Are you getting ready to negotiate with a narcissist and having the hardest time having
a winning mindset?
Well, you're in luck by the end of this interview with Mark Raffan, you're going to know exactly
how to have a winning mindset when you're getting ready to negotiate with that narcissist.
Hi, I'm Rebecca Zung, Top 1% Attorney and the bestselling author of the books, Negotiate
Like You Matter and Breaking Free: A Step-By-Step Divorce
Guide, and I've helped 1000s 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 for you right here on this channel and
in these videos and these interviews that I do.
So before we go any further hit that subscribe button hit
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upload brand new content, new interviews.
And when I go live on this channel, so this is part one of my
interview with Mark Raffan, make sure that you watch all the way till the end, so that
you will be all up to date when I upload part two.
Welcome to another episode of Negotiate Your Best Life.
I'm Rebecca Zung.
And I'm super excited today to welcome Mark Raffan, who is a fellow podcaster
and fellow negotiation guru.
And I'm super excited because we've been following each other's
work and supporting each other in what we do.
And he is a total expert in how to create a winning mindset,
which is so important when you're dealing with a high
conflict, personality and narcissist.
So welcome, Mark.
Thank you so much for having me, Rebecca.
I love your show and I love what you're doing and it's an
honor to be on here.
Thank you so much.
And so tell us a little bit about your background and history?
How did you even come to be talking about negotiation?
Oh man.
Good question.
So right out of university, I started a career in sales and high-ticket negotiations
paid off all my student loans in the first year through all my commissions, which was
fantastic, realized I had a knack for it and having a persuasive
and influential conversations.
Then I went to the other side of the table.
I worked in procurement for a very long time.
And then a few years ago I decided I wanted to
do my own thing.
So I decided to leave the corporate world and start what's now in Negotiations Ninja,
which is a training coaching and content company, all focused
on developing and delivering the most engaging negotiation
content in the world, which is what we try to do every day.
And so our entire goal is to make sure that understand that negotiation can be taught.
It's not something that is native to only a few people.
And that only a few people can master, you can
learn it.
And there's a very specific way that you can learn it
and you can get better at it and you can get significantly more value out of life than
you think you can.
Absolutely.
I love that.
And I love what you're up to, especially because a lot of my viewers, my listeners,
they just feel so beaten down.
So why is it a winning mindset important?
It's critical actually.
It's not just important.
It's required in order for you to do well at negotiations, you
have to believe that you can do well.
I think it was Henry Ford that once said, "Whether you believe you
can or cannot, you are correct."
AndOne of my favorite quotes in the whole world.
Love that one, right?
Me too.
It's so powerful and it's so true because if...
And look, I don't mean to say, you're not going through a
difficult time and that your emotions around this are not real and the experiences that
you've had are not real.
And I certainly recognize that what you've been through is difficult, but it's important
to realize that you can get through this and you can
actually develop a negotiation strategy that helps you to win.
Because, unless you start to change your mindset that you have power and that you have leverage,
then you will never develop the strategy that's
required to get the things that you need to get out of that
negotiation.
And when I talk about leverage and I talk about power, people think that, and it's natural
for people to think this, given the experiences that they've probably been through being in
a traumatized situation, like a lot of your
clients have been, or a lot of your listeners have been.
But power in and of itself or leverage in and of itself is not a bad thing.
It's been used by bad people, but it's not a bad thing.
You get to use that as well.
You get to use all of those things too, and you can use it
for your benefit just because it's been used by someone else to hurt you or to hurt people
that you love doesn't mean that it's not a tool that you
could use.
So I want to make sure that I distinguish between
power being used for good and leverage being used for good and leverage and power being
used for bad.
They're not bad things.
They're just tools that you can develop.
And so once you get your mind wrapped around that, you can start to really
think, "Okay, now what Mark is saying is that I can actually
develop a tool kit around developing a proper negotiation strategy that allows me to use
utilize power and leverage as tools to help win this negotiation."
I love that.
That's so right on point and so aligns with what I think too, and in my book, Negotiate
Like You Matter that M actually stands for my value
is defined by me.
And I tell people all the time, you and you alone define your value.
And you have to start with that because if you don't, I always say 80% of a
negotiation is one before you even walk into a room, but it's not all a mindset.
A lot of it is preparation too, but mindset is just so, so critical.
So my question to you though, is, for these people, excuse me,
who they just feel like the other person always has all the power.
They're always winning.
They not only do they feel that way, but that's how it's
shown up for them in their lives.
And they've also been traumatized.
They just feel like their brain is scrambled eggs in some ways, because they've been gas
lit so many times.
So where do they even begin?
I think one of the things that people need to recognize is that they've been conditioned
to believe these things.
So yes, the feelings that you're feeling are real, but recognize that you've been conditioned
over the course of this relationship to feel the
way that you feel.
To feel like you have no power, to always feel submissive or to always feel like the
other party is dominant over you.
And it's a literally a power play.
It's cold conditioning for a reason, because they've led you down the path to believe that
you have no power in the relationship.
And so a few of the different ways that they do it, there's a bunch of
different types of power that they could use.
But coercive power, which is like the use of threats and
bullying, right?
So if you don't do this, then you know, you'll be in a lot of trouble, right?
That coercive power has been played in your mind over and over and over again with the
threat.
And sometimes the follow through of the threat
that if you don't toe the line, you're going to be in a lot of
trouble.
And so naturally your body's response, your mind's response is to go, "Oh shit, I'd better
toe the line.
Otherwise, I'm going to be in a lot of trouble."
Or which is equally as bad, but sounds better is
reward based power, which is where if you do this, I'll give you this, right?
Here's your reward for toeing the line.
Both are bad.
There's a time and a place for them.
Don't get me wrong.
And you can use those things in your negotiations.
But if they're used by bad people for nefarious means to control someone or
to control their life.
Then naturally your mindset is going to be, "Okay, I'm obviously subordinate to this person.
They're more dominant over me.
They're using this power."
And you don't even realize that this is going on
because this type of conditioning is being done generally speaking over the course of
an entire relationship.
And so you've developed this mindset of always being subordinate.
Here's the thing, they they're doing this on purpose.
They're doing this to make sure that you always toe the line.
You don't have to live this way.
You don't have to be like this on an ongoing basis.
And so recognize a place to start is just recognizing that these things have been used
against you for a purpose of control.
The second thing that I would say to you is when you're
gettingJust wait because I want to make sure I say something about that point because that
was a really, really excellent point.
Yeah go for it.
And so what I see is a lot of times, those threats are actually not even anything that
they could follow through on.
So it's, "I'm taking the kids away from you.
You're never going to see the kids again.
I'm taking every penny and you're going to be
living on the street."
And they believe these things and they come in and they talk to me as the lawyer.
And I go, "Well, that's a bunch of crap.
So let's just push that one over and keep going."
So, and they immediately feel better.
And I think, okay, so people need to know that most of the time, the stuff they
spew in a divorce situation, like in this coercive way, these
threats that you're talking about is usually a bunch of crap.
So anyway, I just wanted to make sure I say, say that before you go to the next point.
No, let's talk about that for a second because I think this is really important.
This is why it's important to make sure that you seek counsel, right?
Because you don't know, especially if you're not knowledgeable
about what you're getting into or what these threats could mean.
No one's going to blame you for not knowing.
It's okay to be ignorant, but what's not okay, is to not get help.
Because now that you know that you don't know everything, you don't
know about what's going on, get the help that you need.
There's an amazing quote by Mark Twain and I'm probably going to butcher it, but he says
something to the effect of, "I've had a lot of worries
in my life.
Most of which have never happened."
So you're being conditioned to worry.
You're being conditioned to expect the worst and the likelihood of those things
happen.
Not to say that it doesn't happen.
I want to be clear.
The likelihood of those things happening is pretty
low.
And this is where it becomes difficult because now you're playing your logos against your
Patheos, right?
Your emotion against your logic to determine what is real and what's not real.
What I would recommend for most people is try your very
best and it's very difficult, I don't discount that, to remove
emotion from the decision making frameworks that you are going through.
Because your emotion only clouds your judgment.
Look, we've been hunter-gatherers for the longest time in our existence, right?
Thousands and thousands and thousands of years, we've been faced with scenarios of fight or
flight or freeze, right?
Yap.
Saber-toothed tiger comes along.
We've got a spear it's fight or flight or freeze.
And the way that the brain works, right?
The amygdala and the hypothalamus are starting to interact with each other.
And then it hits the adrenal system.
And now it releases all of these stress hormones into your body.
And so cortisol is rushing through and you're freaking
out.
That is your body's evolutionary response to stress
and threats.
And no one blames you for that, because it's literally how your body has been evolved to
survive for a long, long time.
You've got to almost fight that evolutionary response to get through
understanding what the next steps are going to be.
Because if you let that emotion cloud your judgment, then you're not going to be able
to make the decisions required to move to this forward.
And the only way for this to get better is for
you to make very clear decisions about what you want your
future to look like.
Because without that, then you're always going to be stuck in this spot.
And that's why it's so important to get the help that
you need.
Oh, I love that.
It's such a perfect, beautiful explanation.
You put that so eloquently and explained it so
simply so that people can really understand why it is so important to take that emotion
out of it.
I love that.
So what is the second thing?
So the second thing that I think that you need to do on an ongoing basis is something
that you recommend all the time, which is to document.
To make sure that you've got your documentation prepared, planned, all that other kind of
stuff.
This happens in corporate negotiations, as well as any
type of negotiation really.
The better prepared that you are, the better that you're going to in the
negotiation.
Have that documentation laid out, make sure you've got all of your supporting evidence,
make sure that you've got everything that lines up to ensure that you are best supported
to your position going into that negotiation.
Because without that documentation, without that preparation,
without that strategy, it becomes significantly less likely that you're going to succeed in
the negotiation 100%t and learning how to organize it and
all of that.
And that's what I talk about in my programs as
well, like just figuring out, because, yes, you need to have a good lawyer.
And that's what I was just talking about on my interview on your show.
Which is, yeah, it's important to have a good lawyer, but
you can't just completely rely on the lawyer because you are in possession of the majority
of the information.
The lawyer does not have ESP.
So the lawyer knows the law, but you have the information.
So you're the one that has to organize it and figure out how to present it to the lawyer
so the lawyer knows what to do with it.
Thanks for joining me for this part two of my conversation with Mark Raffan, the negotiations
Ninja.
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now's a great time to do that and hit the notification bell
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If you are getting ready to negotiate with a narcissist, make
sure you grab my free, Crush My Negotiation Prep Worksheet.
Don't walk into a negotiation without it.
You can get it at the link below, or just go to
winmynegotiation.com. and it will be all yours for free.
If you are dealing with a narcissist and you want
more support, and 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 narcissists negotiators with Rebecca Zung and I'll drop a link to that
below as well.
If you like this video, you know what to do.
Give me a, like, give me a share, drop me a comment.
Let me know that you were here.
I'm so glad that you were here and I will see you in part two of
this conversation with Mark Raffin until then, remember that
today is a great day to start negotiating your best life.