Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

by Chris Voss

After all, kidnappers are just businessmen trying to get the best price.

But after the fatally disastrous sieges of Randy Weaver’s Ruby Ridge farm in Idaho in 1992 and David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993, there was no denying that most hostage negotiations were anything but rational problem-solving situations. I mean, have you ever tried to devise a mutually beneficial win-win solution with a guy who thinks he’s the messiah?

Negotiation as you’ll learn it here is nothing more than communication with results.

You can use your voice to intentionally reach into someone’s brain and flip an emotional switch. Distrusting to trusting. Nervous to calm.

It’s just four simple steps: 1.Use the late-night FM DJ voice. 2.Start with “I’m sorry . . .” 3.Mirror. 4.Silence. At least four seconds, to let the mirror work its magic on your counterpart. 5.Repeat.

But now I know the answer is tactical empathy. They were able to think from another person’s point of view while they were talking with that person and quickly assess what was driving them.

Politics aside, 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.

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.

But no matter how they end, labels almost always begin with roughly the same words: It seems like . . . It sounds like . . . It looks like . . .