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

NEUTRALIZE THE NEGATIVE, REINFORCE THE
POSITIVE
Labeling is a tactic, not a strategy, in the same way a spoon
is a great tool for stirring soup but it’s not a recipe. How you
use labeling will go a long way in determining your success.
Deployed well, it’s how we as negotiators identify and then
slowly alter the inner voices of our counterpart’s
consciousness to something more collaborative and trusting.
First, let’s talk a little human psychology. In basic terms,
people’s emotions have two levels: the “presenting”
behavior is the part above the surface you can see and hear;
beneath, the “underlying” feeling is what motivates the
behavior.

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Imagine a grandfather who’s grumbly at a family
holiday dinner: the presenting behavior is that he’s cranky,
but the underlying emotion is a sad sense of loneliness from
his family never seeing him.
What good negotiators do when labeling is address those
underlying emotions. Labeling negatives diffuses them (or
defuses them, in extreme cases); labeling positives
reinforces them.
We’ll come back to the cranky grandfather in a moment.
First, though, I want to talk a little bit about anger.
As an emotion, anger is rarely productive—in you or the
person you’re negotiating with. It releases stress hormones
and neurochemicals that disrupt your ability to properly
evaluate and respond to situations. And it blinds you to the
fact that you’re angry in the first place, which gives you a
false sense of confidence.
That’s not to say that negative feelings should be
ignored. That can be just as damaging. Instead, they should
be teased out. Labeling is a helpful tactic in de-escalating
angry confrontations, because it makes the person
acknowledge their feelings rather than continuing to act out.
Early on in my hostage negotiation career, I learned how
important it was to go directly at negative dynamics in a
fearless but deferential manner.
It was to fix a situation I’d created myself. I’d angered
the top FBI official in Canada when I entered the country
without first alerting him (so he could notify the Department
of State), a procedure known as “country clearance.”

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I knew I needed to call and assuage him to straighten out
the situation, or I risked being expelled. Top guys like to
feel on top. They don’t want to be disrespected. All the
more so when the office they run isn’t a sexy assignment.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said when he
answered the phone.
There was a long pause at the other end of the line.
“Who is this?” he said.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I repeated. “It’s
Chris Voss.”
Again there was a long silence.
“Does your boss know you’re here?”
I said he did, and crossed my fingers. At this point, the
FBI official would have been completely within his rights to
tell me to leave Canada immediately. But by mentioning the
negative dynamic, I knew I’d diffused it as much as I could.
I had a chance.
“All right, you’ve got country clearance,” he finally said.
“I’ll take care of the paperwork.”
Try this the next time you have to apologize for a bone-
headed mistake. Go right at it. The fastest and most efficient
means of establishing a quick working relationship is to
acknowledge the negative and diffuse it. Whenever I was
dealing with the family of a hostage, I started out by saying
I knew they were scared. And when I make a mistake—
something that happens a lot—I always acknowledge the
other person’s anger. I’ve found the phrase “Look, I’m an
asshole” to be an amazingly effective way to make

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problems go away.
That approach has never failed me.
Let’s go back to the cranky grandfather.
He’s grumpy because he never sees the family and he
feels left out. So he’s speaking up in his own dysfunctional
way to get attention.
How do you fix that?
Instead of addressing his grumpy behavior, you
acknowledge his sadness in a nonjudgmental way. You
head him off before he can really get started.
“We don’t see each other all that often,” you could say.
“It seems like you feel like we don’t pay any attention to
you and you only see us once a year, so why should you
make time for us?”
Notice how that acknowledges the situation and labels
his sadness? Here you can pause briefly, letting him
recognize and appreciate your attempts to understand what
he’s feeling, and then turn the situation around by offering a
positive solution.
“For us this is a real treat. We want to hear what you
have to talk about. We want to value this time with you
because we feel left out of your life.”
Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity
is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment.
Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it
with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts.
One of my Georgetown University students, a guy named

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TJ, who worked as an assistant controller at the Washington
Redskins, put that lesson to work while he was taking my
negotiations class.
The economy was in the toilet at the time, and Redskins
season ticket holders were leaving in droves to avoid the
cost. Worse, the team had been terrible the year before, and
off-field player problems were alienating the fans.
The team’s CFO was getting more worried—and cranky
—by the day, and two weeks before the season was to start
he walked by TJ’s desk and slammed down a folder full of
paper.
“Better yesterday than today,” he said and walked away.
Inside was a list of forty season ticket holders who
hadn’t paid their bills, a USB drive with a spreadsheet about
each one’s situation, and a script to use when calling them.
TJ saw right away that the script was a disaster. It began
by saying that his colleagues had been trying to call for
months, and the account had been escalated to him. “I
wanted to inform you,” it read, “that in order to receive your
tickets for the upcoming season opener against the New
York Giants, you will need to pay your outstanding balance
in full prior to September 10.”
It was the stupidly aggressive, impersonal, tone-deaf
style of communication that is the default for most business.
It was all “me, me, me” from TJ, with no acknowledgment
of the ticket holder’s situation. No empathy. No connection.
Just give me the money.
Maybe I don’t need to say it, but the script didn’t work.

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TJ left messages; no one called back.
A few weeks into the class, TJ rewrote the script. These
weren’t massive changes, and he didn’t offer the fans any
discounts. What he did was add subtle tweaks to make the
call about the fans, their situation, and their love of the team.
Now the team was “YOUR Washington Redskins” and
the purpose of the call was to ensure that the team’s most
valuable fans—the delinquent customers—would be there at
the season opener. “The home-field advantage created by
you each and every Sunday at FedEx Field does not go
unnoticed,” TJ wrote. He then told them, “In these difficult
times, we understand our fans have been hit hard and we are
here to work with you,” and asked the ticket holders to call
back to talk through their “unique situation.”
Though superficially simple, the changes TJ made in the
script had a deep emotional resonance with the delinquent
ticket holders. It mentioned their debt to the team but also
acknowledged the team’s debt to them, and by labeling the
tough economic times, and the stress they were causing, it
diffused the biggest negative dynamic—their delinquency—
and turned the issue into something solvable.
The simple changes masked a complex understanding of
empathy on TJ’s side. With the new script, TJ was able to
set up payment plans with all the ticket holders before the
Giants game. And the CFO’s next visit? Well, it was far less
terse.