Adam Torres and Hesha Abrams discuss Holding The Calm.
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Show Notes:
New book alert! In this episode, Adam Torres and Hesha Abrams, Head Deal-Maker at Hesha Abrams Mediation, explore Hesha’s book, Holding The Calm: The Secret to Resolving Conflict and Defusing Tension.
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About Hesha Abrams
Hesha Abrams is a master at turning high conflict into amicable resolutions and resolving delicate matters with diplomacy and skill. She is renowned for her success in resolving complicated and high-stakes disputes from corporate disagreements to political conflicts. She has resolved thousands of high profile or difficult matters, including mediating the case over the secret recipe for Pepsi. She has worked with Google, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Verizon, Apple, and other large multinational companies, individuals, inventors and small businesses, creating deals, and solving cases. Her strategic ability to remain cool-headed and balanced in complex situations leads to successful outcomes making her a leading name in her field, and an invaluable resource in any dispute resolution process. She specializes in crafting innovative solutions for complex or difficult matters in Intellectual Property, Commercial, Pharmaceuticals, Securities and “Deal Mediation”, which is driving a complex business deal to a successful signing.
She taught mediation and negotiation at the Hague International Symposium on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution. She was on the national panel for Dow Corning Implant cases and was the Chair of the Texas Bar Intellectual Property ADR Committee. She has been appointed Delegate to the Fifth Circuit Judicial Conference, three times, elected as a fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation and received the Brutsché Award for Excellence in Mediation from the Association of Attorney Mediators. She is AV rated by Martindale Hubbell.. Her popular new book, “Holding the Calm: The Secret to Resolving Conflict and Defusing is an insightful, practical, and easy to use guide to defuse tension, eliminate conflict, and make deals.
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So did I have Hesha Abrams on the line and she’s head dealmaker over at Hesha Abrams Mediation.
And today we’re going to be talking about her new book. And for all the longtime listeners, you know, I love promoting books. Hesha’s new book. Holding the calm, the secret to resolving conflict and diffusing tension. Hessa, welcome to show my pleasure to be here. All right. So this is a big topic and a big book.
I see your banner in the background, loving that. And excited to get into the book and we’ll start this episode though, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So Hesha, we at Mission Matters, we amplify stories for business owners, entrepreneurs, and experts.
That’s our mission. Hesha, what mission matters to you? That we can make the world less conflict oriented, less acrimonious, and more harmonious. I’m a professional who’s been doing this for decades. And why are these tools not available to everyday, ordinary people? They should be. That’s why I wrote this simple, inexpensive little book.
So yes, you too can do this at home and you don’t need a master class or a certification or a degree. You can make your life better and your workplace better. It’s not hard stuff. Fantastic. Well great have you on the show. And I guess just just to get us kicked off here. So mediation, like you’re not exactly new to this game.
You’ve been, you’ve been in this field for a while. I like talk to us about that. I like to joke, you know, Clairol covers all the gray hair, but nobody likes conflict. Conflict is like having a root canal without anesthesia or a colonoscopy without anesthesia, which end we’re talking about. Nobody says, Oh, conflict.
Opportunity to discuss things. Every one of us freaks out about it. It’s really very unpleasant. So, how do we turn this lemon into lemonade stuff? And I’ve got some special magic beans, some special tools that professionals use. And I want everybody to be able to have it. So, this is what I spent my life doing.
And I really want to help everybody else do it too. So first off mediation, like maybe define that a little bit for somebody that’s never used a mediator or kind of been in a situation. Mediation is a structured negotiation. If you think about it with two people negotiating in conflict, I barely listen to you, you barely listen to me while you’re talking, I’m just rehearsing what I want to say.
I mean, here’s the third party who has no stake in the outcome who can say, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. But she’s trying to say is this, or wait, wait, wait, he has a good point. What about that? And then to help the parties get through some of the stuff, the analogy that I love is if somebody comes into an ER and they’re covered with blood, doctors doesn’t just start cutting them off the blood, you got to figure out where’s like, where’s the, where’s the injury.
That’s what a good mediator does a lot of diagnostic. What do we have to do? Because very often what people say they’re fighting about. Yeah. is not in fact what they’re fighting about. Holding the Calm. How’d you come up with the title? I love it, by the way. Thank you so much. And it is a book for carnivores, by the way.
It is not a touchy feely book. So it’s a little hesitant using the title, but it’s what I do. Every one of us as human beings has an amygdala. It’s the fear and negativity center in our brain. So friend or foe, and your brain literally freaks out. And so being able to say to yourself. I am not powerless. I have tools.
I have things I can do. And so you can’t say, calm down, calm down. Never in the history of calming down has anyone ever come down by being told to calm down. And so the reason for that is the amygdala feels powerless. So when you or someone else says, calm down, take a deep breath, all you’re saying to your amygdala is, whoa, danger, danger, danger.
If you say, I am holding the calm. That’s a power verb. My amygdala goes, Oh, okay. We’ve got choices. We’ve got options. We’ve got tools. What do we choose to do? And I do that for myself. I’m human. I’ve got an amygdala. You can poke me and it’s a tool I use for myself and I have helped other people do it and it works just it’s magic.
Now, when we think about or when I think about a mediator, normally I’m thinking about specifically only in legal situations or things like that. But if you haven’t been in that, like, what are some other examples of, because maybe some of the audience thinks the way I do what are some other examples where you might use a mediator?
Well, it is definitely in the legal world for sure. It’s in the union world. It’s in the divorce world. It’s in the county world, but you know what it used to be like in the old days, the elder of the village. That’s what I was thinking. That’s what the word I was looking for. That is what it was before.
Yeah, exactly. It was the wise person. I said, Ooh, let’s When we lost all our wise people from the village is now go ahead. We have, and we don’t respect age and wisdom in our, in our society. So they’ve been, that’s harder, but even in a religious setting, the, the priest, the rabbi, the imam, the master, the, whoever it is can actually say, let’s, let’s look at this another way, where is there some value in what the other person has to say?
So it’s any third party. It’s a mom between two kids. You know, it’s a dad between his brother and his wife. Anytime some party says, you know, I’m not, I don’t really have skin in this game, but I think I can help because I’m a little dispassionate. And that’s why I wrote some of these tools to help you actually do that.
Correct me if I’m wrong. This is your first book on this topic. Yes, it is. It is. So, you know, a 30 year career, why this book? Why now? Why do you feel it was important to bring it to market? That’s a great question. I’ve made literally 10, 000 speeches and that’s not an exaggeration. And people are always saying, my God, you got to write a book.
You got to write a book. They finally, so they finally got to you? Really? Who had time to write a book? I was working, I was raising kids, I was doing community work. There was no time. And honestly, I say this just because I want to legitimize it for people. Yeah. Two years ago, I had a hysterectomy that, you know, knock on wood, turned out fine, but I was grounded for six weeks.
And I thought finally, and the book poured out of me because I didn’t want it to be yet another academic theory oriented book, what should work. I want to say that what actually works when you hate somebody. When they hate you, when there’s fear, there’s jealousy, there’s competitiveness, there’s power struggles.
What really, really works. Cause that’s the land I live in. Nobody, you know, I walk into a case and someone says, give me a hundred million dollars and the other side, Oh, here’s a thousand go pound sand. How do you get that? You don’t get that settled by let’s win, win problem solving and talk to each other.
It’s not how it works. So it’s for real life stuff. Yeah. So let me get this straight. So doctors orders, rest, relax, Hesha, like you’re supposed to. Relax, go into like be very calm and you decide to peel back your brain of all this knowledge and do something super stressful like write a book. Are you kidding me?
Honestly, it was easy. It just poured out of me. It really was easy. You know, the hardest part. Was going through the publishing process and the editing process and picking the cover and, you know, that kind of stuff, getting it out. But then when I’m, you know, publicizing it, I get to meet with cool people like you and the cool people who are listening to this.
We’re in a way almost preaching to the choir because really only the cool people are listening to the show. Talk to me about about the book construction, like specifically the content. Like in how you decided, because I’m always interested in an author’s process and how they decide, you know, what to keep in, what to, you know, take out.
Cause sometimes the, the taking out is the hardest part of my opinion. Yeah, no, you’re totally right. What I did was I literally sat down and said, I want this to be a book for normal people that is accessible to normal people, but with stuff that actually works. So what I did is I did 20 tools of my favorite things that I know work.
And I did 20 chapters. Each chapter has a tool. Each tool has sentence stems, has stories. As human beings, we, I could sit and give you information or I could say, can I share a story with you and let you figure out the point of it by yourself? It’s much more impactful for that. I mean, think about all good, you know anybody who wants to convey information, tell stories, all religious books.
our stories. And so what I do is every story in the book is battle tested. Every single one is designed to be told in 30 seconds or less. I have actually used them dozens of times and they work. People will go, Oh, those are the ones that I put in. And what I loved about it is some of them are for our carnivores.
For our soft, you know, warm and fuzzy, loving people. And so I had a lot of debate with the editors because the soft, fuzzy ones didn’t like the carnivorous ones and the carnivorous ones didn’t like the soft, fuzzy ones, which said perfect. And to use your words, the carnivorous or the, you know, the, the fuzzy ones which I like this distinction by the way really.
When you’re in a mediation or when you’re in your day to day with clients, I mean, you’re going to have a mixture anyway. So it was kind of almost like you mediating your own book content. Right? Exactly. Correct. Because, you know, chapter one of the book is speak into the ears that are hearing you. So just an example for everybody.
We all think of, Oh, we all know how everyone would decide. Or how all Democrats or all Republicans or all juries, that’s just not true. So I’m just going to make it easy for everybody. If I’m talking to you, Adam, shouldn’t I first know if you’re an introvert or an extrovert? Probably. Yeah. And that’s pretty easy to do.
Wouldn’t I pitch to you differently? What about if you’re a big picture person? Or a detail person. What if you’re a thinker person versus a feeler person? Those are very easy. If within five minutes of talking to somebody, you know what they are. Well, then you change your pitch to resonate with them. It’s almost like, are you an iPhone, an Apple iPhone or Samsung?
They’re both smartphones, different operating systems. And just that increases your effectiveness a thousand fold. Was there anything in your, in your process that you maybe learned about yourself going through that journey of creating a book? I know sometimes when I’m writing a book or something else, like sometimes I have these aha moments or otherwise, and I’m just like, wow, I didn’t expect that.
Was there any like aha moments or things you learned about yourself through that process? Very much. I love that question. Actually, I learned that I’m too verbose and I had to learn how to be. How can I? I made it a game. How can I make the point? As short as I possibly can. And in the olden days, you know, 20, 30 years ago, people have the capacity to actually listen for five or six minutes nowadays with social media and Twitter and things going X, you know, things going so fast, you got 90 seconds.
to capture someone’s attention. And if they’re already off thinking about something else, so how tight can you make your message? Hmm. What are some, I obviously there was, you know, I think it believes that 20 or over 20 different tools that you added, maybe let’s give the audience a little flavor of a tool or so that you added in the book to cause I, cause I want everybody to go out and pick out a copy and pick up a copy.
So maybe give us a little, an example of one of the tools. Sure, that would be wonderful. So I’ll do something fun. Let’s say you like fun Because there’s some in there that are super easy and quick and there are some that take, you know 15 minutes to work through when it’s a really thorny kind of a problem But this is a fun when everyone likes and i’ll give you two because they’re sort of correlated Let’s say I have to deal with you And I hate you.
I mean, I just, I just hate you. I might be the warm and fuzzy one. I’m just realizing Hesha, because when you said that I was like, Oh, don’t hate me. Number one, number two, you have to deal with me. What do you mean you have to? So I think I might be less on the carnivorous or on the warm and fuzzy. I just learned something about myself there.
Go ahead, please. Definitely correct. You’re definitely correct. But if you think about it, you have to deal with someone, a boss, a coworker, a neighbor. A teenager, a stepchild, a stepmother, a friend, and man, you don’t trust them. You don’t like them. They betrayed you. They’ve hurt you. They’re in a power struggle.
That’s called real life. You know, that’s just happens to every one of us. So you have to do something called paradigm shifting, which is a quick way of splitting your mind to say, maybe you’re not such a bad person. And most people who talk about paradigm shifting, make it way too complicated and way too difficult.
I have a simple one sentence way of doing it. I have to talk to you and my amygdala is up. I’m churning. I’m like, I don’t want to do this. This is awful. I look at you and I think, would you pull my kid out of a burning car? Wow. 95 percent of the time, the answer is yes. Yeah. Okay. I just said to my amygdala, there’s something redeeming about you.
Okay. And that just taps it down a little bit to where now under confirmation bias, which is a neurocognitive bias, I will look for something that is positive because we tend to look confirmation bias is such a big, strong thing. We tend to look and see what we want to see. That is a terrific one. And can I give you the more complicated corollary?
Yeah, do it, please. So, let’s say you’re at the Thanksgiving table, or at a board meeting, or at a meeting of any kind, and someone is just dominating, or they’re poking your buttons because they know they can’t, or they’re just saying stupid crap and you can’t, you know, Stand it. You can’t stop it. Sure. Fire away to stop it and take control of the table.
Easy. You look at the person and you say, you know, you know what I admire about you, Adam, guess what happens. You stop talking. You, what? I want to hear what else you have to say. And what I tell people is choose your verb. What I admire about you. What I respect about you. What I like about you. What I love about you.
What I’m curious about you. Pick the verb that works for you. It’s a fun game. That’s all that is. They stop talking and everyone around the table stops talking. Who has the power? Yeah. And then you know what you say, something validating and true. Like, you know what I love about you? You know what I admire about you?
You know, I respect about you, your passion, your determination, your curiosity, your willingness to try new ideas. It’s not hard. You just find the right thing that you want to say for that person. And you know what happens? The person kind of goes,
yeah, hey, they don’t know what to do. They weren’t expecting it throws them because it’s not a And, and I feel like the more rehearsed or practiced you are in that. And the more you use that particular tool, the better you get. Like, I’m just picturing, I don’t know how well I’d be able to do that in a board meeting day one, but I’m guessing you’ve probably been in some really heated discussions and different things.
And you might’ve just turned to one of the people and said, you know what I admire about you? That you are so passionate about your kids and you want their, and you’re thinking, and you’re both thinking about your wellbeing, their wellbeing in school or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, and again, I’m using a custody, maybe like a fictitious custody example, but that’s a super heated.
Or, or, you know, possibly, and you just cut through that tension like with a butter knife. Like, like it’s nothing amazing. And this is the part that’s beautiful. Mm-Hmm. You cut the tension, but you know, the ancillary whipped cream on top of that. Ooh, do tell. I like ancillary, right? Who’s got the power?
Yeah. The respect. Everyone else around that table is going. Well done. Now, they’re not going to, no one’s going to say to you, my goodness, you know how to hold the calm. You know, unless you’re doing. They might after, afterwards, like afterwards, I can see a lawyer saying that was brilliant what you did. I can see that.
Like the people that are really adept, like, oh, thank you. Yes. And they’ll just think, wow. You just get things done or, wow, you’re really good with people or, wow, you just know how to handle things. That’s what happens, you know, and that probably doesn’t work on a spouse after you do it so many times though, huh?
They’re like, I have to tell you, it does. It would work on me every time. I’d be like, tell me more. I know what you’re doing, but I still want to hear and then I’ll be quiet and you can have the power back. Just tell me what I want to hear. Bitch, you know what? It actually works because then you’re laughing and you’re joking and it’s like I love you.
If you’re fighting with yourself. I know what you did. You read Holding the Calm. I know you’re using your Holding the Calm moves on me. Don’t do it. Why not? I once had my, my son was I don’t know, he’s probably 23, 24. Yeah. Had a problem and he came to me, what do I do with this? And so I’m a mediator.
I go, oh my gosh. You could do this. On this hand, you could do this. And he goes, Oh, mom, just cut the mediator crap and just tell me what to do. And I said, welcome to adulthood. As a teenager, you go, don’t tell me what to do as an adult. You say, Oh, please go ahead. Oh my gosh. That’s who I need to have on the show.
So what was it like growing up with a mediator mom? My kids have mad skills. I’ll tell you that. Yeah. If I, if I got any skills in any of the thing that I do, it’s probably Probably for my mom. She was a, she was a social worker for, I don’t know, 40 something years before she before she retired. But I’m like, yeah, mom, I do what you do.
It’s just, they record me and they distribute it. I just have conversations with people and they call it media. It’s okay. Very good. Very good. So if there was, and I know there’s many as, as we’ve been talking, but if there was one big takeaway from, from the book that you hope that the readers walk away with, what would that be?
That you’re not powerless. that when your amygdala is triggered, you feel powerless. The amygdala is all connected to power. It happens to every single one of us. You’re not powerless. And as soon as you think that, which is why, again, I will sometimes say I’m holding the calm, I’m holding the calm, I’m holding the calm.
It takes two seconds. Oh, so is this like a mantra that you also use that title? So holding the calm. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you do that because that’s why I made it a verb. Because it connotes power to your subconscious. So your mind says, okay, I was feeling a panic attack. My, my chest got tight. Oh my God, what am I going to do?
Wait a minute, I got tools. I got magic beans in my pocket. Yeah, that’s something I can do. Now your brain, this happens in like two seconds, goes into problem solving mode, as opposed to panic, freak out, run away, freeze. What do I do mode? And it is. Very empowering, very empowering. I feel like even just having the book on your desk and looking at it and you’re like, okay, you see something happen, you’re looking at it, you’re like, okay, holding the calm, holding the calm, like just even the title that the title in itself becomes a tool, really.
It does. Well, that’s why I’ve got it in my office, you know, and one of the things I did is I wrote a training guide in the back of the book where People were telling me I needed to print it and make it another book. And I went, no, no, I’m not doing this thing to make money. I want to give it away. I want people to have it.
And now training budgets are so tight. Nobody’s got money anymore. And so it’s a training guide in the back of the book that tracks the book. So you just get a bunch of people together. You all read it and you go through it chapter by chapter and follow the questions. You can apply for professional training and whatever organization you’re a part of.
But what’s really good is you’re in a group or a family or an organization and someone says, I thought that story was stupid. And someone else says, wow, I found it really meaningful. Now all of a sudden that’s way better than those trust exercises where you fall into people junk. It’s real. It’s now I have to understand you like why was that important to you?
Now I learned something that’s real team building. That’s real conflict resolution that happens easy and soft and gentle and One of the chapters in the book, I call it creating small, winnable victories. You don’t do things in big, huge stuff. You erode the outside of a problem. You create little bridges like spiderwebs that get bigger and thicker.
That’s how lasting resolution and change actually happens. Not how it should, not how you want it to. But, you know, chocolate cake is fattening no matter how much we want it not to be. Oh, and, and I think that is a great way to end it actually. Hessa, if people would like to pick up a copy of the book, if they’d like to connect with you, if they want to talk about mediation how do people do that?
Excellent. It’s everywhere. So of course, Amazon, Target, Barnes and Noble, you know, books, a million, all those kinds of places. Plus I’m on LinkedIn and I post every single day, some little tidbit wisdom. And I try to rotate it between inspiration, education, and to be able to entertain. Well, Hey, I was entertained in hearing you talk about it.
So there you go. That was all part of the stick. It’s okay. Go ahead. I do that. Cause then people listen. We don’t like to, who likes to be splained too, right? So anyways, if you connect with me on LinkedIn and on Facebook and we’ll be doing Instagram at some point soon, I do all that kinds of stuff. And then you can be on the mailing list, which I don’t sell.
And then I send out little one minute videos, little new things. I’m just trying to high tide races, all ships. And the more we can get people to do this, we can actually do something in our, you know, sort of crazy, crazy world. And I invite everyone to come and. Join in this glorious adventure.
Fantastic. And for everybody watching we’ll put the links in the show notes so that you can just click on the links and head right on over and pick up a copy and also connect with Hesha. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t hit the subscribe button, this is your very personal invitation.
Hit that subscribe button. We have many more mission based individuals coming up on the line, have some great interviews lined up and we don’t want you to miss a thing. really appreciate you coming on the show today and wishing you much more continued success on the book and the promo. Thank you so much.
My pleasure.
