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

CHAPTER 5
TRIGGER THE TWO WORDS
THAT IMMEDIATELY
TRANSFORM ANY
NEGOTIATION
I
n August 2000, the militant Islamic group Abu Sayyaf, in
the southern Philippines, broadcast that it had captured a
CIA agent. The truth was not as newsworthy, or as valuable
to the rebels.
Abu Sayyaf had kidnapped Jeffrey Schilling, a twenty-
four-year-old American who had traveled near their base in
Jolo Island. A California native, Schilling became a hostage
with a $10 million price tag on his head.
At the time I was a Supervisory Special Agent (SSA)
attached to the FBI’s elite Crisis Negotiation Unit (CNU).
The CNU is the equivalent of the special forces of
negotiations. It’s attached to the FBI’s Hostage Rescue
Team (HRT). Both are national counterterrorist response
assets. They are the best of the best.
The CNU is based at the FBI Academy in Quantico,
Virginia. The FBI Academy has come to be known by the
one word, “Quantico.” Rightly or wrongly, Quantico has

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developed the reputation as one of the centers, if not the
center of knowledge, for law enforcement. When a
negotiation is going badly and the negotiators involved are
directed to call and find out what “Quantico” has to say, the
CNU is who they call.
CNU developed what is a powerful staple in the high-
stakes world of crisis negotiation, the Behavioral Change
Stairway Model (BCSM). The model proposes five stages—
active listening, empathy, rapport, influence, and behavioral
change—that take any negotiator from listening to
influencing behavior.
The origins of the model can be traced back to the great
American psychologist Carl Rogers, who proposed that real
change can only come when a therapist accepts the client as
he or she is—an approach known as unconditional positive
regard. The vast majority of us, however, as Rogers
explained, come to expect that love, praise, and approval
are dependent on saying and doing the things people
(initially, our parents) consider correct. That is, because for
most of us the positive regard we experience is conditional,
we develop a habit of hiding who we really are and what we
really think, instead calibrating our words to gain approval
but disclosing little.
Which is why so few social interactions lead to actual
behavior change. Consider the typical patient with severe
coronary heart disease recovering from open-heart surgery.
The doctor tells the patient: “This surgery isn’t a cure. The
only way to truly prolong your life is to make the following

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behavior changes . . .” The grateful patient responds: “Yes,
yes, yes, of course, Doctor! This is my second chance. I will
change!”
And do they? Study after study has shown that, no,
nothing changes; two years after their operation, more than
90 percent of patients haven’t changed their lifestyle at all.
Though the stakes of an everyday negotiation with your
child, boss, or client are usually not as high as that of a
hostage (or health crisis) negotiation, the psychological
environment necessary for not just temporary in-the-
moment compliance, but real gut-level change, is the same.
If you successfully take someone up the Behavioral
Change Stairway, each stage attempting to engender more
trust and more connection, there will be a breakthrough
moment when unconditional positive regard is established
and you can begin exerting influence.
After years of refining the BCSM and its tactics, I can
teach anyone how to get to that moment. But as
cardiologists know all too well, and legions of B-school
grads weaned on the most famous negotiating book in the
world, Getting to Yes, have ultimately discovered, you more
than likely haven’t gotten there yet if what you’re hearing is
the word “yes.”
As you’ll soon learn, the sweetest two words in any
negotiation are actually “That’s right.”