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

LABELING
Let’s go back to the Harlem doorway for a minute.
We didn’t have a lot to go on, but if you’ve got three
fugitives trapped in an apartment on the twenty-seventh
floor of a building in Harlem, they don’t have to say a word
for you to know that they’re worried about two things:
getting killed, and going to jail.
So for six straight hours in that sweltering apartment
building hallway, the two FBI negotiating students and I
took turns speaking. We rotated in order to avoid verbal
stumbles and other errors caused by tiredness. And we
stayed relentlessly on message, all three of us saying the
same thing.

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Now, pay close attention to exactly what we said: “It
looks like you don’t want to come out. It seems like you
worry that if you open the door, we’ll come in with guns
blazing. It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail.”
We employed our tactical empathy by recognizing and
then verbalizing the predictable emotions of the situation.
We didn’t just put ourselves in the fugitives’ shoes. We
spotted their feelings, turned them into words, and then very
calmly and respectfully repeated their emotions back to
them.
In a negotiation, that’s called labeling.
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 has a special advantage when your counterpart
is tense. Exposing negative thoughts to daylight—“It looks
like you don’t want to go back to jail”—makes them seem
less frightening.
In one brain imaging study,2 psychology professor
Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los
Angeles, found that when people are shown photos of faces
expressing strong emotion, the brain shows greater activity
in the amygdala, the part that generates fear. But when they
are asked to label the emotion, the activity moves to the

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areas that govern rational thinking. In other words, labeling
an emotion—applying rational words to a fear—disrupts its
raw intensity.
Labeling is a simple, versatile skill that lets you reinforce
a good aspect of the negotiation, or diffuse a negative one.
But it has very specific rules about form and delivery. That
makes it less like chatting than like a formal art such as
Chinese calligraphy.
For most people, it’s one of the most awkward
negotiating tools to use. Before they try it the first time, my
students almost always tell me they expect their counterpart
to jump up and shout, “Don’t you dare tell me how I feel!”
Let me let you in on a secret: people never even notice.
The first step to labeling is detecting the other person’s
emotional state. Outside that door in Harlem we couldn’t
even see the fugitives, but most of the time you’ll have a
wealth of information from the other person’s words, tone,
and body language. We call that trinity “words, music, and
dance.”
The trick to spotting feelings is to pay close attention to
changes people undergo when they respond to external
events. Most often, those events are your words.
If you say, “How is the family?” and the corners of the
other party’s mouth turn down even when they say it’s
great, you might detect that all is not well; if their voice goes
flat when a colleague is mentioned, there could be a
problem between the two; and if your landlord
unconsciously fidgets his feet when you mention the

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neighbors, it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t think much of
them (we’ll dig deeper into how to spot and use these cues
in Chapter 9).
Picking up on these tiny pieces of information is how
psychics work. They size up their client’s body language
and ask him a few innocent questions. When they “tell” his
future a few minutes later, they’re really just saying what he
wants to hear based on small details they’ve spotted. More
than a few psychics would make good negotiators for that
very reason.
Once you’ve spotted an emotion you want to highlight,
the next step is to label it aloud. Labels can be phrased as
statements or questions. The only difference is whether you
end the sentence with a downward or upward inflection. But
no matter how they end, labels almost always begin with
roughly the same words:
It seems like . . .
It sounds like . . .
It looks like . . .
Notice we said “It sounds like . . .” and not “I’m hearing
that . . .” That’s because the word “I” gets people’s guard
up. When you say “I,” it says you’re more interested in
yourself than the other person, and it makes you take
personal responsibility for the words that follow—and the
offense they might cause.
But when you phrase a label as a neutral statement of
understanding, it encourages your counterpart to be
responsive. They’ll usually give a longer answer than just

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“yes” or “no.” And if they disagree with the label, that’s
okay. You can always step back and say, “I didn’t say that
was what it was. I just said it seems like that.”
The last rule of labeling is silence. Once you’ve thrown
out a label, be quiet and listen. We all have a tendency to
expand on what we’ve said, to finish, “It seems like you like
the way that shirt looks,” with a specific question like
“Where did you get it?” But a label’s power is that it invites
the other person to reveal himself.
If you’ll trust me for a second, take a break now and try
it out: Strike up a conversation and put a label on one of the
other person’s emotions—it doesn’t matter if you’re talking
to the mailman or your ten-year-old daughter—and then go
silent. Let the label do its work.