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

PERSUADE IN THEIR WORLD
I’d like to present you with a guy named Joe Businessman
as he readies himself for a negotiation. You’ve met him
before. He’s the prepared type, with all his Getting to Yes
strategies written out and memorized. And he’s more than
ready to unleash them on the guy across the table. Joe
pauses to look at his expensive suit in the mirror, fantasizing
about the impressive things he’ll say and the fancy charts
and graphs that’ll back up those things and leave his

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counterpart—his opponent—vanquished and in defeat. He is
Russell Crowe in Gladiator. He is The Man.
Now allow me to let you in on a secret: None of that
preparation will mean a damn thing. His negotiation style is
all me, me, me, ego, ego, ego. And when the people on the
other side of the table pick up those signals, they’re going to
decide that it’s best to politely, even furtively, ignore this
Superman . . . by saying “Yes”!
“Huh?” you say.
Sure, the word they’ll say right off is “Yes,” but that
word is only a tool to get this blowhard to go away. They’ll
weasel out later, claiming changing conditions, budget
issues, the weather. For now, they just want to be released
because Joe isn’t convincing them of anything; he’s only
convincing himself.
I’ll let you in on a secret. There are actually three kinds
of “Yes”: Counterfeit, Confirmation, and Commitment.
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. A confirmation “yes” is generally
innocent, a reflexive response to a black-or-white question;
it’s sometimes used to lay a trap but mostly it’s just simple
affirmation with no promise of action. And a commitment
“yes” is the real deal; it’s a true agreement that leads to
action, a “yes” at the table that ends with a signature on the
contract. The commitment “yes” is what you want, but the

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three types sound almost the same so you have to learn how
to recognize which one is being used.
Human beings the world over are so used to being
pursued for the commitment “yes” as a condition to find out
more that they have become masters at giving the
counterfeit “yes.” That’s what the people facing Joe
Businessman are doing, dangling the counterfeit “yes” so
they can hear more.
Whether you call it “buy-in” or “engagement” or
something else, good negotiators know that their job isn’t to
put on a great performance but to gently guide their
counterpart to discover their goal as his own.
Let me tell you, I learned that the hard way.
Two months after talking with Amy, I started answering
phones for HelpLine, the crisis hotline founded by Norman
Vincent Peale.
The basic rule was that you couldn’t be with anybody on
the phone for more than twenty minutes. If you did your
job, it wasn’t going to take you longer than that to get them
to a better place. We had a thick book of organizations we
referred them to for help. It was a paramedic approach:
patch them up and send them on their way.
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.
We kept a list of frequent callers and when you got one,

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the first thing you had to do was check to see if the person
had called that day, because they were only allowed one call
a day. They knew it, too. A lot of times, they’d say, “Yeah,
I’m Eddie. I haven’t called yet today. Go ahead and check
the list. You got to talk to me.”
Since I was there primarily to learn a skill, I loved the
frequent callers. They were a problem, and I loved trying to
figure them out. I felt I had some talent at it. I felt like a
superstar.
When it came time for my performance review, they
assigned me a shift supervisor named Jim Snyder. Jim was a
hotline veteran and a sweetheart; the only problem was he
always wanted to joke around. Jim understood that
volunteer burnout was the biggest problem at a hotline, so
he dedicated his time to making work fun. I became good
friends with Jim.
For my review, Jim waited until I got a call and went into
the monitoring room where the supervisors could listen to
our calls. The call was from one of my frequent clients, a
cabbie with a fear of going outside and plenty of time to tell
me about it. This energy vampire (his name was Daryl)
launched into his shtick about how he was going to lose his
house and with it his will to live if he couldn’t work.
“Seriously, when was the last time someone tried to hurt
you on the streets?” I asked.
“Well, I mean, it’s been a long time,” Daryl said.
“Like . . . ?”
“I can’t really remember a date, Chris. Maybe a year, I

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guess.”
“So it’s safe to say that the outside world hasn’t been too
hard on you, right?”
“Yes,” Daryl said. “I suppose so.”
We went back and forth like this for a while, as I made
him admit that most of us had little to fear in the world. I
was feeling good about my new skills, about listening to
Daryl and then “CareFronting” him, which was the slightly
goofy name we gave to assertively—but caringly—
responding to frequent callers.
It was all flowing, and our rapport was great. I even got
Daryl to laugh a few times. By the time I was done with
him, he couldn’t give me one reason not to step outside.
“Thank you, Chris,” Daryl said just before he hung up.
“Thanks for doing such a great job.”
Before I went to see Jim, I leaned back in my chair and
basked in that compliment. How often do you get that from
a man in pain, I thought. Then I sprung up and strode
toward the monitoring room, so proud I was practically
buffing my nails on my shirt and patting my own back.
Jim motioned me to the chair in front of him and gave
me his biggest smile. I must have returned it with twice the
wattage.
“Well, Chris,” he said, still smiling. “That was one of the
worst calls I ever heard.”
I stared at him, gape-jawed.
“Jim, did you hear Daryl congratulate me?” I asked. “I
talked him down, man. I killed it.”

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Jim smiled—I hated that smile right then—and nodded.
“That’s one of the signs, because they should be
congratulating themselves when they get off the line,” he
said. “They don’t need to be congratulating you. That tells
me you did too much. If they think you did it—if you were
the guy who killed it—how is he going to help himself? I
don’t want to be harsh, but you were horrible.”
As I listened to what Jim said, I felt that acid stomach
rush you get when you are forced to accept that the guy
dumping on you is completely right. Daryl’s response had
been a kind of “yes,” but it had been anything but a true
commitment “yes.” He’d made no promise to action. His
“yes” had been designed to make me feel good enough to
leave him alone. Daryl may not have known it, but his “yes”
was as counterfeit as they came.
You see, that whole call had been about me and my ego
and not the caller. But the only way to get these callers to
take action was to have them own the conversation, to
believe that they were coming to these conclusions, to these
necessary next steps, and that the voice at the other end was
simply a medium for those realizations.
Using all your skills to create rapport, agreement, and
connection with a counterpart is useful, but ultimately that
connection is useless unless the other person feels that they
are equally as responsible, if not solely responsible, for
creating the connection and the new ideas they have.
I nodded slowly, the fight drained out of me.
“One of the worst calls?” I said to Jim. “That’s right.”

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I worked hard at reorienting myself from that point on. I
asked so many questions and read so much about it that
soon they had me teaching two classes for new volunteers at
HelpLine: the opening class, on active listening; and the one
on CareFrontation.
Got it, you say. It’s not about me. We need to persuade from
their perspective, not ours. But how?
By starting with their most basic wants.
In every negotiation, in every agreement, the result
comes from someone else’s decision. And sadly, if we
believe that we can control or manage others’ decisions with
compromise and logic, we’re leaving millions on the table.
But while we can’t control others’ decisions, we can
influence them by inhabiting their world and seeing and
hearing exactly what they want.
Though the intensity may differ from person to person,
you can be sure that everyone you meet is driven by two
primal urges: the need to feel safe and secure, and the need
to feel in control. If you satisfy those drives, you’re in the
door.
As we saw with my chat with Daryl, you’re not going to
logically convince them that they’re safe, secure, or in
control. Primal needs are urgent and illogical, so arguing
them into a corner is just going to push your counterpart to
flee with a counterfeit “Yes.”
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

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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.
Who hasn’t received the short end of the stick in dealings
with a “nice” salesman who took you for a ride? If you rush
in with plastic niceness, your bland smile is going to dredge
up all that baggage.
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.
About five months after she’d told me to “go away,” I
stopped by Amy Bonderow’s office and told her that I’d
volunteered at HelpLine.
“You did?” she asked, smiling with surprise. “I tell
everybody to do that. And nobody ever does.”
It turned out that Amy had started her negotiating career
by volunteering at the same place. She started naming
people who were now mutual friends of ours. We laughed
about Jim.
In a sudden shift, Amy stopped speaking and stared at
me. I shifted in my shoes as she gave me the Pause. Then
she smiled.
“You get the next position.”
At that time, there were five other people aiming for the

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same slot, people who had psychology degrees, experience,
and credentials. But I was on the road to the next hostage
negotiation training course at the FBI Academy in Quantico,
Virginia, ahead of everybody else. My career as a negotiator
had officially begun.