The chapter up for debrief this week sorts the people you meet across a table into nine rough types, and the group tried to play the exercise live. Rather than memorize the list, Larry’s group went around naming the type each person had actually dealt with that week. A stalling client, an over-eager one, someone who negotiates through a proxy, that kind of thing, no two stories matched.
The value of the exercise isn’t the labels, it’s noticing the pattern before you’re three sentences into a pitch. That noticing is really PQRST in disguise, reading the room is just an extension of reading the material beforehand. One person said the typing exercise made her rethink a meeting from months ago that she’d chalked up to bad luck.
Larry’s read, by his own account, is that most negotiators only ever prepare for the type of counterpart they expect, not the one who actually shows up. The group tested that by swapping stories about the type they most often get wrong.
Someone pointed out the SuperModel discipline matters most here, staying in the listening position even when the type across from you is hard to read. No one in the room claimed to have all nine down cold, which felt like the honest outcome.
The debrief ended with a short list of tells everyone agreed to watch for next time. Larry’s own walkthrough of the chapter is in the video below.
Details: Watch Larry walk through the nine types
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