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

1. ANCHOR THEIR EMOTIONS
To bend your counterpart’s reality, you have to start with
the basics of empathy. So start out with an accusation audit

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acknowledging all of their fears. By anchoring their
emotions in preparation for a loss, you inflame the other
side’s loss aversion so that they’ll jump at the chance to
avoid it.
On my first consulting project after leaving the FBI, I
received the honor to train the national hostage negotiation
team for the United Arab Emirates. Unfortunately, the
prestige of the assignment was tempered during the project
by problems with the general contractor (I was a
subcontractor). The problems became so bad that I was
going to have to go back to the contractors I’d signed up,
who normally got $2,000 a day, and tell them that for
several months, I could only offer $500.
I knew exactly what they would do if I just told them
straight out: they’d laugh me out of town. So I got each of
them on the phone and hit them hard with an accusation
audit.
“I got a lousy proposition for you,” I said, and paused
until each asked me to go on. “By the time we get off the
phone, you’re going to think I’m a lousy businessman.
You’re going to think I can’t budget or plan. You’re going
to think Chris Voss is a big talker. His first big project ever
out of the FBI, he screws it up completely. He doesn’t know
how to run an operation. And he might even have lied to
me.”
And then, once I’d anchored their emotions in a
minefield of low expectations, I played on their loss
aversion.

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“Still, I wanted to bring this opportunity to you before I
took it to someone else,” I said.
Suddenly, their call wasn’t about being cut from $2,000
to $500 but how not to lose $500 to some other guy.
Every single one of them took the deal. No
counteroffers, no complaints. Now, if I hadn’t anchored
their emotions low, their perception of $500 would have
been totally different. If I’d just called and said, “I can give
you $500 per day. What do you think?” they’d have taken it
as an insult and slammed down the phone.