Are you negotiating with a narcissist and you want to know more about leverage?
By the end of this video, you're going to know what leverage is, when to use it, and
how to get it.
Hi, I'm Rebecca Zung, top 1% attorney and the bestselling author of the books Negotiate
Like You M.A.T.T.E.R. and Breaking Free: A Step-By-Step Divorce Guide, and I've helped
thousands of people go from lives of drama, trauma and chaos, to step into lives of freedom,
possibility and purpose, and I do the same thing right here with you in these videos,
so before we go any further, make sure you hit that subscribe button, hit that notification
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Now, let's talk about leverage.
What is it, and how do you get it, and when do you use it?
And when you're dealing with a narcissist, you're going to need it, believe me, because
a narcissist does have a plan, believe it or not, and that plan is to take you down.
It's to smear you, it's to use everything they possibly can against you, everything
you do and say will be used against you, just like as if you were being arrested, but so
much worse.
So, if you don't have leverage as part of your overall strategy, you will be sunk, you're
going to be put to sea in shark-infested waters with no oars to help you and nothing to save
you, you will go down.
You're going to constantly feel like you're on the defensive rather than finally feeling
like you can go on the offensive for a change.
So if you're looking at negotiating with a narcissist, whether it's in a divorce situation,
or a business partner setting, or anything like that, leverage is the one thing that
you are absolutely going to need to have in order to gain an advantage over them.
And the truth of the matter is that even for people who say, "I don't want to fight," and
as a divorce attorney, I've been a divorce attorney for over 20 years, I can tell you
that every single person who comes through the doors of my office says "I don't want
to fight."
Nobody wants to fight, because nobody wants to spend thousands of dollars with the divorce
attorney.
Fighting means spending money if you have an attorney engaged, whether...
Even if you're in a business partner setting and you're dealing with an attorney, fighting
means spending money, because attorneys bill on time, for the most part.
So, every single person says, "I don't want to fight," but the truth of the matter is
if you don't want to fight, and you're dealing with a narcissist on the other side, then
you have to have leverage just to get back to the middle, just to get back to what's
fair.
The problem is that if you are a reasonable person, then you're just thinking in reasonable
terms.
"Well, let's just come up with an agreement.
Let's just think of how we can settle this in a way that's fair for everybody.
I don't want to take this person for all they're worth, I just want what is fair or equitable,
I just want to be done with this thing, I just want to move on with my life."
That's the way you, reasonable person, are thinking.
That is not the way narcissists think, because to them, the fight, the making you squirm,
the jerking you around, is actually part of how they get narcissistic supply.
They enjoy that, so you are not on the same page from the beginning.
Neither of you are thinking in the same terms, one of you is thinking, "Let's just get this
done," the other one is thinking, "Let's jerk this person around," so you can't come to
this realization of, "Oh, let's just resolve this thing amicably," it's not going to happen
if you're truly dealing with a narcissist.
Remember that narcissists have no inner sense of value, all of their value comes from the
external, so they need an endless amount of supply in order for them to feel valuable,
and supply, while it can come in the form of money and compliments and respect and adulation,
it also, for them, comes in the form of making you squirm, jerking you around, getting their
way, beating you, winning, but not winning in the same way that you think of as winning.
Winning, to them, is jerking you around, that's a win.
It's not even [inaudible 00:05:07] they necessarily want the end result the same way that you
may.
So if you want to get anywhere with a narcissist, even though you don't want to fight, I know
it sounds counter-intuitive, but in order to get where you want to go, you are going
to have to create leverage.
And it has to be part of an overall strategy, and I talk so much more in-depth on this in
my S.L.A.Y. program, and S.L.A.Y. stands for having strategy, you have to have a super
strong strategy, and then leverage, which is what I'm talking about here, and then anticipating
what the narcissist is going to do and being two steps ahead of them, and then focusing
on you and your case.
So you do have to have an overall strategy, what's your long game, what's your vision,
what's your end result, where do you want to go?
Sometimes, when you've been so traumatized by a narcissist for so long, it can almost
seem foreign to you to think in terms of, "Where am I going with this?
I can actually maybe be on the offensive, maybe I could actually win this thing, or
get where I want to go.
What do I want?"
It's really hard sometimes to think in those terms, because you've been beaten down for
so long and you've been told that you're selfish, or you've been told that there's something
wrong with you, or you've been told that you don't deserve to have anything, and so you
start to believe that stuff, but that...
I'm here to tell you that that's not true, you deserve to have a fair result, you deserve
to have whatever it is that you want that's...
You're entitled to under the law, and sometimes you can even get people to settle for more
than what you're entitled to under the law, depending on if you have enough leverage or
not.
But leverage is that thing that's going to motivate and inspire and incentivize the narcissist
to want to come to the table with you, and it could be in the form of all different kinds
of things.
I mean, it could be people that you get to testify against them, it could be information
that they don't want out there, it could be a chart of their web of lies, it could be
all kinds of different things.
The thing is that leverage isn't only one thing, you've got to have a lot of it, and
it's got to be in multiple different forms, because you're basically building an invisible
fence around the narcissist while they're not looking so that by the time they look
up, when you're sitting in mediation or whatever, they realize that they are surrounded by all
sides and there's no way they're getting out unless they sign an agreement with you, and
that's what you're doing with leverage.
If you want to know more about negotiating with a narcissist, check out my video on negotiating
with a narcissist, I also have a video on divorce mediation with a narcissist, and you're
going to want to check that one out as well.
And if you're ready to do this, I want to see a "Let's do this" in the comments.
When you're looking at different types of leverage, what you want to be looking at is
anything that's going to interrupt their supply, that's going to be the key, because narcissists
just want one thing, they just want that one prize, there's the only one thing that motivates
them.
As human beings who are not narcissistic, there's lots of different things that motivate
us and incentivize us to do the things that we do.
With narcissists, it's just the one thing, it's supply, and it can be in the form of
good things like money and prestige and compliments and adulation and respect, and it can be in
the form of bad things too, such as devaluing, degrading, and making you feel like a piece
of crap, jerking you around, controlling the process, and in a court setting, it looks
like ignoring court orders, refusing to give discovery, which we call obstruction.
It could be in the form of smear campaigns, lying about things that you do, using the
court system as their sword, using your children as pawns, things like that, so they're...
That's their plan, and if you don't have a plan, then they will take you down.
So leverage is that thing that...
That you're pushing against them, it's you're leveraging your position in a way against
them, and it's going to be in the form of their supply.
The one thing that I really want you to remember is this, that is that they get supply from
jerking you around, so how you are going to get your case settled is by threatening a
source of supply to them that's actually more important for them to keep than the leverage
or the supply that they get from jerking you around.
In other words, is it more important for them to not be exposed that they have a sexually
transmitted disease?
Is it more important for them to look good in the community, or in front of the judge,
or to hold onto their money, or something like that?
Is that, in the long run, going to be more important to them than the supply and the
satisfaction that they get from jerking you around?
Or maybe it's that they have a new set of supply that's better for them and they want
to move on, and they just want you to sign, that's a good piece of leverage that you would
have too, so figuring out what source of supply you could potentially threaten to take away
from them will really very much help your situation.
So, inside of my program, I give like 30 different examples of leverage.
There's no one thing that's leverage for every single narcissist, other than the fact that
it's definitely going to be tied into their supply source.
If you are getting ready to negotiate with a narcissist, you will not want to do it without
my free Crush My Negotiation Prep Worksheet.
It's 15 pages, it's basically an E-book, and thousands of people have gotten it.
Just go ahead and grab it, just go to the link below or go to winmynegotiation.com and
it will be all yours.
If you are dealing with a narcissist and you want additional support, you want to connect
with others who are also dealing with narcissists, come on over and join me in my free private
Facebook group, it's called Narcissist Negotiators with Rebecca Zung, and I'll drop a link to
that below so that you can join me there as well.
And if you like this video, give it a like, give it a share, drop me a comment, let me
know that you were here, and if you haven't subscribed, now's a good time to do that.
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I'm Rebecca Zung, and I'm so glad you stopped by my channel.
Remember, today is a great day to start negotiating your best life.
I'll see you in the next video.