Never Split the Difference Quotes

“No” is not failure. Used strategically it’s an answer that opens the path forward.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“being right isn’t the key to a successful negotiation—having the right mindset is. HOW”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“you get what you ask for; you just have to ask correctly.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Life is negotiation. The”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight.1 To”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“For anger to be effective, it has to be real, the key for it is to be under control because anger also reduces our cognitive ability. And”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“In a study of the components of lying,2 Harvard Business School professor Deepak Malhotra and his coauthors found that, on average, liars use more words than truth tellers and use far more third-person pronouns. They start talking about him, her, it, one, they, and their rather than I, in order to put some distance between themselves and the lie. And they discovered that liars tend to speak in more complex sentences in an attempt to win over their suspicious counterparts. It’s what W. C. Fields meant when he talked about baffling someone with bullshit. The researchers dubbed this the Pinocchio Effect because, just like Pinocchio’s nose, the number of words grew along with the lie. People who are lying are, understandably, more worried about being believed, so they work harder—too hard, as it were—at being believable.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“This happens because there are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Commitment, Confirmation, and Counterfeit.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“That is, only 7 percent of a message is based on the words while 38 percent comes from the tone of voice and 55 percent from the speaker’s body language and face.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Let’s pause for a minute here, because there’s one vitally important thing you have to remember when you enter a negotiation armed with your list of calibrated questions. That is, all of this is great, but there’s a rub: without self-control and emotional regulation, it doesn’t work. The very first thing I talk about when I’m training new negotiators is the critical importance of self-control. If you can’t control your own emotions, how can you expect to influence the emotions of another party?”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Does this look like something you would like?” can become “How does this look to you?” or “What about this works for you?” You can even ask, “What about this doesn’t work for you?” and you’ll probably trigger quite a bit of useful information from your counterpart. Even something as harsh as “Why did you do it?” can be calibrated to “What caused you to do it?” which takes away the emotion and makes the question less accusatory. You should use calibrated questions early and often, and there are a few that you will find that you will use in the beginning of nearly every negotiation. “What is the biggest challenge you face?” is one of those questions. It just gets the other side to teach you something about themselves, which is critical to any negotiation because all negotiation is an information-gathering process.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“The real beauty of calibrated questions is the fact that they offer no target for attack like statements do. Calibrated questions have the power to educate your counterpart on what the problem is rather than causing conflict by telling them what the problem is. But calibrated questions are not just random requests for comment. They have a direction: once you figure out where you want a conversation to go, you have to design the questions that will ease the conversation in that direction while letting the other guy think it’s his choice to take you there.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“It’s a “how” question, and “how” engages because “how” asks for help. Best of all, he doesn’t owe the kidnapper a damn thing. The guy volunteers to put the girlfriend on the phone: he thinks it’s his idea. The guy who just offered to put the girlfriend on the line thinks he’s in control. And the secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“■    All negotiations are defined by a network of subterranean desires and needs. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the surface. Once you know that the Haitian kidnappers just want party money, you will be miles better prepared.         ■    Splitting the difference is wearing one black and one brown shoe, so don’t compromise. Meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides.         ■    Approaching deadlines entice people to rush the negotiating process and do impulsive things that are against their best interests.         ■    The F-word—“Fair”—is an emotional term people usually exploit to put the other side on the defensive and gain concessions. When your counterpart drops the F-bomb, don’t get suckered into a concession. Instead, ask them to explain how you’re mistreating them.         ■    You can bend your counterpart’s reality by anchoring his starting point. Before you make an offer, emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be. When you get to numbers, set an extreme anchor to make your “real” offer seem reasonable, or use a range to seem less aggressive. The real value of anything depends on what vantage point you’re looking at it from.         ■    People will take more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Make sure your counterpart sees that there is something to lose by inaction.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“To get real leverage, you have to persuade them that they have something concrete to lose if the deal falls through.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“them. By far the best theory for describing the principles of our irrational decisions is something called Prospect Theory. Created in 1979 by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, prospect theory describes how people choose between options that involve risk, like in a negotiation. The theory argues that people are drawn to sure things over probabilities, even when the probability is a better choice. That’s called the Certainty Effect. And people will take greater risks to avoid losses than to achieve gains. That’s called Loss Aversion. That’s why people who statistically have no need for insurance buy it. Or consider this: a person who’s told he has a 95 percent chance of receiving $10,000 or a 100 percent chance of getting $9,499 will usually avoid risk and take the 100 percent certain safe choice, while the same person who’s told he has a 95 percent chance of losing $10,000 or a 100 percent chance of losing $9,499 will make the opposite choice, risking the bigger 95 percent option to avoid the loss. The chance for loss incites more risk than the possibility of an equal gain.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“people who had damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated, he found that they all had something peculiar in common: They couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should do in logical terms, but they found it impossible to make even the simplest choice. In other words, while we may use logic to reason ourselves toward a decision, the actual decision making is governed by emotion.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“And being “nice” in the form of feigned sympathy is often equally as unsuccessful. We live in an age that celebrates niceness under various names. We are exhorted to be nice and to respect people’s feelings at all times and in every situation. But nice alone in the context of negotiation can backfire. Nice, employed as a ruse, is disingenuous and manipulative.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“To successfully gain a hostage’s safe release, a negotiator had to penetrate the hostage-taker’s motives, state of mind, intelligence, and emotional strengths and weaknesses. The negotiator played the role of bully, conciliator, enforcer, savior, confessor, instigator, and”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“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.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“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”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“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. As”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“That’s why, instead of denying or ignoring emotions, good negotiators identify and influence them. They are able to precisely label emotions, those of others and especially their own. And once they label the emotions they talk about them without getting wound up. For them, emotion is a tool. Emotions”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“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. Playful”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“the greatest inspiration for institutional change in American law enforcement came on an airport tarmac in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 4, 1971. The United States was experiencing an epidemic of airline hijackings at the time; there were five in one three-day period in 1970. It was in that charged atmosphere that an unhinged man named George Giffe Jr. hijacked a chartered plane out of Nashville, Tennessee, planning to head to the Bahamas. By the time the incident was over, Giffe had murdered two hostages—his estranged wife and the pilot—and killed himself to boot. But this time the blame didn’t fall on the hijacker; instead, it fell squarely on the FBI. Two hostages had managed to convince Giffe to let them go on the tarmac in Jacksonville, where they’d stopped to refuel. But the agents had gotten impatient and shot out the engine. And that had pushed Giffe to the nuclear option. In fact, the blame placed on the FBI was so strong that when the pilot’s wife and Giffe’s daughter filed a wrongful death suit alleging FBI negligence, the courts agreed. In the landmark Downs v. United States decision of 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that “there was a better suited alternative to protecting the hostages’ well-being,” and said that the FBI had turned “what had been a successful ‘waiting game,’ during which two persons safely left the plane, into a ‘shooting match’ that left three persons dead.” The court concluded that “a reasonable attempt at negotiations must be made prior to a tactical intervention.” The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations. Soon after the Giffe tragedy, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) became the first police force in the country to put together a dedicated team of specialists to design a process and handle crisis negotiations. The FBI and others followed. A new era of negotiation had begun. HEART”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“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. Too”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“My years of negotiating had infused everything from how I dealt with customer service reps to my parenting style.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“that we can process only about seven pieces of information”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“vehicle”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“First, how could they all be using reason if so many have made different offers? That’s the point: They didn’t. They assumed the other guy would reason just like them. “If you approach a negotiation thinking that the other guy thinks like you, you’re wrong,” I say. “That’s not empathy; that’s projection.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It