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Implementing Tactical Empathy with Chris Voss and Steve Shull
In this episode of the short term show, Avery interviews Chris Voss, former FBI negotiator, and Steve Shull, former NFL linebacker turned real estate coach. They discuss their backgrounds, collaboration, and how negotiation tactics apply to real estate, as highlighted in their book The Full Fee Agent. They delve into overcoming emotion with logic, the challenges real estate agents face, and how to improve negotiation strategies in the real estate world.
Avery: Hey y’all, welcome back to another episode of the short term show. I am very excited about today’s guests. I am a super fan myself, so I’m going to try to contain myself while I’m asking these questions.
Guys, we’ve got Chris Voss and Steve Shull. They really need no introduction, but I’m going to let them introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about their background and their new book that they have out.
Avery: Chris, do you want to go first?
Chris: Sure. I am Chris Voss, and I’m a ballerina.
Avery: I heard that about you actually. There’s a friend of mine here, I live in Vegas, a friend of mine, a woman who was running a SWAT team before she was a cop—she was a ballerina!
Chris: Goodness, so that Mickey and ballerina, that’s a tough combo. You know they’re tough. They take a lot of pain, they’re great athletes, you know? I could probably compare myself to a ballerina. She’d be like, “You’re not tough enough to be hungry.” But yeah, I’m a retired FBI agent, former lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI. I wrote a book on negotiation first called Numbers, but the difference in a business negotiation plan is hostage negotiation, emotional intelligence.
Real life and doing better than anything else, not perfect—just better than anything else—and then along came this NFL Super Bowl captain football player coaching negotiation, a coaching real estate agent. Said, “You know your stuff is awesome.”
Avery: Let’s collaborate, and Steve, show foreign.
Steve: Thank you for having both of us today. As Chris mentioned, my professional life started in the NFL as a linebacker for the Miami Dolphins, and then a knee injury ended my career after four years. From there, I went back, got an MBA from the University of Miami, went to work on Wall Street for a period. University of Miami is that the school that called San Quentin, that’s the one, that’s the one now.
Then I worked on Wall Street for about five years, ended up in Southern California selling residential real estate. 1991, first year in business, sold 53 homes. Second year, was on track to sell a hundred, and I came up with the idea of creating a coaching program for real estate agents. And that’s where this is real estate coaching started.
I’ve been doing that for about 25 years when one of my clients went to a book signing of Chris’s in Malibu and gave me a copy of the book. One Saturday afternoon, I read it, and it was a lightbulb moment for my entire coaching career. I had been trying to take all the emotion out of real estate sales and boil it down to logic, fact, and reason. In reading Chris’s book, I realized I had it completely backward. You can’t overcome emotion with fact, logic, and reason.
I reached out to Chris, we got together. I said to him, “Everything you wrote and Never Split the Difference applies 100% to real estate.” So we started out with an eight-week negotiation course, did several more programs, and about two years or so, we got together and collaborated on The Full Fee Agent, and that’s how we got here today.
Avery: Awesome! Well, I’m really excited to have y’all. I have a lot of questions because, same as you, when I read Never Split the Difference as a real estate agent running a real estate team, I was like, “Oh wow, this is very applicable to what we’re doing.” There’s a lot of things that I’m doing wrong that I realized from reading that book.
So now, our first of all, wrong is a harsh term to say that you can do something better. It doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, and that’s what’s okay. I think people are changing their habits a little bit, you know? That’s kind of the first emotional hurdle, like, “Ah, was I wrong?”
Chris: You weren’t wrong. A guy I used to live close to in DC used to always say.