Mickey Bergman on Negotiating with Emotional Intelligence and Empathy

Mickey Bergman is one of the most fascinating, interesting people that I’ve met (and certainly that we’ve had on this podcast). He’s currently the Vice President and Senior Advisor at the Governor Richardson Center for Global Engagement. We are going to talk about Governor Richardson, who’s also known as “The Gov” to Mickey, and the impact that he’s had on Mickey’s life. The Center for Global Engagement really was at the forefront of what Mickey calls “fringe diplomacy,” which is a field that he is forming, which is an innovative discipline exploring the space in international relations that are actually beyond the boundaries of states’ and governments’ capacity and authority. So, Mickey and his team, they try to negotiate and help represent families of hostages, people whose loved ones are imprisoned and in awful situations and places like North Korea, Cuba, Lebanon, and the Middle East. We talk a lot about Mickey’s work in Gaza and trying to help a lot of Israelis who are currently hostages of Hamas. So, he has been in some of our most challenging areas of the world. We talk about Russia in today’s conversation. Mickey and his people go in and they try to help families get their loved ones back; that is really what they do, that is his job, and he represents families, not governments. He was the Executive Director of the Global Alliances Program at The Aspen Institute, and he’s a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service where he teaches about emotional intelligence and international relations. Emotional Intelligence is something that Mickey references often in today’s conversation and the importance of being able to manage emotions and find ways to understand people they are talking to and try to create what he calls symmetry and common ground and try to really get to know people even if they represent some of the atrocities that exist in our world. Mickey talks a lot about evil and good and bad and how that bad people can do good things and good people can do bad things and how he tries to keep that the forefront of his brain when he is representing hostages and personally trying to get them back to their families. He’s published numerous articles, he’s been interviewed, and he’s done opinion pieces in The New York Times, Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, and The Boston Globe just to name a few. He’s appeared on TV on places like CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX News, etc. So, Mickey is an expert when it comes to trying to understand what it takes to bring people home. And just to give people an idea of the scale and the scope of Mickey and his colleagues’ work, in 2019 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work at the Richardson Center, where he led a team to facilitate the release of more political prisoners than any other organization. And Mickey is from Israel and he talks a lot about his work in today’s conversation to try to bring hostages home from Gaza. And remember, Mickey represents the families that have members that are still in hostage situations in Gaza. And so, this conversation goes deep and gets vulnerable pretty quickly. Mickey still has family in Israel, he cares about the country, we both talk about how we are proud to call ourselves Zionists in today’s conversation, and still there are challenges that exist with governments at play and his ability to get people home, and that is what Mickey is most focused on is trying to help families reunite with prisoners that are held hostage, oftentimes in an unjust way. And so, I found this conversation to be extremely inspiring, I find Mickey to be someone to be thoughtful, to be caring, to make you think, and I know and I hope that he does that with all of you today. He has a wonderful book which we talk about quite a bit which is called In the Shadows and I highly recommend you check that out, it is a wonderful read as I share in today’s conversation. And so, as you listen, I hope you listen with an open mind, I hope you learn from Mickey today, I know I did.

Mickey had a number of amazing insights during our conversation. Some of them include:

“I don’t go into panic modes” (12:00).

“Governor Richardson was a father figure for me because not only was he a mentor, he was in my life day and night” (16:25).

“[During that highly stressful time] I was missing my grounding power, which was Governor Richardson” (19:35).

“We knew that we had to make it an American issue” (28:50).

“It’s about the sheer level of devastation here and trying to explain why people do what they do” (32:05).

“The heart of my work is around emotional intelligence” (34:30).

“In reality, when you first hear those shots, you have no idea where they’re coming from” (36:25).

“If you can’t take care of yourself, you’re not going to be able to take care of anybody else” (38:20).

“My blinders were removed from the side and I could actually digest what I was hearing” (41:30).

“You try to cling to any straws of humanity in order to do this [work]” (45:20).

“Even people who are responsible for absolutely terrible things, they are not born evil, they are not all evil” (45:30).

“The dichotomy of good and evil is not as absolute as we like to think” (45:55).

“I try not to compare” (50:05).

“Our brains, especially under trauma, look for shortcuts” (52:50).

“You need to scratch really deep beneath the surface of a human in order to find the humanity sometimes. But you have to do it, because otherwise we’re in an all-out war: (54:45).

“We actually need to process this as a society. We need to figure out who we are as a society” (1:01:30).

“95% of the time when you actually pay the ransom the victim comes back alive and well” (1:19:40).

“Until it’s a loved one or a friend of yours who is in that situation [of being kidnapped], you really can’t judge those who do everything in their power to bring them home” (1::20:35).

“Empathy is a must within our society” (1:24:15).

“Empathy is not sympathy” (1:24:40).

“In my line of work, empathy is a must, sympathy is a trap” (1:24:55).

“When you remove resistance movements but don’t remove the source of the resistance, the next resistance movement is not going to be more moderate, they’re going to be more radical” (1:29:30).

Additionally, you can purchase Mickey’s book, In the Shadows, here. You can also find the Global Reach website here. Additionally, you can connect with Mickey on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Thank you so much to Mickey for coming on the podcast!

I wrote a book called “Shift Your Mind” that was released in October of 2020, and you can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongskills.co/. If you liked this episode and/or any others, please follow me on Twitter: @brianlevenson or Instagram: @Intentional_Performers.

Thanks for listening.