One can only be an exceptional negotiator, and a great person, by both listening and speaking clearly and empathetically; by treating counterparts - and oneself - with dignity and respect; and most of all by being honest about what one wants and what one can - and cannot -do. Every negotiation, every conversation, every moment of life, is a series of small conflicts that, managed well, can rise to creative beauty.

  • Review everything you hear from your counterpart. You will not hear everything the first time, so double-check. Compare notes with team members. Use backup listeners whose job is to listen between the lines. They will hear things you miss.
  • Exploit the similarity principle. People are more apt to concede to someone they share a cultural similarity with, so dig for what makes them tick and show that you share common ground.
  • When someone seems irrational or crazy, they most likely aren’t. Faced with this situation, search for constraints, hidden desires, and bad information.
  • Get face time with your counterpart. Ten minutes of face time often reveals more than days of research. Pay attention to your counterpart’s verbal and non-verbal communication at unguarded moments - at the beginning and the end of the session or when someone says something out of line.

People generally fear conflict, so they avoid useful arguments out of fear that the tone will escalate into personal attacks they cannot handle. People in close relationships often avoid making their own interests known and instead compromise across the board to avoid being perceived as greedy or self-interested. They fold, they grow bitter, and they grow apart. We’ve all heard of marriages that ended on divorce and the couple never fought.

Families are just an extreme version of all parts of humanity, from government to business. Except for a few naturals, everyone hates negotiation at first. Your hands sweat, your fight-or-flight kicks in (with a strong emphasis on flight) and your thoughts trip drunkenly over themselves.

The natural first impulse for most of us is to chicken out, throw in the towel, run. The mere idea of tossing out an extreme anchor is traumatic. That’s why wimp-win deals are the norm in the kitchen and in the boardroom.

But stop and think about that. Are we really afraid of the guy across the table? I can promise you that, with very few exceptions, he’s not going to reach across and slug you.

No, our sweaty palms are just an expression of physiological fear, a few trigger-happy neurons firing because of something more base: our innate human desire to get along with other members of the tribe. It’s not the guy across the table who scares us: it’s conflict itself.

If this book accomplishes only one thing, I hope it gets you over that fear of conflict and encourages you to navigate it with empathy. If you’re going to be great at anything - a great negotiator, a great manager, a great husband, a great wife - you’re going to have to do that. You’re going to have to ignore that little genie who’s telling you to give up, to just get along - as well as that other genie who’s telling you to lash out and yell.

You’re going to have to embrace regular, thoughtful conflict as the basis of effective negotiation - and of life. Please remember that our emphasis throughout the book is that the adversary is the situation and that the person that you appear to be in conflict with is actually your partner.

During a typical business meeting, the first few minutes, before you actually get down to business, and the last few minutes, as everyone is leaving, often tell you more about the other side than anything in between. That’s why reporter have a credot to never turn off their recorders.

Also pay close attention to your counterpart during interruptions, odd exchanges, or anything that interrupts the flow. When someone breaks ranks, people’s facades crack just a little. Simply noticing whose cracks and how others respond verbally and nonverbally can reveal a gold mine.

But when someone displays a passion for what we’ve always wanted and conveys a purposeful plan of how to get there, we allow our perceptions of what’s possible to change. We’re all hungry for a map to joy, and when someone is courages enough to draw it for us, we naturally follow.

So when you ascertain your counterpart’s unattained goals, invoke your own power and follow-ability by expressing passion for their goals - and for their ability to achieve them.

Ted Leonsis is great at this. As the owner of the Washington Wizards professional basketball team, he is always talking about creating the immortal moments in sports that people will tell their grandchildren about. Who doesn’t want to come to an agreement with someone who is going to make them immortal?

In a famous study, Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer and her colleagues approached people waiting for copy machines and asked if they could cut the line. Sometimes they gave a reason; sometime they didn’t. What she found was crazy: without her giving a reason, 60 percent let her through, but when she did give one, more than 90 percent did. And it didn’t matter if the reason made sense. (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I cut in line because I have to make copies?” worked great.) People just responded positively to the framework.

While idiotic reasons worked with something simple like photocopying, on more complicated issues you can increase your effectiveness by offering reasons that reference your counterpart’s religion. Had that Christian CEO offered me a lowball offer when he agreed to hire my firm, I might have answered, “I’d love to but I too have a duty to be a responsible steward of my resources.”

By positioning your demands within the worldview your counterpart uses to make decisions, you show them respect and that gets you attention and results. Knowing your counterpart’s religion is more than just gaining normative leverage per se. Rather, it’s gaining a holistic understanding of your counterpart’s worldview - in this case, literally a religion - and using that knowledge to inform your negotiating moves.

Using your counterpart’s religion is extremely effective in large part because it has authority over them. The other guy’s “religion” is what the market, the experts, God, or society - whatever matters to him - has determined to be fair and just. And people defer to that authority.

That said, a word of warning: I do not believe in making direct threats and am extremely careful with even subtle ones. Threats can be like nuclear bombs. There will be a toxic residue that will be difficult to clean up. You have to handle the potential of negative consequences with care, or you will hurt yourself and poison or blow up the whole process.

If you shove your negative leverage down your counterpart’s throat, it might be perceived as you taking away their autonomy. People will often sooner die than give up their autonomy. They’ll at least act irrationally and shut off the negotiation.

A more subtle technique is to label your negative leverage and thereby make it clear without attacking. Sentences like “It seems like you strongly value the fact that you’ve always paid on time” or “It seems like you don’t care what position you are leaving me in” can really open up the negotiation process.

Every person has a set of rules and a moral framework.

Normative leverage is using the other party’s norms and standards to advance your position. If you can show inconsistencies between their beliefs and their actions, you have normative leverage. No one likes to look like a hypocrite.

For example, if your counterpart lets slip that they generally pay a certain multiple of cash flow when they buy a company, you can frame your desired price in a way that reflects that valuation.

Discovering the Black Swans that give you normative valuation can be as easy as asking what your counterpart believes and listening openly. You want to see what language they speak, and speak it back to them.

You have to feel for the truth behind the camouflage; you have to note the small pauses that suggest discomfort and lies. Don’t look to verify what you expect. If you do, that’s what you’ll find. Instead, you must open yourself up to the factual reality that is in front of you.

This is why my company changed its format for preparing and engaging in a negotiation. No matter how much our team has done prior to the interaction, we always ask ourselves, “Why are they communicating what they are communicating right now?” Remember, negotiation is much more like walking on a tightrope than competing against an opponent. Focusing so much on the end objective will only distract you from the next step, and that can cause you to fall off the rope. Concentrate on the next step because the rope will lead you to the end as long as all the steps are completed.

Most people expect that Black Swans are highly proprietary or closely guarded information, when in fact the information may seem completely innocuous. Either side may be completely oblivious to its importance. Your counterpart always has pieces of information whose value they do not understand.

If they’re talking to you, you have leverage. Who has leverage in a kidnapping? The kidnapper or the victim’s family? Most people think the kidnapper has all the leverage. Sure, the kidnapper has something you love, but you have something they lust for. Which is more powerful? Moreover, how many buyers do the kidnapper have for the commodity they are trying to sell? What business is successful if there’s only one buyer?

Never in the history of the US had a hostage-taker killed a hostage on deadline. The deadline was always a way to focus the mind; what the bad guys really wanted was money, respect, and a helicopter.

  • Prepare. When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion; you fall to your highest level of preparation. So design an ambitious but legitimate goal and then game out the labels, calibrated questions, and responses you’ll use to get there. That way, once you’re at the bargaining table, you won’t have to wing it.
  • Get ready to take a punch. Kick-ass negotiators usually lead with an extreme anchor to knock you off your game. If you’re not ready, you’ll flee to your maximum without a fight. So prepare your dodging tactics to avoid getting sucked into the compromise trap.
  • Before you head into the weeds of bargaining, you’ll need a plan of extreme anchor, calibrated questions, and well-defined offers. Remember: 65, 85, 95, 100. Decreasing raises and ending on nonround numbers will get your counterpart to believe that he’s squeezing you for all you’re worth when you’re really getting to the number you want.
  1. Set your target price
  2. Set your first offer at 65 percent of your target price
  3. Calculate three raises of decreasing increments (to 85, 95, and 100 percent)
  4. Use lots of empathy and different ways of saying “No” to get the other side to counter before you increase your offer
  5. When calculating the final amount, use precise, nonround numbers like, say, $37,893 rather than $38,000. It gives the number credibility and weight.
  6. On your final number, throw in a nonmonetary item (that they probably don’t want) to show you’re at your limit.

I want to emphasize how important it is to maintain a collaborative relationship even when you’re setting boundaries. Your response must always be expressed in the form of strong, yet emphatic, limit-setting boundaries - that is, tough love - not as hatred or violence. Anger and other strong emotions can on rare occasions be effective. But only as calculated acts, never a personal attack. In any bare-knuckle bargaining session, the most vital principle to keep in mind is never to look at your counterpart as an enemy.

The person across the table is never the problem. The unsolved issue is. So focus on the issue. This is one of the most basic tactics for avoiding emotional escalations. Our culture demonizes people in movies and politics, which creates the mentality that if we only got rid of the person then everything would be okay. But this dynamic is toxic to any negotiation.

Across our planet and around the universe, “Why?” makes people defensive. The only time I say, “Why did you do that?” in a negotiation is when I want to knock someone back.

No deal is better than a bad deal. If you feel you can’s say “No” then you’ve taken yourself hostage. Once you’re clear on what your bottom line is, you have to be willing to wak away. Never be needy for a deal.

Here it is: the clash for cash, an uneasy dance of offers and counters that send most people into a cold sweat. If you count yourself among that majority, regarding the inevitable moment as nothing more than a necessary evil, there’s a good chance you regularly get your clock cleaned by those who have learned to embrace it.

No part of a negotiation induces more anxiety an unfocused aggression than bargaining, which is why it’s the part that is more often fumbled and mishandled than any other. It’s simply not a comfortable dynamic for most people. Even when we have the best-laid plans, a lot of us wimp out when we get to the moment of exchanging prices.

Now, bargaining is not rocket science, but it’s not simple intuition or mathematics, either. To bargain well, you need to shed your assumptions about the haggling process and learn to recognize the subtle psychological strategies that play vital roles at the bargaining table. Skilled bargainers see more than just opening offers, counteroffers, and closing moves. They see the psychological currents that run below the surface.

The use of pronouns by a counterpart can also help give you a feel for their actual importance in the decision and implementation chains on the other side of the table. The more in love they are with “I,” “me,” and “my” the less important they are.

Conversely, the harder it is to get a first person pronoun out of a negotiator’s mouth, the more important they are. Just like in the Malhotra study where the liar is distancing himself from the lie, in a negotiation, smart decision makers don’t want to be cornered at the table into making a decision. They will defer to the people away from the table to keep from getting pinned down.

Our cabdriver kidnapper in the Philippines used “we,” “they,” and “them” so rigorously early on in the kidnapping I was convinced we were engaged with their leader.

A few years ago I was in a bar in Kansas with a bunch of fellow FBI negotiators. The bar was packed, but I saw one empty chair. I moved toward it but just as I got ready to sit the guy next to it said, “Don’t even think about it.”
“Why?” I asked, and he said, “Because I’ll kick your ass.”
He was big, burly, and already drunk, but look, I’m a lifelong hostage negotiator - I gravitate toward tense situations that need mediation like a moth to the flame.
I held out my hand to shake his and said, “My name is Chris.”
The dude froze, and in the pause my fellow FBI guys moved in, patted him on the shoulders, and offered to buy him a drink. Turned out he was a Vietnam veteran at a particularly low point. He was in a packed bar where the entire world seemed to be celebrating. The only thing he could think of was to fight. But as soon as I became “Chris,” everything changed.

I asked her if I got a discount for joining and she said, “No.”
So I decided to try another angle. I said in a friendly manner, “My name is Chris. What’s the Chris discount?”
She looked from the register, met my eyes, and gave a little laugh.
“I’ll have to ask my manager, Kathy,” she said and turned to the woman who’d been standing next to her.
Kathy, who’d heard the whole exchange, said, “The best I can do is ten percent.”
Humanize yourself. Use your name to introduce yourself. Say it in a fun, friendly way. Let them enjoy the interaction, too. And get your own special price.

Only 7% of a message is based on the words while 38% comes from the tone of voice and 55% from the speaker’s body language and face.

While these figures mainly relate to situations where we are forming an attitude about somebody, the rule nonetheless offers a useful ratio for negotiators. You see, body language and tone of voice - not words - are out most powerful assessment tools. That’s why I’ll often fly great distances to meet someone face-to-face, even when I can say much of what needs to be said over the phone.

I’m positive that sometime in your life you’ve been involved in a negotiation where you got a “Yes” that later turned out to be a “No.” Maybe the other party was lying to you, or maybe they were just engaged in wishful thinking. Either way, this is not an uncommon experience.

This happens because there are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Commitment, Confirmation, and Counterfeit.

By making your counterparts articulate implementation in their own words, your carefully calibrated “How” questions will convince them that the final solution is their idea. And that’s crucial. People always make more effort to implement a solution when they think it’s their. That is simply human nature. That’s why negotiation is often called “the art of letting someone else have your way.”

There are two key questions you can ask to push your counterparts to think they are defining success their way: “How will we know we’re on track?” and “How will we address things if we find we’re off track?” When they answer, you summarize their answers until you get a “That’s right.” Then you’ll know they’ve bought in.

On the flip side, be wary of two telling signs that your counterpart doesn’t believe the idea is theirs. As I’ve noted, when they say, “You’re right,” it’s often a good indicator they are not vested in what is being discussed. And when you push for implementation and they say, “I’ll try,” you should get a sinking feeling in your stomach. Because this really means, “I plan to fail.”

When you hear either of these, dive back in with calibrated “How” questions until they define the terms of successful implementation in their own voice. Follow up by summarizing what they have said to get a “That’s right.”

Let the other side feel victory. Let them think it was their idea. Subsume your ego. Remember: “Yes” is nothing without “How.” So keep asking “How?” And succeed.

The first and most basic rule of keeping your emotional cool is to bite your tongue. You have to keep away from knee-jerk, passionate reactions. Pause. Think. Let the passion dissipate. That allows you to collect your thoughts and be more circumspect in what you say. It also lowers your chance of saying more than you want to.

The Japanese have this figured out. When negotiating with a foreigner, it’s common practice for a Japanese businessman to use a translator even when he understands perfectly what the other side is saying. That’s because speaking through a translator forces him to step back. It gives him time to frame his response.

Another simple rule is, when you are verbally assaulted, do not counterattack. Instead, disarm your counterpart by asking a calibrated question.

The basic issue here is that when people feel that they are not in control, they adopt what psychologists call a hostage mentality. That is, in moments of conflict they react to their lack of power by either becoming extremely defensive or lashing out.

Neurologically, in situations like this the fight-or-flight mechanism in the reptilian brain or the emotions in the limbic system overwhelm the rational part of our mind, the neocortex, leading us to overreact in an impulsive, instinctive way.

That means biting your tongue and learning how to mindfully change your state to something more positive. And it means lowering the hostage mentality in your counterpart by asking a question or even offering an apology. (“You’re right. That was a bit harsh.”)

If you were able to take an armed kidnapper who’d been surrounded by police and hook him up to a cardiac monitor, you’d find that every calibrated question and apology would lower his heart rate just a little bit. And that’s how you get to a dynamic where solution can be found.

Who has control in a conversation, the guy listening or the guy talking?
The listener, of course.
That’s because the talker is revealing information while the listener, if he’s trained well, is directing the conversation toward his own goals. He’s harnessing the talker’s energy for his own ends.
When you try to work the skills from this chapter into your daily life, remember that these are listener’s tools. They are not about strong arming your opponent into submission. Rather, they’re about using the counterpart’s power to get to your objective. They’re listener’s judo.

  • Don’t try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation.
  • Avoid questions that can be answered with “Yes” or tiny pieces of information. These require little thought and inspire the human need for reciprocity; you will be expected to give something back.

Remember the idea of figuring what the other side is really buing? Well, when you are selling yourself to a manager, sell yourself more than a body for a job; sell yourself, and your success, as a way they can validate their intelligence and broadcast it to the rest of the company. Make sure they know how you’ll act as a flesh-and-blood argument for their importance. Once you’ve bent their reality to include you as their ambassador, they’ll have a stake in your success.

Ask: “What does it take to be successful here?”

Please notice that this question is similar to questions that are suggested by many MBA carreer counseling centers, yet not exactly the same. And it’s the exact wording of this question that’s critical.

The key issue here is if someone gives you guidance, they will watch to see if you follow their advice. They will have a personal stake in seeing you succeed. You’ve just recruited your first unofficial mentor.

When you do talk numbers, use odd ones.
Every number has a psychological significance that goes beyond its value. And I’m not just talking about how you love 17 because you think it’s lucky. What I mean is that, in terms of negotiation, some numbers appear more immovable than others.

The biggest thing to remember is that numbers that end in 0 inevitably feel like temporary placeholders, guesstimate that you can easily be negotiated off of. But anything you throw out that sounds less rounded - say $37,263 - feels like a figure that you came to as a result of thoughtful calculation. Such numbers feel serious and permanent to your counterpart, so use them to fortify your offers.

A few years ago, I stumbled upon the book How to Become a Rainmaker, and I like to review it occasionally to refresh my sense of the emotional drivers that fuel decisions. The book does a great job to explain the sales job not as a rational argument, but as an emotional framing job.

If you can get the other party to reveal their problems, pain, and unmet objectives - if you can get at what people are really buying - then you can sell them a vision of their problem that leaves your proposal as the perfect solution.

Look at this from the most basic level. What does a good babysitter sell, really? It’s not child care exactly, but a relaxed evening. A furnace salesperson? Cozy rooms for family time. A locksmith? A feeling of security.

Take the same person, change one or two variables, and $100 can be a glorious victory or a vicious insult.

I have this coffee mug. No chips, but used. What would you pay for it, deep down in your heart?
You’re probably going to say something like $3.50.
Let’s say it’t your mug now. You’re going to sell it to me.
You’re probably going to say something between $5 and $7.
In both cases, it was the same mug. All I did was move the mug in relation to you, and I totally changed its value.

If you approach a negotiation thinking that the other guy thinks like you, you’re wrong. That’s not empathy; that’s projection.

That rocsk my students’ view of themselves as rational actors. But they are not. None of us are. We’re all irrational, all emotional. Emotion is a necessary element to decision making that we ignore at our own peril.

The most powerful word in negotiation is “Fair.” As human beings, we’re mightily swayed by how much we feel we have been respected. People comply with agreements if they feel they’ve been treated fairly and lash out if they don’t.

Whether your deadline is real and absolute or merely a line in the sand, it can trick you into believing that doing a deal now is more important than getting a good deal. Deadlines regularly make people say and do impulsive things that are against their best interests, because we all have a natural tendency to rush as a deadline approaches.

What good negotiators do is force themselves to resist this urge and take advantage of it in others. It’s not so easy. Ask yourself: What is it about a deadline that causes pressure and anxiety? The answer is consequence; the perception of the loss we’ll incur in the future - “The deal is off!” our mind screams at us in some imaginary scenario - should no resolution be achieved by a certain point in time.

When you allow the variable of time to trigger such thinking, you have taken yourself hostage, creating an environment of reactive behaviors and poor choices, where you counterpart can now kick back and let an imaginary deadline, and your reaction to it, do all the work for him.

Yes, I used word “imaginary.” In all the years I’ve been doing work in the private sector, I’ve made it a point to ask nearly every entrepreneur and executive I’ve worked with whether, over the course of the careers, they have been a witness to or a party of a negotiation in which a missed deadline had negative repercussions. Deadlines are often arbitrary, almost always flexible, and hardly ever trigger the consequences we think - or are told - they will.

Deadlines are the bogeymen of negotiation, almost exclusively self-inflicted figments of our imagination, unnecessarily unsettling us for no good reason. The mantra we coach our client on is, “No deal is better than a bad deal.” If that mantra can truly be internalized, and clients begin to believe they’ve got all the time they need to conduct the negotiation right, their patience becomes a formidable weapon.

  1. Effective pauses: silence is powerful. We told Benjie to use it for emphasis, to encourage Sabaya to keep talking until eventually, like clearing out a swamp, the emotions were drained from the dialogue.
  2. Minimal Encouragers: besides silence, we instructed using simple phrases, such as “Yes,” “OK,” “Uh-huh,” or “I see,” to effectively convey that Benjie was not paying full attention to Sabaya and all he had to say.
  3. Mirroring: rather than argue with Sabaya and try to separate Schilling from the “war damages,” Benjie would listen and repeat back what Sabaya said.
  4. Labeling: Benjie should give Sabaya’s feelings a name and identify with how he felt. “It all seems so tragically unfair, I can now see why you sound so angry.”
  5. Paraphase: Benjie should repeat what Sabaya is saying back to him in Benjie’s own words. This, we told him, would powerfully show him you really do understand and aren’t merely parroting his concerns.
  6. Summarize: a good summary is the combination of rearticulating the meaning of what is said plus the acknowledgment of the emotions underlying that meaning. And once he did that fully and completely, the only possible response for Sabaya, and anyone faced with a good summary, would be “that’s right.”

Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or how smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their 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.

If a potential business partner is ignoring you, contact them with a clear and concise “No” - oriented question that suggests that you are ready to walk away. “Have you given up on this project?” works wonders.

There’s nothing more irritating than being ignored. Being turned down is bad, but getting no response at all is the pits. It makes you feel invisible, as if you don’t exist. And it’s a waste of your time. We’ve all been through it: You send an email to someone you’re trying to do business with and they ignore you. Then you send a polite follow-up and they stonewall you again. So what do you do?
You provoke a “No” with this one-sentence email.
“Have you given up on this project?”

Every ‘No’ gets me closer to a ‘Yes’.

One great way to do this is to mislabel one of the other party’s emotions or desires. You say something that you know is totally wrong. That forces them to listen and makes them comfortable correcting you by saying, “No, that’s not it. This is it.”

Another way to force “No” in a negotiation is to ask the other party what they don’t want. And people are comfortable saying “No” here because it feels like self-protection. And once you’ve gotten them to say “No,” people are much more open to moving toward new options and ideas.

“No” - or the lack thereof - also serves a a warning, the canary in the coal mine. If despite all your efforts, the other party 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.

“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.

He observes that people will fight to the death to preserve their right to say “No,” so give them that right and the negotiating environment becomes more constructive and collaborative almost immediately.

When I read Camp’s book, I realized this was something we’d known as hostage negotiators for years. We’d learned that the quickest way to get a hostage-taker out was to take the time to talk them out, as opposed to “demanding” their surrender. Demanding their surrender, “telling” them to come out, always end up creating a much longer standoff and occasionally, actually contributed to death.

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, the effectiveness of the decisions go up, and the other party can really look at your proposal. They’re allowed to hold it in their hands, to turn it around. And it gives you time to elaborate or pivot in order to convince your counterpart that the change you’re proposing is more advantageous than the status quo.

Great negotiators seek “No” because they know that’s often when the real negotiation begins.

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
  • 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.

While assigned to the JTTF, I worked with an NYPD lieutenant named Martin. He had a hard shell, and whenever asked for anything he responded with a terse negative. After I’d gotten to know him a bit, I asked him why. “Chris,” he said, proudly, “a lieutenant’s job is to say, ‘No.’”

At first, I thought that sort of automated response signaled a failure of imagination. But then I realized I did the same thing with my teenage son, and that after I’d said “No” to him, I often found that I was open to hearing what he had to say.

That’s because having protected myself, I could relax and more easily consider the possibilities.

Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts.

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 study, Matthew 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.

Labeling is a simple, versatile skill that lets you reinforce a good aspect of the negotiation, or diffuse a negative one. But it has very specific rules about form and delivery. That makes it less like chatting than a formal art such as Chinese calligraphy.

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.

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 lik 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.

The language of negotiation is primarily a language of conversation and rapport: a way of quickly establishing relationships and getting people to talk and think together. Which is why when you think of the greatest negotiators of all time, I’ve got a surprise for you - think Oprah Winfrey.

Her daily television show was a case study of a master practitioner at work: on a stage face-to-face with someone she has never met, in front of a crowded studio of hundred, with millions more watching from home, and a task to persuade that person in front of her, sometimes against his or her own best interests, to talk and talk and keep talking, ultimately sharing with the world deep, dark secrets that they had held hostage in their own minds for a lifetime.

Look closely at such an interaction after reading this chapter and suddenly you’ll see a refined set of powerful skills: a conscious smile to ease the tension, use of subtle verbal and nonverbal language to signal empathy (and thus security), a certain downward inflection in the voice, embrace of specific kinds of questions and avoidance of others - a whole array of previously hidden skills that will prove invaluable to you, once you’ve learned to use them.

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 unconscious level, we can understand the minds of others not through any kind of thinking but through quite literally grasping what the other is feeling.

Think of it as a kind of involuntary neurological telepathy - each of us in every given moment signaling to the world around us whether we are ready to play or fight, laugh or cry.

When we radiate warmth and acceptance, conversations just seem to flow. When we enter a room with a level of comfort and enthusiasm, we attract people toward us. Smile at someone on the street, and as a reflex they’ll smile back. Understand that reflex and putting it into practice is critical to the success of just about every negotiating skill there is to learn.

That’s why your most powerful tool in any verbal communication is your voice. You can use your voice to intentionally reach into someone’s brain and flip an emotional switch. Distrusting to trusting. Nervous to calm. In an instant, the switch will flip just like that with the right delivery.

There are essentially three voice tones available to negotiators: the late-night FM DJ voice, the positive/playful voice, and the direct or assertive voice. Forget the assertive voice for now; except in very rare circumstances, using it is like slapping yourself in the face while you’re trying to make progress. You’re signaling dominance onto your counterpart, who will either aggressively, or passive-aggressively, push back against attempts to be controlled.

Most of the time, you should be using the positive/playful voice. It’s the voice of an easy-going, 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). It applies to the smile-er as much as to the smile-ee: a smile on your face, and in your voice, will increase your own mental agility.

For those people who view negotiation as a battle of arguments, it’s the voices in their own head that are overwhelming them. When they’re not talking, they’re thinking about their arguments, and when they are talking, they’re making their arguments. Often those on both sides of the table are doing the same thing, so you have what I call a state of schizophrenia: everyone just listening to the voice in their head (and not well, because they’re doing seven or eight other things at the same time). It may look like there are only two people in a conversation, but really it’s more like four people talking at once.

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 your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. In that mode of true active listening - aided by the tactics you’ll learn in the following chapters - you’ll disarm your counterpart. You’ll make them feel safe. The voice in their head will begin to quiet down.

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. Wants are easy to talk about, representing the aspiration of getting our way, and sustaining any illusion of control we have as we begin to negotiate; needs imply survival, the very minimum required to make us act, and so make us vulnerable. But neither wants or needs are where we start; it begins with listening, making it about the other people, validating their emotions, and creating enough trust and safety for a real conversation to begin.

“C’mon. Get me the money or I cut your son’s throat right now,” Mnookin said. Testy.

I gave him a long, slow stare. Then I smiled.

“How am I supposed to do that?”