"Never Split the Difference" is a book by Chris Voss, a former FBI
hostage negotiator, that offers negotiation advice you can use in daily
life. The book is centered around the idea that traditional negotiation
strategies, like "splitting the difference," are often ineffective. Voss
provides a range of psychological strategies and tactics to use in
negotiations, derived from his experience in dealing with criminals,
terrorists, and other high-stakes situations.
Life is negotiation.
Key concepts from the book include:
- Mirroring: Mimicking the other person's language
and behavior to build rapport.
- Labeling: Verbally acknowledging the other person's
situation, feelings, or viewpoints.
- The "Accusation Audit": Preemptively addressing all
of the other party's potential accusations and concerns.
- Tactical Empathy: Understanding the feelings and
mindset of another in the moment and also hearing what is behind those
feelings so you increase your influence in all the moments that
follow.
- The "Calibrated 'No'": Saying "No" in a way that
invites more discussion, as opposed to shutting it down.
- Bargaining Strategies: Like setting an "Anchor
Price" or using odd numbers to make a price seem more exact.
- The "Black Swan" Rule: The idea that there are
unknown, unpredictable elements in every negotiation that can be used to
your advantage.
Chapter 1: The New Rules
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.
“I want you to free the hostages,” is a very relevant one to this
book, of course.
But so is:
“I want you to accept that $1 million contract.”
“I want to pay $20,000 for that car.”
“I want you to give me a 10 percent raise.” and
“I want you to go to sleep at 9 p.m.”
Negotiation serves two distinct, vital life functions—information
gathering and behaviour influencing—and includes almost any interaction
where each party wants something from the other side.
“I was employing what had become one of the FBI’s most potent
negotiating tools: the open-ended question. Today, after some years
evolving these tactics for the private sector in my consultancy, The
Black Swan Group, we call this tactic calibrated questions: queries that
the other side 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.”
Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened
to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly
evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings. In addition,
they tend to become less defensive and oppositional and more willing to
listen to other points of view, which gets them to the calm and logical
place where they can be good Getting to Yes problem solvers.
Getting what you want out of life is all about getting what you want
from—and with—other people. Conflict between two parties is inevitable
in all relationships. So it’s useful—crucial, even—to know how to engage
in that conflict to get what you want without inflicting damage.
“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. Negotiating does not
mean browbeating or grinding someone down. It simply means playing the
emotional game that human society is set up for. In this world, you get
what you ask for; you just have to ask correctly. So claim your
prerogative to ask for what you think is right.
What this book is really about, then, is getting you to accept
negotiation and in doing so learn how to get what you want in a
psychologically aware way. You’ll learn to use your emotions, instincts,
and insights in any encounter to connect better with others, influence
them, and achieve more.
Effective negotiation is applied people smarts, a psychological edge
in every domain of life: how to size someone up, how to influence their
sizing up of you, and how to use that knowledge to get what you
want.”
Chapter 2: Be A Mirror
Assumption blinds,
hypothesis guide
Good negotiators, going in, know they have to be ready for possible
surprises; great negotiators aim to use their skills to reveal the
surprises they are certain exist.
In negotiation, each new psychological insight or additional piece of
information revealed heralds a step forward and allows one to discard
one hypothesis in favor of another. You should engage the process with a
mindset of discovery. 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.
“until you know what you’re dealing with, you don’t know what you’re
dealing with.”
Calm the Schizophrenic
Schizophrenia: everyone just listening to the voice in their
head.
“to avoid this, we need to apply true active listening which will
disarm the other party and make them feel heard, safe and
understood.“
“Smile at someone on the street, and as a reflex they’ll smile back.
Understanding that reflex and putting it into practice is critical to
the success of just about every negotiating skill there is to
learn.”
Mirroring
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.
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.”
“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.
By repeating back what people say, you trigger this mirroring
instinct and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was
just said and sustain the process of connecting. Psychologist
Richard Wiseman created a study using waiters to identify what was the
more effective method of creating a connection with strangers: mirroring
or positive reinforcement.”
and usually they will not repeat the same thing again, but will
elaborate on it. This is the key to getting more information from the
other party.
How to
Confront-And Get Your Way-Without Confrontation
- Use the late-night FM DJ voice.
- Start with “I’m sorry . . .”
- Mirror.
- Silence. At least four seconds, to let the mirror work its magic on
your counterpart.
- Repeat.
Key lessons
- 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 a positive 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.
- 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 side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your
side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their
strategy.
Three Voice Tones
Available to Negotiators
- 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.
- 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.
- The direct or assertive voice: Used rarely. Will
cause problems and create pushback.
Chapter 3: Don't Feel
Their Pain, Label It
“How can you separate people from the problem when their emotions are
the problem?”
Tactical Empathy
Empathy is the ability to recognise the perspective of a counterpart,
and the vocalisation of that recognition
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 all the moments that follow.
Empathy is a classic “soft” communication skill, but it has a
physical basis. When we closely observe a person’s face, gestures, and
tone of voice, our brain begins to align with theirs in a process called
neural resonance, and that lets us know more fully what they think and
feel.
Empathy is not about being nice or agreeing with the other side. It’s
about understanding them. Empathy helps us learn the position the enemy
is in, why their actions make sense (to them), and what might move
them.
Labelling
Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging
it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how
that person feels. It gets you close to someone without asking about
external factors you know nothing about (“How’s your family?”). Think of
labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional hack.
“Labeling has a special advantage when your counterpart is tense.
Exposing negative thoughts to daylight—“It looks like you don’t want to
go back to jail”—makes them seem less frightening.
In one brain imaging study,2 psychology professor Matthew Lieberman
of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that when people are
shown photos of faces expressing strong emotion, the brain shows greater
activity in the amygdala, the part that generates fear. But when they
are asked to label the emotion, the activity moves to the areas that
govern rational thinking. In other words, labeling an emotion—applying
rational words to a fear—disrupts its raw intensity.”
Label methods:
- It seems like...
- It sounds like...
- It looks like...
The last rule of labeling is silence. Once you’ve thrown out a
label, be quiet and listen. We all have a tendency to expand on what
we’ve said, to finish, “It seems like you like the way that shirt
looks,” with a specific question like “Where did you get it?” But a
label’s power is that it invites the other person to reveal
himself.”
WIP ...
Credits
All quotes are excerpted from "Never Split the Difference:
Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss". This material
may be protected by copyright.
