Never Split the Difference Quotes

“only half-jokingly refer to mirroring as magic or a Jedi mind trick because it gives you the ability to disagree without being disagreeable.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“For a mirror to be effective, you’ve got to let it sit there and do its work. It needs a bit of silence. I stepped all over my mirror.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“For a mirror to be effective, you’ve got to let it sit there and do its work. It needs a bit of”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“When you inflect in an upward way, you invite a response. Why? Because you’ve brought in a measure of uncertainty. You’ve made a statement sound like a question.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

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

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

“until you know what you’re dealing with, you don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“smart people often have trouble being negotiators—they’re so smart they think they don’t have anything to discover. Too often people find it easier just to stick with what they believe. Using what they’ve heard or their own biases, they often make assumptions about others even before meeting them.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Just remember, to successfully negotiate it is critical to prepare. Which is why in the Appendix you’ll find an invaluable tool I use with all my students and clients called the Negotiation One Sheet: a concise primer of nearly all our tactics and strategies for you to think through and customize for whatever kind of deal you’re looking to close.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Calibrated Questions, the queries that begin with “How?” or “What?” By eliminating “Yes” and “No” answers they force your counterpart to apply their mental energy to solving your problems.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“So it’s useful—crucial, even—to know how to engage in that conflict to get what you want without inflicting damage.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Life is negotiation. The majority of the interactions we have at work and at home are negotiations that boil down to the expression of a simple, animalistic urge: I want.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Emotions and emotional intelligence would have to be central to effective negotiation, not things to be overcome.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“humans all suffer from Cognitive Bias, that is, unconscious—and irrational—brain processes that literally distort the way we see the world. Kahneman and Tversky discovered more than 150 of them.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Their system was easy to follow and seductive, with four basic tenets. One, separate the person—the emotion—from the problem; two, don’t get wrapped up in the other side’s position (what they’re asking for) but instead focus on their interests (why they’re asking for it) so that you can find what they really want; three, work cooperatively to generate win-win options; and, four, establish mutually agreed-upon standards for evaluating those possible solutions.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Getting to Yes,2 a groundbreaking treatise on negotiation that totally changed the way practitioners thought about the field.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Answering my calibrated questions demanded deep emotional strengths and tactical psychological insights that the toolbox they’d been given did not contain.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“we call this tactic calibrated questions: queries that the other side can respond to but that have no fixed answers. It buys you time. It gives your counterpart the illusion of control—they are the one with the answers and power after all—and it does all that without giving them any idea of how constrained they are by it.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“most potent negotiating tools: the open-ended question.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“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.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

“In tense situations like this, the traditional negotiating advice is to keep a poker face. Don’t get emotional. Until recently, most academics and researchers completely ignored the role of emotion in negotiation. Emotions were just an obstacle to a good outcome, they said. “Separate the people from the problem” was the common refrain.
But think about that: How can you separate people from the problem when their emotions are the problem? Especially when they are scared people with guns. Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out the window.
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 aren’t the obstacles, they are the means.
The relationship between an emotionally intelligent negotiator and their counterpart is essentially therapeutic. It duplicates that of a psychotherapist with a patient. The psychotherapist pokes and prods to understand his patient’s problems, and then turns the responses back onto the patient to get him to go deeper and change his behavior. That’s exactly what good negotiators do.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

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

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

“Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings. In addition, they tend to become less defensive and oppositional and more willing to listen to other points of view,”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“The relationship between an emotionally intelligent negotiator and their counterpart is essentially therapeutic.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“don’t treat others the way you want to be treated; treat them the way they need to be treated.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“After all, kidnappers are just businessmen trying to get the best price.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“Prepare, prepare, prepare. When the pressure is on, you don't rise to the occasion; you fall to the highest level of preparation.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

“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. Here are some other great standbys that I use in almost every negotiation, depending on the situation: ■​What about this is important to you? ■​How can I help to make this better for us? ■​How would you like me to proceed? ■​What is it that brought us into this situation? ■​How can we solve this problem? ■​What’s the objective? / What are we trying to accomplish here? ■​How am I supposed to do that? The implication of any well-designed calibrated question is that you want what the other guy wants but you need his intelligence to overcome the problem. This really appeals to very aggressive or egotistical counterparts. You’ve not only implicitly asked for help—triggering goodwill and less defensiveness—but you’ve engineered a situation in which your formerly recalcitrant counterpart is now using his mental and emotional resources to overcome your challenges. It is the first step in your counterpart internalizing your way—and the obstacles in it—as his own. And that guides the other party toward designing a solution. Your solution.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It