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. Here are some of the key lessons from this chapter to remember: ■ A good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find. ■ Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously. ■ People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible. ■ To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. ■ Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built. ■ Put a smile on your face. When people are in apositive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem- solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart. There are three voice tones available to negotiators: 1. The late-night FM DJ voice: Use selectively to make a point. Inflect your voice downward, keeping it calm and slow. When done properly, you create an aura of authority and trustworthiness without triggering defensiveness. 2. The positive/playful voice: Should be your default 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. 3. The direct or assertive voice: Used rarely. Will cause problems and create pushback. ■ Mirrors work magic. Repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. Mirroring is the art of insinuating similarity, which facilitates bonding. Use mirrors to encourage the other sideto empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.

2

• That’s why, instead of denying or ignoring emotions,

good negotiators identify and influence them.

• Emotions aren’t the obstacles, they are the means.

The relationship between an emotionally intelligent negotiator and their counterpart is essentially therapeutic.

• In my negotiating course, I tell my students that empathy

is “the ability to recognize the perspective of a counterpart, and the vocalization of that recognition.” That’s an academic way of saying that empathy is paying attention to another human being, asking what they are feeling, and making a commitment to understanding their world. Notice I didn’t say anything about agreeing with the other person’s values and beliefs or giving out hugs. That’s sympathy. What I’m talking about is trying to understand a situation from another person’s perspective. One step beyond that is tactical empathy. Tactical empathy is understanding the feelings and mindset of another in the moment and also hearing what is behind those feelings so you increase your influence in allthe moments that follow. It’s bringing our attention to both the emotional obstacles and the potential pathways to getting an agreement done.

• In an fMRI brain-scan experiment,1 researchers at

Princeton University found that neural resonance disappears when people communicate poorly. The researchers could predict how well people were communicating by observing how much their brains were aligned. And they discovered that people who paid the most attention—good listeners— could actually anticipate what the speaker was about to say before he said it.

• Now, pay close attention to exactly what we said: “It

looks like you don’t want to come out. It seems like you worry that if you open the door, we’ll come in with guns blazing. It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail.” We employed our tactical empathy by recognizing and then verbalizing the predictable emotions of the situation. We didn’t just put ourselves in the fugitives’ shoes. We spotted their feelings, turned them into words, and then very calmly and respectfully repeated their emotions back to them. In a negotiation, that’s called labeling.

• For most people, it’s one of the most awkward

negotiating tools to use. Before they try it the first time, my students almost always tell me they expect their counterpart to jump up and shout, “Don’t you dare tell me how I feel!” Let me let you in on a secret: people never even notice.

• Picking up on these tiny pieces of information is how

psychics work. They size up their client’s body language and ask him a few innocent questions. When they “tell” his future a few minutes later, they’re really just saying what he wants to hear based on small details they’ve spotted. More than a few psychics would make good negotiators for that very reason.

• It seems like . . .

It sounds like . . . It looks like . . . Notice we said “It sounds like . . .” and not “I’m hearing that . . .” That’s because the word “I” gets people’s guard up.

• What good negotiators do when labeling is address those

underlying emotions. Labeling negatives diffuses them (or defuses them, in extreme cases); labeling positives reinforces them.

• Labeling is a helpful tactic in de-escalating

angry confrontations, because it makes the person acknowledge their feelings rather than continuing to act out.

• Early on in my hostage negotiation career, I learned how

important it was to go directly at negative dynamics in a fearless but deferential manner. I’ve found the phrase “Look, I’m an asshole” to be an amazingly effective way to makeproblems go away. That approach has never failed me.

• “It seems that

you are really passionate about this gift and want to find the right project reflecting the opportunities and life-changing experiences the Girl Scouts gave you.” And with that, this “difficult” woman signed a check without even picking a specific project. “You understand me,” she said as she got up to leave. “I trust you’ll find the right project.” Fear of her money being misappropriated was the presenting dynamic that the first label uncovered. But the second label uncovered the underlying dynamic—her very presence in the office was driven by very specific memories of being a little Girl Scout and how it changed her life. The real obstacle was that this woman needed to feel that she was understood, that the person handling her money knew why she was in that office and understood the memories that were driving her actions.

• Do an accusation audit - So I don’t ask. Instead, I say, “In case you’re worried

about volunteering to role-play with me in front of the class, I want to tell you in advance . . . it’s going to be horrible.” After the laughter dies down, I then say, “And those of you who do volunteer will probably get more out of this than anyone else.” I always end up with more volunteers than I need.

• The first step of doing so is listing every terrible thing

your counterpart could say about you, in what I call an accusation audit.

lessons from the chapter you’ve just read: ■ Imagine yourself in your counterpart’s situation. The beauty of empathy is that it doesn’t demand that you agree with the other person’s ideas (you may well find them crazy). But by acknowledging the other person’s situation, you immediately convey that you are listening. And once they know that you are listening, they may tell you something that you can use. ■ The reasons why a counterpart will not make an agreement with you are often more powerful than why they will make a deal, so focus first on clearing the barriers to agreement. Denying barriers or negative influences gives them credence; get them into the open.■ Pause. After you label a barrier or mirror a statement, let it sink in. Don’t worry, the other party will fill the silence. ■ Label your counterpart’s fears to diffuse their power. We all want to talk about the happy stuff, but remember, the faster you interrupt action in your counterpart’s amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear, the faster you can generate feelings of safety, well-being, and trust. ■ List the worst things that the other party could say about you and say them before the other person can. Performing an accusation audit in advance prepares you to head off negative dynamics before they take root. And because these accusations often sound exaggerated when said aloud, speaking them will encourage the other person to claim that quite the opposite is true. ■ Remember you’re dealing with a person who wants to be appreciated and understood. So use labels to reinforce and encourage positive perceptions and dynamics.

3

• “No” is the start of the negotiation, not the end of it.

We’ve been conditioned to fear the word “No.” But it is a statement of perception far more often than of fact. It seldom means, “I have considered all the facts and made a rational choice.” Instead, “No” is often a decision, frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo. Change is scary, and “No” provides a little protection from that scariness.

• It comes down to the deep and universal human need for

autonomy. People need to feel in control. When you preserve a person’s autonomy by clearly giving them permission to say “No” to your ideas, the emotions calm,

• When someone tells you “No,” you need to rethink the

word in one of its alternative—and much more real— meanings: ■ I am not yet ready to agree;■ You are making me feel uncomfortable; ■ I do not understand; ■ I don’t think I can afford it; ■ I want something else; ■ I need more information; or ■ I want to talk it over with someone else.

• Then, after pausing, ask solution-based questions or

simply label their effect: “What about this doesn’t work for you?” “What would you need to make it work?” “It seems like there’s something here that bothers you.” People have a need to say, “No.” So don’t just hope to hear it at some point; get them to say it early.

• Positive request - what would make this offer an absolute blowout yes for you?
• I’ll let you in on a secret. There are actually three kinds

of “Yes”: Counterfeit, Confirmation, and Commitment. The commitment “yes” is what you want, but thethree types sound almost the same so you have to learn how to recognize which one is being used.

• good negotiators know that their job isn’t to

put on a great performance but to gently guide their counterpart to discover their goal as his own.

• ultimately that

connection is useless unless the other person feels that they are equally as responsible, if not solely responsible, for creating the connection and the new ideas they have.

• Instead of getting inside with logic or feigned smiles,

then, we get there by asking for “No.” It’s the word that gives the speaker feelings of safety and control. “No” starts conversations and creates safe havens to get to the final “Yes” of commitment. An early “Yes” is often just a cheap, counterfeit dodge.

• Good negotiators welcome—

even invite—a solid “No” to start, as a sign that the other party is engaged and thinking.

• “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” Instead ask,

“Is now a bad time to talk?” Either you get “Yes, it is a bad time” followed by a good time or a request to go away, or you get “No, it’s not” and total focus.

• Today, I coach my students to learn to see “No” for whatit is. Rather than harming them or those they negotiate with,

“No” protects and benefits all parties in an exchange. “No” creates safety, security, and the feeling of control. It’s a requirement to implementable success. It’s a pause, a nudge, and a chance for the speaker to articulate what they do want.

• Mark

Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks. I always quote to my students one of his best lines on negotiation: “Every ‘No’ gets me closer to a ‘Yes.’” But then I remind them that extracting those “No’s” on the road to “Yes” isn’t always easy. “No”—or the lack thereof—also serves as a warning, the canary in the coal mine. If despite all your efforts, the otherparty won’t say “No,” you’re dealing with people who are indecisive or confused or who have a hidden agenda. In cases like that you have to end the negotiation and walk away. Think of it like this: No “No” means no go.

• You provoke a “No” with this one-sentence email.

Have you given up on this project? The point is that this one-sentence email encapsulates the best of “No”-oriented questions and plays on your counterpart’s natural human aversion to loss. The “No” answer the email demands offers the other party the feeling of safety and the illusion of control while encouraging them to define their position and explain it to you.

• Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about

how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you.

4

• That's Right.
• Behavioral Change

Stairway Model (BCSM). The model proposes five stages— active listening, empathy, rapport, influence, and behavioral change—that take any negotiator from listening to influencing behavior.The origins of the model can be traced back to the great American psychologist Carl Rogers, who proposed that real change can only come when a therapist accepts the client as he or she is—an approach known as unconditional positive regard.

• You're right vs that's right.
• “Sleeping in the same bed and dreaming different dreams”

is an old Chinese expression that describes the intimacy of partnership (whether in marriage or in business) without the communication necessary to sustain it. Such is the recipe for bad marriages and bad negotiations.

• Creating unconditional positive regard gets to 'that's right.'

6

• Compromise is often a “bad deal” and a key theme we’ll hit

in this chapter is that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” Even in a kidnapping? Yes. A bad deal in a kidnapping is where someone pays and no one comes out.