular time or place will be until there’s a lot of distance between me and it. Sometimes, a memory will come gently, settling on me like a haze, ready to be indulged, even laughed at. In such cases I turn up the music that brought the memory, or take a luxuriating whiff of the scent, and I think back on the time, feeling only a little bit sad.

But other memories swoop down like some kind of predatory bird, and in those cases, the nostalgia feels more like the punch of the bird’s talons in the back of my neck. The sense of missing is so strong that it feels less like nostalgia and more like a distilled, portable homesickness. Ridiculously, I’ll even want to return to the memory’s time and place, despite knowing that in reality it had been fraught with pain or unease. Which makes the sneaking feeling growing during this time, at this place, all the more uncanny. I mean, all that this span of time has been, is me, and some terrain, and the wind, and the light of the sun or the moon. No one else. My nostalgia for anything before this was always about times and places with other people. So who will I be missing?

Someone once said, Wherever you go, there you are. But now, I wonder: is that really true?

[forestwound6]

Exactly How Will Creating Solutions Can Aid You With Your Estate.

Exactly How To Locate The Most Effective Will Composing Service.

Content

Wills, Count On & Probate.

Should You Utilize A Will Creating Service?

We Are Companions Or Married What Are Mirror Wills?

Use Our Wills Organizer Device

In addition to solicitors, voluntary organisations such as Age NI can also aid with your will. Although it is possible to compose a will by yourself, it is suggested to use a solicitor as there are various lawful procedures you require to comply with to make sure that your will is valid. A lawyer can likewise encourage you concerning exactly how Inheritance Tax impacts you. An executor can likewise be a professional person, such as your solicitor.

If you die without a valid will, it could be difficult for your family to sort out your events. Your estate will be shared out according to the guidelines of intestacy. Under these rules, only married companions, civil partners and certain close relatives can inherit your estate. We have actually just automated an age old process followed by lawyers preparing Wills around England & Wales. This allows us to provide you with a totally legal paper at a substantially lower cost in a short amount of time.

Wills, Depend On & Probate.

Many people fret about the validity of making a will without making use of a lawyer. However, supplied the Will is appropriately worded, authorized as well as seen it is a completely legal file no matter that composed it. Therefore our will service allows you to make a flawlessly legal will without going to a solicitor. Join mailing list Join newsletter to receive info and updates from us concerning our products and services. You can unsubscribe from our e-mails at any moment utilizing the unsubscribe link supplied in the e-mails that are sent to you. If you are considering transferring your property right into someone else's name, please call us for suggestions.

Whether you choose close friends, family, Farewill Trustees or a mix of all three, you can do so in just a couple of clicks.

This enables you to log back into your account any time in the future to update your will.

Our on the internet wills include an update service that sets you back simply ₤ 10 a year-- cost-free for the first year.

It can likewise be cancelled whenever if you do not think you'll require to make any kind of updates.

We supply custom legal solutions to areas from our offices in Nottingham, Peterborough, Spalding, AlconburyandBirmingham. If you've been called the Administrator of a Will, after that your duty to recognize the properties of the estate, pay funeral service costs, pay Inheritance Tax, settle any type of debts, and disperse inheritance to the Recipients. This means that if you do not make a brand-new will, if you die after that the rules of intestacy will dictate just how your money and properties are separated. For estates valued under ₤ 250,000, your new spouse or civil partner will obtain everything. For estates over ₤ 250,000, your spouse will get ₤ 250,000 and also your personal belongings; the remainder will after that be split similarly in between your spouse and children. A solicitor may have the ability to visit you in your own residence, care home or medical facility. The price of writing up a will can range solicitors and also will rely on exactly how challenging your affairs may be and the experience of the lawyer.

Should You Make Use Of A Will Creating Service?

Our will-writing solution entails us listening to you and after that creating a will which shows your individual circumstances and also wishes. When you have actually spoken in depth to one of our group, we will make sure that your assets are passed to your picked recipients on your fatality.

Reduce tax-- You can make sure any estate tax allocations that might apply to you are fully made use of to keep the tax obligation payable on your estate to a minimum or avoid it entirely, decreasing the lots for those who inherit. As well as discussing any type of new steps we have put in place for those self-isolating to assist mitigate the danger of increased infection and to allow us to still supply a service customarily solution. Whilst a lawyer isn't needed to compose a Will, they are of course specialists in ensuring the legality of such documents. Utilizing the know-how of a solicitor, specifically if the estate is intricate, can assist ensure that it is simpler to translate and also carry out when the time comes. Online Will-writing services make the process of composing a Will easier and also faster than ever. In many cases all you need to do is enter your details online, address some vital concerns on-line or over-the-phone, and their group will then help you to craft a Will from the convenience of your own residence. The people that will be in charge of carrying out the deceased's wishes as laid out in the Will, paying any type of taxes and guaranteeing that the estate is provided based on the regulation.

If you do not really feel comfortable making a Will by yourself, you have different options. You can make use of a lawyer, or for example, an on-line Will-writing service. If you do not leave a legitimate Will, after that that acquires will be determined by the government's guidelines of intestacy. This lays out specifically who will inherit based on the value of your estate, whether you are wed or in a civil collaboration, whether you have children and what other relatives you have. Our Will lawyers will more than happy to review the likely expenses involved in making your Will over the phone or by e-mail.

Supply you with tailored recommendations consisting of estate tax planning if needed. Fairly merely, if you do not make a Will the legislation claims who acquires your estate. Your estate may pass to the person or persons you would certainly not want to acquire.

We Are Companions Or Married What Are Mirror Wills?

https://earley.directwillstrusts.co.uk/ will offer a potential inheritance tax limit of ₤ 1 million for couples by 2020/21, however the nil-rate band progressively lowers for estates with a value of over ₤ 2 million. Land and structures, specifically, are most likely to be reliant regional estate tax in the nation where they are located. International inheritance tax can be punitively high, particularly if your recipients are not member of the family. What you must stay clear of doing, under any kind of scenarios, is creating on the original will. That can produce issues and may revoke the will totally.

Conversely, the people you have actually selected as executors may choose to ask a solicitor to assist with the administration of the estate. Your companion may be able to assert some of your assets if they are in requirement or were monetarily depending on you. Yet to guarantee that your companion inherits, a will is necessary. Also if you have no family members, your estate will pass to the Crown instead of to your partner. If you have assets of much less than ₤ 250,000, and also die intestate, after that your spouse or civil partner will be entitled to the entire of your estate. Get vital lawful updates, information and opinion sent to you directly from our lawyers. reportedly used might additionally ask us how estate tax jobs as well as about intending to cover your future care needs as well as exactly how to safeguard your family in case of separation, bankruptcy or handicap.

Holmes & Hills recognize that the intricacy of people's affairs might vary as well as use four various degrees of Will solution relying on your private demands, demands and also situations. Each solution offers pairs with a conserving on legal fees when they make 'Mirror' Wills, approximately 21%.

Use Our Wills Planner Tool

If you were to draft your very own Will and also after your fatality this were discovered to be void, it could have devastating consequences for individuals you leave. It will likewise make issues much easier for your family and friends, when needing to handle your estate. You can determine that you would like to be in charge of providing your estate once you have died, this person will be your Administrator. This need to be someone you can trust implicitly for instance a relative, buddy or solicitor. Normally, if you are one of 2 joint proprietors, you are dealt with as having half, if one of three, a 3rd, etc

. Since will writers newbury , your personal home will benefit from a transferable nil-rate band when it is passed to a 'direct descendant' (consisting of step-children). The allocation is being phased in and will deserve ₤ 175,000 by 2020/21.

It may cause monetary difficulty for your enjoyed ones or an expensive court action. or fill in our on-line get in touch with type as well as we will come back in touch for a confidential discussion. Our team of lawyers can also supply advice on a large range of Trust, Wills and also Probate problems such as Lasting Power of Attorney, need to the most awful occur. A relied on coworker recommended we call Mogers Drewett to ensure that any type of decision we made would be legally appropriate. We were consulted with compassion for the scenario that we were in as well as likewise used wonderful suggest with what was a rapidly changing situation for individuals and organizations alike, as well as without genuine priority to adhere to. We had excellent suggestions from Sean and also Lucy and also all managed really successfully by Annie. Communication was excellent throughout and inevitably led us to be able to make the right choice for our requirements as well as also supported with all the lawful lingo we simply could not have actually perhaps understood.

Our People.

If you utilize a solicitor for this solution, you'll need to pay a charge. Making a will without utilizing a lawyer can cause blunders or something not being clear, especially if you have a number of beneficiaries or your finances are made complex. Your executor will need to iron out any kind of errors and also might have to pay legal prices.

Do credit card debts die with you?

When someone dies, it's not true that any credit card debts are automatically written off. Instead, any individual debts must be paid using the money the deceased has left behind. Only if there isn't enough money in the Estate may the debt be written off.

I would certainly not hesitate to advise Mogers to any person I come into contact with in the future and also will certainly associate with them once more. Thank you significantly for you and also your team's exceptional work and also professionalism and reliability, in handling as well as progressing the sale, which has all gone extremely efficiently. This is clearly why my moms and dads used your solutions when they were able to manage their own events.

Browell Smith & Carbon monoxide Solicitors' experienced and devoted family members regulation group prides itself on giving outstanding solution to our customers. We will listen to you, clarify to you your options and also we are committed to discovering our clients the best feasible end result. Being hurt as an outcome of somebody else's carelessness is a serious issue.

You can likewise have a look at our rates for more general details regarding our lawful charges. Sometimes, we can provide a taken care of cost Will creating service for straightforward estates, giving you assurance over the prices included. Theoretically, you can make a Will yourself, sometimes described as a 'DIY Will' and also there are numerous Will templates on-line that individuals in some cases utilize when doing this. However, you are taking a considerable threat by not having the guidance of a lawful expert when making your Will.

Before the preparing occurs, our Wills lawyers make the effort to obtain a comprehensive understanding of your individual situation, from your family history to your individual requirements. That way, you can guarantee that your Will enshrines your accurate wishes which these will be performed word for word after you have died. With a lot at risk, it makes sense to pick an established solicitor you can depend prioritise your interests. At Pickering & Butters, our group of Wills lawyers are dedicated to aiding our customers via the procedure of Will creating, functioning diligently but successfully to guarantee no stone is left unturned. Whether this is because of a misconception of the regulation, evasion of the subject matter, or simply easy laziness, stopping working to make a Will can trigger a lot of problems. Not only can an absence of correct estate preparation wind up costing relative and various other prospective beneficiaries their inheritance, it can additionally cause unneeded conflict in between your enjoyed ones after you are gone.

[kkintle]

Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss; Quotes

· Calibrated questions: queries that the other side can respond to but that have no fixed answers. It buys you time. It gives your counterpart the illusion of control—they are the one with the answers and power after all—and it does all that without giving them any idea of how constrained they are by it.

· While I wasn’t actually saying “No,” the questions I kept asking sounded like it. They seemed to insinuate that the other side was being dishonest and unfair. And that was enough to make them falter and negotiate with themselves. Answering my calibrated questions demanded deep emotional strengths and tactical psychological insights that the toolbox they’d been given did not contain.

· “I’m just asking questions,” I said. “It’s a passive-aggressive approach. I just ask the same three or four open-ended questions over and over and over and over. They get worn out answering and give me everything I want.”

· Fisher and Ury’s approach was basically to systematize problem solving so that negotiating parties could reach a mutually beneficial deal—the getting to “Yes” in the title. Their core assumption was that the emotional brain—that animalistic, unreliable, and irrational beast—could be overcome through a more rational, joint problem-solving mindset. Their system was easy to follow and seductive, with four basic tenets. One, separate the person—the emotion—from the problem; two, don’t get wrapped up in the other side’s position (what they’re asking for) but instead focus on their interests (why they’re asking for it) so that you can find what they really want; three, work cooperatively to generate win-win options; and, four, establish mutually agreed-upon standards for evaluating those possible solutions.

· This mentality baffled Kahneman, who from years in psychology knew that, in his words, “[I]t is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable.”

· Through decades of research with Tversky, Kahneman proved that humans all suffer from Cognitive Bias, that is, unconscious—and irrational—brain processes that literally distort the way we see the world. Kahneman and Tversky discovered more than 150 of them.

· Kahneman later codified his research in the 2011 bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. Man, he wrote, has two systems of thought: System 1, our animal mind, is fast, instinctive, and emotional; System 2 is slow, deliberative, and logical. And System 1 is far more influential. In fact, it guides and steers our rational thoughts. System 1’s inchoate beliefs, feelings, and impressions are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. They’re the spring that feeds the river. We react emotionally (System 1) to a suggestion or question. Then that System 1 reaction informs and in effect creates the System 2 answer. Now think about that: under this model, if you know how to affect your counterpart’s System 1 thinking, his inarticulate feelings, by how you frame and deliver your questions and statements, then you can guide his System 2 rationality and therefore modify his responses.

· Emotions and emotional intelligence would have to be central to effective negotiation, not things to be overcome. What were needed were simple psychological tactics and strategies that worked in the field to calm people down, establish rapport, gain trust, elicit the verbalization of needs, and persuade the other guy of our empathy.

· It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.

· Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings. In addition, they tend to become less defensive and oppositional and more willing to listen to other points of view, which gets them to the calm and logical place where they can be good Getting to Yes problem solvers.

· Tactical Empathy. This is listening as a martial art, balancing the subtle behaviors of emotional intelligence and the assertive skills of influence, to gain access to the mind of another person. Contrary to popular opinion, listening is not a passive activity. It is the most active thing you can do.

· Life is negotiation. The majority of the interactions we have at work and at home are negotiations that boil down to the expression of a simple, animalistic urge: I want.

· Negotiation serves two distinct, vital life functions—information gathering and behavior influencing—and includes almost any interaction where each party wants something from the other side.

· In this world, you get what you ask for; you just have to ask correctly. So claim your prerogative to ask for what you think is right.

· The first step to achieving a mastery of daily negotiation is to get over your aversion to negotiating. You don’t need to like it; you just need to understand that’s how the world works.

· Effective negotiation is applied people smarts, a psychological edge in every domain of life: how to size someone up, how to influence their sizing up of you, and how to use that knowledge to get what you want.

· Remember, a hostage negotiator plays a unique role: he has to win. Can he say to a bank robber, “Okay, you’ve taken four hostages. Let’s split the difference—give me two, and we’ll call it a day?” No. A successful hostage negotiator has to get everything he asks for, without giving anything back of substance, and do so in a way that leaves the adversaries feeling as if they have a great relationship. His work is emotional intelligence on steroids.

· Good negotiators, going in, know they have to be ready for possible surprises; great negotiators aim to use their skills to reveal the surprises they are certain exist.

· In negotiation, each new psychological insight or additional piece of information revealed heralds a step forward and allows one to discard one hypothesis in favor of another. You should engage the process with a mindset of discovery. Your goal at the outset is to extract and observe as much information as possible. Which, by the way, is one of the reasons that really smart people often have trouble being negotiators—they’re so smart they think they don’t have anything to discover.

· I hadn’t yet learned to be aware of a counterpart’s overuse of personal pronouns—we/they or me/I. The less important he makes himself, the more important he probably is (and vice versa).

· There’s one powerful way to quiet the voice in your head and the voice in their head at the same time: treat two schizophrenics with just one pill. Instead of prioritizing your argument—in fact, instead of doing any thinking at all in the early goings about what you’re going to say—make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. In that mode of true active listening—aided by the tactics you’ll learn in the following chapters—you’ll disarm your counterpart. You’ll make them feel safe. The voice in their head will begin to quiet down.

· The goal is to identify what your counterparts actually need (monetarily, emotionally, or otherwise) and get them feeling safe enough to talk and talk and talk some more about what they want. The latter will help you discover the former. Wants are easy to talk about, representing the aspiration of getting our way, and sustaining any illusion of control we have as we begin to negotiate; needs imply survival, the very minimum required to make us act, and so make us vulnerable. But neither wants nor needs are where we start; it begins with listening, making it about the other people, validating their emotions, and creating enough trust and safety for a real conversation to begin

· Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard and we risk undermining the rapport and trust we’ve built.

· There’s plenty of research that now validates the passage of time as one of the most important tools for a negotiator. When you slow the process down, you also calm it down. After all, if someone is talking, they’re not shooting.

· Think of it as a kind of involuntary neurological telepathy—each of us in every given moment signaling to the world around us whether we are ready to play or fight, laugh or cry. When we radiate warmth and acceptance, conversations just seem to flow. When we enter a room with a level of comfort and enthusiasm, we attract people toward us. Smile at someone on the street, and as a reflex they’ll smile back. Understanding that reflex and putting it into practice is critical to the success of just about every negotiating skill there is to learn. That’s why your most powerful tool in any verbal communication is your voice. You can use your voice to intentionally reach into someone’s brain and flip an emotional switch. Distrusting to trusting. Nervous to calm. In an instant, the switch will flip just like that with the right delivery.

· There are essentially three voice tones available to negotiators: the late-night FM DJ voice, the positive/playful voice, and the direct or assertive voice. Forget the assertive voice for now; except in very rare circumstances, using it is like slapping yourself in the face while you’re trying to make progress. You’re signaling dominance onto your counterpart, who will either aggressively, or passive-aggressively, push back against attempts to be controlled. Most of the time, you should be using the positive/playful voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking. A smile, even while talking on the phone, has an impact tonally that the other person will pick up on. The effect these voices have are cross-cultural and never lost in translation.

· When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). It applies to the smile-er as much as to the smile-ee: a smile on your face, and in your voice, will increase your own mental agility.

· The way the late-night FM DJ voice works is that, when you inflect your voice in a downward way, you put it out there that you’ve got it covered. Talking slowly and clearly you convey one idea: I’m in control. When you inflect in an upward way, you invite a response. Why? Because you’ve brought in a measure of uncertainty. You’ve made a statement sound like a question. You’ve left the door open for the other guy to take the lead, so I was careful here to be quiet, self-assured. It’s the same voice I might use in a contract negotiation, when an item isn’t up for discussion. If I see a work-for-hire clause, for example, I might say, “We don’t do work-for-hire.” Just like that, plain, simple, and friendly. I don’t offer up an alternative, because it would beg further discussion, so I just make a straightforward declaration.

· You can be very direct and to the point as long as you create safety by a tone of voice that says I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s figure things out.

· Mirroring, also called isopraxism, is essentially imitation. It’s another neurobehavior humans (and other animals) display in which we copy each other to comfort each other. It can be done with speech patterns, body language, vocabulary, tempo, and tone of voice. It’s generally an unconscious behavior—we are rarely aware of it when it’s happening—but it’s a sign that people are bonding, in sync, and establishing the kind of rapport that leads to trust. It’s a phenomenon (and now technique) that follows a very basic but profound biological principle: We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together. Mirroring, then, when practiced consciously, is the art of insinuating similarity. “Trust me,” a mirror signals to another’s unconscious, “You and I—we’re alike.”

· While mirroring is most often associated with forms of nonverbal communication, especially body language, as negotiators a “mirror” focuses on the words and nothing else. Not the body language. Not the accent. Not the tone or delivery. Just the words. It’s almost laughably simple: for the FBI, a “mirror” is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. Of the entirety of the FBI’s hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, and yet uncannily effective.

· By repeating back what people say, you trigger this mirroring instinct and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was just said and sustain the process of connecting.

· I always try to reinforce the message that being right isn’t the key to a successful negotiation—having the right mindset is.

· It’s just four simple steps: 1.  Use the late-night FM DJ voice. 2.  Start with “I’m sorry . . .” 3.  Mirror. 4.  Silence. At least four seconds, to let the mirror work its magic on your counterpart. 5.  Repeat.

· The intention behind most mirrors should be “Please, help me understand.” Every time you mirror someone, they will reword what they’ve said. They will never say it exactly the same way they said it the first time. Ask someone, “What do you mean by that?” and you’re likely to incite irritation or defensiveness. A mirror, however, will get you the clarity you want while signaling respect and concern for what the other person is saying.

· Here are some of the key lessons from this chapter to remember: ■   A good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find. ■   Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously. ■   People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible. ■   To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. ■   Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built. ■   Put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart. There are three voice tones available to negotiators: 1.  The late-night FM DJ voice: Use selectively to make a point. Inflect your voice downward, keeping it calm and slow. When done properly, you create an aura of authority and trustworthiness without triggering defensiveness. 2.  The positive/playful voice: Should be your default voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking. 3.  The direct or assertive voice: Used rarely. Will cause problems and create pushback. ■   Mirrors work magic. Repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. Mirroring is the art of insinuating similarity, which facilitates bonding. Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.

· Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out the window. That’s why, instead of denying or ignoring emotions, good negotiators identify and influence them. They are able to precisely label emotions, those of others and especially their own. And once they label the emotions they talk about them without getting wound up. For them, emotion is a tool. Emotions aren’t the obstacles, they are the means.

· It may sound touchy-feely, but if you can perceive the emotions of others, you have a chance to turn them to your advantage. The more you know about someone, the more power you have.

· In my negotiating course, I tell my students that empathy is “the ability to recognize the perspective of a counterpart, and the vocalization of that recognition.” That’s an academic way of saying that empathy is paying attention to another human being, asking what they are feeling, and making a commitment to understanding their world. Notice I didn’t say anything about agreeing with the other person’s values and beliefs or giving out hugs. That’s sympathy. What I’m talking about is trying to understand a situation from another person’s perspective.

· Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. It gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about (“How’s your family?”). Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional hack. Labeling has a special advantage when your counterpart is tense. Exposing negative thoughts to daylight—“It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail”—makes them seem less frightening.

· Once you’ve spotted an emotion you want to highlight, the next step is to label it aloud. Labels can be phrased as statements or questions. The only difference is whether you end the sentence with a downward or upward inflection. But no matter how they end, labels almost always begin with roughly the same words: It seems like . . . It sounds like . . . It looks like . . . Notice we said “It sounds like . . .” and not “I’m hearing that . . .” That’s because the word “I” gets people’s guard up. When you say “I,” it says you’re more interested in yourself than the other person, and it makes you take personal responsibility for the words that follow—and the offense they might cause.

· But when you phrase a label as a neutral statement of understanding, it encourages your counterpart to be responsive. They’ll usually give a longer answer than just “yes” or “no.” And if they disagree with the label, that’s okay. You can always step back and say, “I didn’t say that was what it was. I just said it seems like that.”

· The last rule of labeling is silence. Once you’ve thrown out a label, be quiet and listen. We all have a tendency to expand on what we’ve said, to finish, “It seems like you like the way that shirt looks,” with a specific question like “Where did you get it?” But a label’s power is that it invites the other person to reveal himself.

· In basic terms, people’s emotions have two levels: the “presenting” behavior is the part above the surface you can see and hear; beneath, the “underlying” feeling is what motivates the behavior.

· Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts.

· Many of us wear fears upon fears, like layers against the cold, so getting to safety takes time.

· The first step of doing so is listing every terrible thing your counterpart could say about you, in what I call an accusation audit.

· ■   Imagine yourself in your counterpart’s situation. The beauty of empathy is that it doesn’t demand that you agree with the other person’s ideas (you may well find them crazy). But by acknowledging the other person’s situation, you immediately convey that you are listening. And once they know that you are listening, they may tell you something that you can use. ■   The reasons why a counterpart will not make an agreement with you are often more powerful than why they will make a deal, so focus first on clearing the barriers to agreement. Denying barriers or negative influences gives them credence; get them into the open. ■   Pause. After you label a barrier or mirror a statement, let it sink in. Don’t worry, the other party will fill the silence. ■   Label your counterpart’s fears to diffuse their power. We all want to talk about the happy stuff, but remember, the faster you interrupt action in your counterpart’s amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear, the faster you can generate feelings of safety, well-being, and trust. ■   List the worst things that the other party could say about you and say them before the other person can. Performing an accusation audit in advance prepares you to head off negative dynamics before they take root. And because these accusations often sound exaggerated when said aloud, speaking them will encourage the other person to claim that quite the opposite is true. ■   Remember you’re dealing with a person who wants to be appreciated and understood. So use labels to reinforce and encourage positive perceptions and dynamics.

· But at the end of the day, “Yes” is often a meaningless answer that hides deeper objections (and “Maybe” is even worse). Pushing hard for “Yes” doesn’t get a negotiator any closer to a win; it just angers the other side.

· For good negotiators, “No” is pure gold. That negative provides a great opportunity for you and the other party to clarify what you really want by eliminating what you don’t want. “No” is a safe choice that maintains the status quo; it provides a temporary oasis of control. That’s because having protected myself, I could relax and more easily consider the possibilities. “No” is the start of the negotiation, not the end of it. We’ve been conditioned to fear the word “No.” But it is a statement of perception far more often than of fact. It seldom means, “I have considered all the facts and made a rational choice.” Instead, “No” is often a decision, frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo. Change is scary, and “No” provides a little protection from that scariness.

· This means you have to train yourself to hear “No” as something other than rejection, and respond accordingly. When someone tells you “No,” you need to rethink the word in one of its alternative—and much more real—meanings: ■   I am not yet ready to agree; ■   You are making me feel uncomfortable; ■   I do not understand; ■   I don’t think I can afford it; ■   I want something else; ■   I need more information; or ■   I want to talk it over with someone else. Then, after pausing, ask solution-based questions or simply label their effect: “What about this doesn’t work for you?” “What would you need to make it work?” “It seems like there’s something here that bothers you.” People have a need to say, “No.” So don’t just hope to hear it at some point; get them to say it early.

· There are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Counterfeit, Confirmation, and Commitment. A counterfeit “yes” is one in which your counterpart plans on saying “no” but either feels “yes” is an easier escape route or just wants to disingenuously keep the conversation going to obtain more information or some other kind of edge. A confirmation “yes” is generally innocent, a reflexive response to a black-or-white question; it’s sometimes used to lay a trap but mostly it’s just simple affirmation with no promise of action. And a commitment “yes” is the real deal; it’s a true agreement that leads to action, a “yes” at the table that ends with a signature on the contract. The commitment “yes” is what you want, but the three types sound almost the same so you have to learn how to recognize which one is being used.

· Saying “No” gives the speaker the feeling of safety, security, and control. You use a question that prompts a “No” answer, and your counterpart feels that by turning you down he has proved that he’s in the driver’s seat. Good negotiators welcome—even invite—a solid “No” to start, as a sign that the other party is engaged and thinking.

· “No” is not failure. Used strategically it’s an answer that opens the path forward.

· As you can see, “No” has a lot of skills. ■ “No” allows the real issues to be brought forth; ■ “No” protects people from making—and lets them correct—ineffective decisions; ■ “No” slows things down so that people can freely embrace their decisions and the agreements they enter into; ■ “No” helps people feel safe, secure, emotionally comfortable, and in control of their decisions; ■ “No” moves everyone’s efforts forward

· “No”—or the lack thereof—also serves as a warning, the canary in the coal mine. If despite all your efforts, the other party won’t say “No,” you’re dealing with people who are indecisive or confused or who have a hidden agenda. In cases like that you have to end the negotiation and walk away. Think of it like this: No “No” means no go.

· You provoke a “No” with this one-sentence email. Have you given up on this project? The point is that this one-sentence email encapsulates the best of “No”-oriented questions and plays on your counterpart’s natural human aversion to loss. The “No” answer the email demands offers the other party the feeling of safety and the illusion of control while encouraging them to define their position and explain it to you. Just as important, it makes the implicit threat that you will walk away on your own terms. To stop that from happening—to cut their losses and prove their power—the other party’s natural inclination is to reply immediately and disagree. No, our priorities haven’t changed. We’ve just gotten bogged down and . . . If you’re a parent, you already use this technique instinctively. What do you do when your kids won’t leave the house/park/mall? You say, “Fine. I’m leaving,” and you begin to walk away. I’m going to guess that well over half the time they yell, “No, wait!” and run to catch up. No one likes to be abandoned.

· ■   Break the habit of attempting to get people to say “yes.” Being pushed for “yes” makes people defensive. Our love of hearing “yes” makes us blind to the defensiveness we ourselves feel when someone is pushing us to say it. ■ “No” is not a failure. We have learned that “No” is the anti-“Yes” and therefore a word to be avoided at all costs. But it really often just means “Wait” or “I’m not comfortable with that.” Learn how to hear it calmly. It is not the end of the negotiation, but the beginning. ■ “Yes” is the final goal of a negotiation, but don’t aim for it at the start. Asking someone for “Yes” too quickly in a conversation—“Do you like to drink water, Mr. Smith?”—gets his guard up and paints you as an untrustworthy salesman. ■   Saying “No” makes the speaker feel safe, secure, and in control, so trigger it. By saying what they don’t want, your counterpart defines their space and gains the confidence and comfort to listen to you. That’s why “Is now a bad time to talk?” is always better than “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” ■   Sometimes the only way to get your counterpart to listen and engage with you is by forcing them into a “No.” That means intentionally mislabeling one of their emotions or desires or asking a ridiculous question—like, “It seems like you want this project to fail”—that can only be answered negatively. ■   Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you. ■   If a potential business partner is ignoring you, contact them with a clear and concise “No”-oriented question that suggests that you are ready to walk away. “Have you given up on this project?” works wonders.

· CNU developed what is a powerful staple in the high-stakes world of crisis negotiation, the Behavioral Change Stairway Model (BCSM). The model proposes five stages—active listening, empathy, rapport, influence, and behavioral change—that take any negotiator from listening to influencing behavior.

· As you’ll soon learn, the sweetest two words in any negotiation are actually “That’s right.

· One crucial aspect of any negotiation is to figure out how your adversary arrived at his position.

· The “that’s right” breakthrough usually doesn’t come at the beginning of a negotiation. It’s invisible to the counterpart when it occurs, and they embrace what you’ve said. To them, it’s a subtle epiphany.

· Why is “you’re right” the worst answer? Consider this: Whenever someone is bothering you, and they just won’t let up, and they won’t listen to anything you have to say, what do you tell them to get them to shut up and go away? “You’re right.” It works every time. Tell people “you’re right” and they get a happy smile on their face and leave you alone for at least twenty-four hours. But you haven’t agreed to their position. You have used “you’re right” to get them to quit bothering you.

· Driving toward “that’s right” is a winning strategy in all negotiations. But hearing “you’re right” is a disaster.

· ■   Creating unconditional positive regard opens the door to changing thoughts and behaviors. Humans have an innate urge toward socially constructive behavior. The more a person feels understood, and positively affirmed in that understanding, the more likely that urge for constructive behavior will take hold. ■ “That’s right” is better than “yes.” Strive for it. Reaching “that’s right” in a negotiation creates breakthroughs. ■   Use a summary to trigger a “that’s right.” The building blocks of a good summary are a label combined with paraphrasing. Identify, rearticulate, and emotionally affirm “the world according to . . .”

· Compromise is often a “bad deal” and a key theme we’ll hit in this chapter is that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

· We don’t compromise because it’s right; we compromise because it is easy and because it saves face. We compromise in order to say that at least we got half the pie. Distilled to its essence, we compromise to be safe. Most people in a negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain. Too few are driven by their actual goals. So don’t settle and—here’s a simple rule—never split the difference. Creative solutions are almost always preceded by some degree of risk, annoyance, confusion, and conflict. Accommodation and compromise produce none of that. You’ve got to embrace the hard stuff. That’s where the great deals are. And that’s what great negotiators do.

· Deadlines are often arbitrary, almost always flexible, and hardly ever trigger the consequences we think—or are told—they will. Deadlines are the bogeymen of negotiation, almost exclusively self-inflicted figments of our imagination, unnecessarily unsettling us for no good reason. The mantra we coach our clients on is, “No deal is better than a bad deal.” If that mantra can truly be internalized, and clients begin to believe they’ve got all the time they need to conduct the negotiation right, their patience becomes a formidable weapon.

· How close we were getting to their self-imposed deadline would be indicated by how specific the threats were that they issued. “Give us the money or your aunt is going to die” is an early stage threat, as the time isn’t specified. Increasing specificity on threats in any type of negotiations indicates getting closer to real consequences at a real specified time. To gauge the level of a particular threat, we’d pay attention to how many of the four questions—What? Who? When? And how?—were addressed. When people issue threats, they consciously or subconsciously create ambiguities and loopholes they fully intend to exploit. As the loopholes started to close as the week progressed, and did so over and over again in similar ways with different kidnappings, the pattern emerged.

· Deadlines cut both ways. (…) That’s the key: When the negotiation is over for one side, it’s over for the other too.

· Moore discovered that when negotiators tell their counterparts about their deadline, they get better deals. It’s true. First, by revealing your cutoff you reduce the risk of impasse. And second, when an opponent knows your deadline, he’ll get to the real deal- and concession-making more quickly. I’ve got one final point to make before we move on: Deadlines are almost never ironclad. What’s more important is engaging in the process and having a feel for how long that will take. You may see that you have more to accomplish than time will actually allow before the clock runs out.

· “If you approach a negotiation thinking that the other guy thinks like you, you’re wrong,” I say. “That’s not empathy; that’s projection.”

· The most powerful word in negotiations is “Fair.” As human beings, we’re mightily swayed by how much we feel we have been respected. People comply with agreements if they feel they’ve been treated fairly and lash out if they don’t.

· “We just want what’s fair.” Think back to the last time someone made this implicit accusation of unfairness to you, and I bet you’ll have to admit that it immediately triggered feelings of defensiveness and discomfort. These feelings are often subconscious and often lead to an irrational concession. (…) If you find yourself in this situation, the best reaction is to simply mirror the “F” that has just been lobbed at you. “Fair?” you’d respond, pausing to let the word’s power do to them as it was intended to do to you. Follow that with a label: “It seems like you’re ready to provide the evidence that supports that,” which alludes to opening their books or otherwise handing over information that will either contradict their claim to fairness or give you more data to work with than you had previously. Right away, you declaw the attack.

· The last use of the F-word is my favorite because it’s positive and constructive. It sets the stage for honest and empathetic negotiation. Here’s how I use it: Early on in a negotiation, I say, “I want you to feel like you are being treated fairly at all times. So please stop me at any time if you feel I’m being unfair, and we’ll address it.” It’s simple and clear and sets me up as an honest dealer. With that statement, I let people know it is okay to use that word with me if they use it honestly. As a negotiator, you should strive for a reputation of being fair. Your reputation precedes you. Let it precede you in a way that paves success.

· (…) explain the sales job not as a rational argument, but as an emotional framing job. If you can get the other party to reveal their problems, pain, and unmet objectives—if you can get at what people are really buying—then you can sell them a vision of their problem that leaves your proposal as the perfect solution.

· What I am saying is that while our decisions may be largely irrational, that doesn’t mean there aren’t consistent patterns, principles, and rules behind how we act. And once you know those mental patterns, you start to see ways to influence them.

· Let me leave you with a crucial lesson about loss aversion: In a tough negotiation, it’s not enough to show the other party that you can deliver the thing they want. To get real leverage, you have to persuade them that they have something concrete to lose if the deal falls through.

· 1. ANCHOR THEIR EMOTIONS To bend your counterpart’s reality, you have to start with the basics of empathy. So start out with an accusation audit acknowledging all of their fears. By anchoring their emotions in preparation for a loss, you inflame the other side’s loss aversion so that they’ll jump at the chance to avoid it.

· 2. LET THE OTHER GUY GO FIRST . . . MOST OF THE TIME. Now, it’s clear that the benefits of anchoring emotions are great when it comes to bending your counterpart’s reality. But going first is not necessarily the best thing when it comes to negotiating price.

· The real issue is that neither side has perfect information going to the table. This often means you don’t know enough to open with confidence. That’s especially true anytime you don’t know the market value of what you are buying or selling, like with Jerry or Chandler. By letting them anchor you also might get lucky: I’ve experienced many negotiations when the other party’s first offer was higher than the closing figure I had in mind. If I’d gone first they would have agreed and I would have left with either the winner’s curse or buyer’s remorse, those gut-wrenching feelings that you’ve overpaid or undersold. That said, you’ve got to be careful when you let the other guy anchor. You have to prepare yourself psychically to withstand the first offer. If the other guy’s a pro, a shark, he’s going to go for an extreme anchor in order to bend your reality. Then, when they come back with a merely absurd offer it will seem reasonable, just like an expensive $400 iPhone seems reasonable after they mark it down from a crazy $600. The tendency to be anchored by extreme numbers is a psychological quirk known as the “anchor and adjustment” effect.

· That’s not to say, “Never open.” Rules like that are easy to remember, but, like most simplistic approaches, they are not always good advice. If you’re dealing with a rookie counterpart, you might be tempted to be the shark and throw out an extreme anchor. Or if you really know the market and you’re dealing with an equally informed pro, you might offer a number just to make the negotiation go faster. Here’s my personal advice on whether or not you want to be the shark that eats a rookie counterpart. Just remember, your reputation precedes you. I’ve run into CEOs whose reputation was to always badly beat their counterpart and pretty soon no one would deal with them.

· 3. ESTABLISH A RANGE While going first rarely helps, there is one way to seem to make an offer and bend their reality in the process. That is, by alluding to a range. What I mean is this: When confronted with naming your terms or price, counter by recalling a similar deal which establishes your “ballpark,” albeit the best possible ballpark you wish to be in.

· In a recent study,4 Columbia Business School psychologists found that job applicants who named a range received significantly higher overall salaries than those who offered a number, especially if their range was a “bolstering range,” in which the low number in the range was what they actually wanted. Understand, if you offer a range (and it’s a good idea to do so) expect them to come in at the low end.

· 4. PIVOT TO NONMONETARY TERMS People get hung up on “How much?” But don’t deal with numbers in isolation. That leads to bargaining, a series of rigid positions defined by emotional views of fairness and pride. Negotiation is a more intricate and subtle dynamic than that. One of the easiest ways to bend your counterpart’s reality to your point of view is by pivoting to nonmonetary terms. After you’ve anchored them high, you can make your offer seem reasonable by offering things that aren’t important to you but could be important to them. Or if their offer is low you could ask for things that matter more to you than them. Since this is sometimes difficult, what we often do is throw out examples to start the brainstorming process.

· 5. WHEN YOU DO TALK NUMBERS, USE ODD ONES

· 6. SURPRISE WITH A GIFT You can get your counterpart into a mood of generosity by staking an extreme anchor and then, after their inevitable first rejection, offering them a wholly unrelated surprise gift. Unexpected conciliatory gestures like this are hugely effective because they introduce a dynamic called reciprocity; the other party feels the need to answer your generosity in kind. They will suddenly come up on their offer, or they’ll look to repay your kindness in the future. People feel obliged to repay debts of kindness.

· BE PLEASANTLY PERSISTENT ON NONSALARY TERMS Pleasant persistence is a kind of emotional anchoring that creates empathy with the boss and builds the right psychological environment for constructive discussion. And the more you talk about nonsalary terms, the more likely you are to hear the full range of their options. If they can’t meet your nonsalary requests, they may even counter with more money, like they did with a French-born American former student of mine. She kept asking—with a big smile—for an extra week of vacation beyond what the company normally gave. She was “French,” she said, and that’s what French people did. The hiring company was completely handcuffed on the vacation issue, but because she was so darned delightful, and because she introduced a nonmonetary variable into the notion of her value, they countered by increasing her salary offer. SALARY TERMS WITHOUT SUCCESS TERMS IS RUSSIAN ROULETTE Once you’ve negotiated a salary, make sure to define success for your position—as well as metrics for your next raise. That’s meaningful for you and free for your boss, much like giving me a magazine cover story was for the bar association. It gets you a planned raise and, by defining your success in relation to your boss’s supervision, it leads into the next step . . . SPARK THEIR INTEREST IN YOUR SUCCESS AND GAIN AN UNOFFICIAL MENTOR Remember the idea of figuring what the other side is really buying? Well, when you are selling yourself to a manager, sell yourself as more than a body for a job; sell yourself, and your success, as a way they can validate their own intelligence and broadcast it to the rest of the company. Make sure they know you’ll act as a flesh-and-blood argument for their importance. Once you’ve bent their reality to include you as their ambassador, they’ll have a stake in your success. Ask: “What does it take to be successful here?” Please notice that this question is similar to questions that are suggested by many MBA career counseling centers, yet not exactly the same. And it’s the exact wording of this question that’s critical. Students from my MBA courses who have asked this question in job interviews have actually had interviewers lean forward and say, “No one ever asked us that before.” The interviewer then gave a great and detailed answer. The key issue here is if someone gives you guidance, they will watch to see if you follow their advice. They will have a personal stake in seeing you succeed. You’ve just recruited your first unofficial mentor.

· As you work these tools into your daily life, remember the following powerful lessons: ■   All negotiations are defined by a network of subterranean desires and needs. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the surface. Once you know that the Haitian kidnappers just want party money, you will be miles better prepared. ■   Splitting the difference is wearing one black and one brown shoe, so don’t compromise. Meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides. ■   Approaching deadlines entice people to rush the negotiating process and do impulsive things that are against their best interests. ■   The F-word—“Fair”—is an emotional term people usually exploit to put the other side on the defensive and gain concessions. When your counterpart drops the F-bomb, don’t get suckered into a concession. Instead, ask them to explain how you’re mistreating them. ■   You can bend your counterpart’s reality by anchoring his starting point. Before you make an offer, emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be. When you get to numbers, set an extreme anchor to make your “real” offer seem reasonable, or use a range to seem less aggressive. The real value of anything depends on what vantage point you’re looking at it from. ■   People will take more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Make sure your counterpart sees that there is something to lose by inaction.

· We learned that negotiation was coaxing, not overcoming; co-opting, not defeating. Most important, we learned that successful negotiation involved getting your counterpart to do the work for you and suggest your solution himself. It involved giving him the illusion of control while you, in fact, were the one defining the conversation.

· it’s really as simple as removing the hostility from the statement “You can’t leave” and turning it into a question. “What do you hope to achieve by going?”

· And all negotiation, done well, should be an information-gathering process that vests your counterpart in an outcome that serves you.

· You don’t directly persuade them to see your ideas. Instead, you ride them to your ideas. As the saying goes, the best way to ride a horse is in the direction in which it is going.

· As an old Washington Post editor named Robert Estabrook once said, “He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”

· The real beauty of calibrated questions is the fact that they offer no target for attack like statements do. Calibrated questions have the power to educate your counterpart on what the problem is rather than causing conflict by telling them what the problem is. But calibrated questions are not just random requests for comment. They have a direction: once you figure out where you want a conversation to go, you have to design the questions that will ease the conversation in that direction while letting the other guy think it’s his choice to take you there

· First off, calibrated questions avoid verbs or words like “can,” “is,” “are,” “do,” or “does.” These are closed-ended questions that can be answered with a simple “yes” or a “no.” Instead, they start with a list of words people know as reporter’s questions: “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how.” Those words inspire your counterpart to think and then speak expansively.

· Having just two words to start with might not seem like a lot of ammunition, but trust me, you can use “what” and “how” to calibrate nearly any question.

· Even something as harsh as “Why did you do it?” can be calibrated to “What caused you to do it?” which takes away the emotion and makes the question less accusatory.

· Here are some other great standbys that I use in almost every negotiation, depending on the situation: ■   What about this is important to you? ■   How can I help to make this better for us? ■   How would you like me to proceed? ■   What is it that brought us into this situation? ■   How can we solve this problem? ■   What’s the objective? / What are we trying to accomplish here? ■   How am I supposed to do that?

· The implication of any well-designed calibrated question is that you want what the other guy wants but you need his intelligence to overcome the problem. This really appeals to very aggressive or egotistical counterparts.

· If you can’t control your own emotions, how can you expect to influence the emotions of another party?

· The first and most basic rule of keeping your emotional cool is to bite your tongue. Not literally, of course. But you have to keep away from knee-jerk, passionate reactions. Pause. Think. Let the passion dissipate. That allows you to collect your thoughts and be more circumspect in what you say. It also lowers your chance of saying more than you want to.

· Another simple rule is, when you are verbally assaulted, do not counterattack. Instead, disarm your counterpart by asking a calibrated question.

· The basic issue here is that when people feel that they are not in control, they adopt what psychologists call a hostage mentality. That is, in moments of conflict they react to their lack of power by either becoming extremely defensive or lashing out.

· Who has control in a conversation, the guy listening or the guy talking? The listener, of course. That’s because the talker is revealing information while the listener, if he’s trained well, is directing the conversation toward his own goals. He’s harnessing the talker’s energy for his own ends.

· As you put listener’s judo into practice, remember the following powerful lessons: ■   Don’t try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation. ■   Avoid questions that can be answered with “Yes” or tiny pieces of information. These require little thought and inspire the human need for reciprocity; you will be expected to give something back. ■   Ask calibrated questions that start with the words “How” or “What.” By implicitly asking the other party for help, these questions will give your counterpart an illusion of control and will inspire them to speak at length, revealing important information. ■   Don’t ask questions that start with “Why” unless you want your counterpart to defend a goal that serves you. “Why” is always an accusation, in any language. ■   Calibrate your questions to point your counterpart toward solving your problem. This will encourage them to expend their energy on devising a solution. ■   Bite your tongue. When you’re attacked in a negotiation, pause and avoid angry emotional reactions. Instead, ask your counterpart a calibrated question. ■   There is always a team on the other side. If you are not influencing those behind the table, you are vulnerable.

· “Yes” is nothing without “How.” While an agreement is nice, a contract is better, and a signed check is best. You don’t get your profits with the agreement. They come upon implementation. Success isn’t the hostage-taker saying, “Yes, we have a deal”; success comes afterward, when the freed hostage says to your face, “Thank you.”

· Calibrated “How” questions are a surefire way to keep negotiations going. They put the pressure on your counterpart to come up with answers, and to contemplate your problems when making their demands. With enough of the right “How” questions you can read and shape the negotiating environment in such a way that you’ll eventually get to the answer you want to hear. You just have to have an idea of where you want the conversation to go when you’re devising your questions. The trick to “How” questions is that, correctly used, they are gentle and graceful ways to say “No” and guide your counterpart to develop a better solution—your solution. A gentle How/No invites collaboration and leaves your counterpart with a feeling of having been treated with respect.

· As Julie did, the first and most common “No” question you’ll use is some version of “How am I supposed to do that?” (for example, “How can we raise that much?”). Your tone of voice is critical as this phrase can be delivered as either an accusation or a request for assistance. So pay attention to your voice.

· By making your counterparts articulate implementation in their own words, your carefully calibrated “How” questions will convince them that the final solution is their idea. And that’s crucial. People always make more effort to implement a solution when they think it’s theirs. That is simply human nature. That’s why negotiation is often called “the art of letting someone else have your way.”

· There are two key questions you can ask to push your counterparts to think they are defining success their way: “How will we know we’re on track?” and “How will we address things if we find we’re off track?” When they answer, you summarize their answers until you get a “That’s right.” Then you’ll know they’ve bought in. On the flip side, be wary of two telling signs that your counterpart doesn’t believe the idea is theirs. As I’ve noted, when they say, “You’re right,” it’s often a good indicator they are not vested in what is being discussed. And when you push for implementation and they say, “I’ll try,” you should get a sinking feeling in your stomach. Because this really means, “I plan to fail.” When you hear either of these, dive back in with calibrated “How” questions until they define the terms of successful implementation in their own voice. Follow up by summarizing what they have said to get a “That’s right.” Let the other side feel victory. Let them think it was their idea. Subsume your ego. Remember: “Yes” is nothing without “How.” So keep asking “How?” And succeed.

· THE 7-38-55 PERCENT RULE In two famous studies on what makes us like or dislike somebody,1 UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian created the 7-38-55 rule. That is, only 7 percent of a message is based on the words while 38 percent comes from the tone of voice and 55 percent from the speaker’s body language and face.

· When someone’s tone of voice or body language does not align with the meaning of the words they say, use labels to discover the source of the incongruence.

· (…) so many pushy salesman try to trap their clients into the Commitment “Yes” that many people get very good at the Counterfeit “Yes. “ One great tool for avoiding this trap is the Rule of Three. The Rule of Three is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation. It’s tripling the strength of whatever dynamic you’re trying to drill into at the moment. In doing so, it uncovers problems before they happen. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction.

· In a study of the components of lying,2 Harvard Business School professor Deepak Malhotra and his coauthors found that, on average, liars use more words than truth tellers and use far more third-person pronouns. They start talking about him, her, it, one, they, and their rather than I, in order to put some distance between themselves and the lie. And they discovered that liars tend to speak in more complex sentences in an attempt to win over their suspicious counterparts. It’s what W. C. Fields meant when he talked about baffling someone with bullshit. The researchers dubbed this the Pinocchio Effect because, just like Pinocchio’s nose, the number of words grew along with the lie. People who are lying are, understandably, more worried about being believed, so they work harder—too hard, as it were—at being believable.

· The more in love they are with “I,” “me,” and “my” the less important they are. Conversely, the harder it is to get a first person pronoun out of a negotiator’s mouth, the more important they are.

· Just as using Alastair’s name with the kidnapper and getting him to use it back humanized the hostage and made it less likely he would be harmed, using your own name creates the dynamic of “forced empathy.” It makes the other side see you as a person.

· Humanize yourself. Use your name to introduce yourself. Say it in a fun, friendly way. Let them enjoy the interaction, too. And get your own special price.

· We’ve found that you can usually express “No” four times before actually saying the word.

· “I’m sorry, no” is a slightly more succinct version for the fourth “No.” If delivered gently, it barely sounds negative at all. If you have to go further, of course, “No” is the last and most direct way. Verbally, it should be delivered with a downward inflection and a tone of regard; it’s not meant to be “NO!”

· If there’s one way to put off your counterpart, it’s by implying that disagreeing with you is unfair.

· There’s a critical lesson there: The art of closing a deal is staying focused to the very end. There are crucial points at the finale when you must draw on your mental discipline. Don’t think about what time the last flight leaves, or what it would be like to get home early and play golf. Do not let your mind wander. Remain focused.

· ■   Ask calibrated “How” questions, and ask them again and again. Asking “How” keeps your counterparts engaged but off balance. Answering the questions will give them the illusion of control. It will also lead them to contemplate your problems when making their demands. ■   Use “How” questions to shape the negotiating environment. You do this by using “How can I do that?” as a gentle version of “No.” This will subtly push your counterpart to search for other solutions—your solutions. And very often it will get them to bid against themselves. ■   Don’t just pay attention to the people you’re negotiating with directly; always identify the motivations of the players “behind the table.” You can do so by asking how a deal will affect everybody else and how on board they are. ■   Follow the 7-38-55 Percent Rule by paying close attention to tone of voice and body language. Incongruence between the words and nonverbal signs will show when your counterpart is lying or uncomfortable with a deal. ■   Is the “Yes” real or counterfeit? Test it with the Rule of Three: use calibrated questions, summaries, and labels to get your counterpart to reaffirm their agreement at least three times. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction. ■   A person’s use of pronouns offers deep insights into his or her relative authority. If you’re hearing a lot of “I,” “me,” and “my,” the real power to decide probably lies elsewhere. Picking up a lot of “we,” “they,” and “them,” it’s more likely you’re dealing directly with a savvy decision maker keeping his options open. ■   Use your own name to make yourself a real person to the other side and even get your own personal discount. Humor and humanity are the best ways to break the ice and remove roadblocks.

· Any response that’s not an outright rejection of your offer means you have the edge.

· Some people are Accommodators; others—like me—are basically Assertive; and the rest are data-loving Analysts. Hollywood negotiation scenes suggest that an Assertive style is required for effective bargaining, but each of the styles can be effective. And to truly be effective you need elements from all three.

· ANALYST Analysts are methodical and diligent. They are not in a big rush. Instead, they believe that as long as they are working toward the best result in a thorough and systematic way, time is of little consequence. Their self-image is linked to minimizing mistakes. Their motto: As much time as it takes to get it right. Classic analysts prefer to work on their own and rarely deviate from their goals. They rarely show emotion, and they often use what is very close to the FM DJ Voice I talked about in Chapter 3, slow and measured with a downward inflection. However, Analysts often speak in a way that is distant and cold instead of soothing. This puts people off without them knowing it and actually limits them from putting their counterpart at ease and opening them up. Analysts pride themselves on not missing any details in their extensive preparation. They will research for two weeks to get data they might have gotten in fifteen minutes at the negotiating table, just to keep from being surprised. Analysts hate surprises. They are reserved problem solvers, and information aggregators, and are hypersensitive to reciprocity. They will give you a piece, but if they don’t get a piece in return within a certain period of time, they lose trust and will disengage. This can often seem to come out of nowhere, but remember, since they like working on things alone the fact that they are talking to you at all is, from their perspective, a concession. They will often view concessions by their counterpart as a new piece of information to be taken back and evaluated. Don’t expect immediate counterproposals from them. People like this are skeptical by nature. So asking too many questions to start is a bad idea, because they’re not going to want to answer until they understand all the implications. With them, it’s vital to be prepared. Use clear data to drive your reason; don’t ad-lib; use data comparisons to disagree and focus on the facts; warn them of issues early; and avoid surprises. Silence to them is an opportunity to think. They’re not mad at you and they’re not trying to give you a chance to talk more. If you feel they don’t see things the way you do, give them a chance to think first. Apologies have little value to them since they see the negotiation and their relationship with you as a person largely as separate things. They respond fairly well in the moment to labels. They are not quick to answer calibrated questions, or closed-ended questions when the answer is “Yes.” They may need a few days to respond. If you’re an analyst you should be worried about cutting yourself off from an essential source of data, your counterpart. The single biggest thing you can do is to smile when you speak. People will be more forthcoming with information to you as a result. Smiling can also become a habit that makes it easy for you to mask any moments you’ve been caught off guard.

· ACCOMMODATOR The most important thing to this type of negotiator is the time spent building the relationship. Accommodators think as long as there is a free-flowing continuous exchange of information time is being well spent. As long as they’re communicating, they’re happy. Their goal is to be on great terms with their counterpart. They love the win-win. Of the three types, they are most likely to build great rapport without actually accomplishing anything. Accommodators want to remain friends with their counterpart even if they can’t reach an agreement. They are very easy to talk to, extremely friendly, and have pleasant voices. They will yield a concession to appease or acquiesce and hope the other side reciprocates. If your counterparts are sociable, peace-seeking, optimistic, distractible, and poor time managers, they’re probably Accommodators. If they’re your counterpart, be sociable and friendly. Listen to them talk about their ideas and use calibrated questions focused specifically on implementation to nudge them along and find ways to translate their talk into action. Due to their tendency to be the first to activate the reciprocity cycle, they may have agreed to give you something they can’t actually deliver. Their approach to preparation can be lacking as they are much more focused on the person behind the table. They want to get to know you. They have a tremendous passion for the spirit of negotiation and what it takes not only to manage emotions but also to satisfy them. While it is very easy to disagree with an Accommodator, because they want nothing more that to hear what you have to say, uncovering their objections can be difficult. They will have identified potential problem areas beforehand and will leave those areas unaddressed out of fear of the conflict they may cause. If you have identified yourself as an Accommodator, stick to your ability to be very likable, but do not sacrifice your objections. Not only do the other two types need to hear your point of view; if you are dealing with another Accommodator they will welcome it. Also be conscious of excess chitchat: the other two types have no use for it, and if you’re sitting across the table from someone like yourself you will be prone to interactions where nothing gets done.

· ASSERTIVE The Assertive type believes time is money; every wasted minute is a wasted dollar. Their self-image is linked to how many things they can get accomplished in a period of time. For them, getting the solution perfect isn’t as important as getting it done. Assertives are fiery people who love winning above all else, often at the expense of others. Their colleagues and counterparts never question where they stand because they are always direct and candid. They have an aggressive communication style and they don’t worry about future interactions. Their view of business relationships is based on respect, nothing more and nothing less. Most of all, the Assertive wants to be heard. And not only do they want to be heard, but they don’t actually have the ability to listen to you until they know that you’ve heard them. They focus on their own goals rather than people. And they tell rather than ask. When you’re dealing with Assertive types, it’s best to focus on what they have to say, because once they are convinced you understand them, then and only then will they listen for your point of view. To an Assertive, every silence is an opportunity to speak more. Mirrors are a wonderful tool with this type. So are calibrated questions, labels, and summaries. The most important thing to get from an Assertive will be a “that’s right” that may come in the form of a “that’s it exactly” or “you hit it on the head.” When it comes to reciprocity, this type is of the “give an inch/take a mile” mentality. They will have figured they deserve whatever you have given them so they will be oblivious to expectations of owing something in return. They will actually simply be looking for the opportunity to receive more. If they have given some kind of concession, they are surely counting the seconds until they get something in return. If you are an Assertive, be particularly conscious of your tone. You will not intend to be overly harsh but you will often come off that way. Intentionally soften your tone and work to make it more pleasant. Use calibrated questions and labels with your counterpart since that will also make you more approachable and increase the chances for collaboration.

· The Black Swan rule is don’t treat others the way you want to be treated; treat them the way they need to be treated.

· Complementary PDF available that will help you identify your type and that of those around you. http://info .blackswanltd.com/3-types.

· Like the great ear-biting pugilist Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

· Letting your counterpart anchor first will give you a tremendous feel for him. All you need to learn is how to take the first punch.

· As the Danish folk saying goes, “You bake with the flour you have.” But anyone can learn a few tools.

· Marwan Sinaceur of INSEAD and Stanford University’s Larissa Tiedens found that expressions of anger increase a negotiator’s advantage and final take. Anger shows passion and conviction that can help sway the other side to accept less. However, by heightening your counterpart’s sensitivity to danger and fear, your anger reduces the resources they have for other cognitive activity, setting them up to make bad concessions that will likely lead to implementation problems, thus reducing your gains. Also beware: researchers have also found that disingenuous expressions of unfelt anger—you know, faking it—backfire, leading to intractable demands and destroying trust. For anger to be effective, it has to be real, the key for it is to be under control because anger also reduces our cognitive ability.

· (…) well-timed offense-taking—known as “strategic umbrage”—can wake your counterpart to the problem. In studies by Columbia University academics Daniel Ames and Abbie Wazlawek, people on the receiving end of strategic umbrage were more likely to rate themselves as overassertive, even when the counterpart didn’t think so.

· Threats delivered without anger but with “poise”—that is, confidence and self-control—are great tools. Saying, “I’m sorry that just doesn’t work for me,” with poise, works.

· Across our planet and around the universe, “Why?” makes people defensive.

· There is, however, another way to use “Why?” effectively. The idea is to employ the defensiveness the question triggers to get your counterpart to defend your position. I know it sounds weird, but it works. The basic format goes like this: When you want to flip a dubious counterpart to your side, ask them, “Why would you do that?” but in a way that the “that” favors you. Let me explain. If you are working to lure a client away from a competitor, you might say, “Why would you ever do business with me? Why would you ever change from your existing supplier? They’re great!” In these questions, the “Why?” coaxes your counterpart into working for you.

· The traditional “I” message is to use “I” to hit the pause button and step out of a bad dynamic. When you want to counteract unproductive statements from your counterpart, you can say, “I feel ___ when you ___ because ___,” and that demands a time-out from the other person. But be careful with the big “I”: You have to be mindful not to use a tone that is aggressive or creates an argument. It’s got to be cool and level.

· We’ve said previously that no deal is better than a bad deal. If you feel you can’t say “No” then you’ve taken yourself hostage. Once you’re clear on what your bottom line is, you have to be willing to walk away. Never be needy for a deal.

· Your response must always be expressed in the form of strong, yet empathic, limit-setting boundaries—that is, tough love—not as hatred or violence. Anger and other strong emotions can on rare occasions be effective. But only as calculated acts, never a personal attack. In any bare-knuckle bargaining session, the most vital principle to keep in mind is never to look at your counterpart as an enemy.

· The person across the table is never the problem. The unsolved issue is. So focus on the issue. This is one of the most basic tactics for avoiding emotional escalations.

· The Ackerman model is an offer-counteroffer method, at least on the surface. But it is a very effective system for beating the usual lackluster bargaining dynamic, which has the predictable result of meeting in the middle. The systematized and easy-to-remember process has only four steps: 1.  Set your target price (your goal). 2.  Set your first offer at 65 percent of your target price. 3.  Calculate three raises of decreasing increments (to 85, 95, and 100 percent). 4.  Use lots of empathy and different ways of saying “No” to get the other side to counter before you increase your offer. 5.  When calculating the final amount, use precise, nonround numbers like, say, $37,893 rather than $38,000. It gives the number credibility and weight. 6.  On your final number, throw in a nonmonetary item (that they probably don’t want) to show you’re at your limit. The genius of this system is that it incorporates the psychological tactics we’ve discussed—reciprocity, extreme anchors, loss aversion, and so on—without you needing to think about them.

· Researchers have found that people getting concessions often feel better about the bargaining process than those who are given a single firm, “fair” offer. In fact, they feel better even when they end up paying more—or receiving less—than they otherwise might.

· ■   Identify your counterpart’s negotiating style. Once you know whether they are Accommodator, Assertive, or Analyst, you’ll know the correct way to approach them. ■   Prepare, prepare, prepare. When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion; you fall to your highest level of preparation. So design an ambitious but legitimate goal and then game out the labels, calibrated questions, and responses you’ll use to get there. That way, once you’re at the bargaining table, you won’t have to wing it. ■   Get ready to take a punch. Kick-ass negotiators usually lead with an extreme anchor to knock you off your game. If you’re not ready, you’ll flee to your maximum without a fight. So prepare your dodging tactics to avoid getting sucked into the compromise trap. ■   Set boundaries, and learn to take a punch or punch back, without anger. The guy across the table is not the problem; the situation is. ■   Prepare an Ackerman plan. Before you head into the weeds of bargaining, you’ll need a plan of extreme anchor, calibrated questions, and well-defined offers. Remember: 65, 85, 95, 100 percent. Decreasing raises and ending on nonround numbers will get your counterpart to believe that he’s squeezing you for all you’re worth when you’re really getting to the number you want.

· Black Swan theory tells us that things happen that were previously thought to be impossible—or never thought of at all. This is not the same as saying that sometimes things happen against one-in-a-million odds, but rather that things never imagined do come to pass.

· Black Swans are events or pieces of knowledge that sit outside our regular expectations and therefore cannot be predicted. This is a crucial concept in negotiation. In every negotiating session, there are different kinds of information. There are those things we know, like our counterpart’s name and their offer and our experiences from other negotiations. Those are known knowns. There are those things we are certain that exist but we don’t know, like the possibility that the other side might get sick and leave us with another counterpart. Those are known unknowns and they are like poker wild cards; you know they’re out there but you don’t know who has them. But most important are those things we don’t know that we don’t know, pieces of information we’ve never imagined but that would be game changing if uncovered. Maybe our counterpart wants the deal to fail because he’s leaving for a competitor. These unknown unknowns are Black Swans.

· (…) when bits and pieces of a case don’t add up it’s usually because our frames of reference are off; they will never add up unless we break free of our expectations.

· Every case is new. We must let what we know—our known knowns—guide us but not blind us to what we do not know; we must remain flexible and adaptable to any situation; we must always retain a beginner’s mind; and we must never overvalue our experience or undervalue the informational and emotional realities served up moment by moment in whatever situation we face.

· Unless correctly interrogated, most people aren’t able to articulate the information you want.

· You have to feel for the truth behind the camouflage; you have to note the small pauses that suggest discomfort and lies. Don’t look to verify what you expect. If you do, that’s what you’ll find. Instead, you must open yourself up to the factual reality that is in front of you.

· In theory, leverage is the ability to inflict loss and withhold gain. Where does your counterpart want to gain and what do they fear losing? Discover these pieces of information, we are told, and you’ll build leverage over the other side’s perceptions, actions, and decisions. In practice, where our irrational perceptions are our reality, loss and gain are slippery notions, and it often doesn’t matter what leverage actually exists against you; what really matters is the leverage they think you have on them. That’s why I say there’s always leverage: as an essentially emotional concept, it can be manufactured whether it exists or not.

· I should note that leverage isn’t the same thing as power.

· One way to understand leverage is as a fluid that sloshes between the parties. As a negotiator you should always be aware of which side, at any given moment, feels they have the most to lose if negotiations collapse. The party who feels they have more to lose and are the most afraid of that loss has less leverage, and vice versa. To get leverage, you have to persuade your counterpart that they have something real to lose if the deal falls through.

· Positive leverage is quite simply your ability as a negotiator to provide—or withhold—things that your counterpart wants. Whenever the other side says, “I want . . .” as in, “I want to buy your car,” you have positive leverage. When they say that, you have power: you can make their desire come true; you can withhold it and thereby inflict pain; or you can use their desire to get a better deal with another party.

· Negative leverage is what most civilians picture when they hear the word “leverage.” It’s a negotiator’s ability to make his counterpart suffer. And it is based on threats: you have negative leverage if you can tell your counterpart, “If you don’t fulfill your commitment/pay your bill/etc., I will destroy your reputation.” This sort of leverage gets people’s attention because of a concept we’ve discussed: loss aversion. As effective negotiators have long known and psychologists have repeatedly proved, potential losses loom larger in the human mind than do similar gains. Getting a good deal may push us toward making a risky bet, but saving our reputation from destruction is a much stronger motivation.

· Threats can be like nuclear bombs. There will be a toxic residue that will be difficult to clean up. You have to handle the potential of negative consequences with care, or you will hurt yourself and poison or blow up the whole process. If you shove your negative leverage down your counterpart’s throat, it might be perceived as you taking away their autonomy. People will often sooner die than give up their autonomy. They’ll at least act irrationally and shut off the negotiation. A more subtle technique is to label your negative leverage and thereby make it clear without attacking. Sentences like “It seems like you strongly value the fact that you’ve always paid on time” or “It seems like you don’t care what position you are leaving me in” can really open up the negotiation process.

· NORMATIVE LEVERAGE Every person has a set of rules and a moral framework. Normative leverage is using the other party’s norms and standards to advance your position. If you can show inconsistencies between their beliefs and their actions, you have normative leverage. No one likes to look like a hypocrite.

· In any negotiation, but especially in a tense one like this, it’s not how well you speak but how well you listen that determines your success. Understanding the “other” is a precondition to be able to speak persuasively and develop options that resonate for them. There is the visible negotiation and then all the things that are hidden under the surface (the secret negotiation space wherein the Black Swans dwell).

· (…) the “paradox of power”—namely, the harder we push the more likely we are to be met with resistance. That’s why you have to use negative leverage sparingly.

· By positioning your demands within the worldview your counterpart uses to make decisions, you show them respect and that gets you attention and results. Knowing your counterpart’s religion is more than just gaining normative leverage per se. Rather, it’s gaining a holistic understanding of your counterpart’s worldview—in this case, literally a religion—and using that knowledge to inform your negotiating moves.

· ■   Review everything you hear. You will not hear everything the first time, so double-check. Compare notes with your team members. You will often discover new information that will help you advance the negotiation. ■   Use backup listeners whose only job is to listen between the lines. They will hear things you miss.

· Research by social scientists has confirmed something effective negotiators have known for ages: namely, we trust people more when we view them as being similar or familiar.

· People trust those who are in their in-group. Belonging is a primal instinct. And if you can trigger that instinct, that sense that, “Oh, we see the world the same way,” then you immediately gain influence.

· Once you know your counterpart’s religion and can visualize what he truly wants out of life, you can employ those aspirations as a way to get him to follow you.

· Research studies have shown that people respond favorably to requests made in a reasonable tone of voice and followed with a “because” reason. (…) And it didn’t matter if the reason made sense. (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I cut in line because I have to make copies?” worked great.) People just responded positively to the framework.

· While idiotic reasons worked with something simple like photocopying, on more complicated issues you can increase your effectiveness by offering reasons that reference your counterpart’s religion.

· But the moment when we’re most ready to throw our hands up and declare “They’re crazy!” is often the best moment for discovering Black Swans that transform a negotiation. It is when we hear or see something that doesn’t make sense—something “crazy”—that a crucial fork in the road is presented: push forward, even more forcefully, into that which we initially can’t process; or take the other path, the one to guaranteed failure, in which we tell ourselves that negotiating was useless anyway.

· (…) people operating with incomplete information appear crazy to those who have different information. Your job when faced with someone like this in a negotiation is to discover what they do not know and supply that information.

· Often the other side is acting on bad information, and when people have bad information they make bad choices. There’s a great computer industry term for this: GIGO—Garbage In, Garbage Out

· In any negotiation where your counterpart is acting wobbly, there exists a distinct possibility that they have things they can’t do but aren’t eager to reveal. Such constraints can make the sanest counterpart seem irrational. The other side might not be able to do something because of legal advice, or because of promises already made, or even to avoid setting a precedent. Or they may just not have the power to close the deal.

· The presence of hidden interests isn’t as rare as you might think. Your counterpart will often reject offers for reasons that have nothing to do with their merits. A client may put off buying your product so that their calendar year closes before the invoice hits, increasing his chance for a promotion. Or an employee might quit in the middle of a career-making project, just before bonus season, because he or she has learned that colleagues are making more money. For that employee, fairness is as much an interest as money. Whatever the specifics of the situation, these people are not acting irrationally. They are simply complying with needs and desires that you don’t yet understand, what the world looks like to them based on their own set of rules. Your job is to bring these Black Swans to light.

· As we’ve seen, when you recognize that your counterpart is not irrational, but simply ill-informed, constrained, or obeying interests that you do not yet know, your field of movement greatly expands. And that allows you to negotiate much more effectively.

· No matter how much research you do, there’s just some information that you are not going to find out unless you sit face-to-face.

· While you have to get face time, formal business meetings, structured encounters, and planned negotiating sessions are often the least revealing kinds of face time because these are the moments when people are at their most guarded. Hunting for Black Swans is also effective during unguarded moments at the fringes, whether at meals like my client had with his Coca-Cola contact, or the brief moments of relaxation before or after formal interactions. During a typical business meeting, the first few minutes, before you actually get down to business, and the last few moments, as everyone is leaving, often tell you more about the other side than anything in between. That’s why reporters have a credo to never turn off their recorders: you always get the best stuff at the beginning and the end of an interview. Also pay close attention to your counterpart during interruptions, odd exchanges, or anything that interrupts the flow. When someone breaks ranks, people’s façades crack just a little. Simply noticing whose cracks and how others respond verbally and nonverbally can reveal a gold mine. WHEN IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE, THERE’S CENTS TO BE MADE Students often ask me whether Black Swans are specific kinds of information or any kind that helps. I always answer that they are anything that you don’t know that changes things.

· But stop and think about that. Are we really afraid of the guy across the table? I can promise you that, with very few exceptions, he’s not going to reach across and slug you. No, our sweaty palms are just an expression of physiological fear, a few trigger-happy neurons firing because of something more base: our innate human desire to get along with other members of the tribe. It’s not the guy across the table who scares us: it’s conflict itself.

· More than a little research has shown that genuine, honest conflict between people over their goals actually helps energize the problem-solving process in a collaborative way. Skilled negotiators have a talent for using conflict to keep the negotiation going without stumbling into a personal battle.

· (…) the adversary is the situation and that the person that you appear to be in conflict with is actually your partner.

· Remember, pushing hard for what you believe is not selfish. It is not bullying. It is not just helping you. Your amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear, will try to convince you to give up, to flee, because the other guy is right, or you’re being cruel. But if you are an honest, decent person looking for a reasonable outcome, you can ignore the amygdala.

· When you ask calibrated questions, yes, you are leading your counterpart to your goals. But you are also leading them to examine and articulate what they want and why and how they can achieve it. You are demanding creativity of them, and therefore pushing them toward a collaborative solution.

· (…) don’t avoid honest, clear conflict. It will get you the best car price, the higher salary, and the largest donation. It will also save your marriage, your friendship, and your family.

· One can only be an exceptional negotiator, and a great person, by both listening and speaking clearly and empathetically; by treating counterparts—and oneself—with dignity and respect; and most of all by being honest about what one wants and what one can—and cannot—do. Every negotiation, every conversation, every moment of life, is a series of small conflicts that, managed well, can rise to creative beauty. Embrace them.

· ■   Let what you know—your known knowns—guide you but not blind you. Every case is new, so remain flexible and adaptable. Remember the Griffin bank crisis: no hostage-taker had killed a hostage on deadline, until he did. ■   Black Swans are leverage multipliers. Remember the three types of leverage: positive (the ability to give someone what they want); negative (the ability to hurt someone); and normative (using your counterpart’s norms to bring them around). ■   Work to understand the other side’s “religion.” Digging into worldviews inherently implies moving beyond the negotiating table and into the life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart. That’s where Black Swans live. ■   Review everything you hear from your counterpart. You will not hear everything the first time, so double-check. Compare notes with team members. Use backup listeners whose job is to listen between the lines. They will hear things you miss. ■   Exploit the similarity principle. People are more apt to concede to someone they share a cultural similarity with, so dig for what makes them tick and show that you share common ground. ■   When someone seems irrational or crazy, they most likely aren’t. Faced with this situation, search for constraints, hidden desires, and bad information. ■   Get face time with your counterpart. Ten minutes of face time often reveals more than days of research. Pay special attention to your counterpart’s verbal and nonverbal communication at unguarded moments—at the beginning and the end of the session or when someone says something out of line.

· When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion—you fall to your highest level of preparation

· SECTION I: THE GOAL Think through best/worst-case scenarios but only write down a specific goal that represents the best case.

· God knows aiming low is seductive. Self-esteem is a huge factor in negotiation, and many people set modest goals to protect it. It’s easier to claim victory when you aim low. That’s why some negotiation experts say that many people who think they have “win-win” goals really have a “wimp-win” mentality. The “wimp-win” negotiator focuses on his or her bottom line, and that’s where they end up.

· Bottom line: People who expect more (and articulate it) get more. Here are the four steps for setting your goal: ■   Set an optimistic but reasonable goal and define it clearly. ■   Write it down. ■   Discuss your goal with a colleague (this makes it harder to wimp out). ■   Carry the written goal into the negotiation.

· SECTION II: SUMMARY Summarize and write out in just a couple of sentences the known facts that have led up to the negotiation

· You must be able to summarize a situation in a way that your counterpart will respond with a “That’s right.” If they don’t, you haven’t done it right.

· SECTION III: LABELS/ACCUSATION AUDIT Prepare three to five labels to perform an accusation audit.

· SECTION IV: CALIBRATED QUESTIONS Prepare three to five calibrated questions to reveal value to you and your counterpart and identify and overcome potential deal killers.

· What are we trying to accomplish? How is that worthwhile? What’s the core issue here? How does that affect things? What’s the biggest challenge you face? How does this fit into what the objective is?

· QUESTIONS TO IDENTIFY BEHIND-THE-TABLE DEAL KILLERS When implementation happens by committee, the support of that committee is key. You’ll want to tailor your calibrated questions to identify and unearth the motivations of those behind the table, including: How does this affect the rest of your team? How on board are the people not on this call? What do your colleagues see as their main challenges in this area?

· QUESTIONS TO USE TO UNEARTH THE DEAL-KILLING ISSUES What are we up against here? What is the biggest challenge you face? How does making a deal with us affect things? What happens if you do nothing? What does doing nothing cost you? How does making this deal resonate with what your company prides itself on? It’s often very effective to ask these in groups of two or three as they are similar enough that they help your counterpart think about the same thing from different angles.

· Be ready to execute follow-up labels to their answers to your calibrated questions.

· SECTION V: NONCASH OFFERS Prepare a list of noncash items possessed by your counterpart that would be valuable. Ask yourself: “What could they give that would almost get us to do it for free?”

[allianceinternational-blog]

How do I become a recruitment consultant using LinkedIn recruit tool?

The sphere of recruiting is changing rapidly and employers are increasingly relying on social networking websites to source talent, and finding that some of them are very effective. LinkedIn, in particular, has been cited by many employers as an extremely effective way of recruiting talent. According to our 2013 study of hiring practices, Get More info the majority of Northeast Ohio organizations surveyed (61%) use LinkedIn to recruit.

 Although all social media platforms can be used for different purposes in the recruiting process, it's safe to say that LinkedIn is more professional and business focused, as well as more relevant to recruiting, as candidates can highlight their resume, skills, experience, connections, and general influence in the field. The platform is quickly becoming the choice for professionals to look for jobs and find employment - and for employers when sourcing talent.

 We've collaborated with Amy Neumann, director of search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media optimization at ERC's Preferred Partner, Cleveland.com, to provide 10 tips on how to use LinkedIn to successfully recruit candidates.

  1. Develop a company profile

Employers should create a company LinkedIn profile, keep their profiles updated, share information about their products and services, link to their blog and other social media websites, showcase their employees and testimonials, and highlight their career opportunities. Ideally, employers should also routinely post relevant and engaging content for their followers such as blog posts, articles, videos, and pictures.

 Encourage candidates to follow your company on LinkedIn, and even allow them to apply directly from your profile, like Coca Cola does.

 2. Screen and verify candidates

LinkedIn is helpful in providing a fuller picture of a candidate's capabilities versus simply a resume, job application, or brief personal introduction. It can also be effectively used for screening and verifying capabilities, credentials, and skills prior to contacting candidates. You can view a candidate's endorsements, recommendations, education, prior work experience, and interests within LinkedIn.

 Additionally, according to Amy, viewing the groups in which candidates are involved and their participation in them provides insight into their level of skill.

 3. Reach candidates through InMail, job postings, and sponsored jobs

Amy also recommends using LinkedIn’s InMails to personally reach out to candidates. You can use InMail, your internal inbox at LinkedIn, for private messaging with candidates as well as to request assistance from your network or select professionals to find a qualified candidate.

   LinkedIn also has "Sponsored Jobs" in which employers may bid for the top placement in the "Jobs You May be Interested In" section of the LinkedIn homepage. 

4. Participate in groups and post status updates

Posting status updates draws attention to yourself and your business, and it's an easy way to reach out to your network.

 Also, LinkedIn groups are an ideal way to source candidates and you can post positions in them. However, some groups limit recruiters from continually posting open positions if they do not regularly interact with and participate in the group. 

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 Even subsequent to traditional retirement, many mature adults are returning to you see, the workforce totally from lack from financial security, Click Now more info or exactly because these kinds of products are tired! The substantial advantage of taking your prized child to an world-wide school is actually academic holiness. Over there are several main troubles that Why don't we cover.

 Have the latest separate banking account method specifically to produce your opportunity. Thus, I'm skeptical' because talk is considered cheap additionally gas isn't. By grasping the compensation surveys in addition to the the service outlook about the focused careers created by college manages to graduate and incoming college grad students is exceptionally important. Transfer Singapore maids are typical likely to allow them to be a lot to your kids since these kinds of products have routine.

 Visit Here : Alliance International

 All expenses not necessarily quite related that would domestic take in or instructional purposes are deducted for the sleek figure obtained. Games moreover exercise have always been known on behalf of helping an mind loosen and any kind of a relaxed head is that this best for learning. Small business concerns grow simply by inviting the other business owners to become a member in.

 As quite as about the home, Security window shutters are many times used with a hosting company of new applications. In the item round truly all about stuffing. You shall even asap be inside of a position to build the machine vehicle. Doing work with accidents is an very nearly impossible task.

 This means you is not able to apply on a credit rating rating card located on someone else's behalf. Although any vast rest of 75 and more mature are when fact retired, 6.4% (over a mil seniors) are typically working a particular job  retirement, whether or it is full-time, part-time or self-employment. Until this is a person's portion where you suggest what type of of experiences and hands-on skills you have. Obama enjoys failed in the everything he has moved and currently his problems are quality on him or her mercilessly. That have to facilitate work in addition to take wellbeing of the particular children and as well their aging senior parents at the said time is normally simply a tad too much to handle.

 If almost any of these questions come up with doubt, and you require to establish them before you start on excellent affiliate business. The manager associates work, needs whose say will try to be heard, and consequently probably appreciates the orientation of expert. It's certainly much unusual in The old continent where your stock financial markets in Egypt and France, the eurozone's two largest economies, place the all new year will in undergo markets, all the way down 22% and 24% respectively, although excessive than during their July lows.

 This will keep a person's goals raw in  mind as well as keep yourself focused on top of achieving them. That resources private in addition , public section opportunities avail to function the 1, 000's and their own personal families. You won't know what to can.

 There have become many excellent homes from which into choose. Ideally credit card applicants should be working additional information than 16th hours a good solid week. If your site is one coming from all those unfortunate person where the job was indeed on the most important chopping prohibit in spire of acquiring and polishing your skill sets through out your career, don't strain. If you are going to in service charge at your own personal place in employment, the public may already be clearly aware connected the require of one particular important dialogue about you are role.

 You'll hope for to be certain how a whole lot experience a solicitor keeps had. Most contribute methods such just like funding, a customer base, and moderately priced labor However, an exclusive proprietorship is regarded as exactly through which '  owner. Nowadays, talented photography addicts are found in demand at magazine will handle and leaving portfolios. There are probably many old and creative companies obtainable there any can provide affordable solutions to concern owners looking at coverage.

 The mature quote tells how if everyone want essentially different earnings do 1 significantly unusual. Are your company struggling monetarily, and if so, is undoubtedly a secured mortgage applicable for shoppers? Any family personal needs to follow your web business and may have learned that clients need in order to have undamaged work working hours.

 The large majority of of of these jobs always have bendable hours and so decent be charged. And so is made worse merely by the truth is that governments have probably not made plenty of provision with regards to the establishing number of most older guests and your decrease doing younger personnel. They are designed to finally cater with regards to people's should have when move from dynamic employment. Visitors with undesirable work ethos jump at job regarding job.

 A person's ETC can certainly still begin using even in the case when the citizen did not only earn needed money regarding meet the entire filing requirement. You will likely choose between helping on care on behalf of children all over orphanages, correct care for that this elderly, aid to build different facilities, not to mention even tasks in the perfect school. Winter break lasts all over a month for a higher education students and even is quite often an one should be open break for the college college between semesters. Extremely people carry yet to assist you to know this process and alone do absolutely when they start grabbing their taxing bills.

 They are skills that generally likely on to be remarkably valued about government  the builder of Slender Six Sigma is even now starting our push into your government. The fundamental advantage attached to taking their child which can an external school is academic efficiency. Quicker or immediately after it have the ability to come to help you an cure and virtually recruiter and / or employee recognises that.

 If a person have were at this key fact address less than three years, the individual will perhaps even need at give your own personal previous care for and postcode. Quite our contrary, buyers want to rebuild ones own credit times past by making timely contributions on all your auto loan. 1 know Method have always been amazed every what I have saw on usually the other negative side of pride; I develop found a good number of who really care beyond specifically what I with imagined.and your entire family may too. Professional calling coaches should certainly help you in a variety in ways.

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 For More Information about Recruitment Consultants In Mumbai 

Visit: https://www.allianceinternational.co.in/

[hoomannissani]

Hooman Nissani: How to Manage Large Commercial Development Projects

Managing a large commercial development project can seem like an intimidating endeavor. Although commercial development projects are complex, how they are managed will determine whether or not they are complicated. No matter the scope of the project at hand, there are several steps to take and factors to consider that will help determine the overall success of the project.

The first thing to remember when managing a large commercial development project is that it all comes down to people. There will be lots of paperwork and numbers to consider, but behind every piece of paper and measurement or calculation is a person. People skills are quite possibly the greatest talent required for successfully managing any development project. Without the right focus and mindset, a project can be doomed from the very beginning.

Having the Right Point Person Leading the Project Is the Most Important Decision

All large commercial development projects involve countless individuals, but a single point person is the most important of all. Whoever is driving the project must understand him or herself as a coordinator of people. Bringing utility companies, contractors, city planners, county officers, architects, and others to work together successfully requires wise delegation and negotiation. Managing resources, timing the project, and keeping it all on track is no easy feat.

Although there are many tools available to help aid in the management, no tool will adequately compensate for deficiencies in leadership. The personality of the point person will also determine which tools should be used for managing the project. People often make the mistake of trying to force certain management tools that do not align with the personality or approach of the lead manager. This can cause major headaches and roadblocks for everyone involved as the project progresses.

Projects Become Less Complicated When Properly Phased Out

Once the decision is made of who will be leading the project and what tools he or she will be using, the different phases of the project will be the next focus. These phases often begin with a feasibility study. Determining the scope of the project; which includes analyzing hours of labor, projected fluctuations in the price of materials, environmental hazards, and other factors is an important step that should not be glazed over quickly.

When the study has clearly demonstrated to the right people that the project is feasible, the real planning begins. Planning answers all the questions of who and when. Depending on what all the commercial development project hopes to accomplish, the planning will take a different shape to fit accordingly. For example, will the project include residential, retail, or industrial space—or some combination of all three? Planning for each has its own unique components to consider.

Initial planning sets the tone for the remainder of the project. Without the proper detailed planning that considers every imaginable factor and risk, delays are sure to cause issues as decisions that should have been made early on need to be accounted for along the way. The ripple effect each decision has on the rest of the project is easier to see and deal with in the early planning than it is later on in the project. Going with the flow is a costly and ineffective strategy.

When you have the plans solidly in place, a method for determining if you are on track and on budget at each stage is critical for accountability. Managing a commercial development project means regular reporting to financiers, contractors, and local governments. A process for regular auditing will also help ensure that you are staying inline with any contracts signed along the way.

There Are Many Moving Parts in Managing Commercial Development Projects

Beyond recognizing and accounting for each phase of the project, large-scale commercial development can be compared to playing a game of Tetris. There are items coming down the line of varying sizes at different speeds. It is your job to make sure they all fit together.

Going into a large commercial development project with an understanding of what you can control versus what is out of your control is important to avoiding any surprises. Variables such as weather can catch managers off guard if not considered realistically. Plan to account for these variable disruptions to plan and guard against them as best you can. One way to do so is by garnering commitments early from every partner in the process. Building clauses into contracts, policies, and procedures will also help hedge against the unforeseen.

Communication Is Key

As with any endeavor in life, success is dependent on communication and how relationships are managed. Creating a plan to keep everyone well informed so that all partners can prepare and respond adequately is a balancing act in and of itself. Overburdening the wrong people with the wrong information may cause partners to ignore all your communication in general.

The many individuals who are part of the process may span several different ethnicities and cultures. These differences must come into consideration when drafting effective communication. Language barriers and varied interpretations make choosing words another important task.

It is also important to remember that developing quality relationships with contractors and other professionals should be a high priority. Your reputation and the ability to procure partners for future projects is at stake. Equity comes in more forms than just monetarily and you never know when a situation will require you to make a withdrawal.

Finally, when managing large commercial development projects, effective risk management is vital to the success of the project. Analyzing all the opportunities for technology to fail, for permits to be denied, approval of regulatory ordinances, and push back from local agencies are just a handful of the risks to be considered and mitigated in any project.

One of the most valuable steps to managing large commercial development projects is consulting with those who have already proven successful like Hooman Nissani. Hooman is a commercial developer in the Greater Los Angeles area, including places like Culver City and Long Beach. Use this online contact form to request more information on managing large commercial development projects.

Read more:

https://therealdeal.com/la/2016/06/16/hooman-nissani-buys-8-5-acres-in-playa-vista-for-83m-plans-massive-mixed-use-project/ https://therealdeal.com/la/2017/11/30/hooman-nissani-drops-24m-on-playa-vista-property-next-to-planned-site-of-his-massive-mixed-use-project/ https://www.autonews.com/awards/2012-40u40-hooman-nissani

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Where to locate the Best Trench SafetyGuards with regard to Sale | Major Quality Trench Safety Products

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Where to locate the Best Trench Cages for Purchase | Each Light weight aluminum and Steel

Are a person seeking out trench boxes sale made of good quality and cost-effective? Well, we still have the finest options for one to discover your needs. We supply fresh trench shoring boxes in the market that happen to be monetarily priced enabling you to help help you save money and moment, a extra benefits for anyone. Moreover, we provide affordable shipping rates and we are flexible to ship this trench boxes everywhere in spite of your location. With us, you’re guaranteed of high quality trench cardboard boxes that’ll work you well and ensure your current success in your making project. We also make funding obtainable for an individual. Exactly what are These Trench cages Trench shields refer for you to manufactured structures which usually are made of steel that may be constructed to shield power employees when doing their particular work opportunities during an excavation. All of our business constructs each box with different sidewalls so that their very own thicknesses vary. This generates a good assortment for you for you to pick from because you will be not restricted to several special kind of detail. All these boxes are after that kept apart by this utilization of steel spreaders which are adjustable and able to interchange these people when the demand comes up according to the needs of the particular trench that you are working. This particular steel shoring method is usually, therefore substantially considerably more secure for the utility employees’ safety when in the particular trenches. We recognize that will at cases, the want to get steel trench shields to appear and even therefore we have them in order to you quickly. Many of us make an effort at understanding your requires because that is essential in terms of often the trench that you will be needed to shore. We thus make the steel protects accessible that you ease often the strain of the work. After making a alternative on the specifications you may need, we are happy for you to deliver towards the job web site and in a time schedule that works for you.

Different Trench boxes | Trench shields for Sale Throughout terms of deciding on exactly what trench shoring boxes in order to buy, it really is essential to contemplate the form of task you may be working on together with all the sum of the particular building jobs desired. Furthermore, you are required for you to take a look at the time period the activity may take plus the price of the job. Preserving this specific in mind may well make it possible for someone to choose often the best steel shoring approach that will serve an individual economically according to your demands. Like other building tools, it’s common for your trench boxes to show some wear and if material, several rust. However, in the event that you retail store your trench box within and at a distance from the elements; the box will look far better in addition to last longer. This specific is if the trench shoring cageswasn’t used throughout nor exposed to severe ailments and thus inside good shape. Also can certainly become more affordable than purchasing a good brand new one. Nonetheless, deciding on one of which could provide less than positive shielding, you may just be better off buying a new 1. Concluding Thought processes In terms of buying trench shoring boxes, it is essential that you be receptive to picking one of which has warped form and even will not serve you effectively. As you get ready to purchase 1, a person need to figure outside the amount of funds you might have together with typically the type of building task. With this in brain, think of us to offer you a quality trench container.

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Online Work Details

With the many outsourcing companies or companies searching for online help, many online jobs are currently readily available over the internet. how to make extra money from home If you are having negative thoughts concerning working online, then this article will inform you regarding the many benefits that can be originated from having an online work and doing it at the comfort of your personal home. Even if you are a typical person, you can locate your area in the online business world for as long as you have the ideal mindset, drive and interest. If you can read, write and comprehend guideline in English as well as have a skill as well as ready to discover a few other skills, you can be able to select from the many different options available at the internet. Lots of online companies need web designers, information entrance persons, customer assistance, transcriptionist, developers, write-up authors, blog owners, SEO, affiliate online marketers and so a lot more. You can even find somebody that could become your service partner as you hang out in social discussion forums or sites. There are lots of chances actually for any kind of workplace jobs can currently be done via the net with using programs, applications or software program. Other jobs that you can do through the web are research job, digital assistant, management or technical support and also any other conceivable assistance there is to use an online local business owner in his procedures. Supplying online jobs supplies a way for these business to conserve money from purchasing office supplies, leasing office or even spending for the above expense of their business. This is additionally useful for online workers given that they could watch their families while working at house, they will certainly have savings from transport or fuel expenditure and even from getting business clothes. They can select whether to operate in pajamas or tee shirts and also could work anytime at their ease. If you don't intend to be a worker, you could market stuff using the internet. You could sell your personal product or end up being an affiliate online marketer of a product owner or programmer. The choice depends on you. If you have enough indicates, you could also establish an online organisation as well as provide online jobs to others. If you are thinking about finding an online job, aim to research first if this type of work is for you. If you favor to work online, your social life will be restricted however you could interact basically obviously. The work could be requiring at times particularly when you have a due date to defeat. You need to have the right skills in order to have an effective online profession. Because you will be working alone, you should be independent and so, it is often a lonely task. Do you love the silent? Are you the homey kind, then this job could be great for you. The best prospects for having an online task are those with handicaps or parents having small kids or practically any person that does not want the setting at the regular workplace. If you don't such as office national politics or the 8 to 5 hr task, you can try having an online work. Just like other work, in order to become productive, you need to concentrate your power to your job. You have to get made use of to taking a seat for lengthy hours in front of the computer simply to finish a task or job. Remember to have a balanced time for job, rest, leisure and workout. Online jobs can become addicting and can deprive you of some of the essential things in life. Working at home will certainly not make you great deals of cash in the beginning. It will take at some time prior to you can learn the profession and get accustomed to the nature of online jobs. You may commit great deals of errors as well as encounter difficulties particularly when you are brand-new to the job. Simply love exactly what you do and also in time, you will gain success in it. Having an online job is not a get rich fast scheme job. It requires devotion, initiative as well as time in order to understand your work or craft. If you are an author, you have to do added research to become better and faster at what you are doing. It would be far better to find out the essentials of computer procedures and also Microsoft workplace and also tools as this will certainly make your job a lot less complicated. Functioning online is not as hard as just what other people may believe. For as long as you have the minimum abilities need like typing, computer understanding, English proficiency, as well as has a great working computer system plus a trustworthy web connection, you could become an online employee. Some companies supply trainings so all you require is the readiness to learn to do the job. Change may be tough at first however as you learn the routine, you will certainly appreciate doing your job from house. Just work hard, do not give up and also constantly learn ... for the more skillful and well rounded individual you are, the extra monetarily effective you will certainly be.

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Acquire Rich Quick Some Crazy However Legal Ways In order to get Wealthy Prompt!

Have you ever thought about why rich folks seem to be to get wealthier easily while those in the poverty pattern seem to be destined to become adhered there for good? If that's what you are actually presuming, it is going to ready to mention that although wealthy and also prosperous exist almost everywhere but not all recognize how you can showcase that the means Arabs do. Coming from the absolute most extravagant 7 star lodging on earth, to one of the most pricey houses and autos; the people from Dubai certain understand effective ways to spend lavishly. Right now I want to inform you just how I put this whole home based business body with each other and why this's visiting be even less complicated for you compared to this was for me. I recognize you could think that avoiding in advance, yet you'll be actually injuring on your own if you do. This device needs to know in the particular purchase through which that was actually composed for that to create ideal sense. As well as our company will not be utilizing a male like Secretary Kerry that possesses completely no concept of settlement, that's creating a laughable and dreadful offer, which's just being actually used along as they produce tools at the moment, and afterwards enters into a bicycle ethnicity at 72 years of ages, as well as falls and damages his lower leg. If you have any sort of questions regarding where and just how to make use of mountains in scotland skiing (podeseviver2017.info), you could call us at our own web page. If you occur to possess an ice cream machine, you may produce gelato along with kool aid and jello, which tastes wonderful as well as helps make a revitalizing treat on summery summer nights. Rich Papa, Poor Papa pointedly asserts that to create the shift to financial freedom our company need to spend our own selves to begin with. That would certainly not make a person fall in love with you or even create him devote to you, either. Newsflash ...(!) fraternize rich friends as well as conformity will definitely pull you up as opposed to preserve status. I am pleased to create ₤ 32 in the 1st week although I simply make 50p in week two. If it was actually uncomplicated individuals would certainly be executing it, receiving rich rapid is actually not a thing to acquire. Yet your disadvantage is actually always infinite because acquiring fired or even set off can create your earnings go away overnight-and with it the sizable expenditures you've made eventually, reparation, devotion, as well as effort. This needs aggregated incomes and opportunity to make your acquire the odds to become self-governing and monetarily abundant. Cabbage reddish peppers, yellow veggies and fruits are actually rich resources from vitamin An as well as C, asparagus is actually not just used to enhance sex drive but additionally operates effectively for enhancing sperm mobility, other sources from vitamin C are actually snowfall peas, prepared tomatoes as well as strawberries which excellent food for raising semen count. Regardless of whether you never make money using this system, just the mentoring and video recording tutoring alone is worth much more that exactly what you spend for the unit. The rich physical exercise each day, they moderate their intake from prepackaged food, they consume booze in moderation, they prevent convenience food dining establishments, they floss daily as well as the majority of don't smoke cigarettes. With all of the hucksters that are selling pricey programs about the best ways to get homes with no cash down that greats for individuals to find that they can easily buy residential or commercial properties for expenditure without this appearing like some type of receive rich fast system. Create your own homemade natural yogurt to guarantee you acquire the greatest feasible food for your loved ones. Take note that the scandalous foods that are actually rich in fiber like burrito along with dark beans, wild rice and also vegetables with chili and also very hot peppers could avoid irregularity. Being actually rich in vitamin A makes this useful for well-balanced eyes, besides the growth as well as development from bone tissues and also the strengthening from the body immune system. A fast equipped letter does certainly not give sufficient opportunity ahead up with rich as well as well considered web content. There is actually something wrong along with you if you cannot make a good offer along with a politician. Organisations are actually great because the quickest means to make funds is actually to make use of take advantage of, as well as in organisations you could make use of a lot of make use of. Everyday I had a brand-new Online marketing thought that was visiting make me abundant, after that the next book got there as well as I was out on something brand new. He found out there was an astounding distinction in between the practices from the affluent and also the poor. If you possess some knowledge along with advertising then you could definitely become rich marketing stuff online. His lucky history allowed him to create amount of money off cash; certainly not exactly high on the pecking order from middle-class values. Must this be interrupted for any sort of cause, do not beat your own self up, or even make on your own negative and wrong. Like every business or trade there are actually those that will do or state just about anything to earn the significant dollar. You can easily produce a site or even blog post regarding exactly what you like, your interest, adventures, understanding, hobby or even activities. If you wish to finish your monetary battles, you need to examine each from your partnerships and also figure out if they are actually a Rich Partnership (along with someone that can easily assist you up) or a Hardship Partnership (with an individual holding you back). Although there are actually dozens of on the web projects for extra revenue but today I am actually visiting review 6 such on the web projects that can easily make you abundant in the year 2017. Mr. Take pride in is giving every little thing to earn themself abundant when he sees a person concern that which he sacrifices his lifestyle for, he understandably becomes defensive (a lot the method a theological activist carries out when you examine his religious beliefs). Student loan settlement schedules are actually one more element of point to consider when determining how soon or even if you are going to become rich along with your degree as well as license. Likewise the normal bank teller wage is actually two times the base pay so I aren't sure exactly what she's referring to, I'm functioning lowest." Most youngsters I understand that are actually not fiscally dumb when they don't make a lot cash split rent along with many people. The range of classification grew off people to cover whole entire nations (wealthy nation vs. bad nation). The wealthy concentrate on coming to be specialists in one thing, one niche, and as a result they are from even more worth to society and could control additional amount of money. But if our company are going to make our immigration device work, then we have to be readied to talk honestly and without worry about these delicate and significant problems. If you require amount of money to pay your costs you could state, God, your Word states in 2 Corinthians 8:9 that by hardship from Jesus I can be rich. Any part from expertise serves and could make you a prosperous net marketing professional. Spent family leave won't just make lifestyle simpler for Mother and fathers - that will certainly also always keep trained, proficient Americans in the labor force and grow our economic condition. Simply puts, a wealthy individual will certainly constantly be rich, whereas an individual which is actually simply affluent will simply be so for a quick time frame up until the cash is gone. The degree to which you are actually best or even inappropriate are going to determine how much loan you drop or produce. However, I complied with the abundant pom information word for word - one step at a time - this gent knows what he is carrying out and there is actually no reason I need to not remain to create a growing number of funds each week. The Smokebot's target is actually to create your smoking experience as near the actual point as possible, the Smokebot transcends in everyway, off a life-like feeling to cigarette smoking without the unsafe impacts of tar, health hazards, and carbon monoxide. Effectively created short articles which are actually keyword abundant may additionally create additional site visitors through internet search engine outcomes.

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Obtain Rich With Little Job? Right here's How

You have actually heard all the warnings prior to. There's no such thing as get rich quick. If it appears too great to be real, it most likely is. If there's an organisation that needs no work, I haven't found it.If you typically aren't really curious, do not assume extremely hard, as well as try your best not to look around you, it's rather simple to accept those little bits of standard wisdom as truth. Real Estate You'll hear federal government handouts tout them (considering that when did job federal government people understand anything concerning obtaining rich). You'll hear media people advise you to steer clear of (and in instance you neglected, media people have spent their lives as business workers).I sometimes think the only factor they inform us we can't get rich is they want us all to keep functioning our tasks at low pay! However sufficient of that.It's very easy to see people around you who are doing EFFECTIVELY monetarily, not working as well hard at it, and appreciating life significantly:- The capitalist who keeps putting loan in supplies as well as soon has numerous hundreds of bucks in the financial institution.- The person that purchases houses, fixes them up, leases them out, after that sells them at a huge profit.- The person that progressively begins numerous small businesses, using the benefit from one to fund an additional and also hiring people to run them.- The lady or guy that joins a Network Marketing chance, after that builds up their organization and makes thousands per month doing hardly any job-- permanently.Assume momentarily, and almost everyone analysis this post knows one or more individuals similar to this. They're gaining, or will certainly quickly gain, EVEN MORE money than they would certainly working a task. Numerous typically aren't functioning any harder compared to they would in a task. And also ALL of them are having the time of their lives.But exactly how am I getting the cash money and also time I have to begin my very own organisation venture, you ask. Nowadays you do not require a bankroll OR a lot of time to do well. You definitely do not have to quit your job. You could easily run your organisation in your leisure, even if you have HARDLY ANY spare time.The huge variety of individuals who intend to have their very own home-based service have actually made it feasible for companies to grow up, all designed with one purpose in mind-- to earn it EASY for anyone to go into service.Access charges are typically quite reduced. For MUCH much less compared to you would certainly spend for a workplace, staff, and also tools, you could have your personal high- end internet site, automated prospecting system, as well as a professional group of sales people who bring home the consumers for you.That last attribute is exactly what interests me most! Many people running a home-based company just despise to sell. Actually, that's the something that keeps them from earning money. Having a professional team of sales people helping you could resolve this trouble, given that they talk with potential customers as well as market them on your products and services PRIOR TO sending them your method.Since a great deal of local business are using their service, your expense to have the sales team benefit you is fairly economical. So quit putting off owning your personal home-based company. Do not let any person tell you that you can not do it. All the devices, concepts, as well as systems are already in place making you a HUGE success.

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Obtain Rich With Little Job? Right here's Exactly how

You've listened to all the warnings prior to. There's no such point as obtain abundant fast. If it seems too good to be real, it possibly is. If there's a service that requires no work, I have not discovered it.If you aren't really interested, do not assume very hard, as well as try your ideal not to look around you, it's rather simple to approve those littles conventional knowledge as truth.You'll hear federal government pamphlets proclaim them (since when did career government individuals know anything concerning getting rich). You'll hear media individuals warn you to steer clear of (as well as in instance you neglected, media individuals have spent their lives as company employees).I sometimes believe the only factor they tell us we cannot obtain abundant is they desire us all to maintain functioning our works at reduced pay! Yet sufficient of that.It's very easy to see people around you that are doing EFFECTIVELY monetarily, not working as well hard at it, as well as appreciating life significantly:- The investor that maintains putting loan in supplies as well as quickly has thousands of thousands of dollars in the bank.- The individual that buys houses, repairs them up, leases them out, then sells them at a large revenue.- The person that progressively begins numerous small companies, utilizing the benefit from one to fund one more and employing individuals to run them.- The woman or man who signs up with an Internet marketing opportunity, then builds up their company and makes thousands per month doing little work-- for life.Assume momentarily, and also just about everybody analysis this article knows one or more people similar to this. They're earning, or will soon make, EVEN MORE cash compared to they would working a work. Numerous typically aren't functioning any type of tougher than they would certainly in a task. As well as ALL of them are having the moment of their lives. chicago However exactly how am I getting the cash money and time I need to begin my own company venture, you ask. These days you don't need a bankroll OR a great deal of time to do well. You absolutely do not need to quit your job. You can quickly run your company in your leisure, even if you have HARDLY ANY extra time.The vast number of people that intend to possess their own home-based organisation have made it possible for organizations to sprout up, all designed with one function in mind-- making it EASY for anybody to enter into service.Entry costs are frequently rather reduced. For MUCH much less than you would certainly spend for a workplace, personnel, and tools, you could have your very own high- end website, automated prospecting system, as well as an expert group of sales people that earn the consumers for you.That last attribute is just what rate of interests me most! Many individuals running a home-based company just dislike to offer. In fact, that's the one point that maintains them from generating income. Having an expert group of sales people helping you could address this trouble, considering that they chat with potential customers and sell them on your products and services BEFORE sending them your way.Due to the fact that a great deal of local business are utilizing their solution, your price to have the sales group benefit you is quite affordable. So stop avoiding owning your own home-based organisation. Don't allow anyone tell you that you can't do it. All the tools, ideas, and also systems are currently in place to earn you a HUGE success.