Never Split the Difference

Tactical empathy - repeating without judgment to gain trust.

Empathy - understading counterpart, without necessarily agreeing. Harvard and FBI agree on this definition.

Decisions are made emotionally. Emotions are always involved.

You want repeat customers. A win-lose situation is not a repeat customer.

Tactics

• I’m sorry, Robert, how do I know he’s even alive? - apology and first name to seed warmth and prevent bulldozing.
• Employs FBI’s most potent negotiating tools: the open-ended question.
• we call this tactic calibrated questions: queries that the otherside can respond to but that have no fixed answers. It buys you time. It gives your counterpart the illusion of control—they are the one with the answers and power after all—and it does all that without giving them any idea of how constrained they are by it.
• It turned out that our approach to negotiation held the keys to unlock profitable human interactions in every domain and every interaction and every relationship in life.
• “I’m just asking questions,” I said. “It’s a passive-aggressive approach. I just ask the same three or four open-ended questions over and over and over and over. They get worn out answering and give me everything I want.”
• but no matter how we dress up ournegotiations in mathematical theories, we are always ananimal, always acting and reacting first and foremost from our deeply held but mostly invisible and inchoate fears, needs, perceptions, and desires.
• but instead focus on their interests (why they’re asking for it) so that you can find what they really want...At the time, we were deep into Getting to Yes. And as a negotiator, consultant, and teacher with decades ofexperience, I still agree with many of the powerful bargaining strategies in the book.
• Through decades of research with Tversky, Kahneman proved that humans all suffer from Cognitive Bias, that is, unconscious—and irrational—brain processes that literally distort the way we see the world. Kahneman and Tversky discovered more than 150 of them.
• Now think about that: under this model, if you know how to affect your counterpart’s System 1 thinking, his inarticulate feelings, by how you frame and deliver your questions and statements, then you can guide his System 2 rationality and therefore modify his responses.
• From that moment onward, our emphasis would have to

be not on training in quid pro quo bargaining and problem solving, but on education in the psychological skills needed in crisis intervention situations. Emotions and emotional intelligence would have to be central to effective negotiation, not things to be overcome.

• What were needed were simple psychological tactics and

strategies that worked in the field to calm people down, establish rapport, gain trust, elicit the verbalization of needs, and persuade the other guy of our empathy. We needed something easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to execute.

• The whole concept, which you’ll learn as the centerpiece

of this book, is called Tactical Empathy. This is listening as a martial art, balancing the subtle behaviors of emotional intelligence and the assertive skills of influence, to gain access to the mind of another person. Contrary to popular opinion, listening is not a passive activity. It is the most active thing you can do.

• The majority of the interactions we have at work and at

home are negotiations that boil down to the expression of a simple, animalistic urge: I want.

• The first step to achieving a mastery of daily negotiation

is to get over your aversion to negotiating. You don’t need to like it; you just need to understand that’s how the world works.

• Tools: 1 Active listening to Black Swan; 2 Active listening to Late Night FM DJ Voice; 3 tactical empathy through labeling 4. Getting to That's right. 5 Getting to No 6 Bending Reality: timeless, fairness, loss. 8 Calibrated questions - How or What? How is a way to gently say No. 9 Effective offer/counteroffer 10

Black Swan - 3-5 pieces of info that change everything.

• Negotiation is the heart of collaboration.

1

• Your goal at the outset is to extract and

observe as much information as possible. Which, by the way, is one of the reasons that really smart people often have trouble being negotiators—they’re so smart they think they don’t have anything to discover.

• “Seriously,

do you really need a whole team to . . . hear someone out?” The fact that the FBI has come to that conclusion, I tell them, should be a wake-up call. It’s really not that easy tolisten well. We are easily distracted. We engage in selective listening, hearing only what we want to hear, our minds acting on a cognitive bias for consistency rather than truth. And that’s just the start.

• There’s one powerful way to quiet the voice in your

head and the voice in their head at the same time: treat two schizophrenics with just one pill. Instead of prioritizing your argument—in fact, instead of doing any thinking at all in the early goings about what you’re going to say—make yoursole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say.

• The goal is to identify what your counterparts actually

need (monetarily, emotionally, or otherwise) and get them feeling safe enough to talk and talk and talk some more about what they want. The latter will help you discover the former.

• It’s a phenomenon (and now technique) that follows a

very basic but profound biological principle: We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together. Mirroring, then, when practiced consciously, is the art of insinuating similarity. “Trust me,” a mirror signals to another’s unconscious, “You and I—we’re alike.”

• The way thelate-night FM DJ voice works is that, when you inflect your

voice in a downward way, you put it out there that you’ve got it covered. Talking slowly and clearly you convey one idea: I’m in control. When you inflect in an upward way, you invite a response. Why? Because you’ve brought in a measure of uncertainty. You’ve made a statement sound like a question. You’ve left the door open for the other guy to take the lead, so I was careful here to be quiet, self-assured.

• Most of the time, you should be using the

positive/playful voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good- natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking. A smile, even while talking on the phone, has an impact tonally that the other person will pick up on.

• When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think

more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist).

• When deliberating on a negotiating strategy or approach,

people tend to focus all their energies on what to say or do, but it’s how we are (our general demeanor and delivery) that is both the easiest thing to enact and the most immediately effective mode of influence. Our brains don’t just process and understand the actions and words of others but their feelings and intentions too, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions. On a mostly unconsciouslevel, we can understand the minds of others not through any kind of thinking but through quite literally grasping what the other is feeling.

• Smile at someone on the street, and as a reflex they’ll smile back.
• Mirroring, also called isopraxism, is essentially imitation.

It’s another neurobehavior humans (and other animals) display in which we copy each other to comfort each other. It can be done with speech patterns, body language, vocabulary, tempo, and tone of voice. It’s generally an unconscious behavior—we are rarely aware of it when it’s happening—but it’s a sign that people are bonding, in sync, and establishing the kind of rapport that leads to trust.

• While mirroring is most often associated with forms of

nonverbal communication, especially body language, as negotiators a “mirror” focuses on the words and nothing else. Not the body language. Not the accent. Not the tone or delivery. Just the words. It’s almost laughably simple: for the FBI, a “mirror” is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. Of the entirety of the FBI’s hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, and yet uncannily effective.

• The results were stunning: the average tip of the waiters who

mirrored was 70 percent more than of those who used positive reinforcement.

• I only half-jokingly refer to mirroring as magic or a Jedi

mind trick because it gives you the ability to disagree without being disagreeable.

• “I’m sorry, two copies?” she mirrored in response,

remembering not only the DJ voice, but to deliver the mirror in an inquisitive tone. The intention behind most mirrors should be “Please, help me understand.” Every time you mirror someone, they will reword what they’ve said. They will never say it exactly the same way they said it the first time. Ask someone, “What do you mean by that?” and you’re likely to incite irritation or defensiveness. A mirror, however, will get you the clarity you want while signaling

• Mirroring will make you feel awkward as heck when

you first try it. That’s the only hard part about it; the technique takes a little practice. Once you get the hang of it, though, it’ll become a conversational Swiss Army knife valuable in just about every professional and social setting.