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

HOW NOT TO GET PAID
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?
To show you what I mean, let me tell you a story.
Not long ago, a freelance marketing strategist came to
me with a problem. One of her clients had hired a new CEO,
a penny pincher whose strategy was to cut costs by
offshoring everything he could. He was also a male
chauvinist who didn’t like the assertive style in which the
strategist, a woman, conducted herself.
Immediately my client and the CEO started to go at each
other on conference calls in that passive-aggressive way that
is ever present in corporate America. After a few weeks of
this, my client decided she’d had enough and invoiced the
CEO for the last bit of work she’d done (about $7,000) and
politely said that the arrangement wasn’t working out. The
CEO answered by saying the bill was too high, that he’d pay
half of it and that they would talk about the rest.
After that, he stopped answering her calls.
The underlying dynamic was that this guy didn’t like
being questioned by anyone, especially a woman. So she

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and I developed a strategy that showed him she understood
where she went wrong and acknowledged his power, while
at the same time directing his energy toward solving her
problem.
The script we came up with hit all the best practices of
negotiation we’ve talked about so far. Here it is by steps: