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

by Chris Voss

Mirroring will make you feel awkward as heck when you first try it.

With that in mind, I encourage you to take the risk of sprinkling these in every conversation you have. I promise you that they will feel awkward and artificial at first, but keep at it. Learning to walk felt awfully strange, too.

A counterfeit “yes” is one in which your counterpart plans on saying “no” but either feels “yes” is an easier escape route or just wants to disingenuously keep the conversation going to obtain more information or some other kind of edge.

But people in crisis only accounted for about 40 percent of the calls we got. The majority of the calls came from frequent callers. These are highly dysfunctional people, energy vampires whom no one else would listen to anymore.

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.

Whenever we negotiate, there’s no doubt we want to finish with a “Yes.” But we mistakenly conflate the positive value of that final “Yes” with a positive value of “Yes” in general.

Using this chapter’s tools in daily life is difficult for many people because they go directly against one of society’s biggest social dictums. That is, “Be nice.”

The real problem with compromise is that it has come to be known as this great concept, in relationships and politics and everything else. Compromise, we are told quite simply, is a sacred moral good.

I’m here to call bullshit on compromise right now. We don’t compromise because it’s right; we compromise because it is easy and because it saves face. We compromise in order to say that at least we got half the pie. Distilled to its essence, we compromise to be safe.

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 your counterpart can now kick back and let an imaginary deadline, and your reaction to it, do all the work for him.

hiding your deadlines dramatically increases the risk of an impasse. That’s because having a deadline pushes you to speed up your concessions, but the other side, thinking that it has time, will just hold out for more.

hiding a deadline means you’re negotiating with yourself, and you always lose when you do so.

In a recent study,4 Columbia Business School psychologists found that job applicants who named a range received significantly higher overall salaries than those who offered a number, especially if their range was a “bolstering range,” in which the low number in the range was what they actually wanted.