Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host Roberta.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review.

Now not only do we discuss communication skills on this podcast, but we also focus on leadership and how collaboration will always trump competition.

My guest today hailing all the way from Australia down under, Peter Anthony from Peter Anthony Consulting.

He is a leadership coach based in Sydney.

He has worked in 12 countries and he has conducted over thousands of collaboration workshops.

He's here to talk to us today about how the type of conversations you have can literally change both your professional and your business life.

And before I go any further, please help me to welcome him to the show.

Hi, Peter.

G'day, folks from Sydney, Australia.

Welcome to you all the way from Chicago.

Glad to have you on the show.

I've worked in Chicago, Roberta.

When I was there, it was extremely cold.

Which it is now, actually.

I worked with two companies there.

One was SC.

Johnson, the second was Wrigley in Chicago.

I was there in winter, which is our summer, and I've never experienced anything so cold.

You don't have the best timing when it comes to being weather to come here, for sure.

So Peter, welcome and tell us a little bit about yourself.

As you mentioned, Roberta, I'm a professional coach.

I've worked in 12 countries over a long period of time, run thousands of workshops on collaboration, as you can probably tell, and I've told you already.

I'm from Sydney, Australia.

I love where I work and love where I live.

And one thing I did this morning, which I do most mornings, was I jump into the ocean and swim with my friends for a couple of k's each morning.

It's the best way to wake up at about 6 a.m., dive into the ocean.

Hopefully it's around dawn time.

You see the sun rising over the ocean, you get some exercise, you get to be in nature, and you get to hang out with your friends.

So it's the best way to start the day.

If anyone knows Manly Beach, we swim from the southern end of Manly Beach straight out through the surf and we turn right to Shelley Beach.

We stop there, then we swim back again.

It's called the Bold and Beautiful Swim Club.

They should turn it into a soap opera.

It was named by the lady that started it because she loved the Bold and Beautiful Surf Series and she started it about 11 years ago.

Now it's got close to 8,000 members.

We've had friends from America join us.

Often when people visit Manly, they like to have a swim.

They join our squad.

Wow.

It sounds really fun.

If you ever get down to Manly, Roberta, you're welcome to join us for a swim.

I hail from Durban, which is on the Indian Ocean of South Africa.

So I grew up around the ocean.

Yes.

Lots of South Africans in Australia.

Lots of them here.

I feel like you guys are our second home kind of thing.

A lot of South Africans, if they move countries, it's most likely going to be the UK or Australia.

That's true.

I think it's just a direct East flight.

A lot of South Africans in Perth and a lot in in Sydney too, which is terrific.

We actually swim with a couple.

There's two in my group.

There's a South African and Zimbabwe.

So tell us a little bit about how you got into leadership coaching.

I began my career in advertising and spent a dozen or so years making big brand ads.

And I wanted to work more closely in leadership and sales leadership in particular.

I transitioned into consulting and I found that what we were teaching then and the firm that I was working for then was teaching traditional selling.

And what I found was two really surprising things.

One was that the more I tried to sell, the less I sold.

And when I was in workshops teaching people these influencing and sales skills, they just didn't resonate.

They didn't work and they didn't work for me and for them for a couple of reasons.

One was that when people feel like you're selling to them, they get into a buyer mode.

And when they're in a buyer mode, they tend to get cynical.

They tend to distance themselves in terms of relationship from you.

And they put downward pressure on fees and prices.

So it just wasn't working.

And this was my living.

That began me on a journey of understanding, well, if selling doesn't work, what does?

I went back to university, got a master's in communication to study this more closely, and looked at some collaboration strategies from around the world.

People like Rachel Butzman, who predicted the rise of Uber and Airbnb in the collaborative economy, and looked at collaboration from a cultural point of view, and sort of organizations that were most constructive, collaborative in their cultures were the ones that were most successful and had the most profitable growth.

And then I thought, can we translate this at the conversation level?

Would collaboration translate down to a conversation, as opposed to just a strategy?

Because at the end of the day, your strategy gets executed through the conversations that you have.

So I began developing what is now what I call Collaborative Abra, which rhymes with abracadabra or the magic of a collaborative conversation.

And over a period of time, I developed these six moments that matter.

I was teaching it in workshops live, so I knew what was working and what wasn't with participants that I had.

And fortunately, it worked really well.

We always say we like buying, but we don't want to be sold to it.

Yes, yes, yes.

So how do we get around that?

Because yes, we want to buy.

So why are we giving you, the salesperson, such a hard time?

Because eventually we do want to buy.

I think what we want is we want to buy in a relationship.

I've seen a lot of research on how customers feel, because one of the things I do when I'm working with an organization is to research what customers are looking for, what an ideal relationship looks like at the customer level.

When you look at what customers are looking for from organizations, the number one thing they're after is a unique understanding of my needs and my environment, so uniquely understand me.

And if you look at a leadership conversation, it's no different than a conversation having any other relationship.

One of your compatriots in Washington State University, John Gottman, looked at this very closely in romantic relationships, and he found that he could predict the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in terms of a relationship just based on videoing a conversation between a couple.

So the quality of the relationship was the quality of the conversations, and that's the same in a commercial relationship or a leadership relationship.

It's not about being sold to.

It's about uniquely understanding someone's needs and their environment, which is what they're looking for, and leave them better off as a result of the relationship or conversation with you.

Because what I've found is a relationship is simply a series of conversations.

It might start with nothing.

It can build into something quite spectacular.

Leaders in particular need to think about this because leadership is a journey.

It's not something that you do in a week or a month or even a year.

It's a lifelong journey.

And you want to develop those relationships.

And the way that you do that is by giving people collaborative outcomes, you achieving what you want, them achieving what they want.

And then that collaborative conversation feeds up into a more collaborative, constructive culture.

Is that the reason you call marketing professionals CEOs, which is Chief Emotions Officers?

That's right.

They're in charge of the emotion.

They're in charge of the emotion of the brand or the emotion of the relationship between the organization and the consumers.

Whether it's a business to business relationship or a business to consumer relationship, a brand is simply a manifestation of how the buyers want to feel.

And the more relevant that brand is, the more the consumers are willing to pay for what you're selling to them.

I've worked with a lot of big consumer goods organizations.

And one of the biggest I worked with was a maker of tissue products like facial tissues.

And they made high branded tissues.

And they also made like the no label cheap and cheerful tissues, same box, same tissues, same prints, same scent, made in the same factory from the same trees.

But if it's branded in a relevant way, consumers willing to pay a lot more.

And that's what I learned from my years of advertising, to look at building brands in a way that was relevant to the consumer, that made them sticky, if you like.

So they kept purchasing and they're willing to pay a premium for that brand experience.

Now, leadership and communication and conversation is no different.

If I have a close relationship with somebody, that's of value to me.

And I want to invest in that because they're investing in me too.

It's a very similar sort of strategy that we're after.

I can't stress that strongly enough that leaders are collaborators.

That is true.

We always emphasize leadership, the higher you go, the less the technical work you learned at university and more the relationships, the collaborations, the communication skills, the soft skills.

Can you just share with us your experience on that?

Absolutely.

One of the things I look at very closely, Roberta, is psychometrics.

If I'm working with a leader, I like to do a psychometric profile of them.

The model I use comes from an organization called Lumina Learning.

We look at, say, for example, polarities like outcome focus and people focus.

Often leaders, when they're young, they're more outcome focused.

They're more about getting an outcome, like getting a sales outcome, getting a business outcome, getting a share price, whatever it might be, particularly young entrepreneurs.

However, as they develop through their careers, they get a lot more people focused.

I thought about dropping the outcome focus.

It's about being outcome focused and people focused.

And by people focused, I'm talking about things like traits like collaboration, empathy and intimacy.

Intimacy is the one-on-one relationships you get from conversations.

Collaboration is obviously your ability to work with individuals and teams to create a better outcome than the people could by themselves.

And empathy is about demonstrating that you understand how people feel, not just feeling how they feel or knowing how they feel, but demonstrating that.

And when a leader can demonstrate that two people or people feel like, hey, she understands me or he understands me, that creates a more an environment of authentic trust.

And that's what you can build an organization around, because you can attract high quality people and keep them and grow them with you.

And they certainly grow if you give them that room of first you have the relationship, and also they will thrive and you bring the best out of them.

If you have that relationship.

So the outcomes, like you said, are actually going to be better.

Exactly, exactly.

And all the good research on teams, Roberta, as I'm sure you've seen, from people like James Sturecki and the Wisdom of Crowds and many other studies since then, what they've found is that a well formed diverse team makes a smarter decision than its smartest member.

So again, it echoes that collaboration idea.

So diversity isn't just good ethically.

It's also just good business sense to get a diverse team together and help them collaborate in a way that makes them achieve better outcomes than they could by themselves.

That's the essence of profitable growth.

If you have just your perspective, that's just one perspective, but you have more.

It's going to broaden the perspective and you're going to create the custom experience in a much better, bigger way rather than just the one perspective.

Exactly.

I was back in the UK again working in June of this year, and one of my colleagues showed me some research of publicly listed organizations in the UK.

And I compared the share price or equity growth over a decade, and they compared it or correlated that with how diverse the board was.

And the interesting correlation was the more diverse the board was, the more they had more equity growth that organization experienced.

So it's good business sense to have multiple perspectives in how decisions made, which is more about team collaboration than about one on one collaboration.

It's the same idea.

So let's talk about Collabradabra, the magic of collaboration.

I love that.

It always makes me laugh.

I think Abracadabra, Collabradabra.

The idea came, I was working on collaboration for many years.

I was thinking, I kept thinking, there's real, when you get this magic to it, it's like listening to people talking about how they wrote songs.

There's like a magic you hear, that's the song, that's the lyric, that's the combination of notes and chords I need to make this really harmonious.

I thought that's the same with conversations.

And we know when it feels right, and only you know how it feels, I can't see how you feel.

When it feels right, you think, yeah, there's a magic about this.

I thought magic Abracadabra, Collabradabra.

That became the name of the approach, if you like.

And the approach I developed has three intentions, if you like, or three mindsets to it, and six moments that matter in that conversation.

It's important to be thinking about these things, particularly now because Apple have been researching telephone calls, because originally a phone was about calling people, right?

Now, it's like less than 10% of the time people spend on their phones is making calls.

It's been falling consistently since 2006.

I think it's crazy to call it a phone.

Do people even do that anymore?

They don't call each other.

They found the number of calls has fallen.

And also the length of the conversations is shortening.

So you have less calls, they're shorter.

And the peer research out of the US just recently suggested that we've never been less likely to change our minds as a result of a conversation.

We've never been more polarized in how we think and how we feel, what we believe.

That's really concerning to me because I think that's one of the reasons there's been a correlated rise in like anxiety and depression, sadness and introversion right across the world.

And the fights you witness on social media, all these strangers being keyboard warriors.

We don't know how to have conversations anymore.

No, we don't.

We think we are.

We think we're having conversations because we're texting people or on Snapchat or on Facebook, whatever your favorite platform is.

And texting isn't a conversation.

But what I guess is also concerning is that if you're on a social media platform like say TikTok or any social media platform, what the algorithm does is it feeds you back what you already know and like.

So all it's really doing is reinforcing your biases.

Like say, for example, I'm a surfer and an ocean swimmer.

So if I'm on TikTok, all I'm going to get is ocean swimming and surfing.

I think, wow, TikTok is full of ocean swimming and surfing.

I've got three daughters.

If I look at their TikTok, their TikTok is very different.

They're both of my TikTok.

It's just reinforcing the point of view.

I'm sure.

And I hope it is.

And it's concerning.

I get concerned because I think it's not making us happier as individuals, and it's also making us less effective as business leaders and potential leaders, because we haven't got the skills required to build the collaborative culture required to get the great business results that we're looking for.

That's right.

And also, like you said, so you get stuck in your beliefs and it reinforces it.

The other thing that happens is then you don't know how to open up your mind to a new idea and how to be open to the fact that your idea might need tweaking or even a complete new perspective.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And that's one of the reasons I like listening to a diverse range of podcasts, because I hear different things, different perspectives on the world.

And I attempt to practice what I preach to hear different things, different perspectives and hear their point of view and try to understand it, because it opens up my mind and it's the only way to live.

And speaking of different points of view, talking about leadership, since we both in leadership coaching, we are now in a situation where you have global teams in different parts of the world.

There's different cultures in the same team.

So as a leader, how do you become sensitive to these different cultures and embracing them and making the other team members feel like they're part of the team, while also keeping the company work culture intact?

Yes, that's a great question.

It's like the muddy question of culture.

You and I just talked before we started the podcast, Roberta, about working in different countries and different cultures, and we've both done that.

And my experience has been that it creates another level of complexity because the people that you're working with are applying a different lens to the same environment.

One example I'll give you is that I've done a lot of work in Asia.

Clearly, Australia is almost in the middle of Asia.

It's the first place we get to work-wise.

So places like China, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, India, they're all very different cultures of and by themselves.

And one interesting thing I found when I first started working in China was I thought, wow, these people are so introverted.

They just don't speak up.

They don't give an opinion.

What I realized, though, was they were just waiting to feel enough trust to open up.

And when they opened up, they were extremely extroverted.

But they started off introverted.

When they feel safe.

They feel safe when they're introverted.

And I get that.

I get that completely.

I'd run workshops like in Beijing and Shanghai.

And I'd start the workshop in what I thought was an engaging way.

And all I saw was like eight stone faces looking back at me thinking, wow, this is not great.

But what I found was by the end of the day, they were friendly, they were chatty, they were engaging.

We had dinner that night.

They told great stories.

This is really curious.

Other cultures I go to, it's a lot more open, a lot more quickly.

Like if I go to a culture, if I work in, say, Los Angeles, or I work in Texas, like in Austin or Dallas, you know, a lot more open, a lot more quickly.

But that's a different level of culture.

As a leader, it's about recognizing those different types of cultures and finding a way to engage them all, which gets back to that idea of that wisdom of the crowd.

If you can do that, I mean, why bother doing that?

Because you're going to get a smarter decision.

Not just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do as well.

Yes.

So the six key moments from the book, six moments that matter.

So you think about a conversation, you think, okay, well, why am I so hard on conversations?

Well, because it is the essence of a relationship, as I mentioned earlier.

The six moments that matter.

The first moment is before the conversation takes place.

When you make a decision about or you reflect about what's going to be different at the end of this conversation for both of us.

So you're looking at setting a goal or an outcome for the conversation, not your outcome, our outcome, something that's good for both of us.

And you're looking at changing either how someone's thinking, like changing their thinking, like educating them or introducing them to a new way of thinking about something.

You're changing what they're doing, like changing their behavior in some way.

If you're a leader, you might want to implement a new CRM system or a new procedure in the organization.

Or importantly, we often forget is changing how they feel.

Like helping them feel more comfortable or more confident in your leadership.

Because in this case, you're thinking, well, leadership is really about generating followership.

You can't command people to follow you.

I guess if you're the CEO, you could just say, follow me or you're out.

There's no paycheck for you.

Yeah, there's no paycheck for you.

You're out.

That's not going to last a long time.

So the first one is setting a goal.

Thinking about, okay, this is every conversation you have.

Even when I visited my mom, she's passed away now.

I remember I used to visit her quite regularly on every Saturday morning.

Go for a surf, have a swim, visit my mom.

And I used to think before I saw her, I thought, wow, how can I make her feel treasured in the time that I have with her?

So that at least she can feel like really, really treasured.

And how much can I thank her for the way that she raised me and what a great mom she was for me?

It can be personal.

It can be the same in a romantic relationship, like taking my wife away for a holiday in January.

I'm thinking, how can I make her feel like a really treasured wife?

How can I make her feel loved during this time away?

You think like that and there's the acting differently because you're changing what the goal is.

In a business sense, it's exactly the same.

How can I change how this person is thinking, feeling or what they're doing that leaves us both better off?

That's moment number one before the conversation takes place.

So you just killed all of us women's goal of winning the argument.

Kidding, number two.

Sorry, go ahead.

Well, I live in a family of three daughters, two sons and a wife.

I get a lot of female feedback.

Let's put it that way.

Good luck.

I get lots of advice.

Every night at dinner, I get advice.

Every morning, I get advice.

It's great.

Collaborating.

Collaborating.

Attempting to.

It's a very cool.

I love it.

I love them.

A cool household to be hanging out in.

Yes, that's wonderful.

That's number one.

Number two is relating.

And this is where you're doing two things when you're relating.

This is about saying, first one is you're getting present or mindful, which I'm sure your listeners are aware of, getting very present and very mindful.

And once you're present, you give the gift of your presence to the person that you're with.

And the way that I think about this is you listen until you disappear.

So you completely disappear and you give them your full attention.

And this is extremely rare.

When we do this in workshops, people feel uncomfortable with it.

It's unusual to feel like someone's giving you their full attention.

But the rapport builds automatically.

I mean, there's a lot of old school thinking about rapport when you adjust your style to suit theirs and deliberately match them to the rhythm or stuff.

What happens is that if you give them your attention and give them your presence, subconsciously, you'll automatically begin adjusting to suit their style.

And they'll feel comfortable.

And what you'll find is that when you're willing and able to give your attention to them, they're more willing and able to potentially change their point of view or change how they feel for you.

But you've got to go first.

You can't expect them to go first.

They feel like they're there.

They feel like they're being listened to.

And if you get back to that original thought we talked about a couple of minutes ago, when people are saying, or from leaders and from organizations, I want someone who uniquely understands my needs and my environment.

That's when the understanding starts is when you first meet them.

Then you'll adjust to suit their style.

Some people, some senior clients I meet, they get straight to business.

Click, click, click.

Others want a bit more personal rapport first.

You work with whatever is going to work best for them.

That's moment two.

Moment number three is to take the lead.

This is not leading in a dominant way, but as a leader in a conversation or leader in an organization, you need to give the conversation some structure.

You're doing that by answering four primary questions.

Why is the conversation taking place?

From their perspective and from a joint perspective, what outcome are we looking for together?

What's the best way or how do we go about achieving that in the time we have together in this conversation?

Finally, so what's next?

How does the result of this conversation fit into an overall relationship?

It's not like just a one-off.

You're building a commitment curve.

You're constantly building commitment and building relationship with each conversation that you have.

If I was meeting with you, Roberta, like for this podcast, I might say, well, good day, Roberta.

Great to meet you.

The reason we're getting together is to create a high-quality podcast for listeners and give them some value.

How I thought we could do that is you can ask me some questions.

I'll give you the best answers I can.

We can create some value for listeners so that after our conversation, we can both feel happy that we've done a great job and people have got some value from the experience of listening to us.

It takes about a minute.

It just sets up the conversation.

It's not about me or you.

It's about us creating something of value.

And ideally, a pro-social outcome so other people are better off, as result of us having this conversation or this relationship.

That's moment three.

Does that make sense?

It certainly does.

The first one was the goal.

This one is saying, how do we get to number one?

How do we get to the goal?

Yeah.

And it's not telling.

It's just suggesting.

And ideally, very likely, you might have an exchange of emails or exchange of notes before the conversation takes place.

It's really a completely cold conversation or something.

That's possible.

So you might have done some of this in setting up the conversation to begin with.

And if you want to attract a better, more effective leadership and more senior people to talk to, give them a bigger why.

That's what Simon Sinek so famously said, start with the why.

Give them a big reason why the conversation is taking place from their perspective and from yours.

That's moment three.

Number four.

Number four is my favorite, understanding them.

And I'm taking, I'm borrowing an idea here from Stephen Covey in his Seven Habits of Hardly Affected People, when he said, seek first to understand before seeking to be understood.

So you need to understand how they're thinking, not globally, but everything in their life.

But understand how they're thinking about the topic you're discussing in that conversation, no matter what it might be.

It could be you're changing a board member, looking to employ a new sales director or HR director, anything at all in that conversation.

I think this person has either conscious or subconscious decision making criteria they're using to make that decision.

Now, if you're going to influence that decision or attempt to create a decision together, you need to understand how they're thinking about that already.

And there's four different parts of this.

You want to understand what their decision making values are, like what's important to them.

Like you might say, Hey Roberta, I was selling you a car.

I might say, Hey Roberta, what's most important to you in buying a car?

Reliability, safe, doesn't chow gas too much because it's expensive.

It's reliable, it's safe, and it's not too expensive.

Economically, yeah.

Economically, yeah, fantastic, okay.

I might say then, Roberta, how would you rank those?

Did you give them to me in order?

Reliability, safety, not too expensive?

Is that like the order you put them in?

Actually, yes, that is number one, two, three.

Because really, I don't want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere just because something is not working.

Yes, I need to get home.

I tell you what, I was in Queensland in Australia working recently, and I won't say who it was, a very large mining organization, and we were driving between mines, and sometimes we were driving for 90 minutes, two hours at a time, on roads that were dead straight with no mobile phone reception and not passing any other cars.

See, what a reliable car you're doing back to breaks.

You don't want to be stuck there, nobody's going to help you.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, AAA, exactly.

You can't call them because there's no mobile phone reception.

Middle of the country.

Okay, so I've got your criteria, I've got what rank there, what order they're in, then I might say, because we know we think neuro linguistically.

So when you say reliable, I've got a definition of reliable in my head that I think that's what reliable means, right?

And I'll assume that you think the same that I think, which is very unlikely, right?

So I asked the third thing I need to understand is, what does that mean?

So I'd say something like, hey, Roberta, when you say reliable, what does reliability mean for you?

What does it mean?

You'd say what?

I don't want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere.

I want to make sure every time I drive this car, I get home safely.

Not going to break down.

And I would do the same for each of those criteria.

I'd ask you what does safe mean.

It's got to mean different things.

For some people, particularly Australians, safety means a big car.

They've been big.

And big is safe, right?

Other people, it's smaller.

Other people, it's European is safe.

Other people, Volvos are safe.

I mean, it can vary, right?

Hugely.

And not too expensive.

Well, that's the money question, is it?

Like, well, what's too expensive for you?

What does that mean?

What does expensive?

Because I'm now getting a feel for how you're thinking money-wise, what's an investment you can afford to make or want to make in a car?

I'd say since it depreciates, guess mileage, things like maintenance and service, it shouldn't cost a fortune.

Yeah.

It doesn't cost a fortune.

And then I'd be like, what's a fortune for you?

I'd be really curious.

See, here it's like you're really curious.

And again, you're still disappearing.

But I'm not attempting to force my criteria onto you.

I'm really curious about your criteria.

And like being like an investigative journalist, I've been very curious and really understand.

And oftentimes people don't know what their criteria are, because we're operating on like an autopilot, if you like.

And we don't always know.

Well, there could have been criteria you had when you bought a car five years ago.

That might have changed now.

I mean, I happened to drive a BMW motor car.

It's like a luxury brand of car.

But one of the main reasons I bought BMW was that when I first started working with senior leaders many years ago, I drove a Mazda, which was a great car.

I love a big family car for lots of kids.

It was pretty handy.

And I parked it in the car park of a CEO.

And he came down, he said, what are you doing driving a Mazda?

I said, that's a great car, very reliable.

He said, look, you can't come and park in executive car parks with a Mazda.

You've got to have a European car.

You've got to get into savings on BMW, right?

That was his thinking.

And one of the main reasons I went BMW was to park in the corporate car spaces with the senior execs that I was coaching.

It looked like I was one of them.

To keep your business intact.

That was high on my criteria.

Now, not many people buy a car for where they're going to park it.

You need to retain your clientele, which is understandable.

Exactly.

You've got to look like them.

You've got to look like you belong in that club, if you like.

My wife laughed when I told her that argument.

She thought it was hilarious.

But I won that one, which is not like me.

But I won that one.

That's why I've got that car.

Then the final part of understanding you will get to is, what do you want to do most to avoid?

What are you most concerned about here?

And you want to get into their fears.

I mean, you want to understand what they don't want and then attempt to make your recommendation not what they don't want, if that's possible.

Now, you package that together, then you're going to make a recommendation, which is moment number five.

Ideally, your recommendation fits with what those values are or it's not.

And it's okay if it's not.

That's quite okay.

There's more than enough recommendations you can make with people that don't agree with them without attempting to force or lie or be dishonest or disingenuous about what you're recommending.

So you're recommending a solution that fits their criteria or you're recommending how they might want to think about changing their criteria.

Because something's new, something's different, you've got special knowledge, you can introduce a different perspective, which may be of value, not to you, but to them.

Then you finally got the final moment, which is the agreeing moment, where you get to agree.

And you make the recommendation, they're going to say yes, no, or maybe.

Yes is a great answer.

No is a better answer.

I love no.

It's not because I like conquering no, but because if it's an honest no, I like that.

Because we're not going to waste each other's time attempting to find something that's not there.

I'm not going to lie to you, don't lie to me.

And too often, I see people pretending to agree when they don't really.

That's worse, actually.

I prefer the no in that instance as well.

Yeah, it's annoying in our business, Roberta, when clients might pretend to agree with you or pretend they're going to proceed, they don't.

I suck.

I'm a big boy.

I'm very comfortable with a no.

That's quite okay.

I'm used to getting no's, so that's quite comfortable.

So you get a yes, you get a no.

You get a maybe, you get a maybe.

You want to use a simple negotiating tool, which is in the book, to help you understand how to translate that maybe into a yes.

That's worth having for both of you.

And that might be just revisiting some of those criteria to see whether we can move them around, like change what the criteria are, change what order they're in, change what they mean, or give you more comfort about what it is that you want to avoid.

And then we've got a conversation that leaves us both better off, even if there's no agreement, that's great.

That won't leave us both better off.

And then we've got an enduring relationship together that filters up through the organization in terms of how we treat each other, how we do things around here.

We collaborate, that's our culture.

And that's the six moments.

Okay, let's say them one by one, all six in one sentence.

So the first one.

Okay, set a goal, relate by disappearing, take the lead, understand, recommend and agree.

There you go.

There's all six.

All the six moments of Rolls off the table, isn't it, Roberta?

And last words of wisdom, before you go, Peter, what would you say?

I'd recommend two things.

The first is I would say, count the number of conversations you have at work in a day, the one-on-one conversation you have in a day, and do that for a week.

And then the following week, increase that number of conversations by one a day.

So if I have like three a day, I'm going to have four.

If I have five a day, I'm going to have six.

And attempt to have the extra conversations that you do have, collaborative ones.

And I can guarantee your life will change.

If you have more conversations, not like a hundred more, a thousand more, just one more a day, one more a day.

And you make those conversations, collaborative conversations, and be deliberately and obviously a collaborator.

What's your life change?

What's your career?

Whatever you do, wherever you do it, what's your career explode?

That would be my recommendation.

Words of wisdom from Peter Anthony, all the way from Australia, author of Collabradabra and a leadership executive coach.

Thank you so much, Peter, for being on our show today.

Where can you find your social media before you go?

You can find me, Peter Anthony Consulting.

You can find me on the web, on YouTube, on Facebook, Peter Anthony Consulting, or just check out Collabradabra.

It's the only Collabradabra in Google.

You'll find me or you'll find the book or you'll find my workshops, or all of the above.

Excellent stuff.

Thank you so much for being on our show today.

Absolute pleasure, guys.

Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review, and we'll be with you next time.