Kelly talks to former FBI Hostage Negotiator Chip Massey about his new book “Convince Me: High-Stakes Negotiation Tactics to Get Results in Any Business Situation.”  

We were talking before we started recording that a small group of us will be heading to Quantico in the coming weeks to observe hostage negotiation training and this didn’t’ surprise you. 

“I think one of the things in improvisation, tell me if I got this wrong, is that you are building onto something that has been presented in front of you. And that’s exactly what a good hostage negotiator should be doing. What you’re doing is you’re trying to extract information. You’re trying to pull information. You are letting a conversation flow. Because if I am talking like I’m doing now, if I’m talking, I’m out. It’s not good. I need to be receiving from that individual. That’s what we try to do. We try to keep the conversation going in the most robust and revealing and emotional way we can.” 

I think it’s kind of perfect that your job before becoming an FBI hostage negotiator was that you were a minister. 

“Yes, I was a minister before I was an FBI agent. Yeah. See, you are one of the few people who would say that because you get it. You get it. I was dealing with people in crisis. Every day I was. It was all about listening with empathy, no judgment. It was about handling what was in front of me and listening to get them to work it out through their own solution. What needed to happen was for me to be a presence of good for them.” 

You also talk about replacing active listening with forensic listening. 

“Forensic listening is the art and science of analyzing a conversation after it’s happened. Because words leave clues. That’s what we say. And so, what you’re doing there is you’re observing a person from multiple perspectives. And then you’re building on to that. And you are going to use other techniques that we teach as a way of continuing to build that relationship, that connection, that emotion.”