Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life

by Stuart Diamond

So to persuade people with different perceptions, you must start with their perceptions, not your “facts.”

In psychology, this mistake is called fundamental attribution error.

When you ask someone for their perceptions first, you value them, so they are then much more interested in listening to what you have to say.

is the other person even ready to listen to me?

Explaining your perceptions is the last thing you should do. First, learn their perceptions.

He did it by (a) finding out the other side’s needs, (b) discovering how they evaluated things, and (c) matching his skills explicitly to the other party’s needs.

an “interesting” question, but could not specifically answer it without first knowing the standards against which salary and bonus were set.