So while it may not be a, I guess, quote, common set of facts, you at least understand where the starting point is. So maybe that's a better term is we know, okay, we're starting from, we perceive this differently. And that could tailor the negotiation in a way, because you could spend a lot of time then saying, oh, well, you may have perceived this one way. This wasn't my intent. I'm sorry that happened. Or we can remedy your perception. And, you know, my, my realistic intent was this, and this actually would have solved whatever problem may have been presented on the other side without, you know, kind of just starting from a place of not knowing that there was a misinterpretation. Yeah.

And so check this out. This is actually pretty liberating too, because a lot of conversations get completely derailed because now we're having a battle over memory. Your memory is terrible. My memory is terrible, but I think mine is a little bit better than yours. So how are we going to figure that out? Right? There's no video evidence, like you said. But if we realize, hey, we don't need to be completely on the same page, we can still move forward. That's liberating. And another thing too is like, we exist currently in the present and then we will exist in the future, but the past has happened. I can't do anything about it. So, we can agree to disagree on the past, but really this conversation should be future focused. It should be future focused problem solving. So we're having this conversation to figure out what our relationship is like now and what it looks like in the future. And even if we don't agree on the past, we can use that understanding to move forward and begin to find agreement on what we want the future to look like.

Exactly. And if you really, you know, take a step back, understanding that there's a disagreement on the past is actually a fact, right? So, you know, two people are in negotiation. It's like, hey, we disagree on what happened. So now at least we know we disagree and we can kind of progress going forward. So that is a common set of facts. The fact there is, hey, we disagree on whatever the scenario was.

Oh, this got deep. This got really deep because that changes the whole way that we look at this. I mean, for me, because I always think about common set of understanding. And this might be my lawyer bias. trial advocacy, you might stipulate to some facts. And so we say, okay, we agree on facts one through five, but five through 10, we don't agree on. And then we approach it like lawyers, I'm going to litigate facts five through 10, and I'm going to try to convince you otherwise through brute force. It is really tough. But now we realize, hey, all of that effort and frustration that we experience when we're trying to convince somebody of the way things are and that their perception is wrong is oftentimes completely unnecessary when we actually take a step back and consider what the ultimate goal is.

Right. Agreed. Right. And if the ultimate goal, one of the things, you know, in a law context is oftentimes you're looking for a winner and a loser. Right. So you're trying to persuade judge, jury, you know, arbiter to move in your direction one way or another. And so you're directly opposing each other. I think if you step outside of the legal world, oftentimes there are places where you can have two winners, right? Two people can agree. Or if you're working on a settlement, two people can get two things that they both want at the same time. And so they don't have to be losers. And so understanding, hey, we disagree on these things, how whatever those, you know, using your term stipulated facts that we disagree on, how they play into what the ultimate decision or what our motivations were for coming to the table to negotiate initially can play a big factor into that. two and three are really important to you, oh, excuse me, I guess five and six are really important to you and seven through 10, you don't care about. And I only care about seven through 10 and don't care about five through six. We can come to an agreement very quickly once we realize, hey, we just disagree on these two things, but they're not that important to me. Obviously, you wouldn't say that to the person at the table, but it's much easier to have a negotiation around the things that you do agree on or that you may need as opposed to not. You

know what's cool about this, Brandon? It's like with this, the things that we've talked about, it's not a skill. People don't need to learn a new skill in order to execute this. They just need to change their mindset around the entire interaction and perception and their feelings of right and wrong in the moment. And I think that's really liberating again, because we don't need any high level technique. You just need to change the way you think. And then everything gets a lot better.

Yeah.